John Richardson

[Trevor Marriott]

Ahh, sorry Doc, I misunderstood. If we are talking about the early time then I agree.

Cheers, George

The TOD calculated by the doctors in the Eddowes murder was spot on because we know what time she left the police station, what we dont know is if the Drs at the scene were aware of her release time before they gave the TOD

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock,

I think we can see from Eddowes that he didn't muck about once the victim was in place.

Annie's left arm was across her left breast when the body was found. If it was there previously and fell against the fence, would he have put it back? Not sure this is one of your better suggestions.

Cheers, George

it was just one from the top of my head George But it say that we can’t be anything like certain that he couldn’t have brushed up against the fence at some point. Either way though it’s far more difficult to come up with a cause of the noise that wasn’t actually connected to the murder; especially if we go with the suggestion that Annie was already dead (unless we go with HarryD’s suggestion of course)

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock,

I would see her evidence as more favourable if she "mistook" the woman for Annie Chapman, but she had never seen Annie Chapman, so it was a random woman that, after three days, she decided was Annie Chapman. The bells would only be relevant if it had been Chapman.

This is something i cut and pasted from here: https://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rip-sironi.html. It had a reference of Baddeley, A.: Human Memory Theory and Practice. :

Eyewitness testimony is one of the most widely used types of evidence available. There is a tendency, however, to believe that it is more accurate than it really is. As we will see, eyewitness evidence can be very inaccurate, even when the witnesses are fully confident about what they have seen. Before analyzing in detail the factors that determine the quality of evidence, we will examine the main features of human memory.
Memory is not like a video camera, which can capture all the events that are framed in the direction in which it is pointed, record them and replay them. Our memory cannot do this. We do not absorb information passively in order to replay it exactly as received; our memory is an active, creative process that can be inaccurate for a variety of reasons. For an item of information to be remembered it must go through three main stages: it must be encoded into memory, stored in memory and, finally, retrieved from memory. Problems can occur at each of these stages.
Encoding
Encoding is the process of storing or representing information in memory. What is encoded depends on the direction where an individual’s attention is directed at a particular time and what is taken in or perceived. Owing to our limited capacity to concentrate, we cannot pay attention to, or take in, all the information in our environment at any particular moment, but tend to focus on what is most important for us at the time. This depends both on the person and on the environment. Information to which we do not pay active attention is rarely encoded and, obviously, something that is not encoded in the first place cannot be remembered later on. Even when we pay attention to something there is no guarantee that it will be encoded.
Storage
Since we do not encode everything that we observe, our memory contains gaps. To make sense of these gaps, we may ‘fill them in’ to fit in with our attitudes, beliefs and expectations about a particular event or person. External sources may also be incorporated into memory. For example, if we are told, incorrectly, that a person we have met had a moustache, this information may be incorporated into memory. We may come genuinely to believe the person had a moustache.
Retrieval
We may have encoded information and stored it, but obviously we cannot claim to have ‘remembered’ material successfully unless we can retrieve it from memory. Successful retrieval from memory depends not only on adequate encoding and storage but on other things as well. Retrieval cues can have a considerable effect on our ability to ‘call up’ information from memory.

I find this interesting, even apart from our discussions. We know that Cadosch was thinking about his work and Long testified that they she did not take much notice. This could have affected the reliability of their memories.

Cheers, George

Hello George,

It is interesting and it’s certainly important to consider this when assessing witnesses. They can certainly make mistakes.

[Trevor Marriott]

it was just one from the top of my head George But it say that we can’t be anything like certain that he couldn’t have brushed up against the fence at some point. Either way though it’s far more difficult to come up with a cause of the noise that wasn’t actually connected to the murder; especially if we go with the suggestion that Annie was already dead (unless we go with HarryD’s suggestion of course)

In the still of the morning sound carries, after all cadosh was walking at the time he didnt stop to look or listen when he heard the sounds

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Herlock Sholmes]

Not so fast my friend. If doctor's estimates were so unreliable, how reliable was a solicitor's interpretation of the estimate. Probably about the same as the juror's. So let's call it as one all.


