Evidence of innocence

[MrBarnett]

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.

Obviously, I was just echoing Herlock’s phraseology. Lechmere’s behaviour resulted in his carrying on his merry way to work. If he was guilty and he’d legged it away from the body, drawing Paul’s attention to it, and potentially running into a PC would he have been unquestionably safer?

[FISHY1118]

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

So give us''your'' time you think she was killed .

[MrBarnett]

How could he have seen them at work when their work was inside the slaughterhouse buildings?

[FISHY1118]

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

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

I read and quote testimony , i dont invent it .

[JeffHamm]

Hi Trevor,

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

Sure, I get your point that it is important to consider the possibility she was killed before 3:15 remains open. But you would agree that is also possible that she was killed between 3:13 and 3:45 I would think. I don't think you're suggesting that you've proven she wasn't killed in that time range, only arguing that it isn't proven she was. Correct?

- Jeff

[SuperShodan]

So give us''your'' time you think she was killed .

Maybe Trevor’s suspect Carl Feigenbaum sailed his ship up Bucks Row and ran her over ?

[Herlock Sholmes]

And if I ever need a definition of 'desperation', it will be a tale of how someone fought a measurement of geographical distance by citing a man who stuck his hand in the guts of a corpse and said how warm it all felt, and a woman who said a cadaver looked like someone she saw in the street but didn't pay attention to since there were often women there...

You wanna play those flat-earther games, be my bloody guest. *Things have moved on*.

M.

You appear to get a little angry when challenged for some strange reason. I just raised the issue of a man hearing movement in the yard after the doctor estimated that Chapman was already dead. And how a man who as far as we know wasn’t an idiot or blind sat on a step and said with a 100% certainty that there was no body there and that he couldn’t possibly have missed one had it been there.

Not flat earth games. Simple alternate possibilities. It’s instructive to see how some who support a particular theory constantly seek to make possibles into definites and estimates in specifics. If anything raises my suspicions it’s over confidence. It smacks of wish thinking and shoehorning.

[Herlock Sholmes]

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.

It’s irrelevant. You can’t prove he was at any site at any time. Is there some kind of serial killers rule book that I’m unaware of which say “killers must at all times commit murders near to a site of personal relevance?” What are we saying? That if Lech had been questioned near a crime scene at 3am he would have said “yes I was just paying a visit to my mom?”

This was a small area. I bet if you looked into Robert Paul’s life you’d probably find that he had a relation near to a site or two and a good friend near another and an ex-girlfriend near another. Over a concentrated area these things happen. They only become potentially relevant if you could prove that he killed Nichols and that ship has sailed I’m afraid.

[Trevor Marriott]

So give us''your'' time you think she was killed .

The actual time of death cannot be established and the only evidence as recorded to give any indication comes from wait for it a police officer who said he passed by the crime scene at 3.15am and he didnt see the body.

So the question that has to be asked is did he pass by the crime scene at 3.15am and didnt notice the body, or the body was there and he thought as did Lechmere that the body was a tarpaulin and took no notice

Or did he not pass by as he testified and Nicholls was murdered sometime between 2.30am-3.45am which is my guess.

Nichols was clearly out touting for business and I doubt she would have been doing that in a quiet street like Bucks Row, that being said where would she have gone where she was more likley to find business at that late hour, I guess the Whitechapel Road

Now for those who postulate Lechmere as the killer I would suggest that there would not have been enough time for him to leave his house and walk to The Whitechapel Road and look for a victim and then walk with that victim to Bucks Row and then kill her

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[JeffHamm]

Hi SS,

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).

I think we should be careful. While I like Abby's idea in principal, it's not actually a proven "geographical profile" method (I dislike that term actually, I prefer spatial analysis of crime locations", but that's wordy, less marketable, and doesn't have the glitz factor that makes people think it's magic), it's an interesting idea that could be tested to see if it is a useful method. But at the moment, it's unknown because there would be a lot of work that has to be done to test it out to see what these "routes" predict in terms of crime locations.

Look, let's pretend we did that. We had a bunch of offenders, for whom we know their collection of anchor points, and we knew the locations of their offenses. We might find that the offenses tend to cluster near an anchor point, but rather than being distributed as a circle around those locations, they tend to be more elliptically distributed, with the long axis of that ellipse corresponding to their travel route, and the anchor point closer to the far end of the ellipse.

If that's what we found, well, that doesn't fit Cross/Lechmere.

Or, we might find that the offenses tend to be more midway between two anchor points, and that would be more in line with what we have (at least for Chapman and Kelly and Nichols).

Or, we might find there is no relationship with those travel routes at all.

You are presuming we would find the 2nd pattern. I'm just pointing out there are lots of ways it could turn out, and just suggested one idea about how it could "work" but not lead to support for Cross/Lechmere but would go against him, and another idea where it would tell us nothing either way.

I don't know how it would turn out because, again, it's not a tested method. I'm not willing to draw inferences without actually knowing if those inferences are even valid. I know it has a great "common sense" feel to it, but having done research for a long time, it's a well known fact that common sense is what we think when we don't actually know how things work.

