Witness Testimony: Albert Cadosche

[Lewis C]

Thank you for taking the trouble to answer my post.

I was of course waiting for Jeff to answer, but it may be that he thinks that after his making a remark about my alleged ignorance, it is I who have rubbed him up the wrong way and not vice-versa.

I am sure that your estimate of 14 minutes is an over-estimate, because Cadoche's estimate was obviously earlier than 5:25.

He indicated that it was very soon after 5:20.

What you say is beside the point is obviously not beside the point!

What is the point of giving a range if you are going to disregard most of it?

If Cadoche heard the 'no' between 5:12 and 5:32 and Long passed by at 5:21 to 5:41, then by the time the couple could have finished their conversation, walked to number 29, gone through the passage and into the yard, the Long range for hearing 'no' is at least 5:23 to 5:43.

That means most of the Cadoche rage for hearing the 'no' is too early.

The odds are still against the discrepancy between the two timings being resolved.

You wrote:

... if we assume that she heard the 5:30 chime rather than the 5:15 chime, which is assuming a lot ...

Is it?

Is it as great an assumption as the assumption that she arrived at the market early, even though she testified that she arrived there at about 5:32, and the evidence suggests that she went there regularly at about the same time?

Is it as great an assumption as the assumption that Cadoche arrived late for work without any of his colleagues or superiors noticing it, and even though he must have gone to work at about the same time each day?

The question at hand is whether there's a conflict between the testimonies of Cadosch and Long. If there's a way that the testimonies can reasonably be reconciled, then there's no conflict. It will always be the case that it is necessary to "disregard most of" a range for two events to be reconciled except in cases where the times match perfectly. So the approach that you're taking has the same practical result as requiring that all clocks be perfectly synchronized.

I've seen both 5:20 and 5:25 used for Cadosch, but if we go with 5:12-5:32 for Cadosch's range, it still works.

I don't assume either way on Long. She may have been right or wrong about what time it as when she heard the chime.

[Fleetwood Mac]

Why We Forget Things, According to Neuroscience | Time

From an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of memory “is not to allow us to sit back and say, ‘Oh, do you remember that time?’” says Sheena Josselyn, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, and a professor of psychology and physiology at the University of Toronto. “It really is to help us make decisions.”

Without forgetting, the evolutionary benefits of a strong memory would become redundant, says Hardt. In the course of a single day, the brain registers hundreds of thousands of bits of information, some of it relevant and much of it utterly inconsequential: the way your socks felt when you pulled them onto your feet, the shirt color of a stranger standing before you in the grocery-store line.

“You would have an endless amount of useless stuff accumulating there constantly,” Hardt says. “And each time you want to think about something”—something key to your survival, such as the location of food or the signs of an approaching predator—“all these memories would pop up that are completely meaningless and that make it hard for you to actually do the job of predicting what is next.”

We are told by behavioural scientists that the event to memory recollection is subject to external influences and internal bias, and one of the most common causes of memory error is the event not being fully encoded into the brain, and so it doesn't make it into short term or long term memory as the event actually was. The reason why the event isn't fully encoded is because it is innocuous and we are hard wired to discard non essential information.

Albert tells us this:

They are packing-case makers, and now and then there is a great case goes up against the palings. I was thinking about my work....

Ultimately, this isn't an event that demands the human mind should pay attention. It is an event that Albert has experienced in the past and he was thinking about his work.

I'd suggest that Albert is a prime candidate for that event not being sufficiently essential information to pass from his echoic memory into his short term memory, and from there he may have filled in the gaps based on information he received after the event.

In terms of the balance of probability, it's difficult to say and cannot be quantified, but I reckon there is enough there to suggest that Albert's witness statement is not cast-iron and is open to a reasonable degree of doubt (in terms of what he recollected versus that which actually happened).

[JeffHamm]

Memory IS weird. Last year I bumped into an old friend on Facebook I hadn't seen since school, and when she mentioned something about a funny incident at some morning registration or other, for the liife of me I couldn't remember the name of the teacher who was our 3rd year form tutor... but I could remember my friends old phone number.
OK... Sounds a bit creepy, but I'll explain. When we were in sixth form she used to say that the easy way to remember her number was "56 - George Orwell" and that stuck in my mind. I hadn't thought about it, or needed to think about it, for about 40 years, and as soon as we started talking it was there.
I had to be VERY careful how I phrased... "I remember your childhood phone number..."

