Evidence of innocence

[Aethelwulf]

Have a look at how many married serial killers do away with their spouses, and you may change your mind. I agree that it is not an absolute, but it is nevertheless a rare thing.

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Probably less rare when you consider Ellen was merely a vehicle for Bury's vanity. To him, she was worth £300 (£40,000) in today's money. All he wanted was her money and what it could give him. That is a bit different from your cherry picked examples.

[Harry D]

Have a look at how many married serial killers do away with their spouses, and you may change your mind. I agree that it is not an absolute, but it is nevertheless a rare thing.

Incidentally, how many serial killers grab the first passer-by to come admire their handiwork? Is that even rarer?

[Doctored Whatsit]

Actually, the shocking thing is that Lechmere was seemingly NOT investigated. Have you read Dew on the matter, where he describes Lechmere as a rough but thouroughly honest man, whereas he paints a picture of Paul as a man trying to avoid the law?

I think that is a helpful thing to digest.

Christer, you introduced Dew into the matter, ask if his views have been read, suggest those views are a helpful thing to digest, and then say in #2050 that I shouldn't suggest you used him as evidence of something. You directed us to those comments made by Dew that Lechmere was a "thoroughly honest man" in the sentence following your claim that he was "seemingly not investigated" .

What I was saying was that from what Dew, a senior and experienced policeman actually said, we could equally surmise that he could only say what he did, if he had grounds for believing it to be true, which would mean that Lechmere had bean checked out and cleared. I merely pointed out that we could assume both from what Dew wrote if that is what we wished.

I also wrote that Dew's recollections tended to be somewhat unreliable and I would be reluctant to use him as a basis to develop any comment. This was always a very trivial point, and I think it doesn't merit the space we have given it by discussing it further.

[MrBarnett]

Hi Doc,

Of course Dew wasn’t a senior and experienced detective in 1888. He was a lowly H Div DC when Polly Nichols was killed in J Division.

50 years later he was probably relying on press clippings to support his recollections of hearsay.

Gary

[Doctored Whatsit]

Hi Doc,

Of course Dew wasn’t a senior and experienced detective in 1888. He was a lowly H Div DC when Polly Nichols was killed in J Division.

50 years later he was probably relying on press clippings to support his recollections of hearsay.

Gary

Of course I was saying that he was a senior and experienced police officer when he wrote about the matter! And of course I have said several times that his recollections are not usually reliable.

[Trevor Marriott]

If any ambiguities about his name were cleared up before the inquest, why is not his real name in the material, Trevor?

Because he must have explained the name issue at the earliest opportunity to the police and they were clearly happy for him to use the name he chose to use for whatever reason. He was entitled to use either name. Its not as if he suddenly at the inquest blurted out a name that made everyone gasp and sit up because they knew he was not being truthful if that had occurred it would have been recorded in the inquest testimony along with any other questions and his answers put to him by the coroner to clear up such an ambiguity.

You cannot prove that by giving the name he gave his intent was to mislead or impede the investigation.

I don´t think that the police can always be relied upon, and I think the police of 1888 was much less unreliable than todays unreliable police. To be frank, I´ve seen to many dumb policemen to put much faith in them.

Yes, but dumb or not so dumb, you would be the first to call them up if a crime was committed against you

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[rjpalmer]

"I´ve seen to many dumb policemen to put much faith in them."

Sorry, I can't resist: shouldn't that be toomany dumb policemen?

Walter Dew has one great advantage over everyone knocking him: he was there in 1888; those commenting on him weren't. It is a great exaggeration to say he is 'generally unreliable.' He gets far more right than he gets wrong, and there is nothing particularly 'lowly' about being a Detective Constable. He clearly had ability.

Now we are told Dew used press clippings. This is pure guesswork.

If Dew was relying on press clippings, he wouldn't have remembered Bowyer as being a youth.

As I argued on jtrforums, Dew was very likely remembering young Steve McCarthy, who was mentioned as being in the court that morning.

As the years rolled by, Bowyer and McCarthy blended into one person, or Dew forgot about Bowyer and only remembered Steve. This is how memory works--but it's not how cribbing from news reports works.

Debra Arif seems to have come to a similar conclusion.

And there was clearly something 'up' with Robert Paul--his tardy entrance into the inquest, and his griping about having to give a deposition. It all dovetails nicely with Dew remembering there was a span when Paul could not be found, and he fell under suspicion.

