Casebook Examiner No. 2 (June 2010)

[lynn cates]

PI ad

Hello All. Here is a Le Grand PI ad from 1888. The snippet is from Lloyd's Weekly, June 3, 1888.

Cheers.
LC

[mariab]

Le Grand's motive

My own problem, Tom, with considering Le Grand as the Ripper, is his motive. It's a bit of an overkill to have conducted all these mutilations just to put the “fear of God“ into the “unfortunates“ working independently, without a pimp. And it's atypical from what other gangs did at that time to the Whitechapel “unfortunates“. On the other side, the attack on Emma Smith makes me wonder if such mutilations were indeed so “atypical“ after all, and if Le Grand were not perhaps involved in that attack.
Also, Le Grand doesn't strike me at all as a sexually frustrated man, with a hate for his mother etc.. NOT that necessarily the Ripper would have been like that, i.e. an introvert and general people-hater. He might have kept not just a low profile, but also a superficially very “normal“ profile. It's all so hard to separate from mythology and from the clichés conveyed by profiling! If you want to know, Le Grand strikes me as an extrovert, a very manipulative character, and as such very much reminds me of Chapman.
I'm sure I'll have a more informed opinion after having read Examiner 2, which I have here on my laptop, but there's so a bunch of surf-related lit I need to read up first, plus a couple of work-related emails to write.

[caz]

Among those men, only one can be shown to be inserting himself into the investigation, and in a manner that can only be described as desperate. The end result of that subterfuge is Grape Man and the Batty Street Lodger...

Fine, Tom, but the two words in bold are yours and reflect your opinion of what Le Grand (with Batchelor in tow) was really up to and why.

It's this motivation that I question. Why would Le Grand have been 'desperate' at this point to deflect suspicion away from himself? What suspicion? And how could any 'subterfuge' involving Grape Man be designed to achieve that end, given that here was the least likely witness in the known universe to have had the cops eating (grapes or anything else) out of his hand, following on from his little "I saw nothing" performance?

Love,

Caz
X

[mariab]

Tom,
(are we on the right thread here, or on another kind of forum ?)
So it's a bootleg. OK. Thank you so much for the info. By the way, I've even watched the non canonical movie a few months ago, when it played on German TV in February.)
Gotta go now, trying to get out a 1 inch long urchin needle from my foot with a needle and some massage oil (don't ask).

[Tom_Wescott]

Maria,

Joss Whedon refuses to officially release the Buffy pilot, cuz he hates it. I got it bootleg. You can google around and find sites on the net where you can watch it. The principal is different too, otherwise it's a pretty straight-forward 30 minute version of the aired pilot.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

What an opportunity, and what a simple job it was, for Le Grand and his unconfirmed Batchelor to pull off the small coup of making the force look clueless in the eyes of the press and public, while making themselves look like Holmes and Watson by comparison.

Except that wasn't what they were after. We have all of TWO newspaper articles which even mention their names, one of which is small and so obscure it was just discovered in recent months. In spite of their position with the WVC and Le Grand's connections, he did not make any attempt to capitalize, and seems in fact to have avoided publicity at all cost.

There is really nothing left to explain concerning Le Grand's behaviour, and no cause to see him as the murderer on a cunning mission to cover his arse.

I don't know how you figure that. Subsequent to the Packer episode, Le Grand falls under suspicion for the Ripper murders and remains under suspicion into the 20th century. This can be said only about a handful of men. Among those men, only one can be shown to be inserting himself into the investigation, and in a manner that can only be described as desperate. The end result of that subterfuge is Grape Man and the Batty Street Lodger, two characters who have figured very large in Ripper writings from 1888 all the way up to the present day.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[caz]

You can't teach an old dog new tricks

Hi All,

The more I think about it, the more Packer seems to have been a perfect tool - er, in the sense of allowing a dodgy, self-styled PI a bit of self-LeGrandizement at the expense of his eternal enemy, the boys in blue, one of whom - White to be exact - had just come away without a sausage from our fanciful old fruiterer.

What an opportunity, and what a simple job it was, for Le Grand and his unconfirmed Batchelor to pull off the small coup of making the force look clueless in the eyes of the press and public, while making themselves look like Holmes and Watson by comparison.

If only the old man had stuck with one very simple account of selling some fruit to a man with a woman who turned out to be Liz, then seeing no more, the fun might have lasted a bit longer. Instead, Packer took to the craic with such relish that he told a bunch of grape stories, each more implausible than the one before, with the result that any loss of face suffered by the police was only temporary, and there were no medals for the meddlesome detective duo.

