Any updates, or opinions on this witness.

[Darryl Kenyon]

In The Trial of George Chapman By Hargrave Lee Adam, 1930. HL Adam seems to want to build a case against Chapman. So he concludes that Alice Mackenzie was a victim, saying - In his official capacity of wholesale murderer nothing more was heard of the Whitechapel murderer until July 1889. Also [after a description of the castle alley murder] - This was the last murder of the series. The police were baffled, the Ripper finally and completely victorious. And in his summing up of the coincidences of Chapman/JTR - Last murder in London, July 1889. Chapman still in the vicinity. No Ripper murders in England, but similar murders in America, in the locality of Jersey City. Chapman and his wife left in May 1890, for America, where Chapman opened a barber's shop at Jersey City. And about Hutchinson - Description is given of the man seen with the woman Kelly: "Height, 5 ft. 6in.; age, 34 or 35; dark complexion, with moustache curled at ends." This is a most faithful description of Chapman.
The point of all this is HL Adam himself seems to be building the case. If he took great stock on what Abberline or Anderson for that matter believed, he would discount Alice, or at least be cautious of including her because both Abberline and Anderson believed the killings stopped with Mary. Seems to me he is including Hutchinson's description because of the likeness towards the known photo's of Chapman. As many people, including people who do not believe what Hutch saw, have noticed.

[Fisherman]

Yup, and in the internal police report Abberline states directly that he interrogated Hutchinson at length and believed him. But according to multiple posts on this thread we are supposed to ignore that and go with a vague report in The Echo.

Good grief!

There is no denying that you have an excellent point when it comes to weighing evidence, but it deserves mentioning - I think - that not only the Echo was doubtful about the value (not veracity, value!) of the Hutchinson story. The Star wrote "Another story now discredited is that of the man Hutchinson..." on the 15:th, and Walter Dew in his memoirs pointed out that he believed that Hutchinson had gotten the day wrong.

Personally, I don´t believe that Hutchinson was discredited or looked upon as a liar at any stage, but I do think that a diminished value was ascribed to Hutchinsons story by the police. And, once again personally, I think that Dew was correct.

[Sam Flynn]

and whether right or wrong we owe a debt of gratitute to Stephen on his research on the subject.

Oh, absolutely. One of the very best Ripper books in recent years.

[Joshua Rogan]

I suspect it is because these 'cabins' were not the fully enclosed private rooms that Ben is claiming. Why use the grandiose term 'cabin' if it was, in fact, an enclosed room? It sounds a bit fishy, no? In truth, the article clearly states that were merely partitioned-off sections in a common room, which may have been nothing more than sheets hanging from hooks.

According to Jack London's account (which may or may not actually be the Victoria Home) the cabins had 7' high thin wooden walls, but no ceiling and no door.
"The bedding was clean.....but there was no privacy about it, no being alone....I went from bed to bed and looked at the sleepers"

[rjpalmer]

Hi Fisherman - You could well be right, and it would actually help my personal theory if you ARE right, but the 'Dew' argument makes me nervous. He states directly that he doesn't want to challenge the honesty of Maxwell or Hutchinson, so this is clear evidence that they were not dismissed as well-known liars by Scotland Yard. Or at least in the circle of Scotland Yard that Dew traveled in. So far, so good.

But don't you find the reason Dew dismisses Hutchinson rather wishy-washy? Maxwell was wrong, so Hutchinson must be wrong, too. It seems a bit glib, especially since their 'sightings' were 6 hours apart. But possibly there was more to the story and Dew simply didn't expand upon it. I have often wondered if it had something to do with the fish found in Kelly's stomach and they somehow managed to trace her last meal.

All the best.

[Fisherman]

Hi Fisherman - You could well be right, and it would actually help my personal theory if you ARE right, but the 'Dew' argument makes me nervous. He states directly that he doesn't want to challenge the honesty of Maxwell or Hutchinson, so this is clear evidence that they were not dismissed as well-known liars by Scotland Yard. Or at least in the circle of Scotland Yard that Dew traveled in. So far, so good.

