Witness Testimony: Albert Cadosche

[Herlock Sholmes]

Aye, which translates to: the clocks may have been wrong, we cannot prove in what way they were wrong, and therefore it is equally likely that the clocks were wrong in a fashion that means Elizabeth and Albert were in Hanbury Street at more or less the same time.

Which would be perfectly correct and proper.

It is another version of 'we just don't know' appeal to ignorance.

That we don’t know is simply a fact.

You are told by the witnesses what time they thought they were there, and in order to believe they were there at the same time you have to bend their times up one way and down the other.

You can’t be accused of ‘bending’ if we don’t know what the time was in the first place. This is the nature of an estimate. It’s an estimate. Accurate or inaccurate. Fast or slow. An unknown. The only error is to falsely assume that we can evaluate the estimate.


'Last post on that: in my opinion it is not equally as likely, you're free to have your opinion.

It is equally likely. It cannot be otherwise.

This is a bit newer and so worthy of carrying on with this. I reckon your '5 or 6 minutes apart', is not generally agreed upon.

Can you explain how you have come up with this from the witness statements.

The last part was an error on my part. I mixed up ‘5 or 6 minutes out’ with ‘5 or 6 minutes’ apart.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Ah. So it’s believed by one of the two that all clocks should be considered as accurate and synchronised on the grounds that we can find examples of clocks being accurate and synchronised. It’s good to know the position.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Talking of reasonable possibilities, I suppose another reasonable possibility is that the 40-plus dark foreigner entered Mitre Square from Mitre Street and there met Catherine Eddowes, who after taking her hand off the fair sailor's chest had decided not to conduct any business with him, and instead had walked to Mitre Square alone.

To claim that the man was a sailor is inaccurate and an assumption. Lawende said that he had the appearance of one which could only have come from some item of clothing. He didn’t elucidate. But ‘having the appearance of’ doesn’t allow us to state that he was a sailor. Especially when we apply the police’s ADVOKATE system and see that he was actually a less reliable witness than Elizabeth Long.

And although the fair sailor was seen by someone,

You mean the man who a witness (in the dark, after visiting a club until late, looking briefly across a street) said had the appearance of a sailor.

the 40-plus dark foreigner was seen by no-one that night,

Inaccurate. He could have been seen by a dozen people. He was hardly a clown on a unicycle was he? Why should anyone have noticed a normal looking man in the streets of Spitalfields?

nor seen by anyone to enter #29 nor leave it, even though it was already getting light and people were already up and about.

It happens. Not every event that occurs in daylight is observed. This is fairly obvious I’d have thought?

And John Richardson had already visited the back yard.

Proving that Annie Chapman was still alive at 4.45.

[Herlock Sholmes]

If people were unable to rely upon the accuracy of public clocks, why did PC Harvey do so in Aldgate?

Because he had no choice but to do so.

And again……no one has said that all clocks were always wrong.

The clocks could be wrong and could be poorly synchronised should be accepted without question. Do you accept that fact without question?

[Lewis C]

That's exactly it! Obviously, if it were possible, one would then test that possibility by going to the two clocks and working out what the relative time differences are between them. But at that point, one no longer needs to deal with ranges because by measuring the actual clock settings one no longer has to deal with a range of possibilities. However, when faced with unknown actual values, then as long as the ranges allow for a resolution one cannot conclude there is a conflict. As such, with regards to Long and Cadosche, we cannot conclude there is a conflict, and therefore given the information we have there is nothing to resolve.

That is how range information is interpreted. It's not an opinion, it is simply the method by which one analyses such noisy data. In an active police investigation today, of course, such noisy information is unacceptable and one would be sent out to clarify the settings on the clocks. That wasn't something the police did at the time, but methods have improved since then.

- Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I'm glad that you followed up on my post because I wasn't sure that I expressed my ideas in the clearest way possible, and I think that this post of yours and your follow up post added clarity to what i was trying to say.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Clocks could be wrong and could be poorly synchronised, but that does not make it likely that one particular clock would be 6 minutes fast and another particular clock nearby would be 6 minutes slow, and that no one would notice.

