The Red Handkerchief...

[Ben]

Welcome back, Fisherman.

I just cannot for the life of me believe that the police would not keep track of who was there and when as the murder went down. The task the police has from the outset in a murder case, is to piece the different bits together. They listen to all the the witnesses, and they are therefore the central unit who has access to all the material.

So presumably you cannot "for the life of you" accept that the police “would not keep track” of someone like Charles Cross, who was "there and when as the murder went down"? Remember, they can't have kept proper track of Cross if they allowed him to appear at the inquest under the guise of an innocent witness, never once realising that here was the real Jack the Ripper fibbing his bottom off right under their noses. This is why you should only attack other suspect theories if they don’t expose glaring holes in your own.

Where are you getting your information from that this particular aspect of Lewis' evidence was "judged important by the police"? I don't want to see ex cathedra pronouncements based on thin air. I want to see actual evidence that Lewis' description of the man in the wideawake in particular was "judged important by the police". It is, of course, completely without foundation. What we actually see is that this aspect of Lewis' evidence was totally eclipsed in terms of significance by her other, more sensational claims, such as those pertaining to her Bethnal Green botherer from the previous Wednesday, as well as by evidence from other witnesses, such as Mary Cox. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because we make a lot of noise 120 years later about a particular esoteric area of ripper interest, the police in 1888 accorded it as much attention as we do. What happens more commonly in the real world is that details are often missed or swamped by seemingly more significant and higher priority issues.

“To me, there can only be one reason for the total lack of records of the connection - it was found out very quick that there never was a connection. I also find it incredibly tempting to accept that the sudden lowered interest in Hutchinsonīs testimony is knit to this lack.”

Your inference is a highly questionable one, in my opinion.

The fact that no connection was alluded to only means that nobody noticed it, just as you allege that the police failed to consider the guilt of Cross when they ought to have done. The similarity between Lewis' "wideawake" loiterer and Hutchinson in terms of reported actions, movements and behaviour at the same location and at the same time is far too coincidental for the two to be separate people. That's just obvious. And yet we KNOW that it went unobserved even by the contemporary press. They published Hutchinson's account before they could conceivably have had a chance to discover that a potential Lewis-Hutchinson had been investigated and ruled out by the police (which is what you wrongly claim happened). The connection was there to be made, nobody had told them they'd spotted it or dismissed it beforehand, and yet they didn't notice it.

So, unfortunately for your conclusions, you are forced by the evidence to accept that no connection was made between Hutchinson and Lewis’ wideawake loiterer. We’ve had this discussion many a time, and it would be wearisome to have to go through it all again.

Let’s not have that Dew business again, please. Nobody ever considered it a good idea to revive his thoughts on Hutchinson as accurate until you chimed in a year ago after embroiling yourself in an argument with me, and this is hardly surprising. Dew had no actual knowledge; he was relying on personal speculation only, and he made that much very clear, to be fair to him. It was you, if you recall, who cautioned me not to listen to Dew, citing the fact that he was “a bit of a freshman”, who got “lots of things terribly wrong”, and whose book was “riddled with mistakes”. That being the case, there was no reason to inform a “bit of a freshman” about the actual reasons for Hutchinson’s discrediting. He simply needed to be told that the hunt for Astrakhan man was off, leaving him to speculate many years later as to why.

As for this supposed evidence of Astrakhan man still be pursued after Hutchinson’s discrediting, let’s see the evidence, and I don’t mean the out of date nonsense I’ve dealt with thousands of times. There is not a scrap of credible evidence that anyone in any position of police seniority was still looking for Astrakhan man after 15th November. On the contrary, all indications are that they dropped Hutchinson’s account very shortly after the publication of his drastically contradictory press claims.

“Astrakhan man went from being a red-hot bid for the killerīs role to becoming a man that had met Kelly on the night BEFORE she was murdered. And that meant that the police would very much like to see him and ask him about his encounter with Kelly, but they did not for a minute believe that he was involved in the murder.”

Why not?

Even if the police did accept the “different day” hypothesis – they definitely and provably didn’t, but let’s pretend - why on earth would they rule out the possibility of the mysterious stranger from the early morning prior to her murder being responsible for her murder the next early morning? That makes no sense at all. If they accepted Astrakhan as a living breathing reality, albeit from the previous night, there was every reason to keep him in the frame as a potential suspect. It’s just too bad, I guess, that the actual proven reason we have on record for Hutchinson’s discrediting concerned his delay in coming forward, and had nothing at all to do with any “wrong night” speculation.

To boot, we have the fact that Hutchinson never said a word about standing outside Crossinghams - he instead placed himself at the corner of the court.

Let's not go here again either, if you don't mind. Those two locations are separated by the length of a car, and the chances of him rooting himself to one spot like a statue for the full 45 minutes were obviously remote.

