Did Hutchinson get the night wrong?

[Rubyretro]

Ruby!

You shall have to wait - but I will try and find time for you later this evening.

The best,
Fisherman

Hey everyone ! -I think I've pulled !! (..can someone lend me some lippy ?..)

[Fisherman]

Ruby!

You shall have to wait - but I will try and find time for you later this evening.

The best,
Fisherman

[Fisherman]

Curious4:

"I think it very unlikely that Hutchinson got the day wrong. When something earth-shattering happens people tend to remember what they did around that time more clearly,
as in "What were you doing when JFK was assassinated?" or in Sweden "When Olof Palme was shot" or "When the Estonia sank".

Please keep in mind that Hutchs meeting with Kelly was - if I am correct - on Thursday morning, and not on the day she died. People who remember what they did when Palme was shot, remember that they were in a restaurant, that they were playing cards, that they were singing karaoke when the news reached them. But if you had asked them three days after on what day they did not have their morning paper delivered, they may well have missed the answer. Unless you sugges that they would go "Let´s see, Palme was shot on the 26:th, that means that I got the paper on the day before, and the day before that - aha - it must have been the 23:d!

THIS is what you are looking at - not Hutch´s ability to say exactly what he did as the news of the murder reached him. A major event does not clear peoples skulls and make them immune against muddling dates. If so, the investigators of murders would not tell us that muddled dates is one of the more common mistakes made by witnesses, would they?


The best,
Fisherman

[Fisherman]

Garry:

"The implication is unambiguous."

I thought so too, Garry. But I was wrong. Look at it again, please:

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

One may think, as I used to, that Dew points away from the person error and instead opts for the time error in both cases. But let´s take in the whole context:

"Then followed other information which further shook the police reconstruction of the crime.
The informant this time was a young man name d George Hutchison, who declared that he had seen Kelly at 2 a.m. in Dorset Street. She had been drinking. He spoke to her, and she confessed that she was " broke ".

A few minutes later he saw her again. This time she was in the company of a man, and the two were walking in the direction of Miller's Court.

This man had no billycock hat and no beard. He was in fact the exact opposite in appearance of the man seen by Mrs. Cox.
Hutchison described him as well-dressed, wearing a felt hat, a long, dark astrakhan collared coat and dark spats. A turned-up black moustache gave him a foreign appearance.
But I know from my experience that many people, with the best of intentions, are often mistaken, not necessarily as to a person, but as to date and time. And I can see no other explanation in this case than that Mrs. Maxwell and George Hutchison were wrong."

So the text leading up to the sentences you quoted tells us that Dew is discussing Hutchinson. He did so after having discussed Maxwell in the paragraphs before. And that is why he states that people with the best of intentions (meaning Maxwell AND Hutchinson, I gather) may be mistaken, not necessarily at to person (like Maxwell) but instead to time and date (like Hutchinson).
One may choose a preferred version of course, and I am not 100 Per cent sure which is the correct one - but I do think that the one with the witnesses portraying different reasons for erring is the better one. 70-30, if you ask me! At any rate, surely you can see that it is a viable solution to the wording?

In the light od this, you will understand that I very much chalenge the rest of your elaborations in this field. The fact that Maxwell would have been wrong on a daylight sighting does ni no way mean that Dew could not have had her wrong on person. It is all very easy: If she could not have seen Mary Kelly at eight in the morning, she was mistaken EITHER on the day or on the person! There is nothing in Dew´s text that clinches it either way, althoug, as I say, I think the latter suggestion is the better.

"With Hutchinson, however, no such inference could be made. His alleged 2:00am sighting of Kelly was certainly not incompatible with the medical evidence, and couldn’t, therefore, have been called into question on the basis of date-confusion."

Of course it could! He saw Kelly alive, not dead, and Kelly WAS alive on the 8:th, the 7:th, the 6:th ... Of course he could have muddled the dates!

"It must be emphasised that Dew regarded Hutchinson as a sincere but mistaken witness. In Dew’s mind, there was no question that Hutchinson had met Kelly."

