Chapman’s death.

[Fisherman]

Next up is Paul B, who writes (in a post to Trevor Marriott):

"However, you have acknowledged that Phillips’ estimated time of death was a guess and could have been wrong, so we have two possible times of death; which of them best fits with the context of known facts?" (post 1100)

This calls for an explanation what the term "guess" points to: A random guess with no backing substantiation, or an INFORMED supposition, based on the examnination Phillips made?

There is nothing about the kindergarten in my statement. No explanation of what 'guess' means is needed or implied. Whether a guess is informed or not is an indication of likely reliability, an informed guess being preferred to an uniformed one, but informed or otherwise, it could still have been wrong. What I wrote actually accepted that the guess was valid, I also accepted the time of death suggested by the witness statements was valid, and that is clear from the statement 'so we have two possible times of death'. I asked Trevor which time of death best fitted the context of known facts. He, unsurprisingly, didn't answer. I do suggest that you try to understand what is written before hurrying to assign them to the kindergarten.

I never had any problems whatsoever understanding what is written - I make a life out of it, being a journalist. If there is any problem involved here, it would boild own to you thinking that the kindergarten bit alluded to you specifically. It did not. Much of the reading - and understanding - I have done over the years includes your work, which I have always held very high in esteem.

Which is why I was troubled by the choice of the term guess in respect to Phlllips´work. I find the term careless and a poor choice, since it is in line with the many statements out here about how victorian medicos engaged in guesswork, more or less, throughout. They did not. Theirs was qualified and professional work and we should not loose sight of that.

The specific problem on this thread has always been that the knowledge that no exact TOD can be established via algor mortis, and that hand palpation is (and alway must be) inferior to thermometer reading in terms of exactitude, has been extrapolated into some sort of generalistic idea that any information forthcoming from a hand palpation can be dismissed as being unreliable in the extreme. Once we couple that kind of reasoning to the term guesswork, we end up in a less informed place than we should.

The paper I quouted tells us that hand palpation is a useful and reliable method of determining body warmth to rather a high degree. It does not contest that hand palpation can (and sometimes will) miss out on a degree or two, but overall, it is quite unlikely that medicos practising the method will make grotesque misjudgments. And in the Chapman case, a grotesque misjudgment on Phillips´ behalf is what is required for Long and Cadosch to come into play.

The medical implications rule them out with great certainty, although they cannot do so with 100 per cent certainty - and that is the extent to which the term "guess" comes into play here - there is a freak, a fluke option that Phillips WAS mistaking a one hour dead woman for one three hours dead. But that is as fas as it goes, and the suggestion that he got the palpation terribly wrong is not supported by the onsetting rigor - if the conditions were so very cold so as to chill Chapman from, say, 37 degrees to, say 32 degrees in an hour (and short of a freezer, that is impossible), then rigor would have been halted, the way it typically is in very cold conditions.

Everything is in line medically, thus, for a TOD many hours before Chapman was found, just as the. urder as such becomes in line with the other murders if it was a nightly deed and not one in borad daylight.

If you felt pointed out personally by the term kindergarten, I apologize - it was directed at other posters, not at you. I have the utmost respect for you as a measured and knowledgeable participant in the discussions out here, although you sometimes may misunderstand who can read and digest a text and who cannot...

[Fisherman]

Really? Since when did we start living in a world where one couldn't change one's mind?

We can, and we many times do. But you know just as well as I do that if we have a court case where the defense has an admission from a witnedss that she do not beleive that she will be able to identify a person, that information will be used to great effect when the case is settled.

What I am saying is not that Long cannot have been wrong. I am saying that she very much undermined any forthcoming suggestion that she was able to recognize Chapoman once she initially said that she would not be able to do so.

It´s much the same as Sarah Lewis - once she said that she could not describe the loiterer, later suggestions that she actually could must be treated with the utmost skepticism. Witness psychology teaches us that many witnesses tend to try to please, and when they do, things can go awfully wrong.

The loiterer can have been short, heavyset, darkly clad and with a wideawake, and the woman Long saw may have looked like Chapman. But once these witnesses admit to believing that they cannot tell, future efforts to do so anyway are - exactly - undermined by their earlier statements.

