Who was the first clothes-puller?

[harry]

Corpses have been known to show movement hours after death.Paul would probably have been in a state where the least movement could have been misunderstood,therefor his statement has no evidence that would establish time of death.Pc Neil reported he passed through Bucks Row about 3.15 AM,some twenty five minutes before Cross did,so there is a twenty five minute period in which any number of persons could have done so.

[Wickerman]

Wickerman
Yes Neil noticed Thain walking past at 150 yards or so. Yet Cross says he only noticed Paul behind him at 40 yards. By my reckoning (see above) Cross was distracted by his work and didn’t notice Paul until, he was too close to safely run away. And as has been said he was probably familiar with Neil’s beat and would have run the risk of careering into Neil while fleeing.

Hi Lechmere.
I would agree with you that Cross was momentarily distracted so did not notice the approach of Paul.

However, I would suggest to you that anyone in the commission of such a crime will be "alert", his senses like radar, as to the approach of a potential witness.

Whereas someone confused, who's brain is more occupied with figuring out, "is this a tarpaulin, or a body?", is more likey to be too preoccupied to notice the approach of another person.

Regards, Jon S.

[Ben]

Oh bugger me...I find myself in agreement with Ben...(!)

Thanks, Dave, although I'm wounded by the implication that this isn't a regular occurrence.

[Cogidubnus]

I'm not sure he's that refined by now....he's still a relative beginner

Dave

[Robert]

Hi Lechmere

I would have thought the killer would be kneeling beside her, so as to watch both directions by looking from side to side. If he faces west, he has to keep looking over his shoulder.

[Cogidubnus]

Cross or not

Oh bugger me...I find myself in agreement with Ben...(!)

All the best

Dave

[Ben]

Lechmere, like Fisherman, also makes the highly questionable decision to use this thread to shoot down "rival" suspects, and as with Fisherman, if he wants to persist in that endeavour, that's all well and good if he's in the mood for an off-topic Fleming debate on this thread. I was half expecting some research to be produced on Cross, but it has yet to materialize. Pity. Fleming it is then:

We should reasonably conclude that Kelly’s Joseph Fleming - the mason’s plaster with Bethnal Green connections, was also the son on Richard and Henrietta Fleming, i.e. Joseph Fleming the mason’s plaster with Bethnal Green connections who stayed in the Victoria Home. The offerings of Mrs. McCarthy and Julia Venturney are obviously more scant on detail, but it is nonetheless clear that they were referring to the same person – Joseph Fleming from the building trade, of whom Kelly was ostensibly “fond”.

This same Joseph Fleming was, in all likelihood, 5'7" in height. The height was originally listed as 6"7', but when coupled with the supposedly "healthy" weight of 11 stone also recorded in the entry, we have to assess the likelihood of such a gargantuan height being an error of some description. As some discerning commentators have observed, it is more likely than not that such an error occurred. Indeed, Debs’ recent suggestion that Fleming was 67 inches (i.e. 5’7”) is very persuasive, in my opinion.

Fleming's false name was discovered years after the murders, and presumably because he had no particular incentive to conceal it at that stage. That doesn’t mean he could not have sustained the persona of “James Evans” had he wished to, and very successfully at that, given the ability of the 1888 authorities to check people out anywhere near as extensively as the poster Lechmere seems to envisage.

It was not the sort of place where an inmate could come and go as they pleased in the early hours of the morning.

Yes, it was, Lechmere. If the lodger held a daily of weekly pass, he could come and go at any hour of the night or the small hours of the morning.

Also the Victoria Home afforded no opportunity for the storage of body parts if that is deemed to be a necessity for the Ripper. I don’t personally put massive store on this.

I'm most reassured by this, considering the lack of evidence that the killer intended to keep the organs for any appreciable length of time. What the Victoria Home lacked in facilities to enable innard-pinchers to preserve them for weeks and months (which the real killer probably didn't do or want to to do), it more than made up for in foul smelling kitchens and large fires, suitable for surreptitious cannibalisation and hasty disposal.

I think numerous aspects relating to cross are highly suspicious - I have listed them.

I realise that, and to your eternal credit, you also listed alternative explanations to these "suspicions" that do not involve him being the killer. I personally find those alternative explanations considerably more convincing, as do others. I also think it highly likely that the police did not consider Cross suspicious because he very probably wasn't.

All the best,
Ben

[Lechmere]

Quite apart from the possible heart murmur, Dr Llewellyn, for what its worth gave a time of death around about the time that Cross ‘discovered’ the body.

