Probability of Double Event

[Fisherman]

Here is the next piece of evidence, relating to the picture people had of being middle-aged back in 1888. It is from the Frederick News, November 10 1888:

“The first Whitechapel murder occurred a year ago last month in that section of London where the scum of the vile dens of vice are let loose upon the streets in the early morning, when the police close up the brothels infested by them. The victim was a fallen woman past middle age and her body was found horribly and peculiarly mutilated. But it was supposed to be only a murder common among her class. No effort was made to discover the murderer, and the body was buried in Potter's field unidentified and the case forgotten.
The second murder did not occur until Aug 7 last, but it was unmistakeable the work of the same hand. The victim was again a fallen and dissolute woman, Martha Turner…”

This points us to the first Whitechapel murder, perpetraded against Emma Smith. She was 45, and is described as being “past middle age”!

And this is from Walter Dews memoirs:

“Why did the Ripper choose them as his victims? I do not know. This is one of the questions which will never now be answered.
Few of them were pretty or young. Indeed, with one exception, all the women lured by the killer to their deaths were approaching or past middle age.”

And there we are: if Marshall had had his man down as being of his own age, he would have regarded him as an old man, and not as middle-aged. Middle age was OVER in the mid forties, according to contemporary sources! And that tallies very well with todays perception of the middle age, given that we live so much longer. Today we place it around 35-58, but back then it ENDED around 45, meaning that we may have to stretch it to somewhere between perhaps 28-45. It would have been a shorter period of time than we can allow for today, at any rate.

This is the beauty of having the sources to go back to - whenever an untenable suggestion is thrown forward, we can always go back to them and find the truth.

We may also ponder the fact that Walter Dew was a whopping 75 when his memoirs were published - and that means that a 75-year old man described 45 as being "past middle age"! If we were to work by Tom Wescott´s line of thought, he would probably have suggested that Dew would have regarded 45 as youngish...

The best,
Fisherman

[Chava]

Pinkerton, I'm sorry, the odds on a coin coming up heads in every individual toss are 50/50 unless there has been some funny business with the coin. The odds do not change. There are books written about this, and the belief that the odds change or even out even has a name. I believe it's referred to as The Gamblers Fallacy.

Now let's look at Stride again. As you know, I think she was a Ripper victim. I think he was disturbed and then ran off to find someone else. And poor Catherine Eddowes had the great misfortune to be that someone. However I don't believe that based on the improbability of two women being murdered in the same way close by each other. I know women weren't being killed every night but women were being killed on occasion. If two men separately but within the same time frame decide to murder two women with a knife within a couple of miles of each other, then those murders will occur whether they are statistically improbable or no. What are the odds? Huge. But those are just the odds. They have nothing to do with reality.

So why do I believe Stride was a Ripper victim? She was the right kind of age, right living situation, right occupation--although I know this is disputed. And also because her body is found in what I believe to be a hallmark Ripper-killing site.

[Fisherman]

Next up: This almighty link leads you to a picture of an old man in a cutaway ... what? Is it a cutaway jacket? Or a small cutaway coat? Could it be described as just a dark jacket?
Ask yourselves these questions, and then relate it to Marshalls and Schwartz´s testimony!

http://www.google.se/imgres?imgurl=http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/getImage.aspx%3FImageId%3D1077%26width%3D240&imgrefurl=http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/News/The-Victorian-poses-of-a-bloke-a-lad-and-a-boy-2.htm&usg=___GFjw2ytKqS9ROMEKz0ajjeiZWA=&h=342&w=239&sz=19&hl=sv&start=250&zoom=1&itbs=1&tbnid=ydT5I4_p5fFb7M:&tbnh=120&tbnw=84&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522victorian%2Bportrait%2522%26start%3D240%26hl%3Dsv%26sa%3DN%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26tbs%3Disch:1

The best,
Fisherman

[Ben]

This almighty link leads you to a picture of an old man in a cutaway ... what? Is it a cutaway jacket?

Looks rather like a loose-fitting pepper-and-salt jacket to me.

[Fisherman]

Haha! Hmmm ... I wonder where he stuffed the red hanky...?

The best,
Fisherman

[Pinkerton]

But those are just the odds. They have nothing to do with reality.

Odds have nothing to do with reality?? Wow...In that case I would advise you to get rid of any insurance you have Chava, since you won't need it because odds have nothing to do with reality. You might also go ahead and invest all of your money into the stock market, since odds have nothing to do with reality. Or better yet invest you life savings into buying lots of lottery tickets or maybe bet it all on a horse at the races, since the odds don't mean anything in reality. You're right, it's better to rely on "intuition" and "folk wisdom" then science and math.

[Fisherman]

What I think Chava is trying to convey, Pinkerton, is that odds are only loosely tied to reality, and may prove terribly wrong. The odds are she´s right.

