Witness Testimony: Albert Cadosche

[Lewis C]

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Cadosch did not hear a noise of something hitting the fence. Correct me if I am wrong. I think we can accept that he heard something. Any suggestion that this is a noise made by packing case makers at that specific time in the morning doesn't hold water. Where is the evidence of a packing case maker bumping into the fence at that time. No where. There was nobody in the Hanbury Street back yard at that time to make that noise. Or if I am incorrect and one of the occupants of the house can be shown to be in the yard at that time well, then perhaps it was them. Otherwise it strongly suggests it was Chapman or her murderer and importantly when Cadosch leaves the house there are no signs of the couple that Long has just seen.

No because Chapman lies bleeding in the yard and her killer either still in the yard or climbing fences to make good his escape. Surely it must have been Chapman and her murderer seen by Long otherwise we have two couples hanging around number 29 looking for somewhere discreet to go. The evidence just seems so strong.

So who was the murderer? We have a description. It may not be the description we want but that's how it works in real life.

NW

Hi NW,

We can be confident that the noise wasn't made by a packing case, because if it wasn't made by Chapman or her killer, it would mean that Chapman had been killed prior to that. If anyone had been in the yard with packing cases with a dead body in the yard, they would have seen the body. That is, unless the Chapman and her killer entered the yard after Cadosch left, but I don't think that anyone thinks that that's what happened.

[JeffHamm]

I don’t recall Schwartz using the word Gentile? Or anything about the man’s nationality?

Hi Herlock,

I don't believe he did. Rather, his initial statement was that Lipski was shouted at Pipeman and it appears Schwartz took that to be Pipeman's name, and that Pipeman was working with Broad Shoulders. While not definitive, it would suggest that Schwartz therefore assumed Pipeman was Jewish (Lipski being a common-ish Jewish name) and by implication so was Broad Shoulders.

However, when the police pressed him on this point (who exactly was Lipski shouted at), it appears that Schwartz backed down from his interpretation that it was shouted at Pipeman, and accepted that it could have been directed at he himself (given its derogatory use at the time, and apparently he was readily identifiable by sight as being Jewish - perhaps by manner of dress and/or hair style, etc). Once he changed his mind on that point and accepted it could have been directed at him, then it that too changes the view of Broad Shoulders from a Jewish offender shouting a warning to his Jewish accomplice, to a Gentile offender shouting an antiemetic insult to a Jewish looking bystander.

The whole Schwartz testimony is quite an interesting bit of the whole case, as we have some insights into the police questioning of witness statements and so forth. It would be fascinating, and I think very informative, if transcripts of that interview, including the questions asked, were available for us to go over. I would not be surprised if there were a lot of other interesting details contained in them that have since been lost to us. Indeed, the absence of such police documents, where we're left only with summaries of reports, is one of the barriers we have when trying to get at the actual statements of the various witnesses, or at the details of the police investigations.

- Jeff

[rjpalmer]

In one source, the broad-shouldered bloke was staggering slightly, which might be somewhat unusual for a Jew on the Sabbath, but it was well past sundown and it’s not unknown to break Sabbath with a drink. There’s no law against it.

Personally, I kind of like the idea of Jewish witnesses implicating Gentiles, and Gentile witnesses implicating Jews—and outside of Mrs. Cox, it almost works.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

If it all right with you, Jeff, I will reply to your last post at

The Stride Murder

for the sake of Albert.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Cadosch gets up at around 5.15/16

Cadosch goes to the outside loo at around 5.20/21

Elizabeth Long sees the couple at 5.25

The couple enter the yard, after Long passes, at around 5.25/26

Cadosch exits the loo and hears the ‘no’ at around 5.26

Cadosch returns to the loo at around 5.28

Cadosch exits the loo and hears the noise at around 5.29/30

Cadosch goes into the house and straight out at around 5.30

Cadosch walks the 3 minutes to the church clock

The church clock says around 5.32/33


So we have no need to ‘alter’ Cadosch’s time by the 5 or 6 minutes that I’d previously suggested. The only suggestion is that the brewer’s clock could have been around 5 minutes fast which of course is nothing implausible.


