Originally posted by Herlock Sholmes
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So, now that we have reviewed the timeline we can now state some things with certainty.
- The body was removed to the mortuary at around 3am with doctors Brown and Sequiera observing it being loaded onto the ambulance.
- A Lloyd’s reporter, after speaking to Dr Brown, left the mortuary at 5.20 with Brown (and I assume Sequiera) still there. Therefore it’s unthinkable that these two doctors would simply have stood around for 2 hours after the body had been stripped with examining the body. And yet Trevor claims that the body wasn’t examined until the post mortem at 2.30.
- The only mortuary official that we know was there was Mr John Davis, the mortuary keeper. Is it at all likely that he would have been in on any organ stealing business? What we do know is that he would have known that the body had been examined and he would have been fully aware of the possibility that they might have seen the uterus still in place.
- We know that Dr. Brown, while in Mitre Square, requested the presence of Dr Phillips due to his knowledge of the Chapman murder.
- We know that PC Long handed the apron piece directly to Dr Phillips at Leman Street Station.
- We also know, from the Lloyd’s reporter who left the mortuary at 5.20 that Dr Brown was expecting Dr Phillips arrival. So Phillips would have arrived at the mortuary after 5.20, given the apron to Brown, and checked the injuries/mutilations as per Brown’s request. So we have another Doctor checking the wounds and who, with an open abdomen, might easily have noted the presence of the uterus. This is despite Trevor claiming that he wouldn’t have seen the body until the post mortem.
To suggest that organ thieves would have risked stealing organs after these events and before a post mortem cannot and should not be taken seriously. Organ thieves would only have taken organs after a post mortem had been carried out and never before. So why in this case would they have been in such a desperate rush that they would have risked their entire operation being exposed? The only answer is that they clearly wouldn’t have. We don’t have to prove that Phillips, Brown and Sequiera had become aware of the uterus being in place. All that we need to know is that organ thieves couldn’t possibly have known that they hadn’t seen the uterus in place.
……
Trevor often quotes the ‘infallible’ Inspector Reid as if his memory is proof that Kelly’s heart wasn’t missing. So was his memory all that is claimed by Trevor. I re-read an article on Reid in Ripperologist #147 by Nick Connell. He quotes from an interview with the News of the World (April 12th, 1896) that Reid gave.
He was asked: “So you never obtained a description of the man from anyone?”
He replied:
“Never. Indeed that the murderer was a man, is only an inference from the fact that no one but a person believed by the women themselves to be a man could have been taken by them to the secret haunts in which the murders were all committed.”
> So he couldn’t remember Joseph Lawende, Joseph Hyam Levy, Harry Harris, Israel Schwartz, Elizabeth Long, George Hutchinson or Mary Ann Cox? Not one of them? What a memory!
Reid began by talking about the first murder, Smith:
“The first Ripper murder was one which is not generally associated with the series. This was the Brick-lane murder, committed on a bank holiday in 1888. A woman named Smith was met by a man in Brick-lane who carried a walking stick, and committed a most terrible outrage upon her.”
> So he forgot that she was assaulted by a gang rather than by a single man with a walking stick (although where he recalled a walking stick from I can’t say)
Hopefully his ‘infallible’ memory is slightly better on events in Bucks Row?
“This was the notorious Buck’s-row murder. In this case the woman was believed to have been murdered about one o’clock in the morning.”
And,
“The mutilation in the Buck’srow case was exactly of the same nature as that inflicted upon the woman who died in the hospital”
> Apparently not. Still, he’s only two hours and forty minutes out. None of us were there but how many of us would claim that Nichols injuries were exactly the same as Smith’s?
Perhaps Reid had better recall of the Tabram murder?
“Her throat was cut and she had been stabbed in 39 places.”
> No, he didn’t.
Let’s try Chapman shall we?
“A resident in one of these houses in Hanbury-street went down at five o’clock in the morning into a yard at the rear of the place and found the body of a woman lying between some stone steps and a wall adjoining the side of the house.”
And,
“No one had seen her, no one had heard a person shout.‘
> Only an hour out this time. It was a fence not a wall. He forgets Elizabeth Long possibly saw her and that Albert Cadosch probably heard the victim and the killer.
We can now have a short celebration in that his short version of the Stride murder passes muster (apart from a mispronunciation of Diemschitz but I’ll happily give that a free pass)
What about Eddowes?
