Innocent, By George!

[Monty]

Yeah,

I'll close the door behind me on the way out.

Enjoy.

Monty....whose patience has been exhausted.

[Lechmere]

Mr Ben
I believe the rules for lodging houses were that they had to be vacated for several hours in the daytime. I also believe the beds were available for certain hours (i.e. at night) and the dormitory areas were cleaned in the day time. I asked about this in an earlier post (probably in a different thread) as I have read it before, but I don’t think anyone responded.

Anyway once again we have your over exaggerated debating style.
It is not unthinkable that Hutchinson walked back in the knowledge that he had no bed.
Firstly we do not know that he just misjudged the time it would take him to walk back. I know you think this is also unthinkable. But believe me Mr Ben it is not unthinkable it happens to normal people all the time.
In any case if his usual lodgings were the Victoria Home and he usually lived in the Spitalfields area, the logical thing for anyone in a similar predicament to do is to walk back to his home turf. The logical thing is not to stay in unfamiliar territory the night.
He presumably had no money or he would have booked into a lodging house in the Commercial Street area. That is a lodging house that allowed late night entry (i.e. not the Victoria Home). So he could not get lodgings in Romford whether he wanted to or not as he had no money.
At least if he got back to his home turf, he would be available for work first thing. That is exactly the logical and sensible thing for anyone to do. To argue otherwise is madness.
Incidentally I suspect that Hutchinson had a weekly ticket that he had paid for in advance. He couldn’t get into the Victoria Home as he was too late back and it was closed. But could get in when it opened in the morning. This is in accord with his own statements.

The more walking and even more walking that Hutchinson would be obliged to undertake in the morning looking for work would have been unavoidable for someone not in regular employment, no matter how you cut it. However, we don’t actually know how much walking it would have taken him in order to get a job on Friday morning. For all we know he knew of a suitable job relatively nearby.

So what do you suggest he would have done?
He is in Romford at 9 pm on Thursday night (sorry Fisherman).
He can walk back and get back late or stay in Romford and sleep rough somewhere.
He has no money.
He needs to get a job on Friday somewhere.
I would suggest that if he realised he would be back too late to get entry to the Victoria Home, the most likely thing is that he would have walked back anyway.
What work could he get in Romford?
Did he know where to get work in Romford?
Did he have any contacts?
We have to presume he was resident in Spitalfields so why would he stay in Romford longer than necessary? He would go home. It is crushingly obvious. Particularly if he had paid for a weekly ticket to the Victoria Home in advance.

Most people at some point in their lives have gone a night without sleep and had to work the next day. I am sure Hutchinson managed it.
However as I pointed out, it is less sure that he will have heard about Kelly’s murder on the Friday, although I think it is implausible that he didn’t hear by Saturday. It is not utterly outlandish to suggest this. I will repeat for Mr Ben again. The murder was not publicly confirmed until the afternoon. He was probably at work somewhere and by the time he got back to the Victoria Home will have been tired and may have gone to bed early. That could easily mean he didn’t hear until the next day.
We have no idea when he found out – but this scenario is not unrealistic.

The timing of Hutchinson’s appearance at 6pm at Commercial Street Police Station (thankfully FrankO has got that one out the way) would also coincide with the time he would finish work. No great mystery there.

Let’s say the inquest concluded at 5pm. That is the latest likely time.
After Lewis’s testimony came that of Bagster Phillips. Then there was an adjournment. Then there was a brief discussion about whether the jury had been tampered with. Then came the testimony of Vanturney, Harvey, Inspector Beck and Inspector Abberline. Then the Coroner summed up. The jury withdrew, came to a swift decision, reappeared and gave their verdict.
The point of all this is that Lewis must have finished giving her evidence at around 3.30 pm. It is likely she will have left the court soon after this.

If Hutchinson was outside and just saw her, or heard the detail of her testimony by some magical means – why didn’t he get to the police station until 6pm? Either way he did not appear at Commercial Street Police Station straight after the Lewis testimony. He loitered for two and a half hours.

We know there are a great many reasons why people leave it a few days before testifying. It is nonsense to make a big deal out of it. Mr Ben you seem to think this is some sort of remarkable coincidence.

Then we have this...
“If he did attend the inquest, or hovered outside observing the witnesses coming and/or going, he wouldn’t have been sacrificing any work-related opportunities, and it is annoyingly silly to suggest that he would have done. Hutchinson was without regular work, which meant that he probably didn’t miss any work-related commitment.”
Mr Ben – without regular work meant the pressure was on him, possibly every single day, to find casual work. The only annoyingly silly thing is your statement. Of course he was sacrificing pay and possibly putting himself out on the streets as a vagrant by giving up the possibility of a days pay.

As for the crowds, the area around Shoreditch Town Hall was semi industrial so there would have been plenty of working people in the vicinity, and shopkeepers, people on errands, carmen delivering stuff and so on, who could have made a healthy crowd.

[Ben]

I say, Lechmere, do you think there might be something wrong with the Swanson Marginalia? Seriously, take a break occasionally from marathon Hutchinson threads. That’s what I’ve done over the weekend. I realise how deeply hypnotic the whole thing is for some people, but really, you must have been hammering away at these threads for the entire weekend, which is rather depressing.

“I believe the rules for lodging houses were that they had to be vacated for several hours in the daytime.”

I wasn’t asking for “beliefs”.

I was asking for evidential sources for your statement. If you don’t have any, just say so. Or if you think you’ve found a source that somebody else already provided in a Hutchinson thread years ago, then have another hunt for it and maybe give credit to its original finder next time, but don’t expect mere “beliefs” to count for anything if they can’t be backed up by any sources.

“It is not unthinkable that Hutchinson walked back in the knowledge that he had no bed.”

So you cheerfully accept that Hutchinson walked well in excess of ten miles in the small hours of a November morning in miserable weather conditions in the certain knowledge that his lodgings would have closed by the time he got back, and that in all likelihood, he had nowhere to sleep for what little remained of the night? You cheerfully accept that he trudged all that way with the full expectation that the only thing waiting for him at the end of his journey was the prospect of more walking about until his usual lodgings opened, and that as soon as they did, he didn’t even have any intention of sleeping there, but only intended to do even more walking about in search of a job? You cheerfully accept that he embarked on this journey with no pass or ticket for his usual lodging house, and no money to access any other lodging house in the locality?