[Fisherman]

Hi Fisherman

You've misinterpreted the paper's conclusions as to what Philips would have been able to detect. Perhaps you should reread it and amend what you've proudly "proved".

Also, you are using the article to compare a senior Victorian physician with 21st century manual physical therapists. Would their workdays be very similar, do you think?

The only interesting question is whether a victorian doctor would be as well equipped to tell temperature differences by hand palpation as todays therapists and laymen, I´m afraid. Nothing else. If you can prove that they differed in that respect, I would be amazed.

Let´s not loose track of where the paper is of interest to us.

[Fisherman]

I just want to refer back to previous points I've made concerning ToD issues. Most of the studies in this area involve healthy subjects so are no relevant to Chapman's case. This is because Chapman most definitely was not healthy. She was, according to Dr Phillips autopsy, 'showing signs of great deprivation." And was "far advanced in disease of the lungs and membranes of the brain."

It's fair to conclude, therefore, that Chapman was emaciated, and was possibly suffering from tuberculosis, a muscle wasting condition, which invariably would have progressed to gastric tuberculosis, in the pre- treatment age, further exasperating body weight issues.

And this matters. For instance, individuals who are unusually thin would be expected to have a much lower body temperature than the average person, which is why corrections for body weight is an important corrective factor in the Hennssge method.

And, as I've noted before, individuals who are unusually thin can feel cold to the touch even when alive because their body has no means of retaining the heat it creates: https://www.buoyhealth.com/symptoms-a-z/cold-skin/

No matter if we have cold hands or foreheads, our core temperature nevertheless is around 37 degrees, John.

[John G]

1. Kelly almost certainly had defence wounds, so she at least woke up (if she was asleep to begin with) and realised she was being attacked;

2. Interestingly, both Prater and Lewis, in reporting the cry of "Murder", said that "such cries" were often heard... but does that mean that the word "murder" was cried, or that cries in general were common at night? I've never questioned this before, but perhaps neither Prater nor Lewis literally meant that the word "Murder" was shouted out frequently... in fact, I'd be surprised if it did;

3. Be that as it may, the very fact that a cry of "Murder" was heard in Miller's Court within hours of Kelly's murder is rather more likely than "Murder" just happening to be cried out and sounding as if it came from within the Court/Kelly's room;

4. On that last point, Lewis indicated that the cry seemed to come from the deceased's room, and Prater thought that the cry emanated from the "back of the lodging-house where the windows look into Miller's Court"... now, Kelly's room was at the back of the lodging-house and her windows indeed looked into Miller's Court.

On the point of Kelly's wounds. Dr Bond, of course, took the view that she was attacked whilst asleep, despite the superficial wound to the thumb.

I agee that comments that "such cries were common at night" is a little ambitious. Nonetheless, although they may not have ment that the exact words-"Oh Murder"- were commonly spoken, they are clearly referring, at least, to similar cries of alarm.

[Fisherman]

Fisherman, you throw out comments like:"that does not make palpating by hand unreliable as such" and "we should dismiss once and for all the nutty idea that palpating for warmth was always going to get things very wrong" as if we've all been discussing palpating by hand throughout the entire thread. This is the first time you've mentioned it in this thread.

Palpation is a technique used on living people. As the paper you have cited makes clear, "Healthcare professionals use palpation for assessing various conditions" and that, in part, it can be used "to detect temperature changes resulting from inflammation associated with muscularskeletal disorders".

It has absolutely no application to assessing body temperature on a dead body to assess time of death. The point isn't even mentioned in the paper.

Furthermore, the paper is concerned with whether experienced medics can better assess surface body temperature of living patients than laypeople. It does not even begin to consider, and thus does not negate, the point made by Taylor (as reported by Burman) over 150 years ago that an objectively warm dead body can FEEL subjectively cold to a warm human hand. Nowhere in the paper is it stated that a medic can overcome this problem which affects all human biology.

The argument against you has never been that Dr Phillips wasn't in a better position than a lay person to assess the body temperature of a corpse. The argument is that it's not always physically possible for any human to assess whether a dead body is objectively "cold" or "warm" and THEN, regardless of whether that assessment is accurate or inaccurate, it's not possible to go on to reliably estimate a time of death from that information.