“This woman’s nose and ears had been cut off, and her face slashed. This murder was committed in September 1889 or 90. I forget for the moment which year.”
> Her nose and ears weren’t cut off and he couldn’t remember which of two incorrect years was the correct incorrect one!
Apparently, according to Reid, the chalked message said: “The Jews shall not be blamed for this.“
He continues “..and this was rubbed off before it could be photographed, contrary to my wishes and much to my regret.”
> I can’t find any mention of Reid being in Goulston Street. I’m not saying that he couldn’t have been there but I can see no mention of his presence by anyone.
Reid’s general description of the circumstances of Kelly murder is pretty accurate. But..
“I ought to tell you that the stories of portions of the body having been taken away by the murderer were all untrue. In every instance the body was complete. The mania of the murderer was exclusively for horrible mutilation.”
> We can see clearly from this quote that it was clearly Reid’s opinion, based on memory, that there were no body parts missing from any of the victims. Trevor makes the claim that he was only talking about Kelly but anyone can see that this wasn’t the case. He believed mutilation was all that the killer was interested in with all of the victims. That Reid should have ‘forgotten’ about the missing parts from Chapman and Eddowes should, once and for all, put paid to any claim attributed to his memory about Kelly’s heart not being missing. This was a man who misremembered that body parts had been taken from Chapman and Eddowes. No weight can be placed on Reid on this matter.
Reid also stated that McCarthy became ‘a perfect madman’ after the murder who used to regularly ‘knock up’ Reid to tell him that they had the ripper doesn’t speak of a particularly reliable man. Perhaps a better storyteller that a relater of facts. McCarthy was interviewed by The Times after the murder and testified without issue at the inquest so he wasn’t the gibbering wreck that Reid claimed him to have been.
There are more mistakes made by Reid which could be quoted but I won’t bother going through all of them but it has to be accepted that this man was very fallible and made many errors some memory; some of which would have to be described as real howlers. He certainly got some things right so we can’t state that his memory was uniformly terrible but it certainly wasn’t reliable as Trevor claims. Somewhat ironic from a man who regularly calls people (like Macnaghten as an example for getting a couple of facts wrong) and even objects (the marginalia for eg) ‘unreliable.’ He often accuses people of basing opinions on testimony that is ‘unsafe to rely on,’ and yet here he is relying on someone who is provably unsafe to rely on. Reid got more things wrong that Macnaghten so why is Mac ‘unsafe’ while Reid is ‘safe’?
When we combine the above with the fact that Bond listed all of the body parts found around the room but made no mention of finding the heart we can say that we are on pretty safe ground to say that it had been taken away.
It’s worth adding of course that we are by no means reliant on Kelly’s heart being absent. Trevor always suggests that if the killer was ‘harvesting’ organs why didn’t he take the heart? But ‘harvesting’ is a convenient phrase used by Trevor to manipulate a theory. We cannot claim that the killer was ‘harvesting.’ Who else makes this claim? It’s a suggestion and nothing more. You can’t state a positive by using a posdible. He may have taken organs for shock value and realising what he had time to do in Miller’s Court he knew that he needed no further ‘shock value’ so he didn’t bother with the risk of walking away carry a body part. If he was taking parts as souvenirs to relive his fantasy over again (as we know that some serial killers do) how do we know that he didn’t just take a piece of random flesh. There’s no way that the Doctors would have accounted for every singly inch of flesh. The phrase “If he was harvesting…” carries no weight in this discussion.
Every theory deserves to be looked into thoroughly and this one has. We cannot state, as Trevor repeatedly does, that the killer didn’t have time in Mitre Square to do what is claimed because a) we don’t know how long these actions would have taken, and b) we don’t know exactly how long he had available to him. It really is that simple. We have shown that organ thieves wouldn’t have taken organs away before a post mortem. And we know that no one at the time even suggested, implied or hinted at organs being removed in the mortuary. And we’ve seen from the poll that no one accepts this theory. A glance over on JTRForums reminds us that the theory got the same reception over there from people like Paul Begg, Chris Phillips, Debra Arif, Howard Brown, Gary Barnett etc.
It really is time to place this theory on the ‘refuted’ pile. I know that Trevor will never accept this and there’s nothing that anyone can do about that but this one is dead.
- The body was removed to the mortuary at around 3am with doctors Brown and Sequiera observing it being loaded onto the ambulance.
