If Schwartz Lied ...

[Fiver]

It's quite simple - he gets to explain how the murderer entered and exited the yard unnoticed. This would help to take suspicion away from the people at the club.

Lying about the time does not explain how the murderer entered and exited the yard unnoticed. Lying about the time does nothing to take suspicion away from the people at the club.

[Fiver]

I was standing at the door of my house nearly the whole time between half-past twelve and one o'clock this morning, and did not notice anything unusual.

The word 'nearly' could in general mean one of two things:

one: It could refer to the boundaries - for example, she was at her door in one half hour period until nearly 1am.

two: It refers to leaving her doorstep and returning, within that half hour period.

The first would be bad news for Israel, and the second bad news for Leon.

From the context, "nearly the whole time between half-past twelve and one o'clock this morning" means "most of the time between half-past twelve and one o'clock this morning". Nothing about it says or implies Fanny Mortimer was at her doorway multiple times observing in the street. It also flatly contradicts other statemnets given by Fanny Mortimer in the same issue.

This account by Mortimer contradicts Schwartz. It does not prove if Schwartz was lying, Mortimer was lying, or both were lying.

The other account by Mortimer contradicts this one, but does not contradict Schwartz. That account does not prove if Schwartz was lying, Mortimer was lying, both were lying, or both were telling the truth.

Neither of your interpretations of "nearly" have anything to do with how good a suspect Leon Goldstein was. His contacting the police was a point in his favor and they seem to have dismissed him as a suspect.

Which man do you most need to protect, to keep the mystery alive?

I am not protecting Schwartz. I have repeatedly said he might have been lying.

I am not protecting Goldstein. As near as I can tell, I am the first person on this board to suggest Goldstein as a suspect.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Joseph Lawende in his testimony refers to fixing the time by the club clock.

Good point Kattrup. I certainly wouldn’t claim 100% certainty on this but I have a strong feeling that a quote has been posted on here mentioning a clock at the IWMES but the person quoted (i thought that it was Eagle) said that he didn’t look at it though. The only thing I’m certain about is that I can’t produce the post (if it exists)

[Herlock Sholmes]

. Which man do you most need to protect, to keep the mystery alive?

No one needs protecting. We have a witness who actually saw a clock, who wasn’t partially sighted, who wasn’t viewing the clock through a fog and from 30 yards away and who, apparent, knew how to tell the time and yet you’re trying to brand him a liar with zero evidence. The suggested motive is so thin as to be laughable. And you criticise someone as if they’re defending a man standing over a body with a bloody knife!

Nothing about this alleged plot adds up even when you take the most cursory of looks. You ignore the very obvious point about timings which beggars belief. You look at 200 different press reports and find a couple worded slight differently a gleefully proclaim ‘lies,’ without considering a far more reasonable explanation. That errors occur all over this case and others when you look at the varied reports in the Press. Everything is selective.

Fanny Mortimer is the obvious case, as Fiver mentioned. You turn a blind eye to the inconvenient version of her story. You take her time over that of a Constable on his beat without even allowing the possibility that Smith could have been correct. You find it impossible to believe that she couldn’t have missed seeing Schwartz but you have absolutely no problem with the fact that no one saw or heard Diemschutz return much earlier than he said (although she heard him return at the time that he said that he did.)

Ill repeat myself. Applying a very reasonable and very legitimate margin for error on timings and allowing for the fact that Press reports don’t all come from the horses mouth and therefore errors are inevitable, we can see very easily what happened. Any theorising should be done around only 2 set-in-stone times. Blackwell and Diemschutz (and even they might be allowed a very small margin for the possibility of clocks and watches being fast or slow.) Work around those and everything fits. There’s no mystery. This was just a straightforward murder. Either by Jack the Ripper or someone else.

[GBinOz]

Originally posted by Kattrup View Post
Joseph Lawende in his testimony refers to fixing the time by the club clock.

Good point Kattrup. I certainly wouldn’t claim 100% certainty on this but I have a strong feeling that a quote has been posted on here mentioning a clock at the IWMES but the person quoted (i thought that it was Eagle) said that he didn’t look at it though. The only thing I’m certain about is that I can’t produce the post (if it exists)

And you can was a lot of time trying to find it.

You do realise that Lawende was talking about the clock in a different club?

