Tell me who JTR was

[Fisherman]

Thanks, Fisherman. Crossmere certainly had the means and opportunity to carry out the murders, it's just the motive that needs working out. What new information has come to light?

The motive?
I think we are looking at the motive when we see the pictures of the gutted Kelly.

Many little bits and pieces have surfaced since the article. It has for example been discovered that Lechmere´s family was very much involved in the cat´s meat business. For example, his mother was registered as a cat´s meat woman in 1891, meaning that she would have had access to meat saws and knives, and she may well have conducted her business in 147 Cable Street where she lived. If so, and if Charles had access to her apartment, then the placing of the Pinchin Street torso in 1889 has to have us wondering; Charles Lechmere lived in Pinchin Street with his mother for a period, and her Cable Street apartment was a stone´s throw away from the dumping site.
There are many more details too, but it would claim too much space to go into it here. Check the Lechmere threads out, and you will get information from them!

All the best,
Fisherman

[Harry D]

Others won´t, but here it is anyway - this is an article I wrote for Sydsvenskan, a Swedish daily, on the subject. It sums the case up pretty well, although other things have surfaced since the publication:

Thanks, Fisherman. Crossmere certainly had the means and opportunity to carry out the murders, it's just the motive that needs working out. What new information has come to light?

Hi.
If there is a suspect, its someone who knew the victim Mary Kelly, she was too aware of the dangers in the area, and I believe she would have never walked out at 2am in the morning, unless there was a very good reason, end most certainly would not have taken a complete stranger back to her room , without feeling absolutely safe..
It was all very well going to the pubs amongst others, but alone on near deserted streets ..no way.
The most likely suspect is Joseph Fleming, or another man named Joe, we are not aware off.
The Joe that ill-used her, is the person who killed her..
Regards Richard.....By the way..I doubt if I am right....

Hello Richard,

While it's possible that MJK was murdered by a jilted lover, how do you reconcile that with the rest of the killings?

[richardnunweek]

Hi.
If there is a suspect, its someone who knew the victim Mary Kelly, she was too aware of the dangers in the area, and I believe she would have never walked out at 2am in the morning, unless there was a very good reason, end most certainly would not have taken a complete stranger back to her room , without feeling absolutely safe..
It was all very well going to the pubs amongst others, but alone on near deserted streets ..no way.
The most likely suspect is Joseph Fleming, or another man named Joe, we are not aware off.
The Joe that ill-used her, is the person who killed her..
Regards Richard.....By the way..I doubt if I am right....

[Fisherman]

I'd love to hear anything else you have to support the theory.

Others won´t, but here it is anyway - this is an article I wrote for Sydsvenskan, a Swedish daily, on the subject. It sums the case up pretty well, although other things have surfaced since the publication:

