Hutchinson Content---Moved from MJK crime scene thread

[richardnunweek]

Hi Guys,
The reason i stand accused of repeating the Reg account is he actually puts a face to the otherwise invisable man.
We have not only a identity of the man known as George Hutchinson, but a picture also [ note the Ripper and the Royals] before anyone disputes that this picture was not Regs dad, you might like to ask Ivor Edwards who saw it on the wall of his london flat when he interviewed him a few years before his death[ Reg] thus way after The Ripper and the Royals was published.
This identification of George hutchinson is the only one we have ever had to date, yet we dispute this like we do with various other statements made at the actual period.
Everything that seems odd in our modern day perception we discard, saying its just 'oral history' or yes.. but.., where as i tend to accept many statements as true, and many oral tales as possible truth related , and then try to look into the Ripper murders with a positive mind, not discounting possible vital sightings. like many of us tend to do.
As mentioned many times, i heard that infamous Radio broadcast in the early-mid seventies, i heard Reg speak approx 18 years before he appeared briefly in the so called infamous book, i heard him discuss his father who i should remind people was then just a intresting witness not the sinister shadow of the 21st century.
He was simply giving a recorded interview for a radio broadcast, the same as Mrs Longs grandson, or albert cadouches grandaughter etc etc may have done.
I should add the above section is purely used as a exsample as what is so special about being related to a person who knew one of the victims, and expressing any memories what may have been said when that person was still alive.
Not everyone lies, or is everyone mistaken.
Regards Richard.

[Dan Norder]

It if wasn't for the regurgitation of age-old misconceptions,

Well, of course the greater problem is that we have some people making up brand new nonsense and going around falsely labeling anything they don't believe in as a misconception, even when confronted with arguments that they have no way of responding to other than ignoring it outright and simply repeating whatever claptrap they convinced themselves for the sake of trying to make their suspect look guilty.

[Ben]

And even worse than that we get the occasional moron who never used to infest these threads suddenly barging in where his presence is even less wanted than it is elsewhere, suddenly moaning about speculation and wishful thinking just because his own speculation and wishful thinking has been shown to be both flawed and dependent upon the existence of mysterious lost reports that went missing or got blitzed at a convenient time. Either that or deliberately attempting to obfuscate the issue by trying to pretend we're having a suspect-related debate when we're not.

This identification of George hutchinson is the only one we have ever had to date, yet we dispute this like we do with various other statements made at the actual period

No, Richard, it isn't.

Other candidates for GH have been mooted in the past, and all fit the bill better than Toppy.

[Fortinbras]

just one question

I come to this forum very often and I really enjoying reading all theories and new idea about all of you. my question is what's "blotchy" face mean?, thanks in advance for your answer.

ps:Hope I don't bother with my question

[Supe]

Fortinbras,

Miller's Court resident Mary Ann Cox reported seeing Mry Jane Kelly and a man she described as having a "blotchy-face and carrotty moustache entering Kelly's apartment around midnight the night of her murder. Thus, a shorthand reference to him as "blotchy" or "blotchy face."

Don.

[richardnunweek]

Hi Ben,
I hope the term Moron was not directed as a personal attack on yours truely, even if it wasnt, it is not the kind of remark i would conjure up for any poster on casebook as it is hardly tasteful .
To address your point regarding the ID of Gh, and suggesting other candidates have far better credentials then Gwt, would you feel inclined to share the names of such individuals with us all, as apart from a suggestion that a certain Joseph Fleming was a alias of Hutchy, i can find no named english suspect that is the likely candidate, and therefore i stand by my point that Regs father is the most likely to have been the original chap. like it or not.
Question. Why is it impossible for a man dressed in attire described by GH to have met up with Mjk at the time in question.?
Regards Richard.

[Ben]

I hope the term Moron was not directed as a personal attack on yours

Rest assured it wasn't, Richard. That was in response to a distasteful and inflammatory post from someone else.

