The Chapman murder and Charles Lechmere

[MrBarnett]

Morning All

The suggestion that the Chapman murder was a set-up to frame Paul has an interesting side effect: it fatally weakens the ‘murdering on his way to work’ MO that I have seen put forward as an argument in favour of Lechmere as JTR.

If the choice of Hanbury Street was solely on the basis of its proximity to Paul’s place of work, then it was pure coincidence that it was also in the general area of Lechmere’s route. If Paul had worked in, say, Clerkenwell, then Lechmere would presumably have left out a little earlier one morning to make time for a killing in that area.

So if Chapman was not an OHWTW murder and neither were Stride, Eddowes or Kelly, then that was clearly not Lechmere’s MO.

Having seen Trevor Marriott’s farewell post and his list of JTR ‘pillars’ I thought it might be interesting to cut through all the supposition and list the factual pillars of Lechmere’s candidacy. Only verifiable facts that are reasonably suspicious or inexplicable. My list is:

1. He was discovered at the Nichol’s murder scene.

2. He gave the name Cross instead of Lechmere.

3. The murders were committed on his route to work. (Though having demolished that one perhaps it can be replaced with ‘The second murder was committed close to the workplace of the man who discovered him with the body.’)

4. He was a diligent form-filler.

5. He wore an apron to the inquest.

I’m sure there must be others that I have missed. Further suggestions would be much appreciated.

MrB

[curious]

Curious
The question as to why Paul was never accosted in the street by a policeman (rather than being dragged out of his bed) has never really come up before.
I would suggest that it argues against the police accosting people in the street in the manner you suggest happened to Lechmere.
For the purposes of my theory, if Lechmere was accosted in the street by a policeman, then taken to a police station and hence to the inquest on the same morning (a tight schedule as his evidence would have to have been evaluated) then that is not a bad possibility as it would mean that this man was totally lacking in any public spirit in voluntarily coming forward. That would, in terms of guilt, compensate for his wearing of his work clothes.
It still doesn’t explain why he kept his apron on.
I think the more likely explanation is that he went to the police the night before, voluntarily.

Good Morning, Lechmere,
It's a cold, frosty morn here. So glad computers have been invented!

I recognize that for the purposes of your theory is it necessary for Cross/Lechmere to have voluntarily gone to the police.

However, as Mr. B is quite new, I felt compelled to toss out other possibilities that I see as more certain than those you see as certain. I also recognize that other folks will have other thoughts. Plus, it's good to see that Mr. B appears to be thinking things through on his own . . .

It would appear to me that once the police were shocked to learn on Sunday afternoon that two carmen had discovered the body, the authorities would be busy figuring out how to locate them. A very simple thought would be to be on the lookout for them as they went to work Monday morning. It should be simple and effective. And it was for Cross/Lechmere.

I would think that an ordinary person trudging along to work on a Monday morning, then stopped by a policeman, taken to the station (from 3:30ish to inquest time would be a few hours for him to give his story, wouldn't it?) then on to an inquest would be flustered. I doubt I'd stop to think that I should put on lipstick before giving my testimony. My personal appearance would not be high on my list of priorities as my mind would be tumbling with other thoughts.

You interpret Cross/Lechemere's being stopped on Monday morning as: "it would mean that this man was totally lacking in any public spirit in voluntarily coming forward."

I don't see that as necessarily so. We know that both Cross/Lechmere's daughter and stepfather died soon after the series of Ripper murders. The baby was born in the spring of 1888 as I recall. IF (and since we don't know how the baby died, we don't know if the family was dealing with a sick baby) the baby was born with a major and fatal condition, then the Cross/Lechmere household was dealing with 4 or 5 children (I think it was 5, wasn't it?) and a sick baby. Just in the immediate household. Then, the stepfather was also ill.

Perhaps, on his days off from work, Cross/Lechmere had pressing matters at home on his mind and did not stay on top of the news . . . Time just gets away from us in those difficult family times.

Also, the Nichols murder was at the beginning of the series . . . People (including the police) were not as on top of things then as they would be later in the series.

Well, so much to do today. Hope you all have a nice'un.

curious

[Ben]

I agree very much with the last two posts, and just don't see the merit in suggesting that Cross sought to deflect suspicion onto Paul, who (a) was a fellow carman and gentile local, like him, (b) used the same workroute, and (c) was the second person to discover Nichols body, whereas Cross was the first. Is there any possibility of the police treating body-discoverer #2 as a suspect, but not body-discoverer #1. I'd suggest the answer is fairly obviously no.

