Originally posted by GBinOz
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Yah, we're in agreement on Long. And yes, as I say, there are lots of reasons why she might have taken longer, and I wasn't presenting that as any sort of definitive "proof" or anything. Other arguments for concern could be that her memory for her time of leaving was the error, or the locations that have been suggested for her residence are not correct (apparently the address that is given at the inquest for her doesn't exist, so there was an old thread trying to work out where she did live - a few different locations were suggested, but of course if none of them are correct, then who knows how long it would have taken her??). And of course, she could have stopped along the way and all sorts of things. I was just using it as an example of how one might start going about trying to determine where some witness errors might be determined. Obviously, if the "15 minutes to walk" were found to be reasonable, the next step would have been to question her to find out if she did stop along the way, and so forth. We can't do that for obvious reasons, so it would just end up being another thing that doesn't really differentiate, but does provide food for thought. I think, though, if it turned out that her residence was a 30 minute walk away, that would be seen as providing support for her getting the 5:30 chime correct. When I went looking at this idea, I realised that if the locations were of the 15 min type it would do no more than leave the door open, while a 30 minute walk would probably close the idea on misremembering the chime. Again, I'm not pushing this has to be the case, only that it has to be considered as one of the options we still cannot discount.
And I too am concerned that Long's identification might have been a "line up of 1", which is not a great way to do it as such procedures produce higher false positives (not always, as we see with the coffee vendor, but that's a different person).
And yes, Packer did reject Eddowes before picking Stride. But of course, if he knew Stride hadn't been facially mutilated and he had heard of Eddowes' murder, that might not be as good a "line up" as one might hope. Regardless, Packer may indeed have seen Stride, but the problem with his statements is they continuously change and some have suggested his changes seem to correspond with information that appeared in the press. That makes him an unreliable witness and probably he makes for a good example of how the press can indeed influence a witness - and perhaps indicates what sort of behaviours we would expect to see in such a witness.
In the end, as I've said before, I'm of two minds about Long (and most things). While it could indeed be the case that she saw two people unrelated to the crime, it also could be she did indeed see Annie. Her identification of Annie at the morgue should be taken with caution simply because the identification procedure does appear to be of the more unreliable sort. On the other hand, just because there are reasons to consider that she might be wrong doesn't mean she actually was wrong! In the end, though, nothing really changes whether we include or exclude her testimony.
I'm interested in her testimony, mostly because she poses such an ambiguous puzzle to solve, and I'm not concerned with which solution is correct, but I would like to know the correct solution. I'm not sure the information will exist to solve it - but hey, if one doesn't look one will never see.
- Jeff
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