Let there be light!

[John G]

There is evidence that Kelly was taken completely by surprise by her murderer, which would be consistent with JtR's MO, and may well have been asleep when attacked. Dr Bond, for instance, concluded there was no evidence of a struggle and that her face may have been covered with the sheet when attacked.

In such circumstances, Kelly would clearly have been afforded no opportunity to scream "oh murder!", or anything else for that matter.

[David Orsam]

Yes, I do assume that the scream came from the room of Kelly. So if you dismiss two independent sources, you do ignore the evidence.

That, Pierre, is what is known as a non sequitur.

Your assumption that the scream came from the room of Kelly is most certainly not evidence that it did.

[Pierre]

Yes there are reasons Pierre and I've told you what they are but you seem to want to ignore them.

But if it is the case that the statements were not lies why do you keep saying that Prater lied when she said cries of murder were a common occurrence?

Either Prater's statement was truthful or it was not. Which is it?

David, the world is not black and white. A witness does not either lie to 100 percent or tell the truth to 100 percent. So it is no use to give me a binary option there.

But what are the lies you are postulating?

[David Orsam]

since we have two independent sources

Those two supposedly independent sources do not corroborate each other as to the volume of the scream nor as to what was actually screamed.

How do we know that Kelly and Prater did not have a discussion during the morning or early afternoon of 9 November before they spoke to the police?

[Pierre]

The same thing. It seems likely that, contrary to common belief, Prater did not live in the room directly above Kelly's. From her various descriptions of the lodging house lamps and occurrences in Dorset Street it would appear that she occupied a room at the front of the property - in other words one that overlooked Dorset Street rather than Miller's Court. This would explain why she described the cry of 'Murder!' as not very loud. Sarah Lewis, on the other hand, heard the cry from a position which overlooked the court. Add to this the fact that one of Kelly's windows contained at least one broken pane (and was thereby less able to impede the transmission of sound from within the room) and it becomes obvious why the cry appeared louder to Sarah than it had to Mrs Prater.


Please see above, Pierre. I would also encourage you to read Mrs Prater's various press accounts. Should you do so you'll find that Prater could hear Kelly moving about her room when ascending the staircase, not from within her own room. Again, this makes all of the difference when attempting to reconcile the statements made by Prater and Lewis.

Hi Garry,

Yes, I have seen this discussion about the location of Praterīs room before and she might have been living directly above the shed.

Regards, Pierre

[David Orsam]

there is no reason to think that the statements were lies.

Yes there are reasons Pierre and I've told you what they are but you seem to want to ignore them.

But if it is the case that the statements were not lies why do you keep saying that Prater lied when she said cries of murder were a common occurrence?

Either Prater's statement was truthful or it was not. Which is it?

[David Orsam]

Not ignoring the evidence includes doing source criticism. If you donīt do that, if you do no internal and external source criticism, you do ignore the evidence. That is the problem.

Pierre, please don't continually tell me how to evaluate documentary evidence. All the things you refer to as internal and external source criticism are done naturally by any and every competent and intelligent member of this forum, but they don't need to be labelled as such, nor is there a formal method or process by which it all needs to be done. Nor for that matter does it, or should it, involve "tendencies". You are way too hooked up on the process, the theory, the method. That kind of thing is for newbies and undergraduates. Perhaps you are one, I have no idea.

[Pierre]

Hello, Pierre.

The manner in which your question has been phrased appears to offer only three options or 'types of cases' to those interested in answering it.
That a murder took place sometime that morning is not in question.
That there was a cry of 'Murder!' does not seem to be in dispute, although whether it was one cry or more is a matter of contention.
However, it is in the matter of linking the cry 'Murder!' to the time of the murder that there is an issue. The manner in which you have set out the 'types of cases' seems to indicate that one event is necessarily followed by the other. I think it is unsafe to assume such.
Simply because a cry of 'Murder!' was heard and then later a body was discovered, does not positively indicate that the two occurrences are linked. If we hear an aircraft fly overhead and find out later that one has crashed, it need not be the same ‘plane.
On the evidence regarding the time of death, there is a lack of certainty.
The time of the cry or cries can be better discerned. The testimonies and statements indicate a half hour window, between 3:30 and 4:00 A.M. and seemingly closer to 4:00 A.M.
Based upon all the available evidence, I should be reluctant to assert that the cry of 'Oh,Murder!' was positively related to the actual murder that took place.