Early on the 31:st of August 1888, the carman Robert Paul was on his way to work in Corbett´s Court in London´s East End. He was late; the time was 3.45 as he briskly walked down Buck´s Row after having turned into it from Brady Street. At the intersection between the streets he passed a gas lamp. There were a further couple of lamps along Buck´s Row, but none of them functioned, so the darkness deepened around Paul with every step he took. Having walked a hundred yards or so, and with the light from the gas lamp as a haze in the distance, he suddenly discerned a man standing still in the middle of the street. Robert Paul felt uneasy, and as the other man took a step or two towards him, Paul chose to step down from the pavement to walk round him. Then the other man stretched out his arm, put his hand on Paul´s shoulder and said:
- Come and have a look, there´s a woman lying over here.
At the entrance to Brown´s Stable Yard, a figure was stretched out on its back. The men crossed Buck´s Row to take a look.
The woman lying on the southern side of the narrow street was the 43-year old prostitute Mary Ann ”Polly” Nichols. The man that had stopped Robert Paul was also a carman, 38 years of age, answering to the name Charles Allen Lechmere. And the murder – for it was a murder – was the first in the series attributed to Jack the Ripper.
The Ripper murders were all knife slayings. They were so violent that they made Londoners presuppose that they were dealing with a complete maniac. They would remain unsolved. There were five of them according to traditional opinion, and they were perpetrated over a period of around ten weeks.
When the story about them is told, a number of elements are usually involved: the competent Victorian police, the dark labyrinth of crime-infested streets called the East End and the skill that allowed the killer to avoid the police net.
Those who dig deep enough into the case will discover that one of these elements was not really there. Sadly, that element was the police competence. It is a controversial view, but an inevitable one. The police force had no experience of serial killings, it was led by men who in many instances had peculiar qualifications for police work and it carried out its duties in an era when racism abounded and phrenology – the belief that criminality could be read into people´s differing physiognomies – was an accepted ”science”.
If the investigation had been handled the way investigations are handled today, then Polly Nichols would probably never have come to be regarded as the first Ripper victim. The killings would probably have ended there and then. A modern police force would arguably have concluded that the man Robert Paul found standing by Polly Nichols, was also her probable killer: Charles Allen Lechmere. But let´s return to Buck´s Row and find out what it is that points towards him.
At the inquest after the murder, Lechmere claimed that he had noticed that there was something – his guess was a tarpaulin – lying on the southern side of Buck´s Row. He had then walked out into the street. At that same stage, he heard somebody – Robert Paul – was approaching. But he did not notice Paul until he was some thirty-forty yards away.
And yet we know that a policeman during the same night heard his colleague´s steps from 130 yards away. Reasonably, Lechmere should have already heard Paul when the latter turned into Buck´s Row. The street was resting in silence and the shoes of that time had hard, loud heels.
Likewise, Paul should have heard Lechmere walking in the darkness some thirty, forty yards ahead of him. But he didn´t.
The conclusion is inescapable: Lechmere was in place before he admits to have been. And once he noticed the approaching Paul, he chose to bluff the newcomer instead of running for it, and attracting attention to his person.
They then went over to the woman together to feel her. Her hands were cold, but the face was warm, and as Paul felt her chest he discerned some small movement.
- I believe she is alive, but only just, he said. Let´s prop her up, he suggested. But Lechmere then said that he would not touch her.
The reason for this is easy to see: as long as the woman was lying on the ground, it could not be made out in the darkness that she had had her neck severed down to the spine, and it provided Lechmere with the opportunity to procure an alibi for whatever blood he could have gotten on himself. But the moment they tried to sit her up, what had happened to her would become obvious.
Paul now remembered that he was late. He suggested that he should go and fetch a policeman to send to Buck´s Row. This made Lechmere say that he too was late, and throw forward a proposal that they should seek out that policeman together. If he had the murder weapon stashed on himself – no weapon was found at the spot when it was searched later – one can understand that he did not wish to wait for a policeman. And Paul had seen him and could identify him, so running was no longer any alternative. Lechmere was forced to improvise.
Before they set off, Paul respectfully pulled the woman´s clothes down as best as he could. Before that, they had been pulled up to the hip region, leaving the legs bare. But the clothes had covered her belly completely, and therefore her other wounds had been hidden – she had had the stomach ripped open from the breast bone down to the pelvic region. So somebody had taken the time to conceal this by using her clothes. Only one person stood to gain something by such a thing: a killer that had not been able to flee.
The carmen now left Buck´s Row and walked westwards. A couple of hundred yards from the murder scene, they ran into PC Jonas Mizen, who was in the process of knocking people up by tapping on doors and windows, a practice that was common amongst the police. Mizen would later at the inquest say that only one of the carmen – Lechmere – had spoken to him, and that this carman had told him that he was needed in Buck´s Row, where a woman was lying on the ground and where a fellow PC awaited his arrival.
But wait a second …?
There was no other PC in Buck´s Row, was there?
Exactly.
But if Lechmere was the killer, then he was still carrying his murder weapon on his person. Therefore he would have been anxious not to be searched, and determined to avoid being forced back to the murder site. That would have been why he invented a fictive PC, something that made Mizen accept that the carmen had already been cleared.
That is how easily the probable killer of Polly Nichols got past the police! And actually, there was another PC in place as Mizen arrived in Buck´s Row – PC John Neil had found Nichols on his beat a few minutes after the carmen had left her.
Could Lechmere possibly have known that Neil would be in place as Mizen arrived? Yes, that is an obvious possibility. He had probably picked Nichols up on Whitechapel Road, a known prostitute haunt. At that stage, the couple would reasonably have checked where the beat PC was before they sneaked up to Buck´s Row; prostitution was a crime.
The fact is that John Neil for a couple of days remained the man believed to first have discovered the body. But Robert Paul apparently had gotten word that Nichols had been killed, which was why he went to the press and gave a (probably well-paid) interview. It was published on the Sunday, two days after the murder and the day before the inquest. In the interview, Paul claimed to have found Lechmere standing ”where the body was”.
That was alarming news for Lechmere, and it arguably made him report himself to the police to provide his own version of the story, after which he was summoned to the Monday inquest. If he had avoided going to the police, then they would have had a situation where they knew a man had been standing by Nichols´ body at the approximate time of her death, only to later disappear. And Lechmere knew that both Paul and Mizen could identify him. Therefore he chose to come forward and present himself – but not fully. For he chose to call himself Charles Cross as he witnessed!
