The Red Handkerchief...

[Wickerman]

Hi Gareth.

I agree, Fish.

Wideawake: A soft felt hat with broad brim and low crown

Billycock: A round low-crowned hard felt hat, with a narrow brim.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

(add in bold above)
A rough comparison might be to compare a cowboy hat with a bowler.

PS: I've since noticed that more than one American/Canadian paper carries this story, so it was evidently a Press Agency release, and not the fault of the Atchison Daily Globe as such.

No fault was implied Gareth, it wasn't necessary to post all examples to make the point. And yes, it was apparent the source had no idea the witness was female. Try as I did I could find no English source from which they may have taken their lead, which is why I wondered if some of the points being made were guesswork.
Interesting, nevertheless.

[Sam Flynn]

Hello Jon

No fault was implied Gareth, it wasn't necessary to post all examples to make the point.

That cutting only serves to show that press speculation can be founded on very dodgy logic, and can't be used as evidence that people believed Cox was mistaken about the day. The press agency thought she was, but it was they who drew that conclusion, the reason being that the man she saw didn't match Hutchinson's description - as if Kelly was only "allowed" to be seen with one man on any given night. Happily, we know better

[Sam Flynn]

A rough comparison [for wideawake vs billycock] might be to compare a cowboy hat with a bowler.

I see no reason why a wideawake couldn't be reported as a billycock, or vice versa. I think most of us could tell the difference between a cowboy hat and a bowler, even on a dark night.

[Wickerman]

... I think most of us could tell the difference between a cowboy hat and a bowler, even on a dark night.

Absolutely, I'm sure we could. I think Sarah Lewis could too. Which is why she said Widawake and not Billycock.

[Sam Flynn]

Absolutely, I'm sure we could. I think Sarah Lewis could too. Which is why she said Widawake and not Billycock.

They're really not that radically different, Jon. Certainly, the difference is nowhere near as stark as the differences between a cowboy hat and a bowler, as you suggested earlier. A few inches' difference on the brim is about all that distinguished them, which is hardly earth-shattering.

In addition, who are we to say whether Lewis and Cox weren't describing a generic "wide-a-c0ck" or "billy-wake" type of headgear? Given the known problems with eyewitness testimony, I wouldn't expect them to have been clinically, or sartorially, precise.

[Sam Flynn]

Absolutely, I'm sure we could. I think Sarah Lewis could too. Which is why she said Widawake and not Billycock.

Thanks for the picture, Jon. Proves my point - one could easily be mistaken for, or generalised to, the other.

[Ben]

Boy, can I kick-start a Hutchinson debate…

“The choice concerns how the Daily News reporter was able to attribute certain details to Sarah Lewis that were only known to Hutchinson, and only provided by Hutchinson the next day.”

No, it doesn't

The reality concerns how a Daily News reporter made a complete hash of reporting “certain details” of Sarah Lewis’ testimony, confusing the street with the court and placing the wideawake man in a location entirely different to that provided in her police statement and the overwhelmingly vast majority of newspaper accounts. Does it coincide with Hutchinson’s account in the biblically and profanely unlikely event that (a) Hutchinson told the Gawd’s honest truth, and (b) the Daily News was right and all other sources (including the actual police statement) were wrong? No, it doesn’t, because Hutchinson was at the corner of Dorset Street when Astrakhan and Kelly allegedly passed up the court, NOT opposite the court and certainly not inside it.

So down the lavatory must we flush any suggestion that there is any noteworthy coincidence and correlation between a discredited account (Hutchinson) and a confused piece of press tattle (the Daily News).

Two wrongs do not make a right, Jon, and we’re talking about two very glaring “wrongs” here.

What you’re doing at the moment is deciding which press accounts of Lewis testimony were correct according to how they compare with Hutchinson, whereas what you should be doing is seeing how they compare with Lewis’s original police statement and the majority press coverage. Hutchinson is not a barometer of press accuracy, astonishingly enough.

The Daily News was factually in error.

