Take Your Pick

[Herlock Sholmes]

This point could provide a possible explanation imo.

[c.d.]

Correct.

Thanks, Herlock.

c.d.

[Sunny Delight]

Yeah I think we can be 99% sure it was Lawende.

[Scott Nelson]

People may be forgetting, but Anderson and Swanson were saying the suspect was positively identified, but the witness refused to give further information that would help convict the suspect.

[c.d.]

It most certainly could have been Lawende but simply talking to someone on the street, as he apparently witnessed, is not a crime. Yes, it is extremely suspicious that the woman would be found dead shortly thereafter but I can't see any chance of a conviction in court unless the police had other evidence to go along with his identification.

I am wondering could the police have been trying to get a confession as opposed to grounds for going to court in an attempt to get a conviction?

c.d.

[c.d.]

People may be forgetting, but Anderson and Swanson were saying the suspect was positively identified, but the witness refused to give further information that would help convict the suspect.

The police believed they had finally caught Jack the Ripper. They had to have an identification from an eye witness. It beggars belief that they would have simply said " well that's a shame, but we respect your religious beliefs. Thanks for coming in anyway, have a nice day."

c.d.

[Herlock Sholmes]

It’s also worth recalling from the Inquest:

[Coroner] Would you know him again?
[Lawende] I doubt it.

[Wickerman]

Yeah I think we can be 99% sure it was Lawende.

The problem I have, possibly through my own ignorance, is Lawende was a City Police witness, nothing to do with the Met., though I think the City Police were under the Home Office in 1888, so still under Anderson.
If you recall, Macnaghten also referred to a City Police witness, but I think he confused the Stride murder with Eddowes.

[Wickerman]

People may be forgetting, but Anderson and Swanson were saying the suspect was positively identified, but the witness refused to give further information that would help convict the suspect.

How does that work?
All they need is a positive identification - what else?
I though the witness refused to say so in court, but then we hear an imbecile cannot be charged with a criminal offense.
So, how would they end up in a court?

[The Rookie Detective]

Neither Swanson, Anderson or MacNaghten had any understanding of psychopathy.

They all assumed that the only kind of man who could have committed such heinous murders; was a maniac or lunatic.
In their collective eyes; the killer would have presented as a man with unsound mind and therefore relatively easy to spot.

The biggest piece of luck the Ripper had, was that the concept of Psychopathy in the context of Criminology had only really been established a few years, and was comparatively new compared to your generic raving lunatic or psychotic maniac that one might expect to carry out such barbaric crimes.

When you have senior police officers who are assured of their belief that the perpetrator was a lunatic/Jewish lunatic; it really brings a degree of shallow-minded arrogance to proceedings.

They senior police officers may have had the best intentions; but it seems that none of them at the time would have recognised a clinical psychopath even if they had interviewed them directly.

All the while they were anticipating the Ripper to be an individual who had lost their mind and displaying symptoms of mania; whereas they should have been looking for the average looking man; unassuming, yet charming, bereft of empathy and filled with indifference as to the nature and severity of the murders.

On that basis, the idea of picking the witness is made somewhat redundant, because the idea that there was only 1 witness who saw the Ripper etc.etc.. is based fundermentally on the beliefs of police officers who never really fully grasped or understood what type of individual the Ripper was.


It is IMO likely that the real Ripper had indeed been questioned by the police at some point; but that he came across as normal and behaved typically like a man who was innocent.

The phrase "It's the quiet ones you've got to watch!" springs to mind.

[Sam Flynn]

Hot take: I don't believe Anderson. I put what he said in the same self-aggrandising category as Major Smith's patently BS claim that he was mere minutes behind the killer when the latter washed his bloody hands in a water trough.

[Lewis C]

Hi Lewis C,

I respectfully disagree with your opinion in this regard. Given the proximity of the homes of two of Kosminski's relatives, with the likelihood that he was living with, or frequently visiting, one or both, I think that Schwartz could well have seen Kosminski. That doesn't mean that Kosminski killed Stride, or was the ripper. But it could be that he became Anderson's suspect.

I am not entirely persuaded that the woman Lawende saw was Eddowes. Scott's reference in his dissertation to the NY Times article regarding the report of a man leaving the Aldgate Station area with a woman and returning alone aligns with Watkins story of stepping aside to let a man pass in the Orange Market, the reservation being that no times were quoted. The Aldgate Station area was where Eddowes was found drunk early in that evening, and her returning there instead of going home would not be inconsistent with her story having known the ripper. Just speculation, of course.

Cheers, George

Hi George,

I don't think that anything that you said here is at odds with anything that I said. I'm saying that even if Schwartz did see Kosminski, the man that Schwartz saw might not be the man who killed Stride, and whoever killed Stride might not be the Ripper (although on the latter point, I would say that he most likely was). Also, I think that there's a high probability that the man that Lawende saw was Eddowes' killer, I wouldn't say that it's anything close to a certainty.

[Scott Nelson]

All they need is a positive identification - what else?
I though the witness refused to say so in court, but then we hear an imbecile cannot be charged with a criminal offense.
So, how would they end up in a court?

What did the witness see and under what set of circumstances? I think it all depends on that.

[John Wheat]

What did the witness see and under what set of circumstances? I think it all depends on that.

I've said this before but its important to note that we don't know who did and didn't see Jack the Ripper.

[Fiver]

I've said this before but its important to note that we don't know who did and didn't see Jack the Ripper.

Exactly. We don't know if any of the witnesses saw the Ripper.