IWEC members

[Michael W Richards]

Found it!
Daily News 3rd Oct '88

"Mr. W. Wess, Secretary of the International Working Men's Club, Berner-street, called at our office at midnight and made the following statement:-It having come to my knowledge that the man who was seen by Mrs. Mortimer, of 36, Berner-street, passing her house "carrying a black shiny bag," who walked very fast down the street from the Commercial-road about the time the murder was supposed to have occurred, was a member of the club, I immediately went with him, between 10 and 11 to-night, to the Leman-street Police-station, where he made a statement as to his whereabouts on Saturday evening which was completely satisfactory"

Great quote there Joshua. Confirms Wess as interpreter and Leon as a club member. Who had a gladstone full of empty cigarette cartons at the moment he passes the gates, and was just steps away from men who made cigarettes, who later confirmed they were awake at the rough time of the murder. My question is obviously...did Goldstein intend to enter through the gates to drop off those cartons? Did he see something that caused him to just continue on past.

If men were in that entranceway, then the widely accepted discovery time is incorrect. As a matter of record, the time Leon passes is virtually the same time that Blackwell had estimated would be around the earliest the cut was made.

[NotBlamedForNothing]

Both Goldstein and Schwartz walked south down Berner St, passing Mortimer's house.

Great quote there Joshua. Confirms Wess as interpreter and Leon as a club member.

So, both Goldstein and Schwartz went to the police with an interpreter friend.

Who had a gladstone full of empty cigarette cartons at the moment he passes the gates, and was just steps away from men who made cigarettes, who later confirmed they were awake at the rough time of the murder.

Goldstein was a traveller. Schwartz, who "had gone out for the day" (Star), seems also to have been a traveller.

My question is obviously...did Goldstein intend to enter through the gates to drop off those cartons? Did he see something that caused him to just continue on past.

Did Schwartz also see something? "Before he had gone many yards, however, he heard the sound of a quarrel, and turned back to learn what was the matter,..." (Star).

If men were in that entranceway, then the widely accepted discovery time is incorrect. As a matter of record, the time Leon passes is virtually the same time that Blackwell had estimated would be around the earliest the cut was made.

So, more like the same time that Schwartz gave.

Has the penny dropped?

[Michael W Richards]

Im not sure what your objections are here, but;

Both Goldstein and Schwartz walked south down Berner St, passing Mortimer's house.

We know Goldstein did, he was seen by a witness.

So, both Goldstein and Schwartz went to the police with an interpreter friend.

The point is that I believe both men used the same interpreter, Woolf Wess. Goldstein is referred to as a member of the club, so it seems reasonable that he would have access to Woolf, but how does Israel know Woolf?

Goldstein was a traveller. Schwartz, who "had gone out for the day" (Star), seems also to have been a traveller.

As mentioned, Goldstein was a member of the club so likely a regular, and Israel said he was at the market since shortly after noon that day while his wife moved their belongings from somewhere to their new digs.

Did Schwartz also see something? "Before he had gone many yards, however, he heard the sound of a quarrel, and turned back to learn what was the matter,..." (Star).

Im a bit puzzled by your comment, Israel said that he was passing by the gates on the street at around 12:45pm. Goldstein was seen by Fanny Mortimer at her door to the street at around 12:55pm. By Israels account, he would be scurrying on to his new home by that time. If Goldstein had seen something happening just inside the gates when he passed by, perhaps causing him to "hurry on past" the entrance to the yard, that would make the discovery time earlier than is presently accepted. Mr Diemshitz claimed when he arrived at "precisely"..his words, 1am, he discovered the body just inside the entranceway and no-one else was there. However if multiple witnesses were gathered by the dying woman when Goldstein passes around 12:55, then obviously the body was known about before that time.

So, more like the same time that Schwartz gave.

Schwartz says he saw Liz being assaulted around 12:45, so technically she could have been killed just after he scurried on home. Then Goldstein comes by a few minutes later and perhaps sees the men gathered around. Too bad we dont have any proof at all that Israel Schwartz was there at all and saw anything he says he saw, but good that we do have some witnesses that can be corroborated.

Has the penny dropped?

Perhaps you should address that question.