Or…..


Memory is fallible as we know and Long was recalling events of three days previously. She would no doubt have heard that brewer’s clock hundreds of times on her way to the market but it’s perfectly plausible to suggest that she wouldn’t always have been at the same spot when she heard it. So sometimes she’d have heard it before she’d got adjacent to number 29 and sometimes she’d have heard it after she’d passed. If it was the case that the majority of times it was the case that she heard it before reaching number 29 it’s possible that she may have misremembered when thinking back and that she’d actually heard it after she’d passed. After all, she had no particular reason for mentally logging the time that she’d seen two people chatting normally in the street.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Why would the interval between Cadoche's first visit to the lavatory and his return to the house be 5-6 minutes, but his second only 1-2 minutes?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Because when people go to the loo they don’t go for the same duration every time.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

I am enormously impressed if Herlock can estimate variations in how long Cadoche needed each time he went to the lavatory.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Of course I can’t estimate anything like that, but I can say that any duration of time is possible. So any suggestion is reasonable and no more likely to be wrong or right than any other suggestion.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock,

I don't believe he did. Rather, his initial statement was that Lipski was shouted at Pipeman and it appears Schwartz took that to be Pipeman's name, and that Pipeman was working with Broad Shoulders. While not definitive, it would suggest that Schwartz therefore assumed Pipeman was Jewish (Lipski being a common-ish Jewish name) and by implication so was Broad Shoulders.

However, when the police pressed him on this point (who exactly was Lipski shouted at), it appears that Schwartz backed down from his interpretation that it was shouted at Pipeman, and accepted that it could have been directed at he himself (given its derogatory use at the time, and apparently he was readily identifiable by sight as being Jewish - perhaps by manner of dress and/or hair style, etc). Once he changed his mind on that point and accepted it could have been directed at him, then it that too changes the view of Broad Shoulders from a Jewish offender shouting a warning to his Jewish accomplice, to a Gentile offender shouting an antiemetic insult to a Jewish looking bystander.

The whole Schwartz testimony is quite an interesting bit of the whole case, as we have some insights into the police questioning of witness statements and so forth. It would be fascinating, and I think very informative, if transcripts of that interview, including the questions asked, were available for us to go over. I would not be surprised if there were a lot of other interesting details contained in them that have since been lost to us. Indeed, the absence of such police documents, where we're left only with summaries of reports, is one of the barriers we have when trying to get at the actual statements of the various witnesses, or at the details of the police investigations.

- Jeff

Hi Jeff,

My apologies for such a slow response.

In regard to the emboldened part of your post I wonder if you’d seen this when I last posted it. It was found by Debra Arif and is an example of the insult ‘Lipski’ being directed by a Jewish person to another Jewish person.



Sorry it’s so small Jeff, I haven’t a clue how to make it bigger and clearer.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Those people were already acquainted and the couple who are alleged to have used the insult had a grudge against the person at whom they directed it, and he was having a relationship with a young woman and they objected to it - a quite unjustified reference to the Lipski case.

That is quite different from someone who was obviously not of Jewish appearance using the insult as a person of pronouncedly Jewish appearance passed by.

According to a local Jewish newspaper, it was commonplace for Gentiles at that time to make anti-Jewish remarks as Jews passed by them in the street, and that, I suggest, is what happened that night in Berner Street.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Whether the insult was justified or not isn’t the point because we know that it was still made by a Jew against another Jew. Lipski was a figure of shame within the Jewish community and not just to gentiles. I have no doubt that the local newspaper was correct when they said that it was commonplace for gentiles to use Lipski as an insult to Jews but nowhere does it say that this was never used by Jews toward other Jews and the quote that I posted proves that this did happen at least once. And if it happened once it could have happened on other occasions.

