Chapman’s death.

[The Baron]

Obviously, these sources have not stated that Phillips specifically was wrong

This should be written in gold



The Baron

[Herlock Sholmes]

You are a clown ! why dont you for once extract your head from where it seems to spend much of its time and listen, read, and digest.

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

A personal insult that I’ll ignore.

And you, as every poster on here is aware, are quite staggeringly arrogant. You make posts and expect everyone to simply concede every point even when you’re wrong...which appears to be most of the time. So there’s not much benefit to be gained from wasting time with an ex-Police officer who would rather dismiss 3 witnesses for the most trivial of reasons to back a proven unreliable TOD estimate.

[Herlock Sholmes]

SPEAKING OF READING , TRY READING WOLF VANDERLINDENS ARTICLE THEN GET BACK TO ME . BECAUSE YOU CLEARLY IGNORE EVERYTHING HIS SAYS AS PER USUAL.

AND YOU SERIOUSLY THINK LONG CODOSCH AND RICHARDSON ARE RELIABLE , YOU NEED TO TAKE A BREAK FROM THIS THREAD, HERLOCK ITS CONFUSING YOU .

You are under the misguided impression that Wolf Vanderlinden is somehow incapable of error. He wrote a dissertation in which he put forward his own ideas and suggestions. Like all dissertations readers are free to agree or disagree. Or even to agree with some parts and not others. You keep telling me to read it Fishy but I keep telling you that I’ve read it more than once.

Obviously you love it because it provides you with a suggestion for a faint hope of keeping your obsessive Stephen Knight delusion alive. You might consider this dissertation to be virtually a gospel of ripperology but I, and others don’t. I don’t ignore everything that he says Fishy, as you claim, I just don’t agree.

[Fisherman]

You have cited documentation that suggests that Phillips estimate of time of death was unlikely to have been wrong by any substantial margin. Others have cited with equal conviction a string of sources which indicate differently. I am not qualified to decide who is right, and I suspect most people are in the same boat as me, so, until there is a definitive answer, the medical evidence is up in the air. And the fact is that Mrs Long may have seen Chapman after Phillips' estimated time of death, Cadosch may have heard a words from the yard of 29 after Phillips' estimated time of death, and Richardson may have been right when he said Chapman's body wasn't there when he visited the yard, thus placing Chapman's death after Phillips' estimated time of death. The witness testimony presents problems, but not insurmountable ones, and hasn't been shown to be wrong - which is the important thing; Trevor seems to equate unreliability with being wrong, albeit that he asserts he isn't dismissing it. It's therefore only right to look at a scenario that incorporates the witness testimony, even though qualified expert opinion may at some point give the greater weight to Phillips.

[Just to expand on the above, 'Elemarna', above, dismisses the paper to which you give importance and on which you wish us to place reliance. Even if your interpretation of that paper is correct, it needs substantiation.]

Steve - "Elamarna" - is not any medical expert himself, although some may have that impression. I tend to forget what he works with, but it is connected to the medical sphere, I know that much. However, taking his view as gospel in matters medical is something I would very much recommend against. He has a tendency always to claim that whatever I say, I only say on account of how I have a bias, and no serious researcher would succumb to such antics. The factual contents of a case is what it is, and if it supports a theory, there is nothing much we can do about it.

I think that it is of vital importance to recognize how Phillips´verdict on Chapman seems to be a very consistent one, fitting nicely with what should nornmally be expected. A person that is cold to the touch has, generally speaking, been dead for some 4-6 hours or more, and rigor will in normal cases set in around two hours or more after death - and cold conditions will slow it down.

So if there were no witnesses around, it would have been a case of nobody contesting Phillips´ word, I´d say. The factors all dovetail, and, not least, we get yet another nighttime murder, as were all the others, and a murder that seemingly fits well timewise with the other weekday killings.

