Chapman’s death.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Bummer.

[Fisherman]

Just found this extremely detailed article on individual differences in body temperature: https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5468 Only had chance to skim through it, however, the range was between 35.3 and 37.7 degrees centigrade (95.4 to 99.86 degrees Fahrenheit.) Mean average was 36.6 degrees centigrade ( 97.88 Fahrenheit) This means a difference of 2.48 degrees Fahrenheit between the lowest and average temperatures, equating to an adjustment of over 1.5 hours in a time of death estimate (assuming a 1.5 degree per hour drop in body temperature, which can be influenced, up or downwards, by many factors: see my earlier posts.

I would note that an individual's body temperature is not constant throughout the day. Thus, a "normal" body temperature of 98.6 degrees, may be as low as 97 degrees early in the morning, or a high of 99 degrees in the evening. See: http://www.medguidance.com/thread/No...mperature.html

I believe around 4:00am is when body temperature is at its lowest, so if 97 degrees at that time, this is 1.6 degrees below average, the equivalent of one hour in our post mortem time adjustment (assuming a 1.5 degree drop per hour, variable depending on numerous factors.)

The reason why body temperature is at its Lowes at around 4 AM is in all probability that we normally are asleep at that time, John. The deepest sleep would be around that time, and so we would spen a minimum of energy. When we sleep, no energy process is underway, the way it is when we are awake and using our bodies. The temperature will grow higher the more we move, and if we, say, run, the body has hard work cooling off.

If this is the underlying reason (and I believe it is), then we must understand that Chapman was not sleeping at night; sh e was walking the streets looking for business. And accordingly, she would be close to normal temperature at that stage.

As for variances in temperature, yes, Chapman may have been warmer than anybody else. Then again, that was perhaps not the inference made here?

Of course, there must be learoom for people having various temperatures within their bodies. But no-one - and I men no-one - will drop from that temperature to feeling cold to the touch in an hour!

[Fisherman]

Hi Fisherman. All models for estimating TOD based on temperature of the body are considered unreliable by the Royal College of Pathologists in the UK as well as the UK regulator for forensic pathologists. This was codified into guidance for all forensic pathologists in 2018. They provide their reasons in their guidance, which you can read if you wish by following my link in post 672.

Also, even if we disagree with the Royal College (who are made up of the majority of pathologists in the UK) and the UK regulator on this point, Phillips did not use a sophisticated temperature based model for estimating TOD - he simply said she felt cold and so died at least two hours ago. Not compelling even on its own terms.

Now, the fact that I (and others) find it hard to argue against the professional body for forensic scientists and therefore find we can place no reliance on Phillip's estimate for TOD does not mean we know the TOD. If we find the witness statements combine to be compelling, we would come to an estimate of around 5.30am, if not, we are no closer to knowing what time she was murdered.

All models for estimating TOD based on body temperature ARE unreliable, etenguy! That is absolutely true, and I would not say anything else. There is no way that we can hope that any of these models can point out a TOD with exactitude.

However, this is the exact reason they methods are only used as guidelines pointing out SPACES OF TIME, within which something will be placed. For example, Phillips was not able to say when Chapman died, and he did not claim that he could do so. He basically said that it could have been as little as two hours before his examination. It could also have been three hours before. Or four hours before.

He knew quite well that the methods at hand were unreliable. He knew it far better than you and I do, on account of his vast experience. He knew that all he could do was to look at the parameters; temperature, body weight, body clothing, exposure, type of ground the victim lay on and so on, and from that make his best GUESS, and that guess landed him somewhere around three or four hours, but just because he knew that the method is unreliable, he qualified himself by saying that it could be that it was as little as two hours only.

It could however NOT be LESS than two hours, let alone one hour only. That would not be in accordance with the laws of physics, and when he said maximum two hours, that was NOT in any way, shape or form unreliable. It was based on his knowledge that it takes many hours for a body to grow cold, and that is not something that can be altered. It will work in all cases and with all people.

