was her killer really a local

[Digalittledeeperwatson]

Thanks RC

The "well-dressed" description has to be taken in context. He was probably just well-dressed for the area, and wouldn't be described that way in Belgravia.

Not an unreasonable line of thinking at all. Also, how is your name pronounced? Tired of guessing at it when I read it. Starting to bother my OCD.

[Wickerman]

Hi wicker
Thanks.
Why have you latched onto such an ambiguous "suspect" then for jack the ripper? I don't understand how you can argue so passionately (and with such detail and research)for this ,and against other more specific suspects, when you don't have anything really more concrete than a well dressed suspect?
Why a well dressed ripper , wick why!?!

No-one has anything concrete, do they?

I class him as a Person of Interest, for the obvious reason we, today, know nothing about him except that he was there. That in itself makes him a suspicious character.

Other specific suspects? Do you mean like Kosminski?
He was never a suspect, read Anderson, he'll tell you himself, they suspected no-one at the time of the murders. Kosminski is an afterthought.

If you don't mean Koz, then I'm not sure who you mean.

Why "well-dressed"? - well, that is how they are described, more often than not, in Hanbury St., in Berner St., in Dorset St. even in Duke St. that suspect is not exactly your typical "dosser".
I'm just not so sure about the Berner St. victim.

If the killer was a "Blotchy" type character, who saw him everywhere else?

[Wickerman]

The "well-dressed" description has to be taken in context. He was probably just well-dressed for the area, and wouldn't be described that way in Belgravia.

A detail often lost in the foggy mists of vague details latched upon by many who question the concept.

[RivkahChaya]

Not an unreasonable line of thinking at all. Also, how is your name pronounced? Tired of guessing at it when I read it. Starting to bother my OCD.

Well, it depends, really. "Rivkah" is my actual first name, which varies in pronunciation, depending on where you are and where you are from. If you are calling me to Torah, or are a native Israeli, than it's usually "reev-KAH." People who are Yiddish speakers say it more like "RIF-keh." Most Americans pronounce it "RIV-ka."

Chaya is my middle name, which my parents hadn't the sense to spell "Haya." Most people say it sort of like "HIGH-yuh." The "ch" is a glottal fricative that doesn't even exist in English. However, if you know how the word Hanukkah/Chanukah is actually pronounced, it's the same first letter.

A detail often lost in the foggy mists of vague details latched upon by many who question the concept.

Yes. I suspect even members of the royal family didn't go out on an ordinary evening dripping jewelry.

"Well-dressed" may simply have meant that his clothes were new and unpatched, fit well as though they were tailored, or at least altered for him, and matched, and perhaps his trousers had creases, and his shoes were polished. When pretty much all you do is work and sleep, you don't get to polish your shoes or iron your clothes, so he either had free time, a wife who didn't have to work full-time, or at the very least, could afford to give the landlady he rented a room from a couple of extra pennies a week to do things like iron his clothes. If his clothes were very clean, then he owned more than just what he was wearing, which wasn't the case for a great many people in the East End.

I'm sure there were some people like that. McCarthy, for example, may have been much better dressed than the people he spent most of his time around, and I'm sure Abberline was as well. W. Somerset Maugham spent a lot of time in the East End when he first became a doctor, and he was probably well-dressed relative to his patients. I'd guess a lot of the news reporters writing about the Ripper were better dressed than the dossers.

[Digalittledeeperwatson]

Thanks.

That helps somewhat. Which way is the way you wish people would say it to you?

[Digalittledeeperwatson]

An attempt

reev-kah chai-yah? The latter like the tee and yes in German?

[RivkahChaya]

reev-kah chai-yah? The latter like the tee and yes in German?

No. The "ch" in "Chaya" is a glottal fricative. It's a sound that doesn't exist in English, so most Americans just say it like an "H." Hardly anyone ever uses my middle name. It gets used when I'm called to Torah, and then it gets pronounced correctly, my aunt uses it, and sometimes people who know another Rivkah use it to differentiate. Those are generally Jews who know how it's pronounced (it comes from the Hebrew word for "life," so it's like being named Vivien). The second syllable is sort of pronounced like the German word for yes, but not quite that emphatically. The first syllable is the one that's stressed.

[Abby Normal]

No-one has anything concrete, do they?

I class him as a Person of Interest, for the obvious reason we, today, know nothing about him except that he was there. That in itself makes him a suspicious character.

Other specific suspects? Do you mean like Kosminski?
He was never a suspect, read Anderson, he'll tell you himself, they suspected no-one at the time of the murders. Kosminski is an afterthought.

If you don't mean Koz, then I'm not sure who you mean.

Why "well-dressed"? - well, that is how they are described, more often than not, in Hanbury St., in Berner St., in Dorset St. even in Duke St. that suspect is not exactly your typical "dosser".
I'm just not so sure about the Berner St. victim.

If the killer was a "Blotchy" type character, who saw him everywhere else?

