Time Factor

[Stewart P Evans]

But...

But...there is no icon in 'Ripperology'.

[Phil H]

Is there not Stewart?

I think we all make our own icons - whether it is clinging in a blinkered way to a single killer and five canonical victims; defending a single suspect; seeing the killer in certain ways.

Phil

[Wickerman]

Because the police have been known to be wrong - take Sutcliffe who was interviewed (was it?) three times and let go.

Yes Phil, we all know the police can be wrong.
Public witnesses, professional witnesses, and the police have all made mistakes.
What we shouldn't do is invent our own solutions.

It is always preferred to take the path of least resistance, not to go down the Yellow Brick road.

.

[The Good Michael]

Yes Phil, we all know the police can be wrong.
Public witnesses, professional witnesses, and the police have all made mistakes.
What we shouldn't do is invent our own solutions.

It is always preferred to take the path of least resistance, not to go down the Yellow Brick road.

.

Jon,

I agree, but most solutions aren't nearly as bad as the crooked paths that lead people to them.

Mike

[Jonathan H]

Anti-Icon?

The iconic image in popular culture of 'Jack the Ripper' is that of the top hatted toff with cloak and medical bag.

This icon is rejected by almost everybody in RipperLand.

It was the pop residue of Sims' 'Drowned doctor' solution, but the suicide in the river had become detached from the mad medico, eg, the tormented-penitential element had faded away completely with the deaths of Macnaghten and Sims, in 1921 and 1922 respectively.

In 1959 Lady Christabel Aberconway made an understandable but momentous mistake in showing what she called her father's 'notes' to a celebrity television reporter working to a tight deadline.

She needed, instead, to interest an historian (by no means easily done) or at least somebody with enough time and resources to carefully and methodically rediscover everything pertinent to her father's chief suspect, eg. by George Sims, and Dr. Tumblety (in the US press), the bridging source of M.P. Farquharson, and possibly Aaron Kosminski in the asylum records (sectioned too late), certainly that the police hunt went on until 1891, if not longer, and, most critically, her father's 1914 memoirs which debunk the 'drowned doctor' himself.

Instead, Dan Farson, again understandably but from ignorance of the context of the 'Aberconway' version, and not knowing much about Christabel's late father presumed Sir Melville's memory was at fault in writing about Druitt, and that he had not [posthumously] investigated this suspect himself.

These intertwined mistakes by Farson set in motion 'Ripperology' which had been started by LeQueux in 1923, and which was only halted momentarily by Druitt's re-discovery -- in the long term it was strengthened by his not matching what Mac wrote in his Report(s) -- and on it rolled, the notion that the case was never solved.

That it was up to secondary sources to achieve what primary sources had failed to do.

To some extent the rehabilitation of Anderson (seemingly backed by Swanson) is a worthy corrective to the subsequent freak show of hustlers and hoaxers; to reassert the primacy of the primary police sources and show that, at least to that chief's satisfaction, it was solved. A chief who was arguably not an anti-Semite, nor corrupt.

To some extent the rediscovery of Tumblety via Littlechild is also an attempt to do the same thing: that it was probably solved at the time. Or at least that the Irish-American was a major suspect of 1888 -- if not the police suspect.

But the original Macnaghten-Druitt solution of 1898 to 1922 cannot be so rehabilitated -- not here anyway -- because it would mean that the despised anti-icon would also have to be rehabilitated and be accepted as broadly correct: Jack the Gentleman.

[RivkahChaya]

Instead, Dan Farson, again understandably but from ignorance of the context of the 'Aberconway' version, and not knowing much about Christabel's late father presumed Sir Melville's memory was at fault in writing about Druitt, and that he had not [posthumously] investigated this suspect himself.

Now how on earth would he investigate posthumously?

[Jonathan H]

Challenging Modern 'Orthodoxy'

Eh, how could he not investigate posthumously? When Macnaghten learned of Montague Druitt as a Ripper suspect the latter had been deceased for over two years.

In his 1914 memoirs Mac makes it clear that it was from inside information, 'certain facts' received that he (and he alone?) led to a 'conclusion'. A conclusion which would always have to be 'in all probability' because the suspect could never be arrested, or charged, or convicted:

'Although, as I shall endeavour to show in this chapter, the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November 1888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer.'

