2 types of knives = 2 people?

[Ausgirl]

Awesome, Errata, thanks. Right now, I still tend to think Tabram was stabbed lying down but that information is both useful and interesting, in pondering whether maybe she wasn't - at least not for that wound. I think, in any case, she would likely have been lying down after it. Much appreciated.

[Batman]

I think I have figured out a possible scenario that explains all the facts.

The landing at George Yard buildings was pitch black, literally. One of the witness likely walked passed the body of Tabram because she couldn't see her lying there.

So anyway for the explanation.

Tabram was murdered while lying down. The killer may have struck her in the chin but started to 'stab' not slash her neck. When she was unconscious he began to stab at her elsehwhere. When she started coming around he then started to strangle her before finally inflicting a wound through the heart to make sure the job was done properly and continued his mutilation in the dark and or exited soon after.

Learning from his mistake JtR would
1) Never try this indoors again because of the darkness where outside would offer some visibility.
2) Would slash the neck first, sometimes twice.

Yet he broke with tradition #1 when MJK offered that service with some light (I don't believe she burned clothes in her fire).

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Batman. Struck upon the chin?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Batman]

Yeah, I think the best evidence that he punches them somewhat during the frontal blitz is with Nichols as the medical examiner stated this.

[Tom_Wescott]

Yeah, I think the best evidence that he punches them somewhat during the frontal blitz is with Nichols as the medical examiner stated this.

Nichols wasn't punched, her face was squeezed, probably while her throat was being cut. In the case of Tabram, there was an injury to her head, so either she was garrotted to unconsciousness and injured her head on the toilet stoop as she was laid down/dropped, or she was hit upon the head and that's how she was rendered unconscious.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Batman]

Nichols wasn't punched, her face was squeezed, probably while her throat was being cut. In the case of Tabram, there was an injury to her head, so either she was garrotted to unconsciousness and injured her head on the toilet stoop as she was laid down/dropped, or she was hit upon the head and that's how she was rendered unconscious.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

Nichols pathology
Five teeth were missing, and there was a slight laceration of the tongue. There was a bruise running along the lower part of the jaw on the right side of the face. That might have been caused by a blow from a fist or pressure from a thumb.


I don't discount the face was squeezed but to say she wasn't punched would conflict with that option being proposed by the pathologist. I accept his proposal. Also Schwartz described a blitz attack from the front that resembles knocking someone in the head as you throw them down.

Martha wasn't garrotted. No evidence of one used. Hit in the head? Maybe. However I think the account I gave above has more explanatory power as to why she was strangled, had her neck stabbed and a knife in the heart.

[Ausgirl]

Nichols wasn't punched, her face was squeezed, probably while her throat was being cut. In the case of Tabram, there was an injury to her head, so either she was garrotted to unconsciousness and injured her head on the toilet stoop as she was laid down/dropped, or she was hit upon the head and that's how she was rendered unconscious.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

The particular injury to her head - producing subgaleal haemorrhage - can also be caused by violent hair pulling. It's a common playground injury, for that reason. Perhaps a handful of hair was grasped in the process. Her bonnet was off, after all.

I'd like to know where that haemorrhage was, exactly..sigh.

Her facial swelling is consistent with ligature strangulation, but there's no mention of ligature marks - it's possible to compress arteries with the hands. But it could've been anything, a scarf, a bit of string. I think a proper garotte (anything very thin, really) would leave distinctive marks, however.

I'm still wondering why on earth it's thought she survived very long into the attack (let alone until the end of it! 'alive for all the wounds' - I don't think so), which looks to be massive, massive overkill and any of her wounds could have killed her in the first 20 seconds, including violent strangulation if the arteries were affected.

[Ausgirl]

Sorry, just to add -- I see this as another blitz attack. There's no screaming bloody murder, signs of struggle, victim trying to crawl away, nothing like that. There were people very nearby who heard - nothing. So, he was quick and effective. He *silenced* her immediately -- what does that tell us?

I am pretty sure she was out cold, if not dead (or rapidly approaching it), before she knew what hit her.

