Kosminski and Victim DNA Match on Shawl - Part 2

[mickreed]

G'day Mck

The significance of many of his arguments seems to be that he needed to fill pages.

Well that's how it appears to me anyway, some of his hypothesizing is so weak that it could make you laugh.

The Daisies
The Shawl is a dress
The dates of Michaelmas
The Shawl must have belonged to Kos

G'day GUT

Yes, I reckon the 'meat of the book' would make a smallish pamphlet. I did laugh, but I felt like crying.

[mickreed]

Thanks to both GUT and mickreed for the welcomes!

"Yet he tries to persuade us that the dress she was said to be wearing (an outer garment surely) was the shawl. We are therefore asked to believe that the Ripper dressed her in the 5 minutes max that he had to kill her, and that the (allegedly present) press mistook this shawl for a dress."

I assumed that his theory was that the shawl was left draping or partially draping the body in such a way that it appeared, in the darkness and confusion, to be a garment she was wearing. Given how badly damaged the body was, I would assume the clothing was in great disarray, with torn pieces scattered everywhere.

We are told, by RE, that part of the shawl was cut away because it was blood-soaked. Admittedly when you dig deeper, it appears as though the previous owner only speculated that so as to explain why it had actually been cut up. The clothes that Eddowes was wearing were said, by the pathologist, to have 'not a speck' of blood on the front of them.

The only person to be interviewed about the shawl, and who actually knew Amos Simpson, said that 'nobody knew' how he got it. 'It got into his hands somehow'. (I paraphrase slightly). Apart from the previous owner of the shawl, the only other family member I know of was cited by Mabuse earlier in this discussion and apparently said that the family were 'very sceptical' of the story.

The only people to have no known reservations about the story are Edwards, and the bloke who sold him the shawl for an undisclosed, but apparently substantial, sum

[GUT]

Thanks to both GUT and mickreed for the welcomes!

"Yet he tries to persuade us that the dress she was said to be wearing (an outer garment surely) was the shawl. We are therefore asked to believe that the Ripper dressed her in the 5 minutes max that he had to kill her, and that the (allegedly present) press mistook this shawl for a dress."

I assumed that his theory was that the shawl was left draping or partially draping the body in such a way that it appeared, in the darkness and confusion, to be a garment she was wearing. Given how badly damaged the body was, I would assume the clothing was in great disarray, with torn pieces scattered everywhere.

"Moreover the shawl does NOT have a pattern made up of Michaelmas daisies."

I think there's room for doubt about this. The color scheme looks right to me, and the flowers seen on the shawl in the photo Edwards provides could be daisies. That's all I can really say without better photos and more knowledge of floral print designs.

Well I guess if the flowers "could" be dasies they could be gum leaves as well.

[drstrange169]

Hello Sauropod,


Some of the questions that arise from the book's explanations.


"The fact that the blue dye came off so easily told us one piece of information: the shawl could never have been used as an outer garment, because rain would have made the blue dye leak."

It poured with rain the night Mrs Eddowes was murdered, why doesn't the damage to the shawl reflect that?



"Many posters point out correctly that the shawl did not show up on any police evidence lists. Still, Edwards does argue that it was seen on Eddowes' body and reported in the press. Pages 95-96:
Her dress was made of green chintz, the pattern consisting of Michaelmas daisies."

The Shawl, by Edwards own words is "predominately brown" and he does not specifically show where the "michelmas daises" are on the shawl. They are not visible in any photograph published so far. The Chintz skirt is descibed as having "3 flounces, brown button on the waistband, jagged cut 6 1/2 incheslong from the waistband ..."

None of the above corresponds the the "shawl".


"We can only assume the press included this description of the chintz dress or skirt with the border of Michaelmas daisies in their reports because a journalist was either present at the scene and glimpsed the material (and despite the best efforts of the police, crime scenes were not kept secure as they are today), or that they talked to policemen who were there and who again mistook the distinctively patterned shawl for a skirt or dress."


What Edwards did not quote in his book about the press reports was the first part that specifically stated,

"The following is the official description of the body and clothing ..."

(my emphasis)


"... it does provide possible grounds for believing that a large garment patterned with Michaelmas daisies was at the Eddowes crime scene."


As the above documented evidence shows, that is NOT the case.



"Since it was not included in the police list (reproduced on pp. 93-94), it would have disappeared somewhere between the crime scene and the mortuary. "

Since it's not on the police lists and does not fit the press description, isn't it more logical to believe it wasn't actually there?



"... this scenario is not inconsistent with the Simpson family tradition."

The Simpson family tradition, as described by descendant David Melville-Hayes, noted down in the 1990's, was that Amos Simpson was the first to discover the body and took the shawl. His mother, the only person to actually have met Simpson, had no knowledge of how Simpson gained the shawl.

The mortuary story was not part of the family tradition back in the 1990's. The first we hear of it is in Edwards book.


This is were the problems lie, Edwards may well be right, but when you check Edwards book against the actual facts, all that arises is more questions and no answers.

