Chapman’s death.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I dont believe i did state that as a fact herlock , i was trying, and will show in my opinion the killer was not on Annie left hand side when he cut her throat while she was on the ground .

But you somehow managed tho balls that up as usual

You said:

.

The killer was indeed on the right side of Chapman when he cut her throat, not her left where he could have kicked the fence so codosch could hear him.

You can’t even remember your own dishonesty.

Any apology?

Thought not

[Michael W Richards]

I'm not convinced that Stride was a Ripper victim. There's no evidence that Stride was given the cachous by anyone.

I believe the fact that she doesn't have the money she made that afternoon on her, and that she hadn't been drinking that night, and that she had a new flower arrangement on her jacket and cashous in her hand, is indication that she bought those herself. And without knowing where she would stay that night? I don't think so. I think she knew where she would stay, but not how long she would stay there. She was there meeting a date. Or a cleaning job client...she was at work "among the Jews".

[FISHY1118]

Nichols , Chapman , Stride , Eddowes and Kelly all had their throats cut from left to right, if this is correct would there be any argument if one was to declare that the killer must have been right handed. ?

[FISHY1118]

Has it been proven that she was strangled? I’m not saying that she wasn’t of course but I wasn’t aware that this was a proven fact.

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, in consequence of the loss of blood caused by the severance of the throat.

so lets agree at least she was rendered unconscious and placed on the ground before her throat was cut ?

If the “no” came from Annie then I’d tend toward the fact that she said it before she died, yes.

Again, so that being the case then the noise that codosch heard hit the fence, came six minutes ''after'' she was killed. i conclude therefor it was not Annie Chapmans dead body that hit the fence as she was dead on the ground long before codosch heard the noise, and to suggest that any part of her body somehow was pushed, moved, or any other way she could have hit the fence after death is just in the realms of impossibility.

Errata is suggesting that the killer knelt above Annie’s head to do the mutilations. Unlike you Errata isn’t claiming to be psychic. He/she is suggesting a possibility.

Unlike him i suggested that the killer cut Annie Chapman throat while he was on her right hand side and not her left, between her and the fence. i dont recall saying anything about the mutilation ........... yet.

[JeffHamm]

So, here we go again!

True, Jeff: I could not determine whether you are alive or dead by feeling your hands for warmth after you have had them sunk into icy and hot water, respectively. But the thing is, that was never the aim of Phillips examination, was it? He knew the moment he saw Chapman that she was dead - and so we may conclude that he did not feel Chapman for temperature in order to establish whether life was extinct or not.

So why did he do it? Well, as I believe you well know, he did it because he wanted to establish whether she had been dead for a long or a short time.

Now, if Chapman had had HER hands sunk into two buckets of water, one of them icy and the other hot, and if Phillips subsequently felt them for warmth, he would know that he had been pranked. People do not have one extremely warm and one extremely cold side (in spite of what some may think...).
But let´s presume that he only felt one of the hands, and chose the cold one. In such a case, he would say that he had been pranked - because the body will not take on a temperature that is COLDER than the ambient temperature.
But what if he touched the hot hand? Well, the same thing would apply: he would know that he had been pranked.

If we are less dramatic and offer one warm hand and one that is of ambient temperature, then Phillips would go either "has not been dead for any longer time" or "has been dead for hours" - and then he would add that it is perilous to go by hand temperature only, since the hands are extremities that are likely to be cold with many people. That is why he would have felt a body in numerous spots. And in Chapmans case, he actually did not settle for "skin temperature" only - he felt the inside of the abdominal cavity too, finding a small amount of warmth there.

In neither case, regardless if he dealt with hands dipped in buckets of varying temperature or with a corpse that had only been subjected to the surrounding elements, would he be able to say "She died at around XX o clock" other than as a crude estimation, and he would be aware that he was at risk to miss out on many parameters. So all he could do was to offer a crude guess at the time, and in Chapmans case, he took care not to name any time at all. He did not say "she will have died at XX o clock", but instead he concluded that since she was cold, she would have been dead for some substantial time, absolutely not less than two hours, and in all probability significantly longer than that.