If he knew he had to work or seek work early on Friday morning, he wouldn’t have left Romford one and a half hours too late to make it back to his lodgings before closing time. That is illogical, especially if he was the critically impoverished job-seeker you want him to have been. If he was really of that mould, proper sleep and energy reserves would have been essential. Moreover, if he was a usual resident of the fourpence-per-night Victoria Home, he cannot have been without regular employment, despite what he told the police. This is the problem with your approach; you accept all manner of preposterous coincides as being supposedly unrelated; you “fill in” gaps in our knowledge with imaginary, invented reports and other pieces of evidence that you desperately hope existed once upon a time, and yet you adopt an absurdly uncritical approach to some of the most untrustworthy and discredited sources associated with the case, which is why, when you say:

“But believe me Mr Ben it is not unthinkable it happens to normal people all the time.”

…I don’t believe you.

Your professed “belief” merits only derision because you are pronouncing weightily with no evidence.

What evidence do you have to suggest this “happens all the time”?

“At least if he got back to his home turf, he would be available for work first thing”

Please don't make me chunder.

So after walking all the way from Romford and "walking around all night", what next? Straight out again to do yet more walking, in addition to the many miles from Romford and the “walking about” the Whitechapel/Spitalfields district, this time to get him to some far-flung location where he managed to avoid any reference to the recent murder and only had horses for company? It matters not that he “cannot sleep the day away”. He’s still only human, and what is being suggested here is physiologically improbable to say the least!

“Incidentally I suspect that Hutchinson had a weekly ticket that he had paid for in advance. He couldn’t get into the Victoria Home as he was too late back and it was closed.”

Oh, this again?

Great, I was gagging for an excuse to deal with this ridiculous nonsense again.

No, you’re wrong. If Hutchinson had paid for a weekly ticket, he could have gained entry to the Victoria Home at any hour of the night. Otherwise, the cut-off point for anyone not in possession of a weekly ticket was 12:30 or 1.00am. The sources varied.

“What work could he get in Romford?
Did he know where to get work in Romford?
Did he have any contacts?”

We might reasonably assume so if he was telling the truth about it, yes.

If not, what the hell was he even doing there in the first place? Visiting England’s green and pleasant lands? Once again, you argue yourself into an untenable position out of a cherished desire to be argumentative and score points on a Victorian serial killer discussion forum. It has long been argued that if there was any truth to the Romford journey, he went there for work-related purposes, and that he would consequently have had work-related "contacts". This is all forgotten, of course, when it ceases to become convenient for those who look ever more frantically for bad excuses to explain away Hutchinson's three-day inertia prior to coming forward.

“Most people at some point in their lives have gone a night without sleep and had to work the next day. I am sure Hutchinson managed it.”

But they hadn’t been walking long distances in the cold November rain non-stop, more or less, from about 11.pm in the evening to mid morning the next day. To suggest otherwise is preposterous. It is certain to all but the obstinately ill-informed and desperate that Hutchinson and pretty much everyone else in the entire country had heard about the murder by Saturday morning. In Hutchinson’s case, the news would have reached him when he emerged from the Victoria Home, which was located a few hundred yards from where Kelly was murdered. It is maddening, ghastly, stomach-churningly sickening nonsense to argue that he emerged from the Victoria Home, pissed off out of London and managed to remain completely oblivious to the gossip in London, let alone the immediate locality where he lived, concerning the recent murder and where it occurred.

“The point of all this is that Lewis must have finished giving her evidence at around 3.30 pm. It is likely she will have left the court soon after this.”

If you use “likely” in the wrong context again, i.e. when you have no evidence of any description to determine what is likely and what isn’t, it will be difficult for me to suppress a rather wobbly fit. I could say it is far more likely that Lewis remained in the courtroom for the duration, and was encouraged if not compelled to do so in order to hear other evidence. At the Titanic inquest, witnesses were made to attend a day hearing even when they were due to give their own testimony the next day.

“If Hutchinson was outside and just saw her, or heard the detail of her testimony by some magical means – why didn’t he get to the police station until 6pm?”

Not “magical” means”. Logical and easily accessible means. And I suggest he went to the police station after discovering that Lewis was a witness who had imparted her evidence concerning the wideawake loiterer, and that perhaps an hour between the Lewis revelation and 6.00pm in which to concoct a story that legitimized his presence at the crime scene and deflected suspicion in a false direction.

“Mr Ben – without regular work meant the pressure was on him, possibly every single day, to find casual work.”

But if he was without regular work, he could hardly have been a “usual” resident at the fourpence-per-night Victoria Home.

“As for the crowds, the area around Shoreditch Town Hall was semi industrial so there would have been plenty of working people in the vicinity, and shopkeepers, people on errands, carmen delivering stuff and so on”

And why couldn’t Hutchinson have been one such person? If the working class poor could overwhelm the coroner’s office in their crowds, why couldn’t nearby resident Hutchinson have been one of them?

With respect, it is very obvious that you are far too early in your study of the case to be making the sort of sweeping misstatements that have littered your recent contributions.

[Lechmere]

Mr Ben
Let me get this straight then – do you think inmates could sleep at any hour in a lodging house?

Hutchinson had two options
1. Sleep rough in unfamiliar territory in Romford, get up very early and walk back to find work.
2. Walk back, sleep rough in his neighbourhood then get up and find work.
He obviously chose the second. Even if there is the presumption that he walked around all the time and didn’t try and get his head down.
I don’t know why you repeatedly chose to use the word cheerfully. Has anyone said he did it cheerfully. No! This is your old over exaggeration technique isn’t it?
You seem to think he must have cheerfully chosen the first option.
In my opinion it is most unlikely that anyone would choose that option.

As we have no knowledge of why Hutchinson was in Romford, we cannot possibly know why he set off too late to get back in time before the Victoria Home closed. As I have suggested, it could simply be that he underestimated the time it would take for him to walk the distance.
I notice that you say he left an hour and a half too late. It may be - as you know – that he left an hour late. We are not sure whether the Victoria Home closed at 12.30 or 1 am.
In any case life doesn’t work in simple straight logical lines. To suggest that people never **** up and get back late is frankly ludicrous.

The proposition is that someone had to go to Romford, got back late, and didn’t get a night’s sleep yet had to work next day anyway. You seem to think that this is some sort of otherworldly event.
Of course it isn’t. If you could take a step back I am sure you can see that it isn’t. You are merely the prisoner of your theory.
Read accounts of the retreat from Mons. The British Army marched day and night, fighting battles and had barely any sleep for days on end. It was the same in the Waterloo campaign. It is the same in virtually every military campaign. Hutchinson didn’t have to fight any battles. He missed one day’s kip. Big deal. Only soft handed twenty first century metro men would find this hard to accept.

