Why Cross Was Almost Certainly Innocent

[Elamarna]

yes of course sam. i see your point.but im not talking about how close someone was to a body.of course legit witnesses will be close. but let me ask you this. if you were walking along to work and saw a man standing in the middle of the street in the dead of night next to what you later found out was a freshly killed dead woman wouldnt you be a tad suspicious? i know i would.

The argument of course is that Lechmere was never more than 50 or so yards ahead of Paul.
The idea that Lechmere was there before Paul was in Bucks Row, is one that's been constantly pushed, and which many appear to accept as a proven fact.
However, the limited evidence we have, the testimony of the two men, does not suggest this was the case.
Therefore the often quoted "found alone " is I suggest somewhat misleading.


Steve

[Abby Normal]

Hi Abby & Gareth,

Sorry to butt in, but if I may...

Even though you would and perhaps I would too, it doesn't seem that Paul was, or Mizen, or anyone involved in the case, for that matter. I would think that the police would have had good reason to clear up the question of why Lechmere and Paul hadn't told Mizen that they'd examined the body, but if they did question the men about it, the carmen must have satisfactorily cleared it up and given no reason for the police to suspect at least Lechmere. Even though they knew well, at that point, that Paul had found Lechmere standing in the middle of the road, not far away from where Nichols was lying.

Cheers,
Frank

good point. but the police didnt really have experience they do now. unlike today, witnesses and or people who found a body werent de facto people of interest that need to be cleared like they are now. i can only say that they werent stupid just inexperienced. and as far as we know, lech was not investigated.

[rjpalmer]

There are many cases of domestic killings where the "Discoverer" has later been identified as the killer. (I'm sure no one wants to sit through 138 hours (OK.... it only FELT that long...) of "The Staircase" and similar "True Crime" documentaries to reach that conclusion.)

I have yet to come across one where the Killer, the Victim and an independent 3rd party witness have all been completely unconnected to one another.
As far as I'm aware, the claim of Cross/Lechmere as the killer would made it unique in that regard.
I might be sitting here blindly oblivious to some really obvious case...
I confess my search for one has not been exhaustive, but I'm pretty sure that if there was a similar case out there, (stranger killing a stranger and stopping another stranger in order to discuss what to do,) I can think of two people, off the top of my head, who would have made it their priority to wave it as a flag from the highest building by now.

Of course, as I'm sure you'll agree, in the domestic cases, the murderer knows he's going to be questioned about the crime anyway--he (or she) can't hope to slink into anonymity. The victim is his wife or sibling or housekeeper, etc., so an interview with Johnny Upright is an inevitability...

By contrast, a man who murders a stranger in a public street has no such concern. His concern is the exact opposite--to be unwittingly seen or connected to the case. To draw a passing pedestrian's attention to his deed strikes me as extraordinary.

[A P Tomlinson]

Hi Abby,

fair enough, but by the same token, have you ever heard of any guilty witness in this type of circ?

As far as I can gather, Herlock and Fiver and other "anti-Lechmerians" are saying the same thing you are but in reverse.

Having read or heard a lot of true crime, they apparently can't think of a single example of a man beckoning another man over to examine a dead body in the street, and the first man later turning out to be the murderer.

There are many cases of domestic killings where the "Discoverer" has later been identified as the killer. (I'm sure no one wants to sit through 138 hours (OK.... it only FELT that long...) of "The Staircase" and similar "True Crime" documentaries to reach that conclusion.)

I have yet to come across one where the Killer, the Victim and an independent 3rd party witness have all been completely unconnected to one another.
As far as I'm aware, the claim of Cross/Lechmere as the killer would made it unique in that regard.
I might be sitting here blindly oblivious to some really obvious case...
I confess my search for one has not been exhaustive, but I'm pretty sure that if there was a similar case out there, (stranger killing a stranger and stopping another stranger in order to discuss what to do,) I can think of two people, off the top of my head, who would have made it their priority to wave it as a flag from the highest building by now.

[rjpalmer]

ive seen and read alot of true crime for many years and ive never heard of any innocent witness in this type of circ.

Hi Abby,

fair enough, but by the same token, have you ever heard of any guilty witness in this type of circ?

As far as I can gather, Herlock and Fiver and other "anti-Lechmerians" are saying the same thing you are but in reverse.