Cheers, George

[JeffHamm]

So the reference to the chiming clock could be figurative (as Caz suggested), or it could be literal. Presumably Smith did not hear this clock chime, even though some reporters have him very near that clock at 1am. So either Diemschitz told the reporter that he heard it chime, or Diemschitz told the reporter the same as he told the coroner, and the reference to chiming was just a figurative way of describing it.

Was the tobacconists clock a public or private clock? Did it sit behind a window, or face the elements? Has it been definitively ascertained to have been clearly visible to a nighttime passer-by, other than by simply accepting Diemschitz at his word?

It seems very odd to me that Smith would have walked right past that clock - having seen the crowd at the gates from Commercial Road - and not looked at it.

Caz has offered a possibility that his statement could be viewed figuratively. Since none of us were there, it's impossible to rule that out since we cannot ask Deimshutz if he actually heard it chime. So, we deal with such ambiguities by looking at what happens in each case. If he meant it literally, then his setting the time by the clock means he set it either by seeing the clock and hearing it chime, or potentially just by the chime, as they would be redundant. If he meant it figuratively, his setting of the time means he saw and read the time. Either way, he's got the time from a clock. All I was getting at was the fact that if the clock didn't chime (because the chime was turned off, let's say), that in no way leads to the conclusion he could not have ascertained that it was 1 o'clock.

I've not seen a description of the physical location of the clock, but there may be one. I seem to recall a thread where a photo was posted, and the clock was an outdoor one, but I very well could be misremembering that. If I'm not, though, it was visible to passersby, and he would have had no issue in reading the time from it.

If it was the outdoor clock I'm thinking of, it's up high, and Smith's priority could easily be to check out the crowd rather than look around for a clock from which to take the time, particularly if he's directly below it (he would have to move out into the street, turn around, take the time, etc; all activities that delay him from getting to the crowd). Of course, I offer that only as speculation as to one possible series of events and decision making processes that Smith could be argued to have made - in short, I'm making that up. As we cannot question him, we cannot ask him his intentions or thoughts at the time, all we can do is work with what was said, as much fun as making stuff up may be.

- Jeff

[GBinOz]

First of all, the times listed are estimates, unless they specifically reference a watch or clock. Even those that do reference a watch or clock could be several minutes off. One of the top examples if from the Nichols Inquest. Cross and Paul found the body around 3:45am and went in search of a constable. PC Neil found the body after Cross and Paul had walked far enough to be out of sight, also at 3:45am. Several minutes after finding Nichol's body, Cross and Paul found PC Mizen - he thought the time was 3:45am. Clearly, at least one of those people was wrong about the time. All four might have been wrong about the time. But that does not mean any of them were lying.

Hi Fiver,

This is one of the concerns I had about clock times being used as proof of the Lechmere guilt in the Nichols case. There was a clock tower in the Albion Brewery but I don't know if it was multi-faced or if it chimed the quarter hours. I still regard him as a suspect but based on intervals rather than clock times.

In the Stride case, as in the Nichols case, it is time intervals that matter. The reference clock's relationship to GMT is less important than the time intervals deduced by people who are viewing that same clock. We know that Diemshitz, Smith, Lamb, Johnson, Blackwell, Schwartz and Goldstein were at the corner of Commercial Road and Berner St and had the opportunity to look at the Harris clock. We know that Smith, Lamb, Johnson and Blackwell were coming from the west so would have a clearer view of the clock, and that Diemshitz was probably coming from the east. We don't know which side of the street that Schwartz and Goldstein were on at that intersection. The disagreement we are having revolves around who is likely to have looked at the Harris clock as they passed.

The only real purpose of knowing an accurate discovery time is to determine the interval between when Stride had the knife drawn across her throat and when her body was first seen in the yard. This is the basis of the interruption theory. The time of death was estimated by the doctors, but their methods at that time in history were not all that accurate and they also disagreed with their estimate ranges. Even if we adopted the mean of their closest time estimates for death, which comes out to 12:46, their opinion was that the nature of the wound indicated that she may have taken some minutes to bleed out. The bottom line is, the chance that Diemshitz interrupted JtR is inversly proportional to the interval between the cutting and the finding. Of course the interruption could of been caused by something else. We'll never know.

If we return to the title of this thread, "if Schwartz lied", we have to ask ourselves, why would he voluntarily involve himself in a murder investigation by showing police that he was there at the time of Stride's death and thus making himself a suspect. I can only think that if he lied it could have only been to provide himself with an alibi. IMHO he didn't lie. If he didn't lie, and the body was discovered significantly earlier than 1:00, then the odds of BSM being the killer increase and the odds of BSM being JtR decrease.