This is the whole problem and it has been the whole problem throughout the discussion we have been having: The overall uncertainty that must always be there when we try to find a TOD using algor mortis has been transferred by those who want Chapman to have died at 5.30 to an area of the algor mortis field where no uncertainty at all exists.

It is uncertain whether a vaguely warm body has been dead for two or three hours.

But it is not in any way uncertain to say that a body that is cold to the touch has been dead for many hours!

As I said before, the first example is one where we are asked to say whether a gray color contains more black or white paint.

The second example is trying to tell black from white. And that IS easy.

There is therefore no problem involved here, and frankly there never WAS. The Yard quickly understood that, but since Baxter had misinformed the press about Phillips´ qualification, there has ever since been a faulty assumption that Phillips may have been wrong. He actually cannot have been wrong. There is not a chance that he was wrong.

If he had been asked "At what exact time did Chapman die?" he would have been at a colossal risk to get things wrong, and the more exact a time he presented, the more he would be claiming to do things no medico can do.

But he COULD tell us which factors we were dealing with, what we had to go on when TRYING to understand what had happened, and one of this factors was that Chapmans body was cold to the touch. And we only grow cold to the touch after 4-6 hours! Now, Phillips knew that there was some remaining heat inside the abdominal cavity (a heat he would NOT have detected if she had not been cut open), and he was willing to accept that it had been cold at the site. And nobody knew what kind of influence it would have if a body was cut open like in a butchers shop, having bled out completely. To Phillips, this meant that he was willing to propose that she had cooled off very much quicker than normally, and so he offered two hours as an extreme.

Had he waited three weeks, he would have gotten an example to extrapolate from: it turned out that cool temperatures and extensive bloodloss did not have much of an influence at all when Eddowes died. What Phillips was unaware of was that there is an initial plateau of between half an hour and an hour after death when the temperature does not drop at all, and so Eddowes was "quite warm" to the touch 45 minutes after having been slain. Similarly, if Chapman had been dead an hour only, she would have been warm too.

There is uncertainty in the methods. But that uncertainty does not come into play here.

If we look at it like an onion, where the outer layers represent uncertainty, Phillips had peeled those players away when he said two hours at the least. It is also obvious from the Eddowes case that he had peeled away more layers than he would actually have needed to.

If we could refrain in the future from speaking about the uncertainty in temperature gauging dead bodies, we will get a sounder debate.

[Fisherman]

I have a great respect for Fisherman. He is extremely knowledgeable about these crimes and has conducted much useful research, especially in relation to the possibility of Lechmere being the Ripper. He usually posts cogent arguments and is happy to enter into passionate debate. I find it unfortunate that he and Herlock (who I also respect greatly for similar reasons) are at such loggerheads in this thread, but that I think is not too surprising given the different views they hold.

However, Fisherman is not infallible, and for him to argue that Phillip's estimate of TOD should be relied upon in the face of great opposition to this by the profession itself seems a pointless argument. While I would, and often do, concede to his superior knowledge on most ripper related threads I have met him on, in this particular case I find the scientific experts more convincing.

Like Henssge? Experts agree that temperature gauging is fraught with uncertainty. I also agree that this is so. But no expert would agree that a body can grow cold to the touch in one hour only. What experts say in THAT case is that it will take 4-6 hours, normally, for a body to grow cold. And by that they mean cold to the touch, because it will take a full day or two before the body really has lost all its warmth.

THAT is where you should listen to the experts! And then explain to me how Chapman managed to grow all cold in an hour or less, when we know that Eddowes followed the exact pattern the experts speak of: we will retain out full temperature for up to an hour after death, depending on a chemical process that oxygenates our blood.
It is a factor, by the way, that was weighed in by Henssge when he developed his method.

And when we factor in what we KNOW about the case and employ the Henssge method, we find that it had Chapman dying around 2.30 (if we use the Celsius scale) or 3.30 (doing it the Fahrenheit way).

Could it have been 3.45? Yes, because there is uncertainty and many factors to weigh in.

Could it have been 5.30? Not a chance in the world, etenguy. No, njet, nej, non, nein.