Having read or heard a lot of true crime, they apparently can't think of a single example of a man beckoning another man over to examine a dead body in the street, and the first man later turning out to be the murderer.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I’ll throw in one small point that I made in my original posts. If Cross was guilty (and he wasn’t of course) then he would have had to have walked from the body to the middle of the road where he was seen by Paul. He would have done that either when he’d finished what he was doing or when he first became aware of Paul’s presence. We could eliminate the ‘when he’d finished’ option (unless he became aware of Paul’s presence at exactly the same time that he’d finished his work) because if he’d finished he’d have moved on. Therefore he must have moved to the centre of the road when he first became aware of Robert Paul. So…

How could he have known that Paul hadn’t seen him move from the body to the middle of the road? As we all know, it’s not the case that just because x can’t see y then y couldn’t have seen x. If he was guilty, to cover his own a**e, surely he would have said ‘I went over to have a quick look but I couldn’t tell if she was alive?’ Failing that he’d have been left saying that he’d looked at the woman from no closer than the middle of the road with Paul saying ‘I saw him move from the body to the middle of the road.’

[A P Tomlinson]

yes of course sam. i see your point.but im not talking about how close someone was to a body.of course legit witnesses will be close. but let me ask you this. if you were walking along to work and saw a man standing in the middle of the street in the dead of night next to what you later found out was a freshly killed dead woman wouldnt you be a tad suspicious? i know i would.

Yet so many seem happy to dismiss Robert Paul's lack of suspicion on seeing Cross and his lack of "raising the alarm".
As I keep being told, those boots apparently sounded like a hammer on a dustbin lid, so if Cross IS the killer, he will hear Paul as soon as he's walking up the Row, he has a short walk to the end of the wall where he can just disappear and at least make an effort to make sure he isn't visibly blood stained by the murder and aftermath. Instead, he stands up in the middle of the street, stops Paul. and puts his hand on the guys shoulder. (No blood transfer...lucky? Maybe so...) He must have had blood on or around his hands and sleeves, and cant have known whether or not he had blood on his face. And even if "It was dark" that won't help when they approach Mizen with his lantern.
WHERE was the blood? If he'd used her clothes to wipe it off, that would have been felt when they tidied her up. Or is that just another "He got lucky" situation?
Or was it down to his miraculous "Bloody apron of immunity?" He wore it to court, and no one in the press mentioned it being bloody, and Mizen must have recognised him but didn't point out, "Yes, but the apron he had on, the morning of the event, had a lot more blood on it..."

I'm not sure what Cross should have done when faced with that situation, that Paul also didn't do. Started shouting "murder"? What's that going to do? Wake everyone up so that they could... get dressed, come downstairs and someone eventually go find a copper.
Why didn't Paul immediately start doing those things that (according to the Lechmere advocates) Cross should have, if that would be the most obvious and optimum means of getting help? Paul did claim to have been sure she was dead when they examined her. Cross only said he wasn't sure if she was dead or drunk.
So why didn't (or wouldn't) Paul do all the things that people think Cross SHOULD have done?

If Paul is inncoent of the murder and didn't "Raise the alarm" why does Cross not doing so become a marker for guilt?

[JeffHamm]

yes of course sam. i see your point.but im not talking about how close someone was to a body.of course legit witnesses will be close. but let me ask you this. if you were walking along to work and saw a man standing in the middle of the street in the dead of night next to what you later found out was a freshly killed dead woman wouldnt you be a tad suspicious? i know i would.

But Abby, from the information we have he's not next to the body, he's in the middle of the street looking across the road to where the body is, and that's not an inconsiderable distance. And then he waits there for Paul to reach him, and rather than let Paul pass, calls upon him for assistance. That's a very different situation than him standing next to the body with Paul suddenly appearing out of nowhere, which makes it sound like he was right there beside the body and come upon unawares. I'm not trying to make it sound like he was miles away obviously, but at the same time he was not close enough to describe his location as being "next to" the body either. And clearly, there's no indication that Paul, who is the person who actually had the encounter with Cross/Lechmere, was ever even a "tad suspicious", so that sort of suggests that describing the situation in a way that arouses suspicion might, well, not be how it was? (meaning, he wasn't actually "next to the body", but rather, was in the middle of the street at a sufficiently large distance from the body that it wasn't suspicious to anyone actually there.")

As you know, I tend to consider the case against Cross/Lechmere as being based primarily on charged language rather than hard evidence, and I'm not having a go at you or anything, rather, just putting it out there that perhaps the phrase "next to the body" is not reflective of how the situation should be described.

- Jeff

[drstrange169]

"re davis, he wasnt seen near chapmans bady before raising any alarm. he found the body and got help. lech was seen near nichols freshly killed body before he is doing anything else, trying to find help, raising the alarm etc."

