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So, the next poster I am going to call upon to debate with me and comment on my observations (while I will of course answer questions in return) is Herlock Sholmes.
Herlock has been very active on this thread, and he has posted very aggressive material, with a less than cordial tone. It is my hope that the debate between the two of us can be conducted with as few aggressive inclusions as possible, and I will certainly do my best to be on point without resorting to any inflammatory wordings.
So here we go!
I am going to begin by pointing out a matter where Sherlock has offered repeated criticism. It revolves around my using 3.45 as an anchor point of my reasoning. Herlock writes in post 776 that ”To claim that Lechmere arrived at 3.45 and that this was what Baxter meant is a blatant manipulation of the evidence. There’s no other way of putting it. Moving the goalposts in an attempt to frame Lechmere.”
In post 795, Herlock writes ”Baxter clearly said before 3.45 because Lech had to have found the body before Neil did at 3.45. Only in this world can sometime before 3.45 only mean 3.45 or a few seconds before and not 3.42 or 3.43 or 3.45. It’s much easier to make a point when you can fix the times to suit the theory.”
I am going to begin answering this by pointing out that there was never any case of me claiming that the body was found by Lechmere exactly at 3.45 or seconds away from it. What I am pointing to is instead that we can identify two five minute time slots, if you will.
The three PCs all said that they were called into action at circa 3.45. That would put Lechmeres discovery of the body around five minutes before, at circa 3.40. This was initially the belief held by the ones examining the case.
Robert Paul said that he walked down Bucks Row at exactly 3.45, and when we see that Dr Llewellyn was contacted by John Thain at around 3.55 or 4.00. This seemingly suggests that Paul was correct.
So we have two suggested time points for Lechmeres discovery, 3.40 and 3.45.
These two time windows were clearly much mulled over by the coroner of the inquest, and it is obvious that coroner Baxter did his utmost to try and make sense of them. Ultimately, he opted for the latter time window being the correct one. He said at the inquest that the time at which the body was found could not have been far off 3.45.
Given that there at the time was great awareness of these two possible time slots, my contention is that Lechmere found Nichols in the latter one. This does not mean that he must have been in place at 3.45 exactly, my interpretation is instead that he will have been there at a time between 3.42.30 and 3.47.30, making up the later five minute time slot. The former slot, the one suggesting that Lechmere was there earlier, as per the three PCs timings, is accordingly one of the five preceding minutes, 3.37.30 and onwards.
Coroner Baxter did not leave any learoom for an interpretation of 3.40 being the correct time. And the matter about Thain fetching Llewellyn is very much in line with what Baxter laid down. I am not saying proposed, because there was as per himself never any possibility of him being wrong: he said that the matter was fixed by many independent data, and so there was enough in it to ensure that the second time window was the correct one.
Next: In Cutting Point, I write that Lechmere said that he left home at 3.30. This has been called a lot of things by some, none of them being kind. I have made it clear that I would have liked to have added the word ”around” but I unfortunately did not do so. It would have saved me a lot of time if I did.
That aside, it nevertheless applies that when somebody says that he left home at around 3.30, he is suggesting 3.30 as the likely time. He does not rule out any of the times close to 3.30, but every minute removed from it must be regarded as less likely than 3.30. The very purpose of suggesting a time the way Lechmere did is to offer a likely starting point, not to inform about how it is actually unlikely in any way.
My reasoning is that if somebody says that he leaves home at around 3.30, then that timing can be used to check roughly how it fits with the known data. In our case, we have Baxter giving us what I would call an approximation for the finding of the body that lies in the 3.42.30 - 3.47.30 scope. If we treat Lechmeres claim the same way, he left in the 3.27.30 - 3.32.30 time window. We then get a result of the time it took for his seven minute trek, ranging from ten minutes as a minimum, and twenty minutes as a maximum. We can therefore see that if we want to find a seven minute trek for Lechmere, we need to tweak a good deal - or a huge deal.
The most interesting matter about all of this, at least to my mind, is how Lechmere testified at a remove in time when it was generally accepted that the finding time of the body was around 3.40. That meant that Lechmeres given timing of having left at around 3.30 should have seen him at the murder site at around 3.37, meaning that his suggestion seemed very reasonable, not least since he said around 3.30, not exactly 3.30. Of course, if Lichee as the killer had followed the proceedings, he would want to present a time that fit with the accepted timings at the inquest. And it originally did.