But there WERE witnesses. And they are the only reason that Phillips was doubted. However, that doubt was predominantly the work of one man: Baxter. Not only was he in open conflict with the doctor, he even took it upon himself to overrule Phillips on matters medical! And in order to enable that, he took the drastic step of misrepresenting Phillips, claiming that he had allowed for much less than two hours. There can be no doubt that Phillips never allowed for any such thing, since he said very clearly that Chapman had been dead "at least" two hours - and probaly more. To claim that he in the same sentence dismissed bis own opinion and allowed for one hour only is not compatible with ratioinal thinking, the way I see things. It would have Phillips saying, basically: "Yes, I weighed in all the parameters, taking care to note that it was a cold day and that the victim was very badly cut up, and then I arrived at the conclusion that she may perhaps have been killed two hours only before I saw her, but to be fair, I think she had been dead for significantly longer than so. But it may also have been an hour only, and we may need to dismiss my carefully considered lowest estimate and replace it with a halved time."

Phillips would have been acutly aware of how medicos typically can pick up on body heat for at least three hours, and so he really stretched things when he said that it could perhaps been as little as two hours anyway, given the cold conditions and the damage done. To do what Baxter did, and to insinuate that Phillips would have qualified that to allow for HALF of that time just does not work.

[Herlock Sholmes]

This should be written in gold



The Baron

Why?

Yet again you don’t read the posts. All you do is latch on to a section of a post a think to yourself “that contradicts Herlock so I’ll applaud it like a seal”

As ever you get it wrong though. I haven’t said that Phillips had to have been wrong. What I’ve repeatedly said, and proven, is that his TOD estimate is totally unsafe to rely on. Paul has repeatedly confirmed this.

And let’s remember, everyone accepts the unreliability of TOD estimates (even Fish) but you and Fishy have repeatedly mocked this fact when I mentioned it in the past. Dr Fishy and Professor Baron appear to know better than every

[FISHY1118]

So , all you have to do now is just say its possible that his dissertation could be one possibility of how Chapman was murdered .... thats it , take your medicine and be done with it . But of course you wont ,and thats your problem, and its also why other posters dont take you or your opinions seriously because you dont offer them the same in return. ..

[Fisherman]

As already explained, I am not qualified to comment on the medical evidence. Like most people, I have read your arguments and also noted that authorities have been cited by Herlock and others - you'll excuse me if I don't go trawling back through endless posts for their names, but I'm sure Herlock and others will cite them again. Obviously, these sources have not stated that Phillips specifically was wrong, and I'm sure we don't want to get into that kind of semantics.

Ah, yes - that was what I was after. Not a single source comments specifically on Phillips. Instead, what they say about the general unreliability of hand palpation as compared to thermometer measuring is used to claim that there is an overall uncertainty built into palpation that renders is useless on a general level. This is why the paper I posted is of paramount importance - it tells us that therapists will tell differences of a degree or two from each other in more than 75 per cent of the cases, and differences of three degrees or more in ninety per cent of the cases. And it is - so far - the ONLY paper presented in this debate that concerns itself with palpation and it´s reliability in ratinal and clear measurements, given in percentages. And the numbers presented lead to the conclusion that palpation is a reliable enough method. Of course, the authors would never question that the thermometer method is even more reliable, much more so - but that is not the issue, we have known that for more than a hundred years.

To Steve, the results from the paper should not be used whe discussing whether Phillips used a viable tool when he palpated for warmth in Chapman. He wants more papers and he wants to dismiss this paper on account of how the exercises made are not the exact same thing as Phillips did in Hanbury Street. However, this is NOT the issue. The issue is that hand palpation is an exact enough tool to tell subtle temperature differences apart, and once we know that, we can dismiss any clains to the contrary. And they come thick and fast when discussing with some posters out here.

You did not answer my question about which TOD you think Phillips suggested. The answer is of course that he did not suggest any specific TOD at all - he suggested a time range during which Chapman could not have died: 0-2 hours before his examination at 6.30. What is interesting is how the fewest seem to understand to the full what Phillips DID say. We even have Swanson claiming that Phillips had fixed Chapmans death at around 4.30, but he never did any such thing. He actually actively warned against believing in that late a TOD, since he himself was of the opinion that Chapman would have died at an earlier stage. He was not opposed to accepting, as an extreme, that it cpould have been as late as 4.30, though - but he did NOT recommend in choosing tnat time over an earlier one.

[Fisherman]

Why?