Everyone gets that. Harry gets it, Garry gets it, Sally gets it, Gareth gets it, Fisherman gets it. So your excuse for obstinately NOT getting it is…?

Lewis saw the loitering wideawake man once, and ONLY once - rendering wholly irrelevant your reminders that Hutchinson stood in three different locations according to his press account. It doesn’t matter how many locations he claimed to have stood at, because if the wideawake man was Hutchinson, she only saw him once, when he was standing outside the lodging house on the opposite side of Dorset Street. She did not, as you weirdly propose, supply a variety of different wideawake locations to lots of different reporters who then had to choose which one was their favourite to report about.

Here’s your basic litmus test – if you happen upon a press account that ill-accords with what Lewis said in her original police statement and the vast majority of press coverage, then that press account is wrong.

That’s how it works.

You’ve just got to give up on this stuff. If you want to Hutchinson to have told the truth and not to have been a murderer, there are others ways to argue that case without resorting to proven press falsehoods from one dubious press outlet. The Hutch-hasslers reject it, the Hutch-Hassler-hasslers reject it. It really is just you. All you need to say is that Lewis’ evidence confirms Hutchinson’s presence opposite the court where he said he was, and doing what he claimed to be doing at that particular moment in time… and that really is ALL you can say in terms of mutual corroboration between the Lewis and Hutchinson accounts. Hutchinson’s presence – that’s all. No “couple”, no activity in the court (which she denied), just his loitering 2:30 presence.

“Lewis first related seeing the loiterer outside Crossinghams, then offered the fact she saw him at the entrance to Millers Court.
Later, and perhaps through the Keyler's downstairs window, she observed a man stood at the door of the deceased.”

Yes, no, no, no, and no.

And those are factual “no’s”, not just “probably nots”.

The Keylers did not have a “downstairs window”. They occupied a single room, the size of Kelly’s if not smaller, on the first floor. Unless you want to argue that she popped into Julia Vanturney’s gaff “downstairs” for a spot of small-hours wideawake-watching.

“Lets say, for arguments sake, all the press accounts did confuse the location, and she only did see him outside Crossingham's, and nowhere else.
We are then left with Hutchinson who does claim to stand outside Millers Court entrance, and up the court at Kelly's room.”

And this is noteworthy or problematic…why? Whatever other locations Hutchinson may have claimed to have stood at, he was definitely NOT standing at them where Lewis saw him, and that’s really all there is to it. This is a fact, and it nullifies any consideration of a “coincidence” between Hutchinson’s press-only claim that he loitered outside Kelly’s window, and a provably false claim that Lewis saw someone standing there.

I don’t want to hear you say one more time that the Daily News “confirms” Hutchinson. It absolutely does not. The Daily News has a couple passing up the court when the loitering man was already outside Kelly’s window, and for that loitering man to be Hutchinson (and for the Daily News to be right, and for Hutchinson to be truthful), the latter would need to have told Abberline that he saw a couple heading up the court towards HIM, then stationed at the doorway of room #13, who presumably asked him to budge aside (no questions asked?!?) so they can gain entry.

But this doesn’t bear any relation to the actual Hutchinson statement which YOU treat as gospel, does it?

No harmony whatsoever between the Daily News and Hutchinson, m’afraid.

[Ben]

What’s this you’ve been arguing about the press only confusing single words, and never whole sentences? That’s obviously rather a silly argument. In the case of the Daily News – which was about the only newspaper to make a complete pig’s ear of reporting the name “Keyler” correctly – it could have been a simple case of substituting “street” with “court” in the context of the “passing along” or “passing up” couple. “Passed” makes very little sense when applied to the court unless Lewis herself was standing in the court passage at the time of the observation (obliging them to “pass” her), and yet we know that's not where she made her sighting from.

“No source mentions Dorset St. No source described where Lewis saw this couple.”

Wrong.

Utterly wrong.

