John Richardson

[Herlock Sholmes]

And on the subject of the alleged conflict between what Richardson and Chandler said at the Inquest….

We could only claim that there was a conflict between Chandler and Richardson if Richardson had been given an opportunity to respond to what Chandler had said. But he never had that opportunity because he testified before Chandler.

Chandler claimed that Richardson hadn’t mentioned sitting on the step or the boot repair. If Richardson had been asked if Chandler was right or wrong to say this he might very well have said: “Inspector Chandler is right. I didn’t mention sitting on the step to repair my boot when we spoke in the passage way.” And there would have been no conflict between the two.

Of course if Richardson had replied: “Inspector Chandler is mistaken, I did tell him about sitting on the step to repair my boot,” then there would indeed have been a conflict between the two.

But as we have no way of knowing (because Richardson never had the chance to reply) we can’t assume what he might or might not have said in order to create a conflict that we have absolutely no evidence for. Therefore we can’t claim any conflict between what Chandler and Richardson said at the Inquest.

[Abby Normal]

Longs ID at the mortuary was the equivelant of a direct confrontation carried out in some criminal cases up unitl 2003 when viper ID parades were first used.

Because of the implications and to be fair to the person in custody these direct confrontations ID were frowned upon for obvious reasons and fraught with danger and without any corroborating evidence were of no real evidential value

So her mortuary ID cannot be relied upon and at the risk of upsetting Herlock I have to the word unsafe testimony again

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

lol!
so someone Iding a dead body and the direct confrontation method is "equivalent"? really?!?

And since the direct confrontation method was done away with as unfair, that therefore a witness IDing a dead body is unsafe also?!?

pure gold Trevor

[Trevor Marriott]

lol!
so someone Iding a dead body and the direct confrontation method is "equivalent"? really?!?

And since the direct confrontation method was done away with as unfair, that therefore a witness IDing a dead body is unsafe also?!?

pure gold Trevor

Of course its unsafe the witness is shown a dead body on a slab, of course the witness is going to Id the body. by that time the witness knows that a murder has been committed and that the victim is there before her. But to be fair to Long she doesnt make a positive ID of the body what she says is "Have seen the deceased in the mortuary, and I am sure the woman that I saw in Hanbury-street was the deceased" so to me thats not a positive ID and unsafeto totally rely on

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Herlock Sholmes]

Of course its unsafe the witness is shown a dead body on a slab, of course the witness is going to Id the body. by that time the witness knows that a murder has been committed and that the victim is there before her. But to be fair to Long she doesnt make a positive ID of the body what she says is "Have seen the deceased in the mortuary, and I am sure the woman that I saw in Hanbury-street was the deceased" so to me thats not a positive ID and unsafeto totally rely on

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Why was se certain to identify the body? Have witnesses never gone to view a body and said “no, that’s not the woman I saw.”

Also, yes we can’t ‘rely’ on the ID but we also can’t eliminate her as you tried to do a few posts ago.

[DJA]

Mrs. Elizabeth Long said: I live in Church-row, Whitechapel, and my husband, James Long, is a cart minder. On Saturday, Sept. 8, about half past five o'clock in the morning, I was passing down Hanbury-street, from home, on my way to Spitalfields Market. I knew the time, because I heard the brewer's clock strike half-past five just before I got to the street. I passed 29, Hanbury-street. On the right-hand side, the same side as the house, I saw a man and a woman standing on the pavement talking. The man's back was turned towards Brick-lane, and the woman's was towards the market. They were standing only a few yards nearer Brick-lane from 29, Hanbury-street. I saw the woman's face. Have seen the deceased in the mortuary, and I am sure the woman that I saw in Hanbury-street was the deceased. I did not see the man's face, but I noticed that he was dark. He was wearing a brown low-crowned felt hat. I think he had on a dark coat, though I am not certain. By the look of him he seemed to me a man over forty years of age. He appeared to me to be a little taller than the deceased.
[Coroner] Did he look like a working man, or what? - He looked like a foreigner.
[Coroner] Did he look like a dock labourer, or a workman, or what? - I should say he looked like what I should call shabby-genteel.
[Coroner] Were they talking loudly? - They were talking pretty loudly. I overheard him say to her "Will you?" and she replied, "Yes." That is all I heard, and I heard this as I passed. I left them standing there, and I did not look back, so I cannot say where they went to.
[Coroner] Did they appear to be sober? - I saw nothing to indicate that either of them was the worse for drink.
Was it not an unusual thing to see a man and a woman standing there talking? - Oh no. I see lots of them standing there in the morning.
[Coroner] At that hour of the day? - Yes; that is why I did not take much notice of them.
[Coroner] You are certain about the time? - Quite.
[Coroner] What time did you leave home? - I got out about five o'clock, and I reached the Spitalfields Market a few minutes after half-past five.
The Foreman of the jury: What brewer's clock did you hear strike half-past five? - The brewer's in Brick-lane.

