Chapman’s death.

[Fisherman]

If nothing else comes out of this exchange, surely Herlock must have put an end to his old antics of claiming that I write many and long posts while he does not...?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock - my bad for using imprecise terminology. The 95% confidence interval only tells us our confidence that the mean average data point is in the interval - I think Fisherman, and perhaps yourself also, thought I meant a 95% probability which is absolutely not the case. I will be more specific in future posts, this thread is confusing enough already without loose language.

Not at all eten, I understood you perfectly, and you were correct. But I could see that Fisherman had latched onto that figure and he was bound to start talking about Phillips' estimate being in a 95% confidence range. Just thought it best to kill that one at birth!

[etenguy]

Well - what a life I have. I've spent a little time googling around but have at least found search terms that bring results back about skin temperature cooling (or warming) on death (depending on ambient temperature). I have met the source Herlock quotes, Rob Seldon Smith who offers the lowest value so far (20 minutes) and a range of others with the other end being 12 hours. But none have defined methodology (so far) and I think (but don't know) some are meaning a difference you might notice by touch and others mean stone cold (ambient temperature).

Just an up-date - no well defined answer so far.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I forgot to add this.

[Herlock Sholmes]

As usual, Herlock employs his all out aggressive tactics, and fails to take a real look at the facts of the matter. Most of what he says is aimed at shooting down what I say, and to that end, no means is too lowly to use.

A little sense would be recommendable. A good start would be to take a look at how etenguy, who does not take what I say as gospel (nor should he do so), soundly acknowledges that we have quite an enigma to solve if we want Chapman to have been dead for an hour only. While, of course, Herlock claims that he has "rebutted" my take many times already, and claims that I have my fingers in my ears.

Claiming that I have been rebutted - THAT is getting caught with your own fingers in your ears, Herlock.

I would like to see the article you refer to, so a link would be welcome, regardless where it leads. It is either a case of the body NOT being cold, or a case of prussic acid being somehow magically able to lower body temperatures many degrees - in which case the matter is not applicable in the Chapman discussion in the first place. So let's put this misconception of yours to sleep.

As for the Eddowes/Chapman discussion, yes different people WILL cool in different ways, but as always - not THAT different! You are crying for the moon, and you think it is as easy to just say "people differ", but that won't do. Least of all when we know that Eddowes lay in colder conditions and in a way that subjected her more to the elements.
If we drop two soccer balls from a height of five yards, they WILL bounce to different heights. But it will not be a case of one bouncing three yards and the other three inches! You oversimplify, and you trip yourself up rather badly along the way. That wish you have for Chapman to have grown cold along a schedule that is incredibly different to what we can see in Mitre Square carries with itself an extreme cooling off process that will mean that whatever rigor she developed would have been totally delayed. Rigor is conducted by body heat, and so to develop it quickly, a body HAS to be warm and conduct it efficiently. If Chapman grew colder than an arctic iceberg in two minutes flat, she would be the unlikeliest person in the northern hemisphere to develop rigor quickly.

And no, not factoring in a muscle ratio will not open up a door to a possibility to shave 66,6 per cent off the time Chapman had been dead according to Henssge.

The one solution you can suggest is that Chapman was really, really warm - but that Phillips mistook her body for a really, really cold one. Anyone who believes that is welcome to make a case for the possibility of it happening.

Its all very easy, and its way past time to admit that.

My responses in blue.

A good start would be to take a look at how etenguy, who does not take what I say as gospel (nor should he do so), soundly acknowledges that we have quite an enigma to solve if we want Chapman to have been dead for an hour only.


I didn't see etenguy using the word "enigma". What he wanted was reliable information from an expert source. Not your uninformed and unsupported waffle. As I read him, he disagrees with your claim that we can have any confidence in an estimate of time of death based on surface body temperature. That's because he has bothered to dig out the official advice to pathologists which makes clear that even estimates based on rectal temperature in 2019 can be significantly wrong.