All the best,
Ben

[Ben]

Hi Caz,

I’ve very little to add on top of Abby’s excellent points, but I’ll have a go.

I don’t see how you can argue that Hutchinson can only be kept “in the frame” as a suspect if the apparent lack of suspicion in 1888 can be explained – to whose satisfaction you don’t make clear. That isn’t true at all. Even if we rely on imaginary lost reports and argue that the police “must” have been suspicious, and “must” have investigated him etc, he is still very much “in the frame” given how astoundingly unlikely it is that any attempt to “check him out” resulted in him being proven innocent. As you know, I don’t accept the argument that he was ever suspected, but it’s a possibility, and not one that remotely rules him out. The better explanation is that due to the large number of bogus witnesses who had bogged down the investigation (and the lack of any precedent for offenders coming forward as witnesses), he was simply cast aside as a publicity-seeker, and never considered a potential suspect.

This is an irrefutably reasonable and plausible explanation for the lack of suspicion attached to Hutchinson, and it doesn’t rely on inventing a whole load of mythical reports that once upon a time documented a convenient neatly-packaged sequence of invents involving Hutchinson being suspected, investigated, and ruled out – a three-fold speculation based on absolutely nothing.

The important point to bear in mind that just because a person says they were there at such and such a time and place, it doesn’t make it true, and very often it wasn’t, as the police discovered again and again with the likes of Violenia and others. Violenia claimed to have been the last person to see Annie Chapman alive, effectively placing himself at the crime scene at a critical juncture, and to make matters worse, he wasn’t remotely believable (unlike Hutchinson, whose initial appearance obviously created a favourable impression). So here we have a deeply dodgy foreigner placing himself at the crime scene, and yet what happened to him? He was cast aside as a dud witness, who wasn’t at the crime scene when he claimed to have been. There is not the slightest scrap of evidence that he was considered a suspect, lookout or anything of that nature. What, then, is the argument for the more superficially believable Hutchinson being treated any differently to Violenia?

On the subject of the Lewis-wideawake connection, the main objection to your suggestion that it was explored and ruled out is that there wasn’t the time and opportunity for that to happen before the press got wind of the connection and reported on it. If the press noticed it at all, they would have alluded to it well in advance of any hypothetical investigation taking place that supposedly could have determined that Hutchinson wasn’t the man in question. The only credible explanation (the only possible one, in fact), therefore, is that the press simply did not notice the connection, despite how obvious we consider it today, and if the press didn’t notice it, there is even less reason to suppose that anyone else did either. Personally, I’m not in the least bit surprised by that. We’re analysing the subject at our leisure over 100 years later. We’re not being bombarded by one new lead after another, and nor are we being subjected to enormous pressure to catch a serial killer.

As far as Lewis blabbing was concerned, she was hardly a prime candidate for that. Unlike some other witnesses, Lewis observed the silence requesting of her by the police with regard to press interviews. If she read Hutchinson’s account in the newspapers and realised he must have been the wideawake man, there was no reason to inform the police about anything. It would have been a case of “Oh well, that all makes sense then”.

All the best,
Ben

[Ben]

Continued...

Please don’t keep saying that it is a “tiny minority” of serial killers that have injected themselves into their investigations. You’ve stated this before, and it is absolutely not the case. Serial killers make up a “teeny-tiny” population of the criminal fraternity, let alone the population. You have to look at the frequency of certain behavioural traits that have been proven to have occurred within an already “teeny-tiny” group, and the act of coming forward as a false witness is far from a rare occurrence. Were it otherwise, seasoned criminological expects would not correctly anticipate this outcome in the cases of uncaught offenders, and lay successful traps accordingly. And yet that’s precisely what has happened.

And yes, Hutchinson is irrefutably the “best fit” in terms of ripper suspects fitting the above description, which is why more books have been written about him than any other suspect…which is why there are 12,000 bloody posts in the Hutchinson forum (unless people are just addicted to me, of course, which I don’t buy)… and which is why Hutchinson is infinitely more popular than some of the other Johnny-come-lately witness-turned-suspects who tend to last about five minutes in the “spotlight” before sinking without trace shortly thereafter, and who basically ride the coat-tails of the original suspicions advanced with regard to Hutchinson. His evidence was at least discredited, unlike a lot of the other witnesses touted as suspects, whose stories were never doubted at the time. He is legitimately suspicious insofar as it can be demonstrated that he was very probably loitering outside the crime scene at a time critical to that crime’s commission, and that he later lied about his reasons for being there.

The suggestion that he may have been culpable is criminologically sound – untouchably so when we consider other cases of pre-emptive behaviour from murderers.