Just in case you lot missed this on the previous page.

[Joshua Rogan]

With Packer, did he know which mortuary the body was being stored?

There's no way to know, alas. But the relevant info - including descriptions of the victims, plus the name and location of the mortuary each had been taken to - was certainly published in the press before Packer was contacted by the private detectives.

If Macdonald knew the answer, why was he asking the question? Is there a record of Maxwell describing Kelly's clothing in her police statement that we can reference? If there is, was he trying to test her consistency?

As Jon says, the coroner uses the witness statements to question them at the inquest.

The police statements (taken 9 Nov) of witnesses who later appeared at the Kelly inquest are available if you have access to a copy of The Ultimate JTR Companion / Sourcebook (or the London Metropolitan Archives), along with the inquest statements themselves. Chapter 21 The Kelly Inquest, Maxwell's statement is on page 365-6 of my old copy.

[JeffHamm]

lol!
so someone Iding a dead body and the direct confrontation method is "equivalent"? really?!?

And since the direct confrontation method was done away with as unfair, that therefore a witness IDing a dead body is unsafe also?!?

pure gold Trevor

Hi Abby,

What Trevor is pointing out is that the direct confrontation method has since been show to result in a higher proportion of false positive identifications, which is what is unfair about them when identifying a suspect - an innocent person is more likely to be identified as the perpetrator in a direct confrontation than in a line up. And group line ups, as shown in most movies, are more likely to result in false positives than "parades", where each person in the line up comes out individually for a decision. The rate of true identifications between "classic line ups" and "parades" is the same, but the false identification rate is higher in groups. I recall research papers on this, but can't remember the details of where to find it. It's a pretty common finding though. I'm not sure if direct confrontation true identification rates change, though the false positives are higher.

The same would apply to identifying a body. It has to do with the witness tending to presume the police "have the right man", and so they are more prone to pick the person that looks most like who they saw. In a parade, they have to identify each individual without knowing how many may come out.

This is why I also mentioned that it is a shame we don't know how Long identified Annie. If she was just shown Annie, we do have to be concerned about the reliability of that identification. If she was shown more than one, in a sequence, it would be more reliable. Sadly, we don't know, and given they didn't even have proper morgues, I would be surprised if it wasn't a direct single viewing (a "confrontation identification").

Just to be clear, it doesn't mean she must be wrong, only that we have to weigh her identification with a wider "margin of error", where false positive is considered as a reasonable possibility.

- Jeff

[Fleetwood Mac]

We should put this desperate knife nonsense to bed.

Inquest interview Part One

[Coroner] Did you go into the yard? - No, the yard door was shut. I opened it and sat on the doorstep, and cut a piece of leather off my boot with an old table-knife, about five inches long. I kept the knife upstairs at John-street. I had been feeding a rabbit with a carrot that I had cut up, and I put the knife in my pocket. I do not usually carry it there. After cutting the leather off my boot I tied my boot up, and went out of the house into the market. I did not close the back door. It closed itself. I shut the front door.

Inquest interview Part Two

produced the knife - a much-worn dessert knife - with which he had cut his boot. He added that as it was not sharp enough he had borrowed another one at the market

…..

So we can see from these two parts, taken before and after he was sent to fetch his knife, that it can’t fairly be said that he changed his story. He didn’t mention the second knife because he had absolutely no reason to. Firstly the coroner hadn’t seen the knife yet so he couldn’t possibly have known what comments the coroner might or might not have made about it and, secondly, the second knife wasn’t relevant to the inquest because it was never at number 29. And thirdly, he had absolutely no way of knowing that the coroner was going to ask him to fetch the knife. So very obviously Richardson only mentioned the second knife after the comment by the coroner. So there was no ‘suspicious’ changing of his story.

You must be on a wind up, surely?

Richardson stated he cut the leather off his boot with a knife.

The coroner told him to go and get the knife, i.e. the knife that cut his boot.

Richardson returned with a knife that didn't cut his boot because it wasn't sharp enough.

