A new critique of the Cross/Lechmere theory from Stewart Evans

[Fisherman]

And once again, if the police were so interested in what he had to say, and so convinced that his information needed to be presented on the 3:rd, that they judged it necessary to suss his address out and then raid him "in the middle of the night" on the 2:nd - then why on earth did he NOT take the stand that day...? It was the day that Mizen and Lechmere witnessed, so his testimony would have belonged to that part of the inquest.
The suggestion is totally preposterous.

The best,
Fisherman

[Lechmere]

There seems to be a desperation to reinterpret Paul's words in the strangest ways.
It is totally impossible for Paul to have been summonsed for 3rd September.
At some date after 3rd he was raided in the middle of the night and questioned the next day, so he missed a day's work. All we can say is that logically he was not raided on a Saturday night.
I would also propose that it would have been after 8th as I don't think the police would have shown the urgency to find him before that date.
Then he was summonsed. Once.
Then he had to attend on 2 days.
The first must have been 17th September. A Monday.
The second can only have been 22nd September - the final day which was a Saturday but also a workday.

Logically he must have been raided on an evening between 9th to 14th September.

[Fisherman]

Wickerman: Its unfortunate that we have no clearer detail, for instance which 'two days' are we supposed to think he attended the inquest, when we know he only appeared once.
So perhaps there is some confusion here.

Paul appeared at the Inquest on Mon. Sept 17th, courtesy of the Police no doubt. He must also have been summoned earlier (according to Hunter?), possibly on the Mon. Sept. 3rd, along with Cross.
Therefore Paul was summoned twice, in total.

Because he missed a days work when he appeared on the 17th, then he must have been hauled in by police on the Sunday, kept overnight at her majesty's pleasure, and escorted to the Inquest by police on the Monday morning.
Therefore, he missed one days work (17th), and had been summoned twice (3rd/17th).

Jon, Paul´s name would not have been in the police´s possesion from the outset. Lechmere did not know who he was.
He appeared under his name in a paper interview on the 2:nd, an interview that arguably made Lechmere go to the police.

So, on the 2:nd of September , the police potentially had the name Robert Paul. But they did not believe in what he claimed in the interview, as shown by the press conference spoken of earlier. It was Lechmere´s appearance at the cop shop that made them realize that Paul told a true story.

Now, in order for them to summons Paul to the 3:rd of September inquest day, are you suggesting that they raided his house on the night leading up to that date? Surely not.

Instead they appealed for him to come forward - as per Dew, who tells us that the police appealed repeatedly for him to come forward. That means they did so for a number of days, meaning that the 3:rd of september drifted by with no Paul in sight.

What Paul says in his interview is "he was fetched up in the middle of the night by the police, and was obliged to lose a day's work the next day, for which he got nothing. He was then summoned to give evidence at the inquest on two different days."

He was THEN summoned. And how could he be summoned to give evidence on the 3:rd if this day had already passed? For "the next day" to work in your scenario, that next day would be the 3:rd. And how would the police know where Paul lived on the night of the 2:nd? Why would they fetch him up in the middle of the night? And - not least - if they DID do this, why don´t we have him testifying on the 3:rd...?

No, he must have been fetched up at a day later in the schedule. And if he lost one days work the next day because of that, due to a requested inquest attendance, then that would have happened on the night of September 16:th, whereupon he lost the next day´s job.

However, which would be the two further inquest days if that was the case? It does not pan out.

Therefore, we can easily conclude that, just as Paul says, the day after he was fetched up in the middle of the night, was no inquest day. It was a day during which he would have been interrogated. After that, he was summoned to the two remaining inquest days, out of which he appeared on the first, but was requested to attend the other day too, should the need arise to put any further questions to him. But only Eade was requested to reappear on that day, whereupon the coroner summed the case up.

All the best,
Fisherman

[Simon Wood]

Hi All,

Robert Paul [Pawle] dramatically changing his story between Friday 31st August and Monday 17th September could have had something to do with his nocturnal visit from London's Finest.

Regards,

Simon

[Wickerman]

As for your second point, read the salient part of Paul’s interview
‘he was fetched up in the middle of the night by the police, and was obliged to lose a day's work the next day, for which he got nothing. He was then summoned to give evidence at the inquest on two different days’.

Paul did not lose the next day’s work because he went to the inquest. He went to the inquest on two totally separate days!

Its unfortunate that we have no clearer detail, for instance which 'two days' are we supposed to think he attended the inquest, when we know he only appeared once.
So perhaps there is some confusion here.

Paul appeared at the Inquest on Mon. Sept 17th, courtesy of the Police no doubt. He must also have been summoned earlier (according to Hunter?), possibly on the Mon. Sept. 3rd, along with Cross.
Therefore Paul was summoned twice, in total.

