Charles Lechmere: Prototypical Life of a Serial Killer

[Lewis C]

Could someone educate me about the evidence that serial killers murder at locations that they have a family connection to please?

Hi Herlock,

I haven't researched this, but I'll say that the only thing that I can figure is that depending on what the family connection is, a family connection might indicate that the killer is more familiar with the area, and I do think that whoever JtR was, he was was very familiar with the Whitechapel area. The thing is that in this case, I think it's already established that Cross was very familiar with the Whitechapel area, so for me, exploring his family connections doesn't really add anything.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock,

I haven't researched this, but I'll say that the only thing that I can figure is that depending on what the family connection is, a family connection might indicate that the killer is more familiar with the area, and I do think that whoever JtR was, he was was very familiar with the Whitechapel area. The thing is that in this case, I think it's already established that Cross was very familiar with the Whitechapel area, so for me, exploring his family connections doesn't really add anything.

Hi Lewis,

I don’t see any significance in it either. It smacks of desperation to me.

[Fisherman]

Good to see you admitting that you accept or discard facts based on whether it fits your theory.

No post started like this deserves any answer.

[Fisherman]

There is no evidence of a time gap.

It took some time to find anything at all to answer in Fivers many posts. This needs to be answered though:

The evidence SUGGESTS a time gap, is what I have said. Nothing else.

[Fisherman]

Its a statement of fact that you haven’t been able to give an explanation for. Because there isn’t one.

I donat have to give an "explanation", Herlock, because I am not the one who has claimed to be able to prove my opponent a liar. You are.

And, of course, as I have pointed out a zillion times, you HAVE no proof. You have made claims about me that you are totally unable to substantiate. So far, you best effort is "because I think so".

Does that work?

I don´t think so.

[Fisherman]

My wording:

-So you fail to mention that Paul spoke about walking down Bucks Row at exactly 3.45 in Lloyds Weekly. zz0.geam4l6wdzzz

That's a deliberate misrepresentation on your part. No one is ignoring the time that Robert Paul gave. We are pointing out it doesn't fit with the timings given by the other witnesses.

The fact that Paul spoke about "exactly" in Lloyds Weekly was left out in the post you wrote and that I commented on. It is neither here nor there if you in retrospect claim to have considered it - it WAS left out in the post nevertheless.

You're deliberately ignoring that the Lloyd's Weekly contained several factual errors and that Paul did not use the word "exactly" in his inquest testimony.

The factual errors are in no way connected to the issue at hand; there is correct and incorrect information in the article, but it remains that it quotes Paul as saying "exactly", and I can see no reason for the paper to invent it on Pauls behalf, regardless if they may or may not have invented other things. As for my ignoring how Paul did not use "exactly" in his inquest testimony, that is a ridiculous claim. I have pointed it out time and again.

[Fisherman]

You really do love these semantic games, don't you, Christer?

No. But you seem to relish in falsely infecting that I would do so. It is not the first effort on your behalf, is it?

Actually, you're wrong here, but I'll attribute your mistake to English not being your native tongue instead of any deliberate attempt at obfuscation.

And Merriam-Webster? How do they cope with British English...?

"Attire" doesn't mean a single piece of clothing. That would be incorrect usage. It's one of those pesky English words that is a plural even though there is no 's' on the end of it. 'Attire' means multiple pieces of clothing--the entirety of what the person is or was wearing. Another definition of 'attire' is a 'genre of clothing'--as in Egyptian attire, wedding attire, a working woman's attire, etc. Think of it as their 'outfit.'

So, a woman's "attire' would be her outfit: her shoes, her slip, her girdle, her dress, her hat, etc. A 'portion of her attire' would mean one portion of her outfit--one item of clothing, in this case, her apron. In no shape or form does this mean to imply that this portion of her outfit was torn, incomplete, or a rag.

And by the way, in English, when we say someone is 'dressed in rags' it is meant as a metaphor. They aren't dressed in small dish towels or bits used to clean up around the dog's dish. It means that the person's clothing is so worn out that it is only fit to be torn into pieces and used as such.

In describing the constable removing the St. Phillip's apron from under the hoarding and turning it over to his superiors, it is described four times: a 'rough apron'; 'an apron'; a 'suspicious garment'; and 'a stained apron.'