As for the Eddowes/Chapman discussion, yes different people WILL cool in different ways, but as always - not THAT different!

Source for that statement please.


Rigor is conducted by body heat, and so to develop it quickly, a body HAS to be warm and conduct it efficiently.


Source for that statement please.


And no, not factoring in a muscle ratio will not open up a door to a possibility to shave 66,6 per cent off the time Chapman had been dead according to Henssge


Source for that statement please.


The one solution you can suggest is that Chapman was really, really warm - but that Phillips mistook her body for a really, really cold one.


Phillips didn't say that Chapmans' body was "really, really cold". In fact, you appear to be talking here about the rectal temperature which he didn't take. No-one knows the rectal temperature. All we know is that she felt cold at the surface. That's it. It tells us nothing about her core temperature and nothing that allows anyone to estimate a reliable time of death. That's the hard fact.


And there's not much point me discussing this issue with you further until you provide sources for your categoric statements because I happen to know that you are making it all up as you go along in order to desperately try and avoid a time of death of 5.30am when Lechmere was safely at work.

[Herlock Sholmes]

https://ibb.co/pdwFWGh

[etenguy]

OK - Well I'm giving up for the night.

What I think I've learned so far:
Skin temperature is not used to estimate the time of death.
I conclude this as I can find no mention of it's use in any of the large number of papers I have read or skim read today. All refer to rectal or liver temperature as a means of gauging core temperature. And even for core temperature, all sorts of caveats are given relating to factors that might have significant impact on the rate of cooling.

Skin temperature cools significantly more rapidly than core temperature
This has been mentioned by a number of authors I have read but none have quantified the difference, largely I believe because external factors affect skin cooling to a great extent and so it would not be possible to quantify it in a meaningful way.

A good and quite full list of factors affecting core body cooling (and by extension to a greater degree for skin cooling) can be found at what-when-how tutorials ( https://what-when-how.com/forensic-s...e-since-death/ ) quoted below for convenience. These align with the other papers I've read.

Furthermore there are a number of complicating factors, of endogenous (cadaveric)or exogenous (en-vironmental)origin, that may strongly affect the rate of postmortem cooling. These include:
• Body mass Heat loss is slower in obese subjects (owing to greater body mass and because fat may act as an insulator), whereas it is more rapid in slender ones.
• Movement of air Any air movement enhances heat losses by convection, thus accelerating the fall in temperature. At outdoor scenes of death it is therefore important to note if the weather is windy, and in buildings sources of air currents (open doors/windows)should be looked for.
• Humidity High atmospheric humidity will increase heat losses due to evaporation.
• Clothing Clothes will act as insulators; the thicker they are, the more the fall in temperature will be delayed. This is also true for any kind of covering found on or around the body (e.g. subjects dying in bed and found lying under sheets and blankets).
• Immersion in water A corpse immersed in still water will lose heat mainly by conduction, at a rate several times higher than in air (because water is a much better heat conductor); the temperature decay will be even more accelerated if the water is flowing.
Henssge’s nomogram probably constitutes the most elaborate and easy-to-use system developed to establish the time of death from body cooling, taking into account the main influencing factors. This three-parameter abacus (body temperature, ambient temperature, body mass)furnishes a crude estimation of the time since death, corresponding to the ‘average’ situation of a naked corpse lying in still air. Depending on the case, this preliminary value may be adjusted using corrective factors from 0.35 (for a naked body immersed in flowing water)to 2.40 (for a clothed body coved by a thick bedspread). Another major feature of this nomogram is that it provides the estimation together with a confidence interval (corresponding to a permissible variation of 95%); for an adult weighing 70 kg, this interval is +2.8h during the first 15 hours post mortem.
Many authors have proposed alternative solutions to enhance the accuracy of this technique, e.g. repeated or continuous postmortem temperature measurements over several hours, or the measurement of central temperature by invasive techniques (intra-hepatic or subhepatic temperature taken by abdominal stab, or intracerebral temperature measured by inserting the probe through the orbit). These methods are difficult to apply to the routine investigation of scenes of death; in addition, none of them has proved to be clearly better than the single measurement of rectal versus environmental temperature.

