Charles Lechmere: Prototypical Life of a Serial Killer

[Herlock Sholmes]

Your # 387 achieves the remarkable feat of being both insulting and evasive in the same post.

You accuse me of making up a three-day trip by Druitt to Dorset, you deny that he necessarily spent all three days in Dorset, and then you claim that I am wrong because he could have been in Dorset for more than three days!

I suppose I should have written '≥ 3' instead of 'three', so as not to set you off.

Strange that you should call me evasive after you made this point which is far from clear. Are you claiming that the trip from London to Dorset took three days? I wouldn’t have thought so but your wording is unclear.

What I took it to mean was that you were claiming that he’d somehow planned a 3 day break in Dorset during which he would have had to have undertaken a return trip to London. This is baseless as we don’t know when Druitt travelled down to London so he could have been there for 2 weeks before returning on the 30th for all that we know. So this would be a false.

What other alternative explanation could there be for your 3 day claim? You must have said it for a reason but I can’t see a single remotely valid reason for using either ‘3 days’ or even around ‘3 days.’

Clarity would be nice. A reduction in the constant complaints would be even nicer.

Sickert is not, as you claim, 'irrelevant'.

If you deny Druitt an alibi, then you have to deny Sickert an alibi, and that puts you in the same camp as Patricia Cornwell and, possibly - because, unlike Cornwell, he may have changed his mind by now - Fishy, who it seems from your remarks is not your friend.

That's too bad.

Its too bad that you still haven’t grasped what constitutes an alibi. I can’t recall the details on Sickert so perhaps you could refresh our memory on the two dates that we know he was in France either side of one of the murders?

Fishy doesn’t support the suggestion that Sickert had an alibi. Which I’ve already told you.

It is also too bad that you took my remark about Sickert's 'travelling companions [who] might have provided him with an unshakeable alibi' to be about Druitt, but then you obviously do not wish to deal with the issue of Sickert's alibi, which is so inconvenient.

If you were talking about Sickert having companions and not Druitt then I’d suggest that you try to make your points clearer. As anyone can see from re-reading it’s far from clear that you were talking about Sickert and not Druitt. It’s not too much to ask is it?

You talk about my allegedly 'digging a hole' for myself, but that is just what you have done for yourself, when you write, 'Pretty much every suspect has no alibi.'

That is not true!

Pretty much every suspect can have an alibi when he is asked to produce one.

This is not really worthy of an answer. It’s such a twist of reason. If we don’t know for a fact that someone has an alibi then we have to (legally as well as logically) take it that they have none. You refuse to accept the obvious in that you cannot seek to exonerate someone by saying “well, I’d say he was innocent because for all that we know he might have had an alibi that we don’t know about.” Try that one with a jury.

When I challenged you to produce evidence of a single Polish Jew in the East End of London having attacked a Gentile woman, you responded - and I'm quoting you from memory but if necessary I will find the post and quote it exactly - 'That's easy. John Pizer.'

When I then pointed out that there is no evidence whatsoever that John Pizer ever assaulted a Gentile woman and that the only court record we have of John Pizer having been involved in an assault records that one of the women who accused him assaulted him, you just shut up.

You never wrote another word on the subject.

Really? Is this how desperate you are to try and score points that you’ll go trawling back months to dig up trivialities? Give us all a break PI.

THAT is an example of digging a hole for yourself.

Pizer produced alibis for the first two murders.

We know of those alibis because he was challenged to produce them.

If that had not happened, and there had been insufficient evidence to charge him, you would likely be writing now that he had no alibis - and I suppose one of the eminent people to whom you refer would be doing likewise and perhaps suggesting that he was Anderson's suspect and was identified at the Seaside Home.

Im not interested in your Kosminski obsession.

There is no reason to suppose that the outcome would have been any different had Druitt, Lechmere, Sickert, or Kosminski been challenged to produce alibis.

Which couldn’t possibly be more irrelevant.

The fact that we do not know exactly what alibis they had does not mean that they 'had no alibi'.

1. On that exact same principal then you would have to agree that just because we have no evidence of any issues in Druitt’s childhood we cannot assume that those issues never happened.

