New Book

[Jeff Leahy]

No, Jeffrey, no.

That line by Anderson from 1892 could also be interpreted as Anderson not knowing, not yet about the Polish suspect.

Dog ****

That why your book won't be worth reading... Because you continually put your opinion as fact... When if you care to read what he actually says, it is clear that Anderson changed his point of view from Aug 1889 until 1892

'A maniac revelling in blood'

A specific change in what he says...

You can say Blue is red as long as you like but anyone else can see (And i suggest you check the Facebook reviews) that you are up u own ass

Yours Jef

[Jonathan H]

No, Jeffrey, no.

That line by Anderson from 1892 could also be interpreted as Anderson not knowing, not yet about the Polish suspect.

Why?

Because from the moment he does know, arguably much closer to 1895, he says so. He tells Major Griffiths, as Alfred Aylmer, that he knows the Ripper was [probably] a man who was locked up in a madhouse.

He, himself, keeps saying this and writing this, from that year. And arguably embellishing the tale so that by 1910 a slam dunk witness has been added.

Had he known about "Kosminski" already, in 1892, he would have said so. Instead he speaks theoretically about a maniac, and shows pictures of the victims to make his point.

OK, now for the hard part.

What you wrote is not a fact. Or, a FACT! It is a theory. It might be right, or it might be wrong.

The same with what I have written above.

It might be right, and it might be wrong.

Since you don't take anything I write seriously -- which you have the right not to -- I suggest you check with Paul Begg, and brace yourself for the shock that he agrees with me and not you (re: the 1892 source is capable of different and rival interpretations, both equally valid).

[Jeff Leahy]

No Jeffrey, no.

That line by Anderson from 1892 could also be interpreted as Anderson not knowing, yet, abo

Anderson 1892 'A maniac revelling in Blood'

Thats what he said FACT

You just simply try to take everything out of its historical context...ironic for someone who claims to understand history

[Jeff Leahy]

Dear David

I am sorry I did not see your rebuttal.

I accept your second quasi-apology.

But I am not the intellectual coward you think I am.

You have the right to think it, but you should not be so baffled that I have the equal right to both disagree and to defend myself.

By all means analyse and debunk my book's central thesis.

You do not know me at all if you think I am sensitive to dissent. Not at all.

I cannot get through that people involved in this sub-world already disagree with it, and have said so to me.

But you need to know when people have reached a point where they are deadlocked in disagreement, and to walk away.

And something else.

R. J. Palmer is so much of a greater writer and analyst than I am.

That is hardly me wearing sackcloth and ashes, as I think he is the greatest living writer on this subject.

I sort of agree with you that my defence of his interpretation is not all it could be, as 1) it is second-hand not being original to me, and 2) I am, frankly, not up to it. It is unfair to therefore keep saying that the Palmer argument is demolished because of one perhaps inadequate reader-defender of it.

That marvellous quote you found by Andrews denying Dr T as the Ripper. I wish I could have put that in --and I would have properly said you found it and that you did not agree -- as it was the clincher that he was hunting info. on the American suspect. In fact, desperately so. But there was not room.

Yardy yader

Perhaps you should read the reviews on Facebook...?

[Jonathan H]

No Jeffrey, no.

That line by Anderson from 1892 could also be interpreted as Anderson not knowing, yet, abo

[Jeff Leahy]

, who denounced one of my theories for years until you stole it, without so much as a by your leave

Jonathon your theory is a rabits bottom, for which no self respecting ripperologist would have any quarter

It clearly says Druit was the ripper, does it not?

Not only do i spurn it , like i would spurn a rabid dog...

But i refute your interpretation of Anderson and the Marginalia

How could you possibly mistake my balanced reasoning for MacNaugten and why he believed what he did, over your tenuous ramblings?

Yours Jeff

PS and NO i have no intension of reading your book , i don't read the Sun Newspaper and I don't eat ****

[Jonathan H]

Dear David

I am sorry I did not see your rebuttal.

I accept your second quasi-apology.

But I am not the intellectual coward you think I am.

You have the right to think it, but you should not be so baffled that I have the equal right to both disagree and to defend myself.

