Witness Testimony: Albert Cadosche

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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

[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

[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).

[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.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

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.

But is it reasonable to assume that Long could not tell the quarter past and half past chimes apart, or that she did not realise that she arrived at work early, or that Cadoche did not realise that he arrived at work late, and that his colleagues and employees did not realise it either?

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

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).

What is the probability of the two sounds he heard being connected when they occurred about five minutes apart?

If Chapman and her murderer were having a conversation, during which she said 'no', and she fell against the fence about five minutes later, what is the murderer supposed to have been doing during the intervening five minutes?

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

If there's a way that the testimonies can reasonably be reconciled, then there's no conflict.

Here is how the coroner tried to reconcile the two witnesses' testimonies:

There is some conflict in the evidence about the time at which the deceased was despatched. It is not unusual to find inaccuracy in such details, but this variation is not very great or very important. She was found dead about six o'clock. She was not in the yard when Richardson was there at 4.50 a.m. She was talking outside the house at half-past five when Mrs. Long passed them. Cadosh says it was about 5.20 when he was in the backyard of the adjoining house, and heard a voice say "No," and three or four minutes afterwards a fall against the fence; but if he is out of his reckoning but a quarter of an hour, the discrepancy in the evidence of fact vanishes, and he may be mistaken, for he admits that he did not get up till a quarter past five, and that it was after the half-hour when he passed Spitalfields clock.

Do you find that convincing?

Cadoche gets up and thinks it is about 1/4 of an hour earlier than it really is, the Spitalfields church clock is about 1/4 of an hour earlier than it really is, and when Cadoche arrives at work about a quarter of an hour late, no-one notices?


P.S. the coroner underestimated the time interval between the two sounds.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Firstly, there is no need to make an assumption involving 15 minutes in regard to either Long or Cadosch’s evidence. It doesn’t matter how the coroner tried to reconcile the two times because that was simply the only suggestion considered at that time. Now, after additional thought and consideration we can now see that the only margin for error required is one of around 5 or 6 minutes. We recall again what Cadosch said at the inquest:


“I got up about a quarter past five in the morning, and went into the yard. It was then about twenty minutes past five, I should think.”


So it couldn’t be clearer that there was a level of uncertainty. He was uncertain about exactly what time he got up and he was uncertain about the length of time between him getting up and going out.

So this is quite clear…..Cadosch was estimating and was uncertain about these times. We can also add of course that he makes no mention of how long he was in the toilet on both visits. He also estimates that it was 3 or 4 minutes later when he made his second visit….so more uncertainty.

So we cannot dispute the fact that these times are uncertain estimates which we have no way of verifying.


Secondly, just as we know that clocks and watches aren’t perfectly accurate and synchronised even in 2023 with the massive advancements in technology it should be obvious that we have to allow for the same in 1888 (135 years ago) Not to do this across the board would be to risk getting a false picture by dismissing or assuming things unnecessarily. Whichever side of any debate that we might find ourselves on.


Thirdly, Mrs Long said:


“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.”


So, according to Mr. Long it was probably still 5.30 by the brewer’s clock as she passed the couple.


————


Now, let’s dismiss the perhaps unlikely sounding 15 minutes and talk of a mere 5 or 6 minutes. It’s difficult to conceive of anyone claiming that it would have been unlikely for a clock to have been 5 or 6 minutes out in 1888. As we speak, I can find two clocks in my own house that are out by at least that much. So a 5 or 6 minutes discrepancy is absolutely nothing. Perfectly normal, everyday and entirely reasonable.

So the suggestion is that when Long passed the couple it was actually 5.25 because the brewers clock was 5 minutes fast (as clocks often are)


And if it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the brewers clock might have been 5 minutes fast (or maybe more?) then it cannot be unreasonable to suggest that when Cadosch estimated that he’d got up at about 5.15 then he could very easily have been 5 minutes out and that it was actually 5.20. Or maybe it was 5.18 and the estimated gap between him getting up and going into the yard was slightly longer. No matter which way, the margin for error is tiny. But small periods can be significant.


And so with just the merest margin for error we have Long and Cadosch tying up perfectly. No need for an unlikely sounding 15 minutes. And certainly no need for any suggestion of manipulating a time to suit. I believe that these margins for error should be applied across the board to every single time quoted in this case. No exceptions whatsoever ever so complete fairness.



So there are clearly no grounds for dismissing Long or Cadosch on the time. No modern police investigation (if they had no way of testing the accuracy of clocks at the time of the crime) would dismiss anything on the bases of 5 minutes or so.

[Herlock Sholmes]

On the subject of the gap of time between the ‘no’ and the noise then 5 minutes would be an issue as the killer clearly wouldn’t have held Annie up for 5 minutes before allowing her to fall to the ground.


The problem with this point of course is that it requires to unsafe assumptions at both ends to make this a valid point. The word ‘no’ might or might not have been the commencement of the attack; we have no way of knowing. It could equally have been a response to a question. In making a suggestion I’m only seeking to provide an example. I’m claiming nothing as a fact…just to be clear. What if the killer, on hearing Cadosch, asked if they should find another spot. To which Annie replied “NO…he’s gone inside now so he’s not going to come back out.” Other suggestions could be made of course but the point is that we can’t know the context of the ‘no.’


The second assumption is that the noise was Annie’s body falling against the fence. But this could have course been made by the killer himself bumping against the fence.


So the situation can be made to appear unlikely if we accept two unsafe assumptions. Surely we are better served by acknowledging all possibilities without assuming that we know exactly what went on. The gap between the ‘no’ and the noise therefore should not be viewed as detrimental to any suggestion.

[Lewis C]

But is it reasonable to assume that Long could not tell the quarter past and half past chimes apart, or that she did not realise that she arrived at work early, or that Cadoche did not realise that he arrived at work late, and that his colleagues and employees did not realise it either?

First, with Long, I'm only saying that more than one thing is possible. Even if she could tell the 2 chimes apart, maybe she wasn't making a point of noticing it at the time, or maybe she misremembered it later. If there's evidence that Cadosch and Long were required to be at work at precise times, I'm not aware of it.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

If there's evidence that Cadosch and Long were required to be at work at precise times, I'm not aware of it.

But is it not reasonable to assume that people were in the habit of arriving at work at about the same time each day?

For example, Lechmere said that he was in danger of arriving late and that he started work at 4 a.m.