Ripper Confidential by Tom Wescott (2017)

[David Orsam]

I forget how new you and Mr. Barnett are sometimes. Many of the older posters from a decade or more ago no doubt find it amusing that in a thread this long the 'meanest' thing I've said is calling someone 'petty and jealous'. Which, incidentally, I don't think anyone disagrees with. It might be an inconvenient truth, but it's not what I'd call an insult. You see, I used to be something of an arse. I've since evolved.

I should point out that although these exchanges occur over a period of many days for us, the many readers coming along later consume them in about an hour or two. And to them your constant defense of Barnett's honor probably seems a bit creepy, forced, and repetitive. That's why I like to keep my material as fresh as possible. You lot make that easy.

What I was saying, Tom, is that the charge of "petty and jealous" didn't strike me as "playful" and "breezy", as you now wish to present yourself, and I really don't see it in your posts at all actually. I see someone trying too hard to convey this impression.

Anyway, I see you've now added "creepy" to the list of accusations against me, well done. Of course, I wasn't defending MrBarnett's honour, I was registering a protest against a clear injustice.

I also don't think you should be speaking for other people, or claiming to. I'm sure if anyone has anything to say they will say it themselves.

[Phil Carter]

It's been a sorry story. On past performance, Tom, if he responds at all to this, will no doubt post a glib comment rather than a sensible and serious response, which will be another sad thing.

Probably the best post on this thread.
Some of us are tired of the flippancy. The insults and the deflection. A total lack of seriousness and acceptance of making errors is poor.

I can only conclude the constant stream of the above is a deliberate attempt to cover up the many weaknesses found in the book. Such argumentation is a poor substitute for viable proposition through substantially checked presentation.

I, along with others, refuse to be led down the newly invented garden path created by the author of this book.
The book..imo, is a disappointment. It screams out of being rushed. It could have been so much better throughout with sufficient re editing.
As a customer who has read the book. I find the worse thing of all is the attitude of the author in the aftermath of publication. Totally unprofessional made worse by the constant use of personal attack against any person who happens to show disagreement. Extremely sad.


Phil

[Tom_Wescott]

David,

Let it be said that you can write long posts faster than it takes a normal person to read them. Genuinely impressive.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

Like I said, Tom, jesting is not my department.

What exactly IS your department, Fish? Let me guess, you're a 'truth seeker'. LOL. No really, what is your department?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

I appreciate that this is the impression you are now trying to give, and that this error you have made in your book is no big deal for you, but it certainly wasn't reflected in your claim that MrBarnett was being "petty and jealous", nor in a number of posts you have written about me, nor in the tone of many of your responses in general.

Perhaps if you had been a bit more serious and bit less flippant and/or insulting we could have resolved what should have been a very simple matter of document interpretation some days ago.

I forget how new you and Mr. Barnett are sometimes. Many of the older posters from a decade or more ago no doubt find it amusing that in a thread this long the 'meanest' thing I've said is calling someone 'petty and jealous'. Which, incidentally, I don't think anyone disagrees with. It might be an inconvenient truth, but it's not what I'd call an insult. You see, I used to be something of an arse. I've since evolved.

I should point out that although these exchanges occur over a period of many days for us, the many readers coming along later consume them in about an hour or two. And to them your constant defense of Barnett's honor probably seems a bit creepy, forced, and repetitive. That's why I like to keep my material as fresh as possible. You lot make that easy.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[David Orsam]

1) The date she was recorded as being admitted to the hospital was Sept 1st. 2) This was recorded at a later time after she received treatment. 3) What her injury was.

Because of (2) we cannot definitively say that she wasn't in the hospital on the 31st. It leads one to believe that Sept 1st is the most likely time of her arrival, but it does not eliminate the possibility of an earlier one.

Dane, this is terrible logic. Because the time of her admission was "recorded at a later time after she received treatment" you think "we cannot definitively say she wasn't in the hospital on the 31st"???? Why?

Leaving aside that we don't know when she, or any other patients, were "treated", all the hospital records by definition must be recorded at some point after a patient was initially "treated", or at least after they had entered the building, but why does that fact cast doubt on the admission date in the records? Why should there be any doubt about it? Do you mean to say that the records might just be plain wrong?

And do you simply mean that she might have been brought into hospital at shortly before midnight on 31st or when you say "the 31st" do you actually mean about 4am on the 31st? Are you saying she might have waited around in the hospital with a radial artery wound for over 20 hours before being admitted?

Earlier in this thread you made a very sensible statement when you said "There is a stark difference between medical records showing someone having a hand/arm injury being admitted the day of the Polly murder and the day after." Why do you now depart from that?

I must say, all this talk about whether this thing is "possible" or that thing is "possible" is just silly because so many things are possible if one uses enough imagination without actual evidence to support it. If Tom's theory is to survive as one worthy of consideration then the question has to be whether there is a credible argument to be made that MM was attacked in Brady Street before 3.30am on the Friday morning and then admitted to a nearby hospital more than 20 hours later with a radial artery wound.