Here’s just one example of a reliable source that faithfully places the “couple” on Dorset Street, in keeping with her actual police statement, and no, it’s not the Daily News. Nor is it the East Dorking Herald or the Bognor Regis Bulletin, or whatever obscurities you keep pulling up on keyword search in Casebook’s press section. It’s one of the most reputable and informed newspapers in the country – the Daily Telegraph, and it says:

“When I went into the court, opposite the lodging-house I saw a man with a wideawake. There was no one talking to him. He was a stout-looking man, and not very tall. The hat was black. I did not take any notice of his clothes. The man was looking up the court; he seemed to be waiting or looking for some one. Further on there was a man and woman - the later being in drink. There was nobody in the court.”

The location she is describing here (for wideawake man) is the same location she gave in her police statement (shock!), and that location is Dorset Street, on the other side of the road from the court entrance. Now amuse me please by trying to explain how a man standing outside Kelly’s room (as per your provably wrong adherence to the Daily News’ placement of Lewis’ man) can be looking “up” the court? Then, having acknowledged that the man observed was indeed on Dorset Street, I need you to observe that the couple were described as being “further on” from this man, i.e. further on Dorset Street from where the widwawake man was standing on Dorset Street. End of…again.

“in fact if I remember you actually choose to invent a second couple to satisfy your argument.
There was no second couple, even Hutchinson himself says”

Invent?

Back you must go to Sarah Lewis’ police statement and testimony if you think it’s just me “inventing” a second couple. Couple #1 were standing on Commercial Street near the Britannia, and Lewis feared that the male half of that couple was the same man who tried to accost her on Bethnal Green Road the previous Wednesday. Couple #2, meanwhile, were (concurrently with couple #1) strolling along Dorset Street – young, pissed, and having nothing to do with Miller’s Court, as accepted by the police who were evidently not the slightest bit interested in them, having recognised them as an obvious irrelevance to the Kelly murder. Couples did walk along Dorset Street – usually for nocturnal naughtiness with a prozzie in one of the grotty doss houses that littered Dorset Street and that general locality.

“By his own words, Hutchinson first observed the couple in Commercial St., then from the corner of Dorset St, then from the entrance of Millers Court, and subsequently, walked up the court himself.
What is there to debate here?”

According to Hutchinson’s press account (as accepted as truthful and accurate by you), he remained at the corner of Dorset Street until after Astrakhan and Kelly entered the court. This is utterly at odds with the Daily News’ hilarious misreported claim that the couple entered the court when the loitering man (Hutchinson, according to you) was already outside Kelly’s room, i.e. INSIDE Miller’s Court. This is why it bothers me so much when you attempt to argue that the Daily News’ unique take on Lewis’ evidence supports Hutchinson – it irrefutably and provably does not.

[Ben]

“I am still waiting for proof of your dubious “discrediting” claim. Sure, you believe it, but where is the proof?”

I’ve provided the proof over and over again, and the fact that you have rejected it on spurious grounds does not entitle you to keep requesting proof that you know full well I’ve provided to the satisfaction of anyone capable of understanding the source material. Either agree to disagree or provide actual counter-arguments (I’ve dealt with those already, mind), but don’t keep repeating the original “objection” as though it was never addressed. That’s terribly irritating. And do stop telling me I’m on the “defense”. It isn’t incumbent on me to “defend” anything, as I haven’t formulated any particular theory. I’m on the attack - attacking nonsensical rejections of realistic proposals based on obstinacy and ignorance, especially when they are supplanted with “alternatives” that garner absolutely no support, other than from their solitary proponent. Many people think Hutchinson lied, and Hutchinson is a more popular suspect than most. I have adherents to my views, while you have none. I'm not terribly perturbed, therefore, when you "throw down" your big old scary "gauntlet".

“the jury and press were all escorted to the crime scene”

"All"?

Evidence?

Nah, didn’t think you had any.

And you miss the point. The newspapers may well have understood the distinction between the court and the street, but simply misunderstood or misheard Lewis’s evidence, thus resulting in the Daily News’ erroneous placement of the wideawake man and the “in drink” couple outside Kelly’s room and “passing up” the court respectively. The Daily News either made a mistake (somehow) or they lied. Those are your only options. What absolutely isn’t an option – not even a vague possibility - is that they recounted Lewis’ evidence accurately, because we know for a fact that they didn’t. Well, everyone except you, apparently.