I’m unclear as to what is supposed to “fly in the face” of my suggestion that Hutchinson deliberately omitted any reference to Lewis to avoid making it obvious that her evidence forced his hand. What is the problem with Sarah Lewis making the connection? Why would she bother getting involved and alerting the police even if she did? At that stage, remember, his account was being widely circulated as accurate and credible, so if she read about it and had a little “Eureka” moment to herself along the lines of “Oh, so that bloke I saw was obviously this Hutchinson chap I’m reading about, and he was just another witness like me. Great. That’s that one cleared up then. Jolly good”, what’s the impetus for making a song and dance about it? As far as she was concerned, the press article was simply confirmation that the lurker’s identity had been established, and that he wasn’t a suspicious character.

Lewis would only be a problem if she went on to read that this supposedly innocent wideawake-wearing witness had been discredited, but then we know this wasn’t extensively reported, presumably to save face for the police. We also know that Lewis never sought out either police or press herself, suggesting a somewhat reluctant witness.

I’ve never heard it suggested before that a “local Gentile everyman” is a poor fit for the various eyewitness descriptions. On the contrary, it is impossible to get a better fit, and it is generally acknowledged by the majority that whoever Jack the Ripper was, he was most likely to have been precisely that sort of individual. Lawende’s evidence indicates a "local Gentile everyman” as does Israel Schwartz’s, and the worth of Long’s “foreigner” observation is drastically undermined – as the police at the time agreed – by the fact that she didn’t get a look at the man’s face. Not one of these is incompatible with what we know or believe to be true about Hutchinson’s appearance, i.e. that he was not tall, but stout (ref. Schwartz’s broud-shouldered, full-faced man), wore dark clothes and a wideawake (see Ada Wilson’s description of her attacker), and with a military appearance.

Again, the police could not touch him in the event that he was guilty and the police suspected him – at least not unless they decided to parade him in front of earlier witnesses from earlier ripper crimes, which, given their treatment of other witnesses at the time, they were very unlikely to have done. Hutchinson, however, had every reason to fear precisely that – an identity parade with earlier witnesses, and no way of knowing that the police were not employing that strategy at the time.

Your professed doubt that Hutchinson was able to learn about Lewis's evidence is unreasonable, to my mind, and it doesn't account for the whopping implausible "coincidence" of Hutchinson coming forward with his account of watching and waiting for someone to emerge from Miller's Court the moment it was publicly divulged that Lewis had seen someone doing precisely that. And there's no evidence whatsoever of any other man hanging around the court in the small hours that night, and in very poor weather.

As for blabbing to the papers, this was probably done (if guilty, of course) to ensure that any unresolved issues or bum notes in his initial statement were ironed out and/or elaborated upon, thus ensuring that any potentially incriminating grey areas didn’t remain grey for long. They only didn’t consider his actions to be consistent with that of a stalker because he had successfully engineered – in my opinion – a false predicament that placed him on the ripper’s streets in the small hours of the night with nothing important to do beyond loiter outdoors. Take away that excuse (Romford and all), and he’s just a loitering man in the heart of ripper territory when Jack himself was known to be active.

Regards,
Ben

[caz]

Hi Caz
If abberline came to disbelieve hutchs story and does what you say try to establish why he was there. Hutch would just reiterate his story: I just came back from romford and no where to stay and I ran into Mary. what can he do? say Ok hutch I don't believe you. now what? parade him in front of the witnesses as you say. OK but surely by this point there would be something written down that hutch is a suspect. it never got this far-right?

Morning Abby,

There must have been scores of men considered as potential suspects, or persons of interest, at one time or another, for whom no records have survived - that's why nobody can claim it as a definitely ascertained fact that Hutch was never among them. At the very least the police would have wanted to identify and question Lewis's lurker, whoever he was.

But from Hutch's point of view, the risk of finding himself paraded in front of the witnesses was there at the start, when he decided to come forward and had no idea if his performance would be good enough to avoid coming under suspicion.

Now from hutchs point of view (as killer): he finds out someone saw him. maybe they know him. uh-oh. he decides he should come forward as a witness to explain why he was there and provide a bogus suspect. again, how can they prove me wrong? they cant. and perhaps he knows as the killer that none of witnesses can either-they saw someone else or I know did not get a good look at me.

Yes, as I said, maybe he knew he had nothing to fear from previous witnesses (particularly if he wasn't there and hadn't killed anyone) but maybe he didn't. What he would have known, if he heard what Lewis had said at the inquest, was that she didn't know him, by name or by sight, or her account would have been very different and a lot less vague. So making off on his toes where no witness could spot him and recognise him again (if he really was worried enough about this to come forward) would have been no gamble at all. Did he know, for instance, that the police in his day would have been above dirty tactics to break him, if they suspected he was involved but the evidence was lacking? If so, how?

they never suspected hutch enough to take it to the next level. if he was the killer he fooled them. simple as that.