That´s my take on it too - although I think even Dew must have had some doubts at times. But he very obviously optd for a truthful story on Hutch´s account in that particular respect.

"Under Dew’s surmise, Blotchy was Kelly’s killer and the murder took place at one o’clock or thereabouts – meaning that Kelly had already been dead for an hour when Hutchinson claimed she was parading about Commercial Street"

I would not be too certain about the exact timings, but they are not of any greater importance here - the main thing is that Dew would have thought that Blotchy killed Kelly before Hutch claimed he saw her. Agreed.

"Since one or the other condition must have been untrue, Dew concluded that Hutchinson must have been mistaken with regard to his timings and revised his ‘theory’ accordingly."

If we are speaking of a muddling up of the dates - yes. If we are speaking of merely a muddling up of three hours - emphatically no. I outlined a numner of problems in that respect in my former post to you - the pubs were still open at the time you are suggesting that Dew believed Hutch saw Kelly, the streets would still have been full with pubcrawlers, vendors, merrymakers ... there is no realistic way that Hutch would have mistaken 11PM for 2 AM. He aslo said that the clock struck 2 as he came into Whitechapel, and 3 as he left. Would he have mistaken eleven strokes for two and twelve for three? I think not. That suggestion does not stand up for a second, Garry, and I suspect you know this too.

"But this was mere speculation on Dew’s part."

Sounds to loose to me - I think it was something that was the general meaning of the police at the time. But both of us will find it hard to prove our respective views, althoug I agree that Dew seemingly was not 100 per cent sure that Hutch was off on the dates/timing. But I have elaborated before on possible explanations to this.

"‘If’ … ‘is it not probable’ … This is mere surmise – supplicatory speculation lacking any semblance of evidential corroboration."

So it is - but we need to add that you forgot to add that he also wrote that "I can see no other explanation in this case than that Mrs. Maxwell and George Hutchison were wrong." He would have felt personally sure, apparently, but he would not have had the proof to go with it. Not did the police at the time - or else, we would not have dew wording this the way he did. And no matter how you choose to look upon it, I still say that this is very valuable and useful information that in all probability holds the key to the Hutchinson enigma.
Plus I noted that you were very pessimistic about me having a case from the outset - and yet here we are, closing in on 1500 posts on the subject, ans nobody has put forward a scintilla of evidence that goes to disprove me. The best shot so far is an anchorless suggestion that people don´t muddle days in weeks with significant occasions - and that is really as faint as it is unsubstantiated.
Clearly my suggestion has something going for it!

The best,
Fisherman

[curious4]

Did Hutchinson......?

I think it very unlikely that Hutchinson got the day wrong. When something earth-shattering happens people tend to remember what they did around that time more clearly,
as in "What were you doing when JFK was assassinated?" or in Sweden "When Olof Palme was shot" or "When the Estonia sank". What happened to Mary Kelly must have been one of those shocking things which make the day stick in people´s minds.

Regards,

C4

(Sorry if this has been said before - not up to reading all 100-odd posts)

[Rubyretro]

[QUOTE]

Ruby:

"Surely the 'conjecture' is you saying that the witness got the wrong night"

Think about it, Ruby - is it just I who say so? No, it is not. I quote Walter Dew, who said so. And he was a detective researching the Ripper case. We cannot possibly know if it was conjecture back then. It may have been a very well underbuilt speculation.

Since Dew was making his very personal comments a long time after the events, and since those comments have long time been regarded as dubious, I think looking at Mrs Lewis's inquest statement, made while her memory was fresh, is better. Any comments regarding Dew and conjecture are superflous.

If you ask me whether it was proven or not, I would say that it was most probably not proven beyond doubt. But it sure seems that the police had no qualms about dropping Hutchinson. They would thus have been pretty sure.

But were they right ? We cannot judge because we don't know the reasons that Hutchinson was dropped. We can judge the general efficacity of the Police at the time, and if we judge them by their track record in catching murderers , we can form the justified opinion that they could easily have been wrong in their assessment of Hutchinson.