But don't you find the reason Dew dismisses Hutchinson rather wishy-washy? Maxwell was wrong, so Hutchinson must be wrong, too. It seems a bit glib, especially since their 'sightings' were 6 hours apart. But possibly there was more to the story and Dew simply didn't expand upon it. I have often wondered if it had something to do with the fish found in Kelly's stomach and they somehow managed to trace her last meal.

All the best.

I don´t look upon it like Dew looked for a simple way out and ascribed the same mistake to Maxwell and Hutchinson alike, no - and indeed, I don´t think that Dew had Maxwell down as mistaking the days. This is what he wrote:

But I know from my experience that many people, with the best of intentions, are often mistaken, not necessarily as to a person, but as to date and time. And I can see no other explanation in this case than that Mrs. Maxwell and George Hutchison were wrong.

Indeed, if the medical evidence is accepted, Mrs. Maxwell could not have been right. The doctors were unable, because of the terrible mutilations, to say with any certainty just when death took place, but they were very emphatic that the girl could not have been alive at eight o'clock that morning.

And if Mrs. Maxwell was mistaken, is it not probable that George Hutchison erred also? This, without reflecting in any way on either witness, is my considered view.

... and I tend to think he believed that Maxwell got the PERSON wrong, whereas Hutchinson got the DAY wrong.

Of course, just as you say, Dew could have expanded more on the matter to make things easier and less debatable, but anyway, that´s how I look upon it. I think a very fair case can be made for Hutchinson never seeing Lewis, and an equally fair case can be made for how he would be unlikely to "walk the streets" throughout the night, given the circumstances. And I think these matters were ultimately found out, which would make Dew anything but wishy-washy in his judgment. I think the police realized that Hutch never crossed the street, that he never saw Lewis and that he could not have been seen by her. But I don´t think Hutchinson himself ever owned up to the possibility, and that´s why Reg comments on how he felt bad about how his testimony never came to anything.

I also think that a missed day would provide a good reason to look for A man anyway - just as it seems the police did. He would be a potentially useful and important witness. And Hutchinson would remain a truthful man in the eyes of the police - like Dew.

[Ben]

Ugh. Give it a rest, Ben.

No, I think it’s about time you gave it a rest, as you keep threatening to do without yet delivering on the promise. It was boringly predictable that you wouldn’t have the humility to thank me for the information regarding the Victoria Home cabins, which were an absolute, irrefutable reality, despite your baseless, zero-evidence attempts to deny their existence.

The article makes clear that the protective brass bed heads were intended for the privacy of lodgers occupying beds in the dormitories. They most assuredly would not have been necessary in the cabins. Here is Jack London’s detailed description of their layout, although again, I won’t be holding my breath for any gratitude:

To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-crate till each pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise properly dimensioned, then place the magnified layer on the floor of a large, barnlike room, and there you have it. There are no ceilings to the pigeon-holes, the walls are thin, and the snores from all the sleepers and every move and turn of your nearer neighbours come plainly to your ears. And this cabin is yours only for a little while. In the morning out you go. You cannot put your trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the door behind you, or anything of the sort. In fact, there is no door at all, only a doorway. If you care to remain a guest in this poor man's hotel, you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations which impress upon you constantly that you are nobody, with little soul of your own and less to say about it.

What was that you were saying about mere “sheets hanging from hooks”?

Not exactly the parlour suite (where your hilarious posh-knob ripped lived); in fact it sounds positively ghastly, but they afforded the occupant at least some degree of privacy in an area where even that was a rare luxury. The doorless situation was less than ideal, but remedied to a considerable extent by placing a coat over the entrance, Millers Court style.

Further, the Home must have kept records of which bed/cabin was paid for etc.

Yes, but a great many of the lodgers buying bed/cabin tickets would have done so in advance, with some even for paying for weekly passes. It would obviously have been a regular occurrence, therefore, for many of these pre-purchasers to flash their tickets to the doormen at all hours of the night, regardless of when that bed/cabin purchases were made.