“You really want to challenge me on this?”

Yep, I thought I might just go berserk, stare into the face of adversity, and dare to take on the Mighty Jon “on this”. The reality that the police divulged case related information to the press at divers times during high profile police investigations is one that is disputed by no one and accepted by everyone – except you. Did I suggest at any point that the police in 1888 always divulged to the Echo and nobody else, or that the Echo never made errors? No, I didn’t. I couldn’t give a monkey’s if the Echo reported in October that a hedgehog was assumed by the police to be the culprit. It makes not a scrap of difference to the information which we know for a fact was obtained from the police in November and reported by the Echo on the 13th and 14th of that month, and which we know for a fact was accurate information obtainable only from police sources.

Care factor if you disagree? Negligible.

Irritation factor if you show signs of wanting to go through all this again? Gargantuan.

Willingness to go through all this again if antagonised into doing so? Ravenous.

I absolutely dare you to “write an essay” discussing the naïve and snort-worthy contention that the police never discuss case-related information with the press.

“Here, I have compared details found “only” in the Daily News, with details found “only” in Hutchinsons own account, These details are a match”.

Nuh-uh.

They're not.

See above.

They’re completely incompatible, even if we found a magic wand capable of wishing away the fact that the Daily News’ placements of “the loiterer” and “the couple” are hilariously and provably wrong.

“The elephant in the room, your room, is that the Daily News source was Lewis herself”

But you do realise that sources are capable of being misheard, misconstrued and manipulated, don’t you? And you do realise that the Daily News is irrefutably a case in point?

My “room” is looking decidedly un-elephantine!

[Ben]

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to illustrate by calling into question Lewis’ ability to gauge the time accurately – with she did, after registering it from the Spitalfields clock, which more or less faced Dorset Street. There is every reason, therefore, to trust her estimation of 2:30 as the time she entered Miller’s Court. She certainly wasn’t about to confuse 2:30 for 2:15 on a clockface, and nor are you about to conjure up some imaginary confusion to foist onto Lewis in order for Hutchinson’s evidence to be compatible with the Daily news’ errors. Even if she registered the time whilst walking on Commercial Street, it would still have taken a measly two minutes for her to be inside room #2 at Miller’s Court. Hardly worth arguing about and utterly inconsequential to either Hutchinson’s statement or the Daily News.

Unless you’re suggesting that Lewis read “2:15” from the Christ Church clock and estimated that it took 15 minutes to get from that point of observation to Miller’s Court? That is beyond ludicrous, and Lewis would never have misjudged the time so preposterously badly. It may be necessary for you to visit the actual area should any doubt persist on this issue. Two minutes is not confused with 15 minutes.

As for the suggestion that Hutchinson wrongly “guessed” the length of time he spent on his vigil, nope, that one doesn’t work either; not if you accept that (a) Hutchinson told the honest and accurate truth, and (b) the press accounts of his testimony were accurate. And you’ve made it clear on numerous occasions, including this thread, that you believe both to be true. From (b) we learn that Hutchinson was able to gauge the rough starting time of his vigil according to St. Mary’s church clock, and pinpoint the exact ending point of said vigil when Christ Church clock struck 3.00am.

Based on the forgoing, we can see that fiddling with both Lewis’s and Hutchinson’s account in order to make them compatible with the Daily News’s boo-boo quite simply does not work.

And speaking if things that don’t work, let us please dispense with this “base position” silliness. You can use that expression in the context of a sexual episode, but it has limited applicability here. If you mean the contemporary “position” on the subject of Hutchinson, it was to the effect that his statement was discredited shortly after the first senior copper on the scene gave it a cursory once-over and temporary face-based approval. Them’s the facts, and you calling it “guesswork” doesn’t make it so. The current alternative proposals to the widespread, popularly espoused, and wholly uncontroversial premise that Hutchinson told lies and may have been a killer consist, in the main, of brand new crazy ideas that receive far less support, and are based on far less compelling evidence, than the Hutch-as-liar/killer premise. Interesting that, isn’t it? Interesting that my own “quesswork” receives immeasurably more popular support that the theories of my most vocal detractors…

“no mention of what, or who, she was whilst walking towards Millers Court was written down in the official record”.

