Charles Lechmere: Prototypical Life of a Serial Killer

[FrankO]

What about Patrick Mulshaw?

Christer Holmgren and Gary Barnett make great hay out of Cross's connections to St. George in the East, but Cross wasn't still living there in the Autumn of 1888. His relatives were, but not him. How many bystanders or witness in the case also have connections to that area? Do we even know?

By contrast--Mulshaw--who was also alone in the immediate area of the murder that morning WAS still living in SGE at the time and had connections to the area around Dufield's Yard. How many serial killers have been security guards or former security guards? Quite a number of them--they get to work alone at night, and they enjoy the vicarious status of being seen as an authority figure.

Mulshaw also kicked the bucket a couple of years later, which would explain the cessation of the crimes, unlike the bearded patriarch of the Crossmeres who lived a long and quiet life.

I'm not suggesting Mulshaw was the killer--I'm suggesting that Lechmere only looks impressive (or supposedly impressive) when seen in isolation. There are other characters in our 'cast of thousands' that have similar or even more dastardly connections to the murder locations. What about Alfred Crow? He was on the landing in George Yard when Martha Tabram must have been there and--unlike Cross--reported nothing to the police. His job kept him out on the streets of East London at the time the murders occurred...unlike Cross. He once lived closer to Dutfield's Yard than Cross ever lived. It seems more psychologically realistic that a murderer would strike after his day's work than before it, and we see this pattern in Berkowitz, etc.

I've found a neighbor of Cross's that used no less than three different names and had connections to Goulston Street. It doesn't make him a killer.

In short, the 'evidence' of Cross's guilt is impressive to the commentators on YouTube only because they don't realize how common these 'coincidences' really were. The 'evidence' against Lechmere has all the appearance of one of those wrongful conviction cases we see when two or three overzealous, small-town cops fit up a bystander because they don't have any legitimate idea of who the murderer really was.

Good post, interesting stuff, Roger. I'd be interested to know a bit more about this neighbour of Lechmere's who used 3 different names. Could you tell us more? Like what alternative names did he use & what was his 'birthname'? When did he use these alternative names? Where did you get your information from?

Cheers,
Frank

[rjpalmer]

Good post, interesting stuff, Roger. I'd be interested to know a bit more about this neighbour of Lechmere's who used 3 different names. Could you tell us more? Like what alternative names did he use & what was his 'birthname'? When did he use these alternative names? Where did you get your information from?

Cheers,
Frank

Hi Frank. Give me a day or two; I'll have to chase it down. When I say 'neighbor' I mean he lived just around the corner from Crossmere. I was studying the neighborhood and noticed the name issue with this bloke.

[FrankO]

Hi Frank. Give me a day or two; I'll have to chase it down. When I say 'neighbor' I mean he lived just around the corner from Crossmere. I was studying the neighborhood and noticed the name issue with this bloke.

Thanks Roger. I'm in no hurry, so I'll see it whenever you're ready.

[JeffHamm]

...
In short, the 'evidence' of Cross's guilt is impressive to the commentators on YouTube only because they don't realize how common these 'coincidences' really were. ...

Hi rj,

Good stuff! I think this point, as a general thing to keep in mind, is really important. We look at some suspect, and something looks like "could it be a coincidence?" and think "no, what are the chances?" and then start to imagine how improbable this specific bit of information is (say, relative lived within X yards of one of the murders), and think "no way, too unlikely".

The problem is, we already know the information, and then are trying to back-calculate the probability. That isn't how it is done. Once you know there is the information the probability of that information is 100% You can't go back and work out a meaningful probability after the fact. See, let's say the probability of any particular interesting titbit is 1 in 1,000. And you find Joe Bloggs has 3 interesting points. Wow! That's like 1 in 1,000,000! Must not be coincidence, right?

No, because there are millions and millions of little things that make up that set of interesting possible titbits. It's most likely almost anyone will, by coincidence, have a couple of interesting things about that that one could weave into a story. So knowing that Joe Blogs has point A, B, and C of interest, and knowing that each only has 1/1000 of being a coincidence, isn't the right "probability" to calculate. Because John Smith might have points D, E, and F, and Frank Body has G, H, and I, and so forth. The entire set of interesting little ties, is huge, so while each one is rare, there are so many to choose from most people will have some of them. I.e. Works somewhere near (near being subjective), lives near, lived near, is single, seems normal (like many Serial killers), seems cagey at inquest, has relative in area, can't be located on nights of murders, known to be violent at times, is religous, has a relative named Mary, or Anne, etc, and so on. All the sorts of things that sometimes are thought might tie into what the Ripper might be like - the number of possible things about a person that someone might consider a tie in are so huge that we're bound to find some points, individually rare, for almost anyone. The 1/100,000,000 is meaningless if you start your probability calculations after you know you've got A,B,andC (or DEF, or GHI, etc). You would need to know how many possible things are being selected from in the first place, and when it comes to Ripperology and suspects, that set is pretty much infinite!