The best,
Fisherman

[Pinkerton]

Fisherman, if you want to argue that one can't accurately predict the odds of something happening like the double event down to a single digit then you are right (there are WAY too many variables involved). However one can EASILY tell the difference between something that is likely to happen (I will live to see my 60th birthday), unlikely to happen (I will live to see my 100th birthday), and EXTREMELY unlikely to happen (I will live to see my 120th birthday). And when only a handful of women are murdered in London during the LVP in an ENTIRE YEAR, and throughout the ENTIRE CITY OF LONDON, it stretches ANY SENSE of believability to think that two prostitutes could have their throats cut with a knife, within a mile of each other, and within an hour of each other, by the hand of two different unrelated killers.

And I maintain that those who believe Stride was not a Ripper victim are engaging in "magical thinking" and "emotional reasoning". I don't mean to sound insulting but I feel like I am debating someone who thinks the earth is flat and nothing I say will convince them otherwise.

[Fisherman]

Pinkerton:

"I don't mean to sound insulting but I feel like I am debating someone who thinks the earth is flat"

It isn´t? Geez!

No problems, Pinkerton - you are not the first that that cannot believe that Stride died by another hand, and the odds are (sorry ...) that you will not be the last. Actually, that would provide any killer with the perfect alibi, should they want to; strike at the same night and area as another murder, and you are in the clear.

I don´t know it you are familiar with Sam Flynn, who used to participate on these boards, but he made calculations about the whole thing, and mathematically, his deduction was that yes it would be a coincindence, but no, it would not be incredible in any fashion if Stride was indeed killed by somebody else.

I contributed a piece from the US some time ago, where there was a number of murders over a short period of time where the victims were dumped in similar fashion in small alleys in the very same small area within a major town (which one has slipped my mind). The police were looking for a serial killer, but found a number of killers, totally unrelated.

There is also the story of a killer ( may have been Angel Resendez) who killed and dumped his victims along the railroads of America. At one stage, the police found four dumped bodies withing a few hundred yards. It turned out that three of them were killed by Resendez, whereas the fourth - dumped in the exact same manner at the exact same place - was another killers work.

What you need to take into account, Pinkerton, is that the East end in 1888 was absolutely overcrowded. Very, very many people were living in a very small area, and a good deal of that area was described as crimeridden to a ridiculous extent. To add to the picture: knife violence was rife - knives were the most common weapon, and they lay behind the vast majority of the killings perpetraded in those days. We know that Coles, McKenzie and Tabram - all of them prositutes that are normally not ascribed to the Ripper - died by knife violence in the same area within a three year space. That means that we seem to be dealing with one un-Ripperish prostitute killing per year by knife, meaning that there seemingly was one chance in 365 that somebody would go down alongside Stride, by knife, prostitute and all. Meaning that we are in no way dealing with a flat earth, but perhaps a slightly flattened imagination on behalf of those who cannot swallow this.
After that, we may add the attacks on Wilson, on Millwood, the murder of Emma Smith and so on, and we will see the possibility rising even further.

We may also ponder the thought that on the night Stride died, the papers had been crammed with articles of the Rippers deeds for months, perhaps inspiring the occasional oddball to have a go with the knife himself, or a scheming killer to realize that everybody would be reasoning along the lines you are, and so there would be no better oportunity to get away with murder than the one offered by the Ripper scare.

I am in no way offended by your proposition about how I picture the world, Pinkerton. I am just concerned to show that there is plenty of room to accept another scenario than yours.

The best,
Fisherman

[macknnc]

The East End, particularly Whitechapel, being crowded to an almost unbelivable decree...granted

Knife violence being rife and knife commonly the weapon of choice...granted..


But this debate seems to me to be leading us rather far afield. The question is simply do you believe the 'double event' happened or not?

I do. That Eddowes was a Ripper victim seems to go without saying..that leaves Stride. I believe the Ripper killed her by cutting her throat, (I have no idea why a different knife was possibly used and won't guess)..but her throat was cut in "the Ripper style"..that no further damage was done to her body can be explained (I think) by the sudden arrival of Diemschultz on the scene.

Everyone else is entitled to their own beliefs of course.

[corey123]

Hello All,

I believe this thread has caused more harm than good.

Anyhow, this case is really just how one see's the order of events that night. We obviously have two outcomes, that Jack the Ripper was interupted during the murder of Stride, and that the murderer wasn't the Ripper at all.

Now either is possible, but, like I said, it all comes down to the way you see it. Honestly, there is no more evidence to help fit either senerio.

Personal opinons. I think instead of arguing, perhaps it would be better to put aside opinions and rather discuss what points are really imporant in this murder.

Just my two cents.

Yours truly.

