Evidence of innocence

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Was Kelly killed on a holiday?

Are you asking me?

I don't know.

I suspect the reason Stow won't say whether Lechmere killed Kelly on his way to work is that he knows he would have had to spend about two hours of his working hours mutilating her and then walk half a mile to work.

When I put the same point to Holmgren, he started suggesting alternative scenarios, including Lechmere having the day off.

Even Stow does not preclude Lechmere's having a day off.

What a coincidence - Lechmere having a day off from work on the day of the Lord Mayor's Show!

[MrBarnett]

Was Kelly killed on a holiday?

[Ally]

So the answer is, there is no specific slur for a man who dates younger woman or his partner in "crime".

[MrBarnett]

Sigh. A sugar daddy is someone who pays a woman for her favors. Try again. A slur for a man who engages in romantic relationships with a younger woman, no element of payment involved. Just getting insulted because you date someone younger than you and you're a man.

And the daddy element implies he is generally older.

Cradle-snatcher isn’t gender specific, but it is more often aimed at men.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Well, you get off lightly, Gary, if all you are falsely accused of is misogyny.

Poor old Lechmere is falsely accused of infinitely worse, and he has no right of reply from where he must be turning in his grave.

Much as I dislike bringing Hallie's comic into view again so soon [see what I did there?], I do so because Lechmere accusers are missing a powerful ally by dissing her 'sleeping rough' argument. If Polly Nichols was having forty winks in Buck's Row, when the ripper saw her and swiftly satisfied his Sleeping Beauty fetish, it would then make it plausible that Lechmere was that man, because she would indeed have looked to him from a distance like - drum roll - a tarpaulin! When he got close enough to hear the tarpaulin snoring softly, he'd have known his luck was about to change. Afterwards, he would have been able to say, from a lived experience, that when he first saw the baggage lying in the road, he took it to be a tarpaulin. Naturally he would not have added the small detail that she was alive and well at that point.

It's smart to mix truths with half truths and lies,
When you're pulling the wool over Mr Plod's eyes.

Lechmere could not have done this without Hallie's help, however. Had he seen Polly in life, looking like she was on her last legs, but walking upright if a bit unsteadily, he could not have unseen her as a human being in death, and then been able to picture what an innocent person would have seen instead, on their way to another twelve hour shift. We know Robert Paul would have preferred to give both the stranger and his tarpaulin a wide berth and not engage with either, had he not been asked over to inspect Lechmere's baggage for himself.
on
Free the Pickfords One! Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? Brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten! Is all this to be forgotten?

Love,

Cazanthony Aloysius Hancock
X

I would be careful about quoting Hancock in defence of Lechmere because, without wishing to spoil anyone's enjoyment of that episode in the event that they haven't seen it - he did change his mind and vote guilty in the end.


Whenever anyone mentions Lechmere supposedly bumping into Nichols on his way to work, I think about the murderer's real modus operandi.

He may have bumped into Chapman in Hanbury Street, but he murdered her in a back yard.

He may have encountered Stride in Berner Street, but he killed her in a dark yard, not on the pavement.

He may have met Eddowes in Church Passage, Duke Street, but he murdered her in a dark niche of the Square nearby.

He may have met Kelly in Commercial Street, but he murdered her indoors.

He met his victims in the open and then went with them somewhere darker and more secluded.

Yet we asked to believe that just once, when he was on his way to work, he bumped off someone he had just bumped into, in a dark deserted street, on his way to work.

Funnily enough, Stow mentions both Paul and Lechmere mentioning that they were getting late for work, but he doesn't think Lechmere would have been concerned that murdering and mutilating a woman on his way to work might make him late for work!

Since I have had the unenviable experience of corresponding at length with Stow, and been accused by him of ignorance and, as an alternative insult, malice, I have become aware of just how weak even he seems to think his case against Lechmere is.

Every time I viewed a documentary of his about Lechmere and the Torso Murders, I asked him where his evidence was.

Anyone can watch them and confirm for himself or herself that he doesn't provide any.

Each time, he told me to keep viewing.

