Charles Allen Lechmere - new suspect?

[Fisherman]

Time to put the kelly organ removal issue to bed one and for all me thinks

The Times 10th November

“The latest account states upon what professes to be indisputable authority that no portion of the woman's body was taken away by the murderer. As already stated, the post-mortem examination was of the most exhaustive character, and surgeons did not quit their work until every organ had been accounted for and placed as closely as possible in its natural position.”

The Echo 12th November

“Nothing of any importance was discovered in the ashes at the deceased's house. A small portion only of the remains is missing, while it is noticeable as a special incident in the barbarous murder that the organ hitherto taken away at the mutilations was found in the room, although it had been cut out of the body...”

The Times 12th November

“As early as half past 7 on Saturday morning, Dr. Phillips, assisted by Dr. Bond (Westminster), Dr. Gordon Brown (City), Dr. Duke (Spitalfields) and his (Dr. Phillips') assistant, made an exhaustive post-mortem examination of the body at the mortuary adjoining Whitechapel Church. It is known that after Dr. Phillips "fitted" the cut portions of the body into their proper places no portion was missing. At the first examination, which was only of a cursory character, it was thought that a portion of the body had gone, but this is not the case. The examination was most minutely made, and lasted upwards of 2 ˝ hours after which the mutilated portions were sewn to the body, and therefore the coroner's jury will be spared the unpleasant duty of witnessing the horrible spectacle presented to those who discovered the murder. The ashes found in the fireplace of the room rented by the deceased woman were also submitted to a searching examination, but nothing likely to throw any light on this shocking case could be gleaned from them.”

Then the icing on the cake
Insp Reid 1896
Head of Whitechapel CID who was at the crime scene

"I ought to tell you that the stories of portions of the body having been taken away by the murderer were all untrue. In every instance the body was complete"

And so now condems the ambiguous statement of Dr Brown back to the archives, which so many have sought to rely on to prove that the heart was taken away by the killer.

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Very interesting, I´m sure.

On the other hand, what I tried to point to was that the killer of Kelly actually seems to have taken organs out of the body, clearly implicating that he had a penchant for such things. By extension, this means that the organ-taking in the Chapman and Eddowes cases is not something that should surprise us.

One may of course also infer that opening up the abdominal cavity is very much in line with such an intent, but maybe that is getting overenthusiastic?

You see, this is pretty much why I said before that being Trevor Marriott is something that not lends itself to much inspiration of credence. You throw forward one suggestion wackier than the other, and you seem unable to weigh probabilities in a fair manner. And when you get this pointed out to you, you say that old-school thinking on behalf of 99 per cent of the rest of the ripperological community is all that stands in the way of you having your views accepted as the better scenarios.
That´s just not gonna happen, Trevor.

[Trevor Marriott]

I always thought that Kelly had her organs taken out by the killer too? Could be wrong, of course - she was on that bed for a long time, and somebody other than the killer who knew how to pry the door open may have sneaked in and pulled her organs out and placed them on the bed, before quietly stealing away.
Any ideas?

Time to put the kelly organ removal issue to bed one and for all me thinks

The Times 10th November

“The latest account states upon what professes to be indisputable authority that no portion of the woman's body was taken away by the murderer. As already stated, the post-mortem examination was of the most exhaustive character, and surgeons did not quit their work until every organ had been accounted for and placed as closely as possible in its natural position.”

The Echo 12th November

“Nothing of any importance was discovered in the ashes at the deceased's house. A small portion only of the remains is missing, while it is noticeable as a special incident in the barbarous murder that the organ hitherto taken away at the mutilations was found in the room, although it had been cut out of the body...”

The Times 12th November

“As early as half past 7 on Saturday morning, Dr. Phillips, assisted by Dr. Bond (Westminster), Dr. Gordon Brown (City), Dr. Duke (Spitalfields) and his (Dr. Phillips') assistant, made an exhaustive post-mortem examination of the body at the mortuary adjoining Whitechapel Church. It is known that after Dr. Phillips "fitted" the cut portions of the body into their proper places no portion was missing. At the first examination, which was only of a cursory character, it was thought that a portion of the body had gone, but this is not the case. The examination was most minutely made, and lasted upwards of 2 ˝ hours after which the mutilated portions were sewn to the body, and therefore the coroner's jury will be spared the unpleasant duty of witnessing the horrible spectacle presented to those who discovered the murder. The ashes found in the fireplace of the room rented by the deceased woman were also submitted to a searching examination, but nothing likely to throw any light on this shocking case could be gleaned from them.”