Why couldn’t Hutchinson be without regular employment? You accepted Mr Wroe’s suggestion the other day that he only had to convince the Victoria Home on his first admission that he was in regular employment – which he may have been then. Thereafter they will just have updated his established record. Have you forgotten this?

As I said – we actually have no idea why he went to Romford. I am unconcerned whether it has previously been argued that he must have gone there for work.
It would not be sensible to commute from Spitalfields to Romford for work. It is a wrong direction commute. If he was working casually in Romford he would have been paid – yet had no money. If he was working regularly in Romford the logical thing would be to get lodgings there. It is conceivable he was working there but we just don’t know so I am not going to engage in endless fruitless speculation.

The simple thing is that what little we know of Hutchinson (if he is not Toppy) is that he lived in the Victoria Home and was seemingly at home in the Spitalfields area. It is a fair assumption that Spitalfields was his home turf.

What is this drivel about?
“It is maddening, ghastly, stomach-churningly sickening nonsense to argue that he emerged from the Victoria Home, pissed off out of London and managed to remain completely oblivious to the gossip in London, let alone the immediate locality where he lived”
When he emerged from the Victoria Home no one will have known that Kelly was even dead.
Who says he left London? Have you been reading a different thread?

The Polly Nichols’ inquest lasted four days and witnesses were not compelled to attend every day. I think this has more bearing on the Kelly inquest than the Titanic inquest. Do you agree?
Nevertheless I will happily reduce ‘likely’ to ‘possibly’ – Lewis possibly will have left at 3.30 pm. I know that for your theory to work you will not like that possibility.

I would suggest that various workers (not necessarily ‘poor’ ones) in the vicinity of Shoreditch Town Hall probably popped along to gawk at the inquest. I would suggest that casual labourers would be ill-placed to skive off in this manner. I would also suggest that it would be unlikely that Hutchinson’s casual labouring was in the near vicinity of Shoreditch Town Hall. It could be that it was, but it has to be unlikely.

I hope your weak stomach is better. And I do so hope you don’t have a wobby fit. I suggest you lie down in a darkened room.

[Ben]

Let me get this straight then – do you think inmates could sleep at any hour in a lodging house?

I asked you first.

If you have any evidence that Hutchinson would have been denied access to the bedrooms at the Victoria Home after "walking about all night" (by a "day deputy" sitting on the stairs?), then it is incumbent upon you to provide it.

“Hutchinson had two options
1.Sleep rough in unfamiliar territory in Romford, get up very early and walk back to find work.
2. Walk back, sleep rough in his neighbourhood then get up and find work”

His “options” were most assuredly not limited to just those two. You’ve only “narrowed it down” to those two on the basis of what you’ve already decided to be true about him, which is circular reasoning at its most horrible. You’re forgetting of course the myriad other options such as lying about having gone to Romford in the first place, or not going to Romford at all if it meant a late finish, or not being so implausibly dense as to misjudge a journey by an hour and a half. What you’re also forgetting is that your unique version of option #2 doesn’t involve any sleep. Don’t you remember? You were quite happy to envisage him walking 13 miles in miserable weather conditions in the small hours, only to do yet more walking for the remainder of the night until the Victoria Home opened, thence to pop in and out of the Home just briefly before doing lots more walking in search of a job.

This is what happens when you try to force-feed discredited evidence into your conclusions.

“The proposition is that someone had to go to Romford, got back late, and didn’t get a night’s sleep yet had to work next day anyway.”

No, the proposition is exactly as I’ve described, and it’s an outlandish proposition for obvious reasons. Missing a day’s “kip” is one thing, but missing a day’s kip and walking for hours and hours on end throughout the night and well into the mid-morning is quite another. Unfortunately, however, it’s what people are compelled to resort to once they’ve decided that Hutchinson’s three-day procrastination is all fine and dandy. You do a pretty disgraceful disservice to the soldiers involved in campaigns such as Waterloo when you try to establish a comparable pattern of sleep deprivation with Hutchinson. In the former case, it was often a matter of life and death, whereas with Hutchinson the situation would have been entirely self-imposed. Would any of these soldiers have gone to such extremes of unnecessary discomfort, sleep-deprivation, exhaustion and misery in peacetime?

“You accepted Mr Wroe’s suggestion the other day that he only had to convince the Victoria Home on his first admission that he was in regular employment – which he may have been then. Thereafter they will just have updated his established record.”

So where was he getting his fourpence a night from in order to become the “unusual” resident of the Victoria Home that he told Abberline he was?

“It would not be sensible to commute from Spitalfields to Romford for work. It is a wrong direction commute.”

Right, so you seem to be ruling out work as a reason for his alleged Romford visit. One could be scurrilous and speculate that you no longer like this option because you’ve suddenly realised it doesn’t help your suggestion that he was unable to secure contacts and possibly lodgings and therefore couldn’t have stayed in Romford. Why do you suppose he went there then? Maybe he just lied about it in his discredited account?

Just a small point, but the Victoria Home was in the parish of Whitechapel, not Spitalfields, but only just. Cross Wentworth Street to the north, and you’re immediately in Spitalfields.

“Who says he left London?”

Oh dear, this is even worse.

So you think he could have remained in the area and still remained oblivious to any news about the murder until Saturday? Where’s this evidence for this immediate exit from the Victoria Home before the discovery of the murder, incidentally? It’s obviously nonsense, as I’ve explained in my first paragraph, but where’s the evidence?

“I would suggest that casual labourers would be ill-placed to skive off in this manner. I would also suggest that it would be unlikely that Hutchinson’s casual labouring was in the near vicinity of Shoreditch Town Hall.”

Doesn’t this ever so slightly depend on the motivation? If Hutchinson was a helpful and not unfluffy witness, one could argue that he might not have skived off work, or might not have aborted his job-seeking mission to take a detour to Shoreditch, and that would be fine and reasonable. But if he was the killer, that would alter the priority list just slightly, wouldn’t it? I rather suspect that Jack the Ripper would have kept appraised of police progress whoever he was if it meant a potential life or death situation, and if this meant altering his work patterns to monitor the emerging inquest details, I’m sure he would have taken the plunge. So less of the “unlikelys” when they clearly don’t apply please.

[Ben]

Hi Fleets,

“Except, he wasn't in there, a man with dark trousers etc who could have been any one of half of London was in the papers: there was no need for any killer to go to the police based on that description, there simply wasn't enough to implicate anyone.”

A description is different from a sighting.