So as I see it, something like this is very possible: he grabs her by back of the head on the stair, fistful of hair, displacing bonnet -- hand over mouth -- drags her back to landing. Throttle throttle (or strangle, it had to come *before* the stabs or there's blood absolutely everywhere), she's out cold (or dead, or close to it), and he disarranges her clothes, stabs her in places significant to him, very rapid and possibly shallow (if a single weapon) before moving to the opposite end of her body and delivering the deeper sternum wound (with the same weapon, but using more force? or a different weapon) and scarpers off never to be identified.

[Tom_Wescott]

Nichols pathology
Five teeth were missing, and there was a slight laceration of the tongue. There was a bruise running along the lower part of the jaw on the right side of the face. That might have been caused by a blow from a fist or pressure from a thumb.


I don't discount the face was squeezed but to say she wasn't punched would conflict with that option being proposed by the pathologist. I accept his proposal. Also Schwartz described a blitz attack from the front that resembles knocking someone in the head as you throw them down.

Martha wasn't garrotted. No evidence of one used. Hit in the head? Maybe. However I think the account I gave above has more explanatory power as to why she was strangled, had her neck stabbed and a knife in the heart.

Hi Bat. Nothing I said conflicts with the actual evidence. I didn't say a garrot was used, I said they were garrotted. That's the use of an arm. You still haven't read my book? As interested as you seem to be in Tabram, I'd think you would.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

The particular injury to her head - producing subgaleal haemorrhage - can also be caused by violent hair pulling. It's a common playground injury, for that reason. Perhaps a handful of hair was grasped in the process. Her bonnet was off, after all.

I'd like to know where that haemorrhage was, exactly..sigh.

You're absolutely correct, although that's more common with children. It's harder to do with adults.

Her facial swelling is consistent with ligature strangulation, but there's no mention of ligature marks - it's possible to compress arteries with the hands. But it could've been anything, a scarf, a bit of string. I think a proper garotte (anything very thin, really) would leave distinctive marks, however.

Again, you're spot on. I'll post in a moment what I believe happened. I'll need to dig up a source.

I'm still wondering why on earth it's thought she survived very long into the attack (let alone until the end of it! 'alive for all the wounds' - I don't think so), which looks to be massive, massive overkill and any of her wounds could have killed her in the first 20 seconds, including violent strangulation if the arteries were affected.

She died from exsanguination, which is bleeding out. She was still alive when all the injuries were inflicted. She did not live long at all afterwards, but none of the injuries were inficted post mortem.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

Garroting

Arthur Harding, an East End criminal, describes 'garroting', which is how believe some if not most of the Whitechapel victims were subdued.

‘A lot of garrotting [sic] went on. Five years and a bashing you got for it – eighteen strokes with the cat. That was the penalty. But a lot of it still went on, by Flowery Dean Street (Flower & Dean Street), and in the pubs at the back of Leman Street, and all down the Highway. Even at the ‘Fleur de Lis’ in Elder Street I’ve known it done. Not in Bethnal Green. I’ve never known it done in Bethnal Green. You had to be tall to do it. You would come up to a man from behind, put your arms round his throat, with your fists on his throttle. If it went on for more than a few seconds he would choke, so you had to be skilled. Some of them had a girl working for them – she would get a man well boozed, mix his drinks for him and they’d get him while he was drunk.’

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Errata]

Can't we just agree that's not actually garroting someone? I mean, technically strangling someone in order to rob the is a garroting, but when we are talking about evidence of garroting, no one is talking about some evidence of a heimlich to the throat. They are talking about using a cord.

[Ausgirl]

Tom, if she was still attempting to breathe, after the seven stab wounds to her lungs, and also after the nine stab wounds to her throat, how would you explain the absence of blood in her mouth?

What about the extent of the facial swelling? It was quite grotesque, as it sometimes is with a hanging or strangulation victim, particularly when the blood vessels to the head are clamped shut (which correlates with her brain being notably pale) and then released after death.

I realise Killeen states she bled out. But I don't think I agree with him. His autopsy is sketchy and sounds very hurried. It may be the case that he did not spend as much time on a dead prostitute as he might on a middle class woman who was not selling her body for fourpence in alleys. And just because there's a lot of blood doesn't mean she didn't die first. Thirty nine stab wounds is a LOT of holes for a body to "ooze" blood from in the minutes following death.