[Fisherman]

https://ibb.co/pdwFWGh

Thank you for this, Herlock!

It did not take long to identify a VERY odd thing about the matter, just as I predicted. It is hidden in the sentence "... the body presented great lividity". Lividity is how blood sinking to the lowest part of the body manifests itself long after death. Here is a description of the phenomenon, from Wiki. You will find its the same all over, with little variation, regardless of the source:

"Livor mortis (Latin: livor – "bluish color", mortis – "of death"), postmortem lividity (Latin: postmortem – "after death", lividity – "black and blue"), hypostasis (Greek: hypo, meaning "under, beneath"; stasis, meaning "a standing"^[1][2]) or suggillation, is the fourth stage of death and one of the signs of death. It is a settling of the blood in the lower, or dependent, portion of the body postmortem, causing a purplish red discoloration of the skin. When the heart stops functioning and is no longer agitating the blood, heavy red blood cells sink through the serum by action of gravity. The blood travels faster in warmer conditions and slower in colder conditions.

Livor mortis starts in 20–30 minutes, but is usually not observable by the human eye until two hours after death. The size of the patches increases in the next three to six hours, with maximum lividity occurring between eight and twelve hours after death. The blood pools into the interstitial tissues of the body. The intensity of the color depends upon the amount of reduced haemoglobin in the blood. The discoloration does not occur in the areas of the body that are in contact with the ground or another object, in which capillaries are compressed.^[3]"

I underlined the important part. "Great lividity" cannot be present in a person only an hour dead. There will be no lividity at all observable in such a person. Ergo, the coolness of the body was to be expected, because we are dealing with a person who had been dead for many hours.
Why the doctor would say that he appeared to have been dead for about an hour only, I cannot say, but the probable thing is a misquotation on behalf of the paper.

Once again thank you, Herlock. I think we can take this case off the list now, and I hope you agree.

[Fisherman]

ok - well i'm giving up for the night.

What i think i've learned so far:
skin temperature is not used to estimate the time of death.

Bravo! This is what i have been pointing out for many days now.

i conclude this as i can find no mention of it's use in any of the large number of papers i have read or skim read today. All refer to rectal or liver temperature as a means of gauging core temperature. And even for core temperature, all sorts of caveats are given relating to factors that might have significant impact on the rate of cooling.

skin temperature cools significantly more rapidly than core temperature

Exactly! Seddon-smith (who herlock claims has me panicking! ) says that it will cool in ten to twenty minutes and i find that likely.

this has been mentioned by a number of authors i have read but none have quantified the difference, largely i believe because external factors affect skin cooling to a great extent and so it would not be possible to quantify it in a meaningful way.

A good and quite full list of factors affecting core body cooling (and by extension to a greater degree for skin cooling) can be found at what-when-how tutorials ( https://what-when-how.com/forensic-s...e-since-death/ ) quoted below for convenience. These align with the other papers i've read.

I also like the quotation about the quality of the Henssge method.

[Fisherman]

My responses in blue.

A good start would be to take a look at how etenguy, who does not take what I say as gospel (nor should he do so), soundly acknowledges that we have quite an enigma to solve if we want Chapman to have been dead for an hour only.


I didn't see etenguy using the word "enigma". What he wanted was reliable information from an expert source. Not your uninformed and unsupported waffle. As I read him, he disagrees with your claim that we can have any confidence in an estimate of time of death based on surface body temperature. That's because he has bothered to dig out the official advice to pathologists which makes clear that even estimates based on rectal temperature in 2019 can be significantly wrong.

As for the Eddowes/Chapman discussion, yes different people WILL cool in different ways, but as always - not THAT different!

Source for that statement please.


Rigor is conducted by body heat, and so to develop it quickly, a body HAS to be warm and conduct it efficiently.


Source for that statement please.