[GUT]

You're quite right, Sauropod. And, unlike GUT, I forgot to say welcome. Sorry, and welcome.

Sure, RE doesn't come up with the daisy idea himself, but surely the first thing you would do is to see whether they are really Michaelmas daisies, particularly when you are going to erect an entire theoretical edifice around the significance of Michaelmas to the Ripper.

I quote from the book:

I also realized that, for the Michaelmas daisies to have real significance, they had to be connected to the Ripper.

This is ludicrous. They must be significant so they must be connected to the Ripper.

The corollary is that if they had no significance then they probably had nowt to do with Ripper.

Since they are clearly not daisies, then any significance to his overall argument passes me by.

G'day Mck

The significance of many of his arguments seems to be that he needed to fill pages.

Well that's how it appears to me anyway, some of his hypothesizing is so weak that it could make you laugh.

The Daisies
The Shawl is a dress
The dates of Michaelmas
The Shawl must have belonged to Kos

[sauropod]

Thanks to both GUT and mickreed for the welcomes!

"Yet he tries to persuade us that the dress she was said to be wearing (an outer garment surely) was the shawl. We are therefore asked to believe that the Ripper dressed her in the 5 minutes max that he had to kill her, and that the (allegedly present) press mistook this shawl for a dress."

I assumed that his theory was that the shawl was left draping or partially draping the body in such a way that it appeared, in the darkness and confusion, to be a garment she was wearing. Given how badly damaged the body was, I would assume the clothing was in great disarray, with torn pieces scattered everywhere.

"Moreover the shawl does NOT have a pattern made up of Michaelmas daisies."

I think there's room for doubt about this. The color scheme looks right to me, and the flowers seen on the shawl in the photo Edwards provides could be daisies. That's all I can really say without better photos and more knowledge of floral print designs.

[mickreed]

There does seem to have been a Simpson family tradition that the shawl was patterned with Michaelmas daisies, and I think the auction house also included this detail in its description, so it's not something Edwards came up with on his own.

You're quite right, Sauropod. And, unlike GUT, I forgot to say welcome. Sorry, and welcome.

Sure, RE doesn't come up with the daisy idea himself, but surely the first thing you would do is to see whether they are really Michaelmas daisies, particularly when you are going to erect an entire theoretical edifice around the significance of Michaelmas to the Ripper.

I quote from the book:

I also realized that, for the Michaelmas daisies to have real significance, they had to be connected to the Ripper.

This is ludicrous. They must be significant so they must be connected to the Ripper.

The corollary is that if they had no significance then they probably had nowt to do with Ripper.

Since they are clearly not daisies, then any significance to his overall argument passes me by.

[mickreed]

Hello, all. I've read the Casebook on and off for years, and recently have been following these "shawl" threads with interest, though I can't claim to have read all 4,400+ posts.

"The fact that the blue dye came off so easily told us one piece of information: the shawl could never have been used as an outer garment, because rain would have made the blue dye leak. This underlined that it could not have belonged to Catherine Eddowes: with her itinerant lifestyle it would certainly have been exposed to rain. Just before her death she and her partner John had walked back to London from the hop fields to Kent, and because she had nowhere to live she had all her clothes on when she was murdered: there is no possibility that the shawl would never have been wet if it was hers."

Many posters point out correctly that the shawl did not show up on any police evidence lists. Still, Edwards does argue that it was seen on Eddowes' body and reported in the press. Pages 95-96:

"Unlike the police list, a press report in the East London Observer said, 'Her dress was made of green chintz, the pattern consisting of Michaelmas daisies.' This description was repeated by other periodicals and newspapers at the time …

Sauropod, you must be the only person alive that hasn't read all 4,400 posts.

RE always tries to have it every which way. He insists the shawl couldn't have been Eddowes and couldn't have been used as an outer garment because the the dye would have run. According to Lawnde, it was raining that morning. We don't know how hard of course. If it was at all hard, then it may well have got wet.

Yet he tries to persuade us that the dress she was said to be wearing (an outer garment surely) was the shawl. We are therefore asked to believe that the Ripper dressed her in the 5 minutes max that he had to kill her, and that the (allegedly present) press mistook this shawl for a dress.

Moreover the shawl does NOT have a pattern made up of Michaelmas daisies. This has been discussed some time ago in the forums. Any pattern less like a daisy is hard to imagine. Pansies perhaps, daisies never.

Perhaps RE doesn't know what a daisy looks like, but it seems unlikely that two different observers, 120-plus years apart, would incorrectly identify a flower pattern in exactly the same way.

[sauropod]

That's an interesting point, GUT. The images I've seen of the shawl aren't clear enough to allow me to say if the flowers resemble Michaelmas daisies (which seem to have been quite stylized in print designs - e.g., the William Morris design). There does seem to have been a Simpson family tradition that the shawl was patterned with Michaelmas daisies, and I think the auction house also included this detail in its description, so it's not something Edwards came up with on his own.