Robert
“So what was he going to do if someone had swung round the school into Buck's Row?”
Some of these questions go for whoever did it.
After strangling her, he laid her down with her head to the east and feet to the west. My guess is that he then faced west, towards the school as he attacked the body with half an eye on anyone coming from that direction as it was the most vulnerable approach from his point of view.
I think he slashed the abdomen first and this is backed up by the medical evidence. I think he held the dress in front of him as an apron to avoid splashing. I think he almost sat on her face while doing this. After carrying out the abdominal wounds he turned and slashed her throat. This is why there was so little blood from the throat wound. If the culprit was Cross this would have been when he noticed Paul approaching as he did so – probably at about 100 yards away.

I will also re emphasise that after the body touching episode, Cross would have had a perfect excuse for having blood on his hands or clothes.

For...
“the killer stepped back into the shadows of the stable yard”
...to work the stable yard would have to be open as the doors were only slightly set back from the line of houses and there would have been barely any shadow and anyone standing there would have been seen quite clearly by Cross and Paul. There was nothing to suggest that the stable door was open.

Wickerman
Yes Neil noticed Thain walking past at 150 yards or so. Yet Cross says he only noticed Paul behind him at 40 yards. By my reckoning (see above) Cross was distracted by his work and didn’t notice Paul until, he was too close to safely run away. And as has been said he was probably familiar with Neil’s beat and would have run the risk of careering into Neil while fleeing.

[Cogidubnus]

I'd have thought the killer started just below the sternum. Other views may differ, of course. I find the abdominal stabs interesting - If one killer was responsible for say Tabram - Kelly (a bit arbitrary, but hey) then I'd see every murder as an experiment; building on the experience of the last to see what he could do next. I do wonder where Kelly would have led him.

That's a good post Sally...and raises questions far from this thread too...but please don't get Ben and Christer head to head again...pretty please...oh damn!

Dave

[Ben]

Another point that must be addressed is this issue of "injury concealment", which some have cited as a reason for suspicion in Cross's case, with bizarre analogies involving cakes and schools being wheeled in somewhat laboriously to hammer home the point. There is really no compelling evidence that the victims were put "on display". I'm not suggesting that it's unlikely for serial killers to display their victims, but in this case, all the supposed "posing" of the bodies can be attributed more realistically to the simple, convenient facilitation of the mutilations. The Kelly murder was always going to be visually shocking on account of the sheer butchery inflicted on her corpse, but the body itself did not appear posed at all. In fact, I'd like to know how Kelly's body could possibly have appeared less "posed" under the circumstances.

Why wasn't any attempt made to conceal the injuries of later victims? Well, that's just obvious - the mutilations were more extensive, and any attempt at concealment would thus have been futile. In Chapman's case, the intestines were thrown over the shoulder, not for the purpose of "posing", but to enable access to the organs in the abdominal cavity. Thus, the murderer's failure to pull down his victim's skirt is made clear in that case; it would not have concealed the exposed viscera and would therefore have been a pointless exercise. The same applies to Eddowes - no point pulling the skirts down if it was already clear from the facial mutilations that this was no prostitute "gone off in a swoon" or a drunken stupour.

For these extremely obvious reasons, the pulling down of the skirts in Nichols' case should not be construed as either evidence of interruption (which seems to have developed into some annoying factoid for no good reason), or evidence of Cross's culpability. If the later murders involved as relatively few mutilations as Nichols', I have no doubt that the killer would have pulled down their skirts too, and that applies whether he heard approaching footsteps or not.

Regards,
Ben

[Ben]

Hi Fisherman,

“Keep your shirt on, Ben! Charles Cross and George Hutchinson are a very useful comparison, and it needs to be made to show what kind of evidence we have on them respectively, and how it compares.”

I was only thinking of you and the direction of your thread, but if you want to derail it completely with more talk of Hutchinson, I personally have no objection. In fact it would be rather a positive result for those pesky “Hutchinsonians”, I'd have thought. I said nothing about a stamina war, but if you want to start an argument about Hutchinson on this thread, I will certainly finish it. I mean, you’ve already deviated hugely from the original premise of your thread, which Bridewell and others have tried to revert back to, so another veering off in yet another completely different direction surely won't hurt. It's entirely your call.

“The comparison as such is quickly done, and the outcome is obvious: Charles Cross is a better suspect in all of the practically oriented issues”

Well you’re more than entitled to that hastily conceived, highly controversial and extreme-minorty-endorsed opinion if you’re hell bent on it, and I suppose it doesn’t bother you in the slightest that those with greater knowledge of serial killers and true crime history than you, such as Dan Norder and Garry Wroe, accept that Hutchinson is a better suspect than Cross?

Listing murders that occurred along his working route is utterly worthless in the absence of any good reason to think that either Cross, or serial killers in general, are likely to kill en route to work. Since they obviously aren't, it should be rejected as any sort of “plus” in his candidacy’s favour. Similarly, the fact that Cross was the name of his step-father nullifies any suspicion that might otherwise have attached to him using it. Finding the body is not suspicious. It just isn’t. Someone had to find it, and the chances of it being either a policeman or someone on their way to work (i.e. someone exactly like Cross) were very high. To describe such an inevitable outcome as "suspicious" is hopelessly incorrect. Loitering outside and monitoring a crime scene before the crime occurred, on the other hand, is suspicious, is generally considered so, and is precisely what other serial killers – Rader, Bundy, Napper etc - have done.