And not everyone who is Jewish is of ‘Jewish’ appearance of course. On a previous thread numerous photographs were posted of people who were known to have been Jewish but who didn’t look Jewish. Nothing about Schwartz descriptions of BS man or Pipeman precludes them from being Jewish so we shouldn’t rule out possibilities. I’m not saying that BS man or Pipeman were Jewish by any means, only that we can’t entirely rule it out. We should be wary of generalisations is basically what I’m saying.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

We have Abberline's report, which mentions Schwartz's Jewish appearance and implies that the assailant was a Gentile.

I have already quoted from a report that the average height of Polish Jewish conscripts at about that time was 161 cm.

The corresponding average for British conscripts was about 168 cm.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47750/did-the-average-height-of-men-in-late-victorian-england-decline-due-to-poor-nutr

That suggests that Pipe Man, who was 5 ft 11 ins tall, is more likely to have been a Gentile than a Jew.

Contemporaneous reports on the almost total absence among Jewish men of displays of drunkenness in public and physical attacks on women in public suggest that Broad Shouldered Man was much more likely to have been a Gentile than a Jew.

The fact that he used a well-known anti-Jewish insult as a man of Jewish appearance passed by again suggests he was a Gentile.

One would need to have a compelling reason to suggest otherwise.

There is no such reason.

[Fleetwood Mac]

Contemporaneous reports on the almost total absence among Jewish men of displays of drunkenness in public and physical attacks on women in public suggest that Broad Shouldered Man was much more likely to have been a Gentile than a Jew.

Agreed, assuming BS man was more than the product of an over active imagination.

[Herlock Sholmes]

We have Abberline's report, which mentions Schwartz's Jewish appearance and implies that the assailant was a Gentile.

I have already quoted from a report that the average height of Polish Jewish conscripts at about that time was 161 cm.

The corresponding average for British conscripts was about 168 cm.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/47750/did-the-average-height-of-men-in-late-victorian-england-decline-due-to-poor-nutr

That suggests that Pipe Man, who was 5 ft 11 ins tall, is more likely to have been a Gentile than a Jew.

Contemporaneous reports on the almost total absence among Jewish men of displays of drunkenness in public and physical attacks on women in public suggest that Broad Shouldered Man was much more likely to have been a Gentile than a Jew.

The fact that he used a well-known anti-Jewish insult as a man of Jewish appearance passed by again suggests he was a Gentile.

One would need to have a compelling reason to suggest otherwise.

There is no such reason.

From Abberline’s report:

”I beg to report that since a jew named Lipski was hanged for the murder of a jewess in 1887 the name has very frequently been used by persons as mere ejaculation by way of endeavouring to insult the jew to whom it has been addressed, and as Schwartz has a strong jewish appearance I am of opinion it was addressed to him as he stopped to look at the man he saw ill-using the deceased woman.”

He doesn’t mention or even hint at the nationality or religion of the BS man or Pipeman. All that he states is that Schwartz had ‘a strong Jewish appearance’ which made sense if the insult was directed at him. That was all that Abberline said; he implied nothing.

——————

On the height issue we have this:

“The only other similar study on the height of Jewish military recruits in Vienna found that their average height toward the end of the 19th century was close to 167 cm – about 0.7 cm shorter than average (Komlos, 1992).“

This is around 5’6”. And as this is an average it means that some would have been shorter than 5’6” and some would be taller than 5’6”. So if Pipeman was Jewish then he was simply 5 inches taller than the average which can’t be particularly unlikely or rare. I’m 4 inches taller than the UK average and my younger brother is 6 inches taller yet neither of us are remarkably tall.

Im not in any way pushing the suggestion that either BS man or Pipeman were Jewish in any way. Only that we should be cautious when dismissing possibles because things that might appear to us to be less likely might actually have been the case.

——————

The fact that a word that was used an anti-Jewish statement doesn’t prove in any way that it couldn’t have been used by a Jew to insult a fellow Jew. And to confirm this we have documented evidence of an example of this. Again, I’m not making any claim here because none of us can possibly know. All that I’m saying is that caution is not a bad thing. Even if we think something likely we shouldn’t preclude alternatives just because we don’t have evidence for them. We have no evidence that the killer was Welsh…..but he might have been, so we wouldn’t dismiss it as unlikely would we?