- Jeff

[Abby Normal]

Hi Abby,

One point that I’d have to make on the ‘caught in the act’ scenario would be that it would impact on any suggestion of Lechmere leaving the house earlier due to the fact that the act of killing and mutilating Nichols could have been achieved in under two minutes. So if Paul interrupted him then he could only have been there for a minute or two. This would leave us with Lechmere running into Nichols around 20 minutes before he was due to begin work and with a distance still to walk.

I just can’t accept for a second that Lechmere, no more than 20 minutes from work, bumps into Nichols and just can’t control himself and so decides to kill and mutilate her (with the risk of getting blood on him that he couldn’t have seen in the dark requiring a clean up that would have made him even later [leaving him having to find somewhere light enough to check himself over whilst doing it out of sight])

I just don’t see it Abby. I genuinely see Lechmere as one of the weaker suspects and absolutely no different to the millions of others who have discovered bodies over the years.

As we’ve said Abby we will have to agree to disagree on the subject of Lechmere and I have way too much respect for you to suggest that you would do anything but give your unbiased opinion.

hi herlock

fair enough. of course i agree with your second paragraph and no surprise youve picked up on one of tje best reason imho to doubt lech as a suspect...killing on the way to work. its always been my main beef about him too and rightly so. that being said, is killing on tje way to work really any more crazier than say oh i dont know, a suspect traveling many miles back to london from a cricket vacation on an extremely tight schedule to make a kill?? (lol sorry herlock had to say it. but everyone knows i think druitt is a valid suspect too.)

any way,my friend, ill leave you with the words of noted ripperologist Tom Wescott (who also found a valid suspect named by a contemperaneous law enforcement official). " you could have a worse suspect than lechmere". in the context of the discussion he meant basically..lechmeres not that bad of a suspect.

cheers happy Friday!

[Herlock Sholmes]

hi herlock

fair enough. of course i agree with your second paragraph and no surprise youve picked up on one of tje best reason imho to doubt lech as a suspect...killing on the way to work. its always been my main beef about him too and rightly so. that being said, is killing on tje way to work really any more crazier than say oh i dont know, a suspect traveling many miles back to london from a cricket vacation on an extremely tight schedule to make a kill?? (lol sorry herlock had to say it. but everyone knows i think druitt is a valid suspect too.)

any way,my friend, ill leave you with the words of noted ripperologist Tom Wescott (who also found a valid suspect named by a contemperaneous law enforcement official). " you could have a worse suspect than lechmere". in the context of the discussion he meant basically..lechmeres not that bad of a suspect.

cheers happy Friday!

Have a good weekend Abby

[rjpalmer]

I'd be interested to know a bit more about this neighbour of Lechmere's who used 3 different names.

Hello again, Frank.

I'm not finding all my notes, and my memory about this obscure figure is a bit hazy now, but I think the gentleman in question is Judah Israel, a fruit dealer born around 1834, who was living at No. 7 Doveton Street in 1891. He's listed a page or two before Lechmere in Mile End Old Town, District 8. Note the children's names and ages and the fact that he's a widower. If I recall, "Israel" is actually his wife's name.





Here's the same family in 1881. I think I had reason to believe that John Jacobs, who is also a fruit dealer, might have been his brother or some other relative.



Now, here is who I believe to be the same family in 1871, with Judah still as a fruit dealer, but now listed as "Cohen." They are living at No. 36 Goulston Street.



I can't find all of my records at the moment, but will post again when I find them, but I am reasonably certain that his name wasn't Cohen, either, and that at some point he took the name of a family that he had been living with. I also think he was actually from Poland, but don't quote me on that one. Anyway, the main point is that you can find people in East London using more than one name, so it might not be as uncommon and sinister as we might normally think.

If I recall, what led me to Cohen/Israel is that I was just randomly looking at some of the people in Doveton Street & environs because someone had suggested that Lechmere was an example of "White Flight" and suggested that he had moved to the Mile End/Bethnal Green area to get away from Jews and other foreigners. It is certainly true that there weren't as many Jews in Mile-End as in SGE by quite a margin, but I wouldn't be at all confident in thinking that's why he moved.

I'll let you know if I can recover the rest of it.

[Fiver]

It doesn't make any sense to me, and the argument is paradoxical in how it explains his actions. He's concerned but not concerned at the same time about the same things; he's clever and an idiot at the same time. Sure, people do weird things, and sometimes those things may appear self-contradictory, so as I say, it doesn't actually violate the principles of the known universe, but as an explanation it is logically incoherent. And while I'm sure some examples of some criminals can be found doing something similar to what is described, I rather suspect for each one we could find a hundred or more examples where the offender high tailed it out of there. So could it happen? Sure, anything could happen. Does it make sense? No. Is it probable? No. (I would bet money more criminals flee the scene when someone shows up than remain at it).

I've used the term Schroedinger's Suspect - their theory requires that Lechmere be two contradictory things at the same time - bold and cautious, cunning and stupid, premeditated and impulsive, etc. Their Lechmere isn't a real person.

[Fiver]

Anyway, my issue, though, is that the "they do weird things card" gets played too often with Cross/Lechmere. Not just the decision not to flee when Paul is over 40 yards away (he has to get to the middle of the street after all), but why doesn't he let Paul just walk by when it is clear he's trying to? and so on (all the points have been raised before so I won't go through them all again). To me it seems like almost everything he does requires the "they just do weird things" card, because otherwise his actions make no sense for a guilty person. And if the "serial killers do weird things" card has to be played that often, it starts to look overplayed.

You have nailed it here as well - they play "serial killers do weird things" card a lot. Serial killers do sometimes do things are strange, but those things make sense to the killer. But no attempt is made to explain why the action would make sense to the murderer, the card is played as an excuse to provide any explanation.

And to avoid the problem that the only way the actions do make sense is if Lechmere was innocent.

[FrankO]

I'll let you know if I can recover the rest of it.

Thanks a lot for part I and I look forward to seeing the rest, Roger!

[The Rookie Detective]

At one time Lechmere lived next door to a Ginger Beer dealer. While the drink was popular, the amount of dealers within the local area was very low when looking at the census that covered the Whitechapel area.

I'm very much on the fence about Lechmere and while I think he had opportunity, the rest of the evidence is lacking.

I've always wondered however why the author of the letters refers directly to a Ginger Beer bottle. In fact, apart from his knif and mplying he took a kidney and some of the red stuff (blood in a bottle?) a ginger beer bottle is the only physical item that he specifically mentions and it always struck me as a tantalising clue.

Living next door to a Ginger Beer dealer (with bottles) always struck me as a coincidence, especially as it would have been very easy to obtain and replace bottles as and when.

But without motive, he's a poor choice of suspect.


The only possible motive I can imagine is when he lost his oldest son and namesake within days of his wife giving birth to Mary Lechmere; the daughter to whom he was seemingly estranged from....until he appears as a witness at her wedding and then all the wrongs are seemingly righted.
HIs wife wasn't there/able to help or mother her dying son, because she was about to give birth to a daughter; the same daughter who lived with Charles Lechmere's mother her entire life.
Not a motive, but a symbolic reason to attack the womb. A Lechmerian may even use that as a way to explain a motive...What if Charles was angry at his daughter as she was the focus when he lost his son and namesake...
And what if he really didn't like the name Mary...and when he attacked MJK he was venting his rage andi imagining it was his daughter...and after her, that rage left him..and then he subsequently attended her wedding and all was resolved.
Did Lechmere's mother look after Mary because she knew Charles blamed her for being born, meaning he lost his oldest son because the attention was focused on the new baby and not the dying child.

Food for thought....but Lechmerians...there's your motive.

It's a shame I'm not a Lechmerian...but I do love a good hypothesis ha ha

[Herlock Sholmes]

The problem with motive is that you never find them out until after the killer is caught and then only if they talk (and talk honestly) I think that Lechmere is a weak suspect in general but who knows what might have happened when he was young? How can we know that he wasn’t abused for example? Or that he didn’t torture animals or bully other kids? These things are usually kept quiet. So I rarely bother thinking about motive tbh. If we discovered tomorrow that the killer was a baker called Fred Thompson research might not give us even a hint of a motive.

[Abby Normal]

The problem with motive is that you never find them out until after the killer is caught and then only if they talk (and talk honestly) I think that Lechmere is a weak suspect in general but who knows what might have happened when he was young? How can we know that he wasn’t abused for example? Or that he didn’t torture animals or bully other kids? These things are usually kept quiet. So I rarely bother thinking about motive tbh. If we discovered tomorrow that the killer was a baker called Fred Thompson research might not give us even a hint of a motive.

bingo herlock but even more important serial killers dont have a motive, or to be precise, any traditional motive. there motive is that they like to do it.