[New Waterloo]

I am constantly amazed at the activities of the IWEC in Berner Street and the different positions we all seem to take on what the reality was for Berner Street in general whilst the club was in use. There appears to be more evidence that Berners Street was not a quiet street but to be honest a hive of activity. Evidence suggests that members of the club often disagreed and there were verbal and violent confrontations. There was music and singing and coming and goings till the early hours. This is the important bit. If we are to assume that JTR new the area reasonably well. (A good start I think regardless of our own favorite suspects) then common sense would suggest that JTR would not pick Dutfields yard as a killing location. It would be sheer madness. (of course this does strengthen the case for mad JTR suspects, but any JTR with any sense would have stayed clear of that place. We must look at the evidence first and try to build a picture based on that at least to start with. Let the evidence take us along. In this case the evidence leads us to the question who would kill somebody in that location with such a massive chance of getting caught? A mad man, member or not, a drunk, somebody trying to discredit the club, somebody wanting to kill Stride in particular. A thinking, planning and fully aware JTR would not use this place. Well that is what the evidence would suggest. If it was JTR then he must have been drunk or mad. (suspects please)

Anyway Happy New year to you all. Back to the glass of wine!!

[Scott Nelson]

He could have been a club member who either slipped away after the murder or returned into the club.

[Darryl Kenyon]

He could have been a club member who either slipped away after the murder or returned into the club.

Indeed . Liz may not have even seen her killer . He comes out of the club by the side door, Liz is stood in the gateway so to speak. The killer comes up behind her, over the noise, strangles her from the back by pulling the scarf tight, suddenly and swiftly [ possibly explaining the cachous, and no defence marks ]. Then cutting her throat as he lowers her to the ground, before he hears or sees something which disturbs him.

Regards Darryl

[Darryl Kenyon]

I am constantly amazed at the activities of the IWEC in Berner Street and the different positions we all seem to take on what the reality was for Berner Street in general whilst the club was in use. There appears to be more evidence that Berners Street was not a quiet street but to be honest a hive of activity. Evidence suggests that members of the club often disagreed and there were verbal and violent confrontations. There was music and singing and coming and goings till the early hours. This is the important bit. If we are to assume that JTR new the area reasonably well. (A good start I think regardless of our own favorite suspects) then common sense would suggest that JTR would not pick Dutfields yard as a killing location. It would be sheer madness. (of course this does strengthen the case for mad JTR suspects, but any JTR with any sense would have stayed clear of that place. We must look at the evidence first and try to build a picture based on that at least to start with. Let the evidence take us along. In this case the evidence leads us to the question who would kill somebody in that location with such a massive chance of getting caught? A mad man, member or not, a drunk, somebody trying to discredit the club, somebody wanting to kill Stride in particular. A thinking, planning and fully aware JTR would not use this place. Well that is what the evidence would suggest. If it was JTR then he must have been drunk or mad. (suspects please)

Anyway Happy New year to you all. Back to the glass of wine!!

Hi NW I take what you are saying but I believe the stairwell in George yard buildings and the back of 29 Hanbury [ considering it was coming light ] , were just as risky .

Regards Darryl

[JeffHamm]

I am constantly amazed at the activities of the IWEC in Berner Street and the different positions we all seem to take on what the reality was for Berner Street in general whilst the club was in use. There appears to be more evidence that Berners Street was not a quiet street but to be honest a hive of activity. Evidence suggests that members of the club often disagreed and there were verbal and violent confrontations. There was music and singing and coming and goings till the early hours. This is the important bit. If we are to assume that JTR new the area reasonably well. (A good start I think regardless of our own favorite suspects) then common sense would suggest that JTR would not pick Dutfields yard as a killing location. It would be sheer madness. (of course this does strengthen the case for mad JTR suspects, but any JTR with any sense would have stayed clear of that place. We must look at the evidence first and try to build a picture based on that at least to start with. Let the evidence take us along. In this case the evidence leads us to the question who would kill somebody in that location with such a massive chance of getting caught? A mad man, member or not, a drunk, somebody trying to discredit the club, somebody wanting to kill Stride in particular. A thinking, planning and fully aware JTR would not use this place. Well that is what the evidence would suggest. If it was JTR then he must have been drunk or mad. (suspects please)

Anyway Happy New year to you all. Back to the glass of wine!!