As for more likely candidates for the individual known to the 1888 police as "George Hutchinson" other than Joe Fleming, we have George Thomas Hutchinson, the watch thief of Cottage Grove, Bow who was known to frequent Aldgate and died in 1925. One document examiner, as I recall, believed the signatures matched. Then there's George Hutchinson of Shadwell who worked as a butcher and was aged about 32 in 1888. Then there's the glass cutter of the same name who lived, I believe, in Bethnal Green. Then there's the chap discovered by Bob Hinton, born at King David's Lane, Shadwell.

All fit the bill better than Toppy, whose name first appeared in the "Ripper and the Royals" - the content of which was retracted by the author.

Why is it impossible for a man dressed in attire described by GH to have met up with Mjk at the time in question.?

It isn't impossible. It's just very unlikely, given the time and location. It is impossible for Hutchinson to have noticed and memorised all the alleged details pertaining to the man's appearence in the time and conditions available.

Best regards,
Ben

[Ally]

Fortinbras,

"Blotch" means large spots of color ...a face that has patches of red on it, flushed, or mottled with color. In other words, his facial complexion was not all one even color.

[detective abberline]

Blotchy face

Hi


His face was blotchy and red because he'd been drinking.

Bye

[Fortinbras]

thank you for all your answer

Thank you guys for all your answer at least now I know what Blotch mean :-)

[Dan Norder]

And even worse than that we get the occasional moron who never used to infest these threads suddenly barging in where his presence is even less wanted than it is elsewhere

Gee, Ben... How on earth did you ever get the idea that you were in any position to claim to know more than anyone else or declare who is wanted here and who isn't? You've done what in this field again? Just tried to bury threads with a flurry of posts and then tossed off insults when you didn't get your way, from what I recall. I don't know if you realized you were in a corner with no way to support your arguments and decided to lash out with the first attack you could think up or if you seriously are deluded into thinking you're some sort of expert in this field. Either way it doesn't really matter I suppose. Go ahead, post as often as you like. You can pretend that these boards are your personal playground and act like you're king of the monkey bars but the adults have more important things to do.

[Ben]

Now what's the problem?

There never needed to be any hostility in this discussion if you hadn't initiated it. You advanced a couple of suggestions as to why an eyewitness description apparently came to be discredited, and I simply disagreed with them on the grounds that they wholly lacked support and ran contrary to police proceedures. There was never any antagonism, but then all of a sudden I'm on the receiving end of a barrage of unnecessary aggression and....what? You're surprised that I don't take kindly to it? It's most odd. For over a year I never clashed with you over any topic, but come the inception of a new message board, it's like you've made it your New Board's Resolution to lay into Ben.

As for the faintly ludicrous claim that I've "realized I'm in a corner", fine, cling to that if that's your comfort blanket, but it might be just as well to avoid aggressive postings if you don't want to be repaid with same.

[Pilgrim]

Tracy Browne's Detailed Photofit.

While I accept Dan's point that none of us know for certain why Hutchinson was discredited, I think we can safely rule out the possibility that he was discarded purely on the grounds of uncertainty over Kelly's time of death. Even if the police suspected that Kelly may have encountered someone _after_ Mr. Astrakhan, they couldn't prove that was the case, and for that reason, they had every incentive to use Hutchinson in identity parades and so and on so forth *if* they believed his account.

Maybe not to you, but to police, lawyers, judges and juries it makes all the sense in the world, and that's what's important here. And it's not assuming the killer did come along later, it's merely being open to the very real possibility that it could have happened. All Astrakhan Man would need is a reasonable doubt. Even not knowing who he was (and perhaps the police did find out later) there's already a very plausible reason to doubt he had anything to do with it: she could have been killed hours later, and if previous witness testimony is correct she had gone through at least two clients over the space of a few hours and could have been expected to keep that same rate up.

I honestly don't think so, Dan. I don't know of any lawyer, judge or policeman who would endorse the dismissal of evidence purely on the assumption that the witness in question might not have seen the killer.