But what 'next level' are you thinking of here? The argument that Hutch would have been untouchable anyway - no evidence, nothing to make charges stick - doesn't really work unless you can apply it to every single person ever suspected and investigated. What would have made the real killer(s) touchable?

Clearly whoever killed those women fooled the police, so that's a circular argument. If William Gull, Queen Victoria or Sooty was the killer, one of them fooled the police - simple as that.

Love,

Caz
X

[Abby Normal]

Hi Christer.

We don't have any written records from Scotland Yard about the Hutchinson/Astrachan scenario at all, good or bad.
It isn't just that no record exists concerning the Lewis/Hutchinson connection, there are no records about anything. So isn't it just as likely that the records you seek simply vanished along with all the rest?

It all comes back to that 'also missing' interrogation report of Hutchinson by Abberline. We have no idea what Hutchinson told Abberline, nor what Abberline asked Hutchinson.
The initial voluntary statement that has survived is only the tip of the iceberg, it formed a starting point for the interrogation, heaven only knows what other details surfaced during that face to face meeting.

We can't pass judgement on what we don't know, but 'what is not known' appears to be the main ingredient in the case against Hutchinson.

I think it is (as you say) very obvious that Abberline did see the connection (between the stories of Lewis & Hutchinson), which was one of the reason's he believed Hutchinson in the first place.

hi wick
Thank you. that's what ive been saying all along!

[Fisherman]

Ben:

Welcome back, Fisherman.

Thank you kindly!

So presumably you cannot "for the life of you" accept that the police “would not keep track” of someone like Charles Cross, who was "there and when as the murder went down"? Remember, they can't have kept proper track of Cross if they allowed him to appear at the inquest under the guise of an innocent witness, never once realising that here was the real Jack the Ripper fibbing his bottom off right under their noses. This is why you should only attack other suspect theories if they don’t expose glaring holes in your own.

The police had information about when and where Lechmere entered the scene and left it, and that is what I am talking about: keeping track physically about who was at the murder site and when.

That is rather a simple task. To suss out the incentives for these people being in place is another thing altogether, and belongs to another discussion.

Where are you getting your information from that this particular aspect of Lewis' evidence was "judged important by the police"? I don't want to see ex cathedra pronouncements based on thin air. I want to see actual evidence that Lewis' description of the man in the wideawake in particular was "judged important by the police". It is, of course, completely without foundation.

Eh - I did not name exactly what parts were deemed important. I simply said that the police judged Lewisītestimony of importance enough to advance to the inquest. I have trouble seeing how anybody could challenge that.

What we actually see is that this aspect of Lewis' evidence was totally eclipsed in terms of significance by her other, more sensational claims, such as those pertaining to her Bethnal Green botherer from the previous Wednesday, as well as by evidence from other witnesses, such as Mary Cox.

Letīs just say that I disagree - I donīt think that the police would miss out on the part where a man was placed very close to the murder site at the approximate correxct time for the murder in favour of a story about a person the witness had met days before. Much as they may have listened to that story with some interest, I think we can agree that their main focus would be the murder night and the persons in place at that stage.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because we make a lot of noise 120 years later about a particular esoteric area of ripper interest, the police in 1888 accorded it as much attention as we do.

Donīt make the mistake that the police did not pick up on witnesses telling them about persons lingering directly outside the murder room at the approximate time of the murder. If you think they ascribed little or no importance to such a thing, instead revelling in a story about something that went down days before, then I think you are simply very much mistaken.

What happens more commonly in the real world is that details are often missed or swamped by seemingly more significant and higher priority issues.

There were no more significant and higher priority issues than the question of who was there at the right time on the murder night. One of those persons - detected or undetected - was the killer. Thatīs why this was priority number one. The police wanted to identify the killer, to map his moves and - ultimately - catch him.

Your inference is a highly questionable one, in my opinion.

Thatīs all very fine and worries me not.

The fact that no connection was alluded to only means that nobody noticed it.

Thatīs purely conjecture, Iīm afraid. It could equally be that everybody knew that no connection could be made, so letīs not jump the gun here!

The similarity between Lewis' "wideawake" loiterer and Hutchinson in terms of reported actions, movements and behaviour at the same location and at the same time is far too coincidental for the two to be separate people.

Are you saying that no two people have ever stoood at the approximate same place, looking at a house on two consecutive days? I do believe you are!

And yet we KNOW that it went unobserved even by the contemporary press.

No, we "know" no such thing. It may just as well be that the press simply recognized the fact that Hutchinson was wrong - out on the days, for example - and why would they write about a connection that never was in such a case?

They published Hutchinson's account before they could conceivably have had a chance to discover that a potential Lewis-Hutchinson had been investigated and ruled out by the police (which is what you wrongly claim happened). The connection was there to be made, nobody had told them they'd spotted it or dismissed it beforehand, and yet they didn't notice it.