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.

What we don't know is if Cross/Lechmere normally walked that route though. If he typically went a different way, and on this occasion simply accompanied Paul and they chatted about their common experience, then he might not have travelled Hanbury again. I don't know, we don't have that information, and I think we need to keep that in mind. Also, as you say, the ToD for Chapman is an issue that creates problems for Cross/Lechmere as her killer if she was killed in line with the witness testimony. I know that's debated, but it is another point in the C/L case that requires an unresolved issue to turn out a particular way. Every time that is required, it lowers the probability that the theory is correct. It depends upon a certain pattern of outcomes that could go either way.

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).

If it was him.

First, it is highly debated as to whether or not Stride is part of the JtR series. So if she's not, that makes her location irrelevant in being close to his mother's, and would also be a demonstration of how coincidences need to be considered.

Second, if she is, then the fact he flees away from Doveton street after killing Stride is hard to explain. It would be far easier to simply cut north up to Whitechappel and head back home after fleeing Berner Street. Why is he going west, away from Doveton street in the first place? That points against C/L being involved by the same argument you suggest the apron's position relative to Mitre Square points to him being involved.

And the location of the apron, while yes, one could see how that might be at one end of a route to Doveton, it's also a route to Commercial, where one could turn north, right back towards the area indicated by the established spatial analysis routines (ones that are known to be better than chance because they've been through the ringer of testing - they're by no means perfect, but they are worth a look). In some ways, I think the routines suggest the "Bethnal Green Botherer" is someone who might deserve more consideration. He's up towards that area, and the "hot spot" could reflect a pub, or how he comes into Whitechappel from further north, if he's a commuter. Given we only have 5 crime locations, we probably don't have a very good estimate of the offenders true range. We'll still have useful information, but we are at the low end in terms of what is required for this type of thing.

Finally, the time the apron was desposited at GS is not well established. There is some suggestion that it didn't get placed there until about an hour after the murder. If that is the case, it works against C/L as it would suggest JtR had a place to go very near that location (which, as you may notice, is consistent with the spatial analysis I've shown).

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

Well, Abby's route analysis, since you're using that, ties Paul to Nichols, Chapman, and Kelly just as well as it ties Cross/Lechmere to those 3. We don't have as much information about Paul, so we can't say for sure he doesn't have an anchor point that would tie him to either Stride or Eddowes as well. All he needs is another anchor point that ties him to one of those two, and he's as good a fit as Cross/Lechmere on that basis. And he's a better match to the tested spatial methods I've shown.

So, for one or the other the coincidences are racking up. As such, are those coincidences really as rare as you think they are? They're happening for the only other witness from Buck's Row after all.

- Jeff

P.S. Please don't come away with the impression that I'm suggesting the spatial analysis I've shown means JtR HAD to live in that area. There's a good probability that he has an association with it, but it is not such a high probability that this should be viewed as definitive. It just means it adds some weight for that idea over other ideas, but not to the point where the alternative is out of the question. it doesn't work that way.

And if well tested analyses don't work that way, then untested analyses, whose pattern of results we don't even know, have to be viewed with even more caution. That's really important to keep in mind. It's too easy to get excited by things and get ahead of ourselves.

[FISHY1118]

Ok lets work on that shall we , Nicoles last seen alive at 2.30am , 15 mins to gets to murder, spot dead at 2.50 am . option 1 , Nobody sees the body till paul and lech at 3.45am , [ if neil is wrong or lied ] lets take him out of the picture for a 1 min . Nichols now lays dead for 55mins with out discovery, is that what you think ?. Because thats an awful long time laying dead with all them police walking the beat that morning to believe this would be the case . Or option 2, P.C NEIL walks through bucks row at 3.15am ,see nothing , body found at 3.45am , doctor says at roughly at 4.00am ''death not more than 30 mins'' . t.o.d 3.30 am . Option 2 is for obvious reasons is far and away the better of the two . . out of 100 people how many would say 1 ?:

[JeffHamm]

Hi Trevor,

The actual time of death cannot be established and the only evidence as recorded to give any indication comes from wait for it a police officer who said he passed by the crime scene at 3.15am and he didnt see the body.

So the question that has to be asked is did he pass by the crime scene at 3.15am and didnt notice the body, or the body was there and he thought as did Lechmere that the body was a tarpaulin and took no notice

Or did he not pass by as he testified and Nicholls was murdered sometime between 2.30am-3.45am which is my guess.

Ah, that's what I thought you were saying, that she could have been killed between 3:15 and 3:45, but that earlier cannot be dismissed as well.

Nichols was clearly out touting for business and I doubt she would have been doing that in a quiet street like Bucks Row, that being said where would she have gone where she was more likley to find business at that late hour, I guess the Whitechapel Road

Now for those who postulate Lechmere as the killer I would suggest that there would not have been enough time for him to leave his house and walk to The Whitechapel Road and look for a victim and then walk with that victim to Bucks Row and then kill her

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

And I agree with that assessment as well. It seems to me most probable she's soliciting along Whitechapel (it was known for that), and it seems improbable that C/L would have time to find her if he had to go there to seek a victim. The C/L theory requires, I think, that he meet Nichols in Buck's Row itself. And she cannot be placed there prior to her murder.