If the body had been warm to the touch, he would not have offered this estimation. So to make him wrong, we need one of two things to have happened:

1. Phillips was unable to tell cold from warm - but we will have problems promoting that idea, since we know that he was able to detect a smallish warmth under the intestines in the abdominal cavity. We could of course offer the suggestion that she was blistering hot there and that the rest of the body was all warm and that Phillips failed to recognize that, but I cannot take such a suggestion seriously. What Phillips could NOT say was whether the body was 32,9 or 33,3 degrees Celsius, but he COULD rule out that it was the 36-37 degrees, roughly, that is SHOULD have been if Chapman was an hour dead only.

2. The body grew five degrees or so colder in an hour only. The problem is that bodies do not grow that cold in that period of time.

We may of course offer the usual freak examples of people who have differed wildly from the ordinary but I propose that Chapman must be looked upon as a normal person until we have proof of anything else. And that goes for the rigor too, that is only logical if combined with a TOD hours away.

I understand if my post comes as a bucket of cold water poured over you. If you can find a bucket of hot water to follow it up with, you should be fine.

Hi Fisherman,

He wanted to know if she was alive or dead for a long time. Yes, I agree he wanted to know that. But as he took none of the necessary temperature readings to answer this question based on body temperature, he cannot form an informed opinion - he does not have the necessary information. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. You are incorrect to assert that his touching the body means anything of evidential value.

- Jeff

[Fisherman]

Was Dr Phillips' estimated TOD a scientific fact? No.

He never offered any TOD, actually. He said that the body was all cold but for that little area under the intestines, and he knew that this was not even nearly compatible with a recently dead body.

Was there enough margin for error? Yes.

That depends. Actually, an error as such could only depend on Phillips getting the temperature wrong, and since he allowed for a time window, he acknowledged that setting an exact TOD would be overegging the pudding.
If he HAD offered a set TOD, there would of course be a margin for error, we all know that and he knew it too. The question is instead "Could he have erred so very much as he must have done if Chapman died at 5.30 or later?" I would say no, he could not have erred that much, leastways it is unlikely in the total extreme.

Do several witnesses contradict the TOD? Yes.

Otherwise, we would not be having this discussion, Harry. Because Phillips verdict is consistent throughout - a cold body is a body that has been dead for numerous hours, it normally takes at least two hours and more likely three-four hours to develop onsetting rigor in cold conditions. And the murder would, if Phillips was right, be consistent with the other ones - all dark time killings. The one reason that some are contemplating Chapman as a medically unique case is the witnesses.

Just choose your poison and get on with your lives. This thread is going nowhere.

Yes, it is, actually - it has at long last opened up for a discussion that stale old ripperology has considered ruled out until Wolf Vanderlinden changed it all. Otherwise, I am fine with people making different choices, as long as the copunterpart does not make stupid, faulty and generally speaking outrageous claims about the reason for that choice.

[Harry D]

Was Dr Phillips' estimated TOD a scientific fact? No.

Was there enough margin for error? Yes.

Do several witnesses contradict the TOD? Yes.

Just choose your poison and get on with your lives. This thread is going nowhere.

[Fisherman]

Firstly, I’ve never claimed superior knowledge to anyone.

Actually, you have - you claim that you have the worlds whole expertise on your side. If that is not claiming to know better, I don´t know what is. But fair enough - it is a sign of health if you realize that you may sometimes lag behind. Once you claim that a doctor needs to feel both sides of a body for warmth before he can offer a view you lay the bar. At knee-cap height.

Secondly, I’ve never claimed to be admirable.

And actually, I never said you did. I said that sometimes people delusionally mistake themselves for being admirable. And yes, I do suspect you may be making that mistake, but I never said so in my former post.

Thirdly, I have long experience of ‘The Fish Method’ which is the tactic that you always use to constantly prtray yourself as the innocent victim of people who just aren’t clever enough to understand you.