When I challenged him to produce his proof about Maria's alleged bigamy, he told me to wait for a new documentary.

I asked him to provide just one piece of evidence.

He replied that I should be patient.

I asked him how Lechmere could have murdered Kelly on a holiday.

He replied that only ignorant people think that.

I asked him whether he maintains that Lechmere did work that day.

He said he doesn't know.

I pointed out that, consequently, he had some explaining to do.

He said I was 'reduced to meaningless drivel.'

I asked him why he was sure Lechmere killed Nichols on a Friday on his way to work, but wouldn't say whether he worked on the Friday on which Kelly was murdered.

He said he did not have Lechmere's work schedule.

I asked him whether he thought Lechmere murdered Chapman on his way to work.

Not sure.

I quote directly from our correspondence:

(I'm not sure whether I have permission from him to do so, but then I'm not sure he had permission to call me ignorant and malicious).


'I do suspect Lechmere killed Mary Kelly. Possibly on his way to work.'

This is after having told all the world that he had conclusive proof that Lechmere killed Nichols on his way to work.

Anyone who dares to challenge this 'fact' on one of his forums is liable to be insulted in the crudest possible ways by his supporters and he himself accuses anyone who challenges him of being ignorant, but he only 'suspects' that Lechmere killed Kelly!

Does he think that someone else may have killed Kelly?

[Ally]

Sigh. A sugar daddy is someone who pays a woman for her favors. Try again. A slur for a man who engages in romantic relationships with a younger woman, no element of payment involved. Just getting insulted because you date someone younger than you and you're a man.

[MrBarnett]

To me it seems Ma lechmere was the good one and his biological father was the jerk.
what interests me about lechs mother/father/ parents is that he apparently came from a broken home, with a strong mother/absent father and she was involved in the cats meat business.

and of course maintaining two names. one for work and dealing with police and one for friends and family and other official business.

We are pretty much on the same page, Abby.

There are other things to take into account, such as the vast gulf between how and where Maria was brought up and how and where she had to bring her children up.

Plus the risk that her bigamous marriages could have been overturned at any time while JAL was alive.

I believe that may have been why she left small town Hereford and settled in the East End.

[MrBarnett]

Isn't it ironic that there's a term for a man who has a relationship with an older woman, and a term for a woman who has relationships with younger men but there isn't a specific pejorative term for older men who have relationships with younger woman. Odd isn't it? I'm sure there's a word for that kind of mindset where if a woman does a thing that a man regularly does, all involved get slurred, where it's just seen as normal for a man to do it. I know there's got to be a word for that kind of sexist thinking...oh what is that word...

Sugar daddy?

[Ally]

To me it seems Ma lechmere was the good one and his biological father was the jerk.
what interests me about lechs mother/father/ parents is that he apparently came from a broken home, with a strong mother/absent father and she was involved in the cats meat business.

Isn't it ironic that there's a term for a man who has a relationship with an older woman, and a term for a woman who has relationships with younger men but there isn't a specific pejorative term for older men who have relationships with younger woman. Odd isn't it? I'm sure there's a word for that kind of mindset where if a woman does a thing that a man regularly does, all involved get slurred, where it's just seen as normal for a man to do it. I know there's got to be a word for that kind of sexist thinking...oh what is that word...

[Abby Normal]

To me it seems Ma lechmere was the good one and his biological father was the jerk.
what interests me about lechs mother/father/ parents is that he apparently came from a broken home, with a strong mother/absent father and she was involved in the cats meat business.

and of course maintaining two names. one for work and dealing with police and one for friends and family and other official business.

[MrBarnett]

The term is ‘toy boy’. Guess what it describes.

Let me help you out:

toy boy

noun

British: a young man who is having a romantic or sexual relationship with an older woman

[MrBarnett]

Jenny Jerome Churchill was 20 years older than her second husband, Gorge Cornwallis-West. No one called him the "boy soldier".

She was 23 years older than her third husband, Montagu Porch. No one called him a "boy toy."

The term is ‘toy boy’. Guess what it describes.