And no, not factoring in a muscle ratio will not open up a door to a possibility to shave 66,6 per cent off the time Chapman had been dead according to Henssge


Source for that statement please.


The one solution you can suggest is that Chapman was really, really warm - but that Phillips mistook her body for a really, really cold one.


Phillips didn't say that Chapmans' body was "really, really cold". In fact, you appear to be talking here about the rectal temperature which he didn't take. No-one knows the rectal temperature. All we know is that she felt cold at the surface. That's it. It tells us nothing about her core temperature and nothing that allows anyone to estimate a reliable time of death. That's the hard fact.


And there's not much point me discussing this issue with you further until you provide sources for your categoric statements because I happen to know that you are making it all up as you go along in order to desperately try and avoid a time of death of 5.30am when Lechmere was safely at work.

It has become a sad thing when somebody resorts to claiming that posters opposing their views are "making things up". I am doing no such thing, and I think it lies on you to prove that point, not on me to disprove it.

It is all a simple case of Phillips not having been likely to be as wrong as you need him to be, and a case of deciding whether medical facts or witnesses are most likely to be correct. The question answers itself: the medical realities will always have the upper hand.

Your idea works from the presumption that three witnesses would somehow be more likely to be correct than Phillips. Aside from the fact that we already know that two of the witnesses actually contradict each other, the whole premise is wrong. It is not as if criminal history have no examples of three men with funny monikers swearing about how they played cards with somebody called "Godfather" on the night that said "Godfather" is accused of having pumped half a kilo of led into somebody called Earl "Shotgun" DiMeo.

You can - and HAVE! - dig up examples of freak occurrences any day in the week. Lying/mistaken witnesses do not belong to that category, however, and I will not make it my business to dig up the many thousands of examples I could find out there. I will simply point to the fact that claiming that it would not be expected to find attention-seekers in a case like the Ripper case would be an outright stupid thing to do.

We have a series of murders where we know that three victims were found close in time to death (30-60 minutes is what is suggested, although I would myself say that Nichols could not have been a full hour). These three victims were all recorded as being, and I quote, "quite warm". Then we have a fourth victim, Annie Chapman, who was all cold, but for an area under the intestines (so Phillips had to put his hand INSIDE Chapman to feel any warmth at all!), where some remaining heat could be discerned.

And we are asked to believe that the differences all owe to how Chapman was the odd woman out. Because that is likelier than three witnesses being wrong. That she managed to go through a process that will normally take 4-6 hours IN ONE HOUR ONLY! Because, we are told, not all people ARE normal - some are very, very, very far removed from the normal state. It is suggested that Chapman can have started out with an extremely low temperature and so on, and we are asked to accept that all kinds of freakish circumstances can have applied to her - but not to the others in the series.

And once we are told that Chapman grew cold in no time at all, we are asked to believe that she alongside with that achievement also managed to produce onsetting rigor - a condition that is heat-conducted!

The whole project is a complete non-starter. The other victims provide a great ground for comparison, and they show us what we can expect from a badly cut up and opened up victim lying out in the cold streets: nothing special at all.

Am I making this up, or is this what we are asked to believe in? I think we all know the answer to that question.

[Fisherman]

Checking back on the prussic acid case, I fond that the original quotation offered did not mention the lividity. If it had been, much aggravation could have been saved together with a lot of time.

[John G]

This is my summary so far. As Dr Phillips failed to take an even rudimentary scientific approach, i.e. by assessing body temperature via a thermometer, preferably a rectal reading, I don't think much van be taken from his conclusions.

Referring back to my post 687, wbich highlights the complexities that this issue raises. Thus, the Hennssge method, using nonograms, is the current gold standard for determining time of death where the post mortem interval is relatively short, i.e up to a few hours.