There is really nothing left to explain concerning Le Grand's behaviour, and no cause to see him as the murderer on a cunning mission to cover his arse. Packer would have been entirely the wrong man to help him do it. Yes, he was probably a safe enough bet, given that the killer would have needed a pawn who hadn't seen him hanging around before or after the murder. It would be no good if Packer had recognised the private dick now squeezing him for juicy gossip: "Wait a minute, I know you, Tall Boy. You passed by my place that night smoking a pipe, just like the one you are puffing away on now".

But how could Le Grand be expecting the cops to go off on a wild goose chase on Packer's say-so - a man who initially denied seeing anyone acting suspiciously?

This just doesn't work as a neck-saving exercise. It's all a bit too much.

Or should I say, all a bit too Hutch.

And that one has been done to death.

Love,

Caz
X

[lynn cates]

bastions

Hello Simon. Thanks for this.

And please tell me that they WERE NOT later arrested, but were, instead, bastions of moral character.

The best.
LC

[Simon Wood]

Hi Lynn,

After the Ripper murders, Abberline, Littlechild and Shore became London representatives of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

Then in 1908 there was this ex-cop . . .



. . . and also this lady–



Regards,

Simon

[lynn cates]

characters

Hello Debra. And thank you for this as well.

What? Another unsavoury character/s? I suppose the question now becomes, Were any of the London LVP private investigators upstanding moral examples? (heh-heh)

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

Slater

Hello Simon. Indeed, Slater is the chap to whom I was referring.

Turns out an unsavoury character? Pity.

Thanks for this!

Cheers.
LC

[Fisherman]

Jane Coram:

"Actually, I'm rather partial to a man in waders!"

There you go, Jane - and I´ve got two pairs of them...!

The best,
Fisherman

[Debra A]

Hi Debra,

Yep, me too. Not a sniff of Le Grand other than his less savoury pursuits. No sniff of him either in or around the Special Commission inquiry in which The Times employed as many low-life PIs as it could lay its hands on. This is how I found Mieklejohn, hard at work in Dublin.

Nice find, by the way, of his ad in the press. Who's to say the events of late 1888/early 1889 weren't interconnected?

Hi Simon,
(Aplogies everyone else , this is off topic, but it's short)
Here's the ad from 17th November 1888, it appeared in the Standard on the 17th, Lloyd's and Reynold's on the 18th. Note the phrase' being instructed in the matter of the Whitechapel Mystery' sounds like he was working for someone on this?



Interesting about the female PI's. I've only ever come across them mentioned as employed in a similar manner to a modern day 'store detective.'

[Simon Wood]

Hi Debra,

Yep, me too. Not a sniff of Le Grand other than his less savoury pursuits. No sniff of him either in or around the Special Commission inquiry in which The Times employed as many low-life PIs as it could lay its hands on. This is how I found Mieklejohn, hard at work in Dublin.

Nice find, by the way, of his ad in the press. Who's to say the events of late 1888/early 1889 weren't interconnected?

I found an interesting 1891 interview with a lady detective–

"I entered [the profession] at a peculiarly lucky time. There were few lady detectives then, and there are few now. It is quite a mistake to suppose that there are lady detectives at Scotland Yard. There are none. It is true that some female police are in the pay of the Home Office, but that is quite a different thing.

"These were introduced on this wise. Some years ago it used to be customary for ticket-of-leave women to report themselves once a month at the police station of their respective districts. This was a great injustice to these women. The stain of crime was thus ever upon them, and this soon got noised abroad, and prevented them from gaining their living in an honest, respectable fashion.

"The Home Office saw this, and so several female police were appointed to keep an eye on these women, thus saving them from the disgrace of making periodical visits to the district police station.

"You must not suppose that lady detectives are the rough, tawdry set of women you might be inclined to think. Some of them I could name are most highly educated ladies, and one is a lady of Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied with high distinction."

Food for thought.

Regards,

Simon

[Debra A]

Hello Caz. Your post is succinct and well reasoned. It brings up the inevitable question, Did Le Grand EVER work a legitimate case? or, what is nearly the same, Did he ever work as a serious (or quasi-serious) investigator?

I saw a snippet in Lloyd's Weekly from April 1888, where a private investigative firm was advertising as being the only such firm in London. So, did Le Grand have ambitions of giving competition to the other firm, or was his agency merely a front?

Cheers.
LC

Hi Lynn,
I have been researching Le Grand for a long time and never yet found a mention of him working a legitimate case as a private detective, although that doesn't mean he never did, I know. He claimed to have been working as a detective on the Parnell Inquiry, which solicitor George Henry Lewis denied. Every other mention of private inquiry work talked about in his trials etc. seems to have been a front connected to blackmail in some way.

As an add on to what Simon has just posted, it appears that there were many private detective's in London, not all working for agencies however.
Meicklejohn, the disgraced Scotland yard detective was advertising as a private inquiry man in 1888, and placed an advert looking for information on the latest 'Whitechapel Mystery' a couple of days after the Kelly murder.