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Walter Dew's "suspect"

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  • Walter Dew's "suspect"

    Walter Dew’s story of the Nichols murder in his 1938 book "I Caught Crippen" was that Charles Cross discovered a dead body "in the gateway to Essex Wharf". Cross supposedly noticed "something strange about the position of the woman’s head". He shook the woman but she did not stir. He then saw another man ("the second man") on the opposite side of the street "whose behaviour was certainly suspicious" and this man "seemed to seek to avoid the carman". Cross showed the man the body and the man felt the woman’s heart saying "I think she’s breathing". Dew then says, "The couple parted", with Cross promising to call a policeman. In the key passage for our purposes, he then says:

    All this was afterwards told in evidence by the carman. It never had the corroboration of the other man. The police made repeated appeals for him to come forward, but he never did so.

    Why did he remain silent? Was it guilty knowledge that caused him to ignore the appeals of the police?


    Despite the many inaccuracies in Dew’s account, it is said by some that his story nevertheless reveals that the police were very suspicious of the second man, whom we now know to have been Robert Paul (although Dew apparently never knew this). Essentially, the point is that Dew is reflecting some kind of collective police memory or belief that the second man (Paul) was guilty of the murder.

    The first problem is that Dew’s own memory of events is clearly not very good which can be seen from all the factual mistakes he makes - which can be clearly seen above. His book was published in 1938, some fifty years after the murder of Nichols. Furthermore, at the time, Walter Dew was a young constable in H Division. He had absolutely no role in the investigation of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols which was being conducted by J Division.

    So what is it that Dew is remembering here? It is plain that there were never any "repeated appeals" for Robert Paul to come forward otherwise we would have a record of them in the press. Moreover, what chance is there of the police making themselves look complete fools by making a public appeal for a key witness to come forward who had already spoken to a newspaper journalist? They would have been a laughing stock.

    Surely what Dew is remembering (if anything) is a message circulated around all the police stations after the LWN report which asked if any officer knew a man called Robert Paul who had reportedly been involved in the discovery of Nichols' body. Presumably one of the constable's whose beat went down Foster Street knew the man and this is how the police found Paul.

    But Walter Dew would not have been informed of any subsequent developments regarding Paul. The evidence of Paul at the inquest - which was two weeks after the LWN article - was barely reported in many newspapers and a lot of newspapers did not carry a report of it at all. So it is perfectly possible that Dew never realised that the man the police had been seeking had been located, given evidence to the inquest and eliminated from the inquiry. So when he came to write his book some fifty years later, this vague and inaccurate recollection that he had of a loose end involving the second man was blown up out of all proportion and he felt able to write that this supposedly unknown man could have been the murderer.

    What I suggest Dew’s memory plainly does not do is reflect a collective memory of the police force in 1888 that the second man had any kind of role in the murder.

  • #2
    Dew's memory also played a turn on him in the Stride case. He says the man walking by with a parcel shortly before the murder was never found (or is it questioned?)
    Is it progress when a cannibal uses a fork?
    - Stanislaw Jerzy Lee

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    • #3
      Hi David, I believe Paul was identified within 24 hours of the murder, was he not? It was Cross who took longer. Perhaps Dew is remembering the interest in identifying Patrick Mulshaw's mystery man, who indeed was never identified.

      Yours truly,

      Tom Wescott

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      • #4
        Originally posted by SirJohnFalstaff View Post
        Dew's memory also played a turn on him in the Stride case. He says the man walking by with a parcel shortly before the murder was never found (or is it questioned?)
        That's correct, the man was not identified.

        Yours truly,

        Tom Wescott

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by Tom_Wescott View Post
          Hi David, I believe Paul was identified within 24 hours of the murder, was he not?
          Hi Tom, why do you say that? We don't have any reliable information about exactly when Paul was found but if he was located on the Saturday as you suggest then why did he not appear at the inquest either on that day or on the Monday?

          For what it's worth, the Lloyd's Weekly News of 30 Sept 1888 stated:

          "Mr. Paul says that after he made his statement to our representative, which appeared in Lloyd's, he was fetched up in the middle of the night by the police, and was obliged to lose a day's work the next day."

          This suggests to me that Paul was not located until some time after the report of his discovery of the body appeared in the LWN of Sunday 2 Sept. I would suggest that the police read this report, realised they had no idea that Paul and Cross had first discovered the body and set about finding the two men. The obvious thing to do would be to circulate a message to all local constables (including Dew) who were supposed to be familiar with individuals living on their beat. It's possible that Paul was fetched in the middle of Sunday night/Monday morning but it may be that this was not until after the inquest closed on the Monday, which would explain his absence from the inquest when one would have expected both Cross and Paul to have been produced together if the police had found them both at that stage.

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          • #6
            Hi David. I was thinking the press interviewed Paul the weekend of the murder.

            Yours truly,

            Tom Wescott

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Tom_Wescott View Post
              Hi David. I was thinking the press interviewed Paul the weekend of the murder.
              Oh yes, he certainly spoke to a reporter, probably on the Friday. I thought you meant identified by the police. It seems that the police did not know of Paul's existence until after publication of the interview on the Sunday morning.

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              • #8
                Dew's account of the Cross/Paul story bears a very strong resemblance to an article published before Dew wrote his. The article was posted by Stewart Evans a while back.

                Whether Dew "remembered" anything of this incident or simply collected some clippings together is open to debate.
                dustymiller
                aka drstrange

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by drstrange169 View Post
                  Dew's account of the Cross/Paul story bears a very strong resemblance to an article published before Dew wrote his. The article was posted by Stewart Evans a while back.

                  Whether Dew "remembered" anything of this incident or simply collected some clippings together is open to debate.
                  I agree that there is probably a connection between Dew's account and the 1929 article to which you (& Stewart Evans) refer. At the same time, the 1929 article makes no mention of any repeated appeals by the police for the man to come forward and it's only that bit which makes me wonder if Dew might have had a vague memory of an internal police appeal to track him down. I don't doubt that everything else in his story is based on what he had read (either in the newspapers at the time or subsequently).

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