We do not know if they noticed it or not, Ben - we only know that in the accounts we have, they did not mention it. My presumption is that they first printed the sensational Hutchinson story, only to find out a short time later that he was wrong - and before they went any further when it comes to joining up the threads.

So, unfortunately for your conclusions, you are forced by the evidence to accept that no connection was made between Hutchinson and Lewis’ wideawake loiterer.

Thatīs not "evidence", Ben - itīs you, nothing else. And I am neither convinced by you and much less forced to believe in what you think. My conviction is that it adds up very poorly.

We’ve had this discussion many a time, and it would be wearisome to have to go through it all again.

So letīs leave it!

Let’s not have that Dew business again, please.

Sorry, but I am not very inclined to have a poster whose wiews I disbelieve tell me not to listen to a detective that was there at the time of the murders. It would be very illogical.

As for this supposed evidence of Astrakhan man still be pursued after Hutchinson’s discrediting, let’s see the evidence, and I don’t mean the out of date nonsense I’ve dealt with thousands of times.

I find you have baselessly refuted it. If that is your way of "dealing with" matters, we will make no progress at all.
You know full well that there were articles that spoke of Hutchinsonīs track being followed up on alongside the Cox track. The Echo wrote on the 19:th of November: The police have not relaxed their endeavours to hunt down the murderer in the slightest degree; but so far they remain without any direct clue. Some of the authorities are inclined to place most reliance upon the statement made by Hutchinson as to his having seen the latest victim with a gentlemanly man of dark complexion, with a dark moustache. Others are disposed to think that the shabby man with a blotchy face and a carrotty moustache described by the witness Mary Ann Cox, is more likely to be the murderer.

To me, that reads as if the police followed two tracks at this stage, one of them being Hutchinsonīs gentleman. And this is a fair number of days after which you claim that the police had totally lost interest in Hutchinson, thinking he was a liar/attentionseeker only.

If the tax payers had known that the authorities STILL looked for his man on the 19:th in spite of this, they would have been very upset, methinks

There is not a scrap of credible evidence that anyone in any position of police seniority was still looking for Astrakhan man after 15th November.

Ah! "Police seniority"! Well, to be fair, the Echo article does not say that the ones following up on the Hutchinson track were "senior policemen", Iīll give you that...
Is that your argument here?

Why not?

Even if the police did accept the “different day” hypothesis – they definitely and provably didn’t, but let’s pretend - why on earth would they rule out the possibility of the mysterious stranger from the early morning prior to her murder being responsible for her murder the next early morning? That makes no sense at all.

To some degree, you are right. They could not categorically rule anybody out as such. But the police reaction tells the whole story - a "much reduced importance" was attached to Hutchinsons story after they found out about the muddling of the days, which is exactly what should be expected. But since nothing could be ruled out, and since A man DID meet Kelly the morning before her murder, he was still a person of interest, albeit to a much lower degree.

However, if the police had ever been convinced that Hutchinson was a liar/attentionseeker, they would NOT take any interest in a person they believed to be an invention. Subsequently, the Echo would NOT report about Astrakhan man being sought for on the 19:th.
Iīm sure you can see the logic of this - discarded persons and stories are not allowed to interfere with important police work - but stories that have a core of truth will always have the police interested, even if these stories are not fully as valuable as they may have appeared from the outset for some reason.

Let's not go here again either, if you don't mind. Those two locations are separated by the length of a car, and the chances of him rooting himself to one spot like a statue for the full 45 minutes were obviously remote.

Nobody is saying that he "rooted" himself, Ben. But he may easily have used the northern pavement only. There is nothing at all saying that he would have felt compelled to go and stand outside Crossinghams for some reason.
So this is a very important point, and Iīm afraid that you are going to have to live with it. Hutchinson said that he went to the corner of the court to watch for the couple and he said that he left from the corner of the court as well. That means that we have him speaking ONLY of the northern side of the street.
If you think that there is no possible way he could have told Abberline that he stood on the northern side only, then you are fooling yourself. This is one example of details that may have revealed to Abberline that the loiterer and Hutchinson could never have been one and the same. The fact that Hutchinson said not a thing about Lewis passing him on her way into the court is another. These are almighty pointers in the direction that no connection could ever be made between these people.

But you know that already!

All the best,
Fisherman

[Abby Normal]

Morning Abby,

There must have been scores of men considered as potential suspects, or persons of interest, at one time or another, for whom no records have survived - that's why nobody can claim it as a definitely ascertained fact that Hutch was never among them. At the very least the police would have wanted to identify and question Lewis's lurker, whoever he was.