May I ask, are you suggesting in your narrative, that Prater was reluctant to investigate the cause behind the cry that she heard because of a general fear or are you suggesting that she was aware of a more specific threat towards herself?

Yours, Caligo.

Hi Caligo,

Of course, there is always the possibility of spurious correlations.

No, we donīt have any sources indicating any specific threat towards Prater. Only a general threat. She barricaded her door with two tables.

Or is it a general threat? Do we know anything about how Prater was thinking about that?

Regards, Pierre

[Pierre]

QUOTE=David Orsam;387005

I don't understand all this stuff about tape recorders.

OK. Letīs see.

Both women were human beings.

Yes, and therefore we can not treat their statements as being objective recordings made by machines.

Neither of them took any notice of the cry of murder.

This is what they say after they have got a lot of new knowledge about Kelly and what happened to Kelly.

Prater was so untroubled by the cry

This is what she wanted the police and the court to think.

that she went back to sleep

We donīt know this. We have no recording of it. What we have is a witness at a murder inquest, who lived above the victim. This fact is reason enough to criticize (not in the meaning of common sense but in the meaning of source criticism) the sources.

then went to the pub for a few drinks then went back to sleep again.

Is this an objective recording? Or is it a narrative presented by a witness?

Neither of them appear to have had any intention of reporting to the police what they heard.

We should not start a discussion about the frequency of reported incidents to the police in Whitechapel here. We have no data for it. So this idea must be just an idea, i.e. that there was a subjective possibility for Prater and Lewis to walk out in the night and contact a policeman. We know it is an objective possibility. But you say there was no intention, and I agree with that, at least there is nothing in the sources indicating that there was such an intention.

When they learnt that there had been a murder in 9 Millers Court, however, suddenly that cry of murder took on a new meaning for both women and indicated that perhaps they heard an actual murder in process.

I must say you have a flexible thinking, David. That is great.

But there is a danger of them making a false assumption based on what they had discovered isn't there? In fact, the cry might have had nothing to do with Kelly's murder.

But they did not have your flexible thinking, so do you really think they were analysing that danger the way you do?

As for Lewis saying that the sound seemed to come from deceased's room, I've already pointed out that she was a human not a bat and did not have the power of echo location detection.

It is much easier to interpret her "location detection" from the later knowledge she got about the location of the murder then to say she was not a bat.

How could she possibly have known where a single cry of murder came from? After she learns that someone has been murdered, then she says "oh yes I think it came from where that person was murdered". How reliable is THAT?

Good, David. Now you are doing internal source criticism!

Yes, in the sources there is a "before" and an "after". People tell other people what happened before X but since they do tell it after X, we have reason to think they have processed the before after the after and that the processing might have influenced their narratives about before.

So how reliable is that?

Only the sources can give us the answer. But David, look up to the skies on a dark night. Do you see all the planets in space? No. Even though they are actually there. So what we need is a good astronomical telescope.

And since the material we discuss here is not space, but sources from the past, we need a good historical method.

Regards, Pierre

[Pierre]

Up to a point Pierre. As at 12 November, Prater still did not know whether Kelly was alive or not when she heard the cry of murder on 9 November. This issue was not resolved at the inquest and remains unresolved to this day.

On 9th November Prater knew what had happened to Kelly. She knew that at the time of the police investigation on the same day. So we have NO SOURCES where Prater does NOT know what happened to Kelly.

Interesting, isnīt it?

Regards, Pierre

[Pierre]

But does Lewis really back Prater's statement?

Lewis said: "I heard a female voice shout loudly one Murder!"

Prater said: "I heard a cry of oh! Murder!...the voice was in a faint voice."

Would you say they are describing the same thing or different things?

And of course Prater said in her written statement:

"I heard screams of murder about two or three times in a female voice".

How can this be explained?

It is easy. Two different locations. Two different witnesses. Two different types of perception. Two different ways of describing the experience.

People are not tape recorders, David.

But the time of the experience was the same. The clock is an external device for measurement. That device united the two experiences.