It IS anything but uplifting to have ignorant people telling you that you are wrong. You may be unaware of the feeling, though. And of course, all that shite about me thinking I am a "victim" of anything amounts to nothing but a further mistake on your behalf. It´s repetitious and boring, just like the gabbing about how I only say what I say to support Lechmere as a suspect. In YOUR rather smallish and confused world, standing over a victim with a smoking gun in hand should not be taken as a sign of guilt if the one pointing to it has expressed suspicions against the gunholder before.
It is anti-intellectualism in it´s absolute prime - the kind of arguments I warned my children against in their pre-school days. Out here, and in your hands, it is just as blunt and embarrasing a tool.

Fourthly, my reasoning tends to be, in part, like this. If an expert’s says something like “Rigor mortis And Mortis are unsafe methods and should not be used to estimate time of death” and tend to deduce that they mean “Rigor Mortis And Algor Mortis are unsafe methods and should not be used to estimate time of death.” Strange I know.

The only strange thing is when we extend it into areas where it does not apply. I have a zillion times said that rigor and algor are inexact methods that cannot be relied upon to establish TOD in as high a degree as when using a thermometer. Then again a thermometer is not safe in that department either - the only safe way to establish the TOD is to be present and supervising the person involved as he or she dies.
The problem arises when you choose to use this insight to extrapolate it into a certainty that regardless if a corpse is cold or warm to the touch, this information is worthless to us; a cold body can be warm on the inside and a warm body can be cold inside, that is what you seem to propagate for.

What you need from all of those experts that you think have taken you under their wings, is a unanimous declaration that it is just as likely that an experienced doctor who closely examines a corpse (closely enough to feel inside the abdominal cavity) and says that the body is all cold but for a smallish area within the abdomen will be wrong as it is that he will be right. What you need from your experts is a declaration that Annie Chapmans lack of warmth and her onsetting rigor are likely to be exponents of a woman who has been dead for an hour only, or even less. THAT is what you need, and not more assertations that palpating for temperature by hand is less safe than using a thermometer. Because so far, that is all you have achieved. Oh, and of course, you have also achieved claiming that a paper that unequivocally lays down that people - especially proffesional ones - are able to tell subtle temperature differences by feeling for warmth with their hands is, what was it, "dross"? Knee-cap height, anyone?

And fifthly, on the subject of bias, it’s the only thing that I can come up with to account for the extraordinary distortions misinterpretations of facts and the ‘Lewis Carroll’ type logic that we see on here. If this thread has been derailed it’s not by me. It’s by you and, to a much greater extent, Fishy and The Baron. It’s a little sad Fish that they are the people that agree with you.

Once again you play that "I-am-supported-by-oh-so-many-more clever-people-than-you-are"-card. That is - once again - pityful. Wolf Vanderlinden is a poster I hold much, much higher in regard than I do you. I believe he is better read up, intellectually much more flexible than you, better equipped to deduct than you, better worded than you and much less likely to be wrong than you.
Does that mean that I rant about how my father can beat yours in armwrestling?
No. I have my OWN reasoning, and it is very well underbuilt and so I don´t need anybody to dry my tears and chant my name.
I make battle with what I have. I suggest that you do so too, because in the end, our own respective capacities and knowledge is all we have.
Or don´t have.

I suggest you begin by explaining to all of us how I would have derailed the thread. It is named "Chapmans death", and you are welcome to exemplify how I would not have kept to that topic in my posts. Once you have failed in that department, we can perhaps move on without any more groundless accusations like that.

You have this day to explain it. Afterwards, I will once again flee in desperation and intimidation after having been thrashed by you. So hasten to shine, Herlock, time is running out!!

[John G]

What happened to the theory that the cachous were a cryptic clue to the police that the killer was being "cautious"?

Oh yeah, I remember that. I think it was one of Pierre's cryptic classics!

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

What happened to the theory that the cachous were a cryptic clue to the police that the killer was being "cautious"?