Because he missed a days work when he appeared on the 17th, then he must have been hauled in by police on the Sunday, kept overnight at her majesty's pleasure, and escorted to the Inquest by police on the Monday morning.
Therefore, he missed one days work (17th), and had been summoned twice (3rd/17th).

It would be nice if you could find an alternate newspaper article with a little more detail.

[Lechmere]

Robert
I quite agree that part of the police motivation for treating him badly would have been because he had slagged them off - they are know for that, dare I say. But I can't see that as the whole picture.
That's probably why they so readily thought him capable of murder also.
I think that's why they made him attend the inquest as a bit of extra punishment when they found that he was innocent.

[Robert]

Lechmere, I think the police could have been forgiven for feeling a bit miffed at Paul, and not timing their questioning to suit his work arrangements. Here was a man who took two opportunities to snipe at the police, first in an interview of August 31st, reported in Lloyd's of Sept 2nd, and then in an interview of Sept 1st in which he actually comments on Day One of the inquest, again reported in Lloyd's of Sept 2nd - all this without even coming forward to give the police his story or making himself available to give inquest evidence.

[Lechmere]

Robert – I forgot to add…
I don’t think it’s very surprising that Paul didn’t highlight the fact that he had been (or may have been) accused of murder.
He wasn’t Tumblety with numerous Gross Indecency charges to hide up!

Scott
I don’t think Paul would ever have thought that Lechmere was trying to implicate him in the Chapman murder.

Wickerman

Forgive me for assuming that Paul was in bed in the middle of the night.
Perhaps he was not.
Perhaps he was sitting in his favourite arm chair reading a good book.
It doesn’t really matter.
I think the expression ‘fetched up in the middle of the night’ carries with it rather more than a polite knock at a time when it was assumed the gentle householder might be in doors.

As for your second point, read the salient part of Paul’s interview
‘he was fetched up in the middle of the night by the police, and was obliged to lose a day's work the next day, for which he got nothing. He was then summoned to give evidence at the inquest on two different days’.

Paul did not lose the next day’s work because he went to the inquest. He went to the inquest on two totally separate days!

[Wickerman]

The police fetched him up in the middle of the night.
They had been looking for him (as evidenced by Dew).
In other words they dragged him out of bed. They raided him.

You don't know if he was in bed.
The night is the best time to be sure to find someone at home.

He lost the next day’s work. Why?

Because he appeared at the Inquest instead of going to work.

[Lechmere]

Robert
With reference to this passage in your last post:
‘…you mentioned Stewart's idea that the details of the police investigation into Cross had got lost. You said that was unlikely, bearing in mind all the records that had survived.’

That is a bit misleading.
I made the case that even though much of the official record is missing, we can join up the dots fairly effectively for the first part of the investigation (the period in which Lechmere would plausibly have been investigated) based on the extant records (e.g. but not exclusively the lengthy summary reports by Abberline and Swanson of 19th September and 19th October 1888 respectively).

The most glaring reason for believing that Lechmere was not investigated is that Swanson referred to him as Cross with no explanation.
Swanson was at pains to detail where special attention was given – e.g. to the three butchers, and to Pizer. He actually wrote (or submitted anyway) three lengthy reports on 19th October – all to the Home Office.
The second dealt with the Chapman murder. In it Swanson went into some detail about how the investigation was being conducted and covered how John Richardson was given the once over, it mentioned three medical students, and how special attention was being given to Lodging Houses.
The third concerned the ‘double event’. These reports were written to satisfy the Home Office – to make it clear that no stone had been left unturned.
If he had extra information about Lechmere that might come out then I am sure Swanson would have included it. Furthermore I can think of no instance where a known alternative name was not given in an internal Police report about the Whitechapel Murders (cue quick search).

In the extant police files Paul features at the same moments as Lechmere (in the guise of Cross) and without any suspicion on his character (the above mentioned Abberline and Swanson reports).

But there are also press reports – which should obviously be read with caution when they refer to how the police investigation was being conducted.
But the one where we get the information about Paul comes from Paul himself. And it is confirmed in outline in Dew’s memoirs.
Dew did not mention that Lechmere was a strange fellow who didn’t want his name known or anything of the sort.

We have no source of any description to suggest Lechmere was questioned, unlike numerous people who feature throughout this series. Against that we have the glaring anomaly of his unchallenged name swap.

The only reason for thinking that Lechmere was questioned belongs to the old cudda-wudda-shudda school of thought. But we know the police made numerous glaring errors in the first stages of the Nichols enquiry – they were human and often did not do what we might now think they should have done. They still don’t.

