The defining features of the blackout ripper's murders, or is sadism.

This wasn't the work of a mindless buffoon. as murders or his sadism.

This wasn't the work of a mindless buffoon, who bashed heads in with bricks, or a crazed loon who haphazedly hacked at limbs to feed his fantasy.

This was different.

As with calculated glee, he calmly and cruelly filleted the flesh as these ladies lay dead

or dying, grinning, as through barely conscious slits, they watched with terrified eyes

as he relished every slash and insertion.

The pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury would later state that the wounds he inflicted were not committed in the state of homicidal frenzy,

as each cut was cold, deliberate and calculated.

This killer wasn't skilled with a knife or had a specific biological agenda, but he had clearly taken his time and savoured every moment. But was he a

sadist? As if Mabel Church and Edith Humphreys were his two earliest victims.

Of those he murdered, he only mutilated those in the latter half of his spree.

So were these first three interrupted before being defiled?

Was he yet to explore his sadism, or were these omissions a conscious choice?

Gordon Frederick Cummings was a complicated man who could be both kind and cruel, sociable and sociopathic.

And although the police decried these attacks as the work of a madman, in whom the pathologist

expected to find evidence of sexual sadism and or sexual abnormalities. In Cummings, they found none. Sir Bernard Spilsbury

stated his opinion that some of the wounds to the victims were deliberately made to look like the

work of a sexual sadist.

If Cummings was truly fueled by a pathological sadism, we would expect to find clues in his past,

which hinted a disturbed mind, where the seeds of domination and mutilation were beginning to bloom.

My name is Michael. I am your tour guide. This is Murder Mile.

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