So Fisherman when you say, "this is a paper concerning itself with the EXACT information we have all been making assumptions about for quite some time now" all that means is that you have misunderstood the paper. It is, in fact, totally and utterly irrelevant to what we have been discussing in this thread. I note that your ludicrous conclusion from the paper is that "palpation for temperature is normally fairly exact." Nowhere does it say this in the paper! What it says is that a medic can accurately detect temperature differences BETWEEN SKIN SITES. In other words, they can accurately detect that one part of a living body is warmer or colder than another. That's it!

As it happens, while you've been away, I've posted the definitive answer to this entire question from Dr Payne-James. He actually understands that medics are probably better than laypeople in assessing body temperature but he STILL says that the technique used by Dr Phillips in 1888 and, bizarrely, advocated by you in 2019, was and remains "useless." I only partially quoted him previously, but here is the full quote:

“Many pathologists have in the past used various 'rules of thumb' to calculate time of death from the body temperature but these are generally so unreliable that they should not now be used. Sometimes the perceived warmth of the body to touch is mentioned in court as an indicator of time of death; this assessment is so unreliable as to be useless and is even more so if the pathologist is asked to comment upon the reported perceptions of another person.".

Source: 'Simpson's Forensic Medicine' (13th edition), lead author Jason Payne-James.




So you can see that he factored in a layperson's assessment of body temperature (as worse than useless) but a medic's assessment is just USELESS.


Another pathetic attempt at bolstering Dr Phillips just to maintain the validity of your own suspect. I’d stick to fishing if I were you.

Look at the posters that support your points - Fishy, Baron......need I say more.

All we need to recognize is that palpation is a much more exact technique than you have tried to lead on, Herlock. Any idea that we can feel subtle differences in living people but not in dead is just silly. Actually, the paper is not concerened with living people, something you would know if you read it. It relates to palpating SIMULATED skin.
The one thing that matters here is nevertheless how we are well equipped to identify temperature differences by way of feeling with our hands. And as the paper points out - there is less than a 5 per cent chance that a therapist will get things three degrees wrong or more.

It is all about how exact the method is, and the method is reasonably exact. Exact enough for the writers of the paper to recognize it as a useful tool. Whether the results were reached with simulated skin or not and whether it was directed at being able to feel temperature differences in pathological conditions is neither here nor there.

[Fisherman]

I struggle to understand why this argument persists. We have absolute clarity from the highest authority in the land that temperature based estimates of time of death are so unreliable that they are not to be used in criminal investigations.

Of course - thermometers CAN NOT tell the wrong temperatures and they WILL be more exact, so it wouold be outright stupid to use had palpation. But that is not the question at hand. The question at hand is whether hand palpation is so unreliable as to allow for Phillips to have been mistaken to the degree that is suggested. And it is not, as per the paper provided.

Let´s not compare apples to pears, because it becomes misleading.

[Trevor Marriott]

I know that I don’t win any popularity awards in some quarters when I say this Eten but the reason the argument persists isn’t simply because some have faith in Phillips or particularly doubt Richardson, Cadosch and Long it's because some posters need an earlier TOD to bolster theories. There’s no other way of putting it..

The reason this argument persists is that some on here,and you in particular will not fully accept that the TOD cannot be firmly established. You keep stamping your feet in your posts stating that the TOD was 5.20am. As has been stated there are so many issues with all the witnesses, which we cannot bottom out, which in my opinion lead us into having to accept that TOD is inconclusive.

Is there any reason for this argument to continue. Even if we could positively ascertain a time of death would it further the investigation, or is it the case that some just want to argue for the sake of arguing !

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Fisherman]

This article is about detecting the difference, not the absolute, temperature. Being able to tell if one part is warmer than another does not mean you can tell what the temperature is. Perhaps the easiest analogy to understand this is notes on a piano. Most people can tell if you hit the same key twice or if you hit two adjacent keys, so they can detect the difference in the notes. However, very few people could tell you which keys were pressed (few have what is called "absolute pitch", but most people have very good relative pitch. To determine ToD by touch you would have to have "absolute" temperature detection, not relative temperature.

- Jeff

Yes, it is about how able we are to tell temperature differences. And just as you say, being able to say that object A is warmer than object B is not the same as estblishing any exact temperatures. it IS however, hugely in support of how Phillips would have been able to tell the a body was cold to the touch and not warm.