- A Lloyd’s reporter, after speaking to Dr Brown, left the mortuary at 5.20 with Brown (and I assume Sequiera) still there. Therefore it’s unthinkable that these two doctors would simply have stood around for 2 hours after the body had been stripped with examining the body. And yet Trevor claims that the body wasn’t examined until the post mortem at 2.30.
- The only mortuary official that we know was there was Mr John Davis, the mortuary keeper. Is it at all likely that he would have been in on any organ stealing business? What we do know is that he would have known that the body had been examined and he would have been fully aware of the possibility that they might have seen the uterus still in place.
- We know that Dr. Brown, while in Mitre Square, requested the presence of Dr Phillips due to his knowledge of the Chapman murder.
- We know that PC Long handed the apron piece directly to Dr Phillips at Leman Street Station.
- We also know, from the Lloyd’s reporter who left the mortuary at 5.20 that Dr Brown was expecting Dr Phillips arrival. So Phillips would have arrived at the mortuary after 5.20, given the apron to Brown, and checked the injuries/mutilations as per Brown’s request. So we have another Doctor checking the wounds and who, with an open abdomen, might easily have noted the presence of the uterus. This is despite Trevor claiming that he wouldn’t have seen the body until the post mortem.
To suggest that organ thieves would have risked stealing organs after these events and before a post mortem cannot and should not be taken seriously. Organ thieves would only have taken organs after a post mortem had been carried out and never before. So why in this case would they have been in such a desperate rush that they would have risked their entire operation being exposed? The only answer is that they clearly wouldn’t have. We don’t have to prove that Phillips, Brown and Sequiera had become aware of the uterus being in place. All that we need to know is that organ thieves couldn’t possibly have known that they hadn’t seen the uterus in place.
……
Trevor often quotes the ‘infallible’ Inspector Reid as if his memory is proof that Kelly’s heart wasn’t missing. So was his memory all that is claimed by Trevor. I re-read an article on Reid in Ripperologist #147 by Nick Connell. He quotes from an interview with the News of the World (April 12th, 1896) that Reid gave.
He was asked: “So you never obtained a description of the man from anyone?”
He replied:
“Never. Indeed that the murderer was a man, is only an inference from the fact that no one but a person believed by the women themselves to be a man could have been taken by them to the secret haunts in which the murders were all committed.”
> So he couldn’t remember Joseph Lawende, Joseph Hyam Levy, Harry Harris, Israel Schwartz, Elizabeth Long, George Hutchinson or Mary Ann Cox? Not one of them? What a memory!
Reid began by talking about the first murder, Smith:
“The first Ripper murder was one which is not generally associated with the series. This was the Brick-lane murder, committed on a bank holiday in 1888. A woman named Smith was met by a man in Brick-lane who carried a walking stick, and committed a most terrible outrage upon her.”
> So he forgot that she was assaulted by a gang rather than by a single man with a walking stick (although where he recalled a walking stick from I can’t say)
Hopefully his ‘infallible’ memory is slightly better on events in Bucks Row?
“This was the notorious Buck’s-row murder. In this case the woman was believed to have been murdered about one o’clock in the morning.”
And,
“The mutilation in the Buck’srow case was exactly of the same nature as that inflicted upon the woman who died in the hospital”
> Apparently not. Still, he’s only two hours and forty minutes out. None of us were there but how many of us would claim that Nichols injuries were exactly the same as Smith’s?
Perhaps Reid had better recall of the Tabram murder?
“Her throat was cut and she had been stabbed in 39 places.”
> No, he didn’t.
Let’s try Chapman shall we?
“A resident in one of these houses in Hanbury-street went down at five o’clock in the morning into a yard at the rear of the place and found the body of a woman lying between some stone steps and a wall adjoining the side of the house.”
And,
“No one had seen her, no one had heard a person shout.‘
> Only an hour out this time. It was a fence not a wall. He forgets Elizabeth Long possibly saw her and that Albert Cadosch probably heard the victim and the killer.
We can now have a short celebration in that his short version of the Stride murder passes muster (apart from a mispronunciation of Diemschitz but I’ll happily give that a free pass)
What about Eddowes?
“This woman’s nose and ears had been cut off, and her face slashed. This murder was committed in September 1889 or 90. I forget for the moment which year.”
> Her nose and ears weren’t cut off and he couldn’t remember which of two incorrect years was the correct incorrect one!
Apparently, according to Reid, the chalked message said: “The Jews shall not be blamed for this.“
He continues “..and this was rubbed off before it could be photographed, contrary to my wishes and much to my regret.”