I'm genuinely interested in determining whether or not there is anything of substance to the suspicions against Cross once the theory is "de-cluttered" so to speak. I don't say this disparagingly, and nor am I saying that any one individual is responsible for the cluttering, but some of the latest "ingredients" to the theory just don't convince. The claim that he is "linked" to all crime scenes, for instance, is quite wrong, and the idea that he murdered en route to work and must have had a useful hidey-hole at Pickfords to stash his viscera is not at all likely, and doesn't work at all for the Chapman murder, committed in all likelihood around 5:30am, nearly two hours after Cross was due to start work. Then there is the proposed "Mizen scam", which I struggle with.

Regards,
Ben

[MrBarnett]

Hi All,

No white Christmas for us, unfortunately. Lots of rain and high winds, though. At least one tree down in the garden, which I suppose I should be attending to rather than trying to defend nice Mr L’s character…Perhaps not.

I hope my newbie going back to basics is not too irritating to those of you who know the subject inside out. It may seem at this point that I have an anti Lechmere bias. Please believe me I don’t. I don’t know anywhere near enough about him to have formed an opinion one way or the other. If there were a ‘Cross Is Innocent’ theory that I could question, I would do so with as much energy and impartiality as I am questioning the opposite theory now.

Am I right in thinking the Cross theory includes Stride as one of his victims? If so, that is the one that I find hardest to accept.

Having grown up in St Georges - Mary Ann Street, James Street and Thomas Street - Lechmere was probably better known in that area than anywhere else. That he would chose to stalk and kill in an area where he was so well known - almost on his mother’s doorstep - at a time when the streets where still relatively busy makes no sense to me at all.

And I still firmly believe that in the Commercial Road area he was most likely known ‘as Charlie Cross, the copper’s boy’. In such a community, a policeman was quite a prominent figure I would suggest, and by extension his children would also be well known. I am not talking about the wider East End, but a handful of streets off the Commercial Road - the very streets where he supposedly locates and murders Stride.

He may well have reinvented himself as Lechmere when he moved out of St Georges and shrugged off the Cross name completely, but in St Georges I suspect ( I can’t prove it obviously*) that he would have at the very least been associated with the name Cross. So does it ring true that having given the ‘false’ name Cross to the police ( presumably to disguise his true identity in some way ) the next murder he commits in a place of his own chosing ( i.e. not determined by the need to frame Paul) is in the one place in the world where it can be reasonably assumed that he is identified with the name Cross.

One response to my questions may be: he was a psychopath, you can’t expect him to behave rationally. I agree that he wouldn’t act rationally by normal standards, but surely he would act consistently according to his own twisted logic. If we are to believe that he used the name Cross to avoid identification, surely by the same logic he would steer clear of St. Georges of all places.

*Unless of course we have Charles’s school records. That would be the clincher in respect of what he was called locally, although even if he was known as Lechmere he might still also be thought of as ‘P.C. Cross’s boy’.

MrB

[Lechmere]

Mr B

I haven’t seen anyone claim that killing in his way to work was a vital part of Lechmere’s MO (presuming of course that he was the culprit).
So a victim not being killed on Lechmere’s way to work does not fatally weaken the case against him – unless it can be shown that he could not plausibly have been able to get to one of the ‘not OHWTW’ victims.
It has been suggested that he killed some of the victims on his way to work as that was a time of the day when he had the opportunity – it was dark, relatively quiet, there were some potential vulnerable victims around who would lead him to a suitably secluded spot, and he had an excuse to be out and about (useful for domestic reasons and in case he was stopped or discovered while out and about – as he was in the Nichols instance).
The Double Event was on his night off – so clearly was not connected to his route to work, but rather a visit to his mother’s house, where one of his daughters also lived.

The important factor is opportunity, not that he got some nefarious kick out of specifically killing on his way to work. If that were the case it would be part of his ‘signature’ rather than his ‘modus operandi’.

I think that on the balance of probabilities it is more likely that Chapman was killed at around 3.30 – 4.00 am – based on the Doctor Bagster Phillips’ opinion. Hence when Lechmere was on his way to work.
There is a chance, if the witnesses are to be believed, that Chapman was killed at 5.30 am ish. If this were the case I would suggest that Lechmere made an exception as he was keen to kill in that locality as soon as possible (before Paul was found) and he slipped off from an early morning delivery while his cart was waiting to be unloaded somewhere within, say, ten minutes walking distance of Hanbury Street (that takes in a large amount of territory).
This would represent a variation in MO, but there would be a reason for it, and accordingly quite explicable.

If Paul worked in Clerkenwell then Lechmere would not have known where he worked. The whole point is that Lechmere discovered Paul’s workplace on the morning of 31st August.
Had Paul walked off in a totally different direction or had Chapman been killed elsewhere, then clearly no connection could be made. But Chapman was killed in Hanbury Street about 100 yards from Paul’s workplace and Lechmere did discover Paul’s workplace on the morning of 31st.
Maybe this is just one of those coincidences.

