Evidence of innocence

[FrankO]

And if the murder had taken place outside 38, Berner Street, you’d be more inclined to include it than if it had been outside 42… :-)

Not really, Gary. But that may be because I'm on the fence regarding Stride. :-)

[rjpalmer]

BTW, she only ever had one husband.

How very legalistic of you, Gary.

She fell in love and married her second and third husbands, as far as we know, was entirely faithful to them. Under the understood morals of those around her, these marriages were entirely moral and proper.

Who are we to judge? The rest is between her and God. Calling her a bigamist merely cheapens her.

Considering the subject matter, I make no apologies for defending the women.

[caz]

Of course, the problem with after-work killing is that in Lech's case a full working day might have him clocking off around 2pm Monday to Saturday, and he'd be walking back (maybe getting a lift part of the way on a mate's cart -- if that was allowable) while the sun was high and the streets were chocker. And with the likely regular 4am start at Broad St, he's gonna have to be cleansed, moisturized and up the apples by 8pm at the latest: not for him endless nights out boozing down the local and bitching about Juwes till the wee hours. (Possible cause of even more boiling rage from Lechmere the social descender...)

Having said all that, there are too many things we don't know, and which need to be researched to the extent still possible. My time in cement involved shifts that were rotated through three-week cycles of 'early, late, spare': 'early' (and 'spare') starting at 6am and 'late' starting at 11am. Call them 'Nichols', 'Chapman' and 'Kelly', if you like. To be honest, the idea of a shifting work rota is one of the things that's always jumped out at me from the '7th-31st-8th-30th-[??]-9th' murder pattern (and I'd sure like to know how Lechmere then got to Bradford to butcher poor little John Gill on a Saturday 29th...).

The various prior-to-work 'issues' you list can all be fitted into imagined arrangements and procedures; but none of those currently have actual knowledge they can be pinned to, so they're best kept out of an open forum dripping with hostility.

Bests,

M.

Your time in cement presumably gave you insight into the mind of the hardened criminal, Mark.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I love your turns of phrase, by the way. I trust they will not be wasted here, trying to get Lech's neck stretched.

If you think the Lechmere threads are 'dripping with hostility' I can only assume you haven't checked out some of the more 'heated debates' elsewhere, for example on the events in Berner Street. Lechmere theorists are treated with kid gloves by comparison.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

hi rj
crow is about a normal witness as you could find. comes forth later to say he saw someone who he thought sleeping on the landing and didnt do anything because it was common. He had no reason to come forward if he was the killer, no one saw him there-- he was just trying to be helpful.
However, as someone who was near the body close to TOD, im sure todays police would have checked him out thoroughly.

fyi-CB entry on him says he was still alive in 1901.

Er, I suspect RJ was being ironic, to show how easily someone can be fingered for a series of murders because of his cameo role in one case.

But I could be wrong.

I took his reference to writing a 'novel' as a clue.

[caz]

Carmen for Pickford's typically worked 14 to 18 hour shifts. It was one of their complaints when they considered going on strike in 1891. So Lechmere typically would have gotten off work between 6pm and 10pm.

It's a wonder he had time to fart, let alone father all those babies at night, after working all hours God sends, then slurping down a quick cuppa with his 3am breakfast cereal, before indulging in some more serial murder and mutilation on his way to begin again the daily grind.

He'd have been better off in cement, watching everyone around him on the treadmill.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

If people bled out at the rate you claim, PC Neil is a far better suspect than Charles Lechmere. You asked some vague questions of some medical men, interpreted the response as you wanted, and ignored them saying we don't know how long a body bleeds after death.

In the "documentary", Scobie said "The timings really hurt him because she could have been very very recently fatally killed..."

Please tell me those were not Scobie's actual words, Fiver.

I remember a friend of mine was once told about someone having a fatal accident, and before he managed to engage his brain he asked: "Was it serious?" Boy was his face red!

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

RJ uses the same sort geographical evidence against Crow that you use against Lechmere. Glad so see you belatedly admitting that living in the area gives us "thousands and thousands of suspects". Your refutation of RJ is a systematic dismantling of your own case.

But Christer will never see it that way.

The outdoor victims were mostly left where they were killed and very quickly discovered, because of those same thousands and thousands of people - male and female - who lived and worked in the vicinity of each murder.

Some poor blighter had to be the first person to stumble across one of the recently killed victims while going about his or her legitimate business, and it's only surprising there were not more cases where the second person to arrive at the scene did so before the first had had time to assess what might have happened. The fact that we know both Lechmere and Paul had legitimate reasons for walking along Buck's Row at that particular time of the morning makes it more likely in this case that whoever had found Nichols on their way to the day job would soon have been joined by the next worker doing the same.

