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

[Fisherman]

Okay, my friend, we will have to agree to disagree on the name thing. :-)



I can make a good (circumstantial) case for Richardson, and I would liked to have had a go, but here is not the right thread.

You are certainly welcome to give it a try, no matter which thread you prefer to use. It would be interesting!

All the best,
Fisherman

[Lechmere]

Not here please!

[Lechmere]

Robert
this may unsettle you but people including serial killers often operate with more than one motivation.

Were the police troubled by the dissimilarities between Chapman's Nichols?
Would lechmere have been?
Had a pattern been established by this stage - many (no names) have missed that Tabram was posed.

[Robert]

Lechmere, and you think that Cross was trying to implicate Paul - a man who would have had to return to the scene of the Nichols murder, assuming that he did it? Had he popped off for a tea break?

[Lechmere]

Robert
your quick fire scepticism doesnt seem to have been shared by the police - they raided Paul in the middle of the night and interrogated him.

[Robert]

Because he hadn't come forward?

[Scott Nelson]

I wasn't aware Cross and Paul walked together past Chapman's Hanbury Street murder site after speaking to Mizen. I suppose they could have. Is the suggestion then that Paul told Cross that he worked close-by, only about 100 yards away? Or did it emerge later from inquiries that Paul worked close-by and then Cross thought he could murder somebody along the route near Paul's place of work and thereby implicate him?

[Lechmere]

Scott they definitely walked past 29 Hanbury Street together before they parted at Corbett's Court.

Robert - you think they would have raided and interrogated Paul just because he didn't come forward for the Nichols inquest?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.