But from Hutch's point of view, the risk of finding himself paraded in front of the witnesses was there at the start, when he decided to come forward and had no idea if his performance would be good enough to avoid coming under suspicion.



Yes, as I said, maybe he knew he had nothing to fear from previous witnesses (particularly if he wasn't there and hadn't killed anyone) but maybe he didn't. What he would have known, if he heard what Lewis had said at the inquest, was that she didn't know him, by name or by sight, or her account would have been very different and a lot less vague. So making off on his toes where no witness could spot him and recognise him again (if he really was worried enough about this to come forward) would have been no gamble at all. Did he know, for instance, that the police in his day would have been above dirty tactics to break him, if they suspected he was involved but the evidence was lacking? If so, how?



But what 'next level' are you thinking of here? The argument that Hutch would have been untouchable anyway - no evidence, nothing to make charges stick - doesn't really work unless you can apply it to every single person ever suspected and investigated. What would have made the real killer(s) touchable?

Clearly whoever killed those women fooled the police, so that's a circular argument. If William Gull, Queen Victoria or Sooty was the killer, one of them fooled the police - simple as that.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz

There must have been scores of men considered as potential suspects, or persons of interest, at one time or another, for whom no records have survived

and I am sure William Gull, Queen Victoria or Sooty was among them.

bye bye.

[caz]

Hi Ben,

You wrote to Fisherman:

So, unfortunately for your conclusions, you are forced by the evidence to accept that no connection was made between Hutchinson and Lewis’ wideawake loiterer. We’ve had this discussion many a time, and it would be wearisome to have to go through it all again.

Wearisome, yes, but probably because nobody has yet been able to reconcile this connection being totally missed by everyone on the planet at the time except canny old Hutch, with it supposedly being as obvious today as the nose on your face that Lewis and Hutch must have been describing the same man - himself - watching the court and waiting for someone to emerge. It strikes me that the simplest explanation could be that nobody saw it as any coincidence at all for two (or even ten) men to be hanging around McCarthy's Rents up to the wee small hours, waiting for a spot of how's yer father with one of the female occupants. If it was a rare sight then yes, a connection would have been made between Hutch the Loiterer and Sarah Lewis's Loiterer.

Hutch may still have been that man, but because nobody who was there appears to have leapt to that conclusion, our 21st century minds, which see only snapshots of the main players, and not the bigger picture with all the extras, may well be deceiving us into reading too much into the little we are left with.

It’s just too bad, I guess, that the actual proven reason we have on record for Hutchinson’s discrediting concerned his delay in coming forward, and had nothing at all to do with any “wrong night” speculation.

It's also too bad that his delay in coming forward, resulting in his information not being given under oath at the inquest, was not something that took hours or days to dawn on the authorities, so this alone could not have been the cause of downgrading his account from one of huge potential significance to one of a much reduced importance. Abberline initially believed Hutch's story, knowing how late he was to the party, so if this was going to be an issue later on, it was there from the start. Abberline would have absorbed and tackled Hutch's tardiness before declaring himself satisfied on paper.

However, if enquiries into Hutch's story subsequently revealed that the silly sod had got the wrong night, there would be no Lewis connection to get steamed up about, little or nothing to add to the file (far more important things to do now) and certainly no burning need to give chapter and verse to the papers, leaving them to speculate - illogically - that he was a fading star witness because the authorities had somehow only just cottoned on to the fact that the inquest was over when he came forward.

...the chances of him rooting himself to one spot like a statue for the full 45 minutes were obviously remote.

You mean like the chances he was so mentally or physically challenged that he couldn't have got himself out of the immediate area if he genuinely feared bumping into Lewis again and being recognised? It's a wonder he managed to drag himself to the cop shop.

Love,

Caz
X

[Fisherman]

Caz:

It strikes me that the simplest explanation could be that nobody saw it as any coincidence at all for two (or even ten) men to be hanging around McCarthy's Rents up to the wee small hours, waiting for a spot of how's yer father with one of the female occupants. If it was a rare sight then yes, a connection would have been made between Hutch the Loiterer and Sarah Lewis's Loiterer.

The problem with that is that Hutchinson said nothing about any such crowd. He spoke of an empty street, more or less.
However, if he spoke of the wrong day, then of course there could have been loads of gentlemen peering down Millers court on the murder morning!
Generally speaking, you will of course be right - few people are surprised by finding a swarm of bees outside a beehive.

However, if enquiries into Hutch's story subsequently revealed that the silly sod had got the wrong night, there would be no Lewis connection to get steamed up about, little or nothing to add to the file (far more important things to do now) and certainly no burning need to give chapter and verse to the papers, leaving them to speculate - illogically - that he was a fading star witness because the authorities had somehow only just cottoned on to the fact that the inquest was over when he came forward.

Bravo, Caz - exactly so. It pans out nicely this way. Better, I find, than in any other suggested way.

