Evidence of innocence

[drstrange169]

>>"just approaching Essex Wharf when, across the road he saw "something lying in front of the gateway like a tarpaulin"<<

The wool warehouse gates are just before Essex Wharf. Neil was well aware of my previous posts about the wool warehouse before he wrote his book, and is generally in more accord with me than "Christer and Ed Stow" in them.

[drstrange169]

>>And of course all the while you missing or ignoring the main gist of the idea. <<

Thanks Abby, but I'll stick with Jeff's version.

[JeffHamm]

Hi Abby Normal,

interesting Mark
oh I forgot to add earlier re your map on the Lech Triangle-I think Millwood was one of his early botched attacks and that was right near Tabram, the next victim in the series IMHO, and again inside the triangle.

Millwood lived one road south of Kelly, so her location is closer to Kelly than Tabram's, but that still doesn't make it far from Tabram either of course.

While I like your idea, I would point out, it's a method that has not been tested with regards to how well it works. It might just be something idiosyncratic to Cross/Lechmere. What I'm getting at, if doing this sort of sketching out of an offender's known anchor points to find the area those encompass, to what extent would we expect offenses to fall inside that area? Or, probably a more realistic idea, within a given distance of those borders (meaning, something on the "outside" like Eddowes and Mitre Square).

Off the top of my head, an approach like this is about looking at known travel routes really, and is using straight lines to approximate journeys between locations someone is known to frequent. The straight line approximation is to take into account one could take slightly different routes around that general bearing. So, around those straight lines one might expect a distribution of "familiarity", and so offenses would cluster along those routes, which is what people are generally arguing for.

What we don't know, though, is how tightly that clustering should be (or even if this hypothesis actually produces useful predictions - we're assuming it works, it might not, that's an empirical question). I think it's a highly testable one though. Sadly, the information set I have to work with doesn't provide me with the kind of detail that would allow me to give it a go. Generally, the research focuses on starting from crime locations to predict anchor points, rather than doing the reverse as you are, starting with anchor points to predict crime locations. That's because most researchers are looking at the problem from the point of view of the police not yet having a person of interest to investigate (so they wouldn't have anchor points to enter into the analysis). What you're suggesting is more of a "suspect evaluation", where a specific individual is being looked at to see if their known anchor points produce travel routes that describe the crime locations in space.

In a way, the routines I've been working are focused around the idea of "routes of travel", so I do think there's a lot of merit in your idea, other approaches focus on the crime locations and tend to find the crimes cluster near the anchor points themselves. And when we look at the two carmen, Paul's two known anchor points do that better than Cross/Lechmere's. And we should note, it is Paul, not Cross/Lechmere, who has a known anchor point near Hanbury Street/Kelly/Millwood, all of which are in the highest priority zone. So if we were comparing those two individuals, Paul would get the higher ranking. Remember, he shares that journey path with Cross/Lechmere (at least on this particular day).

Basically, while I think there's some neat ideas here, I would suggest caution about how strong an interference you place upon it. It's an untested method, a good idea, and one that would be worth testing, but at the moment we don't know what this sort of approach actually predicts with regards to where the crimes would be expected. It might be, for example, we would expect the crimes to be near, but not too near, those journey lines (a buffer zone around where they may be seen travelling frequently, but not too far off). Maybe most of the JtR crime locations are "too close" to these lines, rather than Eddowes being too far away. I don't know, but none of us know because we haven't actually verified the approach.

This isn't meant as anything other than to suggest caution.

- Jeff

[Mark J D]

... oh I forgot to add earlier re your map on the Lech Triangle-I think Millwood was one of his early botched attacks and that was right near Tabram, the next victim in the series IMHO, and again inside the triangle.

In principle, I'm sympathetic, bro. My worry is simply that we will eventually reach murders that Lech simply didn't do, so we need to be cautious...

In February 1888 he hadn't yet moved to Doveton Street, so he would have been walking in from James Street. Ya wanna make a map of that, squire?

M.

[MrBarnett]

If you roll it forward to 1889 and move his mother’s house to Cable Street, you capture the Pinchin Street arch - and almost the Backchurch Lane catsmeat sheds.

By 1891, Maria had moved to the Highway, her shop was on the corner of Artichoke Hill and St George Street. Was there a murder in 1891? If so, did it fall within the revised triangle?

[Mark J D]

If you roll it forward to 1889 and move his mother’s house to Cable Street, you capture the Pinchin Street arch - and almost the Backchurch Lane catsmeat sheds.

:-)

We tie him to those sheds, mate, and *we've got him*.

Scenario: That was the place to which he (perhaps as pipeman/knifeman?) ran, following Schwartz, so he could get *a better knife* after the botched blitz attack on Stride...

