An even closer look at Black Bag Man

[Herlock Sholmes]

You have come far pilgrim. A definitive post on the realities of timelines. I entirely agree....hang on...can someone please check the temperature in the infernal realms of perdition.

[GBinOz]

This is from an interview with Mrs Mortimer by the Evening news 1 Oct:
A man touched her face and said it was quite warm.

A young man and his sweetheart were standing at the corner of the street, about twenty yards away, before and after the time the woman must have been murdered, but they told me they did not hear a sound.

I don't believe that it can be disputed that the man referred to as touching Stride's face was Spooner. The young man and his sweetheart told Mortimer they were standing on what could only be the corner of Berner and Fairclough, where Brown observed a couple standing. It seems to me that the couple had, as had Mortimer, gone to the yard after the alarm had been raised and Mortimer was talking to them in that situation. Were that the case, the young man was unlikely to have been Spooner, whom Mortimer could probably have identified, and the young woman could not have been Stride purely on the fact that the young woman was talking to Mortimer and Stride was dead.

[Tom_Wescott]

In the first paragraph you suggest a possible connection between Schwartz and the club. In the second, a hypothetically lying Schwartz gets incredibly lucky that the street is empty at that time. Could Eagle have told Wess the street was empty just before 12:45? Could Lave have confirmed this? Could Eagle have told Wess he believed he had passed the victim on the street, talking to a man, and thus placing an incident a few minutes after his entry to the club was relatively risk free?

In #479, we can see the club paywalling itself to make money by giving journalists "explanations about the murder". Did the Socialist Club's profiteering get out of hand, when Wess's story telling landed him in a hole of own making? What are the chances that Israel Schwartz would have gone to the police about what he saw? Lucky Wess.

You also claim that Brown's dark overcoat man is another remarkable coincidence. This is who you're talking about ...

Second man age 35 ht. 5 ft 11in. comp. fresh, hair light brown, moustache brown, dress dark overcoat, old black hard felt hat wide brim, had a clay pipe in his hand.

Pipeman ran off.

You're misunderstanding. My point is that because the police, at least initially, took Schwartz seriously, and because the contemporary sources do not give us a factual base for discounting Schwartz, we're rather forced to take his evidence on board. I don't believe much in coincidence, so I don't see Brown's man as any sort of coincidence. He is the last man seen with Stride before she's found dead. Full stop. Bern suggests he's BS Man, I've suggested he's Pipeman. He may be a third man, but that's less likely. Frustratingly, if Schwartz was a liar, then BS Man and Pipeman are mere figments. But it's not possible to conclude that Schwartz was a liar, so we have to conclude based on the available evidence that what he described happened just before Brown came on the scene.

Schwartz ran off. And kept running. Pipeman stopped at some point. Where did he go once he stopped?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

This is from an interview with Mrs Mortimer by the Evening news 1 Oct:
A man touched her face and said it was quite warm.

A young man and his sweetheart were standing at the corner of the street, about twenty yards away, before and after the time the woman must have been murdered, but they told me they did not hear a sound.

I don't believe that it can be disputed that the man referred to as touching Stride's face was Spooner. The young man and his sweetheart told Mortimer they were standing on what could only be the corner of Berner and Fairclough, where Brown observed a couple standing. It seems to me that the couple had, as had Mortimer, gone to the yard after the alarm had been raised and Mortimer was talking to them in that situation. Were that the case, the young man was unlikely to have been Spooner, whom Mortimer could probably have identified, and the young woman could not have been Stride purely on the fact that the young woman was talking to Mortimer and Stride was dead.

You're way, way behind in the discussion of Mortimer's couple.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Abby Normal]

Coroner: If there were singing and dancing going on would you have been likely to have heard the cry of a woman in great distress-a cry of murder, for instance-from the yard?
Eagle: Oh, we should certainly have heard such a cry.

Whereas you conveniently left out the evidence. Also, the rain had stopped.

no i didnt. the (not very loud) cries were from the street, and wetness from recent rain would still muffle sounds.

[Herlock Sholmes]

“Not very loudly” tends to mean “not very loudly.” Why some people find this problematic I’ll never know? “Of low volume,” “not piercing,” “lacking in loud noise.” It’s why no one heard the incident.

[NotBlamedForNothing]

You're misunderstanding. My point is that because the police, at least initially, took Schwartz seriously, and because the contemporary sources do not give us a factual base for discounting Schwartz, we're rather forced to take his evidence on board. I don't believe much in coincidence, so I don't see Brown's man as any sort of coincidence. He is the last man seen with Stride before she's found dead. Full stop. Bern suggests he's BS Man, I've suggested he's Pipeman. He may be a third man, but that's less likely. Frustratingly, if Schwartz was a liar, then BS Man and Pipeman are mere figments. But it's not possible to conclude that Schwartz was a liar, so we have to conclude based on the available evidence that what he described happened just before Brown came on the scene.

So, compared to my cleaning up a mess of the club's own making theory - which might also explain modern researchers' difficulty in identifying the individual named Israel Schwartz - you're happy with the incident being real, and even extending it to link Pipeman with Overcoat Man. I'm fine with that and think you're within the bounds of possibility, which is why I've posted on my own interpretation of the event. Where I think you could do better, is in regard to what Wess actually knew. He claims to have been told the name of the pursuer, and hints that onlookers were under the impression the pursued man was the murderer. Schwartz, that is. Describing Wess's account as garbled is not enough, in my opinion. At the very least, the Echo report suggests that Schwartz was more involved in the incident than he claimed. Less specifically, those who take Schwartz at his word might be wise to remember that there are two or more sides to every story, and in this case, we have only heard one.

Schwartz ran off. And kept running. Pipeman stopped at some point. Where did he go once he stopped?

In other words, he circled back, retrieved Stride from the gateway, chatted to her around the corner for a while, and then coaxed her to go back to the yard where he kills her. Have I got that right?

[NotBlamedForNothing]

You're way, way behind in the discussion of Mortimer's couple.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

What got me with Mortimer's couple, is both the distance - "20 yards" - and the coincidence of the young woman's timing - "about twenty minutes" - with that of James Brown. However, after taking other things into account, my perception has flipped - the man is looking in a different direction...



The 20 yards is Fanny's mistake - the pub around the corner the young woman referred to, was the Beehive, not the Nelson. The about 20 minutes is Spooner's about 25. The woman is the subject of the report because she spoke to Mortimer while Edward was attending to matters in the yard. The woman is neither named nor quoted because she did not speak to the press - only to Fanny, who gave her story to the press, second-hand. Mortimer's couple was Spooner and his girlfriend. The board school couple was Stride and Overcoat Man - as Brown supposed. There was no other couple, other than the couple who said their goodnights at 12:30, at the top of Berner St. Had the board school couple been yet another pair, they would have become crucial to the police investigation, but the police make no reference to them as separate identities, nor were they called to the inquest. They didn't exist.

[NotBlamedForNothing]

“Not very loudly” tends to mean “not very loudly.” Why some people find this problematic I’ll never know? “Of low volume,” “not piercing,” “lacking in loud noise.” It’s why no one heard the incident.

Whatever loudness you attribute to the screams, they were still screams. Not accepting this amounts to changing the evidence. Abberline accepted Schwartz in stating the woman screamed three times, so if you believe Schwartz because the police believed him, you have to accept the evidence as it is.