No wonder you've called yourself Herlock Sholmes, you're like a pissed Sherlock Holmes.

[Herlock Sholmes]

You must be on a wind up, surely?

Richardson stated he cut the leather off his boot with a knife.

The coroner told him to go and get the knife, i.e. the knife that cut his boot.

Richardson returned with a knife that didn't cut his boot because it wasn't sharp enough.

No wonder you've called yourself Herlock Sholmes, you're like a pissed Sherlock Holmes.

Your still debating this? How embarrassing.

So what we’re expected to believe is that after being asked to fetch the knife, Richardson returns and presents the knife with which he cut a piece of leather off his boot, then when it was pointed out how blunt the knife looked, he said ‘yes I didn’t cut a piece of leather from my boot with this knife I just thought that I’d bring a random knife that I didn’t use! Is that ok?”

And not only is that obvious piece of gibberish that no one with a brain cell still working would have said but we are supposed to accept that neither the coroner nor the jury noticed this piece of obvious gibberish. Come off it. Can you actually expect anyone to swallow that nonsense. That an experience coroner didn’t say “hold on, you told us that you’d cut a piece of leather with that knife and now your saying that you didn’t?!”

They didn’t mention it for one very obvious reason. It’s clearly not what he meant or said. He meant that he’d cut his boot with the first knife but couldn’t do a good enough job and so had to use a knife at the market to complete the job. If you have to resort to an assumption of idiocy on behalf of a witness, a coroner and Jury then you really are scraping the barrel. Get a grip.

[Fleetwood Mac]

So what we’re expected to believe is that after being asked to fetch the knife, Richardson returns and presents the knife with which he cut a piece of leather off his boot, then when it was pointed out how blunt the knife looked, he said ‘yes I didn’t cut a piece of leather from my boot with this knife I just thought that I’d bring a random knife that I didn’t use! Is that ok?”

I'm expected to believe what is in the inquest statements.

You're expected to go with invention and statement manipulation, which you demonstrate in pretty much every one of your posts including this one I've quoted.

[Trevor Marriott]

Hi Abby,

What Trevor is pointing out is that the direct confrontation method has since been show to result in a higher proportion of false positive identifications, which is what is unfair about them when identifying a suspect - an innocent person is more likely to be identified as the perpetrator in a direct confrontation than in a line up. And group line ups, as shown in most movies, are more likely to result in false positives than "parades", where each person in the line up comes out individually for a decision. The rate of true identifications between "classic line ups" and "parades" is the same, but the false identification rate is higher in groups. I recall research papers on this, but can't remember the details of where to find it. It's a pretty common finding though. I'm not sure if direct confrontation true identification rates change, though the false positives are higher.

The same would apply to identifying a body. It has to do with the witness tending to presume the police "have the right man", and so they are more prone to pick the person that looks most like who they saw. In a parade, they have to identify each individual without knowing how many may come out.

This is why I also mentioned that it is a shame we don't know how Long identified Annie. If she was just shown Annie, we do have to be concerned about the reliability of that identification. If she was shown more than one, in a sequence, it would be more reliable. Sadly, we don't know, and given they didn't even have proper morgues, I would be surprised if it wasn't a direct single viewing (a "confrontation identification").

Just to be clear, it doesn't mean she must be wrong, only that we have to weigh her identification with a wider "margin of error", where false positive is considered as a reasonable possibility.

- Jeff

Nicely put Jeff

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Herlock Sholmes]

I'm expected to believe what is in the inquest statements.

You're expected to go with invention and statement manipulation, which you demonstrate in pretty much every one of your posts including this one I've quoted.

Of course. And these Press versions of the inquest testimony are precise, verbatim, faultless versions of what was said of course.

So Phillips is infallible. Chandler is infallible. The press reporters are infallible. Richardson was a cretin. Cadosch was a fantasist. The coroner was an incompetent buffoon. The jury were asleep. The police at the crime scene were the Keystone Cops. After leaving the doss house Chapman went into suspended animation and did nothing. Chandler somehow disagreed with a statement that Richardson never made in the first place. And the word ‘caveat’ means a different thing in your world to everyone else’s.

No problem, we just have to accept all of the above and we can give you a big pat on the back.

Try harder Clouseau.

[JeffHamm]

Nicely put Jeff

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

Thanks Trevor.

Oh, and having been reminded of this research, I've done a bit of snooping as it's been a long time since I've looked at this particular quesiton.