By all means analyse and debunk my book's central thesis.

You do not know me at all if you think I am sensitive to dissent. Not at all.

I cannot get through that people involved in this sub-world already disagree with it, and have said so to me.

But you need to know when people have reached a point where they are deadlocked in disagreement, and to walk away.

And something else.

R. J. Palmer is so much of a greater writer and analyst than I am.

That is hardly me wearing sackcloth and ashes, as I think he is the greatest living writer on this subject.

I sort of agree with you that my defence of his interpretation is not all it could be, as 1) it is second-hand not being original to me, and 2) I am, frankly, not up to it. It is unfair to therefore keep saying that the Palmer argument is demolished because of one perhaps inadequate reader-defender of it.

That marvellous quote you found by Andrews denying Dr T as the Ripper. I wish I could have put that in --and I would have properly said you found it and that you did not agree -- as it was the clincher that he was hunting info. on the American suspect. In fact, desperately so. But there was not room.

[Jeff Leahy]

Do you know you have just made-up a quote from Anderson which even he did not say, and did not claim to say, in 1892. Furthermore, there is no extant source in which Anderson identified either his suspect or the witness.

The obvious miss quote was a joke

But it don't change the FACTS

Anderson clearly said he didn't know who JtR was in August 1889 = FACT

Anderson clearly stated that JTR was a 'Maniac revelling in blood' 1892 = FACT

These can not be disputed as they are a matter of public record

Yours Jeff

[Jonathan H]

Poor Jeffrey

That you would lower yourself to David Orsom to back yourself into the usual corner is predictable but still a yuk moment, not that you of all people had far to descend. On the other hand, I suppose there is a manic element that makes you brothers of a kind?

But I'll give Barrett his due--he is actually reading the book and therefore has every right to his opinion that it is trash.

You have not read it, and say so, and yet are trashing it in public.

Do you understand how appallingly unfair that is, and how much of a fool you come across?

I guess not.

Do you know you have just made-up a quote from Anderson which even he did not say, and did not claim to say, in 1892. Furthermore, there is no extant source in which Anderson identified either his suspect or the witness.

Did you know that? I guess not.

All we have is a mis-recalled identification, never mentioned before 1910, probably the ones involving [probably] Lawende, and Sadler and Grant. This is variation on the theory of Evans and Rumbelow from 2006.

It is a theory, but persuasive to me as it does not involve things we cannot see, makes logical sense, and explains how the other pertinent police figures could not know about such an extraordinary event.

Plus a Dagonet source from 1910, recently discovered by Chris Phillips, arguably shows Macnaghten via Sims dismissing the notion of any Jewish people assisting in any way the Jewish suspect.

We also have "Kosminski" the fictional variant of a real person, Aaron Kosminski, that arguably shows Anderson (and Swanson) did not know about the real person it was based on, e.g. that the suspect was inconveniently alive and not conveniently deceased.

I write this for other readers, not you Jeff, who denounced one of my theories for years until you stole it, without so much as a by your leave

[Jeff Leahy]

So that non-apology apology lasted all of five minutes. To be expected of course. Still depressing about human nature.

I've got to say it is still amazing to me that Barrett is a middle-aged man, writing all these long, long, long dismembered (by him!?) diatribes full of boyish, and rather immature words like "negated" and "Suckered".

As in, the these old fogies were suckered by being old fogies, whilst I, the young whippersnapper, has set things right.

It is comparable to Bruce Robinson's bombastic sludge about people like us, though he is an old guy openly writing like a young and angry undergraduate for the student rag -- even to writing swear words.

I was quite happy to encourage and indulge that because young people should be, but they also have to grow up too. They have to learn that their enthusiasm does not guarantee consensus and that they should not take that to mean it is automatically because we fossils are too old whilst they are so pure and young, e.g. that we are calcified and rigid and they are supple and lateral.

I'm still in shock that this person is older than I am.

The real reason the first 'debate' ceased was because, like a youngster, Barrett could not handle disagreement.