Yet again you don’t read the posts. All you do is latch on to a section of a post a think to yourself “that contradicts Herlock so I’ll applaud it like a seal”

As ever you get it wrong though. I haven’t said that Phillips had to have been wrong. What I’ve repeatedly said, and proven, is that his TOD estimate is totally unsafe to rely on. Paul has repeatedly confirmed this.

And let’s remember, everyone accepts the unreliability of TOD estimates (even Fish) but you and Fishy have repeatedly mocked this fact when I mentioned it in the past. Dr Fishy and Professor Baron appear to know better than every

The distinction is all-important. If any of your experts had actually said that Phillips was probably wrong, we would have useful material on your behalf. But once all we have is you interpreting papers to say something they do not say at all, it is a different story. So I am applauding Pauls distinction every bit as much as the Baron is. Whether you think that owes to a personal need to stalk you is for you to decide, but I would recommend against voicing any such conviction of yours.

[JeffHamm]

Nope. There is no mistaking warm for cold. If Phillips was uncertain about his ability to correctly establish warmth, all he had to do would be to feel his OWN skin for temperature. And it seems he was anything but uncertain - he was able to pick up on the remaining warmth under the intestines, remember.

Of course, Baxter was right: If the witnesses were correct, then Phillips was wrong. That is not exactly rocket science, is it? But why would we predispose that he WAS wrong, when the paper I posted tells us that it is unlikely in the extreme that he would have been?

You throwing smoke Fisherman. The paper and the question it investigates has nothing to do with estimating the ToD by body temperature in even the remotest sense. To use body temperature as an estimator of ToD (and it's not considered a great one even when done properly), you have to use a thermometer and measure the internal core temperature, you simply cannot do it by measuring the surface temperature at the skin. Dr. Phillips did not use a thermometer, and he did not measure the internal body temperature, so he has not taken the measurements required to make any kind of reliable estimate of ToD. It's not enough to detect "colder than me" even, he needs an exact reading as being out by a degree or two changes the estimated time plus or minus 40 minutes to an hour 20, pending on which way he errs. The surface skin temperature is meaningless, no matter how magic his hands are.

He would also have had to factor in that in this case the body cavity has been cut open, which will greatly change the rate of internal body heat loss (so the fact he felt some warmth under the intestines, if we're going by feel, actually might suggest an earlier time than he estimated - but since we don't know what that temperature was either, we only know she wasn't uniformly cold. But we don't know anything about the temperatures either at the skin or under the intestines, only that one was warmer than the other, and that a body laying outside on a cold day feels cold to the touch - but a living person who comes in out of the cold and who wasn't wearing gloves will also feel cold to the touch because the surface temperature doesn't tell you anything. You can't estimate ToD from those data. And the paper you're looking at has nothing what so ever to do with estimating the actual temperature, it's about detecting differences, but it's actual temperatures that are required, and they have to taken in a specified way, and then other factors (body mass, temperature of the surrounding air, surface area, and other such things) have to be included and then the maths are done. Touching the arm doesn't cut it. And the paper your tossing about is irrelevant for this topic.

- Jeff

[PaulB]

Steve - "Elamarna" - is not any medical expert himself, although some may have that impression. I tend to forget what he works with, but it is connected to the medical sphere, I know that much. However, taking his view as gospel in matters medical is something I would very much recommend against. He has a tendency always to claim that whatever I say, I only say on account of how I have a bias, and no serious researcher would succumb to such antics. The factual contents of a case is what it is, and if it supports a theory, there is nothing much we can do about it.

I think that it is of vital importance to recognize how Phillips´verdict on Chapman seems to be a very consistent one, fitting nicely with what should nornmally be expected. A person that is cold to the touch has, generally speaking, been dead for some 4-6 hours or more, and rigor will in normal cases set in around two hours or more after death - and cold conditions will slow it down.

So if there were no witnesses around, it would have been a case of nobody contesting Phillips´ word, I´d say. The factors all dovetail, and, not least, we get yet another nighttime murder, as were all the others, and a murder that seemingly fits well timewise with the other weekday killings.