Lewis saw her first couple (and remember, there were two) outside the Britannia pub, and at least one account specifies their location as “near the market”, indicating Commercial Street and not round the corner in Dorset Street. Nobody ever placed this couple on Dorset Street. Clearly therefore, Lewis’s observations before she got to Dorset Street were recorded. She described this man - who she accepted as the same individual – as aged about 40, and was therefore obviously nothing to do with the “young” man she spied with a woman “further on” Dorset Street.

We have:

One couple standing near the market on Commercial Street, and betraying not one squeak of an intention to walk down Dorset, and a second couple passing along Dorset Street further on from where the man in the wideawake stood.

“Further on” is consistent with the direction of the view of the loiterer, i.e; further on down the passage (up the court)”

No, absolutely not.

It is not consistent with any such thing. You have drastically misunderstood, as I’ve explained to you years ago. Further on from the loiterer means further on from where he was standing, not where he was looking. If I were to say that I saw a man star-gazing, and that “further” on I saw another man walking his dog, would you assume I meant that I saw the dog-walking man up in the stars, i.e. where the first man was gazing? No, you wouldn’t. Lewis saw a man in DORSET STREET, and “further along” DORSET STREET, she saw a couple.

[Ben]

Where is your evidence that Abberline spent "hours" with Hutchinson? That’s an odd assertion, and certainly a new one on me. Even more curiously, you state that we are in no possession to contest the “findings” of Abberline with regard to Hutchinson. What “findings” are these? What did he “find”? Secret special things that would have supported everything you said had they survived? Not in that time frame. Just forget it. As I’ve been compelled to point out numerous times, there is no way that Abberline could have made any “findings” regarding Hutchinson in the tiny amount of time that elapsed between the end of the “interrogation” and the penning of that report. He wasn’t using “sources” to assess Hutchinson (these mythical “sources” that he was supposed to have had loads of) because there wasn’t the time available to procure them. The best you can argue is that we can’t contest Abberline’s “opinion”, but even that would be wrong considering that “later investigations” undermined – and prompted the revision of – that initial opinion.

I think you’ll agree that “findings” trump “opinions”.

And the latter was all Abberline was capable of providing at that juncture - not “findings”, not “conclusions”, just an “opinion”.

The “handicap” is all yours, because you want to un-discredit a contemporaneously discredited statement and revive it as accurate based on a very short-lived opinion. Despite the schism that you try to create between Hutchinson and Packer, they were treated no differently to one another, Granted the latter didn’t describe an exotic, toff-like suspect like Hutchinson did, and that’s presumably why there’s less interest in extracting him from the discredited doldrums, but even the Star featured them both in the same article “Worthless stories lead the police on false scents”.

You have also challenged the observation that Hutchinson based his fictional account on stories he may have read in the press, but if he was discredited – and we know he was – it is more than likely that this was eventually picked up on, and formed part of the “later investigations” alluded to in the Echo that culminated in his discrediting. It may have taken a couple of days for detectives to cross reference this with other press accounts, especially the nonsense they’d already ditched as valueless, such as the offerings of plagiarizer Mrs. Kennedy, and the nebulous sensationalist third-hand hearsay offerings from “Mrs. Paumier” and “Sarah Roney”, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t noticed eventually, and wasn’t a contributing factor in that “very reduced importance”.

And what’s the difficulty in grasping the concept, put forward by Gareth, that Hutchinson may have borrowed some “well-dressed” man elements from the press? Your objection seems to be that if he did any copying, he would have copied it precisely – what? How and why does that follow? What if he took the existing “well-dressed” men as an idea, and that just added to it in order to incorporate as many scary ripperish bits as he thought might help his cause? If the earlier well-dressed descriptions didn’t incorporate the Jewish element, why not whack that bit in too for good measure, and so implicate yet another convenient scapegoat type?