The fact that Lewis’ inquest description wasn’t particularly detailed does not mean that she was incapable of recognising the suspect again on the streets. In addition, Hutchinson had no way of knowing that Lewis’ inquest real description wasn’t considerably fuller than the one she gave at the inquest. Cast your mind back to the Eddowes inquest, where Lawende only described his suspect very fleetingly. This was because the full description was suppressed at the behest of one of the solicitors, Mr. Crawford. The likelihood is that the killer would have kept himself au fait with investigative progress and would have noted this suppression of evidence. He would also have known that a rather detailed description of his appearance and the clothes he was wearing on the night of that murder was later circulated. When it came to the inquest into the murder of his next victim, he would probably have been concerned that any future description that seemed vague on the surface might also be much fuller in reality, just as Lawende’s had been.

“The only half decent explanation to me is that he was one of those who wanted to get involved in the investigation like a few others e.g. Ian Huntley. But then why didn't he do this after any of the other murders?”

A serial killer is hardly likely to resort to the tactic after every murder, is he? Yes, that person she saw was me, and I saw the murderer running away. Yes, that was me again and I discovered the body this time. Oh look, another one, and I just happened to be there again!

This has never happened for obvious reasons, and the serial killers who have come forward under false guises in order to legitimize incriminating links to crime scenes have only come forward in “response” to one of their victims. I discuss a number of them in my article, although Ian Huntley was an unforgivable omission.

As for Blotchy, I don’t think anyone would dispute that he’s a good suspect, but he isn’t a known quantity unlike Hutchinson, although the term “known” should be applied very loosely in the latter’s case.

“I can't remember the last time I heard a murder discussed down the pub, so in all probability he wouldn't have heard about it there”

This is a rather perplexing observation.

The fact that you aren’t accustomed to hearing murders talked about in pubs most assuredly does not mean that the Whitechapel murders weren’t talked about extensively in the district’s pubs when those murders were taking place!

Believe me, the specifics of Hutchinson’s having heard of the murder before the inquest have been provided in extensive detail already, which explains in part why we have 9000 posts in the Hutchinson forum. It’s just that some people, not necessarily you, seem determined to revive dormant arguments without taking the trouble to read up on the debates that have already been agonized over in depth.

There is no realistic possibility that Hutchinson did not hear of the murders until the inquest unless he had ran out of London and crawled into a hole in the countryside very, very early on Friday morning. He lived a few hundred yards away from where Kelly was murdered, and could not possibly have avoided the gossip on the streets and in the papers.

It’s just that simple.

Best regards,
Ben

[Lechmere]

Mr Ben
I am well aware that you are minded that Hutchinson was lying about going to Romford – on the basis that it is implausible that he would have walked back and got back too late to stay in the Victoria Home.
However I was discussing his options based on the presumption that he had gone to Romford. If he had a genuine reason to go to Romford and whatever it was that he did there kept him occupied until 9 pm, he essentially would have had the two choices that I stipulated and I suggested that the walk back option was the one that most –people would opt for.

As I have said it is a bit futile speculating on what he went to Romford for. I have agreed it may have been for work reasons. I also indicated that it seems to me unlikely it would be permanent work – as surely he would have at least taken temporary lodgings there. And if it was just one day’s work it seems to me he would have come home with his pay in his pocket. Also although there would have been work on available in Romford, the pace people came to get work tended to be central London. People flocked there from all over the British Isles for work. Most casual work could be found in central London, due to the nature of London’s industry, trade and commerce. It is the same now.

I would suggest that if he wanted to get work on the Friday, then he would have to have made himself available for work at an early hour. He would not have had the luxury to have a few hours sleep (even if he was able to get access to a bed). He could hardly roll out of bed at midday and expect to find a job. If he had no money – as he said –m thgen the need for a job would be urgent.

Why do you keep saying that he walked and walked and walked after he arrived back in Spitalfields? I would suggest he mooched about.
There is incidentally no connection between Hutchinson’s movements on Friday morning and him reporting late with his testimony. I see no real connection anyway.

I would however suggest that he will have needed to start looking for work at around 7 am. I would suggest it would be within a mile of the Victoria Home – possibly towards the docks. Possibly he knew of some building works going on somewhere nearby.

As I have said, as a casual labourer, his priority each day would be to get taken on somewhere. That would provide his four pence lodging money and also food money.

I have talked you through how he could easily have failed to hear about the murder on Friday. Certainly any pertinent details about the murder. I will one last time.
He could have gone to find work at about 7 am or so. Laboured all day. Returned dog tired to the Victoria Home and crashed out.

There is of course no evidence he went out to get work. There is no evidence that he stayed and had a kip all day long either. It is one of those ‘what is he more likely to have done situations’.

And Mr Ben I have gone two days without sleeping and even done strenuous work. It really isn’t as remarkable a feat as you seem to think.

[Ben]

“If he had a genuine reason to go to Romford and whatever it was that he did there kept him occupied until 9 pm, he essentially would have had the two choices that I stipulated and I suggested that the walk back option was the one that most –people would opt for.”

But most assuredly not if he knew that he had no prospect of sleep at the other end of that 13 miles trek, but only the prospect of walking around the district until it was time for work-seeking in the morning, which entailed more walking. I can’t think of anything more illogical. What was the purpose of going to the Victoria Home at all in this scenario, if he knew he had no chance of sleeping there? Wouldn’t he have made it an absolute priority to avoid this catastrophic fate by making doubly sure that he made it back home in time for the cut-off point, especially if he had no money? Human being have a limit, and what you’re suggesting with regard to Hutchinson exceeds that limit of human endurance when applied to self-imposed and easily avoidable predicaments.

And yet there’s no need to accept any of this. His account was discredited, and he probably lied. Why conjure up outlandish scenarios just to keep a discredited account buoyant? Is it because you’re worried that a concession that he lied about Romford might lend weight to the possibility that he was the murderer? This Romford business just goes to show that if you try to “un-discredit” a discredited accounts you have to explain away its most implausible components, which is wholly unnecessary since the contemporaneous discrediting should have relieved a modern theorist of that burden.

You really should dispense with the uncritical acceptance that Hutchinson was without a job and constantly work-seeking. His “usual” residence at the Victoria Home should tell us that this could not have been the case. Clearly he must have been getting his fourpence a night from somewhere, and it is very difficult to accept that this was achievable without regular employment. Focus instead on the contradictions and how they might have impacted upon his later “discredited” status. One moment he can’t gain access to the Victoria Home because he has no money, but when talking to the press, it is because of the closure of the home. But the latter is irrelevant if Hutchinson had no money to gain entry, so why mention the closure at all? The only valid explanation, of course, is that he was inconsistent in his reasons for being on the streets in the small hours rather than tucked up in a lodging house.

