ABSTRACTObject of study: the historical case of serial murders in Whitechapel (London,1888), attributed to an unidentified person known as "Jack the Ripper".Objective: to demonstrate the possibilities of the retrospective psychologicalprofiling method (A. O. Bukhanovsky) in application to a historical serial crime inthe absence of direct physical evidence.
Method: retrospective psychological profiling by Bukhanovsky, the concept of"pseudo-investigative" motive (Yu. M. Antonyan, V. V. Guldán), and the clinicalmodel of avoidant-schizoid pattern. The procedure included four stages: datacollection and systematization, identification of stable patterns, reconstruction ofmotivational dominants, and construction of a socio-psychological profile.
Results: the biographical analysis of George Chapman (Severin Klosowski)showed his correspondence with the reconstructed profile on key parameters.Convergence of the obtained profile with the independent FBI expert assessment(J. Douglas, 1988) developed in a different methodological tradition wasestablished.
Conclusions: the work is not an attempt at legal identification. Its purpose is toshow how a clinically grounded model of motivation can be applied to historicalmaterial, what conclusions follow, and what limitations such an approach entails.The proposed model can serve as a didactic tool in profiler training and a heuristicframework for analyzing non-sexual serial homicides.