But there WERE witnesses. And they are the only reason that Phillips was doubted. However, that doubt was predominantly the work of one man: Baxter. Not only was he in open conflict with the doctor, he even took it upon himself to overrule Phillips on matters medical! And in order to enable that, he took the drastic step of misrepresenting Phillips, claiming that he had allowed for much less than two hours. There can be no doubt that Phillips never allowed for any such thing, since he said very clearly that Chapman had been dead "at least" two hours - and probaly more. To claim that he in the same sentence dismissed bis own opinion and allowed for one hour only is not compatible with ratioinal thinking, the way I see things. It would have Phillips saying, basically: "Yes, I weighed in all the parameters, taking care to note that it was a cold day and that the victim was very badly cut up, and then I arrived at the conclusion that she may perhaps have been killed two hours only before I saw her, but to be fair, I think she had been dead for significantly longer than so. But it may also have been an hour only, and we may need to dismiss my carefully considered lowest estimate and replace it with a halved time."

Phillips would have been acutly aware of how medicos typically can pick up on body heat for at least three hours, and so he really stretched things when he said that it could perhaps been as little as two hours anyway, given the cold conditions and the damage done. To do what Baxter did, and to insinuate that Phillips would have qualified that to allow for HALF of that time just does not work.

I'm not relying on Steve, just pointing out that he disagreed with you. Whether you are better able to understand the article that he is, or vice versa, is something on which I can make no constructive comment. It's simply that there is a strong difference of opinion that needs a definitive resolution, and the possibility that three witnesses outweighs his estimated time of death is a legitimate consideration until we have one. Personally, I haven't allowed Baxter's comments about Phillips to prejudice my opinion at all.

[Herlock Sholmes]

So , all you have to do now is just say its possible that his dissertation could be one possibility of how Chapman was murdered .... thats it , take your medicine and be done with it . But of course you wont ,and thats your problem, and its also why other posters dont take you or your opinions seriously because you dont offer them the same in return. ..

Where do you get this nonsense from? Do you honestly think that posters take you seriously Fishy? Believe me, you are widely regarded as a joke. Let’s not forget that you are the only poster that believes the Knight story? Who agrees with you on that one? Even Melvyn Fairclough’s doesn’t and he wrote a book supporting it!

I don’t want to keep naming people that do agree with me Fishy (and who obviously do take my opinions seriously. Researchers like Sam Flynn, Jeff Hamm, Michael Richards, MikeG, Etenguy, Steve Blomer (Elamarna) oh and yes..Paul Begg (acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject.) All agreeing with me Fishy.

Its also very noticeable that, yet again, you avoid answering the question about Phillips. Why do you choose to agree with him on TOD when it suits you but you disagree with him when he said that Chapman was definitely killed where she was found?

[etenguy]

The distinction is all-important. If any of your experts had actually said that Phillips was probably wrong, we would have useful material on your behalf. But once all we have is you interpreting papers to say something they do not say at all, it is a different story. So I am applauding Pauls distinction every bit as much as the Baron is. Whether you think that owes to a personal need to stalk you is for you to decide, but I would recommend against voicing any such conviction of yours.

Dear Fisherman. We do have experts that actually said that the technique used by Phillips (estimating time of death based on temperature) is so unreliable as to be unsafe. Therefore, by extension, they are saying that no reliance can be placed on the TOD estimation provided by Phillips (since he used such a technique). Not only are the authors of this advice experts, they are the training and professional body for all pathologists working in the UK and have issued guidance telling pathologists to not give the impression to police authorities that they could even provide a window in which death likely occurred using this technique, as the technique is not capable of providing reliable information.

Of course this does not mean Phillips was wrong, but in light of contradictory information provided by witnesses, Phillips estimate must be considered weak given the technique he used is known not to be reliable.

[Herlock Sholmes]

The reoccurring problem with this debate is that people seem unable to recognize that we are talking about two different matters.

I have no problems acknowledging that trying to establish a TOD by way of hand palpation must always result in a guess. Depending on many circumstances, that guess will be better or worse. Most of the time, it will be a useful guess since most cases involve parameters that are relatively easy to keep track of. But there will also be cases where the initial temperature of the vioctim is not what one would havce expected and there may be other parameters involved, internal as well as external, that can have unforeseen influence of the temperature curve of the body. Couple that with how feeling for warmth is a much cruder method tham using a thermometer, and we are at risk to get things very wrong.