But if you have a credible argument to explain why a woman would be attacked at 3am on a Friday morning, suffering a severe radial artery wound, and then not admitted into hospital until the Saturday - or to explain why the record says what it does - I look forward to hearing it.

[Fisherman]

I did do a 1,000 other things. They're in the other 330 pages of my book. For every error I make I correct 12. You're welcome.



You know who the last person was to laud you for your research? Me. On Rippercast. And before that? Hmmm...you'd have to ask an elephant. See, that's how I roll - I build up. Create. I don't tear down. Can you say that about yourself?



Wow, so my death is imminent now, is it? Imagine what that will do for my book sales!



Don't just leave it there, man! Cleanse yourself! No more posts from you until you're showered and changed!

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

Like I said, Tom, jesting is not my department.

[Tom_Wescott]

In reading Christer's posts on this thread I'm reminded of two things. First, I'm reminded of Little League Baseball coaches I've known who take things so seriously that it sours the experience for everyone involved. They berate one another, umpires, opposing players, their own players, parents. Games that should be FUN are reduced to soul-sucking examples of what a lack of perspective can drive a man to say and do. Everyone shows up at the field with a common interest, ready to have a good time........ Only to leave feeling like they've been kicked in the nuts.

Second, I'm reminded of the myriad times posters - myself included - have driven Christer to lament the lack of courtesy and respect shown him and his work - mainly his documentary - on these pages. More than once it's driven him into hiding, angry, upset, wounded. I think of this because often what has hurt Christer so was criticism and insolence far milder than what he's directed at Tom and his work here.

Anyway. Carry on.

Patrick, that you take the time to come on here and post this means a tremendous lot to me. Please keep it up because what you say is absolutely correct. But don't feel too bad for me. If anything, I'm the one who should feel guilty for participating in these exchanges. It's so easy for me that I can feel no sense of one upmanship, even. Rather like Michael Jordan playing Gary Coleman in a game of one-on-one and then celebrating his victory. But if this is how certain people wish to discuss my book then so be it. It keeps the thread active and piques curiosity among people who - unlike my small, sad band of detractors - possess actual and genuine curiosity about the Whitechapel murders and who would appreciate a work they might actually enjoy and get something out of. Call me naive, but I believe that to be the vast majority of Ripperologists and the Ripper readership.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Phil Carter]

I have no idea why you addressed that post to me, Phil, assuming I am the "David" referred to. It was Tom who asked for a "better candidate", not me. But I'm glad to see that Tom has now addressed your concerns and I will leave you two to sort it all out.

Hello David

Because I wanted your views as to my my concerns.


Phil

[David Orsam]

David, you take yourself too seriously. I'm more playful than anything. These exchanges are breezy for me. A pleasant distraction. Little more than that. If and when I get bored of them, I'll let you know.

I appreciate that this is the impression you are now trying to give, and that this error you have made in your book is no big deal for you, but it certainly wasn't reflected in your claim that MrBarnett was being "petty and jealous", nor in a number of posts you have written about me, nor in the tone of many of your responses in general.

Perhaps if you had been a bit more serious and bit less flippant and/or insulting we could have resolved what should have been a very simple matter of document interpretation some days ago.

[David Orsam]

I doubt Tom mislead anyone...Oh!,Tom got a little confused with the detail.Big deal.

I can tell you for a fact that you are wrong, Harry, because Tom certainly misled me.

When I read Tom's chapter, "The One that Got Away", I thought that the connection between Millous and the Brady Street attack was somewhat tenuous but at least Tom had found a document to hang a connection on which showed the admittance of a woman with some kind of cut arm on the night of the murder. It was something. A genuine discovery.

After MysterySinger posted his information about Esther Mallows on 2 May I went back and looked more carefully at Tom's chapter to check exactly when Margaret "Millows" was admitted to hospital and it seemed clear from what Tom wrote that it must indeed have been at some point between 10am on 30 August and 3:45am on 31 August. I had not seen any of the documents Tom was relying on and he did not explain any further what they said, so I was relying entirely on Tom's summary.

Perhaps you can imagine my surprise when I learnt from MrBarnett on JTR forums two days later that the record, in fact, shows MM being admitted under the date of 1 September, at least 20 hours after the reported attack in Brady Street. How or why Tom missed this or didn't mention it in his book remains a mystery to me to this day.

I was further surprised when Tom claimed on JTR forums that MrBarnett had misread the document, although my suspicions were aroused when he refused to explain how he had done so.

I was even more surprised when Tom posted in this forum that MrBarnett's claim that MM was admitted to hospital on 1 September was no more than a result of him being "petty and jealous" (#207). I could not see a hint of this MrBarnett's posts which seemed to contain very reasonable, fair and pertinent questions.