There was another girl at my school who could remember every world capital city, every US State Capital, and all the county towns of England and Wales. Another guy could recite the periodic table (with atomic weights) at about 11 or 12 but would have struggled to wire a plug.
I think the best I could manage at that age was the ability to recite all the weapon and armour stats from the Dungeon Masters Guide and if someone asked me the AC of something from the Monster Manual, I would be right at least 90% of the time... PRIORITIES!!!!

Yah, it is a fascinating thing to study. And we can store things for easy access, and other things can be difficult to recover. Even things normally easy to recall can at times fail (think tip of the tongue events), and things we haven't thought of for years can suddenly reappear (like the phone number you mentioned).

I used to DM as well back when I was a kid. Those were fun times.

- Jeff

[JeffHamm]

Hi Jeff,

I hope that you have not misinterpreted my post. It was meant to promote the idea of ranges by highlighting the extremities. To that end I will take the liberty of quoting Errata's comments on a Richardson thread:

https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/suspects/general-suspect-discussion/9754-was-john-richardson-jack-the-ripper/page12

She posted:
I feel it necessary to point out for the sake of argument that the things we don't notice in our daily lives, things we should have noticed, are legion. There is a 75 year old hackberry tree in my front yard I didn't notice until a year ago. And I've lived here for five years. And it was a big enough deal that I wracked my brain trying to figure out if someone could transplant a tree that size. Because obviously I didn't just somehow fail to notice an enormous tree next to my garage. Except that's exactly what I did. I'm sure I saw it, but it didn't register.

Have you ever wondered how many people walk past a corpse before someone calls the cops? In New York City, it's a lot. And most of those people don't see the corpse. Or they think they didn't. Most people's brains dismissed the corpse as a homeless person of or a drunk before it ever made it into their conscious mind. Had they registered that person as dead, they likely would have said something. But they didn't.

Can a man sit down and try to trim his shoe next to a corpse without seeing it? I could, easily. I'm absent minded and somewhat notorious for not paying attention to her surroundings. If your mind is on something else, and there is at least some history of people being in that back yard... you see what you want to see. And even then you only see what your unconscious mind hasn't already filtered out as irrelevant. It's a very well known phenomenon. And it seems outlandish to think that you could be a foot away from a mutilated corpse and not notice, but people don't notice all the time. That's why it's rare that the first person to see a body in a trash can is the one to call the cops. The brain just edits it out for a lot of reasons, leaving a person able to throw out their trash while blissfully ignoring the body in the dumpster.

She might have been there, and he might not have seen her. It just depends on what he was thinking about at the time. The more lost in thought or irritated he was, the less likely he was going to register a corpse in yard.

On the bell curve of observational prowess, and by her own acknowledgement of absentmindedness, she MAY be placed as an outlier. Never the less, she has a place on the range of observational data. Posters on this forum also fall under the range of an opinion bell curve, and while the centre of the curve is currently occupied by those who favour a later ToD, that does not necessarily reflect the consensus on previous threads, or the reality of what actually happened, as it is all part of the bell curve. I agree that we have no way of knowing the individual strengths, weaknesses or susceptibility to suggestion of any of the witnesses, so we resort to discussion, exchange of ideas, and assessments of probabilities, as we are doing here.

Best regards, George

Hi George,

I thought you were just illustrating extremes, but wanted to emphasize how used inappropriately an extreme example doesn't mean much when dealing with people we know nothing about. It is basically saying that "If this person is way out in the extreme tail of the distribution then Theory X is possible" is somehow a reason to prefer theory X, when by definition being in an extreme tail is highly improbable. This is the old "possible doesn't mean probable" point that we both have mentioned at times.

I just thought it a good idea to emphasize how if one is left arguing for a given extreme is, in the end, admitting a theory has a low probability.

- Jeff

[Admin]

We are currently going through this thread and we are handing out red cards like they are candy. We're tired of the BS. So let me be clear: The next person who wastes our time and our server space with pointless drivel (like listing out synonyms for a word because they think they have a point to make but don't) or some post that's posted not to add anything relevant to the conversation but just make sure everyone knows they are still here, gets a 3 month ban.