It could so easily have been Paul who got there first, so it's only sod's law that gave Charlie Cross the shorter straw, and the Lechmerian should be truly thankful he is not a Pauline instead.

Or should that be ta, Pauline?

Love,

Caz
X

[Harry D]

There is also the fact that there has not in the history of crime been two serial killers and eviscerators working in the same geographical area and time, and so your decision to doubt Monro to some degree is a very wise one.

Could there be a correlation between the Pinchin St torso and Alice McKenzie being relatively 'tame' murders compared to their predecessors?

[caz]

Police would know the killer was at the place the rag was found. They would have no idea what direction the killer continued after that. They would have no idea what distance the killer traveled after dropping the rag. They would have no idea if the rag was accidentally dropped on killer's way home or deliberately dropped to make the police waste time looking in the wrong direction.

All the police would know was that the killer was at the place the rag was found. And so they would ask the people nearby, in hopes some of them saw something.

They wouldn't draw imaginary lines to nowhere.

Don't forget that Trevor Marriott, who was once a policeman, doesn't believe the killer was ever at the place where the rag was found, or that he went to Mitre Square from Berner Street. So he doesn't have a sodding clue what route the killer took to Mitre Square, or where he may have been heading when he left.

I have never understood why rejecting every potential clue is good practice, in a series of unsolved murders where clues are rarer than hens' teeth to begin with.

But I suppose it's different for those happy few who already imagine they have the solution.

Love,

Caz
X

[MrBarnett]

How very legalistic of you, Gary.

She fell in love and married her second and third husbands, as far as we know, was entirely faithful to them. Under the understood morals of those around her, these marriages were entirely moral and proper.

Who are we to judge? The rest is between her and God. Calling her a bigamist merely cheapens her.

Considering the subject matter, I make no apologies for defending the women.

How very chivalrous of you.

‘She fell in love…’ You know that for a fact?

‘…as far as we know [she] was entirely faithful to them.’ We don’t know anything much at all about her life, so that’s a meaningless statement.

‘Under the understood morals of those around her, these marriages were entirely moral and proper.’ She set up home with Cross in Tiger Bay, a notorious red light District where her background was unknown. I wonder, if ‘those around her’ had been her family and the reverend Archer Clive in Hereford they would have judged her any differently from the prostitutes, pimps and dirt-poor Eastenders of Tiger Bay?

Why did she and Cross leave Hereford and head for the East End? The man who administered her estate was a local JP who had a hand in approving police jobs. Perhaps she had an adventurous streak and thought it might be fun to bring her kids up in Tiger Bay and was so besotted with her toy boy ‘husband’ that the thought of him wrestling with prostitutes on a daily basis didn’t phase her in the least.

It’s a story worthy of Mills and Boon.

[Mark J D]

Could there be a correlation between the Pinchin St torso and Alice McKenzie being relatively 'tame' murders compared to their predecessors?

You mean, as in the perpetrator suffering from some kind of untreatable medical condition or ailment that entailed a measure of atrophic decline and loss of function? <*wink*...>

M.

[Mark J D]

It’s a story worthy of Mills and Boon.

It's also highly indicative, if I may shyly say so, of the way some people have, in essence, anointed the Lechmeres 'Family of the Year, Every Year'. Just as we see a psychology of 'suspect selection' (starting, historically, with the 'incoming Jew' and the 'foreign sailor'...), so do we also see a modern psychology of 'suspect rejection' -- with Lechmere officially burnished as the paragon paterfamilias dedicated to hard work and self-reliance in an uncaring age, and seen as now being *dumped upon* by accusers who couldn't work half the hours or sire half the brood...) Here and elsewhere, I've seen things written in supposed defence of Lechmere's innocence which, in their combination of topical rage and obsessional persistence, point to a bizarrely personal investment in an idealised image of a man, dead these 101 years, whom no person living ever met. And now of the mother, too.

M.

[Fiver]

What annoys me a bit is how in the Pinchin Street case it was said that a murder had taken place in Backchurch Street, and then the victim was found in adjacent Pinchin Street instead. And the Whitehall torso was advertised as a murder on the Embankment.
Why not nail the addresses if they were known in advance?

The railway arch appear to have been at Backchurch Lane and Pinchon Street, so it's hardly surprising that some sources referred to Backchurch while others referrred to Pinchin. It is probably the arch that Israel Schwartz claims to have run to to escape Pipesmoking Man.

[Fiver]

BTW, she only ever had one husband.

Ma Lechmere had three husbands. The later marriages might have been bigamous, but they still happened.

[Fiver]

Then you should ask yourself which of the two series got most attention and publicity, should you not?

The Ripper series got more attention because of the "Dear Boss", "Saucy Jack", and "From Hell Letters".

If the Torso Killer wanted more attention, then writing a a letter would have been the most effective way to do so and a lot less work than sawing up a body and carting around corpse bits.