[Lewis C]

I did not say that we can conclude that the two testimonies are in conflict.

I said that there is a conflict which would need to be resolved in order for the witnesses' testimonies to be taken to support one another.

That there is a conflict that needs to be resolved was acknowledged by the coroner:


There is some conflict in the evidence ... but this variation is not very great or very important... 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 ...


The discrepancy in the evidence cannot vanish, because there is no evidence that the brewery clock was six or more minutes fast nor that the church clock was similarly slow.

Consequently, the conflict remains unresolved.

The coroner didn't mean quite the same thing when he referred to a conflict as what I have meant when I've used the term here. Baxter just means that the times don't line up perfectly. When I have said that there's no conflict, I mean that when making reasonable allowances for time estimates, it is possible for the 2 testimonies to be reconciled with one another. When looking at Baxter's whole statement, including where he said "this variation is not very great or very important", I agree with Baxter, other than his apparent assumption that Cadosch must be the one whose time is a bit off. It could just as easily be Long, or a little of both.

[A P Tomlinson]

At the Eddowes inquest:

Constable Long

[Coroner] Had you been past that spot previously to your discovering the apron? - I passed about twenty minutes past two o'clock.

Detective Halse

I came through Goulston-street about twenty minutes past two,

Do we consider this to be a problematic conflict?

Hypothetical Scenario.

There’s a fight in a street. Two days later one of the men dies as a result of his injuries. Two weeks later two witnesses came forward both of whom had gone on holiday abroad after seeing the fight so were unaware of the significance of their evidence. One witness says that she’d seen the fight at 1.50 pm and that she’d arrived at her time by the fact that she’d left her house at around 1.45 and the location was around 5 minutes away. The other witness said that he’d seen the fight a little after 1.30 pm and he took his time because he’d left his phone in his car and so had asked a passerby who told him that it was 1.30 around 2 minutes or so before he saw the fight.

So should the police doubt the validity of these two witnesses because there is an apparent 20 minute discrepancy between the two?

Try reading the Warren Commission's assessment of the events around the shooting of JD Tippit, in assessing witness times and them coming to a conclusion that the shooting happened around the time that the shooting was actually being reported to the Police via the Police radio.
The witnesses (very broadly and using phrases like "about" and "around" describe a whole series of events that start from a good ten minutes before the stated time of 1:17, only one witness is able to give a definite time, (he arrived after the shooting at 1:10 tried to help and eventually got the radio working at 1:17, but the WC choose to ignore that because watches in 1963 were unreliable...) they also discounted the Police Dispatch time given because it was know to often be out by up to ten minutes...

It had absolutely NOTHING to do with Oswald being seen too far away to have gotten there in time to have done the shooting at the time the wtinesses say, and that giving him an extra 8 to 10 minutes to get there makes it the only plausible way that he was the shooter... no siree... no shenanigins here! And you would have to be a liar and a communist to suggest otherwise!

The fact that (as much as it was complete horse crap,) this was an entirely plausible situation put forward by the WC, (as accepted by pretty much everyone at the time, and to challenge it made you a "Tin-Foil Hat Conspiracy Nut") shows that even in 1963, personal anecdotal time, wrist watches and timings provided by the Police themselves were considered to have the same level of unreliability, and not considered accurate enough to establish a "True and Accurate" timeline.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Is it at all likely that someone at the market would have thought “Elizabeth got here around 5 minutes early 3 days ago on the day of the murder?” I think that we can say this would have been unlikely in the extreme unless someone was remarkably observant and clued up enough to have considered that this 5 minutes or so might have been materially useful to the police in helping to align times accurately.