At no time is there nary a hint that is anything other than whole--which, of course, is debilitating to your strange theory for the reasons already given.

I hope this helps.

What helps is when you stop suggesting that I would not understand for example how "dressed in rags" is a metaphor.

Your earlier post worked from the faulty assumption that a rag is a piece of cloth used to wipe yourself on. I corrected you; a rag CAN be a piece of cloth used to wipe your hands on, but it does not in any way HAVE to be just that. The piece of cloth is a rag before you wipe your hands on it. If you do not wipe your hands on it, but instead drop it on the ground and walk away, does its status as a rag go away? Nope. it does not.
Does the piece of cloth actually have to BE a piece of cloth? If I wipe my hands on a discarded t-shirt, am I then allowed to say that I wiped my hand on a rag? Or must I say that I wiped them on a t-shirt, but NOT on a rag?

Let me take you a few years back to another discussion that took place back then. It was then said that I was NOT supposed to say that Lechmere was "found" standing all alone in the street by Robert Paul. "Found" was a LOADED word, inferring guilt - or so I was told. It was a sort of panic, coupled to the sudden insight that a factually correct word could look like it inferred guilt on Lechmeres behalf. I was banned from JTR Forums for writing that Lechmere was found standing close by the freshly killed body of Polly Nichols. It was too much for the administrators of the boards.
Luckily, we have moved on from that sad point of administrative evidence obfuscation.

It was ridiculous then, and it is ridiculous now. But there are matters that are even MORE ridiculous.

When the torso killer decided to dump a body in the East End of London, he settled on Pinchin Street. The exact street where Charles Lechmere grew up and spent his formative years.
There were hundreds and hundreds of streets to choose from. There were a thousand streets in Whitechapel. There were tens of thousands in the East End.
But the killer chose Charles Lechmeres boyhood street.

Is-that-not-an-ALMIGHTY-coincidence?

Moreover, he put the torso in a railway arch, and that railway arch was only erected after Lechmeres mothers and her bigamous husbands lodgings were torn down to give way for it.

IS-that-not-another-ALMIGHTY-coincidence?

And then, the day after the torso was dumped in that Pinchin Street railway arch, a bloody guess what was found in an EXACT line between the railway arch and Charles Lechmeres lodgings.

Surely-that-must-be-the-coincidence-to-end-ALL-coincidences?

And the man who is so coincidentally pointed at, is a man who JUST HAPPENED to stumble over the dead body of Polly Nichols, who JUST HAPPENED to be found there by Robert Paul, who JUST HAPPENED to be present there at a remove in time when the victim would go on to bleed for many minutes, who JUST HAPPENED to use another name with the police than the name he otherwise habitually used with all other authorities, who JUST HAPPENED to leave out his registered name, who JUST HAPPENED to disagree with a serving PC about what he had said on the murder morning, who JUST HAPPENED to come up only with disagreements that seemed tailor-made to take him past said police, who JUST HAPPENED to find the only Ripper victim where the clothing obscured the damage done, who JUST HAPPENED to have a working trek that took him right past the Spitalfields killing area, who JUST HAPPENED to have his mother staying a stones throw from the Berner Street murder site and who JUST HAPPENED to have an old working trek of many years standing that would have led him close by Mitre Square on a daily basis.

Me, I think that the circumstances surrounding the Pinchin Street murder and the incredible way they all seem to link up to Charles Lechmere makes for a much more interesting topic of discussion than the question about which fabrics can perhaps be described as rags and which can perhaps not.

Because THAT is where I perceive the semantic games are to be found. It is a matter that has plagued the debate about Lechmere long enough now.

He WAS found standing near by Polly Nichols by Robert Paul.

And a discarded piece of cloth - regardless if it is an apron, part of an apron or any other fabric or attire - IS a rag.

Now that I have taken all this time to explain the matter to you, how about YOU explaining to ME why the whole Pinchin Street drama was set on Charles Lechmeres boyhood street, and why it is that a bloodied rag was found in an exact line between the arch and 22 Doveton Street the day after the dumping of the body.

Are they just coincidences? R J?
AGAIN?
MORE OF THEM??

And guess what? When I ask this question, which answer do you think will surface? I will tell you: people will say that I should not use the term "coincidences", becasue they are not coincidences at all. I have misused the British language, see?