I noticed that a photo apparently taken from one of Stewart Evans' books was posted on one of these threads. (I've attached it.) In this photo the flowers on the shawl look nothing like daisies. OTOH, when I look closely at the photo of the shawl provided in Edwards' book (following p. 184), I do see daisy-like petals on the clearer flowers. And the color scheme seems about right; for comparison, see this photo of an Aster "Little Carlow" Michaelmas daisy, with its reddish interior and lavender petals:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardenprojects/3338685/On-the-spot-the-best-Michaelmas-daisies.html

I'm no expert, though. All I know about horticulture is that Oscar Wilde made a classic pun on it once.

[GUT]

G'day sauropod and welcome.

The only problem [well maybe not the only one] is that there is nothing on the shawl that remotely resembles a Daisy, a Poppy maybe.

[sauropod]

Hello, all. I've read the Casebook on and off for years, and recently have been following these "shawl" threads with interest, though I can't claim to have read all 4,400+ posts.

Earlier, someone asked if Edwards believes that the shawl was owned by Eddowes or Kosminski. From what I read in the replies, no definitive answer was given (unless I missed it).

For the record, Edwards insists that Kosminski, not Eddowes, owned the shawl. From p. 181:

"Catherine was very poor, and the day before her death she and her partner John had pawned a pair of his boots, no doubt very worn, for enough money to buy themselves some food. Surely, if she'd had an expensive silk shawl, they would have pawned that for considerably more money? And where would she, with her history of poverty and privation, have acquired an expensive shawl? ...

"Kosminski's family were certainly not wealthy, but they were not semi-destitute, as Catherine was. And in the escape from Poland the shawl could easily have been brought along his possessions."

And on page 196:

"The fact that the blue dye came off so easily told us one piece of information: the shawl could never have been used as an outer garment, because rain would have made the blue dye leak. This underlined that it could not have belonged to Catherine Eddowes: with her itinerant lifestyle it would certainly have been exposed to rain. Just before her death she and her partner John had walked back to London from the hop fields to Kent, and because she had nowhere to live she had all her clothes on when she was murdered: there is no possibility that the shawl would never have been wet if it was hers."

Many posters point out correctly that the shawl did not show up on any police evidence lists. Still, Edwards does argue that it was seen on Eddowes' body and reported in the press. Pages 95-96:

"Unlike the police list, a press report in the East London Observer said, 'Her dress was made of green chintz, the pattern consisting of Michaelmas daisies.' This description was repeated by other periodicals and newspapers at the time …

"We can only assume the press included this description of the chintz dress or skirt with the border of Michaelmas daisies in their reports because a journalist was either present at the scene and glimpsed the material (and despite the best efforts of the police, crime scenes were not kept secure as they are today), or that they talked to policemen who were there and who again mistook the distinctively patterned shawl for a skirt or dress."

This explanation is obviously debatable, but it does provide possible grounds for believing that a large garment patterned with Michaelmas daisies was at the Eddowes crime scene. Since it was not included in the police list (reproduced on pp. 93-94), it would have disappeared somewhere between the crime scene and the mortuary. Though unproven, this scenario is not inconsistent with the Simpson family tradition.

[Hatchett]

Hi,

The media was very active with The Final Solution, it was also very active with "The Diary," of course the general public will mostly be affected, but I would put forward that the only people who really believe it will be the people who dont read the book, and havent read any books about the case.

I too have been quite forcibly barraged by a number of people who believe that one of the Royal Family was the killer. But they didnt read the book, they have got that from the television film.

People who have an interest in the case will make a ballanced decision.

The others will be swayed by any theory that hits the press.

[GUT]

I'm not sure anything will displace the impression made in the minds of a generation of newspaper readers...

Up until now, whenever I've confessed my interest in the case, (and this is nearly forty years after Stephen Knight), I've been getting either the "oh that was all down to the Masons wasn't it" or "wasn't that hushed up by the royal family" response...

I'm quite convinced I'll now be getting the Polish Jew response just as often...such is the power of the media in leaving a lasting impression in peoples' minds

All the best

Dave

I'm already getting that Dave.

[lynn cates]

staying

Hello Dave. Absolutely.

And that is why we old flatulators must stay about and keep the investigation on the straight and narrow. And that in spite of any nay saying and personal criticism we may encounter.

Cheers.
LC

[mickreed]

I'm not sure anything will displace the impression made in the minds of a generation of newspaper readers...

Up until now, whenever I've confessed my interest in the case, (and this is nearly forty years after Stephen Knight), I've been getting either the "oh that was all down to the Masons wasn't it" or "wasn't that hushed up by the royal family" response...

I'm quite convinced I'll now be getting the Polish Jew response just as often...such is the power of the media in leaving a lasting impression in peoples' minds

All the best

Dave

Yes, Dave. It's a worry. And of course, the DNA stuff has such a hold on the public imagination that the only likelihood of the impression being superseded would be for RE and/or JL to appear in the world's press to say 'We were wrong'.

Any takers?