Cheers, George

That’s not the point that I was trying to emphasise though. I was talking about language because some have claimed that the caveat wasn’t aimed at suggesting the possibility of a later TOD which it clearly was (not only that but it couldn’t have meant anything else) So I was just pointing out that the Coroner certainly interpreted the caveat in the same way that I and others have.

The correct way.

[Herlock Sholmes]

No one is discarding her statement it is in conflict with other witnesses so not just her but the other witnesses must be catergorized in the same way because of the conflicts and we are not able to show which one is corrcet or they are all mistaken

You cant compare a witness to a chair which is an inamiate object, you really are struggling with this

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

So why will you never, when faced with a witness that you deem unsafe, consider it possible that they might have been telling the truth or that they were simply right.

Ill ask you again Trevor because you never responded the first time (although you may not have noticed the question) Could you please explain what makes John Richardson ‘unsafe?’

[Wickerman]

The TOD calculated by the doctors in the Eddowes murder was spot on because we know what time she left the police station, what we dont know is if the Drs at the scene were aware of her release time before they gave the TOD

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

C'mon Trevor, Dr Brown gave his opinion of a time of death at the inquest, so after the autopsy.
He doesn't say what his thinking was the moment he arrived at the scene.

[Trevor Marriott]

C'mon Trevor, Dr Brown gave his opinion of a time of death at the inquest, so after the autopsy.
He doesn't say what his thinking was the moment he arrived at the scene.

But if the police at the crime scene had been switched, on a natural first question would have been to the doctors "How long has she been dead"? my point which you seemed to have missed is that the estimated TOD could have been accurate if they had not been told that Eddowes had recently been released from police custody and would prove that estimated times of death in victorian times could have been relied upon

Dr Sequeira
[Coroner] How long do you believe life had been extinct when you arrived? - "Very few minutes - probably not more than a quarter of an hour"

Dr Brown
The crime must have been committed within half an hour, or certainly within forty minutes from the time when I saw the body.

I dont see anyone questioning these estimations because we know what time she was released and what time she was murdered

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[DJA]

Not to mention the 14 minutes between the policeman's beat.

[Herlock Sholmes]

But if the police at the crime scene had been switched, on a natural first question would have been to the doctors "How long has she been dead"? my point which you seemed to have missed is that the estimated TOD could have been accurate if they had not been told that Eddowes had recently been released from police custody and would prove that estimated times of death in victorian times could have been relied upon


www.trevormarriott.co.uk

It would prove no such thing Trevor. It’s exactly as we have been saying all along. No one has said that a Victorian Doctor couldn’t get it right at times. But you couldn’t rely on them being correct every time. The methods used just weren’t reliable then and they aren’t reliable now. What special ability did Phillips have that would exempt him from this?

If you gave a person a quick view of the face of a passerby and then asked them to pick the face out of a set of photographs and then you repeated this exercise another twice and the person got it correct 3 times would that mean that you could rely on that person being an infallible witness? Getting an identification correct every time that you might ask him?

Why are you still resistant to this? Why are you still tying to make Phillips infallible or the possessor of a level of skill and knowledge that he couldn’t possibly have had?

[Herlock Sholmes]

In the still of the morning sound carries, after all cadosh was walking at the time he didnt stop to look or listen when he heard the sounds

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

All that we know is that he was a very few feet from the fence. He was honest and cautious enough to admit that he couldn’t be certain about the ‘no’ even though his first impression was certainly that it came from number 29. Then apparently in that same conversation that same person threw caution to the wind or lied.

Do you accept the possibility that he told the truth and was correct?

[Wickerman]

But if the police at the crime scene had been switched, on a natural first question would have been to the doctors "How long has she been dead"?