This is all true. Sadly, it is not the one and only exponent of the issue we need to look at.

What we have is a medico who said that the body he examined was cold to the touch (yes, apart from an area under the intestines etc, etc). A medico will be able to feel body warmth for at least three hours, generally speaking. Conversely, a bdoy will start feeling cold to the touch after 4-6 hours, once more generally speaking. This means (and this is of course totally obvious) that what makes the body feel cold to the touch is a drop in temperature in the body core. The body core starts dropping in temperature after half an hour to one hour (there is an initital temperature plateau, led on by chemical reactions in the body after death, where the body temperature is upheld). When the dropping sets in, the temperature falls by roughly once degree celsius per hour (the number mentioned is actually 0,8 degrees, but let´s say that the cold conditions in Hanbury Street made it 1,0 degrees).

That would mean that Chapman upheld something very close to full body temperature after one hour, that is to say at 6.30, when Phillips examined her. If her body temperature was normally 37 degrees celsius (the average is 37.2, with womwen having slightly higher temperatures on average, but let´s keep it simple), then it would have been between 36,5 and 37 degrees one hour after death.

If she instead died at 3.30, then the temperature should have dropped aroundthree degrees, taking us close to the kind of temperatures that are referred to as "cold to the touch".

If she dies at 2.30, we would be more on the safe side to reason that she would feel cold to the touch.

So we can see that if Phillips was right, then some three or four hours would fit what he said perfectly. So the question that must be asked is of course "How likely is Phillips to have been correct?". And before I presented the paper I posted on hand palpation, there was no scientific material at hand that offered a solution to that question. But now there is. There is a less than 5 per cent likelihood that trained therapists will miss out on a temperature difference of 3 degrees or more.

When Phillips said that the body was cold to the touch, he would have made this kind of a mistake - or worse - if the body was in fact warm. And it WOULD have been warm a mere hour after death. There is no telling exactly HOW warm, buyt warm it would have been.

There are no two ways around this. Phillips is unlikely in the extreme to have judged a body dead for one hour only as cold to the touch if it was only one hour dead. This was also accepted by the Lancet at the time, for example, just as it became the stance of the police. The area that needs to be bridged by accepting a mistake on Phillips´ behalf is quite simply way to large.

Add to this how a body is extremely unlikely to develop rigor in an hour in cold conditions, and we have a no-brainer. The one thing that speaks for a OD a mere hour away are two witnesses who gainsaid each other in terms of chronology, who in one case shifted meaning from "No, I could not identify the woman" to "Yes, that was her alright" and in the other case was uncertain where the voices he heard came from and who witnessed about a thud - but no other sounds whatsoever coupled to that thud.

In the end, if Long and Cadosch had swopped times with each other and if Long had said from the outset that she COULD identify the woman and if Cadosch had said that he saw Chapman entering the yeard from window, they would nevertheless not be correct. The medical evidence puts an efficient stop to it.

What the discussionwould benefit from would be if we could refrain from stating that hand palpation is less exact than thermometer measurements. That goes without saying, and it has a tendency to blur the overall issue.

My responses in blue....twaddle in black


I have no problems acknowledging that trying to establish a TOD by way of hand palpation must always result in a guess.

I’ve already provided a source in this thread that the time-honoured method of checking a corpse for warmth is with the back of the hand. Do you have ANY evidence that medics have ever established TOD “by way of hand palpation”? If not, can you please stop discussing hand palpation in the context of establishing a TOD.


Conversely, a bdoy will start feeling cold to the touch after 4-6 hours, once more generally speaking.

Human bodies can still cold to the touch while alive! Your claim that this happens after 4-6hours is palpable nonsense for which you’ve never provided a source, and, I might add, it contradicts the estimate provided by Dr Phillips!


This means (and this is of course totally obvious) that what makes the body feel cold to the touch is a drop in temperature in the body core.

It’s not obvious. It’s totally false. What makes the body feel cold to the touch is loss of heat at the body surface.


