Every minute counts

[MrBarnett]

Oozing IS a movement. And Mizen said STILL running, so that closes the issue. As for clotted blood looking fluid, I feel certain that Brown would be able to tell the difference.

Can we be sure that’s what Mizen said and that he wasn’t talking about some liquid that he noticed while moving the body?

All that aside, perhaps this is a good place to collect examples of blood flowing at a considerable time after death.

Here’s my first contribution - in this case a scalp wound was found to be still bleeding 17 hours after death. ‘Very unusual’ apparently.

[Fisherman]

I forgot: Kate Eddowes was always likely to bleed longer than Nichols, since her neck did not sustain the same amount of total damage.

[Fisherman]

Is it always obvious to the naked eye that blood has clotted? Doesn’t it still look liquid?

I think you might say blood was ‘oozing’ if there was no obvious movement.

Oozing IS a movement. And Mizen said STILL running, so that closes the issue. As for clotted blood looking fluid, I feel certain that Brown would be able to tell the difference.

[MrBarnett]

Foster depicted "fluid blood” on one side and "clot blood" on the other. I donīt know if blood serum can separate and stay in a liquid state, but I do know that coagulation typicaly begins four minutes after the wound is opened up. It is when the blood exits the body and comes in contact with substances in the wound tissue that the coagulation is set off.

Just as you say I have seen it led on before that Neil meant that the blood he described as oozing and running was in fact already coagulated. But I think that when Mizen says that the blood was STILL running as he saw Nichols, that dissolves that particular option. Nichols bled many a minute after Lechmere had left her, therefore.

Another point: why would Neil have said that the blood had "oozed" if he saw it in a coagulated state? How would he have known that it "oozed" out, that it did not simply "run" out? Once he used the word ooze, he described how the blood exited the wound, did he not?

Is it always obvious to the naked eye that blood has clotted? Doesn’t it still look liquid?

I think you might say blood was ‘oozing’ if there was no obvious movement.

[Fisherman]

The question that must be asked, Gary: If Nichols still bled as Mizen arrived at the murder site - do you agree that such a thing would implicate Lechmere as the likeliest killer?

[Fisherman]

When Brown arrived in Mitre Square, at least half an hour after Eddowes had been killed, he observed a pool of ‘fluid blood-coloured serum’ - presumably what Foster labelled ‘liquid blood’ on his sketch. So either this stuff did not coagulate after 4 minutes or it was still running 20+ minutes after the injuries were inflicted.

I’m sure you’ve batted this one away many times before, but it seems to me that by ‘oozing’ and ‘running’ Neil could have meant ‘had oozed’ or ‘had run’.

Foster depicted "fluid blood” on one side and "clot blood" on the other. I donīt know if blood serum can separate and stay in a liquid state, but I do know that coagulation typicaly begins four minutes after the wound is opened up. It is when the blood exits the body and comes in contact with substances in the wound tissue that the coagulation is set off.

Just as you say I have seen it led on before that Neil meant that the blood he described as oozing and running was in fact already coagulated. But I think that when Mizen says that the blood was STILL running as he saw Nichols, that dissolves that particular option. Nichols bled many a minute after Lechmere had left her, therefore.

Another point: why would Neil have said that the blood had "oozed" if he saw it in a coagulated state? How would he have known that it "oozed" out, that it did not simply "run" out? Once he used the word ooze, he described how the blood exited the wound, did he not?

[MrBarnett]

When Brown arrived in Mitre Square, at least half an hour after Eddowes had been killed, he observed a pool of ‘fluid blood-coloured serum’ - presumably what Foster labelled ‘liquid blood’ on his sketch. So either this stuff did not coagulate after 4 minutes or it was still running 20+ minutes after the injuries were inflicted.

I’m sure you’ve batted this one away many times before, but it seems to me that by ‘oozing’ and ‘running’ Neil could have meant ‘had oozed’ or ‘had run’.

[Fisherman]

So, time for the next thread on Charles Lechmere realting to "Cutting Point" and what is said in it.

To make my case, I will return back in time a few years, to a debate I had with Steve Blomer (Elamarna). We were debating how long Polly Nichols could have bled and Steve referred to conversations he had had with people involved in the medical profession. What he had learned from that was that they said that Nichols could have bled for a substantial amount of time, perhaps twenty minutes or even more.
Of course, what such a thing means is that a large gap of time opens up in which another person than Lechmere could have cut Polly Nichols.

One of the things I thought did not look right with such a proposition was that Nichols' clothing was pulled down over the wounds, and that was something the killer never did otherwise. But all in all, one must perhaps accept that the killer chose to do it in Bucks Row but nowhere else. Illogical? Absolutely. But possible? Yes.

I did not think that it sounded likely with a bleeding time of twenty minutes at that time. The neck was severed down to the spine, all vessels were cut open totally, there was no blocking of the bloodflow and decapitated people can bleed out in a minute only. So why would Nichols bleed for twenty times as long?

I have since that debate come to realize that people with the kind of damage Nichols had may actually well bleed for twenty minutes. Or thirty. Or forty. In fact, there is no limit to how long they can bleed, and that owes to how the question is not formulated the way it should be. Instead of asking "how long could Nichols bleed?" we should ask "how long is it likely that she bled?"

In conversations I have had with Jason Payne-James, the forensic pathologist from the documentary, he has told me about a frustrating fact from the legal world. When a court case is settled, there may be matters paralleling the Nichols bleeding issue involved. And in such cases, it may be that an expert is asked to give his opinion on how long a bleeding could go on. In such a case, letīs say that this expert answers "In my opinion, such a bleeding would as an extreme go on for perhaps fifteen minutes or so, but not much longer than that".
At this stage, the defender of the accused party, who needs a bleeding time of more than twenty minutes will ask the expert "But if the victim could bleed for fifteen minutes, why could she not bleed for sixteen?" And the expert will only be able to say that it is perhaps possible, but not likely. At that stage, the defender will say: "Okay, if it is possible but not likely that she bled for sixteen minutes, then is it not possible, although pehaps unlikely, that she bled for seventeen minutes? Or eighteen? Or twenty?"