Where and from whom did these 'certain facts' come from? Mac does not say -- but implies it was from Druitt's family:

'Only last autumn I was very much interested in a book entitled The Lodger, which set forth in vivid colours what the Whitechapel murderer's life might have been while dwelling in London lodgings. The talented authoress portrayed him as a religious enthusiast, gone crazy over the belief that he was predestined to slaughter a certain number of unfortunate women, and that he had been confined in a criminal lunatic asylum and had escaped therefrom. I do not think that there was anything of religious mania about the real Simon Pure, nor do I believe that he had ever been detained in an asylum, nor lived in lodgings. I incline to the belief that the individual who held up London in terror resided with his own people ; that he absented himself from home at certain times, and that he committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888, after he had knocked out a Commissioner of Police and very nearly settled the hash of one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State.'

What he does not reveal is that the character in 'The Lodger', the self-styled Avenger is a young Gentile man who takes his own life. This is quite close to Druitt. He also implies, misleadingly, that the killer lived with his own family, a fictional compression of where he lived and worked.

Yet Macnaghten knew that Druitt's 'own people' knew he was 'absented', a detail which could not be in P.C. Moulson's report on the recovery of the body from the Thames.

We arguably see a glimpse of Mac's posthumous investigation of Druitt in the account he gave to his pal, Sims, a version which is propaganda to make the Yard look better. It also deals squarely with the argument against this suspect -- he killed himself at the wrong time to have been Jack:

George Sims as Dagonet in 'The Referee', April 5, 1903.

'It is argued that "Jack" could not have drowned himself in 1888, because there were murders in Whitechapel in 1891. The last of the Ripper series was the Miller's-court horror, which occurred on November 9, 1888. The East End murders of later years were not in the same 'handwriting.

No one who saw the victim of Miller's-court as she was found ever doubted that the deed was that of a man in the last stage of a terrible form of insanity. No complete description was ever given to the Press. The details were too foully, fiendishly awful. A little more than a month later the body of the man suspected by the chiefs at the Yard, and by his own friends, who were in communication with the Yard, was found in the Thames. The body had been in the water about a month.'

Behind this fact-into-fiction is I think Mac meeting with the Druitts, or a Druitt. From Farquharson the would-be sleuth had the trail to Dorset, where Vicar Charles Druitt, Montie's cousin, 'resided'.

[RedBundy13]

Sorry to change subject...

Again, I don't mean to change the subject but I wanted to post this before I forget. I have recently purchased 'Jack the Ripper CSI: Whitechapel' by Paul Begg and John Bennett (GREAT BOOK!! by the way) and I wanted to address what could be, a big discrepancy. Now this is just an opinion of mine but I do think it has some credibility. On page 82 there is a VERY DETAILED image of the backyard of #29 Hanbury St.. The only problem is is that IMO, the fence it too high and there is not enough space between the boards. I think they got the dimensions from the picture on page 93, where it clearly shows a fence looking just like the one we see on page 82. The problem with this is that the picture taken on pg. 93 was taken in the 1960's, decades after the original fence was torn down.
Now if you measure the height of the outside door on page 82 to the height of the fence it clearly shows that the fence in that particular picture is the same height as the door, which by door standards would be about 7' tall. We know that the fence at the time of the murders was between 5 and 6 feet tall. In this case it makes a HUGE difference. Why, because if we look at page 102, that has a drawing taken at the time of the murders, that shows what the actual fence looked like at the time. Clearly not nearly as tall, and also there is CLEAR gaps in between the boards.
Again, why does this matter? Because as we know, according to Albert Cadosch's statement (and this we have to look at extremely close) he said that when he 1st went outside he heard some voices (which in other books he states he wasn't sure where they were coming from) but the only word he could make out was "no". When he returned a few minutes later he heard a "soft fall" against the fence. Which if we take this literally, would mean that whoever fell either would have been standing up, sitting on the stairs or else kneeling beside the fence. In any of those cases, even someone kneeling, they would have been EASILY seen by a person standing at the top of the stairs next door. Let's even forget about the spaces in the boards right now (which IMO, would have easily shown at least some sort of dark figures moving around over there, but we'll say for arguement that it was too dark to see anything at that point, even though we know it wasn't because the sun was coming up already, but again, for arguements sake, it was too dark) and we'll just say the only way a person or persons could be noticed was by looking over the fence. I still say that if in fact Cadosch did hear something coming from that corner he WOULD have in fact at least looked that way, first after hearing the word "no" and then next by hearing something fall. And it's my opinion that if anyone was in fact at #29 Hanbury St. at that time on the side of the fence, that they would have in fact of been seen by Cadosch when he was on those stairs.
If this was the case then the time of death by Dr. Phillips was correct and the IDing of the "suspect" by Mrs. Long would have to be thrown out. Which it should be because there is such a huge discrepancy anyways right now with the time frames and the only way to get them to fit, is by saying these people heard different bells at different times and so on, which IMO is a far stretch.
This being said, I feel that John Richardson just didn't see the body there at the time he sat down to cut that piece of leather from his boot. It was dark, and unless he some reason to look that way, he could easily not have noticed her body, after all his attention was drawn to the OTHER side of the stairs. It's either that or he's lying and he in fact killed her and is Jack the Ripper... Which I seriously doubt he is.
I think this is of huge importance to the case, after all it's because of Mrs. Longs description we think we know what JTR looks like, which, IMO, isn't even close. I feel he was much, MUCH younger, and would fit in in just about anywhere he went. But that's for another post...

