Blood oozing

[kjab3112]

The pool contained perhaps two wineglasses of blood or half a pint of it, as per Llewellyn. Very roughly speaking, that would mean that there was up towards three decilitres of blood in that pool.
That means that there cannot have been any torrent of bleeding, provided that there was no outled from the pool. Incidentally, there WAS such an outlet, and blood had run from then pool into the gutter. It is not specified how much blood had left the pool that way, but if it had been a very significant amount, we would have known. Instead, a scarcity of blood was commented on.

Fisherman,

The blood pool volume you refer to seems impossibly small. I am aware Llewllyn did not see the blood soaked clothes, but this estimate (which you state may be wrong due to an unrecognised outflow) seems at odds with his postmortem findings of exsanguination as a cause of death. Even more so as this would be the volume from only one carotid in less than a minute if completely severed and certainly not a fatal volume of blood loss.

Regards

Paul

[John G]

Hi John,

Evidence for strangulation would include the bruising you mention, plus discolouration of the face (not remarked upon) and protrusion of the tongue (note small laceration), amongst others. The coroner however issued a certificate stating violent syncope due to cuts to the neck and abdomen: I.e. bled to death from the neck and abdomen. It needs to be remembered that some of the postmortem evidence was retained from the jury (or at least from reporters).

Strangulation takes many stages, to initial unconsciousness can take seconds, but to complete asphyxic death can be minutes. If victim were merely unconscious, then the blood pressure would be maintained and in the case of the internal carotid, blood flow maintained, until a significant volume of blood has been lost, only starting to tail off after there is loss of consciousness from that blood loss (ignore for one moment that bilateral severance of the carotids results in unconsciousness within ten to twenty seconds).

Best wishes

Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the very informative reply. It does therefore appear that Payne James was being speculative when postulating that the victim had been strangled. And, of course, even she had you point out that could add several minutes to the total time the perpetrator was with the victim.

[Fisherman]

I don't know why you felt the need to create an analogy with someone getting tired because you haven't improved the situation. The language used by P-J about the blood flow is clear enough. It can flow for up to 7 minutes with 3 or 5 being more realistic. He did not say it can flow up to and beyond 7 minutes. But if that is what he MEANT then we don't know whether he would have said (or "guessed" to use his language) that the blood would flow for up to 20 minutes. So his answer is completely useless for our purposes isn't it?

The way you try to interpret it, it seems very useful for your purposes.

For seven minutes to be the limit, it would have taken that Payne-James said so: "I guess blood may continue to flow for up to this amount of time, BUT NOT ANY LONGER". He never said anything remotely like that.

Letīs try to help your gifts of understanding a bit on the way: A Mountain, Mount X, has four camps for climbers on it, situated on 6000, 6200, 6400 and 6800 meters. I am asked about a man who I know, and who is going to try and climb up the mountainside. He is not a very good climber. The question I am asked is whether I think he can reach any of the lower three camps, and I answer "I guess he can be able to reach all of them, but he is likelier to only reach camp one or two".

Does that mean that I exclude that he could reach camp 4, or does it mean that I simply think it very unlikely?

Now, make an effort to transfer this thinking into what J P-J said: It could bleed for three, five or seven minutes, but it was more liley to bleed for the shorter periods of time.
Does that exclude categorically that it could bleed for MORE than seven minutes, or does it simply mean that Payne-James thought that such a thing was very unlikely?

Itīs a hard exercise, but Iīve seen you flex some pretty impressive intellectual muscles in the past, so I donīt put it beyond you.

If you think it is "useless" to know that any bleeding beyond three or five minutes is unlikely to happen, then that will have to stand for you. You asked me before how a court of law would look upon the word "guess". Well, guess how a court of law would look upon the information that only Lechmere can be fitted roughly into the span of likely bleeding? How does a jury look upon such matters, even if they are informed that it can bleed for longer times, but it is not to be expected?

[Fisherman]

I don't think J-P-J is blissfully unaware of the mechanisms of bleeding I think that YOU are which is why I cannot accept your speculative interpretations of what you think that J-P-J meant.

And still you ask me for my meaning?

[Fisherman]

I love the way that at the same time as telling me he is less devious than I think, Fisherman is busy laying the groundwork to improve on the answer he was given by his trusted expert Payne-James.

Despite his own question to the expert going no higher than 7 minutes in respect of post-mortem "bleeding", Fisherman now introduces 8 or 9 minutes into the answer. Payne James never said it and, indeed, read properly, he has basically ruled it out but now Fisherman thinks his answer needs a re-tuning.