> I can’t find any mention of Reid being in Goulston Street. I’m not saying that he couldn’t have been there but I can see no mention of his presence by anyone.
Reid’s general description of the circumstances of Kelly murder is pretty accurate. But..
“I ought to tell you that the stories of portions of the body having been taken away by the murderer were all untrue. In every instance the body was complete. The mania of the murderer was exclusively for horrible mutilation.”
> We can see clearly from this quote that it was clearly Reid’s opinion, based on memory, that there were no body parts missing from any of the victims. Trevor makes the claim that he was only talking about Kelly but anyone can see that this wasn’t the case. He believed mutilation was all that the killer was interested in with all of the victims. That Reid should have ‘forgotten’ about the missing parts from Chapman and Eddowes should, once and for all, put paid to any claim attributed to his memory about Kelly’s heart not being missing. This was a man who misremembered that body parts had been taken from Chapman and Eddowes. No weight can be placed on Reid on this matter.
Reid also stated that McCarthy became ‘a perfect madman’ after the murder who used to regularly ‘knock up’ Reid to tell him that they had the ripper doesn’t speak of a particularly reliable man. Perhaps a better storyteller that a relater of facts. McCarthy was interviewed by The Times after the murder and testified without issue at the inquest so he wasn’t the gibbering wreck that Reid claimed him to have been.
There are more mistakes made by Reid which could be quoted but I won’t bother going through all of them but it has to be accepted that this man was very fallible and made many errors some memory; some of which would have to be described as real howlers. He certainly got some things right so we can’t state that his memory was uniformly terrible but it certainly wasn’t reliable as Trevor claims. Somewhat ironic from a man who regularly calls people (like Macnaghten as an example for getting a couple of facts wrong) and even objects (the marginalia for eg) ‘unreliable.’ He often accuses people of basing opinions on testimony that is ‘unsafe to rely on,’ and yet here he is relying on someone who is provably unsafe to rely on. Reid got more things wrong that Macnaghten so why is Mac ‘unsafe’ while Reid is ‘safe’?
When we combine the above with the fact that Bond listed all of the body parts found around the room but made no mention of finding the heart we can say that we are on pretty safe ground to say that it had been taken away.
It’s worth adding of course that we are by no means reliant on Kelly’s heart being absent. Trevor always suggests that if the killer was ‘harvesting’ organs why didn’t he take the heart? But ‘harvesting’ is a convenient phrase used by Trevor to manipulate a theory. We cannot claim that the killer was ‘harvesting.’ Who else makes this claim? It’s a suggestion and nothing more. You can’t state a positive by using a posdible. He may have taken organs for shock value and realising what he had time to do in Miller’s Court he knew that he needed no further ‘shock value’ so he didn’t bother with the risk of walking away carry a body part. If he was taking parts as souvenirs to relive his fantasy over again (as we know that some serial killers do) how do we know that he didn’t just take a piece of random flesh. There’s no way that the Doctors would have accounted for every singly inch of flesh. The phrase “If he was harvesting…” carries no weight in this discussion.
Every theory deserves to be looked into thoroughly and this one has. We cannot state, as Trevor repeatedly does, that the killer didn’t have time in Mitre Square to do what is claimed because a) we don’t know how long these actions would have taken, and b) we don’t know exactly how long he had available to him. It really is that simple. We have shown that organ thieves wouldn’t have taken organs away before a post mortem. And we know that no one at the time even suggested, implied or hinted at organs being removed in the mortuary. And we’ve seen from the poll that no one accepts this theory. A glance over on JTRForums reminds us that the theory got the same reception over there from people like Paul Begg, Chris Phillips, Debra Arif, Howard Brown, Gary Barnett etc.
It really is time to place this theory on the ‘refuted’ pile. I know that Trevor will never accept this and there’s nothing that anyone can do about that but this one is dead.
So tell me what part of the arcticle about the Kelly murder did Reid get wrong and this all I am concerned with, and this is very relevant and it shows that his memory of all that took place regarding the Kelly murder was as it should have been, and not as you and others suggest fading, and why would he make a statement like that years later when he knew that there were people involved in the Kelly murder that could have rebuuted his statement about no organs were found missing.
Reid attended the crime scene and when he later stated no organs were found missing this statement should be readily accepted and not questioned by you or others who subscribe to the killer taking organs in fact If the killer was harvesting organs, he could have taken any number of organs for Kelly.
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