Chapman’s death.

[DJA]

[Coroner] Were they talking loudly? - They were talking pretty loudly. I overheard him say to her "Will you?" and she replied, "Yes." That is all I heard, and I heard this as I passed. I left them standing there, and I did not look back, so I cannot say where they went to.

Suspect Long overheard a blackmail attempt by Chapman.

Sutton has put a strangle hold on Chapman and dragged her off the street and out the back.

Doesn't sound like a street walker and a John to me.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Now im certain you've lost the plot with a ridiculous statement like this , take a break from this thread herlock, your just being dishonest and deceitful .

To add to the challenge I’ll ask a question that I’ve asked numerous times but you’ve never had the honesty or integrity to provide an answer. You’ve simple ignored it or tried to change the subject. I’ll embolden it and put it in colour in case you might miss it again.

Please tell me why you are so convinced that Phillips was correct when estimating the TOD (given that all of the world’s experts tell us that he could not have made a reliable estimate using the methods that did) and yet, when he was performing the very much simpler task of checking for evidence of Annie being killed elsewhere with the help of the police (as you believe that she was) he said this:

[Coroner] In your opinion did she enter the yard alive? - I am positive of it.


This is cherry-picking. Purely and simply.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Still doesn't prove Annie was killed at 5.30am tho does it herlock. Stop trying to make 100% certain long codosch Richardson make Annies t.o.d a certainty. unreliable and contradictory testimony from all 3 .

Without getting too annoyed by your nonsense and dishonesty I’ll give you one challenge in regard to your post Fishy.

Please point to the post or cut and paste the quote where I have said that Annie’s TOD was a 100% certainty. You’ve made a statement which you are claiming to be true. I’m telling you that it’s false. You made the statement so the burden of proof is with you. Where have I said that Annie’s TOD is 100% certain? I said - beyond all reasonable doubt - a statement that I stand by because it’s true.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Please go away.

Adults are talking.

[DJA]

Please go away.

Adults are talking.

[FISHY1118]

ANNIE CHAPMAN WAS MURDERED AT AROUND 5.25/5.30 BEYOND ALL REASONABLE DOUBT APART FROM TO THE BIASED OR THE BLOODY MINDED!!!!!

Now im certain you've lost the plot with a ridiculous statement like this , take a break from this thread herlock, your just being dishonest and deceitful .

[DJA]

Incidentally, does Dr Phillips mention TB specifically in Chapman's case, or is that your diagnosis? As far as I can recall, most of their lungs showed "firm adhesions" which are characteristic of something like pleurisy, but can only recall Phillips mentioning generalities.

"Disease of the lungs was long standing, and there was disease of the membranes of the brain" Meh .... dropsy of the brain.Oops

Pretty sure it was TB.

You missed Page 57.

Pages 75 onward concern cases in London with Mr Bond from 1887 to 1889.

Bloody good read.

[FISHY1118]

Excellent, calm, reasoned post as ever Jeff. Totally wasted on some though.

Still doesn't prove Annie was killed at 5.30am tho does it herlock. Stop trying to make 100% certain long codosch Richardson make Annies t.o.d a certainty. unreliable and contradictory testimony from all 3 .

[Joshua Rogan]

Page 33 mentions ecchymosis,etc (showing Chapman's neck wound was inflicted while alive),swollen tongue and lips due to strangulation ..... 634 pages to go

I'm pretty sure the section by Hebbert on the torso autopsies (from memory, page 86 or so) is quite thorough too, though obviously doesn't cover the brains...

Page 36 ...... "The ordinary dissecting-case is therefore not well adapted for the purpose of an autopsy".

That line has always leapt out at me, too!

Page 37 ..... the brain (first on the list) of things to do.

Quite. But all the major organs and the spinal column should also be examined.
Perhaps all the autopsies on the victims were as thorough as they should be, but only mentioned and organ if it had suffered damage or illness?
Killeen, again, comments on the state of health of most of Martha's organs followed by the number of stab wounds. And most of the PMs comment on the victims' lungs.

Incidentally, does Dr Phillips mention TB specifically in Chapman's case, or is that your diagnosis? As far as I can recall, most of their lungs showed "firm adhesions" which are characteristic of something like pleurisy, but can only recall Phillips mentioning generalities.

[DJA]

Page 33 mentions ecchymosis,etc (showing Chapman's neck wound was inflicted while alive),swollen tongue and lips due to strangulation ..... 634 pages to go

Page 36 ...... "The ordinary dissecting-case is therefore not well adapted for the purpose of an autopsy".

Page 37 ..... the brain (first on the list) of things to do.

Page 57 ..... Government Regulations,basically informs that the above are largely NOT done.

[Joshua Rogan]

Well, it was and it wasn’t. It’s an exacting procedure with often no fruit for a ton of effort. So some coroners even today tend not to bother unless there is some other indication of head injury, such as palpable cracks in the skull, penetrating injury, or swelling. It certainly was not a procedure regularly done on essentially the homeless. But they really should have in these instances. Because all of these women have injuries consistent with a blow to the face or side of the head. And I never thought about what that meant until I had my own brain injury two years ago. Annie Chapman’s brain is consistent with a closed head injury. Yes, some of her brain condition is due to disease, but dark blood, fluid, the texture, classic closed head injury. Perhaps even a concussion, but with no injury to the skull. And having the other brains described as thoroughly as Chapman’s would have been useful. Though with little knowledge of brain injury aside from injury from insult, I’m not confident of what their conclusions would have been.

Dr Killeen appears to have carried out a brain biopsy on Matha Tabram, from the limited details in ELA 15 Aug;

"He had since made a post mortem examination, and on opening the head found there was an effusion of blood between the scalp and the bone. The brain was pale but healthy."

