Regarding Joseph Barnett

[perrymason]

Hi everyone,

Mary Kelly reputedly had blue eyes and a distinctive hair colouring. When he was reported to have said he recognised her by the ear and eyes, he may have said "Hair and eyes."

Best wishes.

The main issue with that supposition is that we do not know when and where Joe Barnett made his identification, nor how much of Marys corpse he saw. If he saw her in the room as she is in picture MJK1, then he could not have identified her eyes, they and the eye sockets themselves were obscured likely by the skin flaps cut on her forehead from the slashing, they drooped over her eyes.

We can also see that virtually all of Mary is visible in that shot, her arms, her legs, her feet, her hands, .....in my opinion a lover living with her would recognize most if not all of the exposed undamaged parts of Mary.....and for me, her body above the neck in MJK1 would be difficult to use in and of itself as an identifier. Her face is ruined, the bulk of her hair is down her back, and I dont believe her ears are visible.

Best regards

[miss marple]

That Barnett suffered from echolalia is simply a theory, put forward by Bruce Paley to boost his own theory that Barnett was the ripper . There is no evidence that he suffered from a speech impediment,he read the papers to Mary. There is evidence that he was suffering great stress at the inquest and 'spoke with a stutter, and evidently laboured under great emotion' The trauma of seeing his girlfriend's body hacked to pieces would have caused what we now know as post traumatic stress. We forget that real people were suffering because of these murders, their feelings remain unknown to us. The Whitechapel murders have become a circus, a blame game to which many innocent people have been dragged in. while not allowing the normal reactions of loss, pain, fear and trauma.
We don't know Barnett's exact words, we don't know how he viewed the body. He had Irish parents, brought up in an area full of first generation Irish. It is possible he had an Irish tinge to his accent making hair sound like ear.

Miss Marple