I hope you can see how this works. No far limit can ever be established. It is impossible to do so. We cannot say that twentyfour minutes and six seconds is the absolute limit. It leaves us with an endless scope and an open verdict.

So letīs leave that kind of reasoning, and look at the other question that can be asked: How long is it likely that Nichols would have gone on to bleed?
When I asked Jason Payne-James that question, I gave him thee alternatives. I asked whether it was likely that she would have bled three, five or seven minutes. His answer was that all these three times were possible, but he personally thought that three or five minutes were the likelier propositions.

That means that Jason Payne-James would personally have expected Nichols to stop bleeding within the 3-5 minute interval, although he did not rule out 7 minutes as a possibility.

When I spoke to professor Ingemar Thiblin, he concurred with Jason Payne-James in this respect: he too thought that 3 or 5 minutes were the likelier propositions, although he would not rule out 7 minutes either. He also added that he thought that an absolute maximum bleeding time would be perhaps 10-15 minutes, adding that there is luckily precious little material to compare from.

This made me think about the whole time schedule and bleeding matter. And I quickly realized that I had missed out on a very important factor that can be worded like this: every minute of bleeding that was added onto Nichols overall bleeding time was one where that bleeding was less expected than it was the minute before.

Another way of phrasing it goes like this: The first minute of bleeding is always the one which is likeliest to be a bleeding minute. People who have their heads taken clean off can bleed out in a minute only. Therefore, minute number two of bleeding will always be a minute where that bleeding is not as expected as it was in minute one.

This holds true all the way, of course. Minute four is a likelier bleeding minute than minute seven. Minute nine can never be as likely a bleeding minute as any of the eight preceding minutes.

This is factual. It cannot be challenged, it is a law of nature in practice.

So letīs see what happens when we apply it to Nichols and what the forensic pathologists said!

Both pathologists essentially say that they are fine with the suggestion that Nichols would have bled for 3-5 minutes. They are less fine with any added time, because they consider a longer bleeding time as less likely than the suggested time of 3-5 minutes.

In the book, I suggest that Nichols bled for a minimum of nine minutes. I am reasoning that Lechmere cut her throat as he first heard Robert Paul entering Bucks Row. After that, it took a minute for Paul to reach the murder spot. Paul then says that his meeting Lechmere, examining Nichols and walking up to Mizen took around four minutes altogether. That means that we have five minutes elapsed at that stage. Then there was a conversation between Lechmere and Mizen, after which Mizen tended to some of his waking up duties before he set out for Bucks Row. I reason that this would have added up to around the same amount of time, four minutes, and so the whole procedure before Mizen reached the murder site would have taken a total of nine minutes.
Of course, it may have taken eight minutes too. Or ten. But the nine minute suggestion will not be wildly wrong.

As Mizen arrived at the murder site, he said that the blood was still running from the neck, and that it had at this stage started to run into the gutter. He said the blood looked fresh and that it was partly coagulated in the pool. Coagulation begins at around the four minute mark and so it all makes sense.

The immediate fact that leaps out is that the estimation of a likely bleeding time of 3-5 minutes as per Payne-James and Thiblin does not cover the actual bleeding process. If I am correct on the nine minute timing, then Nichols will have bled for a substantially longer time, almost twice as long as the pathologists both expected.
However, neither of them ruled out as such that the bleeding time could be longer. Thiblin actually said that he believed that we could be looking at a maximum of 10-15 minutes, and 9 minutes is of course well within that scope.

But this nevertheless leaves us with the implication that Lechmere is by far the LIKELIEST cutter! Not only does he occupy the 3-5 minute period judged as the likeliest outcome by the pathologists - he occupies a four minute scope BEYOND that time, all the way up to nine minutes.

If we are to allow for another killer, we must add at least a minute or so of bleeding time: If another killer than Lechmere did for Nichols, then he must have slipped away before Lechmere arrived, and Lechmere said he would have noticed if anyone was in place at the murder site as he himself approached it. So we must add at the very least a minute.

So which minute is it we must add? Correct, we must add minute number ten. And what can we say about minute number ten? Is it just as likely to have been a bleeding minute as minute number one? No. Is it just a likely to have been a bleeding minute as minutes 2-9? No. It is less likely than all of these minutes to have been a bleeding minute. And we are dealing with a falling scale - minute number ten is a little less likely to have been a bleeding minute than minute number nine, but hugely less likely to have been a bleeding minute than minute number one.

The conclusion becomes very easy: another killer than Charles Lechmere is a much less likely proposition than the carman. It may well be that the bleeding stopped in minut ten (we should actually expect it to do so, given what the pathologists said) and if this was so, then another killer is of course impossible.

Then again, maybe she did bleed for fifteen minutes, in which case there is a six minute gap for another killer to have worked in. But such another killer could never be as likely a killer as Lechmere. He would instead be an altogether unlikely and unexpected killer going on what the pathologists said.

And that bings us full circle back to the frustration Jason Payne-James spoke of: we cannot rule out that unlikely and unexpected things may happen - but we CAN recognize them as being unlikely and unexpected. The likely minutes and well beyond are all occupied by Lechmere, leaving an alternative killer with only unlikely options - or no options at all if Nichols - expectedly - stopped bleeding after minute nine.

Charles Lechmere is therefore by far the likeliest killer of Polly Nichols. The blood evidence puts it beyond doubt.