2. Just because we have no evidence of Druitt consorting with prostitutes it can’t mean that he couldn’t have done.

3. Just because we have no evidence of violence from Druitt cant mean that he couldn’t have had instances of violence.


Cue the moving goalposts.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Or maybe he had no alibi. But as you point out, a lack of alibi does not prove guilt, it merely means they cannot be eliminated as a suspect.

And that’s the whole point Fiver. It’s still legitimate to consider Druitt a weak suspect if that’s what someone thinks but we cant invent an alibi. And why would anyone feel compelled to do it?

[Lewis C]

I can’t recall the details on Sickert so perhaps you could refresh our memory on the two dates that we know he was in France either side of one of the murders?

Hi Herlock,

My take is that Sickert didn't quite have an alibi, but the evidence that we have makes it appear highly unlikely that he was in England during the first 4 C5 murders. His case is different from Druitt's in that with Druitt, we know that he was in England. Below I have quoted details about this from from Stephen Ryder's "Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert: A Primer":

Sickert's biographer, Matthew Sturgis, recently elaborated on this evidence in an article in the Sunday Times (3 November 2002). According to Sturgis, although the exact date Sickert left for France cannot be determined, he apparently departed sometime in mid-August. His last London sketch is dated August 4th, and there are no sources to indicate that he was in London after that date. On September 6th, Sickert's mother wrote from St. Valéry-en-Caux, describing how Walter and his brother Bernhard were having such a "happy time" swimming and painting there. A letter sent by a French painter, Jacques-Emile Blanche, to his father described a visit with Sickert on September 16th. Walter's wife Ellen wrote to her brother-in-law on September 21st, stating that her husband was in France for some weeks now.

There is evidence to suggest that Sickert stayed in the Dieppe area at least until early October, 1888. He painted a local butcher's shop, "flooded with sunlight" in a piece he titled The October Sun.

Although any one of these several bits of evidence could feasibly be ignored or explained away, the combination of all these independent sources confirming the same thing - namely, that Sickert was in France at the time of the Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes murders - suggests that Sickert could not have been the killer. While it is true that ferry service between England and France was widely available, and technically Sickert could have travelled back and forth before and after each murder, that is pure speculation and there is no evidence to suggest this was the case.

[Lewis C]

double post

[Fiver]

My take is that Sickert didn't quite have an alibi, but the evidence that we have makes it appear highly unlikely that he was in England during the first 4 C5 murders.

To me, that means Sickert did have an alibi. It's not 100% coverage - real life alibis seldom are - but it is multiple independent sources putting Sickert outside of England at the time. In a whodunnit, that could have been a clever ruse to throw off suspicion. In real life, pnly someone under suspicion would try to fake an alibi and Sickert was not under suspicion. A fake alibi would also be a premeditated act and I don't see how any of the crimes would have been, at least not on that level.

And if Sickert was going to fake an alibi for the first four, why didn't he for Kelly's murder?

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

In real life, only someone under suspicion would try to fake an alibi and Sickert was not under suspicion.


And if Sickert was going to fake an alibi for the first four, why didn't he for Kelly's murder?

Cannot the same considerations be applied to Druitt?

Druitt was obviously not under suspicion before the first murder was committed, and why did he not contrive alibis for the other murders?

[Mark J D]

I am, as before, writing for the lurkers and newbies present and future...

The history of seral killers does not support the cases against Lechmere, Druitt, or Kosminski.

The history of serial killers is radically incomplete, not least because it is constructed from the tiny minority who are actually caught and studied. On the basis of what we have, Lechmere is a vastly better suspect than the other two.

The family working man argument is powerful because Lechmere had five to nine hours to spend with his wife and nine children and get some sleep.

He arrives home one Saturday, possibly as late as 10.30 p.m.

We are asked to believe that about two and a half hours later, he has had dinner, walked to his mother's house, visited his mother, left his mother's house, and walked to Berner Street.

The 'family working man argument' is doo-doo, as has already been shown. To imagine an unlikely itinerary just so you can ridicule it is straw-manning (again). And why stress 'the walk from his mother's house to Berner Street' when the distance walked is literally 250 yards and would likely take less than 90 seconds?