I prefer to go with the record we have rather than the record we do not have. There is no reason to suppose Lechmere was closely question beyond unsupported supposition. There are things to back up the opposite stance.

[Scott Nelson]

Edward,

At what point do you think Paul suspected Cross was trying to implicate him in the Chapman murder, if he ever did?

[Robert]

Lechmere, I don't know why Paul was kept in all day. Maybe he got stroppy with the police when they knocked him up in the night, and they kept him hanging around to pay him back. After all, he hadn't been very complimentary about the police. At any rate, he didn't complain that the police actually accused him of the murder, although he seems to have complained about everything else.

Cross tells the story of how Paul had found him close to the body. He doesn't try to make out that he, Cross, found Paul close to the body. So how on earth Cross could have hoped to get the police to believe that Paul committed the murder, left the body, and then returned to it, is beyond my powers of comprehension, especially as Cross does not seem to have been an idiot, or insane, or on drugs.

The reason I referred to your post 85 is that in that post you mentioned Stewart's idea that the details of the police investigation into Cross had got lost. You said that was unlikely, bearing in mind all the records that had survived. That's why I asked you if you could direct me to a police reference to Paul's interrogation and exoneration. So far you have only mentioned the newspaper interview with Paul. You see, if you are right and the police did thoroughly investigate Paul, and the police record of that has gone missing, then so could the police record of their investigation of Cross.

[Lechmere]

Hunter

This is the relevant passage from Lloyds Weekly Newspaper on 30th September 1888:

'Mr. Paul says that after he made his statement to our representative, which appeared in Lloyd's, he was fetched up in the middle of the night by the police, and was obliged to lose a day's work the next day, for which he got nothing. He was then summoned to give evidence at the inquest on two different days, and he had to pay a man 5s. each day to do his work, or he would have lost his place. At the close of the inquest he got two shillings, being a shilling for each day.’

The police fetched him up in the middle of the night.
They had been looking for him (as evidenced by Dew).
In other words they dragged him out of bed. They raided him.

He lost the next day’s work. Why?
I take it that the police were questioning him that day. Why else did they fetch him up in the middle of the night? The questioning must have been of a serious nature, one I would describe as an interrogation.

Paul was then called as a witness where he gave a nondescript and seemingly brief account that added nothing much to what was already known.

It is clear that the raid on his house preceded the summons. The summons would only have been made after he had made a statement, so it is impossible that he was raised for failing to comply with the summons.
Also Paul explicitly makes it clear that he was summonsed after the raid.

As the police clearly took no further action and he appeared as a witness at the inquest, and as he was not mentioned in any sort of prejudicial way in Swanson’s report of 19th October 1888, whatever suspicion attached to him that prompted the raid and the interrogation must have been lifted.
Thus it is obvious that he was cleared or exonerated.

(That was for you as well Robert).

Robert
The police didn’t know that he killed Stride. The evidence points to them not interrogating him closely and so wouldn’t have known that he had connections to that area.
If you tried to apply your logic to how serial killers operate – there would be no serial killers.
You presumably think it more likely that the murders were committed by someone who have no connections to the area.
I’ll go with my theory.

Paul needn’t have run around the bock – he could have walked back don Buck’s Row before Lechmere got there and reappeared. This is in any case irrelevant. It seems the police suspected him of something – the obvious ‘thing’ being murder.

The facts are this:
Lechmere and Paul walked past the Chapman murder site on that morning.
Paul worked about 100 yards from the Chapman Murder site.
Lechmere discovered where Paul worked.
Chapman was murdered 8 days later.
Lechmere and Paul got past Mizen without giving their names and addresses.
Paul went running to the press and this promoted Lechmere to present himself to give his side of the story.
Paul was raided by the police, interrogated and exonerated.

Of course none of this looks at all strange and no suspicion can be laid at Charles Lechmere’s door.

[Hunter]

Paul was visited by the police because he probably failed to comply to a summons to appear before the coroner's inquest. Baxter was pretty firm about such things and dealt with it severely. Paul's later complaints about the inconvenience and financial burden imposed strongly suggest that's what happened.

[Robert]

Lechmere, I refer you to your own post#85. My books are packed away at the moment, but perhaps you could refer me to the police record which says that Paul was interrogated and exonerated.

What is being suggested here, is that Cross expected the police to believe that Paul had murdered Nichols, then run round the block - presumably because he heard Cross approaching - and encountered Cross the second time round. Bizarre.

Cross then tries to incriminate Paul by murdering a second woman in Hanbury St, but in such a way that it suggested that the Nichols murderer might have been interrupted.

By the end of September, though, Cross has given up trying to incriminate Paul and has gone back to incriminating himself, by murdering two women in places with which he had connections.

Nope, I just don't see it.