The next person who issues a Personal Insult/Attack NO MATTER HOW VAGUE gets a six month ban or maybe a year. Depends how cranky we are when we read it.


If you find someone too ridiculous to argue with without resorting to drivel, take a deep breath, go for a walk and come back and find something that doesn't irritate you to discuss. Someone out there is just as irritated by your obstinate refusal to accept you're wrong as you are irritated by someone else's refusal to accept you are right. That's how life goes.

To be clear: STOP talking about other posters, and focus on the topic.

[Fleetwood Mac]

Did you not read what I just said? I never said it was speudo science.

You did.

In the event I was that way inclined, I could very easily go back to one of the your earlier posts and quote it here, but I can't be bothered.

So, you agree it's not pseudo science, fine.

Point 2 of the 4:

How and why did you conclude that I'm trying to 'eliminate' Albert?

I didn't say such a thing, nor insinuated it, and the qualified people's research and articles I have posted do not suggest that either.

Can you explain why you think I'm trying to 'eliminate Albert'?

Long story short, nobody in their right mind is going to go 'round the houses with your objections only for you to receive answers, ignore them and instead move into a different objection.

Assuming you're here for a reasonable discussion, here's your opportunity. Explain point 2 and then we'll move onto point 3.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Nichols' legs were still warm half an hour or more after she had been murdered.

Stride's legs were still quite warm more than half an hour after she had been murdered.

Eddowes' body was still quite warm about 42 minutes after she had been murdered during the same night.

Yet we are being told that it is obvious that Chapman would have been cold after only an hour.

If it is obvious, why has there been no response to my post above?

[Herlock Sholmes]

What is the truth that you seek to rely on ?

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

That while there are some things that we can interpret differently as individuals there are some things that should be taken as read and the topic can only be discussed if these things are accepted.

1. That we cannot rely on Phillips estimate due to specific, solid, 100% expert-backed scientific knowledge. That this should be accepted without question and without any ‘yes but’s’ or ‘but maybe’s.’ And we should not attempt to give false legitimacy to the spurious and scientifically unsound suggestion that we can compare the TOD’s of two different people when science warn us against doing this.

2. That it’s inaccurate and dishonest to make an assumption that clocks and watches were accurate and synchronised. Every single time mentioned in this case should be considered with a reasonable margin for error (I’d say a minimum of 5 minutes but in many cases more is quite reasonable) The failure to do this is more potentially damaging than not doing it. It cannot prove anything but it can highlight things that should not be dismissed. This should be about as fundamental as it gets when looking at the case. So I’ll repeat….any attempt to deny this is nothing more than dishonesty. It’s a black and white issue.

3. That we should avoid making any claims to be able to ‘deduce’ what someone would have thought or done. Especially when their lives and experiences are about as far removed from our own as possible. For example - that something might appear ‘too risky’ to us doesn’t mean that it would be the same to a deranged serial killer. Or to assume that because certain behaviour might not seem likely to us then it wouldn’t have seemed normal to a penniless, homeless, malnourished, ill-treated, possibly alcohol-addicted Victorian prostitute.

4. That we should be wary of relying on ‘stupidity’ to prove a point. By that I mean the ‘stupidity’ of someone involved in the case.

5. That we should be wary of selective quoting. From finding differences in newspaper reporting and making assumptions on their validity.

6. That we should be less wary of saying “we don’t know.” An example is the unknown period of time before Chapman was killed. We have no clue what she did or didn’t do or where she did or didn’t go. We should be making no claims about this complete absence of knowledge. There are hundreds of things that she might or might not have done and we have zero reason for claiming any of them.

7. We should avoid the deliberate attempt to dismiss a witness by looking for the smallest discrepancy in newspapers that are littered with discrepancies.

Point 3 and point 7 are clearly regularly linked on here. The thinking is often “the killer wouldn’t have done x therefore y and z must be wrong.” The 7 points above are too ingrained with some for meaningful discussion. It’s a question of whether those doing these things actually realise that they are doing them.

[A P Tomlinson]

Hi Jeff,

I once worked with a guy that was so phenomenal at estimating age that it was suggested that he must have been secretly accessing personnel files to achieve his purpose. When my wife worked in our shop she would recognise customers from years before, and remember their names and what they bought, to the astonishment of said customers (and myself). When it comes to estimating age, height and weight, I fall into the category of "worse than useless". However, my facial recognition is excellent, and my wife informs me that my hearing rivals that of Mr Spock. These are the problems we encounter in the judging the description by Hutchinson, or the contradictory heights observed by Lawende and Levy, particularly when said observations are made in less than optimum circumstances.