Once we add in how coroner Baxter later moved the finding of the body out of the 3.40 time slot into the 3.45 ditto, we get another picture. Then Lechmeres timing becomes much less credible, because it suggests that he arrived at the spot around fifteen minutes after he left home. If we detract two and a half minutes from 3.45 and if we add two and a half minutes to 3.30, we still have him using a full ten minutes for a seven minute trek. If we instead add two and a half minutes to 3.45 and detract the same from 3.30, we get a twenty minute trek. None of the suggestions fits with the facts, even if we allow for substantial generosity towards the carman.
We can probably discuss this for an eternity, but it will always be impossible to find any interpretation of the matter that would benefit the defence in a court of law. It is firmly a point for the prosecution, and a jury would be quite aware of the implications. If the tilting point in a trial hinged on the timing matter, that would likely have encouraged a conviction as far as I can see.
Lets now move on to some other points of disagreement between how I look upon things and how Herlock Sholmes sees them. Point number one would be whether or not a serial killer could kill before going to work. Herlock Holmes claims that suggest this is to suggest a huge leap of faith, mainly because we have no other example of it.
It applies that whatever detail we look upon in a serial killer case, it will at some stage have appeared for the first time. Somebody would have been the first serial killer to extract organs, some other serial killer will have introduced taunting the police, and some will have been the first one to go down onto the street to fetch a murder victim back to his apartment from the arms of two police officers. Reasoning that something that has never happened before will never happen in the future either is not scientifically viable unless a physical impossibility can be pointed to. And as it happens, only yesterday I found evidence that Lawrence Bittaker, a serial killer who worked in tandem with another man, Roy Norris, actually killed right before work, risking to be late on account of it. All other differences aside, this is an important find if true. I need to check further on it.
But that is an extended discussion, and I would for now just ask people to keep in mind that Herlock Holmes claims that killing before going to work is a suggestion that is a huge leap of faith.
The same goes for not running from a murder site if you have the opportunity to do so. In fact, Herlock Sholmes is even able to quantify how likely such a thing is - he says that he is ninety nine per cent certain that it cannot happen. He also words himself ”The fact alone that he stood and waited for Paul to arrive makes his innocence close to certain” in post 742. He has on numerous occasions expressed that he cannot understand how anybody could believe in such a suggestion.
Again, what we should keep in mind here is that Herlock says that the suggestion that Lechmere could have chosen to stay put and bluff Paul is an extremely poor one, and with close to absolute certainty a falsehood. In other words, it is as huge a leap of faith as anybody could produce.
The one producing these suggestions is of course myself. And Herlock is not lenient on me when it comes to passing judgment:
”Every single, minute detail is twisted into something incriminating. So much so that many people who have been interested in the case for years find it more than a little embarrassing.” (Post779)
”Fish’s whole case revolves around turning unknowns into ‘knowns.’ (Post 898)
”You simply make things up.” (Post 911)
In short, I twist the facts, I make up ´facts´ and I do everything I possibly can to incriminate Lechmere.
Again, putting it in other words, it is not only the two suggestions of killing before work and not fleeing that are huge leaps of faith - ”Every minute detail” is a leap of faith, a misleading. All I say is an example of a leap of faith, seemingly.
It is a tough thing to get that kind of feedback on something you have put years of research into.
Then again, I sometimes get reactions to my theory that are very much more positive. Take, for example, this glowing review of Cutting Point:
”I’m not ‘convinced’ of Lechmere’s guilt (I’m certainly not convinced of anyone’s guilt) but I am now ‘convinced’ that he has to be taken seriously as a suspect; as the ripper and maybe the Torso Killer. I could be wrong. We can all be wrong. Lechmere might be our man though; who knows? Fish piles on the circumstantial evidence without any leaps of faith. It’s conspiracy and Freemason-free. Sadly most ripper books I buy these days I end up wishing that I’d spent the cash on something else but not in this case. Fish has presented the case for Lechmere and he’s done it well.”