There is a huge and I do mean HUGE difference between almost treading on a body in broad daylight that is to all intents and purposes naked and has been literally gutted with the entails thrown over the shoulder and a seeing, from a distance, a vague shape of a woman though the darkness.

There is no comparison what so ever that I can see between the two reactions.

[John Wheat]

Hi Abby & Gareth,

Sorry to butt in, but if I may...

Even though you would and perhaps I would too, it doesn't seem that Paul was, or Mizen, or anyone involved in the case, for that matter. I would think that the police would have had good reason to clear up the question of why Lechmere and Paul hadn't told Mizen that they'd examined the body, but if they did question the men about it, the carmen must have satisfactorily cleared it up and given no reason for the police to suspect at least Lechmere. Even though they knew well, at that point, that Paul had found Lechmere standing in the middle of the road, not far away from where Nichols was lying.

Cheers,
Frank

Hi Frank

An excellent post. The Police of 1888 were not familiar with serial killers but were not stupid.

Cheers John

[FrankO]

yes of course sam. i see your point.but im not talking about how close someone was to a body.of course legit witnesses will be close. but let me ask you this. if you were walking along to work and saw a man standing in the middle of the street in the dead of night next to what you later found out was a freshly killed dead woman wouldnt you be a tad suspicious? i know i would.

Hi Abby & Gareth,

Sorry to butt in, but if I may...

Even though you would and perhaps I would too, it doesn't seem that Paul was, or Mizen, or anyone involved in the case, for that matter. I would think that the police would have had good reason to clear up the question of why Lechmere and Paul hadn't told Mizen that they'd examined the body, but if they did question the men about it, the carmen must have satisfactorily cleared it up and given no reason for the police to suspect at least Lechmere. Even though they knew well, at that point, that Paul had found Lechmere standing in the middle of the road, not far away from where Nichols was lying.

Cheers,
Frank

[Geddy2112]

Does anyone give any serious credibility to this thead https://victorianripper.forumotion.c...echmere-busted

That basically states Charles Cross and Charles Lechmere were two different people? It's a difficult read on an horrendous forum layout that gives me a headache haha, I presume it's been seen and destroyed though.

[Lewis C]

Chapman's ToD was being hotly disputed back when I was a child -- which is quite a few summers ago and ages before people even knew Lechmere's real name. The idea that a 'late' ToD is somehow 'established' is purely the product of anti-Lechmerian desperation, not any kind of objective reading.

'The weak underbelly'? I tell you: the anti-Lechmerian zealots have more weak underbellies than a ruminant has stomachs.

M.

Hi Mark,

Ichobod didn't say that the late TOD is established, he said that the evidence strongly supports a late TOD. What he said was also argued before Lechmere was promoted as a suspect, so it can't be the case that Ichobod's argument necessarily is the product of one's views about Lechmere.

[Abby Normal]

Here's the thing, though: Davis (and even Cadoche, albeit on 'tother side of the fence) was closer to Annie Chapman's body than Cross initially was to Polly's. Indeed, Louis Dymshitz, PC Watkins and Harry Bowyer were all probably closer than Cross to "their" corpses when they found them. The key difference in the latter's case was that somebody else was walking not far behind him and saw Cross mere moments after he'd made his discovery.

We've all heard of the Double Event, so here perhaps we have another... the unique "Double Event" of two witnesses finding a Ripper victim at almost the same time. Of course, there's no more sinister explanation for this than that both men traversed Buck's Row on their daily commute, and they were both en route to work that morning.

yes of course sam. i see your point.but im not talking about how close someone was to a body.of course legit witnesses will be close. but let me ask you this. if you were walking along to work and saw a man standing in the middle of the street in the dead of night next to what you later found out was a freshly killed dead woman wouldnt you be a tad suspicious? i know i would.

[Sam Flynn]

lech was seen near nichols freshly killed body before he is doing anything else

Here's the thing, though: Davis (and even Cadoche, albeit on 'tother side of the fence) was closer to Annie Chapman's body than Cross initially was to Polly's. Indeed, Louis Dymshitz, PC Watkins and Harry Bowyer were all probably closer than Cross to "their" corpses when they found them. The key difference in the latter's case was that somebody else was walking not far behind him and saw Cross mere moments after he'd made his discovery.

We've all heard of the Double Event, so here perhaps we have another... the unique "Double Event" of two witnesses finding a Ripper victim at almost the same time. Of course, there's no more sinister explanation for this than that both men traversed Buck's Row on their daily commute, and they were both en route to work that morning.