The Laying Out

[Cap'n Jack]

What was it Thomas said about the women he encountered?
That he was only laying them out?

'It was not denied that the bodies of women were washed and laid out by men. '

From the 'Star'.

'Laying out' was a term to describe the dead.

[Natalie Severn]

Yes Ap, its an interesting term"laying them out" and you are right to point to the connection with corpses.But I have been intrigued by this phrase attributed to Thomas Cutbush,since I read that the young couple in Camden Town heard him making such a weird remark. But what caught my interest most was that Thomas Cutbush apparently enjoyed cutting and pasting as a hobby-he seems to have collected magazine pictures of Victorian women, replacing their Victorian outer dress with a corset and a pair of pink fishnet stockings. Aside from this he is also said to have done similar things with the diagrams or tracings of diagrams ,he collected from medical textbooks he was obsessed with.He is said to have "disembowelled" the drawings he found in them "in a similar fashion" to how the victims were found etc.,once again cut and paste jobs seem to have been found in his scrap books.
It would be helpful to know just when he started buying knives to "attack" women with.The shop record found of him buying the Bowie knife in the Minories was from around 1890/91.This was ofcourse when he started up a campaign of stabbing women with knives in Kennington.
We know his murderous attack on his elderly colleague at work predated the Whitechapel murders ---by a few months at least,and the knife attack on the servant girl"s throat, at his home, seems to have predated the murders too, but we dont know whether he actually purchased a knife at this time.The 5 lead articles in The Sun Newspaper,naming him as Jack the Ripper in 1894,suggest a policeman who was actually on the Ripper case,who had fed them their information and it is known that a policeman was reprimanded for holding on to Cutbush"s knife for three years.Do you know who the policeman was and whether the knife was the Bowie knife or an earlier knife of his?

[Robert]

This was our old friend Race, wasn't it, AP?

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks Robert, Was Race an Inspector on the Ripper case? Or was this from the 1891 stabbings?

[Robert]

Nats, I think Race was only 1891, because Macnaghten singles out McCarthy as having worked on the Ripper case, but not Race or Chisholm.

[Cap'n Jack]

Natalie, Robert... am I not right when I say that Inspector Race was not involved in the Whitechapel Murders because it was outside of his police area, but Jack the Ripper lived and worked in his police area?
A small rub to catch a grub.

[Natalie Severn]

Ok Ap---I think I know what you are saying.....

[Simon Wood]

Hi AP,

A small rub is usually all it needs.

It was Inspector William Race, L Division [Lambeth], who gave interviews about the Whitechapel Murders to Reynolds News, 18th February 1894.

I reckon that together with Chief Inspector Colin Chisholm, L Division [Lambeth], who in 1896 was selected by Macnaghten to bring a group of prisoners from Gravesend to London, they enquired into Cutbush's antecedents.

They tie in neatly with Cutbush having lived at 14 Albert Street, Kennington, and also having escaped from Lambeth Infirmary.

Regards,

Simon

[Natalie Severn]

posted twice by mistake

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks for that info Simon,
There must have been a few raised eyebrows in the force over the antics of Thomas Cutbush and his escape from the asylum,starkers except for his shirt tails flying out behind him as he sped through town with that great crowd of Londoners on a wild goose chase behind him . What a handful he must have been for Inspector Charles Cutbush-and the rest of Scotland Yard come to that! Charles needed Thomas acting out like that like he needed that hole in his head!

[Stephen Thomas]

It was Inspector William Race, L Division [Lambeth], who gave interviews about the Whitechapel Murders to Reynolds News, 18th February 1894.

Hi Simon

What does he say in these interviews? I just checked the entry for him in the A-Z and it's very vague.

[Cap'n Jack]

Unfortunately I can't access Reynold News at the moment, but it is worth looking again at the highly important Lloyd's article that Robert found where the defence team for Cutbush made the following statement:
'In certain police circles (and here they obviously mean Inspector William Race)... there is a growing feeling that it may in the end prove to be in some way connected with the darker and more tragic mysteries of the East End.'
They of course meant the Whitechapel Murders.

[Stephen Thomas]

Thanks for trying AP

The entry for Race in the A-Z is very offhand but intriguing.

[Robert]

This is the item in question.

[Cap'n Jack]

Thanks Robert, it is that pesky 'Dartmoor' reference again.
My opinion is that Race was under pressure, or misquoted, and he meant, of course Broadmoor.
It is , again of course, highly unlikely that a person sentenced to HMP in a London court would end up in Dartmoor rather than Broadmoor.