Her last known sighting, however, means she could have been elsewhere too, perhaps up on the east end of Hanbury Street (just to pick a location at random; I don't know if that area was a common area for soliciting and if it wasn't, it's not a good specific example but it still illustrates my point), and she may have met her killer there. We just don't know.

[Abby Normal]

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

thanks jeff
your the master at this sort of thing so i appreciate your insight.

[GBinOz]

Not quite. I took a line from the body to east corner of the gateway, and found the point on that line that would put him in the middle of the street (the idea is that he starts walking diagonally towards what he's seen. And that point, in the middle of the street, is 12m from the body, the wool warehouse would be 24 m. So if he notices the "shape" at 24m, I could see him working out what it was at 12m. But that's the question, isn't it?


Nice to see some recreation ideas being tested. Since we don't know all the conditions of the day, would probably have to do a bunch of these to get an idea of how variable things can be though (including different "observers", as we don't know if your night vision and Cross/Lechmere's night vision are similar or not, etc).

One question though, if the light you left on is in front of you at all, that's going to severely limit your ability to see the barrow even if the light is well above you and off to the side. If that's the arrangement, this sounds more like the situation that PC Harvey would have been in when he patrolled Church Passage and explains how he could have missed seeing JtR and Eddowes. You may get a very different result if your light source is behind you (and give yourself some time for your eyes to adjust too, of course, as anyone involved at the time would have had).

Anyway, in my view, these sorts of things are what we should be doing more of. And if people do try setting things up, it is really helpful to outline what the set up is, and the more details you can provide with exact positions (and even, if possible, how bright the lights are with a light meter, etc) then that really helps everyone know what was done. It's hard to understand results if one doesn't fully understand what they are the result of, after all. That's our problem with the case information; we don't really know all the details from 1888. We can at least work out all the details of things we do ourselves.

- Jeff

Hi Jeff,

"That's our problem with the case information; we don't really know all the details from 1888."

I agree. We are trying to solve an equation with too many variables. But the experience of my recreation tells me that the details and variables are insignificant. Given that the primary evidence is that it was too dark to see a cut throat at less than a metre, the prospect of being able to determine that there is a shape on the ground that is a woman at a distance of 12 metres is zero. I believe that anyone who conducts even this basic experiment will see that the conclusion is overwhelming. Examining details would be somewhat akin to experimenting with the location of the deck chairs on the Titanic to see if that would have affected the sinking.

Best regards, George

[JeffHamm]

Obviously, I was just echoing Herlock’s phraseology. Lechmere’s behaviour resulted in his carrying on his merry way to work. If he was guilty and he’d legged it away from the body, drawing Paul’s attention to it, and potentially running into a PC would he have been unquestionably safer?

Yes, he would have been unquestionably safer. It's not far to Whitechapel, and as Baxter points out, he would vanish into the people there. He would also be able to claim he's on his way to work as he's heading in the right direction. Moreover, as we see, though he wouldn't know, the first things additional police at the scene did was 1) go for the doctor and 2) go fetch the ambulance. We don't know how long it took before the police start searching the area for her killer, but it looks like at least 15 minutes or more pass during which we know a search has not yet begun. Cross/Lechmere is, therefore, at work by 4:00 apparently before a search even begins, and that's without him waiting for Paul, checking the body, and speaking with PC Mizen.

If he flees, then he's not going to been seen as anything other than a fleeing figure in the dark, if even that (the C/L is guilty theory seems to require the area to be very dark and Paul can't see him move away from the body after all). And at the earliest time a search might begin, he's almost a mile away, at work, like 1000s of other men. How risky is that compared to sticking around and making sure someone gets a good look at you after possibly seeing you crouched over the body? How is he to know what Paul has seen? Turn away and get out of there is absolutely the safer option.

He's got 120 feet as a head start, and he'll run, while Paul will be walking. He will be on Whitechappel before Paul reaches the body, and even then there's a chance Paul won't notice it (remember, it's so dark Paul can't see C/L move away; even C/L indicates it's not noticeable as a body on the far side of the street), or at least, won't check it out. Paul only examines the body because C/L gets him involved. Of course, if in this fantasy world of fleeing C/L (yes, I'm engaging in fantasy here), Paul does check out the body, given he appears to suggest propping her up, without C/L there to refuse to help, maybe he would have noted her head was almost off. Sure, at that point, after C/L is long gone, an alarm would no doubt get raised. And he would have blood on his hands he has to explain probably.

But of course, C/L didn't take the obviously safer option for a guilty person. And that, I think, is important information. So maybe engaging in fantasy is not completely pointless. It's certainly fun to be able to tell a story without having to be constrained by evidence though.

- Jeff