For, let's face, it if PC Neil could have arrived no earlier than 6 minutes after Paul first walked into Bucks Row that doesn't really give Lechmere much time to commit the murder does it? And Fisherman sees that. Sixty seconds isn't quite enough. He needs 2 or 3 minutes. So 7 minutes is out the window and we need a slightly larger window of time. 8 or 9 minutes is perfect. Still just enough time to exclude anyone other than Lechmere.

The fact that Payne-James didn't say anything about 8 or 9 minutes is not important. For Fisherman, the fact that the murder was most likely committed within 8 or 9 minutes of Neil's appearance but unlikely to have been 15 or 20 minutes before that is all he needs to frame Lechmere for the murder.

No, itīs all any logically reasoning person needs to realize that Lechmere is a very viable candidate. If you can - for a moment - try to break free from your prejudices, you may realize this.

Can you?

[Fisherman]

I'm confused as to why Payne James, a respected forensic scientist, would say that Nichols would most likely, or perhaps very likely, be completely exsanguinated in seven minutes. That clearly doesn't take into account any blood still trapped in the body, and must surely be wrong if the victim was still bleeding when the ambulance arrived.

Exsanguinated in this context means that she has bled out all she can bleed out, given the position she lay in, not that every drop of blood has left her body. That never happens to anybody, unless you cleanse the vessels out.

[Fisherman]

I informed you I could not find the wording in the edition of the Star i was looking at and assumed i had the wrong edition. I asked what edition the wording was in. Never did i say you had made a mistake, I accepted it was my inability to find that source. Why you could not have simply said it was in the edition of the 31st several hours ago I fail to understand.

Having now spent several hours look at press reports I can find 4 which all use the same basic wording, with minor variations. There is therefore a probability that they all come from the same original source.
As I have said before there are many mistakes in these early reports ranging from simply confusion to exaggeration and pure invention.
For those reasons I see no overriding reason to accept that the profusely comment is any different. We therefore need to compare it to the ACTUAL statements given by PC Neil. On those grounds it does not appear consistent.

In addition to the 4: Star Pall Mall Gazette Evening News all of 31/08 and the East London Advertiser 01/09 a shorter version is carried the the Weekly Herald a week later.


Steve

I already pointed out that a common source is a good suggestion, Steve. It is nevertheless the only information we have in the errand, and it is in several papers.

[Fisherman]

I think Fisherman must have it in his mind that there was some sort of press conference at which PC Neil was paraded before journalists and gave them a direct comment about what he witnessed. I'm certain nothing of the sort took place. There is no reason to think that any reporter ever spoke to PC Neil. Clearly a reporter has been given some information, was probably told by someone within the police that there was a lot of blood, and has written the report accordingly. For him to think that the word "profusely" came from PC Neil strikes me as based more on a wish than on judgement.

You are fabulating, David. What I have in my mind is not something you understand. Itīs deceitful or dumb, and very unbecoming.

I have stated already that I think that the information came from Neil or someone within the police relating what Neil said. This is because only Neil saw the blood running at this point, and therefore only he could describe it.

If it did not originate from Neil, then it was a complete invention. It may have been -and I have already said asa much too - but it remains the only piece of information we have and must be regarded as more likely than not to be truthful. Itīs extremely simple.

[Fisherman]

It certainly baffles me that Fisherman seems to prefer something in a newspaper article over the reported evidence at the inquest but only, it seems, to the extent it incriminates Lechmere.

Elaborate, please!

[Fisherman]

To the extent that Fisherman somehow believes that his questions require an answer before he will answer my question (the one that he has blatantly ducked) I want to make clear that I am trying to see if he is prepared to give an honest answer to a question which is consistent with Lechmere's innocence? Or is he acting in bad faith to try and frame Lechmere?

I remind him of what I said in my first post in this thread:

"What I would want to know from Payne James is, if I tell him a women had been murdered with a cut throat and blood was still oozing from her neck wound fifteen or twenty minutes later would he regard that as so unlikely and so implausible as to be able to be virtually discounted as fiction on my part or would he say it's entirely possible that this could have happened."

To which Fisherman responded:

"Whether he would discount the possibility that Nichols could have bled for fifteen or twenty minutes as completely implausible, I cannot say. But given that he opted for seven minutes being less likely than three or five, I think that he would at least have been genuinely surprised by such a thing."

This is the key. Ignoring Fisherman's deliberate (and devious?) change of my language of "oozing" to his word of "bled", would an expert like Payne-James be "genuinely surprised" to hear that Nichols, or anyone, had blood oozing from their wound 20 minutes after their death? Biggs said quite clearly NO. There would be no surprise. So why would Payne-James say something different?