Ok thanks wicker
So you have given up then on A-man being the Britannia/bethnel green man theory?
So then you have Mary Kelly taking three men home that night? Blotchy, Aman and Britannia/bethnel green man? Wow busy girl.

re Blotchy:
I simply don't believe hutches Aman story and "witness" "Kennedy" is too much of a nebulous character to me to put any weight on.
So IMHO, Blotchy, whos description seems more of the average joe/white chapel male (by a most reliable witness )is the most likely last man seen with Mary Kelly and therefore her killer and JtR.

[Michael W Richards]

If the killer was a "Blotchy" type character, who saw him everywhere else?

It would seem that he was spotted a few days later and when the witness moved towards him he fled. A Policeman was told about it and stated that "they were looking for someone quite different" than this ragamuffin man.

Courtesy of George Hutchinson. One wonders if Hutch hadnt stepped in with his 2 cents whether they might have apprehended and questioned that man who fled....the last man to be seen with Mary Kelly alive.

Cheers

[Wickerman]

Ok thanks wicker
So you have given up then on A-man being the Britannia/bethnel green man theory?

Yes, in my opinion, though the timing is tight, it seems to me A-man is in the clear, he left minutes after Hutchinson. but, the Britannia-man is still at the corner of Commercial St.
He was there at 2:30 (Lewis), and still there at "about 3:00" (Kennedy).

So then you have Mary Kelly taking three men home that night? Blotchy, Aman and Britannia/bethnel green man? Wow busy girl.

Two for sure, the third is a suggestion.
I mean, as opposed to her staying in after A-man, and her killer being someone who broke in and killed her.

re Blotchy:
I simply don't believe hutches Aman story and "witness" "Kennedy" is too much of a nebulous character to me to put any weight on.

Ok. but the problem with both is that we just have no further information on either of them. Which does not mean they did not exist, in fact Joseph Isaacs is the best candidate for A-man, and the Astrachan coat was associated with him for some reason.

"Mrs Kennedy", may, or may not, have been her real name. In her story of the Wednesday sighting she admits to possibly soliciting.
Apparently, both women (on Wednesday) attempted to coerce Bethnal Green/Britannia-man into buying them both a drink. Not something a woman would do unless she knew the man well enough, or was attempting to engage the man in some way or other.

So IMHO, Blotchy, whos description seems more of the average joe/white chapel male (by a most reliable witness )is the most likely last man seen with Mary Kelly and therefore her killer and JtR.

Indeed, but whether she was a "reliable" witness is to some degree tempered by the fact the police could not locate any establishment where Blotchy was seen, with or without a drink in his hand.

Something may be wrong with Cox's story.

[Wickerman]

It would seem that he was spotted a few days later and when the witness moved towards him he fled. A Policeman was told about it and stated that "they were looking for someone quite different" than this ragamuffin man.

Yes, they were looking for Astrachan.

There is a follow up report which reads somewhat ambiguous.

The Evening News reporter asked the police about this incident and was given a curious explanation:
"(the blotchy character)...is a respectable citizen, and that he was, as a matter of fact, acting in concert with them.."

Given that the police were known to put reporters off by telling them untruths, we might wonder what was behind this rather strange response.

The police simply did not wish any publicity on the matter.

Courtesy of George Hutchinson. One wonders if Hutch hadnt stepped in with his 2 cents whether they might have apprehended and questioned that man who fled....the last man to be seen with Mary Kelly alive.

They had tried to locate anyone who had seen him on the night of the 8th, no-one had seen him in any pub, so they appeared to be at a dead end at that point.

[Digalittledeeperwatson]

my memory

Is currently impaired do to sickness, but I swear I read a report or something similar that stated the blotchy guy spotted and reported about to the officer who said they were looking for someone, was actually an undercover. Currently searching for it.

[Digalittledeeperwatson]

Thanks Rivkah

One less thing to keep me from sleeping.

[RivkahChaya]

One less thing to keep me from sleeping.

You might want to CP it, though, before the mods delete it as being irrelevant to the thread.

Also, I know what your screenname is, but somehow, I keep misreading it as "digital little person," like a little person who works in IT, or tech support, or something.

For Brits, there's an organization in the US & Canada called "Little People of America." It provides all kinds of support and resources to people of very short stature, and parents of such children. Medically, most of the members have a form of dwarfism, but they prefer the term "little person" to "dwarf," when it is describing a person, rather than a medical condition-- ie, "Pituitary Dwarfism" is fine; "that girl over here is a dwarf," is not. I don't think they've weighed in on the use of "dwarf" in things like World of Warcraft, but I think it's the way it's used in such things that makes it objectionable in the first place.

[Prosector]

Did Mary Jane speak Welsh?

To introduce a slightly new element into this discussion, many writers including the person that wrote Mary Jane Kelly's profile in Casebook state that she spoke Welsh fluently. Does anyone know what the evidence for this is? Of course anyone who had been brought up in Wales (other than Monmouthshire) in the 1860s would almost certainly have spoken Welsh but is there any contemporary written evidence that Mary Jane did?

Prosector