Kelly incidentally could also easily have been killed on his way to work, although her time of death is not known with any precision. Some people think that she was killed by someone who knew her, and if such was the case then maybe Lechmere made another exception and killed her while his cart was being unloaded somewhere, a little later in the morning that usual.
There is an interesting connection between Lechmere and Kelly.
However, my gut feeling is that the Kelly attack was carried out on his way to work. She met him in the street, they were strangers, and she unexpectedly took him back to her place.

There are several more factual pillars upon which the Lechmere case is founded:

(1) The various timings allow Lechmere a window of opportunity to carry out the Nichols murder. True Victorian ‘o’clocks’ are estimates, but it could be the case that the given times do not allow a window of opportunity. I would suggest that it is better for the case for the admittedly imprecise Victorian timings to dovetail rather than having to manipulate them to fit.

(2) There is a clear suggestion that whoever killed Nichols was disturbed as the abdominal wounds were not left on display as was the case in every other Whitechapel murder that involved abdominal wounds.

(3) The time of death suggested by Dr Llewellyn almost exactly matches the time Paul spotted Lechmere close to the body, prior to Lechmere having raised any alarm.

(4) Most of the murders happened on Lechmere’s route to work and he had a plausible reason to be near those that were not. The can be geographically linked to the murder scenes including the Goulston Street graffiti.

(5) There was a difference of opinion between Lechmere and PC Mizen as to what was said between them.

(6) Lechmere was supposedly late for work yet chose to walk a longer route with Paul, that also avoided leaving Mizen and going in the direction of the Tabram murder scene (three weeks previous).

(7) There was the unusual touching of the body by Lechmere and Paul. This doesn’t seem to have happened with any other Whitechapel murder.

(8) There was the strange meeting or greeting between Paul and Lechmere – with Paul thinking he was about to be mugged.

(9) Nichols was the only victim ‘discovered’ twice – with Lechmere and Paul abandoning her when they supposedly thought she may only have been unconscious. This would have been a callous act – and would they have reported their discovery to anyone of they had not bumped into Mizen?

(10) Lechmere certainly delayed before him came forward – most likely until the Sunday evening after Paul’s newspaper story appeared (of which more later).

(11) Lechmere seems to have avoided giving his home address in open court.

That isn’t a bad list and as I have pointed out, it is a lot longer than any that can be established for other suspects.

You raised issues with the Stride murder – feeling that it was too close to the areas where he was well known.

Duffield’s Yard was quite close to Mary Ann Street, but Lechmere had moved from there to James Street bout twenty years before. James Street was a little further away. As was his mother’s address on Cable Street.
If you plot the murders on a map along with his locations of greatest comfort – Doveton Street, Broad Street, Cable Street and James Street - then you find there is a cordon sanitaire of similar width between each of those locations and the nearest murder scene. In other words Lechmere did not commit his street killing crimes too close to these locations but inside an area bounded by them.
The cordon sanitaire between Cable Street or James Street and Duffield’s Yard is marginally narrower than the one between Broad Street and Miller’s Court or Doveton Street and Buck’s Row – but there is not much in it and he would not have gone out equipped with a tape measure.

Furthermore, there is a strong suggestion that Stride’s killer was a bit jumpy and precipitously abandoned her body without carrying out any mutilations. We might expect Lechmere to be a bit more jumpy in that area, particularly after he had appeared as a witness in the Nichols murder.

We have no reason to think that Charles Lechmere was ever known as ‘Charlie Cross the copper’s boy’. Let alone in 1888.
He and his sister where christened as Lechmeres after his mother married Thomas Cross.
His sister died as Emily Lechmere about six months before Thomas Cross died.
Charles Lechmere married as Lechmere about seven months after Thomas Cross died.
Thomas Cross would probably have been long forgotten by 1888. He had died 19 years before and his widow had been remarried to Joseph Forsdike for some 16 years.

Charles Lechmere’s (and those of his sister) school records no longer seem to exist unfortunately.

[Lechmere]

Curious

As I think I said, it isn’t necessary for ‘my’ theory that Lechmere went to the police on the Sunday evening after reading Paul’s newspaper interview.
Guilty or innocent I think it is the most likely explanation.

The police conducted some sort of press conference on the Sunday evening where they contradicted the Paul story. Until Lechmere came forward to confirm it, they pooh-poohed Paul’s story.
This in turn makes it somewhat unlikely that the police will have stopped and accosted anyone in the early hours of the next morning in an effort to find the two Carmen.
And as I pointed out, if the police were engaged in some sort of trawl to find Lechmere and Paul, it is remarkable that they only located Lechmere, and in double quick time at that, but could not find Paul and had to eventually raid his house to find him, some time later.