[Fisherman]

Fish says:


'"You have a problem now - you need to explain how Henssges method can lead to a TOD around 2.30-3.30 for Chapman, when you are sure that it must have been 5.25 at the earliest."


Simple response:


The Henssges method leads to a TOD of 2.30-3.30 to Chapman? Sorry, Fish, I must have missed that one.


But, of course, it's impossible. You can't use the Henssges method without having a rectal temperature reading for Chapman. We don't have one!


So how does the Henssges method cause me any kind of problem? Err...it doesn’t.


But if we wrongly assume that we can guess Chapman's temperature at death as 37.2 deg C and we randomly assume a rectal temperature at 6.30am of 36.2 deg C, that's going to lead to a TOD based on the Henssges method of 5.30am (using your own figures of 9 deg C ambient temperature, weight of 45kg, with an empiric correction factor of 0.75, and not even factoring in that Chapman was suffering from TB and was severely undernourished).


So where does that get us? As Phillips never took the rectal (core) temperature how do we know it wasn't 36.2 deg at 6.30am?


All he felt was the skin temperature. We know that the skin is insulated from the core and will be cold in 10-20 minutes post mortem. So she could easily have felt cold on the surface while retaining most of her core temperature.


I don't seem to have any kind of problem here.

I'm sorry, but we know that she was cold to the touch, and we don't need a rectal thermometer to establish that. In fact, in the first 24 hours after death a rectal thermometer would have registered some remaining warmth. But that would not alter the fact that she was nevertheless cold to the touch. "Cold to the touch" is not equivalent to the body having cooled of completely. This must be understood before we can understand what the process of feeling for warmth is about.

That was not a passage mainly for you, Herlock, but for everybody reading the thread. The misconceptions must not be allowed to play a further role.

Henssge is as far as we are going to get, and that stands.

[Fisherman]

Bummer.

No, not at all. We can use Henssge, because we don't need a rectal thermometer, we need a temperature. And that temperature is easy to establish. She was cold to the touch, and we grow cold to the touch in the span of 4-6 hours after death. After 4 hours, if we use the Fahrenheit scale, we will have had a drop in temperature of 4x1,5 degrees, the equivalent of 4x0,8 degrees Celsius, meaning that we should drop down from 37,2 degrees to 34 degrees Celsius within the body. It is of course possible that we should drop down 6x0,8 degrees instead, taking us down to 32,4 degrees Celsius. But I am allowing for the most forgiving suggestion (which means I am not even opting for the mean value, I am giving away as much as I can to the naysayers).

And with this most forgiving scenario, we STILL get a TOD removed 3 hours in time!

If we were to use the Celsius scale and the maximum of six hours, it would point to her having been dead for perhaps twice that time. So we are looking for something inbetween 3 to 6 hours of death. What is not even remotely in sight is a one hour perspective. We have to shave away between 66,6 and 80 per cent plus to get there.

And why would we try to get there? Its La-La-land. All parameters are already in sync with each other and within the normal range of developments, plus we arrive at a night time murder if we DON´T try to bend and distort the medical evidence.

It very clearly is a no-brainer, and it has been so for 131 years now. It took the Yard all of five minutes to realize it, but look at ripperology. Lagging 131 years behind!

[Herlock Sholmes]

. The misconceptions must not be allowed to play a further role.

Then stop posting them.

[Fisherman]

Then stop posting them.

I'm correcting them. You are posting them. And you still need to explain how a body can grow cold to the touch in one hour or less. Plus I want the source for the example you mentioned earlier, with prussic acid poisoning involved.

[FISHY1118]

Seeings how were getting nowhere when t.o.d is concerned, lets try something new shall we , how about some simple yes or no . 1 Yes or No, it was Annie Chapman that Albert Codosch heard say NO?...... anyone? pisssssssttttt Herlock ? Remembering a yes answer also means its agreed that the time was 5.22 am [ allowing 2 mins at the privy , fair and reasonable ?]

Albert Codosch''On Saturday, Sept. 8, I got up about a quarter past five in the morning, and went into the yard. It was then about twenty minutes past five, I should think. As I returned towards the back door I heard a voice say "No" just as I was going through the door.'' So agreed .... anyone ? yes/no .