Possibly prompted by external signs of trauma on the scalp, or, perhaps like Dr Phillips, maybe he was a stickler for doing things by the book?

[Joshua Rogan]

It's certainly standard procedure for post mortems today: https://www.rcpath.org/

"A System of Legal Medicine" published on 1894 contains a section on PM procedures, so it was then too.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Herlock, there is no point in arguing. They're not listening.

You’re right Paul. Tying to apply reason and logic to the assessment of evidence is becoming akin to trying to teach a goldfish to tell the time. It’s a sad state of affairs when posters refuse to be objective especially when, in some cases, its because they need an earlier TOD to bolster a theory. It’s similar to the reaction that occurred on the Druitt thread when some posters reach a point of apoplexy purely because we suggested that Macnaghten cannot be dismissed and that consequently Druitt is at least worthy of consideration. And now we here were faced with the bizarre spectacle of someone accepting that Phillips TOD was unreliable but still insisting on favouring it over three witnesses. Have you ever heard anything like it? I bet you never thought that you’d be debating thinking like this when you set out in the field?

[John G]

Great link John. Thanks.

The various Guidelines on autopsy practice pdfs are interesting reads.

No problem. For some reason the specific page that I found didn't copy- through. However, it can be found by searching, " What Happens During a Post Mortem."

The relevant information is:

" A long incision is made down the front of the body to enable the internal organs to be removed and examined. A single incision accross the top of the head allows the top of the skull to ne removed so that the brain can be examined."

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi,

I think it should be noted that Dr. Phillips evidence is not being dismissed en mass, nobody is suggesting, for example, that his descriptions of Annie's injuries, or how her body was positioned at the crime scene, etc should be dismissed simply because one bit of his testimony is problematic. His estimation of the ToD, because it was based upon feeling the surface of her body rather than based upon actual core body temperature readings, is being dismissed because he made that estimation using a procedure that is known to be inaccurate. I suppose if he found her still warm to the touch that would be more informative simply because the cooling of the body surface will take some time, and under the conditions she was found, not very much time (which is why once she doesn't feel warm to him anymore it doesn't give any useful information; let's say it would take X amount of time for exposed skin to feel cold, then once it does, all you can say is that the ToD is X or more, and if X was 45 minutes, and he doesn't examine her until 1, or 2 hours, or 3, etc, all he could do was say "well, she's cold, so X or more", but if she's still warm he could say "withing 45 minutes". That would be why Eddowes ToD could be relatively accurate because she was probably killed quite soon before she was examined, so she was still warm to the touch (Brown notes the body was quite warm to the touch). The difference in the rate of cooling between the two cases, or the difference in the perceived warmth of the bodies, may have to do with differences in the amount of clothing the two victims were wearing, the amount of exposed skin, where on the body was felt to determine body warmth (and don't forget, Phillips does report feeling some heat under the intestines as well, so she's not cold throughout). I'm not saying that determining ToD by touch is accurate here, only that bodies that are outside and exposed cool rapidly, so if they haven't cooled to the touch then they can't have been there for long, but if they have cooled, that just means it's cold outside and we probably can't say much of anything - it's not the type of information that works "both ways", where warm can tell you not here long and cold tells you the opposite, rather it's more "warm can tell you not here long, but cold tells you all bets are off". I'm not even sure what I've suggested there is even reliable as the time for X is probably also so variable that it could be just as misleading. Some have argued that the ToD estimations by touch for Eddowes was accurate, but again, that was based upon feeling warmth, in Chapman's case it was upon perceive cold, and if only the former has a chance to be accurate, and the latter is widely inaccurate, there's your explanation for why the results differ. Again, I want to make it absolutely unambiguous, I don't know if feeling warmth is at all reliable, but I can imagine why it might be, and how at the same time, feeling cold is utterly useless. But if warmth is accurate, and Phillips did feel heat under the intestines, that that to me suggests his data points more towards earlier than later.

Anyway, for all the reasons that have been repeated, the ToD he gives based upon surface body perceived coldness cannot be considered as reliable and must be set aside. But the rest of his evidence, however, remains open for consideration, we don't throw it all out just because one bit is known to be unreliable.

And we shouldn't do that with the witness testimony either. We know there must be some errors associated with it, particularly the times given by Long and Cadosh. But really, reconciling that difference in time, which is basically in the order of minutes, should hardly be such a source of contention. There are all sorts of reasons why reports of the time have error with them. I've tended to lean towards Long misremembering the chime she heard (a simple memory error; note, I'm not saying she misheard it at the time, only she misremembered what she heard when she later thought back to what happened and what she saw, etc). Herlock has tended to suggest that Cadosh may be the one that was out, which is also possible, though in my view his morning routines of getting ready to go to work make me think he was probably more specifically aware of time as he was going about his routines than Long would have been as she went to the market. But that's a difference of opinion, if Cadosh is out by 15 minutes, or as Herlock has also suggested, if both Long and Cadosh are out by 7 or 8 minutes, there really is no conflict in their testimony. All that's been done is one aspect of their evidence is being questioned without throwing all of it out.

It's also partly why I'm now trying to work out if we can determine at what point Annie may have reached full rigor (or at least determine the times at which she hadn't yet reached full rigor). While the analysis I've done is highly tentative, and estimating ToD is crude, there are times that are more consistent with the witnesses than with Dr. Phillips, and vice versa. If we can determine either when she did enter full rigor, or at least know the last time she was not in full rigor, that latter time has the possibility of bringing Dr. Phillips evidence in line with the witnesses (in that it would be more consistent with 5:30ish than with 4:30ish). It would be satisfying to know that all of the evidence that is not known to be erroneous fits together in a consistent, even if tentative, way.

- Jeff

Excellent, calm, reasoned post as ever Jeff. Totally wasted on some though.