M.

[SuperShodan]

Hi Abby Normal,



Millwood lived one road south of Kelly, so her location is closer to Kelly than Tabram's, but that still doesn't make it far from Tabram either of course.

While I like your idea, I would point out, it's a method that has not been tested with regards to how well it works. It might just be something idiosyncratic to Cross/Lechmere. What I'm getting at, if doing this sort of sketching out of an offender's known anchor points to find the area those encompass, to what extent would we expect offenses to fall inside that area? Or, probably a more realistic idea, within a given distance of those borders (meaning, something on the "outside" like Eddowes and Mitre Square).

Off the top of my head, an approach like this is about looking at known travel routes really, and is using straight lines to approximate journeys between locations someone is known to frequent. The straight line approximation is to take into account one could take slightly different routes around that general bearing. So, around those straight lines one might expect a distribution of "familiarity", and so offenses would cluster along those routes, which is what people are generally arguing for.

What we don't know, though, is how tightly that clustering should be (or even if this hypothesis actually produces useful predictions - we're assuming it works, it might not, that's an empirical question). I think it's a highly testable one though. Sadly, the information set I have to work with doesn't provide me with the kind of detail that would allow me to give it a go. Generally, the research focuses on starting from crime locations to predict anchor points, rather than doing the reverse as you are, starting with anchor points to predict crime locations. That's because most researchers are looking at the problem from the point of view of the police not yet having a person of interest to investigate (so they wouldn't have anchor points to enter into the analysis). What you're suggesting is more of a "suspect evaluation", where a specific individual is being looked at to see if their known anchor points produce travel routes that describe the crime locations in space.

In a way, the routines I've been working are focused around the idea of "routes of travel", so I do think there's a lot of merit in your idea, other approaches focus on the crime locations and tend to find the crimes cluster near the anchor points themselves. And when we look at the two carmen, Paul's two known anchor points do that better than Cross/Lechmere's. And we should note, it is Paul, not Cross/Lechmere, who has a known anchor point near Hanbury Street/Kelly/Millwood, all of which are in the highest priority zone. So if we were comparing those two individuals, Paul would get the higher ranking. Remember, he shares that journey path with Cross/Lechmere (at least on this particular day).

Basically, while I think there's some neat ideas here, I would suggest caution about how strong an interference you place upon it. It's an untested method, a good idea, and one that would be worth testing, but at the moment we don't know what this sort of approach actually predicts with regards to where the crimes would be expected. It might be, for example, we would expect the crimes to be near, but not too near, those journey lines (a buffer zone around where they may be seen travelling frequently, but not too far off). Maybe most of the JtR crime locations are "too close" to these lines, rather than Eddowes being too far away. I don't know, but none of us know because we haven't actually verified the approach.

This isn't meant as anything other than to suggest caution.

- Jeff

Hi Jeff,


I agree about the geographical profiling and being cautious. That being said it’s interesting when you decide that Lechmere is a suspect worth looking into, and you find out that 3 of the C5 happen on routes he would likely take to work. He literally walks right past them, and around the time they were killed (yes I am aware of Chapman TOD issues).

Furthermore, we also have Chapman killed on the road he walked with Robert Paul just a week earlier. Is it just a coincidence that while the Nichols enquiry is ongoing, we have a body turn up so close to Robert Paul’s work ? Which results in Paul falling under suspicion and being arrested and questioned. Plus Chapmans killing successfully incriminated Paul and took attention of the Bucks Row enquiry.

Moving on, he 2 killed on a Saturday (his only day off) one occurs near his mothers house, practically the end of the street. Then after nearly getting caught in Duffields Yard, he makes off on the old route he would have taken to work (pre Doveton Street). Then after killing Eddowes he heads home in a direct line towards Doveton Street (based on the Apron location).

The coincidences are racking up. I don’t think we can overlook just how easily we can tie Lechmere to EVERY murder.

[rjpalmer]

My worry is simply that we will eventually reach murders that Lech simply didn't do

Good lord.

[Trevor Marriott]

Hi Trevor,

No, but he does say that 3:15 is half an hour before he found the body. And since his patrol of Winthrop would occur after he had previously patrolled past the crime scene, there's an argument for him having patrolled the crime scene area some amount of time before 3:15 (making his beat patrol time to pass the crime scene from pre-discovery to discovery a bit longer than 30 minutes). Whether or not he would have missed seeing a woman laying in the street on the previous round, though, is really the issue here, not so much the exact time of that patrol. If his previous patrol of the crime location was before 3:15, it means he patrolled more slowly than I've got him (though I've not worked out how much as I'm just thinking of this now as I type). My suspicions are, though, is that even at the speed that would suggest, he is still going to be up in the northerly part of his patrol (as currently he's quite near finishing that section that puts him out of view of the carmen), and so on the whole not much will change at that end. It might, however, influence some of the speculative stuff, like the dramatic Hollywood exit version I've shown, but all that is speculation anyway.