[Herlock Sholmes]

I wish there was a usual trick of me running away becasue I get so intimidated by all of your superior knowledge and wisdom, Herlock - it would be a scenario that comprised only facts and people who could not deal with them. And that would be a lot better than the true picture: people not being able to understand the facts, and peddling material for something it never was, thereafter proudly claiming that they have the worlds whole expertise supporting themselves.

In the former case we would have a knowledgeable poster telling dimwits off.

In the latter, we would have a delusional person thinking HE is that admirable person from the first scenario.

I have never run away from any discussion out here. I have - occasionally - grown tired of the complete lack of quality coupled with an overdimensioned ego that surfaces here.

A typical exponent for the kind of arguments such posters make is when they start to speak of how they have what they perceive as more and better support for their takes on things. Sadly, that is not what estabishes what is more or less likely to be true. As I have pointed out before, taking a look at Galilei is a useful exercise before we venture into "all of these people think I am very clever"-country.

If we want to look for an even more stupid line of reasoning, that would be if somebody takes it upon himself to claim that his opponent only reasons the way he or she does on account of a wish to fit the facts to a suspect. That kind of reasoning robs anybody with a suspect of his right to be on equal footing with those who have not. And if we are dealing with somebody who has a suspect and a good grasp of the case and somebody else who have no suspect but who is ignorant about just about anything, that is a recipe for disaster.

Come to think of it, this is the exact way you reason.

Now, that was just about all I felt I wanted to say for now - I am reading up on a number of things relating to the discussion out here, and I find it a lot more productive not to waste too much of my time telling you that you are as wrong as always.

You can of course once again try to use it to claim that I am fleeing from an enemy that I find too much to tangle with. You may even believe that to be the truth, as far as I understand. Regardless of which, bye for now.

Firstly, I’ve never claimed superior knowledge to anyone.

Secondly, I’ve never claimed to be admirable.

Thirdly, I have long experience of ‘The Fish Method’ which is the tactic that you always use to constantly prtray yourself as the innocent victim of people who just aren’t clever enough to understand you.

Fourthly, my reasoning tends to be, in part, like this. If an expert’s says something like “Rigor mortis And Mortis are unsafe methods and should not be used to estimate time of death” and tend to deduce that they mean “Rigor Mortis And Algor Mortis are unsafe methods and should not be used to estimate time of death.” Strange I know.

And fifthly, on the subject of bias, it’s the only thing that I can come up with to account for the extraordinary distortions misinterpretations of facts and the ‘Lewis Carroll’ type logic that we see on here. If this thread has been derailed it’s not by me. It’s by you and, to a much greater extent, Fishy and The Baron. It’s a little sad Fish that they are the people that agree with you.

[John G]

Do you think that's why Jack gave her the cachous?

I'm not convinced that Stride was a Ripper victim. There's no evidence that Stride was given the cachous by anyone.

[Fisherman]

I’ll respond to your nonsense later when I have more time.

What you are doing is your usual trick. One that you’ve done on many a Lechmere thread. You run away when your argument have gotten so riddled with desperation that they have become embarrassing.

You stand alone (unless you count Fishy, The Baron and PS) whistling in the dark. Every single point that you’ve made has been shredded and kicked into the long grass. You disappeared and came back with your irrelevant dross about palpating which has been shredded too.

Ripperology has many faults of course but the biggest one is bias due to theories and suspects. And, as I’ve pointed out before, it’s hardly a coincidence that you, Fishy and PS all require an earlier TOD. The rest of us on this thread will maintain an unbiased, evidence led approach.

I wish there was a usual trick of me running away becasue I get so intimidated by all of your superior knowledge and wisdom, Herlock - it would be a scenario that comprised only facts and people who could not deal with them. And that would be a lot better than the true picture: people not being able to understand the facts, and peddling material for something it never was, thereafter proudly claiming that they have the worlds whole expertise supporting themselves.

In the former case we would have a knowledgeable poster telling dimwits off.

In the latter, we would have a delusional person thinking HE is that admirable person from the first scenario.

I have never run away from any discussion out here. I have - occasionally - grown tired of the complete lack of quality coupled with an overdimensioned ego that surfaces here.