Then the icing on the cake
Insp Reid 1896
Head of Whitechapel CID who was at the crime scene

"I ought to tell you that the stories of portions of the body having been taken away by the murderer were all untrue. In every instance the body was complete"

And so now condems the ambiguous statement of Dr Brown back to the archives, which so many have sought to rely on to prove that the heart was taken away by the killer.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Fisherman]

Or the killer simply wanted to kill and mutilate and never ever wanted to take organs. It may be coincidence but the only two victims that were missing organs when the post mortems were carried out were Chapman and Eddowes, whose bodies were left for 12 hours before the doctors came back to carry out the post mortems and left in situations where it would have been possible for someone to remove the organs quickly using anatomical knowledge.

I always thought that Kelly had her organs taken out by the killer too? Could be wrong, of course - she was on that bed for a long time, and somebody other than the killer who knew how to pry the door open may have sneaked in and pulled her organs out and placed them on the bed, before quietly stealing away.
Any ideas?

[Fisherman]

harry: No fisherman,the article was not just about clotting.It included oozing.

Did it now? Here´s the full quotation:

"Blood Clotting

Normal clotting time for blood is 3 - 15 minutes, but clotting time is extremely individual and can be affected by certain diseases such as hemophilia and some leukemia?s and various medications including blood thinners

When blood first begins to clot it forms a dark shiny jelly like mass, with time the clot begins to contract and separate from the yellowish serum.

Investigators use the state of blood clotting as a rough guide to estimate how much time has passed since the blood has shed. If it's a shiny gelatinous pool bleeding occurred less than an hour earlier and if the blood is separated into clot and serum, several house have probably passed.

The mechanisms by whish blood leaves the body can be divided into two categories, passive and projected. Passive bleeding depends upon the action of gravity alone. This kind of bleeding includes oozes and drips. Blood is projected when en a person or object applies some force other than gravity. Arterial spurts, cast off blood and impact spatter are examples of projected blood."

Tell me where it says that oozing will go on for 3-15 minutes, Harry!

And tell me another thing: Why do you bring a quotation about bloodclotting, from an obscure internet site, into the discussion about bleeding times? What possible application could it have?

It seems clear to me that you either misunderstood what you read or you misrepresented it. Which is it?

However, I answered your request to show my source,now let me see in similar fashion,your source in writing.Lets see from Jason Payne-James own words what he has to say about blood flow.Then we can compare.Lets see,from him that 7 minute limit,what it means.Give me a source.

The source is a private conversation via e-mail. I have exchanged a lot of posts with Jason Payne-James. All of his posts carry this text:

Warning
The contents of this email are confidential and copyright and they may also be privileged. They are intended for the addressee(s) shown. Any unauthorized reading, use, distribution or copying of them is prohibited. If this email has been sent to you in error you may not take any action based upon it nor may you rely on it for any purpose. Please let us know of the error by email


...so I am not at liberty to reproduce it. Nor do I want to do so - I have participated before in an exchange over what an expert did or did not say: signature specialist Frank Leander.
When I posted how he said that the witness signature from the Hutchinson protocol and the signature by George William Topping Hutchinson were a probable match, I was told by another poster that I had misinterpreted what Leander said. I then went back to Leander and asked hi to clarify, and he did. But the other poster said that I had again misinterpreted Leander. This went on in absurdum, and Leander even said that malicious misinterpretations were not an uncommon thing. In the end, though, Leander laid down what he thought in a fashion that could not be misinterpreted or explained away, and then the other poster changed tactics. He now said that Leander had become so tired of all my questions that he had fobbed me off just to get rid of me.