Best regards, George

Memory IS weird. Last year I bumped into an old friend on Facebook I hadn't seen since school, and when she mentioned something about a funny incident at some morning registration or other, for the liife of me I couldn't remember the name of the teacher who was our 3rd year form tutor... but I could remember my friends old phone number.
OK... Sounds a bit creepy, but I'll explain. When we were in sixth form she used to say that the easy way to remember her number was "56 - George Orwell" and that stuck in my mind. I hadn't thought about it, or needed to think about it, for about 40 years, and as soon as we started talking it was there.
I had to be VERY careful how I phrased... "I remember your childhood phone number..."

There was another girl at my school who could remember every world capital city, every US State Capital, and all the county towns of England and Wales. Another guy could recite the periodic table (with atomic weights) at about 11 or 12 but would have struggled to wire a plug.
I think the best I could manage at that age was the ability to recite all the weapon and armour stats from the Dungeon Masters Guide and if someone asked me the AC of something from the Monster Manual, I would be right at least 90% of the time... PRIORITIES!!!!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Did you not read what I just said? I never said it was speudo science. But we'll get to that down the line. Lets see how long your attention can actually be held before wandering and the self inflicted "Misinformation Effect" grabs hold.

(OK PI, cover your eyes, this is going to contain vehemence)

Show me the science (the stuff that YOU keep citing) applied to Albert Cadosch in terms of how it shows his memory was flawed in giving testimony.
YOUR topic, YOUR witness, YOUR scientific evidence.
Now show how they work together. Not in some weaker than water "Here's some science." (insert Link) and leaving it at that.

I'm not going to stop asking for this since THIS is what you claim you have done, but havent.

Is there a specific Latin phrase for "Starting a discussion then avoiding the subject because you realised you don't understand what you actually said?"

Here's the nearest you came... back in your very first post.

"Psychological scientist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn’t happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It’s more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics, and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider.

And this:

Contrary to common intuition, however, courtroom statements of confidence are very poor predictors of accuracy (26–29). The cause of this confidence–accuracy disparity is well captured by Daniel Kahneman’s cognitive “illusion of validity” (30). Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true."


NONE of which carries anything approaching a case against Cadosch's reliability.
It's two vague statements saying that scientists have shown memory can be influenced. It doesn't even start to show HOW. And I think that's your problem.. you didn't go into the HOW and WHY. You settled for the introductions and Abstracts and didn't bother to learn. You were just happy to find something that at face value supports your position.
When in fact I don't think you even understand your own position!
Anybody who actually understood this who has your flair for quoting Latin would cite the specific science in specific case... IF they understood them!!
You don't... you post links to what clever people said, but can't interpret them yourself. You have to cut and paste, which means you can't apply it to a specific case!

PLEASE demonstrate that I'm wrong by actually applying the SCIENCE to the SUBJECT... the thing I have been asking you to do all along and you have avoided like the plague.

ALL you have done is post links and pseudo-INTELLECTUAL definitions of Latin arguments, and not yet even tried to do the scientific thing and apply the science to the subject.

Now you want to play PI's game of "I'm only prepared to argue things that I might be able to steer to a victory".

I'm prepared to have a serious discussion when the person who Started the Thread, chose the subject, and cited the science decides to actually add those things together in a coherent fashion.

And since you clearly lack the attention to actually READ anything beyond skimming. Here is me using the phrase "pseudo science"... (Post #110 if you care to read it all in full context)

"OK, what percentage of overall convictions are overturned? 75% is a big number, but if it's 75% of a couple of pecrent of all convictions that's very different to 75% of half of all convictions.

I saw a stat recently claiming that between 2% and 10% of all convicts in America may be innocent. If its 10% that's a lot and suggests a systemic failure, if its 2% it's not that bad for a country that lacks a single justice system while many jurisdictions employ the sorts of cowboy justice techniques the people who write the studies you keep quoting are trying to highlight and tackle. It is also increasingly down to bull**** pseudo science masquearding as reliable forensic evidence.
But it also means that over 92% of convinctions based on EYE WITNESS testimony are sound.