We are asked to believe that he then spent the next one and a half hours committing two murders in locations a mile apart and then travelled to a third district to leave an article of clothing, before making his way home, arriving home about 24 hours since he had last got up to go to work.

That is not believable.

This stuff is quite outrageous. Stride was still alive at c. 00:45, and Eddowes' body was found at 01:44. By no stretch of the imagination is the time interval 'one and a half hours'. As for distance, Dutfield's Yard and 'Murder Corner' are not 'a mile apart': as the crow flies, the distance is around 950 yards; to follow the roads makes it 0.66 of a mile. By 'travelled to a third district to leave an article of clothing, our poster refers to the walk to the end of Goulston Street -- a location that, as the crow flies, was a mere 400 yards distant -- after which Lechmere was actually on his route home, courtesy of Wentworth Street. The idea that none of the above could have happened because it would result in him having to stay awake for 24 hours is imbecilic.

I hope that helps people navigate through the seemingly inevitable future garbage fields produced by Lechmere Derangement Syndrome.

M.

[Aethelwulf]

The history of serial killers is radically incomplete, not least because it is constructed from the tiny minority who are actually caught and studied. On the basis of what we have, Lechmere is a vastly better suspect than the other two.

There is my problem. All you have is manipulation of the 'times' 'around 3.30 am' and 'not far from 3.45'.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Please see my replies below:

This stuff is quite outrageous. Stride was still alive at c. 00:45, and Eddowes' body was found at 01:44. By no stretch of the imagination is the time interval 'one and a half hours'.


It may be that I could have expressed my point more clearly.

What I meant is that from the time at which Stride was murdered to the time that the piece of apron was deposited at Wentworth dwellings - assuming that PC Long was correct about the approximate timing of it - was about 1 1/2 hours.

I wrote:

'We are asked to believe that he then spent the next one and a half hours committing two murders in locations a mile apart and then travelled to a third district to leave an article of clothing, before making his way home, arriving home about 24 hours since he had last got up to go to work.'

I meant:

'We are asked to believe that he then spent the next one and a half hours committing two murders in locations a mile apart and travelling to a third district to leave an article of clothing, before making his way home, arriving home about 24 hours since he had last got up to go to work.'

I wonder how many people agree with you that what I wrote was 'outrageous' let alone 'quite outrageous'.



The idea that none of the above could have happened because it would result in him having to stay awake for 24 hours is imbecilic.


Would you care to withdraw your implied insult that I as well as the person who first made that point here are imbecilic?

[Mark J D]

There is my problem. All you have is manipulation of the 'times' 'around 3.30 am' and 'not far from 3.45'.

By all means spend the rest of your life posting and re-posting this. But it isn't true, and it isn't anything to do with me.

M.

[John Wheat]

There is no evidence whatsoever that Lechmere was the Ripper.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

There is no evidence whatsoever that Lechmere was the Ripper.

I notice that you have posted that comment before, but it does not make it any less true.

[John Wheat]

I notice that you have posted that comment before, but it does not make it any less true.

Thanks Private Investigator. I just wish those that are attempting to formulate a case against Lechmere on garbage would note that there is no evidence he was to the Ripper.

[Aethelwulf]

By all means spend the rest of your life posting and re-posting this. But it isn't true, and it isn't anything to do with me.

M.

It may suprise you but for years I totally believed lech was the ripper. By chance I stumbled on the c5 docu and it seemed so obvious and simple. For years following that docu I regularly checked on casebook to see the latest thinking on lech, partly because I was uneasy about the actual case against lech. At that point the only other suspect name I could have told you was tumblety. It wasn't until the first lockdown that I was so unsure that I started going through each suspect case by case. So I was a fully signed up true believer of lech, not just a knee jerk reaction dismissing lech out of hand. And I believe I was right to dismiss lech because when all said and done the case is really wafer thin imo

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Im not interested in your Kosminski obsession.

(HS, # 391)



It is remarkable how many times I have been accused of having an obsession.

Two posters today have quite independently accused me of having an obsession.

At least one other member has done the same.

I have never accused anyone here of having an obsession about anything.

Some people might think, however, that someone who has just had a thread on a particular topic deleted today and another thread on a similar topic closed down on the same day, may have a tendency to be obsessive about that particular subject.