We agreed to disagree because our positions were not reconcilable (I did not even write the trilogy, R. J. Palmer did, but to agree with Palmer damns me as a heretic anyhow). It is hardly earth-shattering. I said that we had gone as far as we could, we were not going to agree, and so we could leave it that.

No, no, no, no, Barrett said. That was unacceptable. Un! Ac! Ceptable! I had to agree with him, and only then could it end. And if I did not agree I would be abused as a coward and empty, and so on.

I exited because I had nothing more or new to say, and had become disturbed by the irrationality of the other poster. And now on he goes, flailing away, cutting and pasting, misusing words like ironic with abandon, even though nothing new is being shared. This 'debate' is just another manic attempt to force my agreement, by somebody who obviously reads no history and knows no history (and is noticeably uncomfortable with such topics and concepts).

Which is not the same as me being aged and stuffy about dissent -- dissent away. Tear the book apart. Be my guest. My closest friends here are not going to be persuaded by my book. So what? I would not expect them to be.

Will I then do a David the Orsom (such an adolescent moniker) and endlessly berate and abuse them -- whilst creepily denying I am doing either -- until they meekly capitulate?

I don't think so. It's all such wasted energy.

For other readers, let us examine a couple of pertinent secondary sources.

If you read the excellent "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of President Kennedy" (1993) by Gerald Posner, who is a lawyer and not an historian, he does not tell you that a Dallas policeman testified that he ran into a man behind the 'grassy knoll' whom he swore identified himself as Secret Service. There were no such agents except with the motorcade and this has led to much speculation that this unidentified person was involved in the death of the president.

It has always been counter-argued that the policeman simply mis-identified a Treasury agent as a Secret Service agent because the credentials look so much alike (the SS is an organ of Treasury). But this is a theory about this bit.

What Posner does is simply summarize it pithily that some people were mis-identified but the explanations are probably innocent, and leaves it that -- no fake SS agent at the Knoll is specified driving JFK-Buffs apoplectic (sound familiar?). You would be in the dark about the original testimony and how suggestive it is of something perhaps sinister, criminal and conspiratorial.

Yet what I learned from that for the rewriting of my manuscript-- in which I took out speculation that Andrews was not investigating Tumblety -- is that you the author can and should make decisions about what you think is important for the thrust of your narrative and argument. I chose to do the same thing, to focus not on the arguments about whether Andrews' business abroad was Tumblety-related (I think it was) but to focus on why Tumblety was suspected, and to what extent he was likely to have been the Ripper (I think he wasn't, because Macnaghten did not).

In the same book, Posner judges the Silvia Odio incident in a way that I do not agree with, but nevertheless accept and agree with his right as the author to make the editorial decision that he did. He depicts her as an unsatisfactory, unreliable witness and ipso facto her testimony as close to worthless -- if you use it to point to a conspiracy involving Oswald being framed.

What Posner does not tell the reader is that lawyers for the Warren Commission took her very seriously and judged her to be reliable. He also does not tell you that the alleged Oswald lookalike (and the resemblance is uncanny) William Seymour, whom Posner thinks Odio actually met and mistook for Oswald later, had documented evidence that he was in another state (which still does not rule out Seymour, because he might have met her a month later if she has her timing off, which again make her testimony arguably unreliable).

Should not the reader be exposed to everything? Practically-speaking there is not room in a single book, and anyhow the author is presenting an historical argument not by cherry -picking but by making judgment calls about a massive amount of sources; deciding which are relevant and what they mean. Even Vincent Bugliosi's massive tome on this subject --also excellent -- could not find room to include the line by Warren Commission lawyers about Oswald perhaps being manipulated by anti-Castroites posing as their ideological opposite -- one line, but it is not in the thousand or so pages.

But is his right not to include it because he judged it to be extraneous. Do I agree? Not at all. I think Bugliosi missed the solution because of its exclusion, but that does make his book hopeless. It is just my interpretation of limited and contradictory data.

Hence historians disagreeing diametrically about the same subject and the same sources. I think Posner is wrong about Odio but he has every right to make such an argument -- and it is a brilliant book. But saying something is brilliant and enjoying it does not mean you have to agree with it's thesis.

Can I get through to somebody out there? I suppose not.