That is my experience of allowing people with an agenda into a mail conversation. I am not doing it again. Jason Payne-James´ view on this has been presented, and it cannot be found in any book, so I cannot give you that kind of a source. Of course, given how he has written extensively on these matters, you may well find something that clarifies how he thinks these matters work. Buy the books and find out.

If I was to disregard the warning in Payne-James´ mail, and publish them out here anyway, you could just ask me "How do I know that he wrote this, and not you?".

So go find out. Go ask other experts, get an informed view, do the ground work yourself. Then you won´t have to rely on me - which you clearly don´t do anyway, otherwise you would not have asked about this.

Just don´t forget to explain to us all out here just what blood clotting has to do in a discussion about bloodflow!

PS. You speak of a seven minute "limit", but Payne-James never did - he said that seven minutes was less likely than three or five.

[Fisherman]

Columbo: It also relies on the health of the victim, their weight, whether on an angle pointing up or down, lying on their side, stomach, back or sitting up. You may possibly be able to formulate a medical opinion based on a healthy, normal weighted individual, but that also would not be concrete because of the individual who was losing the blood and under what circumstances would cause the loss of blood to begin with.

This is all true - and Jason Payne-James was fed all the information there is about Polly Nichols, and concluded that based on that information, his take on things was that she would have bled out on a matter of minutes only, and when I asked him how many minutes he was talking about, three, five, seven...? - he answered that all three suggestions could be true, but he regarded seven minutes as less likely than three or five.

What I don't know is being understood is not all of a person's blood flows out of the wound that was created. blood in the arms and lower extremities is not going to flood out of a neck wound unless the body was hung upside down. Blood from the neck is going to leak from the head and pump from the neck until the heart stops pumping. the heart stops pumping at death so if Nichols was throttled before her throat was cut, that would cause her heart to slow down before the cut and the heart would not beat that much longer, so not as much blood as originally thought would escape the wound.

All the blood in a dead body with no bloood pressure is subjected to gravity, and will run out of the body. What will not run out is the blood that rests on such a low point within the body as not to be able to exit it on account of how it would need to defy gravity to do so.
Putting it differently, punch a hole in an oil barrow halfway between bottom and top - and the barrel will leak out half of it´s contents. It is extremly easy!

So theoretically she could've been killed 15 minutes or so before Lechmere was seen with her, and the trickle or oozing could've continued that whole time after the initial gush of blood. Or it could be the result of Lechmere attacking her on 5 or so minutes before.

Jason Payne-James said that there can never be any total certainty, but given what we know about Nichols´s body, the wounds and the position, his best guess was that the bleeding was more likely to go on for three to five minutes than for seven. It is my belief that if he was asked if it could have gone on for fifteen minutes, he would say that he would not want to rule anything decisively out, but he would regard the suggestion as a not likely one.
During a conversation with him, he said that this was something that often was used in legal matters - if a forensic expert said that something would go on for 1 minute up to one and a half, then the other side would ask "Could it go on for a minute and 40 seconds?", and the expert would have to say that yes, it COULD go on for that time but it would be less likely. And thereafter the other side would go "But if it COULD go on for a minute and 40 seconds, then surely it could also go on for a minute and 50 seconds? Or two minutes?", and the same would occur - the expert would have to say that yes, it COULD go on for that time, but it was even less likely.
Payne-James said that he often saw such matters escalate into completely absurd territory, but that is how the legal system works. And it is impossible to rate these things in percentages.

So if we want to stretch seven minutes to eight, we can. And to ten, we can do that too. And if we can stretch it to ten we can stretch it to eleven, tvelwe, thirteen, fourteen, and theeeere we go: fifteen!
It´s NOT impossible, it´s just absurd.

What I've always looked at is not the blood but the mutilations. If the intent was to take an organ and the killing happened even 10 minutes before Paul saw Lechmere then the killer had plenty of time to take said organ without being caught and Lechmere would be innocent. On the flip side, if taking an organ was the intention then either Lechmere was the killer and disturbed by Paul or he disturbed the killer before he could complete his work.

My opinion only of course.