I recently discovered that Kosminski lived next to the yard as a youngster. I had discarded him as not being smart enough to be JtR but thought he may have murdered only Stride, and this latest discovery has firmed his odds with me.

Cheers, George

[GBinOz]

Doubt the IWMES could be managed without a clock.

Beware of "The Star" articles.

I agree. But we don't know where it was or even which floor, and a clock doesn't improve testimony if you don't look at it as Herlock suggests in Eagle's case.

Cheer, George

[GBinOz]

Caz has offered a possibility that his statement could be viewed figuratively. Since none of us were there, it's impossible to rule that out since we cannot ask Deimshutz if he actually heard it chime. So, we deal with such ambiguities by looking at what happens in each case. If he meant it literally, then his setting the time by the clock means he set it either by seeing the clock and hearing it chime, or potentially just by the chime, as they would be redundant. If he meant it figuratively, his setting of the time means he saw and read the time. Either way, he's got the time from a clock. All I was getting at was the fact that if the clock didn't chime (because the chime was turned off, let's say), that in no way leads to the conclusion he could not have ascertained that it was 1 o'clock.

I've not seen a description of the physical location of the clock, but there may be one. I seem to recall a thread where a photo was posted, and the clock was an outdoor one, but I very well could be misremembering that. If I'm not, though, it was visible to passersby, and he would have had no issue in reading the time from it.

If it was the outdoor clock I'm thinking of, it's up high, and Smith's priority could easily be to check out the crowd rather than look around for a clock from which to take the time, particularly if he's directly below it (he would have to move out into the street, turn around, take the time, etc; all activities that delay him from getting to the crowd). Of course, I offer that only as speculation as to one possible series of events and decision making processes that Smith could be argued to have made - in short, I'm making that up. As we cannot question him, we cannot ask him his intentions or thoughts at the time, all we can do is work with what was said, as much fun as making stuff up may be.

- Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I gave a link to some photos in my post # 1761. Here it is again:https://www.casebook.org/victorian_l....w-berner.html

The clock was in the Harris Tobacco shop window. Smith and Lamb would have had a clear view. Diemshitz would be looking from further away, possibly with the corner masonary obscuring his view. It would be doubtful if it's chime, if it had one, could be heard on the street over the clatter of the horse's hooves.

Cheer, George

[GBinOz]

His return time of 1.00 was confirmed by his wife and servants by the way.

To which servants are you referring?

Wess left the club at 12:15.
Eagle: [Coroner] Can you fix the time the discovery was made?-About one o'clock was the time that I first saw the body. I did not notice the time, but I have calculated it from the time I left home to return to the club.
Kozebrodski: About twenty minutes to one this morning Mr. Diemschitz called me out to the yard.

Is that the Eagle quote about the (implied) clock that you were trying to recall?

Diemshitz closed his stall earlier than usual so he would have arrived back at the yard earlier than usual as indicated by Kozebrodski.

Cheers, George

[NotBlamedForNothing]

James Brown testified to being alerted to the murder around 1am. He supports both Spooner and Diemshutz' accounts of their movements on Fairclough Street, but Brown appears to have mistaken Spooner for a police officer.

Either that, or everyone else has mistaken Spooner for an ordinary member of the public. Times, Oct 6:

When I heard screams of "Police" and "Murder" I opened the window, but could not see any one and the screams ceased. The cries were those of moving persons, and appeared to be going in the direction of Grove-street. Shortly afterwards I saw a policeman standing at the corner of Christian-street. I heard a man opposite call out to the constable that he was wanted. I then saw the policeman run along to Berner-street.

[GBinOz]

The following photo was taken at the corner with Berner Street (now named Henriques Street) in about 1890, two years after Jack the Ripper committed one of his murders in the street. From 1871 to at least 1881, Cord Lemmerman lived at 29 Berner Street with his wife Sophia Elizabeth, three children, and fourteen other people.


This is the view Diemshitz would have had just before he turned into Berner St. Of course it was alot darker at 1 o'clock in the morning.....or 12:45 in the morning.

Cheers. George

[GBinOz]

A few yards east, and still looking east, in circa 1895. The Duke of Clarence pub on the left was at 71 Commercial Road, on the corner of Greenfield Road.


Diemshitz would have been starting his turn from about where the white waggon with the two horses is located.

Cheers, George

[NotBlamedForNothing]

Great work, George

[GBinOz]

Modern night shot, building still standing.

Cheers, George