"Toppy thought that" IS conjecture if it is not coupled to something we know he thought. It is conjecture to say that Toppy thought that Kelly was beautiful, but not to say that he thought astrakhan man was someone like Randolph Churchill - we KNOW that this was Toppys stance. At least if we are to believe Reg Hutchinson. It can and should be argued that Reg makes the quotatio second hand material.

It is pure conjecture that Toppy even said what Reg quoted him as saying, let alone whether he was lying or not. For the time being, it remains conjecture that even Reg said what he was quoted as saying.

"Abberline must have" may or may not be conjecture. If we say he must have taken an intrest in the Ripper case, we are in the clear. If we say that he must have bathed twice a day we are not. Inbetween, there are lots of things that - depending on who makes the call - may be conjecture or not. A good example would be where I say that Abberline must have known that both Lewis and Hutchinson placed a man in Dorset Street at 2.30, it is nothing I can prove. But the overwhelming probability that he realized it or had it pointed out to him takes it away from conjecture country in my mind. But not in Bens, mind you!

It neverless remains total conjecture as to what Abberline thought/could have or would have checked out.

"

Mrs Lewis was 'nervous, saw what the loiterer was doing from afar, didn't get a good close up look etc' which is fairly deductable and uncontentious"

Not so, I´m afraid. How could we possibly know that she was nervous? How can we possibly know that she looked at her man from afar? The suggestion that she never got a good close look is better, since it tallies with the poor/nonexistant descriptions she gave. As for the rest, it remains pure conjecture.

We know that she was a woman in the street at 2am with a murderer at loose. It would follow that the majority of women would be nervous but we know that, in addition, Mrs Lewis had been frightened a short time before, because she recounted the fact to the coroner at the inquest. We know that she witnessed what the 'loiterer' was doing (enough to swear to it) but she didn't
look at him close up.

There is very little need for conjecture (unlike your scenarios), as the testimony of of Mrs Lewis makes her actions plain.

[Garry Wroe]

"[Dew] leaves no room for doubting his belief that Carrie Maxwell was mistaken over the date, as witness, ‘[i]f the medical evidence is accepted, Mrs. Maxwell could not have been right. The doctors were unable, because of the terrible mutilations, to say with any certainty just when death took place, but they were very emphatic that the girl could not have been alive at eight o'clock that morning.’"

That´s how I read it before too, Garry. But the implication that she must have been wrong on the dates is actually NOT there.

Oh, but it is, Fish. And demonstrably so: ‘I know from my experience that many people, with the best of intentions, are often mistaken, not necessarily as to a person, but as to date and time. And I can see no other explanation in this case than that Mrs. Maxwell and George Hutchison were wrong.’ (My emphasis.)

The implication is unambiguous. Dew thought it unlikely that Maxwell had misidentified Kelly and thus concluded that she must have confused either the date or time. At no point in his text does Dew even hint at a misidentification on Maxwell’s part. The emphasis is consistently on ‘date and time’.

"if the medicos were unable to specify a precise time of death, there was no possibility that Hutchinson’s alleged 2:00am encounter with Kelly was discounted on the basis of the available forensic evidence. No possibility whatsoever. Accordingly, we are left with but one alternative – Dew believed Hutchinson to have been mistaken over the timing of the Kelly encounter, not the date."

Not agreed, I´m afraid! The failure to mention Lewis speaks a very clear language here, as does the walking the streets all night in spite of the hard rain. And other things too may and would have been dug up that made the police realize that Hutch was off on the days.

The only thing that need concern us here, Fish, is what Dew actually wrote. Since he made no mention of Sarah Lewis, the prevailing weather conditions, nor indeed Hutchinson’s nocturnal peregrinations, such issues are irrelevant under the present discussion. The fact is that Dew believed both Maxwell and Hutchinson to have been mistaken over either the time or date. In the case of Maxwell, the forensic evidence was sufficient to exclude any possibility of a daylight sighting. Thus Dew clearly concluded that Maxwell had confused the date on which her Kelly encounter had occurred.