The reason a doctor is called is to certify death, you know that.
A doctor is not expected to estimate when death occurred, just that it had occurred, so she can be moved to the dead house, or the hospital.

.....my point which you seemed to have missed is that the estimated TOD could have been accurate if they had not been told that Eddowes had recently been released from police custody and would prove that estimated times of death in victorian times could have been relied upon

I didn't miss your point.
I, in turn, was pointing out that an estimate given at the inquest carries more weight due to what the doctor has learned from the autopsy.

Dr Sequeira
[Coroner] How long do you believe life had been extinct when you arrived? - "Very few minutes - probably not more than a quarter of an hour"

Dr Brown
The crime must have been committed within half an hour, or certainly within forty minutes from the time when I saw the body.

You need to have those same questions being asked in Mitre Sq., when the doctors arrived, not days later at the inquest. The answers 'could' be different as the doctor knows little to nothing the moment he arrives, but after the autopsy he has learned a great deal more.

I dont see anyone questioning these estimations because we know what time she was released and what time she was murdered

Right, learning the former could influence the latter. But, none of us know if it did.

[Doctored Whatsit]

I don't think we should get too excited about the apparent accuracy of the doctors' ToD estimates in the Eddowes' case. Even Inspector Collard had an opinion at the inquest, "The blood flowing from her was in a liquid state,not congealed, and from his experience he should say that the body had not been there for more than a quarter of an hour." So he estimated appx 1. 48 am.

[Trevor Marriott]

The reason a doctor is called is to certify death, you know that.
A doctor is not expected to estimate when death occurred, just that it had occurred, so she can be moved to the dead house, or the hospital.



I didn't miss your point.
I, in turn, was pointing out that an estimate given at the inquest carries more weight due to what the doctor has learned from the autopsy.



You need to have those same questions being asked in Mitre Sq., when the doctors arrived, not days later at the inquest. The answers 'could' be different as the doctor knows little to nothing the moment he arrives, but after the autopsy he has learned a great deal more.



Right, learning the former could influence the latter. But, none of us know if it did.

The doctors were giving the times of death based on their crime scene observations.

How could a doctor give details of the estimated time of death at an inquest after a 12 hour gap between murder and post mortem?

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[JeffHamm]

Hi Herlock,

I would see her evidence as more favourable if she "mistook" the woman for Annie Chapman, but she had never seen Annie Chapman, so it was a random woman that, after three days, she decided was Annie Chapman. The bells would only be relevant if it had been Chapman.

This is something i cut and pasted from here: https://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rip-sironi.html. It had a reference of Baddeley, A.: Human Memory Theory and Practice. :

Eyewitness testimony is one of the most widely used types of evidence available. There is a tendency, however, to believe that it is more accurate than it really is. As we will see, eyewitness evidence can be very inaccurate, even when the witnesses are fully confident about what they have seen. Before analyzing in detail the factors that determine the quality of evidence, we will examine the main features of human memory.
Memory is not like a video camera, which can capture all the events that are framed in the direction in which it is pointed, record them and replay them. Our memory cannot do this. We do not absorb information passively in order to replay it exactly as received; our memory is an active, creative process that can be inaccurate for a variety of reasons. For an item of information to be remembered it must go through three main stages: it must be encoded into memory, stored in memory and, finally, retrieved from memory. Problems can occur at each of these stages.
Encoding
Encoding is the process of storing or representing information in memory. What is encoded depends on the direction where an individual’s attention is directed at a particular time and what is taken in or perceived. Owing to our limited capacity to concentrate, we cannot pay attention to, or take in, all the information in our environment at any particular moment, but tend to focus on what is most important for us at the time. This depends both on the person and on the environment. Information to which we do not pay active attention is rarely encoded and, obviously, something that is not encoded in the first place cannot be remembered later on. Even when we pay attention to something there is no guarantee that it will be encoded.
Storage
Since we do not encode everything that we observe, our memory contains gaps. To make sense of these gaps, we may ‘fill them in’ to fit in with our attitudes, beliefs and expectations about a particular event or person. External sources may also be incorporated into memory. For example, if we are told, incorrectly, that a person we have met had a moustache, this information may be incorporated into memory. We may come genuinely to believe the person had a moustache.
Retrieval
We may have encoded information and stored it, but obviously we cannot claim to have ‘remembered’ material successfully unless we can retrieve it from memory. Successful retrieval from memory depends not only on adequate encoding and storage but on other things as well. Retrieval cues can have a considerable effect on our ability to ‘call up’ information from memory.