A typical exponent for the kind of arguments such posters make is when they start to speak of how they have what they perceive as more and better support for their takes on things. Sadly, that is not what estabishes what is more or less likely to be true. As I have pointed out before, taking a look at Galilei is a useful exercise before we venture into "all of these people think I am very clever"-country.

If we want to look for an even more stupid line of reasoning, that would be if somebody takes it upon himself to claim that his opponent only reasons the way he or she does on account of a wish to fit the facts to a suspect. That kind of reasoning robs anybody with a suspect of his right to be on equal footing with those who have not. And if we are dealing with somebody who has a suspect and a good grasp of the case and somebody else who have no suspect but who is ignorant about just about anything, that is a recipe for disaster.

Come to think of it, this is the exact way you reason.

Now, that was just about all I felt I wanted to say for now - I am reading up on a number of things relating to the discussion out here, and I find it a lot more productive not to waste too much of my time telling you that you are as wrong as always.

You can of course once again try to use it to claim that I am fleeing from an enemy that I find too much to tangle with. You may even believe that to be the truth, as far as I understand. Regardless of which, bye for now.

[Fisherman]

ha ha ha! That was very amusing. Ok, let's see if I can get you to understand why Dr. Phillips skin based temperature reading is useless.

I plunge one of my hands into a hot tub, and the other I put into an icebucket and I leave them there for an hour. At which point, you feel the skin on my hands (using your hand thank you very much). One will feel cold, the other hot. Now, am I alive or dead, or have I just proved I'm Schodinger's cat?

Surely that clarifies the difference between being able to tell the difference in temperatures at different points on the skin, and their relationship to ToD (or even to living/non-living)?

- Jeff

So, here we go again!

True, Jeff: I could not determine whether you are alive or dead by feeling your hands for warmth after you have had them sunk into icy and hot water, respectively. But the thing is, that was never the aim of Phillips examination, was it? He knew the moment he saw Chapman that she was dead - and so we may conclude that he did not feel Chapman for temperature in order to establish whether life was extinct or not.

So why did he do it? Well, as I believe you well know, he did it because he wanted to establish whether she had been dead for a long or a short time.

Now, if Chapman had had HER hands sunk into two buckets of water, one of them icy and the other hot, and if Phillips subsequently felt them for warmth, he would know that he had been pranked. People do not have one extremely warm and one extremely cold side (in spite of what some may think...).
But let´s presume that he only felt one of the hands, and chose the cold one. In such a case, he would say that he had been pranked - because the body will not take on a temperature that is COLDER than the ambient temperature.
But what if he touched the hot hand? Well, the same thing would apply: he would know that he had been pranked.

If we are less dramatic and offer one warm hand and one that is of ambient temperature, then Phillips would go either "has not been dead for any longer time" or "has been dead for hours" - and then he would add that it is perilous to go by hand temperature only, since the hands are extremities that are likely to be cold with many people. That is why he would have felt a body in numerous spots. And in Chapmans case, he actually did not settle for "skin temperature" only - he felt the inside of the abdominal cavity too, finding a small amount of warmth there.

In neither case, regardless if he dealt with hands dipped in buckets of varying temperature or with a corpse that had only been subjected to the surrounding elements, would he be able to say "She died at around XX o clock" other than as a crude estimation, and he would be aware that he was at risk to miss out on many parameters. So all he could do was to offer a crude guess at the time, and in Chapmans case, he took care not to name any time at all. He did not say "she will have died at XX o clock", but instead he concluded that since she was cold, she would have been dead for some substantial time, absolutely not less than two hours, and in all probability significantly longer than that.

If the body had been warm to the touch, he would not have offered this estimation. So to make him wrong, we need one of two things to have happened:

1. Phillips was unable to tell cold from warm - but we will have problems promoting that idea, since we know that he was able to detect a smallish warmth under the intestines in the abdominal cavity. We could of course offer the suggestion that she was blistering hot there and that the rest of the body was all warm and that Phillips failed to recognize that, but I cannot take such a suggestion seriously. What Phillips could NOT say was whether the body was 32,9 or 33,3 degrees Celsius, but he COULD rule out that it was the 36-37 degrees, roughly, that is SHOULD have been if Chapman was an hour dead only.