All the best,
Fisherman

[caz]

The important point to bear in mind that just because a person says they were there at such and such a time and place, it doesn’t make it true, and very often it wasn’t, as the police discovered again and again with the likes of Violenia and others.

Yes, Ben. The police 'discovered' again and again when the likes of Violenia and others had told lies about their whereabouts. They must have gained at least a little experience along the way, then, in how to go about discovering what was true and what was not. Yet they are meant to have cocked up royally with Hutch. A bit of a contradiction in your own argument there, surely?

Violenia claimed to have been the last person to see Annie Chapman alive, effectively placing himself at the crime scene at a critical juncture, and to make matters worse, he wasn’t remotely believable (unlike Hutchinson, whose initial appearance obviously created a favourable impression). So here we have a deeply dodgy foreigner placing himself at the crime scene, and yet what happened to him? He was cast aside as a dud witness, who wasn’t at the crime scene when he claimed to have been. There is not the slightest scrap of evidence that he was considered a suspect, lookout or anything of that nature. What, then, is the argument for the more superficially believable Hutchinson being treated any differently to (sic) Violenia?

Unless you are suggesting the police were wrong to conclude that Violenia was a dud but innocent witness (given that he was 'a deeply dodgy foreigner' and not 'remotely believable'), I'm not exactly sure how his example helps you. You said yourself they 'discovered' Violenia's claim wasn't true, so why could they not have discovered the truth or untruths behind Hutch's account, if no detailed record survives of their discoveries in either case?

As far as Lewis blabbing was concerned, she was hardly a prime candidate for that. Unlike some other witnesses, Lewis observed the silence requesting of her by the police with regard to press interviews. If she read Hutchinson’s account in the newspapers and realised he must have been the wideawake man, there was no reason to inform the police about anything. It would have been a case of “Oh well, that all makes sense then”.

Really? I thought you recently argued that two or more females were going round parroting Sarah Lewis's accounts. How did they get hold of this juicy gossip if not from Lewis herself? How very noble of her to observe an official request not to talk to the press, before or after blabbing to women who had no such discretion. It amazes me how you can speak for people who are long dead, and judge what they would or wouldn't have done with new information. Here is a woman who has attended MJK's inquest to give information under oath about a man she saw lurking near the crime scene. The police would be anxious to find him and eliminate him from the investigation. Then lo and behold, that man is in the papers telling his own story. There is every reason for her to pop back to the police station if she can say: "Mystery solved, I've found my lurker for you". That doesn't appear to have happened, but then would we necessarily know if it did?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Continued...

Please don’t keep saying that it is a “tiny minority” of serial killers that have injected themselves into their investigations. You’ve stated this before, and it is absolutely not the case.

Evidence, Ben? What percentage of serial killers have injected themselves into their investigations? Do you actually know? If it's any less than 50% that's a minority. Less than 1 in 10 would be a tiny minority.

He is legitimately suspicious insofar as it can be demonstrated that he was very probably loitering outside the crime scene at a time critical to that crime’s commission, and that he later lied about his reasons for being there.

And there you have it. Every reason for the police to have needed to establish exactly what he was doing there, in that case, especially if they came to believe he was lying about any part of his account. It would have been procedure, just as they 'discovered' that Violenia was a bogus witness. Or do you believe he could have been more than that?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Caz:

"It strikes me that the simplest explanation could be that nobody saw it as any coincidence at all for two (or even ten) men to be hanging around McCarthy's Rents up to the wee small hours, waiting for a spot of how's yer father with one of the female occupants. If it was a rare sight then yes, a connection would have been made between Hutch the Loiterer and Sarah Lewis's Loiterer."

The problem with that is that Hutchinson said nothing about any such crowd. He spoke of an empty street, more or less.
However, if he spoke of the wrong day, then of course there could have been loads of gentlemen peering down Millers court on the murder morning!
Generally speaking, you will of course be right - few people are surprised by finding a swarm of bees outside a beehive.

Hi Fishy,

Yes indeed, and I meant 'generally speaking' - in that most people back then may not have found it remotely coincidental to have more than one man hanging around the vicinity at any one time of night. Only Hutch would have been aware of how long he was on his own, assuming he had no reason to lie about that detail. Others, including Lewis, would have been going from A to B, and therefore could not really know or comment on how many or how few men were out and about before and afterwards. It would only take two men, just missing each other, for Lewis to have seen the first, and for him to have left just before Hutch arrived for his much more lengthy vigil.

But that then raises another question: if Hutch really was the ripper, and was supposedly waiting for the coast to clear before he could safely enter MJK's room and do her in, why did he have to wait so long, if by his own account there was no other bugger around all that time? Doesn't sound like the same fearless killer who operated on Chapman virtually under the neighbours' noses, then did the same for Eddowes between police beats, and very shortly after being seen with her by three witnesses. He could hardly have been getting cold feet, judging by what he achieved in that little room.