As I said, if Lechmere instead was accosted on the Monday morning and frog marched to the police station and then compelled to turn up at the inquest, then this doesn’t do much for his status as a model citizen.
But as you say maybe his mind was tumbling with other thoughts so he left his apron on, and what with his possibly sick kid and step father, is it any wonder he forgot all about the murder that was dominating the world’s headlines and which he discovered. Or maybe he was distracted by the seven (yes) other kids that lived with them.

[Lechmere]

Ben
It seems, whatever you may personally think, that the police did suspect Paul and not Lechmere.
Perhaps it was because Lechmere came forward and put the word in against Paul (good old Dew suggests this anyway) and perhaps Lechmere came across as believable, and oozed humble sincerity, whereas Paul slagged the police off in print.
Paul of course did not voluntarily come forward at all.
Also the Chapman murder happened about 100 yards from Paul’s workplace – not 100 yards from Lechmere’s workplace.
Who knows, maybe Lechmere also pulled the copper’s son card as well.

I doubt there was a freemasonry or brotherhood of Carmen by the way, and I don’t think that it would be particularly unusual for a gentile to do the dirty on a fellow gentile.
As you know, I doubt that Lechmere usually walked Paul’s Hanbury Street route as it wasn’t his shortest route to work. This may explain why he and Paul were strangers. In any case, he could subsequently easily avoid the Hanbury Street route if he so chose.

[Sam Flynn]

I doubt there was a freemasonry or brotherhood of Carmen by the way

Isn't The Brotherhood of Carmen the name of the main lodge in Seville?

[Lechmere]

Skilfully, swiftly, surely.

[Scott Nelson]

...the Chapman murder happened about 100 yards from Paul’s workplace – not 100 yards from Lechmere’s workplace.....As you know, I doubt that Lechmere usually walked Paul’s Hanbury Street route as it wasn’t his shortest route to work. This may explain why he and Paul were strangers.

I think you set the stage before, If I'm not misrepresenting you, that Lechmere and Paul walked past 29 Hanbury Street and then to Paul's place of employment only one time (on the morning of Nichols' murder after one or both of them found and talked to Mizen) and that Lechmere then watched Paul enter his workplace before he moved on. So it was only the one encounter between the two men and only one fleeting observation on Lechmere's part as to where Paul worked (Paul possibly telling Lechmere at that point that this is where I work and a good morning to you, it's been interesting...) and this was enough to plant the idea in Lechmere's mind of setting up Paul because Paul's workplace was so close to the planned murder site and on Paul's route to work...?????

[DVV]

Isn't The Brotherhood of Carmen the name of the main lodge in Seville?

Quoting you just for the pleasure to see you again, Gareth.

[MrBarnett]

Hi Lechmere,

Thanks for the very detailed response. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I confess I am slightly warming to the idea of Lechmere as our man. There's just something about the insistence in using the middle name in virtually every single record that strikes me as a little obsessive.

My Intro to Cross/Lechmere was through Michael Connor’s dissertation on this site. This was obviously written before the Lechmere connection had been made. It would be really useful to have an update summarising all the new information that has since been unearthed.

One final (for now) quibble, though, is the suggestion that Thomas Cross would have been ‘long forgotten’ by 1888. My own family research into Victorian Eastenders shows that usually the first son is named after the father and the second after the paternal grandfather. The first daughter is named after the mother and the second after the maternal grandmother. The fact that Charles named his first son Thomas and not John after his birth father, and this eight years after his stepfathers death, suggests to me that P.C. Cross had made quite an impression on the boy he had effectively brought up. (Of course his second name is predictably Allen!). I doubt that Charles would have forgotten him so easily.

Thanks again.

MrB

[Wickerman]

Quoting you just for the pleasure to see you again, Gareth.

And, it is nice to see you resume posting again Dave.

[Sam Flynn]

Thanks, Dave. You too!

[Lechmere]

Mr B
Clearly Charles Lechmere hadn't forgotten him as he borrowed his surname in 1888!
However, going from memory, his first son - who died young - was called Charles Allen.
His wife's father was called Thomas which is the likely explanation for that name being used. His Bostock in laws seem to have helped him set up in business.
I know the descendents of Thomas Allen and none are aware of any Cross connection nor, until recently that their ancestor was involved the case.
Charles Lechmere's widow died in 1940 and would have known her great grandchildren who I have met (only two I think are still alive from this line).
Plausibly if there was an relevant oral history it would be available.
There is an elderly great grand daughter, who's mother was the grand daughter of Charles Lechmere, and this lady's mother (the grand daughter) got married I think on Christmas Eve 1920, the day after Charles Lechmere died.
The great grand daughter knew from her mother that this had happened as there was talk of cancelling the wedding.
The events aren't so distant in time for everything to be forgotten, if they were known in the first place.

I have quite a few records where he just called himself Charles Lechmere - but the nuances of some of these name usages are interesting and I will look into it further.