The mistake you make is to speak of "Nichols or anyone". The circumstances involved will rule the day. My belief is that Jason Payne-James would be very suprised if Nichols bled fr twenty minutes (we know this since he expected three or five minutes), whereas he would not be surprised at all in other cases, where the circumstances differed.

You are doing a Biggs here, treating all cases as equally likely to bleed for twenty minutes. That is false.

[Fisherman]

Fisherman, I repeat the question, which you have not answered, and now ask for a yes or no answer:

Given that PC Neil said in his sworn testimony that he saw blood oozing from the throat wound of Nichols could she quite easily, and very possibly, have been murdered 20 minutes before the time he saw this oozing?

But WHY are you asking me, a person you put no trust at all in? You have clearly indicated that you do not even WANT me to comment, since you want Payne-James to do so instead. It is absolutely counterproductive and disingenuous, donīt you realize that?

As you are campaigning to claim that I cannot and dare not answer your question, I will do so - I always was for proving you wrong - but I will ask an answer from you in return on another question, and I will qualify my anseer beyond the simple yes or no you want me to give. That is because I have learn from Jason Payne-James that he tries never to do that, on account of the risks involved to get it wrong in the odd case.

My answer to your question is no. Nichols could not very possibly have been murdered 20 minutes before Neil saw the blood running. Nota bene that I use "running", because Neil said running as well as oozing. My qualification lies in how I know that there are people with very varying compositions of the blood, and so some will bleed for a longer time. But if we accept that Nichols had a blood composition that did not differ from the ordinary, and if we are correct in specualting that she lay flat on level or relatively level ground and if we reason that there was no obstacle for the blood to run, then TO MY MIND, being a layman, there is no realistic possibility that she may have bled actively for twenty minutes.

Here is my question to you: You earlier said that there was no chance that blood would only flow (or run or whatever) for three minutes only.

On what authority do you state this?

[Fisherman]

Indeed, Steve, and - as I've pointed out - "profusely bleeding" isn't a medical term at all, it's just a description. It's no more a technical term than "slightly bleeding", "slowly bleeding", "intermittently bleeding" or "severely bleeding".

I only USED one example. There are many others. And I have already said that it was not correct to call it a medical term. How many more times must I say that?

[Fisherman]

For the same reason that the same reporters also said that the corpse, resting in the mortuary, was "a ghastly sight", and that her abdomen had been "completely ripped open". It's standard shock-horror journalese, designed to grip the readers, gain their empathy, and make them come back for more.

I've no doubt that Nichols' body looked pretty awful, that her abdominal wounds (whilst not "completely ripped open") were severe, and that blood was still visibly leaving the body when Neil found her. But that's not to say that we should take the journalists' descriptions too literally.

I'm not blaming the journalists for this, or implying that they were being wilfully deceptive. On the contrary, they were only doing their jobs and some of them did it very well. However, their job was not to write objective, scientific reports of the crimes.

Was it NOT a ghastly sight? Had she NOT been ripped completely open?

[Fisherman]

In the documentary Payne-James refers to Nichols being strangled-based upon the bruise on the lower part of the jaw, which he says is consistent with manual strangulation. He then goes on to say that there would be no arterial spray if her throat was cut after strangulation because she would be dead. The blood would therefore, "leak out, drip out, drain out over a period of minutes."

However, I can't see how he could possibly be sure she'd been strangled. He obviously didn't examine the body and, although strangulation is a possibility, Dr Llewellyn did not arrive at that conclusion. Moreover, we can't be sure how old the bruise was. And Dr Biggs points out that "the presence or absence of bruising around the neck does not either prove or exclude strangulation/suffocation." (Marriott, 2015.)

There were lacerations of the tongue too, remember, often there in cases of manual strangulation. But on the whole, Payne-James was not working with exact, complete and verified data - none of us are. He presented hos take on things, and if you think he was wrong, thatīs your prerogative.

[Fisherman]

Fisherman,

The blood pool volume you refer to seems impossibly small. I am aware Llewllyn did not see the blood soaked clothes, but this estimate (which you state may be wrong due to an unrecognised outflow) seems at odds with his postmortem findings of exsanguination as a cause of death. Even more so as this would be the volume from only one carotid in less than a minute if completely severed and certainly not a fatal volume of blood loss.

Regards

Paul

There were three main blood collections, and we donīt know the exact relations. But we DO know that Llewellyn said that the vessels were emptied of blood.
1. The pool on the ground (half a pint or so)
2. The blood in the clothing, to my mind a minor amount.
3. The blood that had flowed into the abdominal cavity. I think this was by far the greeater amount, and I think that abdominal cutting preceded the neck cut, hence the small amount in the pool and the lack of arterial spray on the ground.