2. The body grew five degrees or so colder in an hour only. The problem is that bodies do not grow that cold in that period of time.

We may of course offer the usual freak examples of people who have differed wildly from the ordinary but I propose that Chapman must be looked upon as a normal person until we have proof of anything else. And that goes for the rigor too, that is only logical if combined with a TOD hours away.

I understand if my post comes as a bucket of cold water poured over you. If you can find a bucket of hot water to follow it up with, you should be fine.

[JeffHamm]

Hi Errata,

Thanks for that. I've a few comments, which I'll insert below (put the square bracketed tags for /quote and quote in, to turn off/on quotes, respectively):

Okay I've temporarily forgotten how to multiquote, so this will go top to bottom

1: I'm not sure how far bruising would have advanced, given she was exsanguinated moments later. Also if she was strangled after being hit that would affect it too. So I genuinely don't know what that bruising would look like. Her face was swollen, there was an abrasion on the right side, there were bruises of various ages. One was clearly from the fight, the bruise on the temple. But there was bruising on the jaw. Not having seen it... yeah.

Fair enough. Though as bruising reflects bleeding under the skin induced at the time of injury due to broken blood vessels, it should still be apparent I would think, but that's just a guess and I don't know how apparent, if at all, if the person is killed immediately afterwards. I believe a swollen face is also consistent with strangulation, at least I know that's been argued before, as is her protruding and swollen tongue (I think those were the signs that led Dr. Phillips to suggest her breathing was interfered with as well). I believe the bruising on the jaw was attributed to JtR holding her head while he cut her throat, and that was suggested to be the cause of the abrasions. That doesn't mean those explanations are correct, of course, but they do appear to be accounted for in both strangulation and punch accounts, that's all I'm suggesting.

2: Choking does not actually render someone silent. You have a better shot with that manually choking someone while pushing them up against a wall? Vocal cords rely as much on vertical movement and horizontal, so the only real barrier is the lack of air flow. Its really hard to completely cut that off. Can you quote Shakespeare? no. Its sounds a little like the Aflac duck having a stroke. It will wake no one, but if a dude is on the way back from the outhouse and is on the other side of the fence, he will hear it. It sounds a lot like someone being choked. To be fair, striking someone makes a sound too, but I think it is a sound that is easier to mistake for something else, or if it precedes a blow to the fence, it might get be experienced as one sound. Maybe.

Good point. However, and I hadn't stated this, sorry. I don't think she was attacked while Cadosh was in the yard the first time. Rather, it seems more probable that JtR would have been aware of Cadosch and waited until he went back inside. So while strangulation isn't completely silent, I doubt Cadosch was in a position to hear it when it did happen. His 3-4 minutes absence before returning would be enough time to render her unconscious at least. Mind you, he wouldn't hear a punch either.

3. I would expect Mrs. Chapman to have been easy to kill in a lot of ways, hard in others. She was five foot nothin. There are not a ton of men who could not overpower her based on that alone. Add in her fairly advanced tuberculosis, maybe syphilis...easy mark. On the other hand she was a stout woman. Moving her might have taken a bit. Also the more thick around the neck a person is, whether is be fat or muscle, the harder it is strangle them. Not impossible, but without completely shutting down the blood flow, that means fighting. And fighting next to a poorly maintained fence should have sounded like doors slamming.

Yes, this is a good point. It depends upon on how close to the fence they are at the time of course. I suppose if he strangled her, and while doing so takes her to the ground that would mean they're not fighting up against the fence per se, and the only bit she could strike would be low down near the ground, which would result in much less noise as the fence isn't going to rock back and forth as a result. It also aids JtR in strangling her as she's now against the ground as a hard surface. He could also bang her head against the ground, perhaps resulting in the brain injuries you're seeing?