“He could have gone to find work at about 7 am or so. Laboured all day.”

…After walking all the way back from Romford – 13 miles or so – then walking about all night in Whitechapel and Spitalfields?

No. Very obviously not.

“And Mr Ben I have gone two days without sleeping and even done strenuous work”

Fascinating, but it's time for you to go to bed.

You’ve been on the Hutchinson threads all weekend. That’s got to be you Hutched-out for now. Irresistible though these threads are.

[Sally]

Romford

Going to and returning from Romford is an essential part of Hutchinson's account. If he was lying, then Romford acts as an alibi in a sense, whether or not the police ever checked on any details he may have given them.

Returning from Romford is Hutchinson's reason for being on the scene just in time to witness Kelly and A-Man. Take it out and he has no obvious legitimate reason for being there.

I can think of other reasons, but none that he'd want to admit to.

If he did go, was it for work? It seems a long way to go for the chance of a day's work when he was obviously getting enough work at home to enable him to be 'resident' at the Victoria Home.

[Rubyretro]

Here is another quote from the Ripperologist article by Gerry Nixon citing lodging house owner, Edward Hoare

Much of the interest in Hoare's narrative is the detailed description of the inside of a typical lodging house in the year of the Ripper murders.

He talks about the hours at the lodging house for a casual worker:

he can go where he likes, and leave off when he chooses. If he is tired he can stop in bed; if it is wet he can stop indoors. In the evening he hears and tells the fortunes of the day

This is a 'typical' lodging house, and despite the Victoria having a religious
aspect, I shouldn't think that it turfed the men out in the day any more than the others.

I should think that Hutch did go to Romford, for the reasons that Sally
stated. I don't suppose that he would have gone and wasted a 'weekly pass'
for a bed, had he had one (and presumably, he would have stayed in Romford
had he found work there).

He said in his statement that he had spent all his money going down to Romford, yet he had money for the lodging house on Friday.
Whilst it is true that a 'regular' could typically stay in a lodging house for the odd night without paying up front, and at the least sit in the kitchen by the fire, I think that IFHutchinson was the Ripper, then he had robbed Mary Kelly.

We know that Kelly's rent was due on the Friday, and she was in arrears -
I would expect that she had at least Blotchy's money for McCarthy, and
she'd maybe had other customers too, but no money was found in her room.

Whatever money she might have had towards her rent, the Ripper took it.

Concerning whether the Spitalfields area was Hutchinson's 'home turf', then here is another quote on lodging houses :

in the summer time there is a great exodus from London into the country, and the common lodging houses, which are nearly full in the winter, have half their beds empty in the summer."

[/QUOTE]

It is quite possible that Hutch drifted up to London with others returning from the country -but never came from London at all. The 'groom' job might be a clue.

[Lechmere]

When judging aspects of Hutchinson’s story it is sensible to ask – how possible is it? And if he lied how easy would it have been to expose that lie at the time. We do not know for sure that his story was checked, but if the lie was one that could easily be exposed, it is I think a sensible starting point to discount it as a lie.

So did Hutchinson go to Romford?
To take my propositions the opposite way around, it would have been quite easy for the police to check if he had or not. We do not know why he went, but unless the reason he gave was one that did not involve any contact with any human beings, then it is fair to say that the police could have checked.
Whether the police actually did check or not is not the issue. It would have been a reckless gamble to invent a story that could be undone by a simple check. I would accordingly suggest that the balance of probability is that he did go there.

How unlikely was it that he walked back and got back too late to stay in his lodgings?
Firstly as I have pointed out – he may have miscalculated how long it would take him to walk back. We do not know that he walked the other direction, so he may have not known how long it would take. Also it was dark so he could easily have got lost. I know the way from Romford to Whitechapel, but if I was walking it would be easy for me to take a longer route unintentionally.

If it is taken as a given that he was in Romford at 9pm and he had these options
1. He could sleep rough in Romford and walk back in the morning. That would mean sleeping in an area he was less familiar with (presumably), he would turn up in Whitechapel tired, and he would be too late to get causal work.
2. He could walk straight back to Whitechapel and mooch about or get a kip in a stair well, pop in to the Victoria Home to freshen up, then find some casual work first thing.

Of these two options, the second would be picked by nearly everyone.
Is it unlikely that someone could stay too long to far from home to get back in good time? Hardly.
Is Hutchinson putting himself through a massively tortuous experience that no sane person could possibly endure? Hardly.It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience but to suggest that it would have been a catastrophe or beyond the limit of human endurance is more than slightly risible.

There were lots of people in the East End – then as now – not in regular employment. People who worked casually meaning they went from job to job – offering their services for whatever work was going. It would not mean that the person was without money usually. It mean a slightly precarious existence and put the onus on the person to actively get a job each day – although no doubt sometimes he would get a week’s work in one place.
Not being in regular employment would not preclude Hutchinson staying at the Victoria Home so long as he was in regular employment the first time he registered there. Also, so long as he earned enough money via his casual labour he would be able to maintain his position there.
A weekly ticket would cost him 2 shillings. Hutchinson could probably earn this on a good day then have less anxiety all week. I would suggest that the evidence implies that he could have had a weekly pass for the Victoria Home but just got back too late on Friday in the early hours of the morning to gain access. Then he went in first thing. I would suggest that it would be likely that he then will have gone out looking for work as soon as possible as he had no money – according to his own account anyway.

Hutchinson said he was living in the Victoria Home. Could the police have checked this if they had chosen to? I would suggest they could. Even if you choose to believe that the Victoria Home did not keep up registers, it is inconceivable that no one there would know him at least by sight. Hutchinson also claimed an inmate to go to the police with his testimony. Saying he lived at the Vitoria Home when he didn’t would have been exceptionally reckless. In my opinion the balance of probability strongly suggests that Hutchinson told the truth and that he did live in the Victoria Home.

Was Hutchinson not in regular employment? Could the police have checked if they wanted to or chose to? Yes – because he would have had employers. Hutchinson was not out of work – he will have had several recent employers that he worked for on a casual basis. Saying he was not in regular work when he was (and may have wanted to keep it secret for some reason perhaps) would have been exceptionally reckless. The police could have asked for a list of these people and confirmed his status. In my opinion the balance of probability suggests that Hutchinson told the truth and he was not in regular employment.

These aspects of Hutchinson’s story are therefore likely to be true:
That he went to Romford (this does not preclude the possibility that he got the day wrong – which would have been seen as an honest mistake). I would suggest that the reason for him setting back so late would also be verifiable for the same reason that his presence in Romford at all would be verifiable. (Please note this does not mean it was verified. It means he was taking a reckless gamble in presenting a story that was verifiable).
That he lived in the Victoria Home on a regular basis.
That he was not in regular employment.

