Originally posted by CommercialRoadWanderer
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There are a number of things that must be laid down here. To begin with:
I am not saying that it is suspicious per se to find a murder victim. It is not. Just as many people have pointed out, "somebody has to do it".
So why am I speaking about how Lechmere found the body when I point to him as the probable killer of Polly Nichols?
To understand that, we need to turn the tables.
Let´s accept that it is not suspicious at all to be found alone at a murder site, where the death is so close in time as to allow for the finder to have been the killer.
If this was the case, then the police should not waste any time on the finders of freshly dead bodies. If there is nothing at all suspicious about it, then a finder like Lechmere would be on par with Mr X, a hypothetical carman living in Heneage Street who cannot be shown to have been anywhere near the murder site.
They should rank as equally viable for the murderers role, if finding a freshly dead body has no bearing at all on whether you should be regarded as innocent or potentially guilty.
But this is not how it works, is it? We all know that the police of today will take an interest in a person who is found alone with murder victim at a time that allows for this person to have been the killer.
We therefore need to make a distincion here: Much as it is not suspicious per se to find a dead body at a remove in time that allows for the finder to be the killer, it applies that such a person will become what the police call a "person of interest".
In essence, this means that the police needs to look into this person and try to establish the reason for his having been in place at the murder site. When doing this, there are three possible outcomes:
1. The person of interest can provide the police with an explanation that can be verified, or somebody else can testify so as to clear the person of interest from any possible part in the murder. In such a case, the status of being a person of interest seizes to exist for this person.
2. The person of interest cannot provide the police with an explanation that can be verified, and nobody else comes forward to rule the person of interest out. In such an event, the finder will remain a person of interest until the case is solved or until something surfaces to rule the finder out.
3. The person of interest can be shown to have misled or lied, or something surfaces to make the police think (or conclude) that the finder may be involved in the murder. In such a case, the person of interest status is swopped for a suspect status.
In Lechmere´s case, we have no confirmation from Paul that he ever saw or heard Lechmere in front of himself in either Bath Street or Bucks Row. We have information showing us that Lechmere did not use the name he was registered by and otherwise always used when in contact with authorities. We know that PC Mizen claimed that he had been told that there was another PC in place in Bucks Row, and if this holds true, then Lechmere lied his way past Mizen. We know that Lechmere had geographical ties to the murder sites. We know that the victims seemingly died at removes in time that are consistent with Lechmere´s route to work. And we have Mizen saying that the blood was still running from the neck as he saw the body. We can establish that if Lechmere cut the neck as Paul entered Bucks Row, then it would take a minute before Paul arrived at Browns. Then Paul said that it took no more than four minutes from the moment when he first saw Lechmere til the moment when the carmen arrived where Mizen was, and we know that Mizen had approximately a two minute walk to the murder site. If we add this together, we end up with around six, seven minutes. And Jason Payne-James says that a shorter bleeding time than seven minutes is more realistic. That means that if the bleeding went down normally, there is only one fully realistic suspect, and that is Charles Lechmere.
These are the hard facts. Against this stands the false, reoccurring claims that I think that having found the body makes Charles Lechmere a suspect. This is not true - it is the rest of the matter, with the many anomalies that makes the case. Once we have these anomalies, it stands to reason that having been found alone with the body at a time that is consistent with having been the killer is not something that helps Charles Lechmere at all.
To understand how this works, we need to imagine a situation where it was suddenly revealed that John Davies was not the finder of Annie Chapman. If we theorize that the finder was instead William Bury, who had been found alone with Annies body at 3.45 AM while she was still bleeding, I think it is very realistic to say that the proponents of Bury would regard it as case closed.
In such a case, I cannot see the Buryists saying that finding the body is totally innocent, and that it should not burden Bury in any way at all.
That owes to how the people out here are quite willing to see any violent man as a better suspect than any man with no criminal record of violence. And that is true as long as we weigh in no other factors at all. But once we know that there is a man who was found alone with one of the victims at a stage in time that is consistent with this man having been the killer, everything changes. That´s when we have to return to the three listed scenarios above and ask ourselves whether we can clear the carman or not, and whether there is anything that is odd or suspicious about him.
When we put that question to a retired murder squad leader and a barrister with no previous interest in the case, they ended up telling us that the carman is of tremendeous interest and that he would warrant a modern day trial where he would be facing a jury that would not like him.
Now, can we drop the idea that being found alone with a freshly killed body is uninteresting from an investigative point of view? And can we drop the claim that I am saying that any finder of a dead body is automatically a murder suspect?
A discussion where realism, insight and honesty prevails would be much more rewarding.
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