All the best,

Ben

[Ben]

You keep repeating a bad argument that grotesquely misuses and misunderstands Abberline’s March 1903 interview in order to make a false point about Hutchinson

But I don’t regard you as anything close to a barometer of argument quality, “good” or “bad”, so I’m not especially troubled by your condemnations, based as they are on total obfuscation and a desire to revive an account that was discredited very shortly after it first emerged, as Abberline’s 1903 interview indisputably attests to.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest if his comments were in response to the Daily Chronicle piece - his recollections of the eyewitness evidence are conspicuous in their absence of any reference to the most detailed and memorable eyewitness account of them all; the one that would have been best suited of all for a comparison with Klosowski.

Why - and please contemplate this with a little more care and circumspection this time - would Abberline bother trying to infer tenuous parallels with P&O caps (which Klosowski probably didn’t even wear until he moved to the coast) when there was an opportunity to infer a far more obvious, far more compelling connection between Klosowski’s facial features and those of Hutchinson’s vividly described Astrakhan man?

He could have utterly trumped and supplanted all that unnecessary “peaked cap”/“back view” straw-grasping with a Hutchinson-Klosowski comparison, shutting the discussion down and presenting the Daily Chronicle with a bombshell. “You want to talk Klosowski and eyewitness? I know you wanted to bleat on about peaked caps for an eternity, but put that all bollocks to one side for a moment and listen to THIS...!” Abberline might have announced with a flourish, if only Hutchinson’s account hadn’t been discredited in 1888.

Bummer, eh?

Abby is not wrong. It was undoubtedly the press who changed “Jewish” to “foreigner”, mindful not to further inflame animosity directed towards that community.

As for Senise, do you accept that George Hutchinson was in the Royal Navy for a minimum of two years?

No, I don’t.

I would strongly encourage you to obtain yourself a copy of Stephen’s “False Flag” book, which makes a persuasive case for Hutchinson signing onto the Ormuz as a “bodge” seaman, replacing the actual trained professionals who were then on strike. The clue here resides in the fact that this particular Hutchinson apparently resumed his career as a “labourer” upon arrival in Australia.

But that’s an entirely separate discussion.

[Abby Normal]

Perhaps these points are too subtle, Abby; you're going about it with a sledge hammer instead of a scalpel.

Abberline does not mention the Astrakhan suspect, because he was not relevant to the description of Klosowski wearing a peaked cap. Yes. True. We agree to that. There was no need to mention him, because he did not fit the description that was being discussed by the Daily Chronicle.

But this in no way, shape, or form, indicates that Hutchinson was “discredited,” which is what Ben and others have been trying to claim on this thread. It only means that his description did not match the one that was being “plumped for” in March 1903.

You are making this omission mean more than it actually means. You are implying that this is evidence that Hutchinson was proven to be a liar, which is certainly not true, no matter how many times you keep repeating it.

Look at it this way. If a man was convicted of murdering prostitutes in 1900 and was wearing a deerstalker cap, Abberline might well have said in passing: “MY gawd! A deerstalker! That’s what the lady described in Hanbury Street! Maybe this man was also the Ripper!”

Would that simple statement be evidence that Abberline dismissed and debunked the witness Joseph Lawende as a liar? He is liar because he described no such deerstalker?

Of course not. But that is what you and others are arguing in regard to Hutchinson. It’s bogus. It’s a bad argument.

And no, it’s not rocket science. It’s obvious.



Yup, and in the internal police report Abberline states directly that he interrogated Hutchinson at length and believed him. But according to multiple posts on this thread we are supposed to ignore that and go with a vague report in The Echo.

Good grief!

Hi RJ

Thanks for the response!

There was no need to mention him, because he did not fit the description that was being discussed by the Daily Chronicle.

the interview Abberline gave to the PMG reporter (who was almost certainly his friend John Collins) was in direct response to the Daily Chronicle piece of the previous day, March 23rd that described Klosowski wearing a peaked cap. That’s it. Full stop.

Are you sure that about that? seems like Abberline didn't even know about the Daily Chronicle story. And that he was already writing about his ideas with all the materials of his about the whole case.


Pall Mall Gazette
24 March 1903

"Should Klosowski, the wretched man now lying under sentence of death for wife-poisoning, go to the scaffold without a "last dying speech and confession," a great mystery may for ever remain unsolved, but the conviction that "Chapman" and "Jack the Ripper" were one and the same person will not in the least be weakened in the mind of the man who is, perhaps, better qualified than anyone else in this country to express an opinion in this matter. We allude to Mr. F. G. Abberline, formerly Chief Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard, the official who had full charge of the criminal investigations at the time of the terrible murders in Whitechapel.