Sally
I am not at all sure why Hutchinson went to Romford. I have gone through the reasons why I don’t think it was work related. We will never get to the bottom of why he went there. Suffice it to say, real people do have private business to transact that can cover a very wide variety of subjects, and it will get us nowhere coming up with fanciful reasons. All I would suggest is that whatever caused Hutchinson to go to Romford would almost certainly be potentially be verifiable, and so to make it up completely would be a foolishly reckless and unnecessary act.

[Ben]

We’ve just been discussing this at length on a number of practically identical threads. I have to question the wisdom and sense of writing another long post on a subject that has already been hotly disputed on several occasions, and which advances arguments that have already been addressed in detail.

“When judging aspects of Hutchinson’s story it is sensible to ask – how possible is it?”

You can’t get extents of “possibility”, Lechmere.

Something is either possible or it isn’t. The question is whether or not a given proposition is probable, and Hutchinson's alleged excursion to Romford may be exposed as very improbable once the circumstances attaching to his claim are analysed. You’re quite wrong to suggest that this was something the police could easily have checked out.

Firstly, the elephant in the room here is the fact that Hutchinson’s account was discredited, which would hardly have been the case if the police were in a position to verify Hutchinson’s claims. Secondly, Hutchinson could easily have fabricated a trip to Romford and remained secure in the knowledge that his lie was very unlikely to be exposed by any police “checking”. A claim to have been seeking a particular street or place and work without success would have done the trick, for example, as it would have been beyond both verification and contradiction. Similarly, a claim to be in search of relatives who weren’t at home would have had a similar effect. So contrary to your assertion, it would have been very simple indeed to invent a reason for going to Romford that wasn’t vulnerable to contradiction from police checking.

As for reckless gambles, this is a complete non-issue as we know that all manner of liars, including serial killers, have come forward as false witness with false accounts that would have been vulnerable to contradiction if the police had decided not to take them at face value. To argue that people in general are incapable of taking “reckless gambles”, let alone serial killers, is a bold assumption that doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny.

The balance of probability is most assuredly not to the effect that he really went to Romford.

“How unlikely was it that he walked back and got back too late to stay in his lodgings?”

Very.

It would mean he misjudged the journey by an hour and a half. If he knew he had to work or seek work early on Friday morning, as per your version, he wouldn’t have left Romford one and a half hours too late to make it back to his lodgings before closing time. That is illogical, especially if he was the critically impoverished job-seeker you want him to have been. If he was really of that mould, proper sleep and energy reserves would have been essential. The idea that he got “lost” is frankly ludicrous, as anyone will discover by looking at a map of the area. Romford is basically at the end of the same road that Hutchinson alleged to have been walking down shortly before 2.00am that night, Whitechapel High Street, give or take a minor diversion. It would have been well-lit main roads all the way, drastically reducing anyone’s chances of getting lost.

As for the two options that you’ve narrowed it down to for no good reason, why are you repeating yourself almost verbatim from yesterday? Here is what I said in response to your preferred option #2, which was:

“2. He could walk straight back to Whitechapel and mooch about or get a kip in a stair well, pop in to the Victoria Home to freshen up, then find some casual work first thing.”

But most assuredly not if he knew that he had no prospect of sleep at the other end of that 13 miles trek, but only the prospect of walking around the district until it was time for work-seeking in the morning, which entailed more walking. I can’t think of anything more illogical. What was the purpose of going to the Victoria Home at all in this scenario, if he knew he had no chance of sleeping there? Wouldn’t he have made it an absolute priority to avoid this catastrophic fate by making doubly sure that he made it back home in time for the cut-off point, especially if he had no money? Human being have a limit, and what you’re suggesting with regard to Hutchinson exceeds that limit of human endurance when applied to self-imposed and easily avoidable predicaments.

Address the responses you receive next time, rather than repeating the original point as though it were never addressed. I’m afraid repetition only breeds a lot more repetition around here, so my advice would be not to bother with it.

“People who worked casually meaning they went from job to job – offering their services for whatever work was going. It would not mean that the person was without money usually.”

But there would have been many occasions when the work seeking didn’t pay off, and this would have prevented him from being able to pay his doss money. Yet the police were perfectly happy to accept that Hutchinson was a “usual” resident of the Victoria Home, despite being without regular employment. I’m not saying he didn’t live there, far from it, but it is clear that despite his claim to the contrary, his employment must have been sufficiently “regular” to enable him to pay for his usual fourpence-per-night lodgings. Again, the “exceptionally reckless” argument is a nonsense, since this again was an aspect of Hutchinson’s account that he could easily have “blagged” if he wanted to, secure in the knowledge that it would have been difficult to contradict in the unlikely event that the police investigated his work history.

It’s not as if we have any evidence that discredited witnesses became the subjects of major “checking” operations into their backgrounds and employment histories.

If he was in possession of a weekly pass/ticket, he would have been able to gain access to the Victoria Home at any hour of the night, simply by showing it to the doorman. This is made quite clear in the entry guidelines for this particular lodging house. If he didn’t lie and wasn’t in possession of a weekly ticket, it would mean he walked all the way from Romford on foot with the full expectation that because of his lack of a ticket and lack of money, he had nowhere to sleep at the other end.

In conclusion, it should be obvious that none of the aspects of his account that you claim the police were in a position to "check" were remotely likely to have been, in reality. As such, there is absolutely no reason to conclude that any of these claims were true. If they were, Hutchinson would hardly have been discredited, and yet we know that he was. The safer explanation, then, is that these claims didn’t stand up to scrutiny, if ever they were investigated in any detail.

The whole “reckless” argument is a total non-objection, as far as I’m concerned. Hutchinson’s capacity for “recklessness” is not easily gauged. If he was a time-waster of the Packer variety, he was hardly likely to have suffered any severe punishment from casual lies (certainly, neither Packer nor Violenia appear to have been hauled over the coals for their false accounts), and if he was the killer, then this example of “recklessness” may be considered perfectly compatible with his earlier “reckless” decisions, such as dispatching Annie Chapman with Albert Cadosche on the other side of the adjoining fence.

[Lechmere]

Mr Ben
“the elephant in the room here is the fact that Hutchinson’s account was discredited, which would hardly have been the case if the police were in a position to verify Hutchinson’s claims.”

