Patterns formed by murder locations

[RivkahChaya]

I wonder though about the length of her hair...since it was noted by many witnesses one wonders if when the ID's took place the length was made known to the witnesses.

Cheers

I know the length of her hair was frequently commented on, but I wonder how many people actually saw her hair down? Barnett surely did, but the fact that she went without a hat, may have simply allowed people to infer that her hair was long, or else very thick. When women put their hair up, in the styles of the 1880s & 90s, they puff most of it up front, and put a hat on the back of their heads, and it gives the idea that the hair is all over the way it is up front, but it isn't. Upper class women could afford hair pieces, but lower class women couldn't. Mary Kelly probably couldn't, and at any rate, they are hard to maintain. If she could go around without a hat, and have a full-around hairstyle, then people would know she had a lot of hair. In fact, showing off her hair, along with de-emphasizing her height, may have been why she didn't wear a hat at a time when it was a real fashion faux pas not to wear one, at least at night.

How this is relevant: if people just inferred that her hair was long based on the way it looked put up, they may not have recognized it down. It's down in the in situ photos, and I'm thinking Barnett is probably the only one who would have a really good idea of what her hair looked like down.

As far as the identification, it wasn't like a game of Name That Tune ("I can identify that body with just the ears"; "I can identify it with one ear"); I'm sure if Barnett said he wasn't sure about the identification, could he see the hair? the morgue attendants would roll the body over.

[Michael W Richards]

I know the length of her hair was frequently commented on, but I wonder how many people actually saw her hair down? Barnett surely did, but the fact that she went without a hat, may have simply allowed people to infer that her hair was long, or else very thick. When women put their hair up, in the styles of the 1880s & 90s, they puff most of it up front, and put a hat on the back of their heads, and it gives the idea that the hair is all over the way it is up front, but it isn't. Upper class women could afford hair pieces, but lower class women couldn't. Mary Kelly probably couldn't, and at any rate, they are hard to maintain. If she could go around without a hat, and have a full-around hairstyle, then people would know she had a lot of hair. In fact, showing off her hair, along with de-emphasizing her height, may have been why she didn't wear a hat at a time when it was a real fashion faux pas not to wear one, at least at night.

How this is relevant: if people just inferred that her hair was long based on the way it looked put up, they may not have recognized it down. It's down in the in situ photos, and I'm thinking Barnett is probably the only one who would have a really good idea of what her hair looked like down.

As far as the identification, it wasn't like a game of Name That Tune ("I can identify that body with just the ears"; "I can identify it with one ear"); I'm sure if Barnett said he wasn't sure about the identification, could he see the hair? the morgue attendants would roll the body over.

You know Dew mentioned that Mary was seen with her hair out often, but "out" could just refer to being out from under a bonnet, and in actuality, it may well have been braided. Im thinking that if she was in the habit of wearing her hair "out" then the fact that she likely didnt wash it daily might factor into her style at any given time.

He also said she wore a clean white apron...so, maybe her hygiene was better than her lifestyle...hard to say.

Cheers

[RivkahChaya]

He also said she wore a clean white apron...so, maybe her hygiene was better than her lifestyle...hard to say.

Clean was probably relative.

I wonder what the signs of being an available sex worker were then? I mean, I can go to a particular corner in Manhattan, and tell you which women are the pros, and which are the bartenders or waitresses on cigarette breaks. Is it possible that wearing hair down was a sign of being available? I'm asking because I have no idea, but there must have been something. Yes, I know that in 1888, a woman simply being by herself in the evening was suggestive, but there were probably still ways that pros had of alerting potential customers, so they wouldn't have to go through the embarrassment of asking women who were not sex workers if they were available, and sex workers wouldn't have to verbally solicit every customer, and risk soliciting a police officer out of uniform, or someone who might give them a lecture on the morality of their profession.

[DVV]

In Berner Street they sold matches, according to a French reporter

[Wickerman]

Hi Rivkah,

There has been some discussion over the years as to whether Barnett meant Hair or Ear in his remarks, thats why I posted it in that manner.

Reports in the press tell that her ears were cut off, so if true, he couldn't have said "ear", it must have been "hair". I think most people have assumed that all along. She had a particularly noticeable hair colour according to some.

Regards, Jon S.

[RavenDarkendale]

No, Raven. Identification means identification. Barnett and Hutch were asked to identify the body.The people you're alluded to were not.

Quite right, they were not asked to identify a body. But they identified Mary as the person they saw alive on the street. Identifying that body as anyone would be difficult. Perhaps the body was MJK, perhaps not. I concede the possibility of Barnett and Hutch identifying the body as MJK because it never occurred to them she might still be alive. It was female, in her room, in her bed, and there were the clothes.

That makes it easy to say those who saw MJK alive afterwards mistook their day, the time, the person, etc. But maybe they were right and B&H were mistaken.