I find this interesting, even apart from our discussions. We know that Cadosch was thinking about his work and Long testified that they she did not take much notice. This could have affected the reliability of their memories.

Cheers, George

Hi George,

I've recently just done my lectures on memory, and we cover encoding, storage, and retrieval issues. It's a fascinating area of research in psychology, both from a basic research perspective (just trying to figure out how it works; memory in "the lab") and also from an applied perspective (such as eye witness testimony; memory in "the wild").

There's a lot of research that suggests far more gets encoded than it may appear, with some going so far as to say that virtually everything we experience, whether attended or not, gets encoded and that the main problem of failures of memory is at the retrieval end coupled with the issue of alteration of stored memories. I tend to think that's a bit on the extreme side as I do not believe any aspect of human cognition is an "infallible process", and therefore there will be encoding errors as well. The main point, though, is that information can be encoded, and stored, but still be nonretrievable.

Ebbinghaus, who is considered the founder of modern memory research, performed his research in the 1800's. What he would do is memorize a list of 30 nonwords, constructed as consonant-vowel-consonant clusters (i.e. JIX) that did not sound like real words. This was to avoid already existing memory structures from language, etc, to get involve and complicate things. Anyway, he would go through the list until he could recall it twice through without mistakes and record how many times it required him to do so. Then, he would wait some interval, which might be a few minutes, or it might be many days (I think a month was his longest). Then, he would try and recall the list again. He might not remember a single one on his first attempt. However, he found that even after a month, he required fewer repeats to reach the same twice through correct level of performance. Let's say it took him 25 attempts the 2nd time, for a savings of 5 (or 5/30, ~16.7%). Plotting savings over time, he found the initial decrease to be rapid, approaching an asymptote that was not zero (so never "lost" completely).

Estimating how much has been encoded and stored produces different values depending upon how one tests memory. Recall tests tend to produce the lowest estimates, recognition tests tend to suggest more information has been encoded and stored, and if you use what's called an "implicit test" of memory, there's evidence for even more information to have been encoded and stored (Ebbinghaus' savings measure tends to suggest even more has been encoded and stored, but it is such a time consuming procedure to implement it is not used as often).

There are ways to improve recall performance, though. Through the repeated recalling of an event, it is common for details not recalled in the first instance to be recalled in subsequent retellings. The notion is that stored information that was not retrieved the first time gets a boost from the reactivation of the memory, and so on the next iteration more details emerge. The danger, though, is that with each retelling and activation of the memory the stored information is put at risk of being contaminated, and false details get implanted. Elizabeth Loftus has examined these "false memories" over many years in the context of eye-witness testimony, and they are a very real problem.

The thing is, if we examine things like Richardson's testimony, which appears to show increasing detail, we cannot know for certain if these details are reflective of an improvement in his testimony due to successful reactivation of the memory bringing out true details, or if they are false memories that have somehow become implanted during his retellings.

One thing we do need to consider, though, is what would be the source of the false details? Normally, they have to be inserted, sometimes inadvertently due to the way they are questioned (more likely "in the wild"), or in the lab, deliberately inserted by the questioner (more likely "in the lab"). For example, in some of Loftus' studies, people watch a short vide of a car accident. When later being questioned, if they are asked "Did you see the broken headlight?", a far greater percentage of people will respond "yes" than if they are asked "Did you see a broken headlight?" (I've bolded the critical wording difference). Because there was no broken headlight in the video, all yes responses are false details. When then asked to recount what they saw, people who responded yes during the interview will recount the event including seeing a broken headlight.

