“Ben! You do make me chuckle.”
But not when you’re being slightly obstinate and unimaginative in your misunderstanding of the working habits of East Enders at that time. That’s when the chuckling stops, and the exasperated posts kick in. I can’t believe you actually confirmed your black and white impression of everyone going to bed at night and only working in the day. This is still absolute nonsense. It is thoroughly well-documented that many residents in the district kept irregular working hours, and that lodgers were coming and going at all hours of the night from their various occupations which started and finshied at varying hours of the day and night – policeman, mortuary attendants, night watchmen, carmen, lodging house deputies, prostitutes, prostitute-seekers, pissheads, serial killers, the lot. They were not any particular “exception” at all – this was the busy ill-reputed, most decidedly dodgy area of Tower Hamlets. It is deplorably erroneous nonsense to argue that anyone who kept later hours would have been immediately conspicuous to everyone else, and that all these late-nighters were magically investigated and “alibied-out” accordingly.
The streets weren’t "empty", as you’ll discover if you actually study the eyewitness accounts from the murders themselves. Whenever a murder was committed, there was always without exception someone active and awake a stone’s throw away.
“I have no doubt the residents of the Victoria Home were poor. Dark blue meant – very poor casual work, chronic want. It did not mean – mind own business and don’t speak to anyone.”
“You are a first in criminology Ben, that’s for sure. Who needs to bother with an alibi, when you can just have an ‘alibi-disposal’ instead?”
Okay, I’ll try again:
If Hutchinson was killing Kelly between 3:30 and 4.00am that night, he wouldn’t have had an alibi.
With me so far?
Right. If Hutchinson then needed to account for his whereabouts and activities for that time frame, it would have been extremely advantageous for him to pick a false explanation that didn’t render him vulnerable to contradiction. That is where I contend “walking about all night” came in, because it was the only conceivable activity that could be neither verified nor contradicted. And yet, astonishingly, you seem to think that this constituted a bad move on Hutchinson’s part.
“I would suggest that any police force at any given time uses the means at its disposal to check people to the extent of their, then, abilities.”
“If someone failed to pass whatever tests were then in place, then the police would not have just thought: ‘oh well our tests are primitive, we better let him go, as we can't progress our suspicions'.”
“Nor would they have thought ‘hold on, he voluntarily came to us, and therefore can’t be a suspect.”
As I said, your wriggling on this obvious point (as your night = day argument) merely demonstrates the weakness of Hutchinson as a suspect.
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