As a child, he had for a duration of around a decade had a stepfather called Thomas Cross, but there are no signs that Lechmere used his stepfathers name in any other context than the murder of Nichols. On the contrary; there are around ninety instances when the carman´s name is recorded in different official contexts. Every single name he writes himself Lechmere.
The secret about the name was unrevealed for more than a hundred years – it was not until some years ago that a genealogist made the connection.
The particulars Lechmere gave to the police where otherwise – apart from the name – correct. He stated 22 Doveton Street as his home address and he added that he worked for a Pickfords depot since an approximate twenty years. But when he witnessed before the inquest he added another anomaly to the false name: he did not state his home address before the jury, something witnesses normally do.
He said his name was Charles Cross and that he worked at Pickfords. But hundreds of men worked there, and without any home address he became unidentifiable to those who took part of the inquest proceedings in the papers. Consequently, his neighbours and his family could read about the murder without understanding that it was Lechmere who had found the victim.
But what about the police – surely they must have checked him out?
Not at all – a check in the registers, a visit at his home address or at Pickfords would immediately have disclosed that his name was not Cross. But Lechmere swiftly disappeared from the investigation, suspected of nothing at all. To be sure, a juryman did ask him if he had really told PC Mizen that another policeman was awaiting him in Buck´s Row, but this Lechmere denied. He added that he actually could not have said such a thing since there had not been any PC in Buck´s Row. This Robert Paul could of course confirm, and therefore everything pointed to Mizen having misunderstood things. And deeper than that nobody went – a murder inquest´s aim is merely to establish the cause of death.
Why then did the police fail to check Lechmere out? Well, they decided at an early stage that they were looking for a lunatic, very possibly a foreign such.
After the fourth Ripper killing, that of Catherine Eddowes, the detective Daniel Halse met two men in a street adjacent to the murder spot. His only measure was to establish that the men had legitimate reasons to be there. After that, he let them go. They were probably British, and they probably stated that they lived in the street or nearby, or perhaps that they were on their way to work. Exactly such a statement was also enough, as we have seen, for Charles Lechmere to gain a free passage from the inquest. He was British, he was a family father with eleven children, he was en route to his work. He was everything the Victorian police did not expect the killer to be.
And still, he was alone with a murder victim, a victim that may well still have been alive as Paul thought he discerned a small movement in her chest. When John Neil laid eyes on her, perhaps some three or four minutes afterwards, there was still blood running from her neck. And Mizen claimed the exact same thing, being in place a couple of minutes after Neil. The extensive damage she had suffered ought to have emptied her of blood quickly, it would not have been a matter of many minutes.
To tell the truth, Charles Lechmere should not even have been in Buck´s Row at 3.45 in the morning. For he claimed that he had left his home at 3.30, and to walk from Doveton Street to the murder spot is easily done in six or seven minutes. That means that Charles Lechmere should have left Buck´s Row well behind him long before Robert Paul turned into it. Therefore the time window is in place for Lechmere to have committed the murder.
All in all, a substantial amount of accusations can be raised against Charles Lechmere. But do we have something to check it against, something that can strengthen the case?
Yes we have, actually! We can take a look at the five Ripper killings, and we can add another knife slaying that may have been perpetrated by the same man, three weeks before the Ripper series. After that, we can compare the times and places the murders occurred at with Charles Lechmere´s route to work. When doing so, an amazing pattern emerges.
Lechmere had two roughly comparable thoroughfares from Doveton Street to Pickfords in Broad Street, where today’s Liverpool Street station is situated. They were Hanbury Street and Old Montague Street.
-On the 7:th of August, Martha Tabram was killed at the approximate time when Lechmere went to work. She died in George Yard, only thirty yards or so off Old Montague Street.
-On the 31:st of August Polly Nichols died on Buck´s Row – along Lechmere’s working route.
-On the 8:th of September Annie Chapman was murdered early in the morning on a working day, in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street.
-On the 9:th of November Mary Kelly met with her killer, early in the morning of a working day, in Miller´s Court, Dorset Street. And Dorset Street offered a short cut to Pickfords along the Hanbury Street route.
There are two murders left to account for, both of them on the 30:th of September, when first Liz Stride and later Catherine Eddowes were killed. Here is a deviation: Stride was killed shortly before one o clock in the morning. That was not a time at which Lechmere was en route to his job. Eddowes died a little less than an hour later, that too being too early to be tied to Lechmere´s working trek.
Nor did these victims die along Lechmere´s working route. Stride met her end on Berner Street, a couple of hundred yards south of the Hanbury Street/Old Montague Street area, and Eddowes fell prey in Mitre Square, that too being situated south of the Lechmere working trek territory.
These cases can, however, be regarded as confirmation of Lechmere´s culpability. For they took place on the night leading up to a Sunday, Lechmere’s day off. And the Stride case took place in the exact territory where Lechmere had grown up and lived for a long stretch of years. Furthermore, Berner Street was a thoroughfare to Cable Street, where Charles Lechmere´s mother and one of his daughters were living!
For a hard-working carman, there was only one real evening off, and that was Saturday evening. What could be more natural than to use that evening to visit your mother and daughter?
The Stride killing was different from the other canonical cases in the sense that her stomach was not ripped open. There is an obvious possibility that Lechmere was disturbed, and frustrated fled Berner Street. After that, he sought out Catherine Eddowes and killed her in Mitre Square – alongside his old working route from James Street to Pickfords! Lechmere lived in James Street until June 1888, when he made the move to Doveton Street. That means that he left his old grounds – and the close proximity to his mother – only weeks before the murders began.
The British police hunted the Ripper up until 1892. After that, scores of armchair detectives have tried to catch the illusive killer. Hundreds of suspects have come and gone, one more fantastic than the other. Lately, a theory that Vincent van Gogh was the killer has seen the light of day.
Many ripperologists have made a quid by throwing a speculation in along the rugged road that winds through the gas lit East End streets of the 1880:s. There now being a rationally functioning, everyday, grey suspect is not something all Ripper researchers have wished for.
They can find consolation in the fact that Lechmere actually has a glamorous family history, counting an archbishop and one of Admiral Nelson´s closest men. Lechmere’s branch of the family, however, had the bad luck of being hit by a waster, namely Charles´ grandfather, who threw away his fortune.
So, to top things off, Charles Lechmere had good reason to feel a strong urge for revenge as he wandered the streets of the East End together with prostitutes, pimps and robbers, carrying the insight that he was made up of another material altogether himself than they were.
Did that insight ultimately drive him over the edge?
Charles Allen Lechmere died at the age of 71, on the 23:rd of December 1920, in Bow, London, after having suffered brain hemorrhage two days earlier.