I suspect Hutchinson's claim that he did try to approach a police constable before Monday 12 could be a most "salient" issue here. And there can hardly be much doubt that this claim, as such, would be well within the realm of the possible, as the scandalous treatment of Tracy Browne during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation clearly show. She was dismissed by a young police constable when she met at the police station to volunteer the perhaps most important and detailed description of Peter Sutcliffe. And she was laughed at even though she had been a victim of a most vicious assault that clearly ought to have made the police treat her testimony with consideration and seriousness. And the dismissal would seem to have been quite unequivocally backed up by the police seniority. Surely, there would be good reason to keep this case in mind when investigating any other crime.

~~~

Tracy Browne got a good look at the man during their walk together and would describe him as having a dark Afro-style crinkly hair and beard, wearing a knitted V-neck cardigan over a light blue open-necked shirt, with dark brown trousers and brown suede shoes. When they reached the gateway to her family's farm he had hung back yet again, and then suddenly she was brutally attacked from behind. "He hit me five times on the head," Tracy said in a Mail On Sunday article, "I heard him grunt like Jimmy Connors serving, each time he struck. I kept saying to him 'Please don't'."

Tracy Browne survived the attack when Peter Sutcliffe was disturbed by an approaching car. Before leaving the scene he threw her over a fence. Covered in blood, she managed to make her way to a caravan about 400 yards from the scene of the attack. Neuro surgeons worked for four to save her life and had to remove a sliver of bone from Tracy Browne's brain.

Tracy Browne recovered, and was able to give a detailed Photofit (see The Photofits) of her attacker, which bore a strong resemblance to Peter Sutcliffe. He was described as having a moustache and beard, staring eyes, and a thin face. Her description of the attacker was confirmed by a witness who came forward and provided a photofit of a dark-haired, beard man, who had been noticed in the neighbourhood that night, and had been seen standing near what was described as a white Ford car (Sutcliffe, at the time, owned a lime green Ford Carpi).

Found near the scene of the attack was a distinctive hippy-style bracelet of wooden beads and a paper handkerchief (the police said the attacker suffered from hay fever, which Peter Sutcliffe did). The Photofit was used in local "wanted" posters after the attack.

Detective Chief Superintendent James Hobson, later in charge of the Ripper Investigation, was in charge of the investigation to find the attacker, and two hundred officers were involved in the hunt, but no progress was made in finding the attacker. James Hobson never linked the attack to the Ripper series. Chief Constable Ronald Gregory explained, in a Mail On Sunday article, why, at the time, the attack was not linked to the Ripper murders: "Tracy was not a prostitute; we thought at the time she was hit with a piece of wood; and all the other attacks were in city areas." Forensic and medical evidence, however, suggested that Tracy was hit with a hammer or similar instrument.

As the Ripper Investigation progressed, Tracy Browne became convinced that the man who attacked her was the same man. After seeing a Ripper Photofit, she went with her mother to the Keighley police station, but a young constable laughed at their suggest that the man who attacked her was the Ripper. Her mother even called her uncle, Mr. Monty Featherman, a local magistrate and personal friend of Chief Superintendent Hobson, but no progress was made to link her attack with the Ripper series. In the article in the Mail On Sunday, her father, Mr. Anthony Browne said: "If they had taken my daughter's account seriously - and released the Photofit - some of the Ripper's victims would be alive." Tracy Browne's Photofit was never re-issued.

The attack was later finally and firmly linked with the Ripper in the review carried out by Mr. Colin Sampson, who later suceeded Mr. Gregory as the West Yorkshire Chief Constable. Sutcliffe was not questioned about the attack on her until after his conviction and he refused to take responsibility for the attack, and challenged the officers to prove it. Finally, in 1992, Sutcliffe did admit to being responsible for the attack on Tracy Browne and on a Bradford Irish student to Chief Constable Keith Hellawell.

The Yorkshire Ripper Website

[Ben]

Hi Pilgrim,