People have presented Barnett as perhaps a Ripper suspect. If he were, then he knew very well to whom the body belonged. If perhaps he knew Mary was alive, perhaps he made the identification to help her get out of the country. Who knows? Possibilities are simply that: a possibility. It pays to be open to all possibilities when studying JTR,

[RivkahChaya]

Quite right, they were not asked to identify a body. But they identified Mary as the person they saw alive on the street. Identifying that body as anyone would be difficult.

...

That makes it easy to say those who saw MJK alive afterwards mistook their day, the time, the person, etc. But maybe they were right and B&H were mistaken.

Two important points: one is that identifying anyone, even a very mutilated body, that is in front of you, is going to be more certain than identifying something only in memory, especially when there was no reason at the past time to be paying particular attention. When Caroline Maxwell spoke to MJK (or whoever), whenever she did, she had no reason to think the event was unusual, or to pay any special attention. The second is that there is no question that there was the body of someone in the bed in 13 Miller's Court. Caroline Maxwell may, or may not have seen MJK on Nov. 9th. She may have spoken to MJK, or to someone else, or to no one. She could be mistaken on one of two counts, the person, or the time/date, or mistaken on BOTH counts.

I know I have said a lot about the possibility that Caroline Maxwell could have seen MJK just as she said (give or take 10 minutes), and yet MJK could still have been dead in Miller's Court by the time Bowyer came around, but I said that because I think it's wrong to put too much stock in the exactness of reported times, or the estimated time of death*, not because I think the victim wasn't MJK. I still think it's by far more likely that Caroline Maxwell and the other witness were mistaken, than it is that MJK wasn't the victim.

There has been a lot of research on memory in the last 20 years, and people realize now that false memories can seem absolutely real, and someone who holds one (as opposed to a knowing fabrication) will appear in no way to be lying, will pass a polygraph, will even show symptoms of PTSD if the false memory is traumatic. From a neurological standpoint, the person is not lying, and fMRIs and PET scans will show the same activity as a person showing genuine recall of an actual event.


*Medical examiners get that wrong even now, if they have incorrect information about ambient temperature, or whether or not the body was moved post-mortem; there was a case in the US where the police dismissed a confession given 20 years after the fact by a woman who had been known to the police the whole time as the last person to see the victim alive. The confession was dismissed, until a new detective assigned to the case did some calculating on the place where the body was found, and with the help of the current medical examiner, figured that since the body was on the ground-- that is, earth-- under a full-leaved tree, it would have cooled faster than people realized 20 years earlier, and rigor would have been delayed. Given a different timeline, the confession made sense, and was finally accepted. I know it sounds odd that a confession wouldn't be accepted, but the woman had a history of mental illness.

[Sherlock Holmes]

RivkahChaya you wrote:
"I think it's by far more likely that Caroline Maxwell and the other witness were mistaken, than it is that MJK wasn't the victim".


If it was her why did she head away from home toward the sq. I thought she was in the lockup the previous night sleeping off having too much to drink. Shouldn't she have been sober when she left?

Mr Holmes

[lynn cates]

possible conflation

Hello Mr. Holmes. Is it possible that you are conflating Kate Eddowes with "MJK"?

Cheers.
LC

[RivkahChaya]

If it was [Mary Jane Kelly] why did she head away from home toward the sq. I thought she was in the lockup the previous night....
Mr Holmes

Hello Mr. Holmes. Is it possible that you are conflating Kate Eddowes with "MJK"?

Cheers.
LC

If not, then there is a very serious problem with the time of death.

[Phil H]

Have any of you ever caught sight of someone - perhaps well-known to you in the past but not seen for years - and known instantly that it was a certain person? I don't mean facially, but from a hundred little details of posture, stance, gesture and just the way the person is put together.

It is quite possible that Maxwell thought she knew Kelly but actually thought the wrong person was her (there seems to have been a good deal of that around Dorset Street). In that case her testimony was accurate, but she was misinformed!! Equally she might be mistaken as to time of day or the day of ther week.

But I cannot see how Barnett can have been mistaken in identifying the remains as Kelly - a woman with whom he had been intimate for months.

Sure she was horribly, unbelieveably motivated. Sure he may have been an emotional wreck.

BUT - her hair - its colour, curl, general length and arrangement were unchanged. Her hands, finger nails, length of fingers, shape of her hands were unchanged. Her ears - very distinctive - presence of lobes, the folds and placing, whether they stuck out... Bodily marks that distinguish us - moles, scars, etc should still have been there on parts of the body.

The features may have been erased, but the shape of the victim's face, the jaw line, the forehead, were all still there to see.

Could any of us, presented with the body of a loved one, parent, partner, spouse, child - be mistaken in identifying the remains, even if (say) the head was missing or the face disfigured? We know people close to us well, and while I can envisage circumstances in which a mistaken identification could take place (see below) I believe that unless by some coincidence the victim and the person identified were so physically similar as to be almost identical any mistaken identification could only be deliberate or because the witness was mentally unstable in some way (shock?) and not really looking closely.

