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Originally posted by Fisherman
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So, the time has now come for me to approach the poster ”Fiver” and have a chat with him. I am hoping that we both can keep the discussion as factual and non-aggressive as possible.
Back in November last year, Fiver posted an excerpt from The Standard, surrounding the working conditions of carmen, Pickfords carmen being among the ones mentioned. It is said in the article that the carmen, who were striving for a twelve hour working day, instead ”at present” (and the article hailed from June 1891) ”had to work from fourteen to eighteen hours per day with no allowance for overtime”.
This article has been used by Fiver to suggest that Charles Lechmere would have been so much occupied with work, as to make him a very poor bid for the killers role. This - and a few more angles of the affair - will be discussed further down this post, but I will begin by pointing out how I believe that the article is mostly about how one of the three hauling companies mentioned, The London Parcels Delivery Company, is the actual focus for the papers interest. The other two companies are Messrs. Carter, Paterson and Co., and then also Pickfords.
What is said in the article is that the meeting informed about in the article was ”to consider their present situation with regard to their demand for a twelve hours day, 6d. Per hour overtime, three days´ holiday in the year for men of twelve months´ service and the abolition of the Sick and Accident Funds. The chairman said the Union had asked them to agitate for an eight hours day, but that could never be applied to their business. They would be content to have a twelve hours day and overtime. At present they had to work from fourteen to eighteen hours per day with no allowance for overtime, and without any holidays during the year.”
Having read this far, it seems that all three hauling companies shared these hardships, and were deprived of the benefits mentioned. But there is reason to think this was not so; when we move a bit further down the article, we have the chairman quoted again, this time like this:
”He moved: -That, after having made repeated applications to be heard with regard to our grievances, and receiving no satisfactory answer, we again apply to Mr. Morley, the manager of the London Parcels Delivery Company, to receive us on Tuesday night, and we shall very much regret if this should not be granted, as in that event we shall be compelled to stop work on Wednesday morning, and wait at the gates until we see Mr Morley.”
So, what we have here is not a unanimous picture. There is just the one company who threatens to lay down their work if they are not granted a discussion with the manager of the company, and that is the London Parcels Delivery Company.
The article goes on to state that ”One of Messrs. Carter, Paterson and Co´s men said the company employed about 1500 men, and they were in entire sympathy with the men of the London Parcels Delivery Company. They intended to hold a meeting in support of their colleagues. Their firm had yielded to them in one point - that was the three days holiday for men of twelve months´ service. The same thing had been granted for Pickford, b ut they would not see their brethren of the London Parcels Delivery Company left out in the cold (cheers). The advance of 28s. Per week for double horsemen and 24s. Per week for single-horsemen had been granted surreptitiously to a number of the older servants, but they wanted it to be given all round, and if the Parcels Delivery men came out the other two firms would support them, and, if necessary, come out as well.”
What is immediately obvious here, is that the London Parcels Delivery Company was a company that was lagging behind the other two in terms of rights and benefits. What is also obvious, is that older servants of the companies had been given economical improvements, although it is not clear if that applied to all three companies or just the two.
Summing up, I think it must be recognized that there were significant differences in between the companies, and in between older and younger carmen, and so that makes me think that there may well have been differences when it comes to the 14-18 hour working days mentioned.
This means that we may of course have had a situation where the 14-18 hour working day was not a reality for Charles Lechmere. We cannot tell. But let’s work from the assumption that he did 14 hour working days in 1888, three years before the article was written and the problems described came to the surface - we can not know if the same situation prevailed in 1887-89, but again, since there is interest in scrutininzing the claims made that a long working day would likely prohibit Charles Lechmere from having killed Stride and Eddowes, I will go with the 14 hour suggestion.
The reason that the other murders in the series are not looked upon in this context is of course that they may all have been committed along Lechmeres way to work, in which case the length of the working day would have had no impact.
First of all, just as it is an assumption that Lechmere worked 14 hours, it is also an assumption that he worked at all on the Saturday leading up to the murders. As a matter of fact, he may well have not worked at all on that Saturday. People fell ill and got injured back then too, and that did not necessarily mean that they lost their jobs over it. And yes, people could also claim that they were ill back then, without this being the truth. That means, of course, that we cannot know for certain that Lechmere did a 14 hour working day before moving on to killing Stride and Eddowes.
But again, these are side remarks, and we will work from the assumption that he did work 14 hours before the two murders. And in the thread ”Evidence of Innocence”, Fiver described the problem he identified with it like this:
”* CAL had to be to work at 4am. He likely woke up at 3am, perhaps earlier.
* Elizabeth Stride was killed between 12:45am and 1am.
* Catherine Eddowes was killed between 1:35am and 1:45am.
So for CAL to be the Ripper he would have to have get up three hours early (on his day off, no less) or he would have to stay up for 23 hours straight. Neither seems likely for a man pushing forty.”
The long and the short of things is that it was never impossible to get up three hours early on a day off, and that it was equally never impossible to stay up for 23 hours straight.
