John Richardson

[Herlock Sholmes]

While you are considering your response, may I add that the claim that what I wrote (see below) about whether Chapman was seen by anyone was 'factually incorrect' is actually yet another exercise in hair-splitting:

Chapman has to have been wandering about for about 3 3/4 hours without being seen by anyone ...

It is obvious - is it not - that I did not mean that she had suddenly acquired the ability to make herself invisible to others.

I meant that no-one had come forward to say that they had seen her, and I suggest that that is how most readers understood what I wrote.

When I wrote that five people had seen Nichols in the space of 4 1/2 hours, it was hardly necessary for me to qualify that by adding that other people may have seen her but not reported having seen her, and that therefore the figure of five is entirely unreliable.

I was stating the evidence.

Wriggling.

My points are proven.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

The 'distinctions in bold' include:

So you invented a point which categorically isn’t true.

So your point that she ate nothing more than a potato is an invention.


Would you like to take the opportunity to make clear that you do not agree with the accusations of invention being made against me?

While you are considering your response, may I add that the claim that what I wrote (see below) about whether Chapman was seen by anyone was 'factually incorrect' is actually yet another exercise in hair-splitting:

Chapman has to have been wandering about for about 3 3/4 hours without being seen by anyone ...

It is obvious - is it not - that I did not mean that she had suddenly acquired the ability to make herself invisible to others.

I meant that no-one had come forward to say that they had seen her, and I suggest that that is how most readers understood what I wrote.

When I wrote that five people had seen Nichols in the space of 4 1/2 hours, it was hardly necessary for me to qualify that by adding that other people may have seen her but not reported having seen her, and that therefore the figure of five is entirely unreliable.

I was stating the evidence.

[Wickerman]

But was Anderson being anti-Semitic? He was (rightly) recognising the closeness of the Jewish community and its sense of mutual-obligation. Quite understandable and applaudable qualities.

Of course, he - and others - may have been anti-Semitic. But given the huge Jewish population in the area, it isn't evidence of prejudice to suggest the killer may have been Jewish. It would have been wrong to assume they couldn't be - on what basis?

The odd thing is, we have no surviving written opinion by Anderson throughout the duration of these murders that he suspected a Jew.
The only official memo is one he penned on 23 Oct. 1888 (Ultimate, p.134), where he writes:

"That a crime of this kind should have been committed without any clue being supplied by the criminal, is unusual, but that five successive murders should have been committed without our having the slightest clue of any kind is extraordinary, if not unique, in the annals of crime."

It appears Anderson developed his incarcerated Jew theory after he retired, yet he telescopes it back as if it was applicable to the force in general during the murders.

[Wickerman]

The question is did he meet the victims and take them to the crime scenes or did the victims take him to the crime scenes.

The balance of probability is that the victims took the killer to the crime scenes, they were picked up in areas they were all familiar with and had probably used these locations many times before.

and having arrived at the crime scenes how long would it to have taken for him to simply murder and mutilate-a matter of several minutes so he would not have needed to stay at the crime scenes any longer other than to murder and mutilate so the risk factor would not be that great

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

That the victim took the client (killer) to her choice of location? - well, lets see.

With Kelly, absolutely.
With Nichols & Eddowes, debatable.
With Chapman, yes, although whether she chose the house passage, as we read others did, or the back yard, was that his choice to move from the house passage to the yard? Who knows.
With Stride, as she was said to be unknown in the area, this does not seem to be the case - it was likely his choice.

[Paul Sutton]

Have you read Trevor's theory on the Eddowes murder?
I'll be brief, but he thinks the two pieces of the apron do not make a full apron, there's a third piece missing.
He thinks Eddowes carried cloths to use as sanitary towels, it was a sanitary towel that was found bloodstained.
He thinks the body was only mutilated at the mortuary, not at the murder scene.
Much of the reasoning he uses to qualify his beliefs are described by many here as ridiculous.
If you go along with this, fine, that's your choice, but just to explain, many on here get frustrated with his train of thought

Trevor deserves a pat on the back, if for nothing else than the fact he takes all the criticism in good faith and still stays here. A good number of members have left after not so harsh treatment. Trevor clearly has a thick skin, and his patience is unique, that's admirable, to stay your ground when so many argue against your ideas.

Members who have thin skin, who are easily hurt, tend not to stay around too long. It's a public forum and you must be able to take criticism, especially if you offer a theory of your own, you are inviting criticism. Though it can range from polite to toxic, but there is a Wicked Witch who monitors this forum who will make no apologies and take her pound of flesh out of anyone who oversteps the guidelines.

Yes, I'm familiar with the Eddowes' discussion. I think the mortuary mutilation theory is about where the organs - especially the kidney - could have been removed. This in response to the stated medical view on his documentary (I'm not saying I agree) that it was impossible in the dark and short time, for this to have been done. It's left hanging that there was a lively trade in body bits...

Oddly, a recent Zodiac theorist claims the blood-soaked shirt fragment from the taxi driver victim, was stolen by a journalist from the morgue.