I've mentioned this before, but DNA evidence has put the wrong person behind bars because of bad practice and cross contaminaton at the source of testing on numerous occasions, and "Bite Mark" evidence of the sort that is often portrayed as being game breaking in the TV shows and movies, has been exposed as little better than phrenology.
Do we consider DNA or "Forensic Science" to be "Unreliable"? No, we apply better standards and protocols so that a very useful tool can be used properly.
The same should apply to witnesses, and their questioning. (A point the "Misinformation Effect" studies goes to great lengths to push.)"

Since I think I've adequately answered you childish insistence on qualifying my use of "pseudoi science"
And since the chances of you saying "Ah... sorry I was wrong" are nil, lets just pretend it happened and move on.

My turn...
Are you able to either put up or shut up?

Apply the science to the subject... you know the whole point of the Thread you started.
or
Just come clean, and tell everyone you read a headline in a magazine in some waiting room, didn't read the body of the text, googled the headline when you got home, found a few links, copied and pasted them into a forum post, and copied and pasted some text that appeared clever... and at some point spotted a coffee table book on "Confrontational Latin Phrases for Dummies" and wrote few down.

I'm not dancing to your numbered questions till you start supporting YOUR own statements with some evidence.

[A P Tomlinson]

At one point, you stated it was pseudo science. I have no interest in hauling you over the coals and going back a few pages to prove the point.

It seems you are now saying: it is not pseudo science. Do I have this correct?

If so, we can move onto point 2.

Did you not read what I just said? I never said it was speudo science. But we'll get to that down the line. Lets see how long your attention can actually be held before wandering and the self inflicted "Misinformation Effect" grabs hold.

(OK PI, cover your eyes, this is going to contain vehemence)

Show me the science (the stuff that YOU keep citing) applied to Albert Cadosch in terms of how it shows his memory was flawed in giving testimony.
YOUR topic, YOUR witness, YOUR scientific evidence.
Now show how they work together. Not in some weaker than water "Here's some science." (insert Link) and leaving it at that.

I'm not going to stop asking for this since THIS is what you claim you have done, but havent.

Is there a specific Latin phrase for "Starting a discussion then avoiding the subject because you realised you don't understand what you actually said?"

Here's the nearest you came... back in your very first post.

"Psychological scientist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn’t happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It’s more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics, and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider.

And this:

Contrary to common intuition, however, courtroom statements of confidence are very poor predictors of accuracy (26–29). The cause of this confidence–accuracy disparity is well captured by Daniel Kahneman’s cognitive “illusion of validity” (30). Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true."


NONE of which carries anything approaching a case against Cadosch's reliability.
It's two vague statements saying that scientists have shown memory can be influenced. It doesn't even start to show HOW. And I think that's your problem.. you didn't go into the HOW and WHY. You settled for the introductions and Abstracts and didn't bother to learn. You were just happy to find something that at face value supports your position.
When in fact I don't think you even understand your own position!
Anybody who actually understood this who has your flair for quoting Latin would cite the specific science in specific case... IF they understood them!!
You don't... you post links to what clever people said, but can't interpret them yourself. You have to cut and paste, which means you can't apply it to a specific case!

PLEASE demonstrate that I'm wrong by actually applying the SCIENCE to the SUBJECT... the thing I have been asking you to do all along and you have avoided like the plague.

ALL you have done is post links and pseudo-INTELLECTUAL definitions of Latin arguments, and not yet even tried to do the scientific thing and apply the science to the subject.

Now you want to play PI's game of "I'm only prepared to argue things that I might be able to steer to a victory".

I'm prepared to have a serious discussion when the person who Started the Thread, chose the subject, and cited the science decides to actually add those things together in a coherent fashion.

And since you clearly lack the attention to actually READ anything beyond skimming. Here is me using the phrase "pseudo science"... (Post #110 if you care to read it all in full context)

"OK, what percentage of overall convictions are overturned? 75% is a big number, but if it's 75% of a couple of pecrent of all convictions that's very different to 75% of half of all convictions.