It makes much more sense to me that it was Blotchy, who wasn't put off by Cox having seen him go in with his victim, but may have decided to give it a while once inside before finally striking when MJK had stopped singing and was gently dozing, and Cox et al were probably sound asleep, unaware that Blotchy had not come and gone - er - so to speak.

Love,

Caz
X

[Fisherman]

Caz: Hi Fishy,

Yes indeed, and I meant 'generally speaking' - in that most people back then may not have found it remotely coincidental to have more than one man hanging around the vicinity at any one time of night. Only Hutch would have been aware of how long he was on his own, assuming he had no reason to lie about that detail. Others, including Lewis, would have been going from A to B, and therefore could not really know or comment on how many or how few men were out and about before and afterwards. It would only take two men, just missing each other, for Lewis to have seen the first, and for him to have left just before Hutch arrived for his much more lengthy vigil.

Technically speaking, thatīs correct. But the time span says that Hutch stood there at 2.00-2.45 whereas Lews arrived at 2.30, justaboutish. So I find it hard to believe that the two did not meet if they were there on the same night - which I of course donīt think they were in the first place!

But that then raises another question: if Hutch really was the ripper, and was supposedly waiting for the coast to clear before he could safely enter MJK's room and do her in, why did he have to wait so long, if by his own account there was no other bugger around all that time? Doesn't sound like the same fearless killer who operated on Chapman virtually under the neighbours' noses, then did the same for Eddowes between police beats, and very shortly after being seen with her by three witnesses. He could hardly have been getting cold feet, judging by what he achieved in that little room.

I second that very much - waiting for three quarters of an hour would not be good sense. He needed to get in there as quickly as he could, since hanging around could potentially have him spotted. And I fail to see that there were people aplenty around between 2.00 and 2.30, especially since at least a little of this profusion of witnesses should have come forward and spoken of the man waiting outside Millers Court. So full points to you on this score, Caz!

It makes much more sense to me that it was Blotchy, who wasn't put off by Cox having seen him go in with his victim, but may have decided to give it a while once inside before finally striking when MJK had stopped singing and was gently dozing, and Cox et al were probably sound asleep, unaware that Blotchy had not come and gone - er - so to speak.

Agreed and disagreed. Agreed in the sense that I also think that Blotchy is a better suggestion for the loiterers role, not least since he seems to tally with Lewis' meagre description. Disagreed since I donīt think that it was Blotchy either. I think it was somebody who we will never learn the identity of.

It could have been the killer. He places himself on the spot at an awkward time, not to be suspected.

It could equally have been any punter, pondering a quick visit to McCarthys rents.

Or somebody who just took a look at the house. I for one have never understood how a man behaves to look as if he is "waiting for somebody to come out" ...

All the best, Caz!
Fisherman

[Abby Normal]

Hi Fishy,

Yes indeed, and I meant 'generally speaking' - in that most people back then may not have found it remotely coincidental to have more than one man hanging around the vicinity at any one time of night. Only Hutch would have been aware of how long he was on his own, assuming he had no reason to lie about that detail. Others, including Lewis, would have been going from A to B, and therefore could not really know or comment on how many or how few men were out and about before and afterwards. It would only take two men, just missing each other, for Lewis to have seen the first, and for him to have left just before Hutch arrived for his much more lengthy vigil.

But that then raises another question: if Hutch really was the ripper, and was supposedly waiting for the coast to clear before he could safely enter MJK's room and do her in, why did he have to wait so long, if by his own account there was no other bugger around all that time? Doesn't sound like the same fearless killer who operated on Chapman virtually under the neighbours' noses, then did the same for Eddowes between police beats, and very shortly after being seen with her by three witnesses. He could hardly have been getting cold feet, judging by what he achieved in that little room.

It makes much more sense to me that it was Blotchy, who wasn't put off by Cox having seen him go in with his victim, but may have decided to give it a while once inside before finally striking when MJK had stopped singing and was gently dozing, and Cox et al were probably sound asleep, unaware that Blotchy had not come and gone - er - so to speak.

Love,

Caz
X

I favor blotchy slightly over hutch as Mary's killer. If blotchy was her killer and lingered in her room, it explains why hutch was outside waiting for so long-he was waiting for blotchy to leave. And while this, of course, precludes hutch as being a murderer, it means he was at least a liar about Aman,which I Beleive is the most likely scenario.

[Wickerman]

Evidence, Ben? What percentage of serial killers have injected themselves into their investigations? Do you actually know? If it's any less than 50% that's a minority. Less than 1 in 10 would be a tiny minority.

Just another example of trying to promote an exception in order to bolster an argument.