While I get your point that PC Neil's activities are not as well established as one would like, if we think his statements are so unreliable as to suggest his missing the body is sufficiently probable that we should start our "divergence of possibilities" at that point, then there is nothing at all we can do further, and the case becomes unresolvable since we're at a "well, if he missed it then ..." vs "and if there was nothing to miss then ...". The former, though, rules out Cross/Lechmere of course, so to test the Cross/Lechmere theory we really only need to consider the latter branch of that divergence. We certainly can't ignore it and act like things had to go along the "missed it" brank - it's just a possible branch, not a proven one after all.

- Jeff

Hi Jeff
Neither is it proven that Lechmere was the killer, neither is it proven that the police officers were all telling the truth because their individual testimony clearly shows unexplained discrepancies and ambiguities, which in my opinon certainly casts a doubt about Nicholls being killed between 3.15am-3.45am

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Mark J D]

Good lord.

In your world, that's some kind of victory, is it?

M.

[FISHY1118]

Pc Neils testimony is crucial to the case agains Lechmere because the TOD cannot firmly be etablished but his testimony is belived put the TOD between 3,15am-3,45am

But can his testimony be proved or disproved I personally belived that based on other testimony given by witnesses his testimony certainly creates a number of ambiguities.

The evidence of Pc Neil as i have continually stated has to be taken on face value as to what his movments were leading up to the body being found, and was he where he said he was and passed by the murder spot at 3.15am I have my doubts his testimony makes it unclear "I had previously seen the men at work. That would be about a quarter-past three, or half an hour before I found the body" was he with them having a cuppa with those men at 3.15am? The officer clearly had been at the slaughterhouse because he left in a hurry leaving his cape behind, but how long had he been there and if he had been there for a significant amount of time, that would have thrown his beat times out of sync so can his testimony be relied upon without question, no it cant So Nichols could have been murdered much earlier and Pc Neil was forced to lie about his movements.

So he didnt pass by the crime scene at 3.15am because he was somewher else

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Again, pure inventivness on your behalf , and now other posters have explain it in cleary detail the series of events. .P.C neil passed through bucks row at 3.15am and saw no one, and Nichols was discovered at 3.45am . She was murdered between these two times, and whats abundantly clear to me is your the only one that cant see it . [or wont]

[rjpalmer]

And it appears to have screamed innocence to Paul and Mizen.

Hmm. I'm not sure the average copper thinks anyone is immediately a screaming innocent. If Mizen did feel that way, it may have been relatively short-lived once he learned about the murder and until further facts could be gathered.

On the 'Robert Paul was the murderer' thread (or some such title), it was suggested by some that Paul specifically tried to implicate CAL by characterizing his behavior in Buck's Row as aggressive.

[FISHY1118]

You seem to have PC Thain and PC Neil mixed up. Thain doesn’t appear to be doing any patrols at all and was chatting with workmen in Winthrop Street. Since he had taken off his cape I’d suggest more than just a quick word. Thain then turned up at the murder site without his cape and had to return for it. If you are suggesting it was Neil who was chatting and Neil who left his cape you are very much mistaken.

Furthermore, PC Neil appears to have done his duties diligently - going down Bucks Row around 03.15 and 03.45 as was his duty.

It’s worth pointing out if PC Neil’s patrol had been interrupted or his beat was out of sync then it calls into question what time he found the body.

However, there is absolutely zero evidence to suggest so. I think the TOD between 03.15 and 03.45 is solid and that’s what we should work with. After all it’s based on a policeman’s testimony.

Finally some common sense

[FISHY1118]

According to Paul Begg, JtR the Facts page 46, Neil passed the slaughterhouse at 3:15am and saw Tomkins and Mumford at work. He then walked into and down Buck's Row. He did not see anything suspicious or unusual. At the same time Sgt Kirby also passed down Buck's Row. He too did not see anything to arouse his suspicions.

Had Neil been skiving one would imagine that Kirby might have noticed?

Cheers, George

[Trevor Marriott]

Again, pure inventivness on your behalf , and now other posters have explain it in cleary detail the series of events. .P.C neil passed through bucks row at 3.15am and saw no one, and Nichols was discovered at 3.45am . She was murdered between these two times, and whats abundantly clear to me is your the only one that cant see it . [or wont]

Why dont you read and digest the testimony and then engage your brain before putting pen to paper

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk