Charles Lechmere: Prototypical Life of a Serial Killer

[Herlock Sholmes]

Living and breathing, too, thankfully Cheers Herlock!

Glad to hear it. Good to see you back.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Thank you for answering my post, Herlock!

1. Your omission of the word ‘about’ when discussing a potential gap of time between Cross leaving home and the discovery of the body is clear evidence of editing. You had used ‘about’ in a previous chapter so you cannot claim error but when you were making the claim of a gap it ‘disappeared.’ It was also quite deliberately omitted from the documentary too and the ‘still’ shows that the evidence presented to Scobie also claimed that Lechmere left the house at 3.30 and not about. This led Scobie to assume that there must have been a gap which naturally he would find created an element of suspicion around Cross. Would he have considered there to have been ‘case to answer’ without this. At the very least I’d say that it would have thrown a large doubt. Personally I think that without the ‘gap’ he wouldn’t have said that there was a case to answer. So…editing.
2. You have previously and numerously proceeded to narrow down this ‘about.’ When I and others suggested that 3.35 or 3.34 was ‘about 3.30’ you were clearly unhappy with this. You said something to the effect of…if someone estimates 3.30 then 3.30 is the likeliest time. This is clearly nonsense. Even in the modern word estimates can he massively wrong but you couldn’t even bring yourself to accept a conservative plus or minus 5 minutes. I think that you would struggle to find any reasonable person to agree with you on this point. We do not and cannot know what time Cross left the house so your attempt to narrow this time down to 3.30 or 3.31 or 3.32 is plainly an attempted manipulation of the evidence.
3. You then, quite bizarrely, try and put a time on the gap between Cross and Paul leaving and Neil arriving. This is another unknown. Neil gave 3.45 as his time but we can’t know how accurate his time was. Did he have a watch? How accurate was it? Was it synchronised to other notes times? How can you know that he didn’t arrive the second that Cross and Paul left the body? It’s an attempt to claim to know, or to be able to judge accurately, an unknown. This is a manipulation of the evidence.
4. Then there is the English language issues regarding the blood….oozing and running etc. Both dealt with conclusively by David Orsam. This is manipulation and a misuse of the language.
5. Then you try and use the blood evidence to try and make Cross the likeliest suspect when he’s no more likely than a killer who fled just before he arrived. And because we can’t put a name to this man you use a bit of propaganda by naming him the ‘phantom killer’ which implies that he couldn’t have existed which is arrant nonsense. If Paul could ‘in effect’ have interrupted Cross then Cross could have interrupted someone else who was no less likely a suspect than Cross just because we have no name for him. In fact he’s a far better suspect that Cross because this bloke didn’t hang around waiting for Cross to arrive. Exaggeration and manipulation.
6. Then we have the suggestion that refusing to flee was perfectly normal behaviour which flies in the face of what we know about killers. We can’t name one that stood around waiting for someone to show up. How many men can we name who found a body in the street who turned out to be the killer? How could any man, with even the meanest levels of intelligence, have not seen that the benefits of fleeing massively and overwhelmingly outweighing the ‘benefits’ of staying? Exaggeration.
7. Then, realising that a choice to stick around would have been close to suicidal you take a sidestep and invent the ‘Mizen Scam’ as a means of justifying it. This would have meant Cross, on the spur-of-the-moment and in a handful of seconds coming up with this nonsense, and risking his life on the strength of it. A plan that required him manipulating a man that he’d never met before and had no clue on how he might or might not have behaved. Little is more preposterous in this case than the Mizen Scam. It’s evidence of desperation. More exaggeration.
8. Then there’s the attempt to show Cross’s behaviour at the body as somehow strange. It was perfectly normal as has been shown over the last few posts. A manipulation to create an impression.
9. Then we have the name issue which is a non-issue. It would only be an issue, in regard to a murder, if it somehow aided his avoiding discovery, He used his stepfathers name, his own Christian names and his own address. He turns up at the inquest with policeman everywhere. When Cross was a child he must have been absolutely useless at hide and seek. Exaggeration.
10. Then there’s the geographical desperation. What can I say? I just can’t be bothered wasting words on the silliness. How desperate can anyone be to build a case of you have to resort to quoting where his Aunty Nellie lived?! Exaggeration and invention.

That’s just 10 examples. I could do more but I really can’t be bothered. I’m sure that Fiver could chuck a few in for good measure?

To sum up. I’ve no issue with Cross being considered a person of interest even though I don’t think that he is. I have no issue with anyone looking into him further. And although in your post you said that I dislike you personally…..this isn’t the case. The only issue that I have, and it’s a massive one, is the lengths that people go to to try and shoehorn him into place. It has become zealotry.

[FrankO]

A bit of speculation here Steve but I’ve wondered at the possibility that Cross and Paul (who took that route six days a week) might have been aware that Bucks Row was part of a police beat (but they might not have been sure of the exact time that the Constable was due to arrive in Bucks Row?) If that was the case then they might have been unwilling to stand around for what might have been 5 minutes or so, increasing their chances of being late for work. It’s true that they never mentioned this possible knowledge of course but could they have just kept schtum about it because they knew that the question would have been asked “Why didn’t you stick around and wait for him to arrive then?”

Perhaps they justified their actions to themselves by saying “one of us will almost certainly bump into another Constable on our way to work but, by then, the Bucks Row Constable will almost certainly have arrived.”

While what you suggest may well have been what actually happened, Mike, I've been wondering about another possibility. Seeing that Mizen's beat also covered Old Montague Street, Hanbury Street and Baker's Row, he may well have seen or heard Neil pass up Baker's Row on his way to Thomas Street not too long before he was approached by the carmen. So, when the carmen approached him and Lechmere told him "You're wanted", he may have assumed that this meant that Neil had in the meantime arrived in Buck's Row on his beat and had stumbled upon this woman, sending the 2 carmen to fetch him. It would have been some 10-11 minutes before when Neil passed up Baker's Row on his way to Thomas Street. Just a thought.

[Fisherman]

No. I won’t dance to your tune Fish. There have been no personal attacks. Everything that has been said about your methods is true. If you just want people to tell you what you want to hear then talk to Von Stow or one of your acolytes.

No, you have not stuck to your take on the Lechmere theory throughout on the boards at all. You gave Cutting Point a glowing review and said that there are not leaps of faith, that you have realized that Lechmere needs to be regarded as a serious suspect and so on. Regardless of what you claim, that is not consistent with your claim. It is instead a fact, authored by yourself and nobody else, that you were very positive in 2021 and only thereafter made a 180 degree turn. I know that you were critical before Cutting Point came out, but that is sadly no evidence of you being consistent throughout. The obvious inference is that Cutting Point made you change your mind, and you made it clear in the first words that this was so - you said something along the line of having been critical before, but Cutting Point had made you see that you needed to accept Lechmere as a serious suspect and you took your hat off to me.
For you to have been cionsistent throughout, it would take a negative review, but you wrote the exact opposite, so there can be no discussion about this. There is no way around it. It is not going away, and you cannot make it do so.

Since the rest of your post seems to be all about making baseless claims that I would have said that I can know times that cannot be known and so on, I will only settle for one matter, that of you writing that this thread is full of the kind of twisting of the facts on my behalf. instead of exemplifying, you generalize, and that tells me that you know that you have no case to make here either.

I therefore feel that our debate has come to an end. Repetitive accusations that you cannot bolster makes for a poor debate, and I will move on to other posters in due course. Until that happens, I suggest you compare your claim that the Lechmere theory ”lies in tatters” with the material on internet, where hundreds and hundreds of posters have supposedly failed to reach your levels of insight. In spite of the theory lying in tatters, it seems it draws more followers than any other theory these days.

[Fisherman]

So, I am making a pause now, since duty and a few other things call upon me. But I will be back in a few weeks. So far, the outcome has been quite interesting; we have concluded that Steve Blomer in his ”Inside Bucks Row” quotes people who have said things that the Lechmere theory does effectively NOT say in his book, and passed those things off as being representative for the theory. They have been quotations of suggestions that are all flawed and faulty, and thus Steve Bloimer has given an untrue impression to his readers of the Lechmere theory involving these obvious flaws and faults. In the process, he forgot to publish what the theory ACTUALLY says.

We have furthermore in a discussion with Doctored Whatsit found out that the claim that PC Neil would have set the blood in the body of Polly Nichols running anew by way of lifting her arm to feel it for warmth, must be wrong. The collected material tells us in no uncertain terms that Neil assessed the bloodflow BEFORE he touched the arm of Polly Nichols, and so the suggestion can be dismissed.

Finally, we have found out that Herlock Sholmes has given two diametrically different versions of his take on the Lechmere theory. In 2021, when Cutting Point came out, he wrote a glowing review, saying that there was not a single leap of faith in the book, that Lechmere must be taken as a serious suspect, that he took his hat off to my book which he confessed to being glad that he had bought. He now says that he never meant it; he was just interested in bringing a nicer tone to the debate.
Regardless of what we choose to believe, it remains a fact in my world that a poster who admits to having made something up, is a poster that cannot be relied upon.

More to come! Have a good few weeks, y´all!

[Fisherman]

If you have no problems debating this, then explain why you have chosen to ignore the majority of posters who disagree with you.

Just a final word for now: I have very clearly pointed out that I will give interested posters time in the near future, just as I have said that I am willing to answer questions that people may have, after I have finished my debates with the various posters. But I will not debate all posters who want to do so at the same time, for reasons equally clearly pointed out.

This has not changed, making posts like the one above superfluous.

[Herlock Sholmes]

No, you have not stuck to your take on the Lechmere theory throughout on the boards at all. You gave Cutting Point a glowing review and said that there are not leaps of faith, that you have realized that Lechmere needs to be regarded as a serious suspect and so on. Regardless of what you claim, that is not consistent with your claim. It is instead a fact, authored by yourself and nobody else, that you were very positive in 2021 and only thereafter made a 180 degree turn. I know that you were critical before Cutting Point came out, but that is sadly no evidence of you being consistent throughout. The obvious inference is that Cutting Point made you change your mind, and you made it clear in the first words that this was so - you said something along the line of having been critical before, but Cutting Point had made you see that you needed to accept Lechmere as a serious suspect and you took your hat off to me.
For you to have been cionsistent throughout, it would take a negative review, but you wrote the exact opposite, so there can be no discussion about this. There is no way around it. It is not going away, and you cannot make it do so.

Since the rest of your post seems to be all about making baseless claims that I would have said that I can know times that cannot be known and so on, I will only settle for one matter, that of you writing that this thread is full of the kind of twisting of the facts on my behalf. instead of exemplifying, you generalize, and that tells me that you know that you have no case to make here either.

I therefore feel that our debate has come to an end. Repetitive accusations that you cannot bolster makes for a poor debate, and I will move on to other posters in due course. Until that happens, I suggest you compare your claim that the Lechmere theory ”lies in tatters” with the material on internet, where hundreds and hundreds of posters have supposedly failed to reach your levels of insight. In spite of the theory lying in tatters, it seems it draws more followers than any other theory these days.

An absolution distortion of reality. Desperate, woeful stuff.

Ive posted 10 examples which you ignore to persist in this drivel about your book. I only wish that I’d read it more carefully the first time. It changes nothing though. Simply a distraction tactic by you.

[Herlock Sholmes]

So, I am making a pause now, since duty and a few other things call upon me. But I will be back in a few weeks. So far, the outcome has been quite interesting; we have concluded that Steve Blomer in his ”Inside Bucks Row” quotes people who have said things that the Lechmere theory does effectively NOT say in his book, and passed those things off as being representative for the theory. They have been quotations of suggestions that are all flawed and faulty, and thus Steve Bloimer has given an untrue impression to his readers of the Lechmere theory involving these obvious flaws and faults. In the process, he forgot to publish what the theory ACTUALLY says.

We have furthermore in a discussion with Doctored Whatsit found out that the claim that PC Neil would have set the blood in the body of Polly Nichols running anew by way of lifting her arm to feel it for warmth, must be wrong. The collected material tells us in no uncertain terms that Neil assessed the bloodflow BEFORE he touched the arm of Polly Nichols, and so the suggestion can be dismissed.

Finally, we have found out that Herlock Sholmes has given two diametrically different versions of his take on the Lechmere theory.

In 2021, when Cutting Point came out, he wrote a glowing review, saying that there was not a single leap of faith in the book, that Lechmere must be taken as a serious suspect, that he took his hat off to my book which he confessed to being glad that he had bought. He now says that he never meant it; he was just interested in bringing a nicer tone to the debate.
Regardless of what we choose to believe, it remains a fact in my world that a poster who admits to having made something up, is a poster that cannot be relied upon.