The absense of any organ-taking is a clear indication that the killer - if not Lechmere - fled very close in time to Lechmere´s arrival.
But we have a man who hides his real name, we have a man who seemingly lied to the police, we have a man who had reason to be at the murder sots at the times of the murders, so I am disinclined to favour a phantom killer.

[Fisherman]

Regarding Trevor's Dr Biggs citation, it would be fair to say, would it not, that while that might hold true as a general principle, one can in fact potentially deduce something regarding the time of death from ongoing blood loss? It surely depends on the individual circumstances. It depends whether we are talking about a stream, a trickle, or an occasional drip.

Nothing I've ever read has suggested that blood loss after death is ever more than the flimsiest tiny trickle of odd drips here and there - absent the pumping heart, capillary attraction keeps almost all of the blood contained within the blood vessels.

Since trials have been completed and people condemned of murder on blood flow evidence, I would say that you are very correct on this score, Henry.
Trevor has a habit of quoting very lofty, completely generalized view expressed by Dr Biggs as if they had any application on the Nichols case, which they don´t.
What Biggs is probably saying here is that the amount of blood on the scene cannot in retrospect say anything much about the time of the injury infliction, and that is of course true.
But any idiot would (or should, at least) be able to tell that a person who has had every major vessel in his an her neck severed, and who is still bleeding, could not have suffered that damage at any point at all in time. It is a very recent damage, because otherwise there would be no bleeding.

[Fisherman]

Oh well, all this will be moot when Pierre finally reveals his dodgy copper.

It´s probably Henry Kirby.

[Fisherman]

Elamarna:

Lack of guilt, that is exactly where I am coming from, looking if anything argues against guilt, we all work in different ways.

The issue is you are searching for points of innocence, because you sincerely believe Lechmere is guilty.

I sense this is wrongly worded...?

I on the other hand am not looking for points which may or may not indicate guilty, it is different as you of course understands

It is indeed different. I recommend looking at things from BOTH directions.


Is it not true that not all the murder sites are on a direct route to his place of work from home? And as such the theory lacks strength.

The only two that differ were killed on a Saturday night, so it stands to reason that Lechmere was not en route to work. The other four are all on a direct route to his place of work from home, however.


It just it seems this post reinforces my view that there is no middle ground on the issue in your mind.

I don´t think you can read my mind, Steve. You can read my posts. I certainly look at both the middle ground and the one far off, but I don´t think I need to argye it out here. Others do it for me.

You are obviously fully convinced of his guilty, the issue is that at present you have not convinced others, maybe you Will, maybe not , time will tell.

I am very nearly fully convinced of his guilt, yes.

[Fisherman]

Good example, but you forgot to mention that the young man was drugged and acting drunk, which made it easier for Dahmer to pull off his story.

I think Lechmere very well could've called Paul over to take the suspicion off himself. Any devious, quick thinker would probably do the same thing. The challenge is why go with Paul to find the police? Lechmere had no idea the PC would let them go on their way. He could very well have asked them to come back with him no matter if a PC was waiting there or not. He was free and clear with Paul.If he was that cunning he should've gone a different way, which also is mentioned a million times on this site.

Columbo

And if he was a devious, quick thinker, he would realize that walking with Paul made him look less suspicious, plus he may well have counted on easily passing any policeman by with his story - which was exactly what happened.

[Fisherman]

Columbo:

People keep talking about oozing and dripping from the neck as an example that Lechmere had just committed the crime.

Both Neil and Mizen used the term "running", Columbo.

Maybe, but it would take a lot longer for that blood to soak completely through the layers of clothes. Add to that the time it would take the blood to flow as far down as the waist.

But why would the blood travel to the waist from the neck? Is it no likelier that the blood at the waist came from the abdominal cutting?

[Trevor Marriott]

It also relies on the health of the victim, their weight, whether on an angle pointing up or down, lying on their side, stomach, back or sitting up. You may possibly be able to formulate a medical opinion based on a healthy, normal weighted individual, but that also would not be concrete because of the individual who was losing the blood and under what circumstances would cause the loss of blood to begin with.