That is the methodology of the naysayers. It is a very obvious violation of commons sense, but hey - one does what one has to do when cornered, eh?

[Fisherman]

Sometimes you get what you deserve.

Lets hope so.

[Fisherman]

What I would like to know is how someone who was working 14 to 18 hours per day and lived with his wife and nine children, and presumably had to sleep some time at home, could possibly have found the time to stalk prostitutes.

The very fact that he stands accused of murdering women while on his way to work does seem to suggest that he was remarkably short of time in which to look for victims.

The suggestion that Lechmere was the killer predisposes that his urge to kill was more important to him than to sleep, say, a quarter of an hour longer on his murder mornings.

That is all there is to it.

As for your suggestion that him killing en route to work would owe to how he was not able to find any other window of time, my own take is quite simply that the morning work trek offered many advantages to him. It gave him a reason to be out on the streets at hours when very few people were around, it offered darkness to work in, and there was prey to be found, streetwalkers who were drunk and all alone.

I struggle to find any other period of time in a common carmans schedule that would offer as many advantages.

[Fisherman]

Hi, Christer. Something that has often crossed my mind is the way a clinically narcissistic personality -- hyper-aware of increasing age, and obsessed by the unrealistic idea that he matters, dammit! -- would react to something like an endlessly lengthening walk to work in the wee hours. Maryann Street to Haydon Square: 650m. James Street to Haydon Square: 810m. James Street to Broad Street: 1.6km. Doveton Street to Broad Street: 2.1km. Doveton Street to Poplar High Street: 3.2km. For someone in the grip of, inter alia, narcissistic personality disorder, this is a progression in absolutely the wrong direction. (You will be aware of the speculative elements in the preceding.) We may even hypothesise that the mid-1888 move out to Doveton Street -- an astonishing development, on the face of it! -- was forced on him for some reason, making it even more of a triggering experience for someone with serious personality disorders of the type we imagine.

Bests,

Mark D.

You ARE aware that these kind of lucid ponderings are not welcomed by many out here ...?

[Fisherman]

This has been repeatedly pointed out to Fisherman.

Many things have, Fiver. And depending on where the pointings out come from, I can normally immediately deduce what value to ascribe to them.

[Fisherman]

That was my best guess too, Lewis.

As you say, the Lechmerians seem to deny that the murderer stalked prostitutes and claim instead that he just happened upon them.

I think it has always been generally accepted that some stalking must have been involved.

Personally, I believe that passing an unfortunate in the street, and noting that there was nobody about, would have been all the stalking needed before the killer initiated a deal with his intended prey.

Are you envisaging him following prostitutes along the East End streets, ducking into doorways and suchlike?

[Fisherman]

I really do think that I’ve heard it all now.

But have you listened?

[Fisherman]

Rose Mylett, who has been included by Lechmere's accusers in his list of victims, was murdered in a yard off Poplar High Street.

Lechmere would have had to make a detour south in order to commit that murder.

If Lechmere was capable of setting out in completely the wrong direction on his way to work, then what does that do for his accusers' argument that he committed murders on his regular routes to work?

There were Pickfords premises nearby. We cannot know if that played a role. It may be that he was there in a line of duty. Myles ws found dead on a Thursday morning, around 4.30 AM.

Of course, there is no certainty that Myles was a Ripper victim in the first place. She belongs to the overall picture, though, and must therefore be looked into as a potential victim of the Whitechapel killer.

[Fisherman]

Well, even if it had been open in 1888, where is the evidence that Lechmere used to go to work in 1888 at two different depots?

Here is how Edward Stow presents the case for Lechmere having murdered Rose Mylett:


So Lechmere, potentially, had reason to be on Poplar High Street.


Notice his use of the word potentially, so commonly used in current American English, especially in could potentially.

Either he could or he could not.

Either he had reason or he did not have reason.

Yes, either he did or he did not have reason to be on Poplar High Street on the morning in question. But the evidence does not allow for claiming either side as a fact. What we do know is that Pickfords had premises in the vicinity and that Lechmere was a Pickfords carman. Identifying matters like these is how any real investigation works. Asking the question "could he have had a reason to be there" must be asked and answered to the best of our abilities.