There's something wrong with the medical side of the JtR murders. As to the cloth, I don't understand why it was ever spotted. It's not like this was some Swiss city-centre, where roads are spotlessly clean. And the PC who found it didn't yet know of the Mitre Square murder - why did he even think it worthy of attention?

I'm sure this must have been discussed somewhere, but it always bugged me.

I don't 'go along' with anything. This isn't the real world!

[Wickerman]

But I'm not saying he's right, merely that his view isn't to be ridiculed, at the very least.

Have you read Trevor's theory on the Eddowes murder?
I'll be brief, but he thinks the two pieces of the apron do not make a full apron, there's a third piece missing.
He thinks Eddowes carried cloths to use as sanitary towels, it was a sanitary towel that was found bloodstained.
He thinks the body was only mutilated at the mortuary, not at the murder scene.
Much of the reasoning he uses to qualify his beliefs are described by many here as ridiculous.
If you go along with this, fine, that's your choice, but just to explain, many on here get frustrated with his train of thought

Trevor deserves a pat on the back, if for nothing else than the fact he takes all the criticism in good faith and still stays here. A good number of members have left after not so harsh treatment. Trevor clearly has a thick skin, and his patience is unique, that's admirable, to stay your ground when so many argue against your ideas.

Members who have thin skin, who are easily hurt, tend not to stay around too long. It's a public forum and you must be able to take criticism, especially if you offer a theory of your own, you are inviting criticism. Though it can range from polite to toxic, but there is a Wicked Witch who monitors this forum who will make no apologies and take her pound of flesh out of anyone who oversteps the guidelines.

[A P Tomlinson]

The article is about "The identification of a criminal suspect by an eyewitness to the crime".

There was no "eyewitness identification" by Richardson or Cadosch. The article gives no reason to dismiss their testimony.

Long did identify the victim and provided some description of the man Chapman was talking to. The article give reasons that Long's identification could have been wrong. It does not prove that Long's identification was wrong.

FM previously linked a piece where test subjects were not merely tested but manipulated into giving incorrect answers by asking questions along the lines of "What colour was the {insert false object that looks a bit like the real object}..." and it was hardly suprising when the subjects thought they'd been mistaken and said "Blue". (Edit to add. It was probably a different colour, I just realised that the enitre point of my post would be discarded if I got a pernickity detail wrong and all focus would turn to THAT... so to prevent such an occurence let me be clear... this was RHETORICAL BLUE!!!)
So in practise, their memory had been just fine in THAT series of questions, but their capacity to accept authoritative directions via the manpulation showed that... surprise surprise... witnesses can be led into mistakes by dodgy questioning.

In those tests, no one asked them something like, "Do your remember being at a test centre and having a memory test done yesterday?" or "Do you recall if there was a body under the table when you walked into the room this morning?" or "Do you recall hearing something suddenly banging into the wall from the other side as you walked into the test room today?"

The fact that 1 in 5 wrongful convictions are down to bad EYE witness identification is an oft heard remark.
But that only means the eye witnesses were fine in 80% of WRONGFUL convictions...
That's not even taking into account the hundreds of thousands of sound convictions.

Malleability is likely to play a large part in some of those "Unreliable" witness statements, as cops push for a closer.

Many exonerations are achieved using DNA, but DNA has also played a part in a host of wrongful convictions... due to cross contamination at the point of testing.
So do we consider DNA "unreliable"?
NO. That would be stupid.
We adapt to implement better protocols to ensure that what is a very useful tool is used under more stringent practices.
When delaing with witness testimony the same should apply.
Over the years, the Police in some jurisdictions have become very adept at manipulating witnesses into giving false testimony through careful use of applied psychology and carefully structured questions.
This is the modern equivalent of "Beating a confession out of someone."
Guidelines on Police questioning techniques need to be as robust as those governing forensic science.

If there's one thing FM's science journals have shown me it's that, as I'd always suspected, it's kind of easy to manipulate someone into giving you the answer you want to hear.
But, anecdotally, I HAVE a memory... it's not as great as it used to be, but I'm able to remember the sort of things the people who are being dismissed were saying they could.
I know there was no body in the road on any day this week apart from Monday morning, when there was a dead pigeon in the gutter outside our drive. (I bagged and binned it before my son saw it because a cat had had it, and he'd have puked...) The last time someone bumped into my fence at night when I was out ON THE STEP while the dogs were in the garden was at about 11.00pm on Thursday as (I assume) someone in the beer garden at the pub moved the table to pick up his lighter, he was talking to someone but the only words I remember were "...dropped me ***ing lighter, hang on..." from one, and "****head" from the other.

But according to experts all that COULD have been some false memory, or acid trip, or God knows what... I think I saw and heard all that just fine.

[Paul Sutton]

With all due respect to your position, every person is well capable of rational thinking. There is no magic textbook in possession of the Met. police.
All they do is apply common sense and consider all the available possibilities.
This can be done, with or without a badge.