Her research has shown that false memories can be for more than just details like that, though, and she's done some studies where the create false memories where the person remembers seeing Bugs Bunny at Disney Land (which, of course, is impossible as Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character).

But, if Richardson's "cutting his boot" is a false memory, we have to ask where that could have come from, and personally, I can't see that being deliberately or inadvertently inserted by some external source. Rather, it looks far more like a true detail that emerges from the repeated retelling of an event.

With Long's testimony, which obviously could indeed be a misidentification, also needs to be examined. While she might indeed be mistaken, and saw someone other than Annie, we still have as evidence the fact that she did identify Annie as the woman she saw. We can question that, but we cannot dismiss the fact that she may really have seen Annie, and that's why she was able to identify her in the morgue. We do run into the issue that her stated time of this sighting is 5:30, which conflicts with Cadoch's testimony as his testimony indicates Annie is already dead by 5:30, and probably went into the backyard around 5:20ish and was murdered around 5:25ish. If so, she could not have been spotted at 5:30 outside the front of Hanbury. This conflict, however, is open to examination with regards to how detrimental it is with regards to her statement. We know that she based her 5:30 time by hearing the chimes of the Brewer's Clock. We do not know the basis for Cadoch's stated times, although he later indicates he passed the Spittlefield's clock on his way to work and it read 5:32, which fits with his earlier stated times. Now, if Cadoch based all his times from that one clock reading, then the conflict in times may be nothing more than the typical "clock sync" problem of the day. If we were there, we could go check the two clocks to determine how in or out of sync they are relative to each other. Sadly we can't do that, so we can never rule out a clock sync problem. The other problem might be a simple false memory, she recalls the chime but falsely remembers it as the 5:30 rather than 5:15 chime. Having misrecalled it during her first retelling, it now distorts her memory and she subsequently recalls the 5:30 chime. Again, we can never rule that out either.

I'm not saying those make her testimony "reliable", they don't. Rather, it means we cannot simply rule out her testimony because the conflicts with other testimony (i.e. the time) could easily reflect memory error or even simply clock-sync errors. Of course, she also could simply be mistaken in her identification as well, but in the end we have her correctly identifying Annie in the morgue.

Basically, as with all eye-witness testimony, there are questions and issues of accuracy. Eye-witness testimony is fraught with problems like this, and modern investigations spend a lot of time trying to find objective confirmation of the details within an eye-witness's statement, and when that can't be found, those details are held "in limbo", with both "true/false" options to be considered.

Which, I think, most of us are doing. Yes, it's possible the eye-witness details are false sometimes. At issue is how many have to be false such that all of the information given by all three witnesses should be dismissed.

To me, Long is the least critical of the witnesses, while Richardson and Cadoch's statements alone are sufficient to suggest a murder in the vicinity of 5:25ish, and I find it difficult to see how Richardson's statement could include false memories about his boot repair, and I don't see it as a problem that this detail appears not to have been mentioned the first time he spoke to the police at the scene. Similarly Cadoch's statement, initially sounding like one visit to the loo gets clarified as two trips, which again is the type of clarification that emerges through questioning.

And also, because these witnesses point to a ToD that falls within the margin of error that the medical opinion produces, their testimony is consistent with the expert opinion.

All of the information we have is associated with sources of error, but despite that, all converge on a common solution. That suggests a common truth, namely that Annie was murdered probably sometime around 5:25. It's not proof of that, and I cannot emphasize that enough, but the alternative (murdered prior to Richardson's visit) require far more improbable events to be accepted as errors than the simple memory/detail errors that the 5:25 hypothesis requires, at least in my view.

- Jeff