Interesting stuff; I think you've quoted this previously on the "old" forums, but just to be clear, Hutchinson never approached a policeman at any stage on Sunday, despite what he claimed. If there was ever any question that a member of the police force anxious to solve the Whitechapel murders should have ignored a witness of Hutchinson's potential importance, he would be identified according to his delineated beat; a fact that the officers on beat knew full well in those days. Hutchinson need only have stated the time and location of the alleged encounter, and the policeman in question would have been hauled over the coals and dismissed for astonishing (and illogical) negligence.

In other words, we can embrace of two scenarios here. Either there was unbelievably callous PC on beat somewhere in the MEPO who ignored Hutchinson despite being fully aware of the consequences of doing so, and was booted off the force, as described in some report or other that went missing or got blitzed (again), or we can accept that Hutchinson made up the "policeman" encounter in an attempt to explain his failure to come forward earlier. Of course, if Hutchinson was truly ignored by this mysterious policeman, why didn't he just go to the station as he was going to eventually anyway?

Ben

[Pilgrim]

Walter Dew's Question.

Well, if Hutchinson did approach a police constable, we have no way of knowing how this encounter transpired. We have next to no information about Hutchinson's character. For what we know he may have had some doubts either way, whether he should contact the police or not. It might even be argued that both a real witness and a murderer injecting himself into the investigation would have been better served by contacting the police before the inquest, if he was aware that he had been observed outside the crime scene. And so, in principle, the motive for contacting the police is unknown, regardless of when he actually did it first. And it is not necessarily true that a police constable would have been removed if he dismissed a witness that was found to be of little value within a few days. Which is not the same as to say we can know why the testimony was, as it may seem, discarded.

I also find it somewhat odd that anyone would put more weight on the lack of any statements about Hutchinson's testimony from some police officials while at the same time showing so little interest in the one comment we do have, even if it was made decades later. To me, that question posed by Walter Dew indicates that there may have been more than one reason why Hutchinson's testimony was, as it may seem, discarded, but that none of them were very obvious: And if Mrs. Maxwell was mistaken, is it not probable that George Hutchison erred also ?

Exactly what kind of "logic" is that ?

Dew's question would seem yet another indication that Hutchinson's testimony was in fact discarded, found to be of little value. That question however, indicates to me that the reason did not seem obvious. Dew's use of Maxwell's mistake to infer that Hutchinson may also have erred is so obviously fallacious and therefore, in my opinion, suggestive of some cognitive dissonance on Dew's part. It certainly does give the impression that Dew either did not remember or never was aware of why Hutchinson's testimony was discarded and that he was grasping to suggest some credible reason why he must have been mistaken. And all he could come up with was that question ? Nonsense, more or less.

Anyone can be mistaken, that would seem a certain possibility and a fact. But to the extent that there could be any necessary relation between the potential truthfulness of these two witness descriptions Hutchinson's testimony would be the one with a direct influence on the probability - that Maxwell could be right, not the other way around. And instead, Dew made that illogical reversal.

Most importantly however, I'd say, Dew did in fact pose a question. And so, if we do have a genuine interest in the possible reasons, or lack thereof, for discarding Hutchinson's testimony, we should ask ourselves why Dew put the question that way ? And I say it could indicate a feeling of some cognitive dissonance.

Some might argue that Dew may have been ill-informed ? But at the same time we are to believe that Hutchinson's testimony was labelled by the Star as being "discredited" on November 15 already ? And that Dew was well enough informed to be quite certain that Maxwell definitely had "erred" ?

But, first of all, why pose that question at all ? It hardly makes Dew's account of the Ripper murders any more nor less interesting. In fact, if Hutchinson's testimony was, publically, labelled as being discredited, and was known to have obviously been so, why not rather have made a point of that, as it would seem a strong support for Dew's "considered view" that the "blotchy-faced man" was the murderer ? And why that cautionary remark about Mrs. Cox ? To me, by the sound of it, Dew's account seems expressive of some doubt as to whether any one of these two witnesses may have told the truth or not, whereas in the case of Mrs. Maxwell he seems well assured that she was in fact mistaken.