Evidence of innocence

[Trevor Marriott]

Don't get me wrong Trevor, I wasn't talking about whether their story was or wasn't actually true, just that Baxter believed it to be true because he didn't warn the jury not to believe them.

He could not do that because there was no evidence presented which would put the evidence into doubt, but we now can speculate as to the alternatives

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[drstrange169]

It's also worth remembering, Paul was questioned for a long period by the police, before he appeared at the inquest. If there were any big discrepancies between his and Cross's stories the police would have highlighted them at the inquest.

[JeffHamm]

Hi drstrange,

Hello Jeff,

I deliberately didn't say where Paul saw Cross, because that's an unknown.

I gave the position Cross said he heard Paul.




And the distance Paul would have traveled to that point.



At what part of that distance Paul saw Cross, we don't know, but as you can see it is a short distance to choose from.

Ah, thanks. I think I misunderstood your post where you said "As the map shows Cross was about 80 metres down Buck’s Row when Paul saw him." and took that to mean that Paul saw him at that 80 metre distance (i.e. that Paul was at the start position of the map "when Paul saw him", but I see now how that is not the only interpretation (as it can also mean "at what ever point Paul saw Cross, this is where Cross/Lechmere was - 80 metres down Buck's Row"). Clearly it's the latter that you intended, so thanks for that. We're on the same page now. A shame, it would be nice to know at what point Paul first takes note of Cross/Lechmere.

- Jeff

[Fisherman]

That persons identity doesn’t have to be proven though. All that is required is the possibility that such a person could have existed. Lechmere isn’t more likely than an unnamed man to have been the killer. If you admit of the possibility that another person might have been there then he’s no less likely than Lechmere to have been the killler.

For another person to equal Lechmere in likelihood as a killer, he must equal the carman on every point. We must have a proven existence on the spot at the same time as Lechmere was there, in order to get an equal nearness to the blood evidence, we must have a proven trek on his behalf that equals Lechmeres morning trek and so on. That, of course, is impossible.
What you see to be proposing is that there COULD have been somebody else at the site before Lechmere, and this somebody COULD have killed Nichols and so on. And since such a person is not impossible, he is equally likely to Lechmere to be the killer.

It all touches on philosophy more than anything else. I think the easiest thing to do is to say that there IS no such persons existence proven, and so claiming that somebody exists who equals Lechmere in culpability is simply wrong.No such person exists, nor must any suchg poerson ever have existed. It is the dreaded phantom killer we are speaking of here, nothing else. And it was you who quoted the saying about "If my aunt had bollocks, she would have been my uncle", not me ...

[Fisherman]

But your suggestion goes out the window if she was killed much earlier even before Lechmere left home

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Yes, Trevor, that is very true. If I am wrong, then I am wrong. Bravo.

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Jeff Hamm: Post #4040

Thanks Jeff, a concise and clear analysis of the 'missing time' debate.

It really is time this part of the Lechmere argument was put to bed.

[drstrange169]

>>"when Paul saw him"<<

Yes, sorry my error.

[FrankO]

It had me wondering a whole lot, and reading a whole lot more. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

Hope you (re)read some interesting things then, Christer - sorry for the inconvenience.

[JeffHamm]

Hi ABE,

Jeff Hamm: Post #4040

Thanks Jeff, a concise and clear analysis of the 'missing time' debate.

It really is time this part of the Lechmere argument was put to bed.

Thanks. It was fun to work on. I never really know how these analyses are going to turn out when I start, as there are a lot of different pieces of the puzzle to factor in. And of course, these recreations have to employ some assumed values, such as average walking speeds, and there are assumptions about the route travelled that have to be made. As such, these can't be viewed as if I'm recovering "facts", rather, this is should be viewed as an analyse of the statements we have. What we would be looking for is whether or not holes appear in the stories - does it look like what is stated cannot be true? If, for example, we were left with 5 minutes that couldn't be accounted for after completing the analyses, then this would have resulted in increased suspicion against Cross/Lechmere. In other words, there are patterns of out comes that could potentially occur that would lead to a different conclusion. However, we didn't find one of those possible outcomes, rather, we end up with everything fitting with what was given as testimony. Basically, people are where they said they were at times we would expect them to be based upon their stated activities. Obviously, this doesn't rule out the possibility that Cross/Lechmere may have lied about the time he left home. I can't address that, but to my knowledge there is nothing in the files that would form the basis of that claim, so it has no more weight than the counter speculation that he left at the time he said he left. Without some new evidence, that's not really worthy of debate as it ends up being "he could have A" vs "yah, but he could have not A".