And before I presented the paper I posted on hand palpation, there was no scientific material at hand that offered a solution to that question. But now there is. There is a less than 5 per cent likelihood that trained therapists will miss out on a temperature difference of 3 degrees or more.
When Phillips said that the body was cold to the touch, he would have made this kind of a mistake - or worse - if the body was in fact warm..

So you are now using that irrelevant paper, which discusses the significance of the ability of modern therapists to better assess the temperature difference between two pads in controlled temperature conditions by using hand palpation, as evidence that Dr Phillips had magical ability to be able to overcome human biology and accurately assess by touch on a cold night whether a still relatively warm but rapidly cooling body was “cold” or not? You have sunk to the very lowest depth that it is possible to sink in your obsessive desire to frame Lechmere for the murder of Chapman.


And it WOULD have been warm a mere hour after death. There is no telling exactly HOW warm, buyt warm it would have been.

That may or may not be true but would it have FELT warm? That’s the point. You’ve never provided any evidence or source to support the claim that it MUST have felt warm and I’ve provided plenty against. In any case, Payne-James tells us that it is "useless" to provide an indication of time of death from feeling whether the body is warm or cold.


Phillips is unlikely in the extreme to have judged a body dead for one hour only as cold to the touch if it was only one hour dead.


That is no more than your ill informed opinion with no source provided for it. It’s a circular argument in any case. You are basically saying that Phillips was right because he was right. Payne-James has told us that judging a body by touch is a useless method to indicate time of death. Your claim that Phillips is "unlikely" to have got it wrong is based on voodoo magic and blind faith, not science.


This was also accepted by the Lancet at the time, for example, just as it became the stance of the police. The area that needs to be bridged by accepting a mistake on Phillips´ behalf is quite simply way to large.


Neither the Lancet nor the police made any comment on whether Phillips was or was not likely to have correctly judged a body dead for an hour or not. The police wouldn’t have had a clue. Phillips qualified his opinion in any case, accepting that some factors could have accelerated cooling. The experienced coroner decided that those factors did accelerate cooling and determined that Chapman was probably killed an hour prior to Phillips' examination.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Body temperature is variable, yes. But none of us go around with a temperature of 33 degrees. And Chapman was no anorectic, she was a sturdy but malnourished woman. Moreover, women normally have higher body temperatures than men, generally speaking.

And please, John - can we agree that Phillips would have known quite well that some people have cold hands and feet and foreheads and whatnot? He would ALSO have known that they nevertheless have a core temperature of around 37 degrees!

When Phillips said AT THE VERY LATEST 4.30, that would have entailed the parameters you mention. Phgillips would have reasoned that IF she had a normal temperature of 36 degrees only and IF the weater had a larger infkuence than usual and IF the damage lowered the temp as dramatically a possible, THEN she could perhaps have died as late as 4.30. It is not as if he recommended that as the best solution, is it? He said that it was probaly MORE, since he knew that he would be able to feel warmth for at least three hours in normal cases - but he acknowledged that if all parameters were extremely in favour of cooling of rapidly, then it could perhaps be two hours only.

That is Phillips´ haggling over and done with. We cant ask for a second round of haggling, John. Least of all one that detracts half of the minimum time...

He didn’t say those words. He actually qualified his opinion and accepted that TOD could have been 5.30.

You are simply making things up.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I have misunderstood nothing, and the paper is very hard to misunderstand per se. To most people, that is. Palpation is a useful and not very inexact method. Read again, it won´t change.

It is funny how you have in the longest been asking for scientific confirmation of why Phillips could not have been as wrong as you wish, and then, when I provide it, you clim that I have misunderstood it?

How can "Palpation can be used to accurately detecting temperature differences between sites and is more accurately performed by an experienced practitioner" mean that palpation is totally unreliable?

In what universe does "We concluded that palpation can accurately detect temperature differences between skin sites. Accuracy increases with larger temperature differences. Manual physical therapists are more accurate than lay individuals" mean that palpation cannot accurately detect temperature differences?

How does "Manual physical therapists accurately detected the warmer plate > three quarters of the time when differences were 1 or 2 °C and detected differences of ≥3 °C with an accuracy >95%" suddenly begin to mean that nobody can feel sublte temperature differences by palpating?