4 mins later at 5.26am it was Annie Chapman the Albert Codosch heard fall against the fence AlbertCodosch'' I went indoors, but returned to the yard about three or four minutes afterwards. While coming back I heard a sort of a fall against the fence which divides my yard from that of 29. It seemed as if something touched the fence suddenly''. YES/NO. ?

So we have 4 mins between the ''NO'' and the ''NOISE'' of something hitting the fence yes /no ?. ill answer for you Herlock . hmmmmm yes fishy . YES that sounds fair and reasonable.

Lets see then , the killer and Chapman enter 29 Handbury st at 5.20, she thinking his a willing client and ready for the act , he intent on one thing, murder and mutilation . Why/what then did Chapman say NO for ? Surely its was the sudden lunge forward where the killer puts his hands around her neck to start strangling her rendering her unconscious causing death .[ Dr Phillips official cause of death ] OR did she have her back to him where he grabs her from behind and then strangled her from that position?[ unlikely] but either way Chapman is dead inside of 30 to 45 seconds , fair and reasonable ?[ likely] agree/ disagree ? Anyone.

IF CODOSCH RETURNED 4 MINS AFTER HEARING THE ''NO'', AND UPON RETURNING A SECOND TIME [2 MORE MINS] THAT MEANS THE KILLER WAS EITHER HOLDING CHAPMAN UPRIGHT FOR 5 MINUTES [ HIGHLY UNLIKELY, VERGING ON IMPOSSIBLE] OR HER BODY WAS ON THE GROUND 1 METER FROM THE FENCE, 5 MINS BEFORE CODOSCH HEARD THE NOISE HITTING THE FENCE . ANNIE CHAPMAN COULD NOT HAVE BEEN THE NOISE CODOSCH HEARD HITTING THE FENCE AT 5.28 IF SHE SAID NO AT 5.22

The Coroner: We will postpone that for the present. You can give your opinion as to how the death was caused.
Witness: From these appearances I am of opinion that the breathing was interfered with previous to death, and that death arose from syncope, or failure of the heart's action,NEARLY ALL in consequence of the loss of blood caused by the severance of the throat.

Lets not forget, nearly all so called Ripperologist believe that it was Annie Chapman that said ''NO'' and that it was her body falling against the fence that Codosch heard ,I respectfully disagree

[Fisherman]

The "No!" and the other elements involved in the observations by Long/Cadosh have always seemed very theatrical to me. We must keep in mind that the victorian concept of what it looked like when a person was killed would have come from the theaters. There were no movies around, and so the picture of unlawful death that prevailed would have been the one where people grabbed their own throat with both hands, crying out "I'm dying!", only to then slump down onto the floorboards of the theatre.

The inclusions we have are all of that quality - they seem tailormade to give away all the elements needed to speak of a prostitution affair (Will you? Yes!), a sudden attack (No!) and then that slumping down to the ground revealing that the curtainfall was imminent, illustrated by the thump against the fence.

If Long and Cadosch had been tasked with producing the exact four words and sound effects needed to illustrate how a victorian would have imagined a murder of a prostitute, they could well have come up with this exact set of inclusions.

And it isn't as if Baxter et al would have been better equipped to tell the difference, because they very likely never saw any murder committed either. and murder is normally a much more gruesome affair than the picture delivered by victorian theaters. People more often than not take a lot of time to kill, they put up a fight (that will be VERY audible), they refuse to die because somebody squeezes their necks for ten seconds and they will normally not die while lying on the ground, reciting text from Victorian scripts "Here I lie dying, and my beloved is far, far away!", sort of.

I am not saying that a murder victim cannot say "No!", nor that I is impossible for a punter and a prostitute to exchange the words "Will you?" and "Yes". And I am not saying that a thumping sound cannot have come from a murder victim falling against a fence.

But I am saying that these four words and that thump were all awfully convenient and totally in sync with how a victorian playwright would be likely to depict things. Which is why I tend to favour a wish for those fifteen minutes of fame over simple mistakes.