What I don't know is being understood is not all of a person's blood flows out of the wound that was created. blood in the arms and lower extremities is not going to flood out of a neck wound unless the body was hung upside down. Blood from the neck is going to leak from the head and pump from the neck until the heart stops pumping. the heart stops pumping at death so if Nichols was throttled before her throat was cut, that would cause her heart to slow down before the cut and the heart would not beat that much longer, so not as much blood as originally thought would escape the wound.

So theoretically she could've been killed 15 minutes or so before Lechmere was seen with her, and the trickle or oozing could've continued that whole time after the initial gush of blood. Or it could be the result of Lechmere attacking her on 5 or so minutes before.

What I've always looked at is not the blood but the mutilations. If the intent was to take an organ and the killing happened even 10 minutes before Paul saw Lechmere then the killer had plenty of time to take said organ without being caught and Lechmere would be innocent. On the flip side, if taking an organ was the intention then either Lechmere was the killer and disturbed by Paul or he disturbed the killer before he could complete his work.

My opinion only of course.

Columbo

Or the killer simply wanted to kill and mutilate and never ever wanted to take organs. It may be coincidence but the only two victims that were missing organs when the post mortems were carried out were Chapman and Eddowes, whose bodies were left for 12 hours before the doctors came back to carry out the post mortems and left in situations where it would have been possible for someone to remove the organs quickly using anatomical knowledge.

[harry]

No fisherman,the article was not just about clotting.It included oozing.
However, I answered your request to show my source,now let me see in similar fashion,your source in writing.Lets see from Jason Payne-James own words what he has to say about blood flow.Then we can compare.Lets see,from him that 7 minute limit,what it means.Give me a source.

[Columbo]

Regarding Trevor's Dr Biggs citation, it would be fair to say, would it not, that while that might hold true as a general principle, one can in fact potentially deduce something regarding the time of death from ongoing blood loss? It surely depends on the individual circumstances. It depends whether we are talking about a stream, a trickle, or an occasional drip.

Nothing I've ever read has suggested that blood loss after death is ever more than the flimsiest tiny trickle of odd drips here and there - absent the pumping heart, capillary attraction keeps almost all of the blood contained within the blood vessels.

It also relies on the health of the victim, their weight, whether on an angle pointing up or down, lying on their side, stomach, back or sitting up. You may possibly be able to formulate a medical opinion based on a healthy, normal weighted individual, but that also would not be concrete because of the individual who was losing the blood and under what circumstances would cause the loss of blood to begin with.

What I don't know is being understood is not all of a person's blood flows out of the wound that was created. blood in the arms and lower extremities is not going to flood out of a neck wound unless the body was hung upside down. Blood from the neck is going to leak from the head and pump from the neck until the heart stops pumping. the heart stops pumping at death so if Nichols was throttled before her throat was cut, that would cause her heart to slow down before the cut and the heart would not beat that much longer, so not as much blood as originally thought would escape the wound.

So theoretically she could've been killed 15 minutes or so before Lechmere was seen with her, and the trickle or oozing could've continued that whole time after the initial gush of blood. Or it could be the result of Lechmere attacking her on 5 or so minutes before.

What I've always looked at is not the blood but the mutilations. If the intent was to take an organ and the killing happened even 10 minutes before Paul saw Lechmere then the killer had plenty of time to take said organ without being caught and Lechmere would be innocent. On the flip side, if taking an organ was the intention then either Lechmere was the killer and disturbed by Paul or he disturbed the killer before he could complete his work.

My opinion only of course.

Columbo

[Henry Flower]

Regarding Trevor's Dr Biggs citation, it would be fair to say, would it not, that while that might hold true as a general principle, one can in fact potentially deduce something regarding the time of death from ongoing blood loss? It surely depends on the individual circumstances. It depends whether we are talking about a stream, a trickle, or an occasional drip.

Nothing I've ever read has suggested that blood loss after death is ever more than the flimsiest tiny trickle of odd drips here and there - absent the pumping heart, capillary attraction keeps almost all of the blood contained within the blood vessels.

[Columbo]

Here is what Dr Biggs says

"Blood can leak out after death (and for quite some time). You can’t tell anything about time of injury / death by assessing the blood loss at the scene"

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

I agree with you on that.

Columbo