I saw a stat recently claiming that between 2% and 10% of all convicts in America may be innocent. If its 10% that's a lot and suggests a systemic failure, if its 2% it's not that bad for a country that lacks a single justice system while many jurisdictions employ the sorts of cowboy justice techniques the people who write the studies you keep quoting are trying to highlight and tackle. It is also increasingly down to bull**** pseudo science masquearding as reliable forensic evidence.
But it also means that over 92% of convinctions based on EYE WITNESS testimony are sound.

I've mentioned this before, but DNA evidence has put the wrong person behind bars because of bad practice and cross contaminaton at the source of testing on numerous occasions, and "Bite Mark" evidence of the sort that is often portrayed as being game breaking in the TV shows and movies, has been exposed as little better than phrenology.
Do we consider DNA or "Forensic Science" to be "Unreliable"? No, we apply better standards and protocols so that a very useful tool can be used properly.
The same should apply to witnesses, and their questioning. (A point the "Misinformation Effect" studies goes to great lengths to push.)"

Since I think I've adequately answered you childish insistence on qualifying my use of "pseudoi science"
And since the chances of you saying "Ah... sorry I was wrong" are nil, lets just pretend it happened and move on.

My turn...
Are you able to either put up or shut up?

Apply the science to the subject... you know the whole point of the Thread you started.
or
Just come clean, and tell everyone you read a headline in a magazine in some waiting room, didn't read the body of the text, googled the headline when you got home, found a few links, copied and pasted them into a forum post, and copied and pasted some text that appeared clever... and at some point spotted a coffee table book on "Confrontational Latin Phrases for Dummies" and wrote few down.

I'm not dancing to your numbered questions till you start supporting YOUR own statements with some evidence.

[GBinOz]

Hi George,

Group data tells us the range of the distribution in the population, not the ability of a given person. As with everything, individuals vary, some are are very good some are very bad, and most in the middle. We know nothing about the witnesses, so we have to consider possibility they are very good, or very bad, or in the middle, so we look to the population range and that is our range we have to work with. By working with that range we are not assuming anything specific, and effectively we are considering all options simultaneously.

Otherwise, what is to prevent me from saying Long has your memory for faces? Or you saying she is your polar opposite? we would both be wrong to do so, rather we have to look at the population range Of course, if we were there in 1888 we could find out about the individuals and set population distributions aside.

Because we can't do those tests, we are always left with ranges. Where we have two ranges we can sometimes narrow things down by looking at overlap.

- Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I hope that you have not misinterpreted my post. It was meant to promote the idea of ranges by highlighting the extremities. To that end I will take the liberty of quoting Errata's comments on a Richardson thread:

https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/suspects/general-suspect-discussion/9754-was-john-richardson-jack-the-ripper/page12

She posted:
I feel it necessary to point out for the sake of argument that the things we don't notice in our daily lives, things we should have noticed, are legion. There is a 75 year old hackberry tree in my front yard I didn't notice until a year ago. And I've lived here for five years. And it was a big enough deal that I wracked my brain trying to figure out if someone could transplant a tree that size. Because obviously I didn't just somehow fail to notice an enormous tree next to my garage. Except that's exactly what I did. I'm sure I saw it, but it didn't register.

Have you ever wondered how many people walk past a corpse before someone calls the cops? In New York City, it's a lot. And most of those people don't see the corpse. Or they think they didn't. Most people's brains dismissed the corpse as a homeless person of or a drunk before it ever made it into their conscious mind. Had they registered that person as dead, they likely would have said something. But they didn't.

Can a man sit down and try to trim his shoe next to a corpse without seeing it? I could, easily. I'm absent minded and somewhat notorious for not paying attention to her surroundings. If your mind is on something else, and there is at least some history of people being in that back yard... you see what you want to see. And even then you only see what your unconscious mind hasn't already filtered out as irrelevant. It's a very well known phenomenon. And it seems outlandish to think that you could be a foot away from a mutilated corpse and not notice, but people don't notice all the time. That's why it's rare that the first person to see a body in a trash can is the one to call the cops. The brain just edits it out for a lot of reasons, leaving a person able to throw out their trash while blissfully ignoring the body in the dumpster.

She might have been there, and he might not have seen her. It just depends on what he was thinking about at the time. The more lost in thought or irritated he was, the less likely he was going to register a corpse in yard.