Regards, Pierre

[Pierre]

Of course I don't just "believe the sources" but, at the same time, you can't just ignore the evidence. As far as I can see, if one is being critical, it's just as likely that there was no cry of murder at all as that Prater was lying about it being a common occurrence.

Not ignoring the evidence includes doing source criticism. If you donīt do that, if you do no internal and external source criticism, you do ignore the evidence. That is the problem. I think you are rather good at the external source criticism. You often seem to have been thinking about the provenience of the sources and the situations where they were created, as well as their functions. But you never do any internal criticism. At least not for the consecrated sources. There is a tendency (meaning tendency in common sense language now) among ripperologists to believe that some sources are to be taken at face value. Also, some believe that you can "read" the sources and get "information". That is a big problem.

Anyway, it is not just as likely there was no cry of murder. Absolutely not, since we have two independent sources, and there is no reason to think that the statements were lies. There is no tendency in the sources making us think that. Prater had problems with explaining away the scream. If she had been silent about it, that would have been a different thing, since she lived above Kelly. Yes, I do assume that the scream came from the room of Kelly. So if you dismiss two independent sources, you do ignore the evidence.

Regards, Pierre

[David Orsam]

The same thing. It seems likely that, contrary to common belief, Prater did not live in the room directly above Kelly's. From her various descriptions of the lodging house lamps and occurrences in Dorset Street it would appear that she occupied a room at the front of the property - in other words one that overlooked Dorset Street rather than Miller's Court. This would explain why she described the cry of 'Murder!' as not very loud. Sarah Lewis, on the other hand, heard the cry from a position which overlooked the court. Add to this the fact that one of Kelly's windows contained at least one broken pane (and was thereby less able to impede the transmission of sound from within the room) and it becomes obvious why the cry appeared louder to Sarah than it had to Mrs Prater.

You say it is a "common belief" but Prater said "I lived in the room over where the deceased lived."

Prater also said that the "faint voice" she heard sounded like it came from "close by" which does not make sense if it was the same sound which Lewis heard as a "loud shout".

There is also the fact that Prater said she heard two words "Oh!" and "Murder!" whereas Prater only heard "Murder!".

On the face of it, therefore, I suggest that the only sensible and credible answer to my question is that Prater and Lewis were describing two separate and distinct events.

[David Orsam]

Cox does insists that she laid on the bed but did not fall asleep, and also that she had not slept all day.
Now, how feasible is that, stay awake all day and at night lay on a bed but not drift off at all through the night?

I think it is very possible that Cox did not hear a scream because she kept nodding off while laid on the bed at least periodically. She did after all live in the last house at the top end of the court, furthest away from the action.

It is possible, so here should be an element of doubt.

Cox's evidence was that she did not sleep all night. Of course her evidence could be wrong, as could be the evidence of any witness, but that's her evidence.

When you say "there should be an element of doubt" I must point out that I have been accepting all along that there was some kind of cry of murder but I have been pointing people's attention to the evidence of Prater that such a cry was a common occurrence, therefore I have actually been disregarding the evidence of Cox.

However, Pierre wants to say that Prater was lying about such a cry being a common occurrence. My response is that if she was lying in her evidence then we can't be sure that she even heard a cry. This in turn means that the evidence of Lewis is uncorroborated and we have a situation of Lewis v Cox so that the very existence of the cry is thrown into doubt.

[David Orsam]

But isn't that speculation Dave, a witness is only supposed to state facts.

The law of evidence is very complicated but no I don't believe that would be regarded as speculation and I suggest it would be admissible evidence at a criminal trial.

To avoid any prolonged discussion on this point, I provide two examples.

The first is from an 1815 trial at the Old Bailey of two men accused of burglary who were convicted and sentenced to death.

See the evidence here of Samuel Mitchell:

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?path=sessionsPapers%2F18160529.xml

"I staid besides the stable; if any one had gone into the stable while I was there I would have seen them".

Then at a 1908 trial at the Old Bailey of attempted murder against Adolph Jacobs.

See the evidence here of Mary Warner:

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?path=sessionsPapers%2F19080331.xml

"I did not know of any quarrel between my father and Emily. There were no rows that night at all. I would have heard them if there had been."