As far as Elizabeth herself was concerned is it all likely that she arrived at the market at exactly the same time every day (to 5 minutes or so?) And how likely would it have been for her, in a market place, to have sought out a clock to check what time she’d actually arrived. And how likely would it have been for a woman like her to have been aware, three days later, of the potential importance of a discrepancy of a very few minutes; enough to even think of mentioning this to the police?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Try reading the Warren Commission's assessment of the events around the shooting of JD Tippit, in assessing witness times and them coming to a conclusion that the shooting happened around the time that the shooting was actually being reported to the Police via the Police radio.
The witnesses (very broadly and using phrases like "about" and "around" describe a whole series of events that start from a good ten minutes before the stated time of 1:17, only one witness is able to give a definite time, (he arrived after the shooting at 1:10 tried to help and eventually got the radio working at 1:17, but the WC choose to ignore that because watches in 1963 were unreliable...) they also discounted the Police Dispatch time given because it was know to often be out by up to ten minutes...

It had absolutely NOTHING to do with Oswald being seen too far away to have gotten there in time to have done the shooting at the time the wtinesses say, and that giving him an extra 8 to 10 minutes to get there makes it the only plausible way that he was the shooter... no siree... no shenanigins here! And you would have to be a liar and a communist to suggest otherwise!

The fact that (as much as it was complete horse crap,) this was an entirely plausible situation put forward by the WC, (as accepted by pretty much everyone at the time, and to challenge it made you a "Tin-Foil Hat Conspiracy Nut") shows that even in 1963, personal anecdotal time, wrist watches and timings provided by the Police themselves were considered to have the same level of unreliability, and not considered accurate enough to establish a "True and Accurate" timeline.

Couldn’t agree more AP. Just as a warning because you may not be aware, the subject of the JFK assassination is a banned topic on here.

[Herlock Sholmes]

What certainly is a Straw Man argument is that we are attempting to ‘move’ Cadosch’s time……because Cadosch didn’t quote ‘a time.’ He quoted ‘an approximated time,’ and an approximated time allows for a measure of leeway. Just as a reminder to assist those who might have forgotten:

“On Saturday, Sept. 8, 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.”

Cadosch’s uncertainty could hardly have been more clearly stated. In a house full of clocks I could tell you ‘about’ what time I went to bed last night but in my case I’d have to give a + or - 10 minutes on that (possibly even slightly longer)

Cadosch arrived at the estimated time that he entered the yard by adding an estimated period or time (probably around 12 hours or so earlier) to an estimated time that he got up. He estimated his time period at around 5 minutes. So he could have got up at 5.18 and the period of time could have been 7 minutes.

These are tiny amounts of time….applied either way (so he could equally have been later or earlier) So, by applying a minimal margin for error, he could have gone into the yard from around 5.15 to around 5.25. This should be an acceptable way of assessing undoubted estimations.

[A P Tomlinson]

Couldn’t agree more AP. Just as a warning because you may not be aware, the subject of the JFK assassination is a banned topic on here.

Apologies to the brass.
I'll keep that in mind, must have missed it in the rules...

[A P Tomlinson]

Back to the clocks...

I have to ask the following question.
"Do i consider it more likely that a couple of people in London 1888, used general expressions around the times of events... not having the means by which to ascertain the precise time, not having any reason to commit the event to memory at the time of it occuring... or more likely that three people experienced unconnected mental/psychological events causing one to experience delayed auditory hallucination, another to confuse which day they had seen a woman and man, and another to somehow erase a body in the backyard from his mind/memory WHILE he was looking at a it to the point where could sit on a step inches away from the discarded innards of the body and pooling blood and focus on his own FEET?

We are asked to believe that those things "might" have happened.
But suggesting that witnesses, just like so many other people who lived in that place, in that period, estimated the time of day rather than knowing it exactly, and that a five minute estimation was probably pretty good for people who didn't have watches or particularly demanding appointment schedules.
THAT's the crazy talk???

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Is it at all likely that Long would have been able to identity Chapman three days after the murder, even though it seems that she was unable to describe any of her clothing?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Apologies to the brass.
I'll keep that in mind, must have missed it in the rules...

It’s only a fairly recent thing AP. You weren’t involved in the thread.