Here, we have a poster who is of the exact opposite meaning as Herlock Sholmes when it comes to the question about whether or not I present a fair case based on the evidence available. We are told that that there is not a single leap of faith in the book. Not one. I have presented the case for Lechmere well, it says.
And that is the way these things often go: Some posters agree with you, some do not. The baffling thing about these two judgments, one of me being a twister and somebody who makes up facts, the other about me not making a single leap of faith and presenting the case well, is that they are both authored by the exact same poster - Herlock Sholmes.
In two years time, he has made a 180 degree turn. And he is perfectly entitled to do so. I would also say that we are free to choose either of the two recommendations he makes when it comes to assessing the Lechmere theory, we can agree with his first take on it or we can agree with his second, and we are equally entitled to our views when we make that choice.
What we cannot say, though, is that any credibility can lie with a poster who does the kind of reversing that Herlock Sholmes has done here. The judgments are not based on different facts, because I have never changed a syllable of what I propose in my theory. The book very clearly suggests all the things that Herlock Sholmes find detestable today, but found quite acceptable and part of a good job with no leaps of faith on Charles Lechmere and his possible culpability two years ago.
Once we compare these two versions, I personally find that Herlock Sholmes has not only burnt his ships - he has torched his whole shipyard, making it impossible for him to launch any take on the Lechmere theory with any realistic hope of being listened to by people who dislike total inconsistency in a poster. And we of course get a poignant answer to Herlocks question about who would be so ill informed as not to be able to see through the Lechmere theory - he himself was not able to do so in 2021, two years ago.
This could have been my final remark, but we are going to go two steps further. The first step we will take involves looking at how Herlock himself treats the facts of the case. We will take a look at post 742, where Herlock writes ”Add the fact that he’d have been at work when Chapman was killed”.
Herlock Sholmes firmly believes that Annie Chapman was killed late in the morning, at around 5.30. And that is fine. He is not alone in entertaining this belief. But he is also acutely aware that others disagree, and make a case for Chapman dying at a much earlier time. Herlock knows that there are conflicting views of this - but he still chooses to claim that his own take on things is a fact.
That tells us how this poster, who accuses me of twisting everything and inventing things, handles the evidence himself.
Point two is a late one (post 865), where Herlock tells us that the case is a simple one. He did so reacting to my proposition that is a simple case of guilt, and wanted to show how he himself believes it is a simple case of innocence. He starts out by quoting a sentence of mine:
‘The picture is, I would suggest, a very simple one..”
He then moves onto his own take:
Indeed.
”The killer killed Nichols - the transparently innocent Lechmere found the body - Paul arrived seconds later - Neil arrived a minute or two later - then Mizen arrived.
Simples.”
The context in which this post arrived involved a debate between myself and Steve Blomer. I had pointed out to Steve Blomer that he had used a quotation from some poster, stating that Neil would have arrived at the murder site two minutes only after Lechmere was there, passing that quotation off as being representative of what the Lechmere theory says. The theory suggests a time gap of around six minutes between the cutting of the throat and Neils arrival, which was why I protested against how Steve Blomer did not publish what is said in my book, for example, instead opting for publishing a flawed estimation form some random poster. I know that he has read - and reviewed - my book, so he was quite aware of my take on the matter.
The one thing we agreed on, was that there could be no doubt that many minutes had passed when PC Neil got to the murder scene.
And here we have Herlock Sholmes, who evidently missed out on that point (or chose to ignore it) and suggests that PC Neil could have arrived at the murder scene as little as a mere minute after Paul arrived there. That could have meant that Neil arrived as the carmen examined the body, and would at the very least mean that Neil must have met Lechmere and Paul in Bucks Row.
Again, this level of ignorance with a poster who shifts between commending me for my good work on Lechmere and accusing me of all sorts of shortcomings, does nothing at all for me when it comes to building any trust.
I send off by way of adjoining two of the contradictory judgements of my work, both given by Herlock Sholmes:
”Fish, I take my hat off to you. I’m glad that I bought your book.” ”Desperate stuff. Way past its sell by date.”
Any comments from Herlock are welcomed. The same goes for any questions that I have not already answered above. I will point out that I have tried as best as I could to avoid any inflammatory wordings, and I urge Herlock to answer in the same vein.
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