Moreover, if we assume that Lechmere got up at 3 AM on that Saturday, and started working at 4 AM, doing 14 hours, we have him getting off at 6 PM, which should see him back in Doveton Street at roughly around 6.30 PM. If he then had supper to 7 PM and a two hour nap, he would be ready to set off for St Georges at around 9 PM, would he not? And as I have said before on many occasions, we must not rule out that his reason to go to St Georges was something else than to see his mother and daughter; he could equally well have gone there to drink with old friends from his old neighborhood, that he had left only a few months before.
Then, after having done whatever he did, a pub crawl, a double murder or both, he could go home, knowing that he had the rest of the day off, and was able to sleep as much as he desired.
I cannot see how this matter could in any way prohibit Lechmere from having been the killer. And saying ”but that must have made him tired” is not the best of reasons to call off a murder hunt.
But the reason I truly wanted to discuss this matter, is one of the other possible angles that I mentioned above! Because it may well be that Fiver has inadvertently stumbled over a possible reason behind the killing spree of the latter part of the 1880s.
Serial murder is often set off by stress. Lets listen to what Nicola Malizia says in her thesis ”Serial Killer: The Mechanism from Imagination to the Murder Phases”:
”Becoming a serial killer is a long, drawn-out process, not a discrete event. A theory that has attempted to integrate cultural, developmental, psychological, and biological concepts is Stephen Giannangelo’s diathesis-stress model (1996). The theory states that all serial killers have a congenital propensity to behave and think in ways that lead to serial killing, if combined with environmental stressors. ”
Stress is often something a budding serial killer experiences a something that robs him of the one quality serial killers are so very often addictive to: control.
So here we have a very interesting example of how it may be that Lechmeres work was something he felt left him without any possibility to shape his own life, eating away at his time and leaving nothing much to him to control himself.
We may well be looking at not so much a reason for why Lechmere would not have killed as an at least partial explanation for why he DID kill!
This is an interesting matter to me, and it is also how I believe ripperology benefits from discussions. Want I don’t think ripperology benefits from is baseless accusations between posters, and to show how I reason about it, I am going to use a few posts by Fivers hand that have failed to meet the mark, as per myself. My passages, if they are quoted, will be in blue below, and Fivers will be in red.
Originally posted by Fisherman
That is your reoccurring mantra, Fiver, and it is untrue. For example, you make the claim that I don't understand what my forensic witnesses say. Then you claim that I would not have understood that Jason Payne James spoke for another likely bleeding out time than Ingemar Thiblin did, and you say that Payne James suggested seven minutes.
The problem with this is that Payne James never did that. He very clearly suggested three to five minutes, and this is the exact thing I have stated in my book and presented on the boards. Thiblin then concurred with Payne James, so they are both promoting 3-5 minutes as the likeliest bleeding out time, although neither man is ruling out seven minutes. Or nine, for that matter.
It's not a mantra. It's the facts.
You misrepresent the forensic doctors. They are college professors, not crime scene investigators. They told you they had little or no data. And they did not agree on 3-5 minutes. You asked some vague questions of Jason Payne James and Ingemar Thiblin, and interpreted them the way you wanted to.
For Jason Payne James:
Q. Just how quickly CAN a person with the kind of damage that Nichols had bleed out, if we have nothing that hinders the bloodflow, and if the victim is flat on level ground? Can a total desanguination take place in very few minutes in such a case.
A. Yes
Q. Do you know of any examples?
A. No
Q. Is it possible for such a person to bleed out completely and stop bleeding in three minutes? In five? In seven?
A. I guess blood may continue to flow for up to this amount of time, but the shorter periods are more likely to be more realistic.
You appear to have made up the word "desanguination". You don't even appear to understand that to "bleed out completely' and to "stop bleeding" are not the same thing.
For Ingemar Thiblin you claim that Thiblin told you that there is "not much empirical data to go on"' as to how long "a seeping bleeding" could last, but that "ten to fifteen minutes'" possible.
So Thiblin stated that he had very little data and estimated 10 to 15 minutes.
James stated he had no data at all and estimated 3 to 7 minutes, based on your prompting.
The two professors disagreed on time and admitted they had little or no information to base their estimates on.
Here, Fiver makes up his own personal truth. I have always been extremely clear on how Payne James and Thiblin both agree that the bleeding would be most likely to stop after around 3-5 minutes. It then applies, and I have been equally clear on that score, that Thiblin and Payne James BOTH agreed that longer timings could apply, but that the were less likely and the more time that was added, the less likely the suggestion would be. And Thiblin offered 10-15 minutes as his absolute and unlikely extreme.
This Fiver claims adds up to Thiblin having suggested 10-15 minutes whereas Payne James estimated 3-7. And after having left out the all important fact that BOTH men suggested 3-5 minutes as their likeliest suggestion, he adds that I misrepresent the facts.
We cannot pick and choose parts to try and make up a faulty picture of our opponents.