You once again try to use Payne-James - and you once more misunderstand him, the way you make it a modus vivendi to misunderstand and misinterpret everything you read. I will help you out:

Yet he still says loud and clear that the "perceived warmth" of a corpse is both "unreliable" and "useless" as an "INDICATOR" of time of death.

What Payne-James says here is not that medicos think that they feel warmth where there is none. He says that the warmth a medico perceives is unreliable and useless as an indocator of the TOD.

And I agree! Fully! Becasue if a medico perceives that a body can be around 36,7 degrees, it may in fact be 35,9 and if so, the TOD will be fixed at a time that is a full hour off. Making it unreliable and useless.

What Payne-James does NOT say is that it a medico says that a body is cold to the touch, it may in fact be quite warm instead.

Yours is a crusade of misrepresentations, ignorance and failure to pick up on the essential parts. Not that you are ever going to acknowledge this, but once you claim that "Palpation can be used to accurately detecting temperature differences between sites and is more accurately performed by an experienced practitioner" can be misunderstood and that it really means that palpation is useless, I think the time has come for some soul searching.

I have misunderstood nothing, and the paper is very hard to misunderstand per se. To most people, that is. I agree that the paper is very hard to misunderstand but you’ve done it.

Palpation is a useful and not very inexact method. Read again, it won´t change.

Tell me, what does palpation have to do with estimating time of death? Just to be clear, I'm not asking you to Fishsplain it to me. I want you to provide an expert opinion showing it is relevant.


It is funny how you have in the longest been asking for scientific confirmation of why Phillips could not have been as wrong as you wish, and then, when I provide it, you clim that I have misunderstood it?

Sorry, where is this scientific confirmation? Like everyone else, I must have missed it.


How can "Palpation can be used to accurately detecting temperature differences between sites and is more accurately performed by an experienced practitioner" mean that palpation is totally unreliable?

Well it’s got nothing to do with estimating time of death for starters.


In what universe does "We concluded that palpation can accurately detect temperature differences between skin sites. Accuracy increases with larger temperature differences. Manual physical therapists are more accurate than lay individuals" mean that palpation cannot accurately detect temperature differences

What do temperature differences have to do with estimating time of death?


How does "Manual physical therapists accurately detected the warmer plate > three quarters of the time when differences were 1 or 2 °C and detected differences of ≥3 °C with an accuracy >95%" suddenly begin to mean that nobody can feel sublte temperature differences by palpating?

What do subtle temperature differences have to do with estimating time of death?


What Payne-James says here is not that medicos think that they feel warmth where there is none. He says that the warmth a medico perceives is unreliable and useless as an indocator of the TOD.

Yes, that's right Fisherman, he says the warmth a medico PERCEIVES is unreliable and useless. You've said it yourself!! No-one has actually claimed that medics "think they feel warmth where there is none". That's not what happened in the Chapman case. In the Chapman case, Dr Phillips perceived that the body was cold. Or in other words, that there was a lack of warmth. Payne-James is telling us that such perception of warmth, of the lack of it, should NOT be used to indicate or estimate time of death because it is an unreliable technique and is useless.

He is saying that it doesn’t matter whether a body feels cold or warm to the touch, such a method of perceiving warmth should NEVER be used to indicate or estimate time of death. That’s what he says isn’t it?



How is your mind twisting this into somehow supporting what Dr Phillips was attempting to do? The effect of what Payne-James is saying must be that Dr Phillips' attempt to estimate the time of death as being between 1.45am and 4.30am (which is effectively what he was doing) should not have been done and is useless as an indication of the time of Chapman's death because it was based on the perceived warmth of her body.

What is it you are not understanding about that?


Yours is a crusade of misrepresentations, ignorance and failure to pick up on the essential parts. Not that you are ever going to acknowledge this, but once you claim that "Palpation can be used to accurately detecting temperature differences between sites and is more accurately performed by an experienced practitioner" can be misunderstood and that it really means that palpation is useless, I think the time has come for some soul searching.

No, I think you need to read your paper again and understand that palpation has nothing to do with estimating time of death by a pathologist.