Alternatively, a thinking JtR may well have realised he had no time for his mutilations, but did have time to murder. His "awareness" could be why we see "Jackus interuptus", he interrupts himself so to speak. While serial killers will take extraordinary risks to commit an offense, they will generally try to minimize the risk of capture when possible. So the idea of killing Stride, given how busy the area is, might have appealed to him. He did, after all, murder and mutilate in an enclosed backyard at Hanbury Street, and out in the open street in Buck's Row when people are out and heading to work. He appears to believe that as long as he's not spotted right at the crime scene, all he needs is a bit of distance and he's fine; or he's mad as a hatter and has a completely bizarre way of thinking that we cannot really understand. This is the thing about "behavioural profiling", you can spin any yarn you want, and in the end, the evidence upon which it is built is minimal. The FBI's study of serial offenders included only a very small number of interviews, so the connection between "crime scene behaviour" and "offender personality characteristics" is really just a tentative hypothesis and doesn't have the evidential backing that one might presume. Independent examination of such things as the "organised/disorganized" continuum, for example, have found little actual support (the idea that organised crime scenes lead to organized offenders, etc, is what I mean here). While I think it is an interesting idea to try and infer offender characteristics from crime scene behaviour, I don't think the proper analyses have been done, nor have enough data sets been put together to truly assess the question. Also, even if information can be reliably extracted, it will be very general in nature; a blurry silhouette rather than a photographic detailed description; but I digress.

- Jeff

[Michael W Richards]

He could have been a club member who either slipped away after the murder or returned into the club.

Ive mentioned that there were men on the scene that night that were originally hired as Security after the club received threats when they had advertised that William Morris was speaking that night. Needless to say he was cancelled and instead Eagle gave the canned "Why Jews should be Socialists" speech. So its possible someone on site, who wasnt a member, might have been the culprit.

But Mrs D had a soapy sink full of dishes from the meeting clean up, open the side door, plop a knife in the suds, and upstairs to join the singing. The police did in fact check the inside of the club for evidence that night.

[Michael W Richards]

Alternatively, a thinking JtR may well have realised he had no time for his mutilations, but did have time to murder. His "awareness" could be why we see "Jackus interuptus", he interrupts himself so to speak. While serial killers will take extraordinary risks to commit an offense, they will generally try to minimize the risk of capture when possible. So the idea of killing Stride, given how busy the area is, might have appealed to him. He did, after all, murder and mutilate in an enclosed backyard at Hanbury Street, and out in the open street in Buck's Row when people are out and heading to work. He appears to believe that as long as he's not spotted right at the crime scene, all he needs is a bit of distance and he's fine; or he's mad as a hatter and has a completely bizarre way of thinking that we cannot really understand. This is the thing about "behavioural profiling", you can spin any yarn you want, and in the end, the evidence upon which it is built is minimal. The FBI's study of serial offenders included only a very small number of interviews, so the connection between "crime scene behaviour" and "offender personality characteristics" is really just a tentative hypothesis and doesn't have the evidential backing that one might presume. Independent examination of such things as the "organised/disorganized" continuum, for example, have found little actual support (the idea that organised crime scenes lead to organized offenders, etc, is what I mean here). While I think it is an interesting idea to try and infer offender characteristics from crime scene behaviour, I don't think the proper analyses have been done, nor have enough data sets been put together to truly assess the question. Also, even if information can be reliably extracted, it will be very general in nature; a blurry silhouette rather than a photographic detailed description; but I digress.

- Jeff

I think we see learned behaviour when the attack is withheld until a more private place is accessed, I think that is evident when looking at Pollys venue and then Annies. He didnt finish with Polly, he wanted to. That alone suggests he wouldnt likely risk failure again in the double gate entranceway to a club that had some 30 people in attendance awake and singing.

[JeffHamm]

I think we see learned behaviour when the attack is withheld until a more private place is accessed, I think that is evident when looking at Pollys venue and then Annies. He didnt finish with Polly, he wanted to. That alone suggests he wouldnt likely risk failure again in the double gate entranceway to a club that had some 30 people in attendance awake and singing.

No doubt he's learning from past experiences, that always occurs. As to whether or not he "finished" in the Chapman case, that's hard to say. Clearly, he's acting out some sort of fantasy, in that he no doubt imagines mutilation and violence in his daily life, and when he acts upon it he tries to fulfil his obsession. The reality is never as good as the imagined scenerio, and his emotional need is never fulfilled by the actual event, hence the drive to repeat again. However, it is always a bit risky to presume we understand such deviant thought patterns beyond such generalities. We know he left the Chapman scene after completing what was found at the scene, but we don't know exactly why he chose to leave when he did. There is information available that suggests his reason may have been Cadocshe's return to the loo, though that of course is a topic for a different thread. If the murder was earlier, then he left, as far as we know, when he simply chose to leave, which would point to the notion that he must have decided he had finished. In the Nichols and Chapman case, JtR leaves, for whatever reason, because at that point he decided he has done all he had time to do (i.e. if in Nichols case he leaves because of Cross/Lechmere's approach, he leaves because he has to; with Chapman, if the murder is early, he leaves because he's done enough, or if it is later, probably because Cadosche has shown up a second time). So if he leaves because he's done all he thinks he has time to do, then Stride's murder may reflect that as well, he kills her, but given the activity in the club, that is all he decides he had time to do in that location. It was an opportunity to murder that he acted upon, but the location did not afford the time to proceed to mutilations. That may be what we're seeing (presuming, of course, that Stride is actually a victim of JtR; I'm non-committal on that, but if she is we do have to try and understand her lack of mutilations, and of course there are many lines of thought on that).