I was in a local piza restaurant last week, one I use a lot and know the staff well. I couldn't work out why the assistant manager seemed vague about my usual order. I called him by his name, he seemed as usual in every way.

As I paid the bill at the end of the meal, the manager told me how pleased he was that the assistant manager's IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER was now helping serve in the restaurant! I apologised to the "twin" for having called him by his brother's name - he said he hadn't noticed. But suddenly everything was explained. But my identification - physically - was right. it was just that there were two people and i didn not know.

Now please note I am NOT suggesting that MJK had an identical twin sister, doppelganger or anything similar. My point is that I was NOT mistaken in my identification, just misled by circumstances.

On balance, I do not think Joe Barnett could have been mistaken in his identifcation of the Miller's Court victim, unless deliberately so.

Phil H

[Phil H]

If not, then there is a very serious problem with the time of death.

This is a new theory, Rivkah.

Eddowes and Kelly were identical twins. On 30 September kelly was pretending to be Eddowes and Eddowes Kelly. Hence Eddowes/Kelly using Kelly/Eddowes' name.

The killer thought he was meeting Mary, when he actually met Kate, but he intended to kill Mary, so murdered the wrong woman. (Stride may have been pretending to be Eddowes too, but that's another story.)

So the killer now had to find Kelly/Eddowes, but wasn't sure whom she was now pretending to be. Hence his confusion at finding multiple personalities in the room at Millers Court - "Jack" was never sure whom he had killed.

Now for me the big question is: was John Kelly pretending to be Joe Barnett? Was Joe Barnett pretending to be John Kelly (or perhaps Mrs Maxwell)? And was Stride's lover a man of that Kidney? Did he send a kidney to Mr Lusk to say he was?

And as a final twist were Joe and Dan Barnett identical twins and did either of them or both work in a pizza restaurant?

Answers on a postcard (in red ink please) to the Central News Agency (or the CIA) just for jollies.

Phil H (or someone else - maybe).

[Steve S]

I've read weirder theories on here............

[Phil H]

Yes, Steve. but the frightening thing is, those other ones were seriously meant!!

[RivkahChaya]

But I cannot see how Barnett can have been mistaken in identifying the remains as Kelly - a woman with whom he had been intimate for months.

I couldn't agree more, Phil. I've said before that we generally can identify the people we are closest to, and see every day, like spouses, and children who live with us, from the back.

Sure she was horribly, unbelieveably motivated. Sure he may have been an emotional wreck.

Autocorrect have its way with you?

Hands are very distinct. I was a sign language interpreter for many years, and I can tell you that. Also, FWIW, it's interesting how heritable the shape and form of hands are. My son has my brother's hands. You can look at photographs of their hands at the same age, and not tell them apart. My aunt often mentioned how her younger daughter had her mother's (that is, my aunt's mother) hands. I never got to compare them in real life, because my cousin's grandmother predeceased her, but now that my cousin is in her thirties, and getting closer to the age of my aunt's mother when I first knew her (she was actually in her fifties when I was born, but, not a child, or teen, if you get my meaning), I see that my aunt is quite right. They really do have the same hands.

My point about that is that I think that humans can recognize hands. There probably is an evolutionary advantage to being able to do so, and maybe evolutionary pressure to hands having a familial look, when you think that a small child does not have his mother's face, but rather her hands at his eye-level.

And, MJK's hands were untouched. It's true that Barnett does not remark on them, but he still may have looked at them. BUT - her hair - its colour, curl, general length and arrangement were unchanged. Her hands, finger nails, length of fingers, shape of her hands were unchanged. Her ears - very distinctive - presence of lobes, the folds and placing, whether they stuck out... Bodily marks that distinguish us - moles, scars, etc should still have been there on parts of the body.

The features may have been erased, but the shape of the victim's face, the jaw line, the forehead, were all still there to see.

I've said before, but I will repeat, the fact that her skull was not damaged is important. Her head shape was maintained.

I couldn't work out why the assistant manager seemed vague about my usual order. I called him by his name, he seemed as usual in every way... the manager told me how pleased he was that the assistant manager's IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER was now helping serve in the restaurant!

When I have known identical twins, I've noticed that if I see them every day, I learn to tell them apart, but if I go a long time without seeing them (or, just months, if they are children), I can't, even if they are side-by-side. It isn't that they don't look different. It's a question of remembering which differences go with which twin. When you see them every day, you have a constant feedback loop, noticing new differences, and reinforcing correct identification. I have known fraternal twins who look a lot alike, or even just brothers who look a lot alike, and it is hard to remember which is which, not because you don't notice differences, but because sometimes it is hard to plug in which difference goes with which child. It can even be hard for a preschool teacher with two unrelated children who look a lot alike, but because they tend to look less and less alike over time, it gets easier.