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Originally posted by Fisherman
You are welcome to present where Payne James would have suggested another likely time of bleeding out that the he we can check and see how truthful your claim is. It is the absolute best way of checking things like these, and getting to the core of them.
I have posted it repeatedly. You ignoring the facts does not make them go away.
So what you are doing is to claim things on my behalf that are simply not true. If they WERE true, they would make me look reckless/dumb/dishonest/misleading and so on and so forth, which may of course be the reason for your reoccurring misrepresentations of what I say. Or maybe you just were not able to read and understand what was said.
They are true. And you are quite correct about how your inaccurate posts make you look.
Here, faced with his methodology, Fiver simply denies. No attempt at any discussion along the lines, ”Oh, I may have misunderstood”. Which is kind of sad, if you ask me.
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Fisherman's version of Lechmere would need to be inhumanly brave, stunningly stupid, and incredibly lucky. And Fisherman attempts to explain this by saying that psychopaths don't think logically.
This is how Fiver presents Lechmere. In actuality, what I think is that Lechmere was able to think on his feet, had a good deal of luck and was not stupid at all. The ”brave” thing is , I presume, Fivers way of saying that he PERSONALLY believes that no killer would stay put at a murder site in order to con oncoming people, and the ”stunningly stupid” propably relates to how Lechmere attended the inquest or something such - and if so, it is again just an interpretation made by Fiver with which I disagree. Many criminals can come forward to save their bacon, and that does not make them stunningly stupid at all. So Fivers description is - in my mind - a wild exaggeration, where it would have sufficed to acknowledge a disagreement..
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Richard Jones’s tour website says "As to whether Jack the Ripper has actually been “unmasked”, the honest answer to that question has to be a resounding no. "
"It has to be said, that the concrete facts about Charles Lechmere’s involvement in the Jack the Ripper murders, end with his being present at the site of the murder of Mary Nichols as the discoverer of her body, and anything linking him to the other Whitechapel murders is nothing more than supposition and speculation. " - Richard Jones, 4 December 2022
"Attempts to depict him [Lechmere] as a psychopath, or to suggest that he had a domineering mother, or that he may have been a frequent user of prostitutes are nothing more than conjecture. If there is a case for him to answer, then it must be based on established facts and not on surmise." Richard Jones, 4 December 2022
These excerpts are in response to how I wrote that Richard Jones described my book as ”fantastic” in his interview with me, and Fiver now argues that Richard Jones actually thinks that any suggestion that Lechmere could have been the killer is nonsense. To make his case, Fiver sadly uses a collection of quotations from BEFORE when Jones read my book. And not only that, he has another explanation to why Jones called my book ”fantastic” in his video:
Fantastic, adj. & n.: Existing only in imagination; proceeding merely from imagination; fabulous, imaginary, unreal (obs.) - Oxford English Dictionary
So this is what Fiver suggests that Richard Jones meant when using the word ”fantastic”: a work of fiction, a figment of my imagination. ”You’ve put a fantastic case. The book, I highly recommend ”Cutting Point”, it is a fantastic book.”
These are the words of a ripperologist who has a very good reputation and whose word counts for a lot in ripperology. I am very pleased and proud about them, and much less happy about any effort to try and alter what Jones said and meant.
To finish off, a quotation made by Fiver in the ”Evidence of Innocence” thread, post 2746, in response to another poster than me:
”You continue to puts words in my mouth. Nothing in what you say matches anything I said and some of it is the complete opposite of what I said.”
It is good to see that Fiver acknowledges that we should not put words in other posters mouths!
Oh no, wait a minute, I believe I have also promised to comment on how Fiver likes to speak of the cult of Lechmere and the church of Lechmere. It of course suggests that those who believe in Lechmere as the likely killer, are not basing their thinking on facts, but on religion or cultism.
Religion is normally built on things that do not exist, etheric creatures referred to as gods. And while my research points to a carman whose existence will have been very mundane in most ways, and who is proven to have found alone at the murder site of Polly Nichols, Fiver prefers to rely on the etheric figure of the so called Phantom Killer, a person who people believe must have existed, but where there is not a iot of proof to go along with that suggestion.
It seems Fiver is propagating for a so far completely etheric solution to the Ripper riddle than I am, settling for the mundane solution.
I’ll leave it at that.
I welcome any response you have, Fiver, and you are welcome to ask any questions you like of me. If I can, I will answer them.
How many, that can be named, actually turned out to have been the killer?
The constant repetition of ‘well he was at the scene,’ is about as useful as saying ‘well he had arms so he could have been the killer.’
Finding a body is not evidence of anything apart from of finding a body. It’s desperation that this has to be repeated. It shows how non-existent the case against him is. This is my evidence has been manipulated, exaggerations have been made and wilful misuses of the English language have been employed. These things have been proven (even though Fisherman tries to slither past them.)
A desperately weak case and a desperately weak suspect requiring a dishonest approach to desperately shoehorn him into place.
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