Another idea we can safely dispense with is the idea that Abberline’s memory and desk was chock full of every detail from every witness account in readiness for instant cross-referencing with Hutchinson’s claims.

Then there is the overlooked detail that Sarah Lewis heard “no noise” coming from the court as she entered it, immediately after the alleged arrival of chatty Astrakhan and laughy “spreeish” Kelly. Did they instantly get down to business and engage in the most silent “hanky panky” in the world ever, or do we have yet another reason to doubt Hutchinson’s version of events? If you think that’s “what we’d expect” in such a situation, I’d respectfully encourage getting out a bit more. Besides which, the last man Kelly brought back was anything but a lights-off silent affair, but rather one that involved booze and singing. Why should this second man be any different?

Amusingly, in your attempt to turn the “young man” in Lewis’s Dorset Street couple into Astrakhan man, you assert that she referred to him as “young” in deference to the fact that he was from the “better classes”, despite appearing over ten years older than Lewis’ own 23 years. This is just nonsense. It has never worked like that at any point. This is pure straw-grasping. If Lewis thought that this irrelevant young man with a pissed woman was from a better class and was well-dressed (nobody apart from you thinks he was, incidentally) she’d have said so. She wouldn’t have said “young” and hoped her interviewers were psychic enough to realise that she actually meant “posh”.

Really. Come on…

All the best,
Ben

[Ben]

@BTCG

“So let me get this right: the Daily News ought to treat “other sources” as more credible than what they themselves had collected”

(Sigh) No.

WE ought to treat “other sources” as more credible "than what they themselves (Daily News) had collected” because those other sources include the vast majority of press coverage and the original police statement, and because we know for certain that what the Daily News collected was wrong.

If any of this remains confusing to you for whatever reason, all you need to do is read Lewis’ original police statement and find out from there where the man stood. Any press account that contradicts this location is therefore wrong, and fortunately, most of them didn’t.

Hi Roy,

“Stalked out this particular one of his victims, Mary Kelly by hanging around Dorset Street across from Miller’s Court”.

This isn’t the remotest bit “complicated”, unless you want to argue that the known behaviour of known serial killers is “complicated” too. It is a fact that serial killers have been known to “stalk out” some their victims, despite having a different pre-crime “MO” with the others. If Ted Bundy, for instance, can go from inveigling his earlier victims under a false guise (as we might assume the ripper did with Chapman, Eddowes and the others) to stalking his later ones (and thereafter breaking into their accommodation), there is absolutely nothing to say that the ripper couldn’t have done likewise.

It certainly isn’t “complicated”, and nor is a perfectly rational fear of being recognised again by a witness. The fact that he didn’t “know” Lewis is irrelevant – it makes no difference to her ability to recognise the same individual again. I have never suggested that he “realised he’d been seen” at the time of the original encounter. I have always argued that this realisation only dawned on Hutchinson once he became aware that Lewis’ evidence was being publicly released at the inquest.

There were reportedly crowds of curiosity-seekers thronging around the Shoreditch Town Hall, and since it is incredibly normal for serial killers to monitor investigative progress more closely that the average paper-reading member of the public, it isn’t at all “complicated” to assume that the ripper was one among that crowd. Nothing complicated – just standard, unremarkable, documented serial killer behaviour, even if it meant walking the not-so-epic trek from Spitalfields to Shoreditch in this particular case. Yes, I posit – as a possibility only – that he may have recognised Lewis as the woman he had seen entering the court on the night of the murder. Very uncomplicated. Equally uncomplicated is the alternative explanation that he heard of Sarah Lewis’s evidence via word of mouth very shortly after the inquest.