Dew is a useful commentator on the case--but he requires a soft hand, not the bull-in-the-china-shop approach.

[GBinOz]

Walter Dew has one great advantage over everyone knocking him: he was there in 1888; those commenting on him weren't.

Agreed. McNaughten wasn't there, and neither was, for the most part, Anderson.

Cheers, George

[harry]

In your post 2014 Fisherman,you are referring to a Prima Facia case and not a trial.That is as far as the docu goes.The one important point is the reference to rebuttal evidence.A case would succeed if there was no rebuttal.True,but that is where the docu falls down.There was plenty of rebuttal evidence.The docu simply didn't refer to it.AS others have pointed out the only evidence considered was of an accusative nature.

[JeffHamm]

Hi Trevor,

Hi Jeff
I think it is wrong for anyone to suggest that the police in 1888 were negligent in their standard procedures of both investigating suspects and witnesses and any ambiguities in witness statements Its basic common sense police procedure even in 1888. When an officer on the ground takes a witness statement in such an investigation it is then channeled to the senior officer investigating who reads it and then directs any other enquiries that should be carried out from that statement.

Swanson was brought in following the murder of Nicholls

He was freed from all other duties and given his own office at Scotland Yard from which to co-ordinate inquiries. He was given permission to see "every paper, every document, every report [and] every telegram" concerning the investigation. As subsequent murders were committed in the series Swanson remained ‘in situ’ - gaining a mass of knowledge and information about the killings.

We have many police officers from the day Swanson being but one who either gave interviews later on or penned their memoirs who mention a number of persons of interest/likely suspects. No one mentions anything about Lechmere being a suspect or anything suspicious being connected with the two names he used, which according to Fish and his small band of followers in their eyes make him a prime suspect.

I cannot believe for one moment that as a follow up enquiry he was not asked to clarify why he used two differnet names, and that he gave an explantiion which was accepted and no suspicion fell on him.

This name issue on here has been blown up out of all proportion.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

I agree completely, which is what I was getting at when I said that without evidence to contrary, we always start from the position that the police did follow standard procedures, and remained within the constraints of the contemporary laws (that's the default position, which requires evidence to overturn). Now, since I am not a legal historian, nor am I a legal scholar, or lawyer, etc, I'm do not know what the contemporary laws of the day would be that the police had to stay within. So while I would argue the default starting point is that they remained within those laws, I don't really know what the boundaries were in 1888.

But we can see in the files comments that do show the police were careful to avoid getting tunnel vision, and were always considering "what can we prove", knowing that is the criterion for a court of law. We see it in the consideration of Schwartz's statement, for example, in that they note how there is enough time for B.S. to have left the scene and for someone else to have attacked Stride. Even if they thought that unlikely, given there wouldn't have been a large time window, they couldn't prove it and so had to keep open the consideration that the person Schwartz saw, and therefore potentially could identify, was not going to be enough to secure a conviction. We see it too in their mulling over the doctor's estimate of the ToD for Chapman and how it conflicts with the witness statements, placing the ToD much later. They note how the discrepancy makes it clear something is wrong, either the doctor's statement or the eye-witnesses, but they do not dismiss either out of hand. They simply recognized that either may be correct, and so would presumably consider a lead that may only fit with one or the other (since they don't know which is right, they treat both as "possibly right").

And like you, while police procedures were not as developed as they are today (there being many years intervening to improve on investigative processes), the idea that witness statements did not need verification, or that people at crime scenes don't require their explanations examined, seems highly implausible to me. I do tend to think we're safe to presume that the people who reported the crimes were, in fact, investigated. The first step in an investigation would be to rule out the involvement of the "witness." And in 1888, all they could really do is interview more people to see if they can indeed verify a person's account of themselves - were they where they said they were at the time they said they were there - did they really have a valid innocent reason for being there - and so forth. And I can't see how the Cross/Lechmere name information would not have come up during those enquiries. If they were asking people about "Charles Cross", and nobody knew him by that name, then that would become very apparent right at the start of their questioning someone.