Applying this approach, let us say we make an initial estimate of TOD of 4:30 am, based upon based on body temperature readings of 95.6 degrees at 6:30 am (allowing for a 1.5 degree per hour drop in temperature).We then need to apply a body weight correction. So, in the Biosphere 2 study the female subjects, as a consequence of a low calorie diet, incurred a 10% weight loss. This had the effect of reducing body temperature from a "normal" 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit to 96-97 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes lower.

Therefore, if in the above scenario we apply a 1.5 degree reduction to initial body temperature -on the basis that our theoretical victim is significantly underweight- (weight correcting factor) then this would presumably require a one hour adjustment to the time of death estimate to 5:30 am.

However, we haven't finished yet. Further adjustments may be required on the basis that there may have been factors which would accelerate heat loss, meaning that the cooling conditions deviated from standard. For instance, if our theoretical victim hsd sufferred severe blood loss, was only partially clothed, and had been left on a cool concrete surface, then these cooling factors would require a further correction, pushing time of death to significantly later than 5:30 am.

Regarding Dr Biggs' comment that even live people can feel cold to the touch. I have to say that I agree with him based on personal experience. For instance, I used to work with someone who, incredibly, hsd a forehead that could feel ice cold, whilst indoors in a heated building!

[Fisherman]

This is my summary so far. As Dr Phillips failed to take an even rudimentary scientific approach, i.e. by assessing body temperature via a thermometer, preferably a rectal reading, I don't think much van be taken from his conclusions.

Since people only grow cold to the touch some four hours or more after death, there is certainly a compelling reason to listen to Phillips. If we were talking about small margins, it would have been another matter.

Referring back to my post 687, wbich highlights the complexities that this issue raises. Thus, the Hennssge method, using nonograms, is the current gold standard for determining time of death where the post mortem interval is relatively short, i.e up to a few hours.

Applying this approach, let us say we make an initial estimate of TOD of 4:30 am, based upon based on body temperature readings of 95.6 degrees at 6:30 am (allowing for a 1.5 degree per hour drop in temperature).We then need to apply a body weight correction. So, in the Biosphere 2 study the female subjects, as a consequence of a low calorie diet, incurred a 10% weight loss. This had the effect of reducing body temperature from a "normal" 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit to 96-97 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes lower.

Therefore, if in the above scenario we apply a 1.5 degree reduction to initial body temperature -on the basis that our theoretical victim is significantly underweight- (weight correcting factor) then this would presumably require a one hour adjustment to the time of death estimate to 5:30 am.

However, we haven't finished yet. Further adjustments may be required on the basis that there may have been factors which would accelerate heat loss, meaning that the cooling conditions deviated from standard. For instance, if our theoretical victim hsd sufferred severe blood loss, was only partially clothed, and had been left on a cool concrete surface, then these cooling factors would require a further correction, pushing time of death to significantly later than 5:30 am.

Regarding Dr Biggs' comment that even live people can feel cold to the touch. I have to say that I agree with him based on personal experience. For instance, I used to work with someone who, incredibly, hsd a forehead that could feel ice cold, whilst indoors in a heated building!

The problem is, as I have pointed out, double: You have to drop way too much and quickly from an initial extremely low temperature to reach the kind of temperatures we would need. And that does not happen. Also, a dead person will not drop at all during the first half hour to one hour - we stay at a plateau during that initial stage, the temperature remaining constant! Lastly, if Chapman defied all the laws of nature and differed totally from Nichols, Stride and Eddowes (who all lived under small circumstances and were not well fed and fat) and grew cold in a jiffy, then why is it that she has onsetting rigor after an hour only? Rigor is heat-conducted, so when you cool somebody, rigor will not commence until late in the process.

How do you make all of these factors work, John? How on earth could Phillips, after having stuck his hands INSIDE Chapmans body, NOT be correct in saying that she was cold? And how can a woman described as cold have been dead for an hour only, when we KNOW that we retain temperature for AT LEAST half an hour and very possibly a whole hour too?

It happens? A coincidence? A lucky fluke? Phillips could not tell the difference between cold and warm? Yes, if we factor in outrageous numbers into the Henssge method, we will arrive at outrageous conclusions. Let's not do that.