- Jeff

[JeffHamm]

>>"when Paul saw him"<<

Yes, sorry my error.

No worries. It's the nature of language. It's almost impossible to avoid ambiguity sometimes, but they can be cleared up with a bit of to'ing and fro'ing, as we've done. And as a result I can see now how what you wrote can mean what you intended. This is a good example, though, of why we have to be careful with being overly confident about what a witness intended simply because of a single sentence (or worse, single word) they uttered. We can't "to and fro" with them to find out.

- Jeff

[Fisherman]

Herlock Sholmes:

"But absolutely nothing comes close to convicting Lechmere though Fish."

This is a common misunderstanding, and an easy enough mistake to make. Brace yourselves, because there is a long post in the pipeline. At the end of it, I will with great certainly not have swayed everybody into accepting Lechmere as the probable killer, but I WILL have made my case as best as I can, and I am fine with that.

The controversy out here has lately been about the timing issues. It is said that since Charles Lechmere likely said he left home at AROUND 3.30 (we don´t know as such that he said exactly this, but is seems reasonable that he did so), then there can be nothing nefarious about how 3.30 as such does not dovetail with him being at the murder spot at 3.45. Using the word "around" is what would absolve him.
The suggestion made out here is that there is no establishable value at all in his words and the matter should be inadmissible as evidence, if I understand correctly.

What I would like do to elucidate my standing point is to present a purely theoretical case. It goes like this:

In the East End of London, close to Tower Bridge, a woman by the name of Judy Jones is found strangled. From analyzing the cell-phone signals, we know that a Mr X, with no criminal record at all and known by his friends and neighbours as a decent enough chap, has actually been in the vicinity of the murder site at the relevant time. What can be said is that a signal has been picked up that puts him around 150 yards from the site at the approximate time of the murder.
Now, Tower Bridge is a very popular tourist landmark, and there can be little doubt that hundreds and thousands of other people would ALSO have been in the vicinity of the murder site at the relevant time.

Question: Can we use the material we have on Mr X to put him on trial for the murder of Judy Jones?
Answer: Of course not. It would be ridiculous.

New development: Three days later, another woman, Tara Knowles, is found strangled behind a shop in Bond Street. And lo and behold, among the hundreds and thousands of people we can put on the place at the relevant time using cell phone information, is Mr X. Again, we can see that he has been in place around 150 yards from the site. Together with hundreds and thousands of other people.

Now, this goes on. A hundred more women are killed. And every time, Mr X can be out in place at the relevant time, around 150 yards or so from the spot.

Suddenly, what was a totally innocent matter has grown into something that would have Mr X arrested and accused. Although he cannot be put on the exact spot at the exact time at any of the murders, and although there is no other evidence, the mere matter of fitting all the murders is an overwhelming indication that the killer has been identified.

And suddenly something that - taken on its own - does not come close to convicting Mr X, the death of Judy Jones, has suddenly become part of a puzzle with a very clear indication of guilt. A very trivial matter has been shown to carry great weight becasue it is in line with many, many other indications, all of them faint, but taken together they outweigh a Blue whale.

This is how the case against Lechmere works too. The timing aspect is part of the case, whether people like it or not. It is one of the many pieces in the puzzle that - to use the words of James Scobie - a jury would decidedly not like. Knowing that Lechmere had originally stated an undetermined area of time that worked very well with the suggestion that the body was found at close to 3.40, only to then have it altered to a finding time in the vicinity of 3.45, would not look good in the eyes of a jury at all. And weighing up the case, it could actually become one of the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that had Lechmere convicted in the end. We all know that Scobie said that there is a prima facie case that suggests guilt, and so saying that there is "nothing that comes even close to a conviction" is actually legally untrue. The claim rests on the methodology of trying to dismiss the various parts in isolation, just as we can easily dismiss the case against Mr X in the murder of Judy Jones. But we can NOT dismiss the case when looking at all the parts!
So! The timing carries weight in the context, for the reasons given above. Any prosecutor worth his salt would be critically aware of it and make the most of it.

We will move on along the timing track and have a look at a number of things linked to it that have not been discussed before. Doing so, we will once again turn to a theoretical suggestion about what the coroner could have said if he felt unsure about Lechmeres veracity. So let´s theoretically add Lechmere to the witnesses who testified on the 22nd, having been recalled together with Thomas Eade:

- Mr Cross, you told the inquest on the 3rd that you left home at around 3.30. But we have since establised that you found the body only at 3.45, and we have measured and timed the distance from your home to the murder site and found it to be a seven minute trek. How do you explain the discrepancy?