And as I have said a zillion times, Phillips never tried to determine the TOD - he only EXCLUDED the 0-2 hour scope. And he was able to do so because he could feel that the hody was cold as opposed to warm.

Actually he was generous allowing for two hours only, because the general idea is that a medico will be able to pick up on body warmth for the first three hours after death. But on account of the cold weather and the extensive damage, Phillips was willing to take an hour off the time. If he had had the Eddowes case details at hand, he would not have done so, I´d say.

[Fisherman]

I know that I don’t win any popularity awards in some quarters when I say this Eten but the reason the argument persists isn’t simply because some have faith in Phillips or particularly doubt Richardson, Cadosch and Long it's because some posters need an earlie TOD to bolster theories. There’s no other way of putting it. As I’ve posted before it can hardly be a coincidence that the three strongest supporters of the Phillips TOD all have theories that would either be completely disproven or severely weakened by a later TOD. Added to the 3 we have The Baron who sole reason for existence on this Forum is to disagree with me on whatever subject.

Let´s not get bogged won in personal bitterness. Let´s just take in how the paper I popsted tells us that you were wrong all along and learn to live with it. I like how it all fits with Lechmere, but I like even more how it fits with the facts.

[etenguy]

Of course - thermometers CAN NOT tell the wrong temperatures and they WILL be more exact, so it wouold be outright stupid to use had palpation. But that is not the question at hand. The question at hand is whether hand palpation is so unreliable as to allow for Phillips to have been mistaken to the degree that is suggested. And it is not, as per the paper provided.

Let´s not compare apples to pears, because it becomes misleading.

Hi Fisherman. Good to have you back.

For the sake of argument, let's assume Dr Phillips was experienced with hand palpation and was able to fairly accurately determine the temperature he felt. Even then, to use that temperature to estimate time of death is too unreliable to be in any way useful. When the measurements were made that determined the unreliability of estimates of time of death based on body temperature, thermometers were used, so even if his hands were as sensitive as a thermometer, his estimate would still be unreliable. It is not Dr Phillips ability to tell hot from cold that is in doubt - it is the usefulness and accuracy of then using that to estimate time of death.

I infer from some of Herlock's posts that your theory concerning Lechmere as Ripper is undermined by a later time of death, since we would expect Lechmere to be at work by 5.30am. I disagree with Herlock on this point. We do not know where Lechmere was, his work pattern, whether he had a later start that day, whether he was working at all that day etc...

[John G]

No matter if we have cold hands or foreheads, our core temperature nevertheless is around 37 degrees, John.

Hi Christer,

The core temperature is variable, and body mass is a significant factor. Thus, even the "normal" range varies between 36.5 and 37.5 C. However, it can be significantly less with abnormally thin people: anorexics, for example, are in danger of suffering hypothermia, where the body temperature falls below 35 degrees C.

Of course, Dr Phillips didn't bother with a temperature reading - he simply relied on touch-so we cannot know Chapman's internal body temperature at the time. However, as I noted previously, unusually thin people can feel cold to the touch even whilst still alive.

Moreover, you don't have to be out by very much in order for serious errors to have occurred in your calculations. Thus, in ideal circumstances body temperature post mortem falls by about 0.83 degrees C an hour, although adjustments for environmental factors-partially clothed victim, surface victim was found on etc- may be necessary. However, to put that into perspective, if you, say, estimate a time of death of, say, 4:30 am, based upon an internal body temperature estimate of 37.5 C, but the victim was actually, 36.5 C (still within the normal range which, as discussed, Chapman might reasonably not have been) then your estimate would be out by over an hour, meaning the actual time of death would be later than 5:30 am.

[FISHY1118]

The conversation that took place in the passageway between Chandler and Richardson was unrecorded therefore we only have Chandlers version - do you disagree with this Professor Baron?

This is a typical Herlock statement, ive notice he does this when it suits his argument, with no regard for posters who believe otherwise ,

Why is it that because Richardson told his story about the sitting on the step and cutting his boot at the inquest and a different version to chandler, we should believe his inquest version? , can we then not use the same argument for chandler who was also under oath when he told his version of what Richardson told him in the passageway?