We obviously don’t know why Hutchinson’s claims were dismissed. Perhaps some were verified and some weren’t. There could be another explanation altogether – such as Lewis said it wasn’t the man or he didn’t see her on the night he thought, or any one of numerous things.
If the police attempted to verify some aspect of his story and he was found to be lying then I would suggest that they would have really taken a close look at him. This may have happened and they may have satisfied themselves that he was a Walter Mitty or a chancer or whatever. Obviously we don’t know.
All I am suggesting is that the three elements I identified could have been checked. I think it would have been unnecessarily reckless for a guilty Hutchinson to make those claims when they could be checked. If they were checked and found to be false, then I would expect the police to really go to town on him.

The simplest lie that Hutchinson could have told would be that he had been out of work for a few days and couldn’t afford any lodgings so he was wandering around aimlessly looking for shelter. That couldn’t be checked – no employers (even irregular employers), no lodging house deputy, no supposedly implausible trip to Romford to invent. Simple. It took me a minute to think it up. Hutchinson would have had maybe an hour and a half between the close of the inquest and his appearance at Commercial Street Police Station, had he been loitering in the crowd outside Shoreditch Town Hall.

Let’s take a look at your proposed uncheckable fake reasons for going to Romford:

“A claim to have been seeking a particular street or place and work without success would have done the trick, for example, as it would have been beyond both verification and contradiction.”
What street? Where did you hear about this place of work? What time did you set off? Why were you still there at 9 pm?

“a claim to be in search of relatives who weren’t at home would have had a similar effect."
What is the name and address of these relatives? If they existed Hutchinson had better hope they weren’t in. Why did you leave it until 9.00pm to set off back to the East End?

As you know, he may have misjudged the walking time by an hour, rather than an hour and a half, and you have no idea whether he had walked it before.
I rather doubt the route to Romford would have been well lit all the way. Romford would have been semi rural. As he got in towards London there are several major roads that would have led in the wrong direction. You confident assertion that this possibility is ludicrous is as worthless as many of you hyperbolic claims.

The reason why I narrowed it down to two possibilities, if it is accepted that he was at Romford at 9 pm, is because I can think of no other sensible options. Please provide me with some more alternatives if you think I said this “for no good reason”.
I await your response to this eagerly.

Again with the hyperbole... it would not be ‘catastrophic’ to miss one night’s sleep and walk about. It wouldn’t be very nice, it wouldn’t be something that you would want to do very often, but get a grip!
“what you’re suggesting with regard to Hutchinson exceeds that limit of human endurance.”
The limit of human endurance? You really have led a sheltered life.

On his work seeking – possibly sometimes he didn’t find work. I would expect that most days he would. London was a thriving humming metropolis. There would have been plenty of casual work about. In any case the police could have asked for his previous several employers, he must have had some for his story to fit.

However implausible you may think, sitting in Sussex in 2011, that someone not in regular employment may have lived at the Victoria Home (where the guidelines state in black and white that he couldn’t get in after 12.30 or 1 am without a separate special pass), it seems that it didn’t strike the press or the police as being implausible in 1888. So I suggest you leave that one there.
Nor did it strike the police or press as being implausible that he had been in Romford and walked back late.

Packer again? The man who said a victim came to his shop and may have lied does not have much in common with someone who put himself at a crime scene at the time of death or thereabouts. And you actually accused me of repeating things?

[Ben]

You really are following me around these Hutchinson threads an awful lot these days.

Have a little pause from it, I would.

“If the police attempted to verify some aspect of his story and he was found to be lying then I would suggest that they would have really taken a close look at him.”

Not this again, Lechmere.

I thought you found repetition “excruciating”

We’ve dealt with all this nonsense about the extent of the “checking” powers and potential of the police in 1888. Let’s not waste time going over it again. I’m not suggesting that they discovered he was lying about anything, with the possible exception of his claim to have contacted a policeman on Sunday 11th November. This would have been just the sort of slip-up that could have exposed an obvious provable lie, and moreover, it would neatly account for his discrediting very shortly thereafter. Once they had established this, the logical deduction for an 1888 nascent police force would most assuredly not have been “Come here, you suspicious potential murderer”, but rather “Oh look, another idiot seeking publicity or money”. The latter would have been two-a-penny at the time, whereas they had no precedent in those days for real offenders coming forward as witnesses.

The “reckless” issue I’ve already dispensed with very successfully, because it’s nonsense. The idea that a “guilty” Hutchinson wouldn’t have been “reckless” is irksomely preposterous. If Hutchinson was guilty, it would mean he murdered Annie Chapman with Albert Cadosche on the other side of the low-wooden fence where her body was later discovered. Clearly, the real killer had a demonstrated capacity for recklessness.

“The simplest lie that Hutchinson could have told would be that he had been out of work for a few days and couldn’t afford any lodgings so he was wandering around aimlessly looking for shelter.”

Which isn’t too far off the version Hutchinson really gave, but let us please not perpetuate the hideous fallacy that unless the lie in question was an embodiment of simple perfection, it can’t have been a lie at all. Or even worse, the hopelessly illogical: Hutchinson didn’t lie, because I would have lied better if I were in his shoes!

“What street? Where did you hear about this place of work? What time did you set off? Why were you still there at 9 pm?”

I forget the actual street, sir. It was a shortish name, and I fancy it began with an “S”. It was one of the side streets off the main one, it seemed to be. I had it written down after a lodger told me about some work I could get there. I left there around Thursday lunchtime. As I was not successful in finding the address, I walked about all afternoon looking for other jobs but nothing really suggested itself, which delayed me. I’m not lying about it because I realise I was seen by Sarah Lewis, and needed to find a convincing excuse for being on the streets in the small hours, honest I'm not!

“What is the name and address of these relatives?”

It’s Mr. And Mrs. A. Killer, sir, of No. 6 Church Lane, but I couldn’t find the address, and don’t even know if they still live there. I was desperate for money, sir, which is why I went all that way to find them. Silly really.

Gosh, this is fun.

“As you know, he may have misjudged the walking time by an hour”

Exactly, which is nonsense, especially when we consider your version of Hutchinson’s predicament and how essential the preservation of energy and the procurement of sleep were for the next day’s work-seeking hardship.

“I rather doubt the route to Romford would have been well lit all the way.”

It would have been. It was main roads all the way to Romford, then as now. Get a map and study it. If you’re seriously suggesting that Hutchinson was incapable of following a main road that headed due west, I’m afraid you’re coming up with worse excuses than usual for explaining away discrediting evidence.

“The reason why I narrowed it down to two possibilities, if it is accepted that he was at Romford at 9 pm”

But you shouldn’t have “accepted that he was at Romford at 9pm” at all. This should have been dismissed as nonsense well in advance of you accepting it as gospel.