[quote]

4: The only part of Cadosche's testimony that seems strange to me is the "No." I believe something hit the fence, I can think of a good half dozen explanations, that doesn't bother me. But the "no" is a bit weird. The transactional stuff should have been taken care of.

[/qoote]

Yah, it's hard to make much out of one word. I don't think it's her responding to JtR starting his attack, though. If it were, I think it would have had a note of fear in it, or be more of a yell, etc, and nothing in Cadosch's testimony leads to that conclusion. It just sounds like he heard people talking in the yard. While I don't want to over state this, as it is pure speculation, but I could see something like this happening. Chapman has taken JtR to the backyard thinking he's a client. Cadosch enters his yard, and JtR asks something like "Is it always this busy here?", or "Does he come out her often?", and she says "No" as she wants to reassure a client that all is well and they won't be disturbed. Cadosch goes to the loo, and back into his house. And I think around then is the most probable time for the attack to have started. When Cadosch returns 3-4 minutes later, Chapman is now on the ground, the initial attack completed, and JtR could be leaning over her to cut her throat, probably positioned around her legs, and given the awkward confines of the area, his shoulder bumps the fence and Cadosch hears that. JtR, however, now bent low, breathing heavy, and in whatever focused state of excitement he gets into at that point, is unaware of Cadosch's return.

But that's an awful lot of speculation built around one word, but most of it, to be fair, is based upon Cadosh hearing living people the first time, and hearing a bump the 2nd time he enters the yard, leaving 3-4 minutes between the last time living people were heard in the yard and when the fence bump was heard (which seems likely to have something to do with the attack sequence). Working the "no" in is really just to demonstrate it doesn't actually cause any problems. It also could have been in response to a completely inane question ("Did I see you at the pub an hour ago? - "no") type thing, as JtR waits out Cadosch.

But again, 3-4 minutes is enough time for either strangulation or a punch.

5: Mostly though, this is all based on the brain. Which was a train wreck given her disease and her attack, but the swelling and edema in the grey matter itself (as opposed to in the meninges which had loads of other problems). Given the lack of cracks in the skull, or projectiles, or rare genetic conditions that made it unlikely her age at death, thats a closed brain injury. My argument is that she in fact had a massive hit to the head. Enough of one to cause very immediate, very nasty symptoms. Like vertigo. Nausea. Ataxia. Blinding pain. When she was attacked by the other woman she got hit in the temple. But if it had been hard enough to cause a closed brain injury, it would have cracked the temple. It's the thinnest part of the skull. So the question becomes, where did she get a head injury and no one notices her vomiting and falling over? At the the time of her attack. If I were a big guy, and I knew a fair bit of boxing (meaning I could aim my punch which I fully admit I cannot do) I would aim for the side of the jaw and ear. Break an ear bone, instantly incapacitate, unlikely to be discovered. And I don't think a weapon was used, because that would crack the skull. And that didn't happen. And what I fully admit is the most obvious answer, that her head hit the stairs, but stone steps would be sure to break the skull. I think her brain says it happened. I agree there's a lot to argue against it. Brain seems pretty sure. So that's whats fueling this. I've said before I have no problem with the idea of strangulation. She was partially asphyxiated to death when her windpipe was cut. I don't object to him doing it because he wanted to. I just think it's a lousy submission method when someone is like, three feet away on the other side of fence.

Yah, as I say though, I don't think the attack, strangulation or a punch, happened until after Cadosh went back inside. Brain injury, I suppose, could reflect a punch or him slamming her head against the ground while strangling her though couldn't it?

I'm not ruling out your suggestion, though. It's got points worth considering. I'm wondering if it is possible to reconcile what you see as brain injury with an aspect of a strangulation attack, simply because the medical testimony at the time did specifically suggest that it appeared to be the case. I tend to be reluctant to throw out any evidence unless it is proven to be unreliable. I suspect in the end, we may find that neither strangulation with head bashing nor a strong punch can be entirely ruled out, which just widens the possibilities as to the sequence of events that comprised the attack.

Anyway, thanks for the things to think about.

- Jeff