And please, PLEASE, forget about how the skin may feel cold in living people - they will nevertheless be 37 degrees on the inside!!!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Thank you for this, Herlock!

It did not take long to identify a VERY odd thing about the matter, just as I predicted. It is hidden in the sentence "... the body presented great lividity". Lividity is how blood sinking to the lowest part of the body manifests itself long after death. Here is a description of the phenomenon, from Wiki. You will find its the same all over, with little variation, regardless of the source:

"Livor mortis (Latin: livor – "bluish color", mortis – "of death"), postmortem lividity (Latin: postmortem – "after death", lividity – "black and blue"), hypostasis (Greek: hypo, meaning "under, beneath"; stasis, meaning "a standing"^[1][2]) or suggillation, is the fourth stage of death and one of the signs of death. It is a settling of the blood in the lower, or dependent, portion of the body postmortem, causing a purplish red discoloration of the skin. When the heart stops functioning and is no longer agitating the blood, heavy red blood cells sink through the serum by action of gravity. The blood travels faster in warmer conditions and slower in colder conditions.

Livor mortis starts in 20–30 minutes, but is usually not observable by the human eye until two hours after death. The size of the patches increases in the next three to six hours, with maximum lividity occurring between eight and twelve hours after death. The blood pools into the interstitial tissues of the body. The intensity of the color depends upon the amount of reduced haemoglobin in the blood. The discoloration does not occur in the areas of the body that are in contact with the ground or another object, in which capillaries are compressed.^[3]"

I underlined the important part. "Great lividity" cannot be present in a person only an hour dead. There will be no lividity at all observable in such a person. Ergo, the coolness of the body was to be expected, because we are dealing with a person who had been dead for many hours.
Why the doctor would say that he appeared to have been dead for about an hour only, I cannot say, but the probable thing is a misquotation on behalf of the paper.

Once again thank you, Herlock. I think we can take this case off the list now, and I hope you agree.

My responses in blue

There will be no lividity at all observable in such a person


I hope we don't get bogged down into an argument about whether lividity (or hypostatis) can develop in an hour, because it can. Bernard Knight in "Lawyers Guide to Forensics" tells us that it 'may commence within an hour after death'. Even your own quote from Wikipedia (lol!) says that it starts in 20-30 minutes after death and then is "usually" not observable until two hours after death, hence meaning that it CAN be observable earlier than this. Payne James in Simpson on Forensics tells us that 'The time taken for hypostatis to appear is so variable that it has no reliable role in determining the time of death'.

But, Fisherman, you have entirely missed my point about Robert Fowler. I'm not saying he was correct (or incorrect) in his estimate of time of death. I've consistently said it's not possible to estimate time of death from finding a body to be 'cold' (or from the appearance of lividity). The point about Fowler is that despite the body being cold he STILL estimated a time of death of an hour prior to the scene of crime examination. So it wasn't in his mind a freak or bizarre occurrence.

You are reduced to claiming it's some kind of reporting error! Was it also a reporting error when Dr Kennedy informed the Surgical Society of Ireland that a dead body can feel as cold after one hour as after six hours?

And is this an error too?

"Once dead for about an hour, a body’s temperature adjusts to whatever the ambient temperature is, and therefore will feel cold, compared to how they usually feel."


https://www.quora.com/Why-would-a-body-be-cold-within-an-hour-of-death-in-a-temperature-controlled-room

[Herlock Sholmes]

I also like the quotation about the quality of the Henssge method.

My response in blue

What i think i've learned so far:
skin temperature is not used to estimate the time of death.

Bravo! This is what i have been pointing out for many days now.

So finally, Fisherman, you agree that Dr Phillips did what is impossible! He used skin temperature (at its most basic level of "cold" or "warm") to estimate the time of Chapman's death. Something which etenguy has found out is not used for this purpose. So we can obviously ignore what Dr Phillips thought and concentrate on the more reliable witness evidence.