I’m not a “suspector” by the way. I simply recognise causality and do not believe in coincidence, especially not the crazy sort that some are envisaging here. It isn’t even necessary to support Hutchinson’s candidacy as ripper in order to recognise that he came forward in response to Lewis’ evidence. Such is the weight of evidence supporting this observation that the “coincidence” argument may effectively be extirpated. It is therefore not my lookout to explain “how” he heard of her evidence. I just point out that he did, and let people fight amongst themselves over the question of “how”. If you don’t like my Shoreditch Town Hall proposal, pick an alternative. The only alternative you can’t pick is Hutchinson’s appearance having nothing to do with Lewis’ evidence, as a coincidence can only be stretched so far.

If we’re all for simple, how’s this for simplicity: Jack the Ripper was an ordinary working class local who lied about his behaviour to cover his butt, just like lots of other serial killers.

Far from being a complicated premise, I defy anyone to find a simpler one.

Lots of interesting interpretations of the word “complicated” here, and conversely, lots of decidedly weird stuff masquerading unconvincingly as “simple”.

All the best,
Ben

[Ben]

Let’s not have this boring old argument about how “obvious” it supposedly is that the Lewis-wideawake connection must have been registered at the time.

Show me the evidence that this connection was ever registered at any point between the commission of the murders and the centenary. Any squeak of a connection before 1988 would be valued and appreciated, otherwise it’s piss or get right off that wretched pot as far as that particularly annoying argument goes. Ironically, it is not until people started researching Hutchinson as a potential suspect that the connection was made, and that was after decades of “ripperology” in which no Lewis-Hutchinson comparison was ever hinted at. The present acceptance that the connection is oh-so-obvious is merely the culmination of lots of people sitting behind their keyboards, all focussing on one esoteric area of ripper research at their (apparently endless) leisure, without being pestered by hundreds of other leads to pursue, and without any onus on them to capture the real killer.

It is a fact that not a single member of the contemporary press registered the connection despite having ample opportunity to. Had they done so, they would have reported it way in advance of anyone else (i.e. the police) having the opportunity to spot it themselves, investigate it, and determine that no connection existed. Remember that on the 14th November, when the press printed Hutchinson’s account in full, they were still endorsing his account as both accurate and truthful, just as they were doing with Lewis. Now, if both accounts are taken at face value – which was what was happening on 14th November – the wideawake man simply HAD to be Hutchinson, and yet no allusion was ever made to the wideawake man’s identity.

Not a single poster has come back to me on this, or attempted to explain it, and it doesn’t surprise me; because here is proof positive that the press did not make the connection despite their acceptance of both accounts, an despite the connection being “there” to be made. And if the press didn’t notice it – not a single pressman apparently – why should the police (working with precisely the same material) have been any different?

If you’ve digested the above material and still want to pick a fight with me on this (please don’t bother posting if you haven’t, or I’ll just post it again), I challenge people to explain why we see neither (a) a connection inferred in the press by an initially pro-Hutchinson press, nor (b) a subsequent retraction of this connection on the grounds that it had been investigated and dismissed. A challenge, in other words, to those justifying their utterly baseless two-fold speculation. If anyone answers (a) with “it was looked into and ruled out”, go back a couple of paragraph and read where I explain how impossible that is.

Had the connection been noted by anyone at the time, it would have appeared in the press.

That’s an unavoidably reality.

They missed it – absolute indisputable fact.

And no nonsense please along the lines that Hutchinson was “lean”. There is no evidence for this, and shockingly “coincidentally”, the press sketch of Hutchinson resembles Lewis’ man precisely – not tall, but stout, and wearing a wideawake. Oh, and no nonsense please along the lines that it was so common for people to hover outside lodging houses. Yes, maybe, but not if that hovering involved “watching and waiting” for someone to come out of Miller’s Court during the small hours of a very inclement night. That’s far more specific, and it describes the behaviour of both Lewis’s man and Hutchinson…”coincidentally”).

[Ben]

Let’s not have the “Why no mention of Lewis” business again please.

We’ve done that one.