Let me tell you, Harry, the surprise continued when, in response to MrBarnett asking him when MM was admitted, Tom replied "she went to the hospital on the same morning Nichols was murdered. She would have been treated at that time". How could he possibly have known this? And then he added "Whenever the paperwork was filled out doesn't really matter" (#212). This suggested to me that Tom was more than "a little confused" over the detail but that he had entirely misread and misunderstood the one new document that he had managed to obtain for his book. He seemed to think that the date of 1 September reflected the date that the paperwork was filled out, which struck me as a very odd thought because an administrator of a hospital admission record would not do this.

Despite MrBarnett attempting to explain the document to Tom, he still refused to concede an inch. He said to him(#223): "Gary, you're not getting it. There is when something happened and when it was recorded. They needn't be the same thing and, in fact, rarely are. You're zeroing in on one thing and choosing to remain blind to all the other stuff". Worse he added, "you just keep discounting all the stuff you don't like Gary. You seem to enjoy that" thus further suggesting that MrBarnett's motives were somehow improper, simply because he was challenging Tom's interpretation of a document.

Having read Tom's inadequate responses, and unhappy with the injustice of his insults directed at MrBarnett, it was at this point (#225) that I intervened in the thread to ask Tom a very simple question in an attempt to clarify what was now a very muddled situation due to Tom's vague replies:

"Do you accept that the woman in question was admitted to hospital on a different day to the attack on Nichols or are you saying that MrBarnett has read the London Hospital records wrong?"

There was no answer to this question from Tom so I had to try again in #231 ("what date was MM admitted to hospital?") and in #232 ("Do you accept that the woman in question was admitted to hospital on a different day to the attack on Nichols or are you saying that MrBarnett has read the London Hospital records wrong").

Tom's response now moved to the childish, ignoring the question in #231 but answering the question in #232 as "yes" (#234), thus not answering it all. At the same time, he started accusing me of "doing what Gary does. Isolating one item and obsessing on it" and claiming that I was somehow taking him "out of context" although I had no idea how.

I had to repeat my question from #231 ("what date was MM admitted to hospital?") before getting a straight answer which was a follows: "Aug. 31st".

By now, Tom had had days to consider this "detail" but he still couldn't get it right. He was, it seems, answering out of hope, based on his desire for his theory about MM having been attacked in Brady Street to be true. Quite simply not the proper approach to this or any other historical matter.

When, in response, I asked him how he explained the heading of "Sep 1" on the document and whether he was saying that Debra Arif, who had by now stated that the record clearly showed MM being admitted on 1 September, was wrong, Tom ignored my first question and to the second didn't answer but simply said "Are you trying to get me killed?" (#239).

By now it was like pulling teeth trying to get any sensible answers from Tom, in what one would have hoped is a sensible forum for adult researchers and those interested in JTR.

Further posts from me to try and elicit information produced this from him, writing about himself in the third person (#267):

"Tom has not 'misread a document, nor does Tom generally heed a command to 'explain himself".

So he was still claiming not have misread the register but in the very same post he now put forward a new angle:

"The archivist who provides these records had these as people being admitted on August 31st".

"I trusted the archivist to whom I paid my monies" he added.

So his information was coming from the archivist. Or was it? Note that strange wording. He wasn't told anything by the archivist. It was just that the archivist "had" it as 31 August. What exactly did that mean?

One had to read a subsequent post on JTR forums to understand that the archivist had not told Tom anything at all and that Tom had, apparently, assumed that the document he had been provided with by the archivist contained only those individuals admitted between 10pm on 30 August and 3.30am on 31 August, on the basis that this was all he had asked for. Apparently it hadn't occurred to him that such a request was impossible to be fulfilled because there are no times of entry on the documents and he had, one assumes, ignored the September dates on the document, if he ever saw them.

That's just about all we have had from Tom. No retraction of his claim that MrBarnett misread the document and no admission that he himself did misread it. One has to tease out clues from his posts that he does now seem to accept that MM was admitted on 1 September, although he has hardly stated this in terms. It has not, in my view, been a full and frank response to the questions that have been asked of him.

From a personal perspective what I would have to say is even worse is the attempts made by Tom to smear me personally by impugning my motives in posting on this subject. He has tried to link my posting to the fact that he got my name wrong when acknowledging my contribution to his book, something I didn't even understand when he first made the claim. He described it as "misattributing a source to someone else instead of yourself" (when for me it was just a case of him getting my name wrong) and claimed that this was what I believed him to be "REALLY guilty of" and, for some strange reason, believed that this had "unsettled" me (#296). It was so far from unsettling me that it wasn't on my mind at all at time which is why I couldn't even understand what he was trying to say. He's made some other strange posts about me too but they all seem to have been intended to distract from the narrow point that I was trying to get clarification about.