On the bell curve of observational prowess, and by her own acknowledgement of absentmindedness, she MAY be placed as an outlier. Never the less, she has a place on the range of observational data. Posters on this forum also fall under the range of an opinion bell curve, and while the centre of the curve is currently occupied by those who favour a later ToD, that does not necessarily reflect the consensus on previous threads, or the reality of what actually happened, as it is all part of the bell curve. I agree that we have no way of knowing the individual strengths, weaknesses or susceptibility to suggestion of any of the witnesses, so we resort to discussion, exchange of ideas, and assessments of probabilities, as we are doing here.

Best regards, George

[JeffHamm]

Hi Jeff,

I once worked with a guy that was so phenomenal at estimating age that it was suggested that he must have been secretly accessing personnel files to achieve his purpose. When my wife worked in our shop she would recognise customers from years before, and remember their names and what they bought, to the astonishment of said customers (and myself). When it comes to estimating age, height and weight, I fall into the category of "worse than useless". However, my facial recognition is excellent, and my wife informs me that my hearing rivals that of Mr Spock. These are the problems we encounter in the judging the description by Hutchinson, or the contradictory heights observed by Lawende and Levy, particularly when said observations are made in less than optimum circumstances.

Best regards, George

Hi George,

Group data tells us the range of the distribution in the population, not the ability of a given person. As with everything, individuals vary, some are are very good some are very bad, and most in the middle. We know nothing about the witnesses, so we have to consider possibility they are very good, or very bad, or in the middle, so we look to the population range and that is our range we have to work with. By working with that range we are not assuming anything specific, and effectively we are considering all options simultaneously.

Otherwise, what is to prevent me from saying Long has your memory for faces? Or you saying she is your polar opposite? we would both be wrong to do so, rather we have to look at the population range Of course, if we were there in 1888 we could find out about the individuals and set population distributions aside.

Because we can't do those tests, we are always left with ranges. Where we have two ranges we can sometimes narrow things down by looking at overlap.

- Jeff

[GBinOz]

Other ranges, like when a witness estimates an age, have known ranges too

Estimates of height and weight were a little better

Hi Jeff,

I once worked with a guy that was so phenomenal at estimating age that it was suggested that he must have been secretly accessing personnel files to achieve his purpose. When my wife worked in our shop she would recognise customers from years before, and remember their names and what they bought, to the astonishment of said customers (and myself). When it comes to estimating age, height and weight, I fall into the category of "worse than useless". However, my facial recognition is excellent, and my wife informs me that my hearing rivals that of Mr Spock. These are the problems we encounter in the judging the description by Hutchinson, or the contradictory heights observed by Lawende and Levy, particularly when said observations are made in less than optimum circumstances.

Best regards, George

[JeffHamm]

The timings that are given should be viewed as falling within ranges, since it's clear that estimated timings won't always be exactly right. Just because they sometimes are doesn't mean that they always are. If we give an allowance for 10 minutes Cadosch's estimated time for hearing the "no" was 5:25, that would men a range of 5:15-5:35. If Long thought she saw the couple at 5:31, that would be 5:21-5:41 if we assume that she heard the 5:30 chime rather than the 5:15 chime, which is assuming a lot. So the beginning of Long's range is 14 minutes earlier than the end of Cadosch's range. All that is needed to show that there's no conflict between Cadosch and Long is that there is a possible timing where they fit. It's beside the point that one can come up with other timings where they conflict.

Hi Lewis C,
Exactly, and the same notion of ranges applies to all bits of information. Some types of information, like estimates of the ToD have known ranges (+-3 hours by todays standards), so all we can say for sure is that the true ToD will be within 3 hours of the estimated time. Other ranges, like when a witness estimates an age, have known ranges too (I cited some research data based in over 1000 estimates, and it was found that just under 50 % of the time the witness estimated an age within 10 years of the true age - which basically tells us that the ages people give are pretty useless really. Estimates of height and weight were a little better, but I can't recall the ranges at the moment. In this study people had to give estimates in feet and inches, ir pounds, ir years, etc. A while back I posted a study where they looked at subjective terms (tall/short, or heavy/thin, or warm/cold etc) where it was shown such descriptions are so variable between people they were all but meaningless. Sadly, this is the kind of statements we often have. I am still looking for a study on the reliability of statements of relative height, as in some cases we have witnesses making those kinds of statements, and relative estimates may be more reliable than absolute estimates - ir they may be just as useless. Hopefully there is a decent study addressing this question.

- Jeff