[Fiver]

If you want to take a gander at a real Victorian wild child, look up Lady Randolph Churchill, if you haven’t already. She is rumored to have had an affair with, among others, a youthful friend of her son Winston.

Jenny Jerome Churchill was 20 years older than her second husband, Gorge Cornwallis-West. No one called him the "boy soldier".

She was 23 years older than her third husband, Montagu Porch. No one called him a "boy toy."

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

I don't recall anyone calling the Lechmereans misogynists. Some have suggested they are haranguing a specific woman to 'get at' her son. That's not misogyny, but it might be a questionable technique in a criminal investigation.

Personally, I assume that Maria Lechmere and Thomas Cross’s marriage, rather than being untoward, was an ethical decision. They didn’t have to get married. They could have faked it indefinitely in a place like East London and no one would have been the wiser. Many people did. Since they involved the church, perhaps the couple genuinely assumed the long-gone John Lechmere was dead, or maybe they thought that---when it came to divorce--the law “was an ass,” and enough time had passed so it was more important to be married in the eyes of their God and in the presence of the children. Like I say, they didn’t have to be married. It’s not a very interesting biographical detail, but I suppose since Stow has few other skeletons in the Lechmerean closet to rattle, he must shake what he can out of a case of technical bigamy.

As for the difference in ages between Thomas and Maria, this is another topic of banter, but it might amount to little more than submerged male anxiety.

Queen Victoria’s favorite statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, married a woman twelve years his senior. I doubt anyone referred to him as “the boy Prime Minister.” The famous Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans (‘George Eliot’) married a man two decades her junior—a man with the interesting name John Cross.

If you want to take a gander at a real Victorian wild child, look up Lady Randolph Churchill, if you haven’t already. She is rumored to have had an affair with, among others, a youthful friend of her son Winston.

But Winston didn’t go on to become a serial-killer. Just Prime Minister.

Human behavior is complex.

Good post.

I would say EVERYTHING about the 'case' against Lechmere is evidence of questionable technique!

Everything he said or did is interpreted in such a way that he will look guilty.

For example, when he approached a policeman and told him that he was 'wanted' - according to that policeman by another policeman - at the murder site, this is explained as a ruse in order to 'get Lechmere past the policeman'.

If Lechmere had wanted to get past that policeman, he wouldn't have gone looking for him in the first place in Bakers Row and he wouldn't have approached him or engaged him in conversation.

As for the bigamy charge, it seems to be part of a character assassination of the whole family.

Anyone who challenges Stow to his face, as it were, gets the same treatment.

He has accused me of both ignorance and malice.

[rjpalmer]

Well, you get off lightly, Gary, if all you are falsely accused of is misogyny.

I don't recall anyone calling the Lechmereans misogynists. Some have suggested they are haranguing a specific woman to 'get at' her son. That's not misogyny, but it might be a questionable technique in a criminal investigation.

Personally, I assume that Maria Lechmere and Thomas Cross’s marriage, rather than being untoward, was an ethical decision. They didn’t have to get married. They could have faked it indefinitely in a place like East London and no one would have been the wiser. Many people did. Since they involved the church, perhaps the couple genuinely assumed the long-gone John Lechmere was dead, or maybe they thought that---when it came to divorce--the law “was an ass,” and enough time had passed so it was more important to be married in the eyes of their God and in the presence of the children. Like I say, they didn’t have to be married. It’s not a very interesting biographical detail, but I suppose since Stow has few other skeletons in the Lechmerean closet to rattle, he must shake what he can out of a case of technical bigamy.

As for the difference in ages between Thomas and Maria, this is another topic of banter, but it might amount to little more than submerged male anxiety.

Queen Victoria’s favorite statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, married a woman twelve years his senior. I doubt anyone referred to him as “the boy Prime Minister.” The famous Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans (‘George Eliot’) married a man two decades her junior—a man with the interesting name John Cross.

If you want to take a gander at a real Victorian wild child, look up Lady Randolph Churchill, if you haven’t already. She is rumored to have had an affair with, among others, a youthful friend of her son Winston.

But Winston didn’t go on to become a serial-killer. Just Prime Minister.

Human behavior is complex.