More to come! Have a good few weeks, y´all!

Run away Fish.

[Doctored Whatsit]

.

We have furthermore in a discussion with Doctored Whatsit found out that the claim that PC Neil would have set the blood in the body of Polly Nichols running anew by way of lifting her arm to feel it for warmth, must be wrong. The collected material tells us in no uncertain terms that Neil assessed the bloodflow BEFORE he touched the arm of Polly Nichols, and so the suggestion can be dismissed.

Oh dear!!!! Christer, I said quite clearly twice, that Neil raising Nichol's arm could have caused the wound to seep when Mizen reported oozing blood. Do please pay attention.

[Fisherman]

Run away Fish.

As you may have noticed, when Steve Blomer had something to add after we had finished our debate, I answered him. The same goes for you, but I will not answer sweeping generalizations and repetitive points of yours that have already had answers.

Unless you noticed, far from running away, I have returned to Facebook and picked posters - one of them being yourself - to debate.

[Fisherman]

Oh dear!!!! Christer, I said quite clearly twice, that Neil raising Nichol's arm could have caused the wound to seep when Mizen reported oozing blood. Do please pay attention.

And I established that this could not have happened in the order it needed to have happened to cause Nichols to bleed. That is what I said and what I stand by.

[Herlock Sholmes]

As you may have noticed, when Steve Blomer had something to add after we had finished our debate, I answered him. The same goes for you, but I will not answer sweeping generalizations and repetitive points of yours that have already had answers.

Unless you noticed, far from running away, I have returned to Facebook and picked posters - one of them being yourself - to debate.

You asked me for examples of exaggeration, manipulation and the distortion of the language. I’ve provided ten which you’ve ignored to continue you embarrassing desperation on the subject of your book.

[Fisherman]

An absolution distortion of reality. Desperate, woeful stuff.

Ive posted 10 examples which you ignore to persist in this drivel about your book. I only wish that I’d read it more carefully the first time. It changes nothing though. Simply a distraction tactic by you.

Surely you would not have to read it carefully to reveal how the suggestion I made about Lechmere staying put must be wrong? You say yourself that it is a near certainty that it is wrong, and you even quantify it to 99 per cent.

But you did not read the book carefully enough to reveal it?

It is at any rate interesting that you are now not claiming that you only commended the book to be nice, but instead saying that you did not read it carefully enough to see how bad it was.

Which is it? And should not a lynx-eyed critic like yourself be able to disclose the kind of whoppers you claim?

I rest my case. This effectively ends our debate, unless you have something interesting to add. And I reserve the right to be the judge of that.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Surely you would not have to read it carefully to reveal how the suggestion I made about Lechmere staying put must be wrong? You say yourself that it is a near certainty that it is wrong, and you even quantify it to 99 per cent.

But you did not read the book carefully enough to reveal it?

It is at any rate interesting that you are now not claiming that you only commended the book to be nice, but instead saying that you did not read it carefully enough to see how bad it was.

Which is it? And should not a lynx-eyed critic like yourself be able to disclose the kind of whoppers you claim?

I rest my case. This effectively ends our debate, unless you have something interesting to add. And I reserve the right to be the judge of that.

You really are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Even for you. For years you’ve been doing this. It’s become a joke amongst posters. We can even predict when some kind of ‘fishing trip’ will come up. Every time it gets tough you have some convenient ‘trip’ to go on.

You’re manipulated case against Cross has been exposed for what it is. Yes you’ll have a few acolytes who worship at the altar of Cross but so what?

[Herlock Sholmes]

While what you suggest may well have been what actually happened, Mike, I've been wondering about another possibility. Seeing that Mizen's beat also covered Old Montague Street, Hanbury Street and Baker's Row, he may well have seen or heard Neil pass up Baker's Row on his way to Thomas Street not too long before he was approached by the carmen. So, when the carmen approached him and Lechmere told him "You're wanted", he may have assumed that this meant that Neil had in the meantime arrived in Buck's Row on his beat and had stumbled upon this woman, sending the 2 carmen to fetch him. It would have been some 10-11 minutes before when Neil passed up Baker's Row on his way to Thomas Street. Just a thought.

That makes sense Frank. And when he got there and found Neil on the spot it confirmed he thought.