Of course there's no paper trail of those enquiries, and that's been the basis for the argument that the police didn't actually check up on the witness statements. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - just because we do not have the paper work doesn't mean it wasn't done. And with no evidence to guide us, we can only evaluate the two positions on their external validity (how reasonable are the two positions), and in my view it is far more reasonable to presume the police did validate witness statements and did rule out involvement by the witnesses found at the crime scene (or who placed themselves there, as would be a better description for Cross/Lechmere). Obviously, some believe it is more reasonable to believe the police accepted statements pretty much on good faith and made little to no effort to verify them, and did not investigate the people associated with the crime scene.

Like you, I see nothing in the name thing being worthy of being called support for his guilt (it's not evidence of his innocence, either, just to be clear).

- Jeff

[FrankO]

Yes, I would. Of course, if he could provide a good reason for why he left out his real and registered name in favour of his stepfathers name, that would help his cause. But overall, I would say that he had compromised himself rather badly in the eyes of the jury, not least if they were provided with the whole truth. Meaning that they were informed that he otherwise never used the name Cross in officialdom.

It can never be a good start for a man under suspicion of a crime.

I think you may not have understood what I meant, Christer, or I didn’t explain well enough. I was talking about a situation in which the police talked to Lechmere as a witness, (long) before there even could have been any question of a trail. So, just checking…

…Are you saying that, if the police would find out that his birth name was Lechmere, they would ask to explain why he’d called himself Cross and he would have given the sort of innocent explanation you think he would give, this would have turned disastrous for Lechmere?

[Dickere]

Yes, but dumb or not so dumb, you would be the first to call them up if a crime was committed against you

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Isn't this a rather pointless comment ? It's not as if you have a choice of who to call.

[Fisherman]

Probably less rare when you consider Ellen was merely a vehicle for Bury's vanity. To him, she was worth £300 (£40,000) in today's money. All he wanted was her money and what it could give him. That is a bit different from your cherry picked examples.

It wasn´t my example, it was YOU who brought Sutcliffe up, right? And let me assure you that there are numerous exaples of both types of serial killers who kill strangers but let their wives live, from Peter Kürten, who worshipped his wife and would never lay a hand on her, but was nevertheless a full-blown sadistic killer, to Pembrokeshire killer John Cooper, who abused his wife and kids for years - but who did not add any of them to his tally of five victims.

Every case is a case on it´s own, and so Bury could have been an exception, of course. What I am pointing to is exactly that, however: If he killed both his spouse and a bunch of perfect strangers, then he IS an exception. That is a simpe enough fact, and it belongs to the discussion.

[Fisherman]

Incidentally, how many serial killers grab the first passer-by to come admire their handiwork? Is that even rarer?

I don´t remember Lechmere asking Paul to "admire his handiwork", Harry? And I don´t think that Paul saw any of that handiwork at all, so it seems you are asking the wrong question here.

I think that when a serial killer is active out in the open street of a crowded metropolis, he subjects himself to a variety of risks that serial killers normally avoid. And so such a kind of killer must be ready to improvise depending on the kind of situation that arises.

As an aside, there are examples of serial killers have directed the police to their "handiwork", presumably becasue they were proud of what they did and wanted recognition for it. But that is another mechanism than the one we are talking about. We are talking about how a serial killer would be likely to try and get away from what he did scot free, something that Lechmere managed to do if I am on the money.

Does that answer your question? Or would he have run?

[Fisherman]

Christer, you introduced Dew into the matter, ask if his views have been read, suggest those views are a helpful thing to digest, and then say in #2050 that I shouldn't suggest you used him as evidence of something. You directed us to those comments made by Dew that Lechmere was a "thoroughly honest man" in the sentence following your claim that he was "seemingly not investigated" .

What I was saying was that from what Dew, a senior and experienced policeman actually said, we could equally surmise that he could only say what he did, if he had grounds for believing it to be true, which would mean that Lechmere had bean checked out and cleared. I merely pointed out that we could assume both from what Dew wrote if that is what we wished.

I also wrote that Dew's recollections tended to be somewhat unreliable and I would be reluctant to use him as a basis to develop any comment. This was always a very trivial point, and I think it doesn't merit the space we have given it by discussing it further.

The fact that there are flaws in his book is one of the reasons why I would not present his weighing up of Lechmeree and Paul as evidence. That is part of the reason why I disliked your claim that I did. I VERY clearly pointed out that there is a POSSIBILITY that his take on Lechmere helps explain how the carman was looked upon by Dews colleagues.

Just don´t misrepresent what I say, and we will be perfectly fine.