The early studies did indeed report higher false positives for sequential (parade) lines up than simultaneous line ups, with similar correct identifications. Those were back in the mid-80s though (in Lindsay & Wells, 1985, for simultaneous it was reported 58% correct, with 43% false positives, while with sequential it was 50% correct, and 17% false positives; the 58% vs 50% for correct identifications was not statistically reliable as a difference). In a later analysis of data from multiple studies allowing them to collate findings from 2753 line ups, Lindsay and Turtle (1999) found both reduced (45% vs 20% for false positives, and 53% vs 42% for correct identifications, for simultaneous vs sequential line ups, respectively).

But, as one can see, with a simultaneous line up, an identification is almost equally likely to be correct or false positive, while with a sequential it is about twice as likely to be correct as a false positive (which, given the implications of a false positive, is still not something to be happy about).

There are a lot of other issues involved as well, particularly when the witness and suspect are from different racial backgrounds. False positives go up quite a bit, and there also appear to be differences related to the age of the witness, and so forth.

As I say, of the 3 witnesses, despite Long's identification of Annie at the morgue, I see her as the witness with the most reason to be cautious about building upon. At the same time, I also see her as the least critical of the 3, so tend to put her aside and focus on the others. I can see how she could be correct in her identification, but wrong about the timing, but also see how she could be correct about the timing and wrong in her identification. But to me, no matter which of those is the true situation (and we can never know which is true anymore), the combination of Richardson, Cadoche, Davies, and Dr. Phillip's all converge on 5:25ish as a mutually plausible ToD that fits with all of their testimonies.

And that is the basis of my preference for the 5:25 hypothesis; not preference just means I see it as the most likely of all the explanations, and it does not mean I see it as the only possible explanation because less likely things do sometimes happen, just not as often (by definition).

- Jeff

[Herlock Sholmes]

Fairly put as ever Jeff

[JeffHamm]

Fairly put as ever Jeff

Thanks Herlock.

We're dealing with information that's over 130 years old, long past the time we can follow up or seek clarifications. Moreover, the information that survives to this day was gathered by techniques far less honed than those used today. Even today there are many complications with dealing with eye-witness testimonies. How a witness is interviewed, even when done with the best of intentions (so setting aside cases where a police officer had developed tunnel vision and railroads a witness/suspect, which we also knows happens), small changes in word choice in how a question gets asked can influence the response such that the witness statement becomes less accurate than it would have been otherwise.

We're also dealing with far less developed forensic techniques, and so medical experts of the day simply were not equipped with the knowledge we now take for granted. It's not disparaging of them or their abilities, it is a simple matter of fact that we know more about the reliability of medical information now than was known then.

My own personal view, which I've said on a number of threads, is that there simply is not sufficient information to prove anything apart from there was a series of murders. We can't even be sure which victims are part of the series and which are not; and this is something that even in a series committed today is a very difficult question to answer. DNA is starting to make it possible to find definitive connections, but it is not always the case that DNA is found at a scene, and not all DNA found necessarily means that was the offender (particularly in cases where a suspect is known to a victim; is that suspect's DNA at the victim's house because they knew each other or because they are actually the offender? Pending upon how it was located, and where, can greatly influence it's evidential value).

So with the above opinion in mind, I think it is critically important that we recognize the insufficiency of the information we have to conclusively prove anything, and to simultaneously recognize that all statements of "fact" are associated with "measurement error" (for lack of a better term). Long's identification of Annie might appear to be a 50/50 thing; either she's right or wrong in her identification. But that isn't a proper evaluation of "measurement error". Rather, how probable she is to be right or wrong depends upon the specifics of how that identification took place. If she was shown a group of bodies (like a simultaneous line up), there is a very good argument to be made that she made a false positive identification, but there is also a good argument she may have made a correct one. And it's about 50/50 (even if there was more than 2 choices for her to select from). If, however, she was taken to multiple different locations, and had to make a decision each time, then the "measurement error" narrows and we become more inclined to think she may have correctly identified Annie, but we shouldn't ignore the fact that about 1:3 times that would also be a false positive. That's still a high failure rate, and one that cannot be ignored.

But just because each individual bit of evidence is "noisy", and has some sort of error range associated with it, the more noisy bits of information one has to line up, the greater the chance a common solution emerges. In the case of Annie's murder, that is what I've been focusing on, the fact that all of the individually largish error ranges all tend to include a common time point, around 5:25. And when that happens, that is an indication that underneath all the noise there appears to be a common possible "truth" emerging. It is not, and never can be, proof that truth is True with a capitol T, but it does indicate that is the most supported interpretation (which is all I'm saying we have).