With Hutchinson, however, no such inference could be made. His alleged 2:00am sighting of Kelly was certainly not incompatible with the medical evidence, and couldn’t, therefore, have been called into question on the basis of date-confusion. Hence, trusting to the criteria laid down by Dew himself, it must have been assumed that Hutchinson had made a timing error.

It must be emphasised that Dew regarded Hutchinson as a sincere but mistaken witness. In Dew’s mind, there was no question that Hutchinson had met Kelly. The problem for Dew was the timing of that encounter:-

Was the man in the billycock hat Jack the Ripper?

In spite of contradictory evidence which came to light later, and in spite of a departure from his method of swift and sudden attack, I think he was, always providing Mary Cox was correct in what she said.

A little later, more than one neighbour heard Marie singing blithely, if a little unsteadily. The singing continued for fully an hour.

Then came silence, a silence which synchronized, if my theory is correct, with the transformation of the quiet-looking bearded man who had mysteriously won the girl's confidence, into the inhuman devil his previous deeds had shown him to be.

The implications of this passage are unequivocal. Under Dew’s surmise, Blotchy was Kelly’s killer and the murder took place at one o’clock or thereabouts – meaning that Kelly had already been dead for an hour when Hutchinson claimed she was parading about Commercial Street in search of clientele. Since one or the other condition must have been untrue, Dew concluded that Hutchinson must have been mistaken with regard to his timings and revised his ‘theory’ accordingly. But this was mere speculation on Dew’s part. Indeed, few if any of Dew’s conclusions are evidentially based. There is no corroboration for a one o’clock time of death, for example, and the notion that Carrie Maxwell could have succumbed to date-confusion is laughable in view of the fact that her final exchange with ‘Kelly’ occurred just an hour or two before she learned of Kelly’s death. So whilst Dew’s Ripper-related writings are undoubtedly interesting, they are all but worthless from an evidential perspective, as witness the following:-

[I]f Mrs. Maxwell was mistaken, is it not probable that George Hutchison erred also?

If Mrs Maxwell was mistaken, is it not probable that George Hutchi(n)son erred also?

‘If’ … ‘is it not probable’ … This is mere surmise – supplicatory speculation lacking any semblance of evidential corroboration. It provides no confirmation whatever that Hutchinson confused the date or time relating to his alleged Kelly encounter, and no indication as to why Hutchinson came to be viewed as a discredited witness. Indeed, just about all it does tell us is that one should never set about writing up one’s experiences of fifty years earlier without recourse notes.

[Fisherman]

Ruby:

"you are on marshy ground with the man standing watching the Court.."

Actually, Ruby, we are ALL on marshy ground with that, though some have chosen to disregard it and claim that they know the exact movements of the two men, that they know that Lewis had a key to understanding how a man who waits for somebody to come out acts physically, that Hutchinson MUST have been on the south side of the street etcetera. Such things would seem to confirm that these posters are not on marshy ground, but make no mistake about it - their assertions are pure guesswork. We have very little information that we try to make very much from, and that - understandably - makes for a lot of wobbly conclusions.

My main concern is that it has been regarded as established, more or less, that the loiterer and Hutchinson were one and the same, and that knot must be untied in order to open up for a broader understanding of the case. Most researchers have missed out - Ben will tell you that they have chosen to disregard a silly suggestion - on this. I think Tom Wescott´s reaction goes to tell what I am talking about - he asked himself why he had never realized the opportunity I am speaking of. Many, many others will have been of the same mind, and the less you know of the case, the likelier it will be that you have never pondered the possibility of a mistaken day. Many if not most of the known authors write that Hutch and the loiterer were probably one and the same. This, to my mind, is not because they have pondered the possibility of a muddling of dates, but instead because they choose to believe that Hutchinson was honest and fail to see any other possibility than an identification with the loiterer. I am very confident that this will not be the case in times to come, though.

"You would have him doing anything but that, because you know very well that your 'cup of tea' is too weak an argument.."

Two objections:

1. I would not have him do "anything", Ruby. I would have him in Dorset Street on Thursday morning, observing Kelly with a well-dressed man.