- Well, I guess Imust have left somewhat later than 3.30.

- But to arrive at the murder site at 3.45, it would require for you to leave home at around 3.38, not 3.30?

- Maybe my clock was not correct. And maybe I left later than I thought, I don´t know.

- Aha. So you have no idea when you left? It could have been 3.24? Or 3.30? Or 3.38?

- I really could not say, Sir. I´m sorry.

- I see. So, then, if you had absolutely no idea when you left home, how is it that you nevertheless knew that you were behind time after having examined the body of Mrs Nichols? That would have required no more than a minutes time, is that not correct?

- Well, maybe I did not actually know as such that I was late ...

- Then why did you claim it, Mr Cross?

If this does not show people the relevance of the timing issue, I don´t know what would. And if anybody is having problems understanding how it would look in the combined eyes of the jury, I cannot see how they reason.

A little more information about the underlying facts of the case: I took a look at the distances involved in percentage terms and found that the distance from 22 Doveton Street to the murder site would represent roughly 22 per cent of Lechmeres trek to the Eldon Street entrance of the Broad Street depot. If he DID set out at exactly 3.30 and if he DID reach the murder spot at exactly 3.45, then it would have taken him 15 minutes to cover this stretch. If he set out at exactly 3.38, it would have taken him 7 minutes - which is the approximate time it actually should have taken.

If we accept that he took 15 minutes to cover the distance, then that is 900 seconds. Staying with that tempo, and disregarding the time the examination and the conversation with Mizen took, it would take Lechmere 4100 seconds or 68,3 minutes to get from home to the Eldon Street entrance, seeing him arriving there at shortly after 4.38.
If we look at the other option, that he left home at 3.38 and got to the murder site at 3.45, we will instead get a time that is around 47 per cent of the former one, meaning that he would spend 32,1 minute on his trek, taking him to the depot at some little time past 4.02.
In both scenarios, he would be late, and that is before we add the time spent with Nichols and Mizen. I would therefore say that it is quite likely that he said at the inquest that he normally left home at 3.20 but on the murder morning he did so at around 3.30 and that he thus would have known from the outset that he was pressed for time. Certainly, the added time at the murder site and with Mizen would then be something telling him that he would likely be running truly late.

If we look at Pauls timings from the same perspective, we find that it would have taken him roughly around two minutes from his home to the murder site. That would then represent around 15 per cent of the total stretch he had to cover, and so, if he kept the same tempo throughout and if the two minute mark is correct, then he would have a trekking time to his working place of around 13 minutes and 20 seconds, putting him there at circa 3.58.20, meaning slightly ahead of 4.00, the probale time he commenced working. However, once we add the examination of Nichols and the delay with Mizen, Paul also comes close to being late.

I tend to think that Neither Paul nor Lechmere would have wanted to arrive at their respective working places at exactly 4.00, but instead a few minutes before that time, eliminating the risk of being late. Therefore, the suggestion that Lechmere may have said that he normally left home at 3.20 seems a plausible one to me, although we will never know for certain. At any rate, if he knew that he was running late, then he also knew when he had departed from home. If that departure took place at a time that would see him comfortably in time at Pickfords, the addition of the examination time and the conversation with Mizen should be easy enough to accommodate without being late. But if he knew that he had set out around ten minutes later, then there would be no doubt about how he would have been late.

This should all go to fix my precise view of the timing issue, and so I think there is nothing more to add - unless anybody has something to add that calls for me to comment on it.

[Fisherman]

Already been done here is his observations now can we put this Lechmere fiasco to bed once and for all

"I think it is certainly possible that ‘bleeding’ could go on for a period of twenty minutes, although I would make a distinction between ‘post mortem leakage of blood from the body’ and actual ‘bleeding’ that occurred during life. The flow of blood is likely to have slowed to a trickle by this time as the pressure inside the vessels would have dissipated and the volume of blood remaining available to leak out would have become very little."

"In many cases, the majority of the blood found at the scene may have seeped out of the veins. This can happen under the influence of gravity, and therefore, is not dependent on a beating heart (i.e. blood can continue to seep out for quite some time after death). As long as there is still blood throughout the body it can theoretically still leak out under gravity, so there could be a period of several minutes where blood continues to flow after an injury (including after death... it is not unusual for a body that has been dead for some time to ‘bleed’ from a knife wound when you start moving it)."