I have no problem with Barrett disagreeing with my decisions of: this in and that out, rather it is the relentless, repetitive and reductionist vehemence which slides all too easily into the worst kind of character assassination, abuse and bullying.

Which is all denied, just as vehemently?!

If you think you have won the argument why do you keep making it?

Because I won't fold. To anybody normal, that would be, again, so what?

Only to fanatics must there be agreement and capitulation. There is nothing really to 'debate' because they already know the truth. It is just a question of assent and not dissent, because the latter is forbidden.

Jonathon I am younger than you are...My only prediction about your book based on your postings over the last five years...is that it is utter bollocks

Obviously a lot of people older and more cautious than i have been kind to your interpretation that Macnaughten was a super cop who covered up the crimes because he didn't want anyone knowing it was Druit...

Obviously my opinion is destorted by years of actually studying the facts

Such as Anderson formed his opinion between August 1889...'I haven't a ******* clue' and July 1892 'it was that bastard Kozminski'

But yes as has been suggested here your theory is utter bollocks and the book is likely to contain information of the same standard

I'm pleased i'm not the only one who has noticed

Yours Jeff

PS in defence before David attacks me, i'm dyslexic

[David Orsam]

Jonathan,

As you seem to be addressing at least part of your posts to me again I will respond directly to you.

Unfortunately, I did not understand much of what you wrote. The first sentence for example: "So that non-apology apology lasted all of five minutes". What apology are you talking about???? Are you literally imagining things?

Apart from Lee Harvey Oswald & Gerald Posner, your last post seemed to be almost entirely about me which is very strange because I was writing about Andrews and Tumblety and your book. It's also strange that you complain about my use of the word "Suckered!" which just happened to be the title of my trilogy, as well as the thread in which you and I posted, so I don't quite know how I could have avoided it.

I entirely disagree with your description of what happened in the Suckered! thread in June. Anyone can look over that thread to see why you left it. So I'm not going to bother going over all that but I do need to correct your statement that 'we agreed to disagree because our positions were not reconcilable.' As I said to you at the time, I would prefer that we agreed to agree, hence I attempted to persuade you of my arguments.

Frankly, I do not understand people who post on internet forums, and are very happy to have their say, but then get upset when they are contradicted or challenged. That is surely the whole purpose of a debate. I have never, incidentally, claimed to have 'won' the argument and the reason I continue to post is to try and convince you (and others) of my points. That's what this forum is all about isn't it?

I really think you have lost your perspective entirely here. I certainly haven't misused your words ever (I'm very careful to quote accurately) nor have I abused or bullied you or engaged in any 'character assassination' although I do wonder how you can possibly think you have not tried to assassinate my character.

If you don't want to discuss any of the points I have made in rebuttal of your theory that Inspector Andrews went to Canada to background research well that is fine and up to you. But from my perspective it is a shame that you haven't even acknowledged such critical issues like the timing point that I raised, so I have no idea what your response to that is.

My final thought is that if you are so sensitive to my criticisms about one sentence in your book I hate to think what would happen if I posted criticisms about your Macnaghtan/Druitt theory in this thread! It really doesn't bear thinking about.

Anyway, if, on consideration, you would like to discuss the Andrews/Tumblety point that you raise in your book (as opposed to the assassination of JFK), that would be good and I'm happy to do so in a civilised adult fashion. As I've made clear to you before, I'm not fanatical about anything, have no fixed position and am willing to change my views based on any evidence you care to put forward, should I find that evidence sufficiently compelling. So you have got me entirely wrong.

A shame, by the way, that you never felt able to answer my simple question about exactly when the sentence re. the 'long-lost' Andrews report was put into your book. I trust that these strange posts of yours have not been an attempt to divert attention from this.

Regards,

David

p.s. What purpose you think is served by constantly mis-spelling my user name as Orsom or Osrom I can't imagine and it seems a bit, well, dare I say, childish to me, but if you think it is useful to members of this forum then please go ahead and knock yourself out with whatever variation of spelling you like.

[Jonathan H]

So that non-apology apology lasted all of five minutes. To be expected of course. Still depressing about human nature.