I have no problem with people who want to explore other possibilities, sometimes the rare event happens. But those other possibilities are, given what we have, less supported options. Nothing wrong with considering them all the same, but they are less consistent with the information we have.

As such, I tend to think our best option is to try and sort the order of the alternatives, which one does by looking at things under a systematic organization of the information.

Something like this:

Evidence:
Dr. Phillips, Richardson, Long, Cadoche, Davies (open door), leggings spring: -> ToD 5:25ish
Drop the leggings spring and we still get 5:25ish
Drop the leggings spring and the open door (Davies), we still get 5:25ish
Also drop Long, we still get 5:25ish
Drop Cadoche, we get sometime after 5:00 or so, which includes but does not specify 5:25ish
Drop Richardson (leaving only Dr. Phillips), we get a wide range spanning hours, centred around 4:30ish, which also still includes 5:25ish.

We could drop things in different orders than as I've listed above as an example, and basically, at no point do we end up being able to preclude 5:25, we only end up widening the window of time we have to consider as possible (so it may lower the probability of 5:25 being the "right time", but it never results in 5:25 being out of the running).

From the above, at least as I've presented it, Cadoche is the witness who has to be discarded to really remove 5:25ish; we could drop Richardson for example, and if we include Cadoche we still get around 5:25. Richardson alone simply means at some point after he left (around 5:00ish I believe), so if we drop Cadoche we can no longer point to 5:25 and maybe she was there since 5:05 type thing, bringing the ToD closer to Dr. Phillips' 4:30 estimate, which we know has such a wide range of error is unlikely to be bang on anyway.

While 5:25 appears to leave very little time for the murder and mutilations, ignoring the debate over organ harvesting, we know that very little time was available to perform even more extensive mutilations to Eddowes, which were performed in worse lighting conditions. So even that doesn't really present a problem (and it points to the over estimations made at the time as to how long it would have taken - because this was such a unique murder that the doctors at the time had no experience with, so their estimations for how long will be error prone, which we can see was the case after Eddowes' murder where there simply wasn't much time available).

Basically, in order to get to a ToD at, or earlier, than 4:30, we have to conclude that all the evidence should be discarded other than Dr. Phillips, and even then we cannot even exclude 5:25 entirely.

Therefore, I see it as being entirely irrational to conclude anything other than 5:25ish is the most supported time, that after 5:00 is the next most reasonable, and that prior to 4:30 is the least supported hypothesis.

That doesn't mean it's wrong to say "I'm betting on the least supported because I am comfortable setting aside all other information as being wrong". And yes, onehas to say it's wrong, not just possibly wrong because we know all the evidence is possibly wrong as stated - that's what the margins of error represent after all. I just don't see any compelling reason to conclude any of the evidence "must be wrong" to justify it being discarded. I can see the justification of considering the possibility some bit is wrong though.

We have 4 eyewitnesses (Richardson, Long, Cadoche, and Davies), all of whom have to be wrong before we open up the possibility of before 4:30 being the ToD. If any of them are right, though, 4:30 disappears. Let's say there is a 50% chance for each of them to be wrong. For all 4 out of 4 to be wrong that is 0.5 to the power of 4, or 6.25% chance of all 4 to be incorrect. And all it takes is for 1 of them to be correct to rule out that earlier time (which has a 93.75% chance of being the case).

I could be accused of being overly generous, though, and some may feel the odds of them being wrong is greater than 50%, say 80% likely to be wrong.

So let's say there is an 80% chance for each of them to be wrong (so they only have a 20% chance of being correct). For 4 out of 4 to be wrong, that is 0.8 to the power of 4, which is 40.96%, meaning, the probability of one, or more, of them, being correct is still greater than the probability of them all being wrong. And it only takes one of them to rule out 4:30 and earlier.

This is what I mean when I say that 5:25ish is the most supported hypothesis, given that we have to deal with probabilities.

And to be clear, it is still possible that all 4 were wrong. Even if they have a 50/50 chance of being correct, sometimes all 4 will be wrong (it just happens to be about 6.25% of the time, so it's far less likely). And if we go with 80% likely to be wrong, then we're still betting on the less probable horse, but the odds are not so long (sorry for the pun, not entirely unintentional).

- Jeff