"it would not be ‘catastrophic’ to miss one night’s sleep and walk about...You really have led a sheltered life.”

It would if we accept your interpretation of Hutchinson as a beleaguered, desperate work-seeker who had to scrape for his fourpenny doss, for whom energy and sleep were absolutely essential to retain. Missing a night’s sleep is one thing, but substituting it with a night of walking the 13 miles in miserable weather conditions all the way back from Romford in the small hours, followed by walking round the district, followed by more walking in search of a job would have been catastrophic to Hutchinson. If you think that simply denying this and yelling "get a grip!" entitles you to make baseless and ill-informed misstatements about my life, about which you know nothing, then just disappear. Seriously. Find another aspect of internet ripperology and make insulting generalizations about people you have never met there.

“I would expect that most days he would. London was a thriving humming metropolis. There would have been plenty of casual work about.”

Sorry, nonsense.

If this was the case, homelessness wouldn’t exist, and we know it did at the time, to make an obvious understatement. Sheer numbers and overcrowding would have ensured that mere work-seekers would not have been successful most of the time, let alone some of it.

“However implausible you may think, sitting in Sussex in 2011”

I love the idea that this is all county-specific. Obviously if I “sat” in Worcestershire, for example, you wouldn’t challenge anything I’ve said.

“it seems that it didn’t strike the press or the police as being implausible in 1888.”

He didn’t tell the press he was out of work, by all accounts.

And he police discredited him, so they may well have spotted the incongruity upon “later investigation”.

So no, I’m not "leaving" that one there. I’ll keep addressing it forever if necessary. It just depends who wants to join me when we go round and round in ever more repetitive circles. Your name’s going straight down as one such willing combatant who’s suddenly got the Hutch bug very badly. Hypnotic, isn’t it?

[Lechmere]

Mr Ben
Regarding the police’s checking powers, you will naturally be familiar with the following report:

St. James Gazette 14 November 1888
At an early hour this morning a Press Association reporter was informed that between midnight and four o'clock three arrests were made in the eastern district in connection with the murders. About one o'clock some young men had their suspicions aroused by the peculiar behaviour of a man in the vicinity of the Spitalfields Flower Market. He accosted two women, and, after conversing with them for a considerable time, tried to persuade them to accompany him into one of the small streets adjoining the market. Theses thoroughfares are in general gloomy and badly lighted, and, the women being suspicious, refused to go with the man. He was followed for some distance by the watchers, and ultimately handed over to a policeman, who took him to Commercial street police station. Here he refused to give an account of himself, on the ground that he did not wish his parents to be alarmed by police inquiries regarding him. Questioned as to his whereabouts on Thursday night and Friday morning last, the man gave various explanations, and contradicted himself so frequently that it was considered advisable to detain him until his identity and antecedents were thoroughly investigated. The two men taken into custody at Leman street police station were alleged to bear some resemblance to the recently published descriptions of the man last seen in the company of the deceased woman Kelly. They were able, however, to give satisfactory accounts of themselves; and after these had been verified by the police, the men were set at liberty.

This tells us that the police were fairly rigorous. You constantly bring up Packer and Violenia as if their treatment tells us anything. I could throw back at you Robert Paul who was hauled out of his bed by the police and interrogated.

Violenia was dismissed when Pizer was dismissed. His claim was that he saw someone and picked out Pizer with certainty. Violenia also lived in Hanbury Street at the time so had a good reason to be there.
The Times of 12th September 1888 had this to say of Violenia:
“Subsequently, cross-examination so discredited Violenia's evidence that it was wholly distrusted by the police.”
In other words they at least rigorously verbally checked him out. He didn’t become a suspect as he seems to have put himself up to have a ‘pop’ at Pizer, as they seem to have known each other.

Mathew Packer had a shop was near the murder scene and so had a good reason to be there. He only claimed to have sold grapes to Stride, and so was hardly in a similar position to Hutchinson as a discredited witness, yet we know his story was sifted and he was even taken to Scotland Yard.

You continuously conjure up Packer and Violenia as if to disprove that the police checked witnesses. But they are witnesses quite unlike Hutchinson and they were both checked anyway. Hutchinson put himself at a murder scene (and he didn't live in that street) at the time a murder was committed and was seemingly discredited and dismissed.
Any police force – even a nascent one- would be negligent in not following up such a witness and I would suggest that if we were to ere on the side of caution now we would accept this.

It is true that we do not have any immediate evidence of checking but we should know that this absence does not disprove it ever existed, because so much is missing. I would suggest the prudent thing is to assume he was looked at and his story was checked out. It is of course more convenient for a ‘Hutchinson is guilty’ believer to discount this possibility, but I would submit it is less than likely.

Your explanation for the police dropping Hutchinson was that he told the press he spoke to a policeman on the Sunday. The Police exposed that as a lie and left it at that?
Not a very credible explanation Mr Ben.

The lie I proposed a guilty Hutchinson could have told was hideously different to the complicated version that he chose to tell.
It is irksomely preposterous to think that Hutchinson was so worried about Lewis’s testimony getting him into trouble that he would concoct another story that was even more likely to get him into trouble, if it was based on a tissue of lies.

Are you now really saying that there would have been no precedent for real offenders coming forward as potential witnesses?
Don’t you actually mean that there is no precedent for serial killers inserting themselves in a case?
Or are you now stating that the police in 1888 would not have been familiar with any criminal coming forward to throw the police of their scent in any type of case?
Please confirm.

The two explanations you provided as excuses for Hutchinson would not, I fear, have cleared him. They would have exited further questioning – had he been interrogated on that subject. To any policeman (even in those nascent days) those answers would not fall into the category of giving a satisfactory account of himself (see St James Gazette).

I am familiar with the route to Romford – in real life - and I am fairly sure the rural sections would not have been lit.
How can you possibly say it is nonsense that he misjudged the time it took to walk back? Do you think he knew the exact number of miles? Do you think he knew how long it would take? You have no idea.
I am afraid I made those generalisations about you as you seem to think - in your exaggerated style – that missing one night’s sleep and walking 13 miles is catastrophic.

Also I would suggest that an eager casual worker who was willing to turn his hand to any tasks would probably have got work most days in London.
I would suggest that a night spent walking back from Romford would not be ideal. It would be unpleasant and leave him ‘knackered’ after a day’s work. But it would not be a massive problem – and as I said, it clearly didn’t seem a big deal at the time to the police or the press – it seems a big deal to you as you have a case to prove.
I won’t mention this again – I will leave that to you.