All the best,
Fisherman

[Harry D]

Correct - pretty much all suspects are rather bad ones, with the one exception.

Charles Allen Lechmere is to my mind by far the best suspect ever to have been suggested. The chances that he was the Ripper are significantly larger than the chances that he wasn´t, if you ask me.

A logical chain can be formed in relation to him, involving all the canonical Ripper murders and a number of non-canonicals, and there is also an opening for him having committed one or more of the Thames torso murders too.

All the best,
Fisherman

I must admit, Crossmere does appeal to me as a potential JTR.

* He knew the local area and travelled through it on a daily basis.
* He's the ONLY suspect found at the scene of the crime.
* He fits the 'everyman' profile who was able to fly under the police radar.

I'd love to hear anything else you have to support the theory.

[Fisherman]

Correct - pretty much all suspects are rather bad ones, with the one exception.

Charles Allen Lechmere is to my mind by far the best suspect ever to have been suggested. The chances that he was the Ripper are significantly larger than the chances that he wasn´t, if you ask me.

A logical chain can be formed in relation to him, involving all the canonical Ripper murders and a number of non-canonicals, and there is also an opening for him having committed one or more of the Thames torso murders too.

All the best,
Fisherman

[Hunter]

Dittos Jon and Lynn.

[lynn cates]

non-starters

Hello Harry. Thanks for starting this thread.

"is there ONE suspect you believe stands out above the rest?"

No. All I've seen are pretty well non-starters.

Cheers.
LC

[Wickerman]

Sadly Harry, if there is anything convincing, I have yet to hear it.

[Harry D]

My rather flip thread title aside, obviously the Whitechapel Murders will go down as one of the greatest unsolved crimes in history. However... based on the mountains of circumstantial evidence, witness testimony, police reports and criminal psychology, is there ONE suspect you believe stands out above the rest, even if the distinction is by the width of a gnat's wing? Whatever pet theories you hold, I'm here to be convinced.