[Abby Normal]

absolute insanity.
we have posters on here on the one hand saying lechmere is a horrible, bonkers paradoxical suspect and on the other hand proposing others as better..the likes of hardiman, mann, endacot (lol who even is that?) mulshaw and another lechmere even!!

so we have peripheral characters that have exactly zilch all connection to tje case vs a man who discovered the body(in todays world would make him a de facto suspect until cleared), was seen alone near the freshly killed body and clearly could have been her killer, whos physical proximity, location and geographic circs are the best of any other suspect hands down, and who had a major discrepency in testimony with a police officer there. lol only in ripper world!

ive never understood what it is with a perfectly valid suspect Lechmere that makes otherwise rational posters lose their mind!?!

but hey, im in it for the whodunnit, so i look forward to the continued research and results on these better than lechmere suspects!
good luck gents cant wait to see what you come up with!

[Newbie]

Originally posted by Elamarna View Post

Why do you call the idea of Lechmere being only 50 or so yards ahead of Paul a nonsense?
That's not what the evidence tells us.
While the evidence is limited, it is all we have, and is the sworn testimony of the two men involved.
At no point in that testimony is there anything to suggest it is not a truthful account from men?
While you can argue that you do not believe it, to call it nonsense simply demonstrates a mind that is set to one view only.



Lechmere only waits if you believe that Paul is not only 40-50 yards behind him. if he is only 40-50 yards ahead, then asking him to look with you , appears to be the immediate action you ask for in other places

A great exaggeration I am afraid, the report of her injuries clearly shows she was not nearly decapitated.
Chapman was the closest to that.



Her condition was clearly not obvious.

Apparently it took a lamp, that of Neil to show just how bad Mary Ann was.
Robert Paul touched her, and he was unsure if she was dead or not.



It was 3.40- 3.45, people were asleep, why would you knock on a door, when you had a man walking 50 or so yards behind you.
Especially if you were not sure of her condition. At the time he saw Paul, he had no idea of Mary Ann's condition. Of course if one starts from the position of him being the killer, one would have a different view.

Harrison, Barber was NOT across the road, it was in an entirely separate street, Winthrop , which ran parallel and to the south of Bucks Row.



Two points here,
Firstly neither Lechmere or Paul were sure of her condition. I suggest you read the statements of both men.

Second more important point, They DID head off to find a policeman, as soon as they could after checking Mary Ann.

The idea, that this was NOT done, comes from a belief that Lechmere was there minutes before Paul, such is simply speculation, based on a manufactured gap between the two men, which the evidence does NOT support.



Again, you are accepting that Lechmere is there minutes before Paul.
Footsteps at the bottom of Bucks Row?
Lechmere talks of 40 yards, which probably translates to a gap of about 50 yards before Lechmere slows down.
The bottom of Bucks Row is 130 yards away.
The evidence says that Lechmere goes for a policeman within probably a minute of so of first seeing Mary Ann Nichols.
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I was a bit busy, so couldn't respond to the entirety of your post.

1. The 50 yards notion is probably an estimate by Lech on the distance just beyond visibility on that street. It doesn't work for me for three reasons:

A. Two pedestrians separated by that distance, on that street, at that time, particularly in the element they were in, should have clearly heard the other for some time.
They weren't wearing rubber souls (a few years away), and their own sounds from walking should not have negated the sound of the other - its' contrary to what neuro-scientists currently believe about processing sounds while walking.

If you really want to insist on walking having negated one hearing the others footsteps,
then just consider more of Lech's testimony: that he had stopped to observe the tarpaulin type object, didn't hear Paul, started walking again a few paces, and then finally heard Paul while in the middle of the street, and turned around to wait for him.

B. Lechmere, in my mind, clearly indicates that he was only aware of the sounds presence, while he was heading towards the body, at the point of mid street; so, he stopped and waited.

C. Lechmere, having come from the body, would have needed a reason to justify standing in the middle of the, waiting for Paul.
It was very convenient to be suddenly cognizant of Paul's footsteps at that time, when he didn't notice them beforehand. It was needed to justify his story.

Could a guilty Lech have come up with a better story, involving being cognizant of Paul's footsteps for a while. On his end, it would have worked better; but then you have the uncertainty of how Paul would have responded .... suddenly, he would start thinking more about the issue of sound and not hearing footsteps.

Lech's first awareness of Paul's presence was auditory, but not from 40 yards away, but somewhere closer to the base of Buck's row.