[Chava]

Odds have nothing to do with reality?? Wow...In that case I would advise you to get rid of any insurance you have Chava, since you won't need it because odds have nothing to do with reality. You might also go ahead and invest all of your money into the stock market, since odds have nothing to do with reality. Or better yet invest you life savings into buying lots of lottery tickets or maybe bet it all on a horse at the races, since the odds don't mean anything in reality. You're right, it's better to rely on "intuition" and "folk wisdom" then science and math.

Listen, moron. There is no way I said anything about intuition. I've stated why I think Stride was a victim and I've attempted to point out to you that if two separate murderers intend to kill two separate victims in close proximity and in a close time-frame then odds don't come into it. There are no odds on human behaviour. If you choose not to read the posts properly that is not my problem. And while I'm at it, stop yelling at other posters. Enough with the bolding and the caps. We get it. You think Stride was a Ripper victim and everyone who thinks anything else is a dribbling idiot. You don't need to scream down our virtual ears.

By the way, thanks Fisherman!

[Fisherman]

Mack:

"The question is simply do you believe the 'double event' happened or not?
I do. That Eddowes was a Ripper victim seems to go without saying..that leaves Stride. I believe the Ripper killed her by cutting her throat, (I have no idea why a different knife was possibly used and won't guess)..but her throat was cut in "the Ripper style"..that no further damage was done to her body can be explained (I think) by the sudden arrival of Diemschultz on the scene."

Once again, Mack - there is no need to think that a different knife was used. That misconception owes to Phillip´s thoughts reagarding the position in which Stride was found. She was lying on her left side, very close to the clubhouse wall, her face being only a very short distance from the wall itself. Therefore Phillips realized that if she was cut after she had fallen - and he was of the opinion that she was, although Blackwell opened up for a scenario where she was cut during that fall - it would have been hard to pry a longish blade in over her, turning it and shoving it underneath her, only to cut her afterwards. Of course, if she was cut during her fall or if her head was lifted from the ground after her fall to facilitate for a cut, we need not believe that the knife that cut her must have been short and thus unlike the weapon that cut Chapman. In that case, Phillips said that the blade would have been many an inch long.
So forget about the difference in knives, mate, for it need not have been there!

The other misconception here is that cutting in the "Ripper style" as you call it, would have been something present in Dutfield´s Yard and something very much out of the ordinary. To understand what I am talking about, we need to realize that Stride was NOT cut in the same fashion as the others. I would say that if there was anything about the Rippers way of cutting that made it stand out, then it was mainly one, perhaps two things: The depth of the cut - it travelled all the way down to the spine - and, to some extent, the length of it. Most cut throats do not suffer a slicing that goes from ear to ear.
When it comes to the ordinary outcome of a cut to the throat, I would say that such a cut is a cut that travels an inch or two into the flesh, and that mainly is situated to the one side of the throat. And this was what Stride suffered. The cut was not deep enough to totally sever the left side carotid artery, and the right side of her neck was left much more undamaged than the left one. An ugly cut, for sure, but nothing that can be used to compare with what had happened to Nichols and Chapman, where it could be argued that an effort to sever the head had been made. No such wish could be read into Stride´s wound.

All in all, when speaking about "Ripper style" cutting as an exclusive art, we must take into account that the THIRD cut throat on the evening in London town, belonging to the unfortunate mrs Brown in Westminster, actually did suffer exactly the most Ripperish feature of them all: a cut to the spine. So that says a lot about the "uniqueness" of the Rippers cutting.

In fact, there is good reason to believe that Jack was the killer of Stride. But that does NOT owe to how the cut on Strides neck looked. It owes to the fact that we KNOW that he was active on the night, and we KNOW that he was in the vicinity, and we can work out a perfectly feasible schedule with one stop in Berner Street and one at Mitre Square. That is the most compelling reason to dub Jack the killer of Stride. But the location, the timing, the cut, the left-out mutilation, the differing position of the body, the noted affectionate meeting with Marshall´s man, the BS man incident - they all tell a different story altogether. And all of these deviations belong to one victim and one victim only. It´s not as if we had the BS man scene with Eddowes, a shallow cut only to Kelly´s neck, Chapman left un-mutilated due to Cadosche scaring the Ripper off or Nichols cut at closing time for the pubs - no, ALL of the differences, each and every one of them, are collected at one and the same spot - Dutfield´s Yard.
That is not a thing that calls for your simple solution, I´m afraid.

The best,
Fisherman

[Fisherman]

Chava:

"thanks Fisherman!"

You´re ever so welcome, Chava!

All the best,
Fisherman

[Pinkerton]

No problems, Pinkerton - you are not the first that that cannot believe that Stride died by another hand, and the odds are (sorry ...) that you will not be the last. Actually, that would provide any killer with the perfect alibi, should they want to; strike at the same night and area as another murder, and you are in the clear.