"This is likely to be minimal (almost negligible) in nature, as the majority of the blood that could come out would have done so much sooner. If a witness discovered a body that was still bleeding relatively profusely, then the injuries are likely to have been inflicted more recently than 20 minutes previously... but if the 20 minute period is critical in ruling out / in certain suspects, then I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of some continued blood loss at this time, as I think, it would be possible. (I base this on my own observations of seeing blood leak out of bodies when I have been present at murder scenes some hours after death"

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

This is mostly general remarks from Biggs, and it does not offer any answer to the question of how long she would have been likely to bleed. Which was what I asked.

[Fisherman]

I’m not disputing that the MA tells us that, Christer. After all, it was the truth and not only the MA tells us that.

Indeed it did, but it's not the conclusion of the long listing, it's what's missing from the long listing as per the DN and the Times.

The DN, for instance, carried the bit in the summing up as follows:
“She was first discovered by a carman named Cross on his way to his work. Paul, another carman, came up, and together they went to the woman. She was only just dead, if life was really extinct. Paul says he felt a slight movement of her breast, and thought she was breathing. Cross says her hand was cold, but her face was warm. Neither appears to have realised the real condition of the woman, and no injuries were noticed by them; but this, no doubt, is accounted for by the early hour of the morning and the darkness of the spot. Cross and Paul reported the circumstance to a constable at the corner of Hanbury street and Baker's row, about 300 yards distant, but in the meantime Police constable Neil discovered the body. The time at which the body was found cannot have been far from a quarter to four a.m., as it is fixed by so many independent data.”

As you can see, the sentence in bold is missing from the MA’s version and, so, the long listing you refer to above actually ended with Neil finding the body and this, albeit implicitly, introduces Neil’s timing to the table.

I can’t, for the life of me, see how Neil’s timing couldn’t, shouldn’t or wouldn’t be the 3.45 meant by Baxter in the final sentence of the DN quote. In fact, I think it’s no more than logical that Baxter, not having an estimated time of the discovery of the body given to him by Lechmere, sought to give an estimate for it himself, based on all the evidence he’d heard – including Neil’s timing and never disputing it - and comparing it to the closest timing he did have and to which he implicitly alluded at the end of the long listing.

I don’t see anything crooked about this line of thinking, but that may just be me.

Cheers,
Frank

It remains crooked to me. Neil did NOT find the body as such, Lechmere did, and so Baxter would have needed to make it clear that he suddenly changed who he spoke of. And he never did, meaning that he laid down that Lechmere was the finder and that the finding took place at 3.45 in one unbroken passage. If I was to do that kind of things as a journalist, I would be severly reprimanded by my superiors for misleading the audience. So no, it is not a train that I would embark on under any circumstances!

Swanson altered his take on things and since he did it only after the summary at the inquest, the clear implication becomes one where the collected knowledge about the timings shifted.

[Fisherman]

>>What Dusty says is that we should put more trust in the 3.55 tining because it was information given closer in time to the deed. <<

What Dusty actually wrote was we should put more trust in the "about 3:55" timing because it is a direct quote from Llewelyn, whereas all the inquests reports are journalists or editors interpretations of what Llewelyn said.

I have decided to waste as little time on Dustys ramblings as possible, but this one is just too juicy a matter for me not to comment on. Here, we have our inventive friend telling us that we should trust the 3.55 timing over the 4.00 one because it was "a direct quote from Llewellyn". So, presumably, when Llewellyn instead said at the inquest that he was called up at around 4.00, that is NOT a direct quote from the doctor? It has now morphed into journalists and editors "interpretation" of Llewellyns sworn evidence?
And how did the pre inquest words of Llewellyn magically transfer themselves onto the pages of the papers, with no journalist involved?

How does a brain work that comes up with this kind of stuff? One has to wonder!

[Fisherman]

>>And from my ”moral high ground”, I am saying it in a post to a man who has called me personally stupid...<<

I just did a word search for the word stupid on this thread, the hit I got was you replying to Trevor (post #3689).

Could you quote the exact post where you claim I called you "personally stupid" on this thread?

If not I'll take your "sorry" as a given.

"Apologies for the delay, but because of the sheer stupidity of Christers posts it's sometimes hard for a sane person to grasp what he's claiming"

So it is my POSTS that are stupid, not me. That´s a relief!

Now, should I apologize to a poster who has compared Lechmereians to cockroaches and who has called me a liar? I will have to give that some really long and hard afterthought. Once I made my decision, I´ll get back to you. It may take some time, seeing how hard the question is.

And that concludes my dealings with you for now.