Here's a study on post-mortem bleeding, in which all the subjects had died from asphyxia an hour or more prior to them getting -one- serious wound.


Amount of postmortem bleeding: an experimental autopsy study.
Nikolic S1, Atanasijevic T, Micic J, Djokic V, Babic D.
Author information
Abstract

An experimental autopsy study was performed on 64 cases (55 male, 9 female; average age 51.5 +/- 16.2 years) of sudden natural (38 cases) and asphyxic deaths (26 cases). The study objective was the amount of postmortem bleeding from postmortem cutting of the thoracic aorta, related to the time since death. The amount of postmortem bleeding ranged from 100 to 1300 cm, 440.6 +/- 268.1 cm on average. The time since death up to the autopsy time ranged from 4 to 72 hours, 19.4 +/- 12.9 in average. A statistically significant correlation between the amount of postmortem bleeding and postmortem time interval was stated: Pearson correlation test value r = -0.461 (P = 0.000): the shorter the time interval, the larger the amount of bleeding. The formula of linear regression was estimated according to this correlation: amount of postmortem bleeding (cm) = -9.571 x time since death (h) + 626.659. This proves that the amount of postmortem bleeding (eg, from aortic blunt rupture) could be about 620 cm.

...
On the other hand, a great amount of blood in body cavities does not always indicate that all blood was antemortem in origin: some wounds could continue to bleed postmortem, particularly if they were situated in a dependent part of the body, under the influence of gravity. In these cases, the quantity of the blood lost could be considerable.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15075683

I am awful at math, perhaps someone else can help put this in terms that are easily 'seen'. But I believe it shows post-mortem bleeding *happens* and can happen an hour or more after death.

39 wounds, moments after death. Or perhaps she died during the throat attack, or the attack on her breats that pierced her lungs, and the rest were postmortem. We really can't know. If Killeen cannot even tell us what the injury to her vagina was, the extent of it and what the weapon was, then what hope have any of us in proving HOW he came to believe she bled out. Or whether it is a was rush job on a cheap whore, and he just stated what was 'obvious' to him before trudging back home for his morning kippers.

But that lack of blood in her mouth bothers me, particularly as her head was turned to one side. A recent amount of time looking at cases where this very thing was in question has me believing there should have been spatter, some kind of leakage, if she was in fact breathing until the end of this multiple-wound attack on throat and lungs (and the rest).

[Wickerman]

But I believe it shows post-mortem bleeding *happens* and can happen an hour or more after death.

Hi Ausgirl.
You know what Lividity is?
Where blood, internally settles to the lowest extremities of the body, typically that which is in contact with the ground. Lividity demonstrates that blood is still liquid after death, that it will move and, if the body is injured, will leak out for as long as it takes before the blood begins to coagulate.
The time it takes for blood to coagulate is different with everybody, and is subject to a variety of outside influences.

If Killeen cannot even tell us what the injury to her vagina was, the extent of it and what the weapon was, then what hope have any of us in proving HOW he came to believe she bled out.

The fact he doesn't was likely due to Victorian sensibilities, voicing such details in public was not the accepted norm. You may notice as the murders progressed we get more and more lurid details as the press became more adventurous.

But that lack of blood in her mouth bothers me, particularly as her head was turned to one side. A recent amount of time looking at cases where this very thing was in question has me believing there should have been spatter, some kind of leakage, if she was in fact breathing until the end of this multiple-wound attack on throat and lungs (and the rest).

You raise an interesting point.

[Batman]

I think this was a very bloody murder and maybe JtRs most bloodiest one next to MJK.

"Reeves also noticed the body on the first floor landing but he was also aware that it was lying in a pool of blood."

Unlike Nichols it seems the pooling was very visible in the early hours of that morning. I don't think this was clean at all and I think the murderer would have been covered in blood.

George St., is the hot zone of the geo-profiling. So JtR may not have had to go far at the dead of night to go home and get clearned up.