And I find it interesting that this has seemingly not been picked up on before.

[FISHY1118]

Next , the cutting of the throat....

[Fisherman]

Next , the cutting of the throat....

Sort of, yes: "There was this slitting sound, as if somebody cut a pork loin in two with a razor..."

[Herlock Sholmes]

So we have 4 mins between the ''NO'' and the ''NOISE'' of something hitting the fence yes /no ?. ill answer for you Herlock . hmmmmm yes fishy . YES that sounds fair and reasonable.

Lets see then , the killer and Chapman enter 29 Handbury st at 5.20, she thinking his a willing client and ready for the act , he intent on one thing, murder and mutilation . Why/what then did Chapman say NO for ? Surely its was the sudden lunge forward where the killer puts his hands around her neck to start strangling her rendering her unconscious causing death .[ Dr Phillips official cause of death ] OR did she have her back to him where he grabs her from behind and then strangled her from that position?[ unlikely] but either way Chapman is dead inside of 30 to 45 seconds , fair and reasonable ?[ likely] agree/ disagree ? Anyone.

IF CODOSCH RETURNED 4 MINS AFTER HEARING THE ''NO'', AND UPON RETURNING A SECOND TIME [2 MORE MINS] THAT MEANS THE KILLER WAS EITHER HOLDING CHAPMAN UPRIGHT FOR 5 MINUTES [ HIGHLY UNLIKELY, VERGING ON IMPOSSIBLE] OR HER BODY WAS ON THE GROUND 1 METER FROM THE FENCE, 5 MINS BEFORE CODOSCH HEARD THE NOISE HITTING THE FENCE . ANNIE CHAPMAN COULD NOT HAVE BEEN THE NOISE CODOSCH HEARD HITTING THE FENCE AT 5.28 IF SHE SAID NO AT 5.22

The Coroner: We will postpone that for the present. You can give your opinion as to how the death was caused.
Witness: From these appearances I am of opinion that the breathing was interfered with previous to death, and that death arose from syncope, or failure of the heart's action,NEARLY ALL in consequence of the loss of blood caused by the severance of the throat.

Lets not forget, nearly all so called Ripperologist believe that it was Annie Chapman that said ''NO'' and that it was her body falling against the fence that Codosch heard ,I respectfully disagree

Now let’s add some adult thinking shall we?

IF CODOSCH RETURNED 4 MINS AFTER HEARING THE ''NO'', AND UPON RETURNING A SECOND TIME [2 MORE MINS] THAT MEANS THE KILLER WAS EITHER HOLDING CHAPMAN UPRIGHT FOR 5 MINUTES [ HIGHLY UNLIKELY, VERGING ON IMPOSSIBLE] OR HER BODY WAS ON THE GROUND 1 METER FROM THE FENCE, 5 MINS BEFORE CODOSCH HEARD THE NOISE HITTING THE FENCE . ANNIE CHAPMAN COULD NOT HAVE BEEN THE NOISE CODOSCH HEARD HITTING THE FENCE AT 5.28 IF SHE SAID NO AT 5.22

You really do need to do better than this Fishy. It’s nonsense even by your own standards. You are assumuning that the noise must have been Annie falling against the fence. The ‘no’ was likely the point at which the killer made the attack. The noise of something brushing against the fence could easily have been the killer but after Annie was dead. I.e. performing the mutilations. He could have brushed a shoulder or an arm against the fence. He might simply have been changing positions to get better access to do what he intended.

This is very simply stuff Fishy.

What we also know is that, if Phillips was correct (and he obviously wasn’t) then there was already a mutilated corpse in the yard so the noise could not have been made by a human being. Unless he was blind of course. Nothing else happened in that yard that we are aware of at that time.

And so it’s overwhelmingly likely that Cadosch heard the killer and probably Annie too.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Sort of, yes: "There was this slitting sound, as if somebody cut a pork loin in two with a razor..."

Yes the deafening noise of a sharp noise slicing through flesh. They’d have heard it streets away!

What next.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Next , the cutting of the throat....

Do you actually believe that Phillips was correct in everything Fishy?