2. My argument is anything but weak. We count 1459 posts on this thread, and so far I am holding my ground easily.

The best,
Fisherman

[Rubyretro]

PPS Fish -I suddenly realised why you were much more encouraging when I mooted an idea about the Ripper's MO changing because of the rain..

You would much rather argue on nebulous things like that - how much background noise there might be, what distance a non existant conversation might have been heard at etc, because you are on marshy ground with the
man standing watching the Court..

You would have him doing anything but that, because you know very well that your 'cup of tea' is too weak an argument..

[Fisherman]

Ruby:

"Surely the 'conjecture' is you saying that the witness got the wrong night"

Think about it, Ruby - is it just I who say so? No, it is not. I quote Walter Dew, who said so. And he was a detective researching the Ripper case. We cannot possibly know if it was conjecture back then. It may have been a very well underbuilt speculation.
If you ask me whether it was proven or not, I would say that it was most probably not proven beyond doubt. But it sure seems that the police had no qualms about dropping Hutchinson. They would thus have been pretty sure.

"Toppy thought that" IS conjecture if it is not coupled to something we know he thought. It is conjecture to say that Toppy thought that Kelly was beautiful, but not to say that he thought astrakhan man was someone like Randolph Churchill - we KNOW that this was Toppys stance. At least if we are to believe Reg Hutchinson. It can and should be argued that Reg makes the quotatio second hand material.
"Abberline must have" may or may not be conjecture. If we say he must have taken an intrest in the Ripper case, we are in the clear. If we say that he must have bathed twice a day we are not. Inbetween, there are lots of things that - depending on who makes the call - may be conjecture or not. A good example would be where I say that Abberline must have known that both Lewis and Hutchinson placed a man in Dorset Street at 2.30, it is nothing I can prove. But the overwhelming probability that he realized it or had it pointed out to him takes it away from conjecture country in my mind. But not in Bens, mind you!

At any rate, just like you say, much of our thinking must involve some sort of conjecture. It is the amount added, though, and the shape and form it takes, that decides whether we are on firm land or on loose sand - or way out at sea. Now, any jokes about fishermen spending most of their time out to sea are NOT welcome!

"Mrs Lewis was 'nervous, saw what the loiterer was doing from afar, didn't get a good close up look etc' which is fairly deductable and uncontentious"

Not so, I´m afraid. How could we possibly know that she was nervous? How can we possibly know that she looked at her man from afar? The suggestion that she never got a good close look is better, since it tallies with the poor/nonexistant descriptions she gave. As for the rest, it remains pure conjecture.

The best,
Fisherman

[Rubyretro]

ps Fishy,

Surely the 'conjecture' is you saying that the witness got the wrong night,
or going off on a 'Toppy thought that.." or "Abberline must have.." spiel..

..not Mrs Lewis was 'nervous, saw what the loiterer was doing from afar, didn't get a good close up look etc' which is fairly deductable and uncontentious

??

[Rubyretro]

I think I have demonstrated quite clearly how much I invest in your ability to keep track of illusive things like logic and conjecture, Ruby. But still, nice try!

The best,

moi non plus !

ps sorry for the typo queue for cue..just spotted it !

[Fisherman]

Ruby:

"ah ! but a logical deduction, taking into account the evidence.."

I think I have demonstrated quite clearly how much I invest in your ability to keep track of illusive things like logic and conjecture, Ruby. But still, nice try!

The best,
Fisherman

[Garry Wroe]

It was the journalist, Ben, rather than ‘Harris’, who considered the Victoria Home a likely bolt-hole for the killer.

Apologies are in order here, Ben. What I took to be closing quotation marks on my copy of the 'Harris' article turned out to be a blemish. You were absolutely correct, therefore, in asserting that it was 'Harris' who regarded the Victoria Home as the killer's likely operational base.

Doh!

[Rubyretro]

Ruby:

"given your blustering and writhing, I assume that I've got 'a hit'"

That´s conjecture too, I´m afraid ...

The best,
Fisherman

ah ! but a logical deduction, taking into account the evidence..