It has to work both ways if your going to use this form of argument , but then again it is Herlock were talking about.

So basically your calling Chandler a liar for his inquest statement ?

[PaulB]

I never had any problems whatsoever understanding what is written - I make a life out of it, being a journalist. If there is any problem involved here, it would boild own to you thinking that the kindergarten bit alluded to you specifically. It did not. Much of the reading - and understanding - I have done over the years includes your work, which I have always held very high in esteem.

Which is why I was troubled by the choice of the term guess in respect to Phlllips´work. I find the term careless and a poor choice, since it is in line with the many statements out here about how victorian medicos engaged in guesswork, more or less, throughout. They did not. Theirs was qualified and professional work and we should not loose sight of that.

The specific problem on this thread has always been that the knowledge that no exact TOD can be established via algor mortis, and that hand palpation is (and alway must be) inferior to thermometer reading in terms of exactitude, has been extrapolated into some sort of generalistic idea that any information forthcoming from a hand palpation can be dismissed as being unreliable in the extreme. Once we couple that kind of reasoning to the term guesswork, we end up in a less informed place than we should.

The paper I quouted tells us that hand palpation is a useful and reliable method of determining body warmth to rather a high degree. It does not contest that hand palpation can (and sometimes will) miss out on a degree or two, but overall, it is quite unlikely that medicos practising the method will make grotesque misjudgments. And in the Chapman case, a grotesque misjudgment on Phillips´ behalf is what is required for Long and Cadosch to come into play.

The medical implications rule them out with great certainty, although they cannot do so with 100 per cent certainty - and that is the extent to which the term "guess" comes into play here - there is a freak, a fluke option that Phillips WAS mistaking a one hour dead woman for one three hours dead. But that is as fas as it goes, and the suggestion that he got the palpation terribly wrong is not supported by the onsetting rigor - if the conditions were so very cold so as to chill Chapman from, say, 37 degrees to, say 32 degrees in an hour (and short of a freezer, that is impossible), then rigor would have been halted, the way it typically is in very cold conditions.

Everything is in line medically, thus, for a TOD many hours before Chapman was found, just as the. urder as such becomes in line with the other murders if it was a nightly deed and not one in borad daylight.

If you felt pointed out personally by the term kindergarten, I apologize - it was directed at other posters, not at you. I have the utmost respect for you as a measured and knowledgeable participant in the discussions out here, although you sometimes may misunderstand who can read and digest a text and who cannot...

You didn't distinguish between myself and those to whom you were directing your kindergarten remark and in fact included me in that remark by saying 'and then we have...' It doesn't matter and I am happy to accept your apology, which was generous but nevertheless unnecessary. My concern is that I was not drawing any distinction between the validity of either time of death, but rather pointing out that we may be in a position where hat is irresolvable and that we need to take a close look at context The word guess was not mine, it was Trevor's (post 1109, for example), and I was using his terminology in a post replying to one by Trevor in which I was trying to encourage him to set the times of death in context, thereby hoping to get him to properly analyse the sources (which he is very bad at), but he didn't pick up that particular ball. No matter.

[PaulB]

We can, and we many times do. But you know just as well as I do that if we have a court case where the defense has an admission from a witnedss that she do not beleive that she will be able to identify a person, that information will be used to great effect when the case is settled.

What I am saying is not that Long cannot have been wrong. I am saying that she very much undermined any forthcoming suggestion that she was able to recognize Chapoman once she initially said that she would not be able to do so.

It´s much the same as Sarah Lewis - once she said that she could not describe the loiterer, later suggestions that she actually could must be treated with the utmost skepticism. Witness psychology teaches us that many witnesses tend to try to please, and when they do, things can go awfully wrong.

The loiterer can have been short, heavyset, darkly clad and with a wideawake, and the woman Long saw may have looked like Chapman. But once these witnesses admit to believing that they cannot tell, future efforts to do so anyway are - exactly - undermined by their earlier statements.

Being aware of the deficiencies of witness identification is one of the things we all take into account when assessing up such testimony (or should do) and we can and do allow for a witness to recall details initially forgotten. What Mrs Long thought she couldn't do is something she may have found herself well able to do once she saw the body in the mortuary. We can't know that she did, nor can we know that she didn't. Both scenarios must therefore be considered.