I've got to say it is still amazing to me that Barrett is a middle-aged man, writing all these long, long, long dismembered (by him!?) diatribes full of boyish, and rather immature words like "negated" and "Suckered".

As in, the these old fogies were suckered by being old fogies, whilst I, the young whippersnapper, has set things right.

It is comparable to Bruce Robinson's bombastic sludge about people like us, though he is an old guy openly writing like a young and angry undergraduate for the student rag -- even to writing swear words.

I was quite happy to encourage and indulge that because young people should be, but they also have to grow up too. They have to learn that their enthusiasm does not guarantee consensus and that they should not take that to mean it is automatically because we fossils are too old whilst they are so pure and young, e.g. that we are calcified and rigid and they are supple and lateral.

I'm still in shock that this person is older than I am.

The real reason the first 'debate' ceased was because, like a youngster, Barrett could not handle disagreement.

We agreed to disagree because our positions were not reconcilable (I did not even write the trilogy, R. J. Palmer did, but to agree with Palmer damns me as a heretic anyhow). It is hardly earth-shattering. I said that we had gone as far as we could, we were not going to agree, and so we could leave it that.

No, no, no, no, Barrett said. That was unacceptable. Un! Ac! Ceptable! I had to agree with him, and only then could it end. And if I did not agree I would be abused as a coward and empty, and so on.

I exited because I had nothing more or new to say, and had become disturbed by the irrationality of the other poster. And now on he goes, flailing away, cutting and pasting, misusing words like ironic with abandon, even though nothing new is being shared. This 'debate' is just another manic attempt to force my agreement, by somebody who obviously reads no history and knows no history (and is noticeably uncomfortable with such topics and concepts).

Which is not the same as me being aged and stuffy about dissent -- dissent away. Tear the book apart. Be my guest. My closest friends here are not going to be persuaded by my book. So what? I would not expect them to be.

Will I then do a David the Orsom (such an adolescent moniker) and endlessly berate and abuse them -- whilst creepily denying I am doing either -- until they meekly capitulate?

I don't think so. It's all such wasted energy.

For other readers, let us examine a couple of pertinent secondary sources.

If you read the excellent "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of President Kennedy" (1993) by Gerald Posner, who is a lawyer and not an historian, he does not tell you that a Dallas policeman testified that he ran into a man behind the 'grassy knoll' whom he swore identified himself as Secret Service. There were no such agents except with the motorcade and this has led to much speculation that this unidentified person was involved in the death of the president.

It has always been counter-argued that the policeman simply mis-identified a Treasury agent as a Secret Service agent because the credentials look so much alike (the SS is an organ of Treasury). But this is a theory about this bit.

What Posner does is simply summarize it pithily that some people were mis-identified but the explanations are probably innocent, and leaves it that -- no fake SS agent at the Knoll is specified driving JFK-Buffs apoplectic (sound familiar?). You would be in the dark about the original testimony and how suggestive it is of something perhaps sinister, criminal and conspiratorial.

Yet what I learned from that for the rewriting of my manuscript-- in which I took out speculation that Andrews was not investigating Tumblety -- is that you the author can and should make decisions about what you think is important for the thrust of your narrative and argument. I chose to do the same thing, to focus not on the arguments about whether Andrews' business abroad was Tumblety-related (I think it was) but to focus on why Tumblety was suspected, and to what extent he was likely to have been the Ripper (I think he wasn't, because Macnaghten did not).

In the same book, Posner judges the Silvia Odio incident in a way that I do not agree with, but nevertheless accept and agree with his right as the author to make the editorial decision that he did. He depicts her as an unsatisfactory, unreliable witness and ipso facto her testimony as close to worthless -- if you use it to point to a conspiracy involving Oswald being framed.

What Posner does not tell the reader is that lawyers for the Warren Commission took her very seriously and judged her to be reliable. He also does not tell you that the alleged Oswald lookalike (and the resemblance is uncanny) William Seymour, whom Posner thinks Odio actually met and mistook for Oswald later, had documented evidence that he was in another state (which still does not rule out Seymour, because he might have met her a month later if she has her timing off, which again make her testimony arguably unreliable).