When a representative of the Pall Mall Gazette called on Mr. Abberline yesterday and asked for his views on the startling theory set up by one of the morning papers, the retired detective said: "What an extra- ordinary thing it is that you should just have called upon me now. I had just commenced, not knowing anything about the report in the newspaper, to write to the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mr. Macnaghten, to say how strongly I was impressed with the opinion that 'Chapman' was also the author of the Whitechapel murders. Your appearance saves me the trouble. I intended to write on Friday, but a fall in the garden, injuring my hand and shoulder, prevented my doing so until today."

Mr. Abberline had already covered a page and a half of foolscap, and was surrounded with a sheaf of documents and newspaper cuttings dealing with the ghastly outrages of 1888. "

[Busy Beaver]

I doubt the Ripper would get into the world of story making. He killed quick and with little fuss. Five minutes to meet, verysmall talk and kill victim number 4. A little longer with victim 5 as he had the relative safety of being indoors.
Hutch throwing himself into the foray makes the Ripper look quite stupid.

[Wickerman]

...
If you want to plonk him anywhere other than the Victoria Home, good luck finding a lodging house near Dorset Street which closed its doors before 3.00am.

I know of one that closed about 2:30, and, as there was one, then there must have been more.

[Ben]

And Hutchinson didn’t go there because...?

[Wickerman]

I doubt the Ripper would get into the world of story making. He killed quick and with little fuss. Five minutes to meet, verysmall talk and kill victim number 4. A little longer with victim 5 as he had the relative safety of being indoors.
Hutch throwing himself into the foray makes the Ripper look quite stupid.

You're quite correct, the character imposed on Hutchinson as the killer by some theorists is of a totally different nature to the type of killer in the previous cases.
That killer was seen by several witnesses yet he just melted into the night. He doesn't seem to have been concerned to go to police with some nonsense alibi - he just disappeared, as Hutchinson would have done if he was guilty of something.

[rjpalmer]

which makes a persuasive case for Hutchinson signing onto the Ormuz as a “bodge” seaman, replacing the actual trained professionals who were then on strike.

Okay, I'll bite. He was originally a stowaway, but fair enough.

Hutch murders Alice Mackenzie, flees London, fakes the credentials of an "able seaman" (needing a minimum of two years experience) in order to bum a lift on the Ormuz and thus escape to Australia.

And all of this under his own name, George Hutchinson. Why exactly would he do that, Ben? Other than it allows a researcher to easily trace him 128 years later?

It's not the same dude.

[Wickerman]

This is where I find I cannot agree with you, Jon. When we read the Daily News from the 14:th of November, we find this passage, quoting George Hutchinson:

" One policeman went by the Commercial street end of Dorset street while I was standing there, but not one came down Dorset street. I saw one man go into a lodging house in Dorset street, but no one else."

So he very clearly says that he saw no one else than the PC at the end of Dorset Street and one man going into a lodging house in the street. Thereby, he effectively rules out anybody else having been present during his vigil, to the best of his knowledge. And Lewis would not have been somebody he could have missed by chance, since she would have walked right past him....

Hi Christer.

In his police statement Hutchinson says nothing about seeing anyone else in the street, so we don't know whether he did or not.

The statement he gave to the press may not be complete, I earlier gave the inquest testimony of Albert Cadoche as an example.

After Cadoche left his house in Hanbury street we that, "He saw no man or woman in Hanbury street".
So that reporter told us there was no-one in the street, not a man or a woman.
If that were the only version we had, we could reasonably argue the street was deserted at that time.

Yet, in another version we read the complete exchange between Cadoche and the Coroner:
The Coroner - Did you see a man or woman in the street?
Cadoche - No; I only saw workmen passing by to their work.

A totally different picture, because we have two different reporters writing what they believed was important.

We only have one version of the press statement by Hutchinson.
Given that women of that class were a regular feature in those backstreets through the night, how important was it to include a woman in the shadows on the other side of the street?

So with respect to Hutchinson's press statement, what did the Central News reporter believe was important?