[DRoy]

Good post RedBundy!

I just can't believe that Richardson could have missed the body. When you look at the actual photos of 29 Hanbury you can see that the steps are very low steps and Chapman's head would be right there. If he could see the leather piece from his boot, he surely would be able to see Chapman laying there when she was only a yard away.

I would suggest that she was murdered sometime after Richardson went inside. That though is quite amazing as the killer would have entered the back yard of a house that most likely had candles burning for light (Richardson was awake and right next door so was Cadosch) and where one of its inhabitants had just been in the yard (most likely making even the slightest amount of noise which would be announcing a presence to "Jack").

Cheers
DRoy

[Phil H]

Perceptive post DRoy, but i would suggest that the murder happened BEFORE Richardson claimed to have been there, but that he in fact never visted on that day. His story evolved in a somewhat unbelievable way - to me at least.

An earlier time of death - when it was still dark - would have considerably reduced the risks for "Jack" (as you yourself clearly recognise) and have fitted with the time Nichols was killed, almost beyond doubt by the same hand.

Phil

[DRoy]

Phil H,

Richardson does appear strange doesn't he? To be honest, I haven't dabbled that much in Richardson to claim his testimony isn't completely truthful a/o he's mistaken.

Depending on the actual time of death, it still could have been dark out if Long was mistaken in identifying Chapman. If you take Richardson's statement out then there is hours of dark to play with.

As Dr. Phillips states from his approximate 6:30am visit "the stiffness of the limbs was not marked, but was evidently commencing". Normally rigor mortis affects the limbs between 4 to 6 hours. In other words, way before Richardson's apparent back yard visit, Cadosch's bump against the fence and Long's witness statement.

So if we believe the witness statements then Dr Phillips is mistaken. But, if we apply Phillips' comment about the stiffness then that would make all of the witnesses wrong, not just Richardson.

Cheers
DRoy

[Phil H]

But, if we apply Phillips' comment about the stiffness then that would make all of the witnesses wrong, not just Richardson.

Precisely.

You may recall that cadosche's integrity has been challenged - a later bigamous marriage and a false age given (IIRC).

I have always had doubts about Mrs Long/Darrell's reliability.

An earlier time of death also means we do not have to explain a sick and visibly ailing Chapman trudging around Whitechapel/Spitalfields for the entire night.

Phil

[DRoy]

Phil H,

I know there has been a lot of discussion (especially in the MJK threads) about rigor mortis. Even factoring in weather, loss of blood, and other outside factors, how could the doctors find a time of death around 5:30? Is it really because of the witness statements and that's it? Even if the physical evidence may be saying otherwise?

I for one have trusted the witness statements although there was obviously something a little funky about them.

Difficult to believe that within an hour the doctors are saying she was already getting the affects of rigor mortis kicking in. Are they fitting the physical evidence to fit the witness evidence?

DRoy

[Phil H]

DRoy - the medical evidence is not my strongest suit in Ripperology. However, I seem to recall that the opening and evisceration of the body is seen as allowing it to cool more quickly in the chilly morning air - hence the rigor set in earlier.

My reading, nevertheless, is that the evidence is ambiguous and will permit an earlier time of death. I have reached no conclusion, but my favoured working hypothesis at present is that Chpman died in the early hours.

If Cadosche heard anything it may well have been an unrecorded individual discovering the body and then fleeing.

Phil

[adelsa]

I can't believe Annie was murdered any later than 4.30am. Even that seems too risky to me. All the others happened not just in the dark, but when there was less than a quarter moon and in rain with cloud cover.
Also he seems to have known the area really well and would have known there'd be lots of potential witnesses about getting ready for the market. Not just those who could overlook the yard of 29 but in the street outside.