Should not the reader be exposed to everything? Practically-speaking there is not room in a single book, and anyhow the author is presenting an historical argument not by cherry -picking but by making judgment calls about a massive amount of sources; deciding which are relevant and what they mean. Even Vincent Bugliosi's massive tome on this subject --also excellent -- could not find room to include the line by Warren Commission lawyers about Oswald perhaps being manipulated by anti-Castroites posing as their ideological opposite -- one line, but it is not in the thousand or so pages.

But is his right not to include it because he judged it to be extraneous. Do I agree? Not at all. I think Bugliosi missed the solution because of its exclusion, but that does make his book hopeless. It is just my interpretation of limited and contradictory data.

Hence historians disagreeing diametrically about the same subject and the same sources. I think Posner is wrong about Odio but he has every right to make such an argument -- and it is a brilliant book. But saying something is brilliant and enjoying it does not mean you have to agree with it's thesis.

Can I get through to somebody out there? I suppose not.

I have no problem with Barrett disagreeing with my decisions of: this in and that out, rather it is the relentless, repetitive and reductionist vehemence which slides all too easily into the worst kind of character assassination, abuse and bullying.

Which is all denied, just as vehemently?!

If you think you have won the argument why do you keep making it?

Because I won't fold. To anybody normal, that would be, again, so what?

Only to fanatics must there be agreement and capitulation. There is nothing really to 'debate' because they already know the truth. It is just a question of assent and not dissent, because the latter is forbidden.

[David Orsam]

In conclusion

The whole dispute between myself and Jonathan began when he posted in my Suckered! thread that there was some 'conflicting data' in existence which potentially invalidated the conclusions of my Suckered! trilogy. The use of the word 'data' made it seem like I had missed some actual evidence which could negate my work. After much to and fro-ing it transpired – as Jonathan has demonstrated by his postings in this thread - that there never was any data, no evidence at all. Indeed, it is the very absence of evidence that seems to appeal Jonathan's finely tuned instincts. But it seems to me that a belief without evidence is no more than a religious belief, an article of faith. My research was completely evidence led. I had no pre-conceived notions at all. Had I found that the evidence supported a Tumblety reason or a Parnell reason for Andrews' visit to Toronto that would have been fine with me. But all the evidence tells me that Andrews went to Toronto to escort Roland Barnett and for no other reason. Jonathan is entitled to believe whatever he wants to believe but I don't agree that he is entitled to say that he believes it on the basis of 'data' or to say that there is 'data' which conflicts with the conclusions of my trilogy. And he should have made clear in his book that it is no more than a personal theory of his that Inspector Andrews ever filed a report on Tumblety.

[David Orsam]

Finally I argue in the book that Macnaghten misled Littlechild about Tumblety's fate. He did, I argue, partly because claiming that the doctor had taken his own life airbrushed out of existence the disappointment of Andrews' trip. Had the trip not been about the Ripper, Mac would not have needed to bother.

Here Jonathan seems to have become confused about his own theory. What 'disappointment' of Andrews' trip? Didn't he just go to Canada to do some background research? So how and why the disappointment? Is it that Jonathan thinks he didn't find out anything? If so, it would have been a very short report he presented to Anderson!

[David Orsam]

That the preponderance of evidence supports R. J. Palmer's thesis.

Jonathan has told me that R.J. Palmer's trilogy was 'beautifully written'. That's great. But how did he do on the facts of the case? Not very well is the answer.

In the first place, Palmer missed a crucial point about timing.

By the time Andrews arrived in Toronto, Tumblety had fled from England to America on a charge for which there was no extradition. Andrews knew that Tumblety had jumped his bail when he arrived in Toronto so there was absolutely no purpose to be served by carrying out any form of 'background research' into a man who was not in custody. Any such research would have been a complete waste of time. As I have said, it's a point that R.J. Palmer missed but it absolutely destroys his entire argument.

I raised this with Jonathan in the Suckered! thread but did I get a response? Of course not.