Actually I believe I am in the majority opinion in this regard. Not that the majority is always right, because it is often not.

I don´t know it you are familiar with Sam Flynn, who used to participate on these boards, but he made calculations about the whole thing, and mathematically, his deduction was that yes it would be a coincindence, but no, it would not be incredible in any fashion if Stride was indeed killed by somebody else.

Yeah I remember Sam. A nice fellow but a little over the top (he tried to give WAY too exact of a figure if I recall, which isn't humanly possible). The very best we could do is to give a very ROUGH approximation based on the murder rate in London of the day.

Again I would invite anyone to look over one year's worth of Old Bailey's transcripts from www.oldbaileyonline.org .It will only take you a couple of hours to thumb through and do a quick count of the number of women murdered in London in a year. To take into account murders that went unsolved or were not discovered you might even double this number. Then look at a map of London and look at the area of the murders. Now slowly pan out over the entire area of London. Look at the hundreds of other localities. Granted Whitechapel was one of the most crowded places in London, but look at the ENORMITY of the city. Also as you go through the Old Bailey records see how many crimes came from the area related to the Ripper area. It is a very small percentage despite the poverty that existed at the area of the time. The Ripper area was only a small drop in the bucket of an enormous city which was the most populated city on earth in 1888.

I contributed a piece from the US some time ago, where there was a number of murders over a short period of time where the victims were dumped in similar fashion in small alleys in the very same small area within a major town (which one has slipped my mind). The police were looking for a serial killer, but found a number of killers, totally unrelated.

Were two of them killed WITHIN THE HOUR of each other by different killers and were the alleys within a mile of each other? I suspect not. No one to my knowledge has EVER been able to find such an occurrence.

There is also the story of a killer ( may have been Angel Resendez) who killed and dumped his victims along the railroads of America. At one stage, the police found four dumped bodies withing a few hundred yards. It turned out that three of them were killed by Resendez, whereas the fourth - dumped in the exact same manner at the exact same place - was another killers work.

I don't think this was Resendez. Would be curious to see who you are referring to though.

What you need to take into account, Pinkerton, is that the East end in 1888 was absolutely overcrowded. Very, very many people were living in a very small area, and a good deal of that area was described as crimeridden to a ridiculous extent.

The Ripper murders as you know did not involve the entire East End--only a small section of it. Overcrowding also existed in Bethnal Green, Stepney, Shoreditch and other places in the East End where the murders did NOT occur. Overcrowding was also bad in other parts of the city though Whitechapel was certainly near the top of the list (along with Spitalfields).

To add to the picture: knife violence was rife - knives were the most common weapon, and they lay behind the vast majority of the killings perpetraded in those days. We know that Coles, McKenzie and Tabram - all of them prositutes that are normally not ascribed to the Ripper - died by knife violence in the same area within a three year space. That means that we seem to be dealing with one un-Ripperish prostitute killing per year by knife, meaning that there seemingly was one chance in 365 that somebody would go down alongside Stride, by knife, prostitute and all. Meaning that we are in no way dealing with a flat earth, but perhaps a slightly flattened imagination on behalf of those who cannot swallow this.
After that, we may add the attacks on Wilson, on Millwood, the murder of Emma Smith and so on, and we will see the possibility rising even further.

This is not exactly true. Of the cases I have come across a razor was often used, as was bludgeoning, strangulation (mainly on women), poison, and occasionally a firearm. Though a knife would be at the top of the list I might hazard a rough guess that between 30-60% of murders were committed with a knife. This hardly respresents a "vast majority". And of those killed with a knife not all had their throats cut. Many were simply stabbed.

We may also ponder the thought that on the night Stride died, the papers had been crammed with articles of the Rippers deeds for months, perhaps inspiring the occasional oddball to have a go with the knife himself, or a scheming killer to realize that everybody would be reasoning along the lines you are, and so there would be no better oportunity to get away with murder than the one offered by the Ripper scare.

Copycat crimes I can understand. But for a copycat crime to be committed, the Ripper to then hear about it, and then quickly commit one of his own within a mile and within an hour just defies the odds. People didn't have radios and televisions to broadcast out the latest headlines. However this scenario at least is within the realm of possibility. For the Ripper to just coincidentally kill Stride within an hour WITHOUT hearing about the other killing is not in my opinion.

I am in no way offended by your proposition about how I picture the world, Pinkerton.

Good, because no offense was intended.

I am just concerned to show that there is plenty of room to accept another scenario than yours.

The three scenarios I offered for there being two killers stated earlier in the thread cover every possibility. Collusion (two killers working in tandem), Ripper acts on hearing of other murder, and two murders committed coincidentally by two different killers. I believe only the first two fall into the realm of possibility, but are still extremely unlikely. And the third I believe defies all reason though I know you disagree.