Experience comes into play when you can sit opposite the witness and see their body posture, feel them becoming uncomfortable, being in their presence, like Abberline was can help a great deal.
None of us here can do this, we are all dealing with written words, some poorly edited, but nevertheless, just the written word.
This forum is a level playing field with regard to dealing with written witness statements.

No, experience in actual crime detection cannot be equated with the work of armchair detectives. Which isn't to decry the work done by the latter. But experience covers so much - gut feeling, intuition, all that.

I don't doubt many armchair jockeys are cleverer then policemen. But intelligence isn't the only factor.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Exactly, the distinctions in bold are factually true

The 'distinctions in bold' include:

So you invented a point which categorically isn’t true.

So your point that she ate nothing more than a potato is an invention.


Would you like to take the opportunity to make clear that you do not agree with the accusations of invention being made against me?

[Wickerman]

This is tragic. Go and join the Old Bill, work there for years, then see how you'd react to a keyboard warrior laying down the law on witness statements.

And produce your own ideas, rather than parasitically feeding on others.

With all due respect to your position, every person is well capable of rational thinking. There is no magic textbook in possession of the Met. police.
All they do is apply common sense and consider all the available possibilities.
This can be done, with or without a badge.

Experience comes into play when you can sit opposite the witness and see their body posture, feel them becoming uncomfortable, being in their presence, like Abberline was can help a great deal.
None of us here can do this, we are all dealing with written words, some poorly edited, but nevertheless, just the written word.
This forum is a level playing field with regard to dealing with written witness statements.

[Paul Sutton]

How can someone who was 34 when he resigned from the force have 25 years of experience?

I was referring to his words on working for the last 25 years on witness statements - I presume as a consultant to the police?

It's somewhere above - post 6443.

[Paul Sutton]

I don't think his statement is anti-Semitic (about Gentile justice) but it can be interpreted as such. I think it's more about immigrant cultures, which Eastern Europeans - gentile or Jew - were.

[Fiver]

Are they being 'dismissed' or simply held to be inherently prone to be unreliable? Too many examples show the latter - and someone with 25 years' experience is bound to have more expertise in spotting them than the rest of us.

How can someone who was 34 when he resigned from the force have 25 years of experience?

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

It would be anti-Semitism if he believed the killer was Jewish because being so predisposed someone to be evil/blood lust etc. And there were certainly those who thought that (in general - the 'blood libel').

But his characterisation of the propensity to shelter a suspect might well have been used for other minorities. It's likely to be the norm, for any immigrant community. You could label that prejudice - my mother came from such a community, and I know how tight-nit that was.

And surely he did have a Jewish suspect in mind?

If I may answer your last paragraph first: no; he did not.

He makes it perfectly clear that he reached the conclusion that the murderer was Jewish merely on the basis of an (obviously incorrect) logical deduction that the murderer must be living with others, and an allegedly standard practice among local Jews of protecting Jewish criminals.


The Jewish propensity to shelter a murderer, which Anderson alleged existed, was unproven:

for it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile justice.

He did not take into account the well-known lower propensity among the local Jewish population to commit acts of violence.

He did not write:

for it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End often attack Gentile women.

And he knew that that was untrue.

I have several times issued the challenge to cite a single case of a Polish Jew attacking a Gentile woman in the East End of London.

No-one has ever been able to cite one.

I have received the answer that it is perfectly possible that the Whitechapel Murderer was a Polish Jew, even though there be no record of a Polish Jew having laid a finger on a Gentile woman.

And this is the approach to evidence of some people here.

Anderson says it is a definitely ascertained fact that the Whitechapel Murderer was a Polish Jew, even though we know of not a single case of a Polish Jewish serial killer anywhere, nor of a Jewish serial killer in the history of British crime, nor even a single case of a Polish Jew attacking a Gentile woman in the East End, and then someone says that it is possible.

But where is the evidence for the definitely ascertained fact?

There is none, and neither Anderson nor Swanson could refer to any - not even an interrogation or arrest.

And that too proves that the whole case was built on prejudice.

[Wickerman]

Differences of opinion are to be expected but when something is untrue or made up then it has to be stated as so. I was commuting on two points.

“Chapman has to have been wandering about for about 3 3/4 hours without being seen by anyone, to choose to go into the back yard of a house, the habits of whose occupants she was presumably familiar with,”

This is factually untrue. We cannot say that no one saw her. We can only say that no one came forward to say that they had seen her. There is a difference. So you invented a point which categorically isn’t true. So I was simply stating a literal fact.

“….at about the time people started to get up, and still to have food in her stomach 3 3/4 hours after eating nothing more than potato.“

This is factually untrue. All that we can say for a fact is that her last recorded food was a potato. We also can’t assume what the contents of her stomach comprised of. So your point that she ate nothing more than a potato is an invention. So again, I was simply stating a literal fact.

Inventions proven.

Exactly, the distinctions in bold are factually true, whereas the statements they responded to are merely assumptions.
Chapman 'could' have been seen by people who choose to not come forward, she could also have eaten a baked potato later in the morning. Both coffee and Fast food carts were still in the main street until the early morning.