Anyway, Eddowes murder later that evening, is in no more a private location than Nichols, really. It's out in the open, it's not in an alley, there is activity in the orange market next door, there were people leaving the club who may have seen him talking to Eddowes (Lawende and company; again, if that's a valid sighting, which it may have been), and yet he feels there is time to perform mutilations in this case. The area, however, while not devoid of activity, is not right next to a door where people could suddenly emerge (the buildings seem quiet - he doesn't know that Morris is cleaning up inside the warehouse after all) as it was in the Stride case, and so one could argue that he learned of the dangers of such things from the Chapman case, and the relative safety of Mitre Square was learned from the Nichols case. It is entirely possible, given the testimony, that Morris in fact opened the warehouse door to sweep out material slightly before PC Harvey came down Church Passage on his patrol (the testimonies allow for either of those events to come first), reinforcing the dangers of people exiting from buildings at unexpected times. That could be why he then looks for opportunities inside, and we get the subsequent Kelly murder.

Obviously, all of this is just speculation. We know he had the opportunity to learn such things, but whether his mind learned what I'm attributing to it, will forever remain unknown. His mind, and thought pattern, will be so unlike my own that what he learned may be beyond my understanding. On the other hand, that too is speculation. How he learned, and what he learned, and from what, will in a large part depend upon his own mental state of mind. A mentally ill, say schizophrenic, offender will learn very different things from a psychopathic offender. There's just too many unknowns to solve such equations, and the pieces we have could form any number of pictures. That is, I think, part of the enduring nature of the mystery.

- Jeff

[Darryl Kenyon]

When we come to the murder scene in Dutfield's yard I think we should take into account that it was pitch black giving the killer some form of cover. And if Liz was killed silently and swiftly as I believe , what noise would there be, especially over the singing ? People could pass up and down Berner st [ as Goldstein did ], and not hear or see a thing .

Regards Darryl

[JeffHamm]

When we come to the murder scene in Dutfield's yard I think we should take into account that it was pitch black giving the killer some form of cover. And if Liz was killed silently and swiftly as I believe , what noise would there be, especially over the singing ? People could pass up and down Berner st [ as Goldstein did ], and not hear or see a thing .

Regards Darryl

Hi Darryl,

Well, it was dark where the body was found. The body, being on the ground, would have a low profile and so would be hard to spot from the street. However, someone standing, or even crouching, in that area, would still have the lit area behind him. I presume there was light coming out from around the doorway; so even if the front area by the gate was dark, if you stood at the gate you would be backlit by any light behind you in the yard.

That aside, the singing would most likely cover any sounds of the crime, but the killer's concern would be the converse, it would also cover any sounds of someone going towards the door, or possibly coming down the street (somewhat). The noise from the club would signal activity and people, which alone is enough to signal the area is too busy for spending any extra time engaging in mutilations, but to the mind of a serial killer, it might still have just been an opportunity too good to pass up completely (partly for the ideas you mention above - unlikely to be heard, and under some cover from anyone in the street - and even if he emerges and someone is coming down, they probably haven't seen or heard anything, etc).

- Jeff

[NotBlamedForNothing]

Im not sure what your objections are here, but;

I wasn't objecting, but clearly you missed what I was getting at.

Israel Schwartz? Who's he when he's at home?

[NotBlamedForNothing]

Indeed . Liz may not have even seen her killer . He comes out of the club by the side door, Liz is stood in the gateway so to speak. The killer comes up behind her, over the noise, strangles her from the back by pulling the scarf tight, suddenly and swiftly [ possibly explaining the cachous, and no defence marks ]. Then cutting her throat as he lowers her to the ground, before he hears or sees something which disturbs him.

Regards Darryl

So to speak? Presumably you find the notion of Liz standing in that gateway eating cachous, a bit hard to swallow?