It's been a sorry story. On past performance, Tom, if he responds at all to this, will no doubt post a glib comment rather than a sensible and serious response, which will be another sad thing.

[Tom_Wescott]

When you told me to "Please, be nice", Tom, I wondered if you were a Catholic Bishop for a moment. In fact, perhaps you think you are the Pope and infallible? I do know it's hard for you to accept that anyone can criticise or challenge you, or anything you have written, without having some kind of sinister ulterior motive or deep personal grudge, but you might want to consider your own behaviour first before impugning the motives of others. He that is without sin let him cast the first stone, as one of those Catholic Bishops might say.

David, you take yourself too seriously. I'm more playful than anything. These exchanges are breezy for me. A pleasant distraction. Little more than that. If and when I get bored of them, I'll let you know.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

Tom_Wescott: So....why'd you ask it? You could have been doing any one of a thousand things instead.

Indeed. Itīs a bit like how you could have done one of a thousand other things than claiming that Millows was admitted to the LH on the 31:st. As choices go, I think I made the better one.

I did do a 1,000 other things. They're in the other 330 pages of my book. For every error I make I correct 12. You're welcome.

No you didn't. Don't lie. You've been around here long enough to know that coming at me demanding I do something is counterproductive.

I was not so much referring to your refusal to answer my question, as I was thinking of how it seems you have lacked sorely in your research, Tom. I find that disappointing.

You know who the last person was to laud you for your research? Me. On Rippercast. And before that? Hmmm...you'd have to ask an elephant. See, that's how I roll - I build up. Create. I don't tear down. Can you say that about yourself?

Life's extremely easy at the moment. You mean to say it only gets better? I share your optimism.

Enjoy it while it lasts, Tom.

Wow, so my death is imminent now, is it? Imagine what that will do for my book sales!

If I piss my pants I'll sell more books? Is that some Swedish superstition? It's best not to wax philosophical to a guy who just quoted Miley Cyrus. It's liable to go over his head. Or down his leg? Anyway, creepy.

[B]Down the leg, more likely, cooling off in the process. But letīs leave it there

Don't just leave it there, man! Cleanse yourself! No more posts from you until you're showered and changed!

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Patrick S]

Tom_Wescott: So....why'd you ask it? You could have been doing any one of a thousand things instead.

Indeed. Itīs a bit like how you could have done one of a thousand other things than claiming that Millows was admitted to the LH on the 31:st. As choices go, I think I made the better one.

No you didn't. Don't lie. You've been around here long enough to know that coming at me demanding I do something is counterproductive.

I was not so much referring to your refusal to answer my question, as I was thinking of how it seems you have lacked sorely in your research, Tom. I find that disappointing.

Life's extremely easy at the moment. You mean to say it only gets better? I share your optimism.

Enjoy it while it lasts, Tom.

If I piss my pants I'll sell more books? Is that some Swedish superstition? It's best not to wax philosophical to a guy who just quoted Miley Cyrus. It's liable to go over his head. Or down his leg? Anyway, creepy.

Down the leg, more likely, cooling off in the process. But letīs leave it there - empty jesting is not my department, and if I am sucked into it I run the risk of coming out shorthanded.

In reading Christer's posts on this thread I'm reminded of two things. First, I'm reminded of Little League Baseball coaches I've known who take things so seriously that it sours the experience for everyone involved. They berate one another, umpires, opposing players, their own players, parents. Games that should be FUN are reduced to soul-sucking examples of what a lack of perspective can drive a man to say and do. Everyone shows up at the field with a common interest, ready to have a good time........ Only to leave feeling like they've been kicked in the nuts.

Second, I'm reminded of the myriad times posters - myself included - have driven Christer to lament the lack of courtesy and respect shown him and his work - mainly his documentary - on these pages. More than once it's driven him into hiding, angry, upset, wounded. I think of this because often what has hurt Christer so was criticism and insolence far milder than what he's directed at Tom and his work here.

Anyway. Carry on.

[David Orsam]

David,

Something concerns me.

....

Therefore...why would you, I or anyone else find the need to "find a better candidate" for something that cannot be established even occurred?

To do so is to believe that it happened. The evidence clearly shows that it was, at this particular time and date, highly unlikely as both the newspapers would have pounced upon the tiniest hint of such a thing, and there would have been mention of it in police papers.

IF Mallows/Millows/Mellows WAS attacked....and the attacker failed in killing her, it would have been registered by both of the above as was done on other occasions during this 4 month or so period of killings.

Exactly why DO we have to "find a better candidate"? To do so only enhances the proposition the suthor wants us to believe.

I have no idea why you addressed that post to me, Phil, assuming I am the "David" referred to. It was Tom who asked for a "better candidate", not me. But I'm glad to see that Tom has now addressed your concerns and I will leave you two to sort it all out.