“Maybe he did what I suggested in my former post - got his working attire on, wawed goodbye to his wife, and went out and killed, staying away from job that day. Gary Ridgway did it”

Yes, he did, but what he didn’t do is kill on his way to work knowing full well he had to be there in the next few minutes. The Ridgway comparison does, therefore, not apply. He did, however, inject himself into the investigation as a helpful witness, just as I contend possibly occurred with the permanently more popular and permanently more mainstream person of interest in the Whitechapel murders: George Hutchinson. This is the thread that tries to do what has already been done successfully with Hutchinson, but doesn’t.

“Yes! And the reason is that I look at the percentages. Five minutes is not much in the context of the history of universe”

But it’s probably wrong, which makes the pointless pedantry even worse. Even Lechmere accepts that the walk would have taken six or seven minutes, which strikes me as pretty plausible. Thus, if he left home at about 3:30am, it isn’t remotely unlikely – less still suspicious – that he arrived at the Buck’s Row location at about 3:40am.

“But keep in mind that the cops who let Dahmer pick up his victim from their custody, were equally impressed by the non-suspiciusness that he emitted”

Granted, but as I’ve explained a number of times, you can’t use the “non-suspiciousness” of people to argue that they are suspicious! That makes no sense at all. The parsimonious assumption is that he didn’t seem suspicious because he wasn’t.

Why would that have them anticipate foul play, murder and violence coming their way?

Cross's impression that she had been "outraged, and had gone off in a swoon", which means whoever was responsible for that potential "outrage" might just have been of a violent disposition, especially if it resulted in her death. Either way, the act of heading off in search of the nearest policeman, albeit in the direction of work, is precisely what I would have done in the circumstances.

“I am not promoting Stride as a definite Ripper victim”

You are apparently more in favour of Stride as a ripper victim now that you’ve “discovered” Cross, and yet you also argue that the potential Stride connection takes Cross up a notch as a suspect, to your estimation. This is obviously very circular reasoning. If you’re in favour of Stride as a ripper victim, it should be because crime scene evidence leads you to that conclusion, and not because your recently decided-upon favourite suspect might have had a relative that lived near Berner Street according to someone else's research. If I’ve read you wrong, I’d be interested in hearing an answer to the question: do you consider Stride a likely ripper victim? Previously you didn’t - that much is clear from years and years of posts in the Stride forum - and now…?

All the best,
Ben

[lynn cates]

whew

Hello Sally, Boris. You make me feel better. Thought I was getting old. (Yipes, I am!)

Cheers.
LC

[Wickerman]

... However, Cross didn't hear any footsteps running away, nor see anyone.

I wouldn't expect him to. If you remember PC Neil heard another PC pass along Brady St., which is approx. 350 ft away from the body.
That being the case, the killer could also have heard Cross when he entered Bucks Row from Brady St., in consequence he was well out of sight by the time Cross came across the body.

The only other option is Bob Hinton's theory that the killer stepped back into the shadows of the stable yard and waited for Cross and Paul to leave (Bob then went on to speculate that he was the "unknown man" who spoke to Mulshaw).

The trouble with that is, there's no guarantee anyone is going to leave. I don't think its a practical decision for the killer to make, given his obvious high state of anxiety.
I think more likely he made a quick exit westward and then around the Board school.

Regards, Jon S.

[bolo]

Hi Lynn,

Hello Boris.

"I think most of the cuts to the abdomen were applied with a downward movement of the knife."

That is my take--from inquest.

Cheers.
LC

yes, I'm also going with Llewellyn's inquest testimony here: "There were also three or four similar cuts, running downwards, on the right side, all of which had been caused by a knife which had been used violently and downwards" (taken from JTR Sourcebook, paperback 2001, pg. 39).

By the way, I added this to my original post but forgot to enclose it with quote tags so it appears within a quote of one of Rubyretro's posts, sorry about that, can't edit my previous message anymore.

Regards,

Boris

[Sally]

Hello Boris.

"I think most of the cuts to the abdomen were applied with a downward movement of the knife."

That is my take--from inquest.

Cheers.
LC

And mine. I'd have thought the killer started just below the sternum. Other views may differ, of course. I find the abdominal stabs interesting - If one killer was responsible for say Tabram - Kelly (a bit arbitrary, but hey) then I'd see every murder as an experiment; building on the experience of the last to see what he could do next. I do wonder where Kelly would have led him.

Anyway, I digress...