Hutchinson didn’t say anything about a PC or a man going into a lodging house in his police statement. This only appeared in the newspapers, and this should raise doubts and questions already. I don’t understand why it was a bad move to mention these characters if he deliberately omitted any mention of Lewis to obscure the fact that it was her evidence that forced his hand. It is doubtful that the details involving the PC and the lodging house entrant were voluntarily offered. They were probably provided in response to the question “Did you see any other MEN in the area” – male characters being relevant insofar as they are potential suspects in the murder in a way that female characters, such as Sarah Lewis, could not be. This would be another plausible reason for Lewis’ omission.

Even if Hutchinson was a liar and the killer, there was no reason for excluding two inconsequential people who were actually there when he said they were. On the other hand, there was every reason for withholding the detail of Lewis’ arrival on the scene, if that is what propelled him out of the woodwork in the first place. Mentioning her would only have made it obvious that she spurred him into coming forward to legitimise his loitering presence. And it worked. Because if Abberline had been satisfied that the two accounts corroborate each other, there was no chance of Hutchinson being dismissed as a mere attention-seeker as he could not be placed at the crime scene. In reality, however, an attention-seeker was the labelled ultimately assigned him, and that would not have been possible had the police already decided that Wideawake=Hutch. Hence, IF he was the killer, his omission of Lewis was a prudent, neck-saving move.

For all Jon’s craziness over the Daily News, he at least accepts the likely identity of the wideawake man as Hutchinson, which is an avoidable conclusion to my mind. Two men, both watching and waiting for someone to come out of Miller’s Court, on two successive nights – that is impossible to accept. Hutchinson was probably the man she saw, and he probably came forward as soon as he realised he’d been seen. This is the only explanation that rejects horrible outrageous “coincidence” as a palatable explanation. Whether that makes him a likely murderer is something we can fight over, but let us at least stick to the points that are actually debateable.

No, by the way, it is not likely that Lewis lied or stole from Mary Cox. If she wanted to use that and dress the loiterer up like Blotchy, she would at least have used Cox’s term, “billycock”, not “wideawake” (even though I agree that the hat’s themselves are interchangeable). In addition, Lewis didn’t even make him the suspicious focus of her story. She was far more concerned with the Bethnal Green Botherer who had spooked her the previous Wednesday. She was fearful of him, not wideawake, and if she was inclined to “enhance” any of the descriptions, it would therefore have been the former, not the latter.

What else are we not doing any more on this thread…ah yes, date-confusion. Let’s just not, please. Walter Dew offered his own 1938 personal speculation that Hutchinson was mistaken as to time and date (not that his account “belonged” on a different date at precisely the same time), and was utterly contradicted by the actual reason for Hutchinson’s discrediting which took place shortly after Hutchinson’s first appearance. We can also forget those blessed signatures which are still a million miles away from “nearly identical” as accepted by the only document examiner to have conducted a professional examination on them.

Hi Richard,

Shall we just simplify things...?
The witness Hutchinson, saw a man escort Mary Kelly back to her room at 2,am plus, he described the man , we have the description, and believe it or not, it is likely that this man either killed her, during the night, or around 9,am in the morning.

Yes, let’s just "simplify" things:

James Maybrick wrote a diary documenting his murderous activity in Whitechapel. Simple. He wrote of his intention to kill prostitutes before carrying out the killings themselves. Simple. It tells us he was Jack the Ripper. It’s so simple. Why can’t we just accept these things as they’re written rather than complicating everything by questioning it?

Yes, I am taking the piss here. Sorry about that. What I’m doing with my Maybrick example is appealing to a purely face-value and totally uncritical acceptance of a given source (i.e. we should accept it because it says what it says), whilst fallaciously dressing it up as “simplicity”. Unfortunately, this is precisely what you’re doing with your rejections to any suspicion of Hutchinson.

All the best,
Ben

[Fisherman]

Let’s not have the “Why no mention of Lewis” business again please.

We’ve done that one.


All the best,
Ben

On this score, I will simply do what I and Caz decided to do before - I will leave you talking to yourself.

All the best,
Fisherman