Let me now reproduce some extracts from one of my posts in the Suckered! thread which Jonathan may not even have read because he had already run away from that thread:


He [Jonathan] tells us that Palmer’s trilogy is "one of the great long essays written on this subject" which "exhibits the highest standards of historical scholarship."

It is strange, therefore, that, in his post, Jonathan completely ignores the document which Palmer categorically states is "one of the key documents, if not the key document" (Palmer Trilogy, part 2, p.74). This, Palmer tells us, is Robert Anderson's letter to the Home Office dated 19 November 1888. According to Palmer, this letter "has gone missing" but I found it in the National Archives. Far from supporting Palmer’s claim that, in this letter, Anderson "inquired about the feasibility of sending a man to North America and was further asking whether he could use the extradition of the prisoner Roland Barnett to do it", he does no such thing and the letter simply shows that Anderson was corresponding with the Home Office about the procedure to extradite Roland Barnett to Canada at the request of the Toronto police.

Despite, Palmer being "the greatest living writer on this subject" (as Jonathan told me in another thread in February), Jonathan evidently does not think much of Palmer’s argument that Anderson got his information about Tumblety’s connection with Canada from a New York newspaper because he now speculates that Tumblety himself was Anderson’s source. Thus, he says, "We do not know what Dr. Tumblety told the police about himself when they had him", the implication being that Tumblety told the British police he had recently been in Toronto.

It is rather unlikely that Tumblety would have told the police anything considering that they were not allowed to question a suspect after they arrested him but had they managed to extract such irrelevant information from him on the gross indecency charge – which must have been at some point on or before Tumblety’s appearance before a magistrate on 7 November 1888 – an urgent cable to the Toronto police requesting information on a Dr Francis Tumblety would surely have sufficed.

According to Palmer, Anderson had no problem contacting San Francisco for information about Tumblety on or before 23 November so why not Toronto? If a "discreet background check" was so important, why not do it immediately rather than hang around waiting to see if the Canadian authorities might be prepared to pay for an officer to be sent over to Toronto and then wait a further period of time for an officer to sail slowly out there?

Jonathan is surely aware of this which is why he includes the sentence: "Especially if police could clarify, face to face, whether they think this is Jack, or not". But "face to face" with whom? Could Anderson or Andrews seriously have expected that a Scotland Yard inspector was going to be able to clarify in Toronto whether Tumblety was JTR? And how is this consistent with a "discreet background check"? It seems to have now become a full-on investigation in a foreign country!

.....

Back in February, he [Jonathan] told me on another thread that I should get hold of Palmer’s trilogy and Wolf Vanderlinden’s essays and that: "You will then come to your own conclusion as to who is probably correct in their examination of the primary record".

I did get hold of both works and discovered that neither of them were correct in their examination of the primary record. Palmer’s trilogy may or may not have been "beautifully written and judiciously argued" but what I failed to find as I read through his full trilogy was any evidence at all that Andrews was doing anything Tumblety related in Toronto. I did, however, find a series of misunderstandings. Comments such as

"under the auspices of the Fugitive Offenders Act, it was entirely up to the Canadians to come and fetch Barnett." (part 2, p.67) - This is factually incorrect.

"it is clear from Lushington’s letter that Robert Anderson had inquired about the feasibility of sending a man to North America and was further asking whether he could use the extradition of the prisoner Roland Barnett to do it." (part 2, p. 75) - It is not "clear" at all and is disproved by the contents of Anderson's letter.

"A critical point is that at this stage the negotiations that would eventually bring Inspector Andrews to Canada were still ongoing. The authorities in Toronto, blissfully unaware that Barnett’s extradition papers had been filed in London on November 6th, were still scrambling to get Barnett’s extradition in order". (part 2, p.88) – This so called "critical point" is not factually correct.

One factually correct statement we do find in Palmer’s trilogy is this:

"Not a single known document filed at the C.I.D. or forwarded to the Home Office reveals what Andrews was actually investigating."

The reason for this is that Andrews was not actually investigating anything. He was escorting a prisoner to Toronto under standard extradition procedure.

ENDS

The errors that I have identified in Palmer's work seem not to trouble Jonathan in the slightest although to ensure that he doesn't have to face up to them he simply ignores them.