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RipperHistorian
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 16, 2004 - 9:09 pm: | 
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Has anybody ever looked into the city police suspect that is described by Inspector Henry Cox in his rendition of the ripper investigation.
It describes him tailing a suspect that he was positive was the ripper and staking out his place of business for quite some time. The suspect was supposedly in th ehabit of going out on late night walks.
Cox never names him, but does describe his appearance and some details about where he lived.
cox went on the be part of a famous case later on in his career.
Has anybody ever investigated this?
Tim |
Shelley Wiltshire
Detective Sergeant
Username: Shelley
Post Number: 79
Registered: 7-2004
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 6:40 pm: |
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Hi RH,
No i can't say that i have looked at it, can't even remember hearing the name Henry Cox.
But as you have mentioned it, it does look interesting, i'll see what i can find , or dig up.
Thanks.
Shelley
Criminology Student (Advanced) |
Monty
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Monty
Post Number: 1303
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 17, 2004 - 7:10 am: |
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Tim,
Im working from memory here, which is notoriously unreliable but.....
Im getting vibes on Jacob Issenschmid.
Been a while since I read up on him. I shall do so.
Like I said, I could be way out.......again !
Monty
Im off to see the Psy-chia-taay........just to see if Im de-men-taaay. Kiss my bad self.
-Aaron Kosminski.
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Monty
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Monty
Post Number: 1305
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 23, 2004 - 7:01 am: |
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Tim,
I have come to the conclusion that my memory is cr@p !
Monty
Im off to see the Psy-chia-taay........just to see if Im de-men-taaay. Kiss my bad self.
-Aaron Kosminski.
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Jon Smyth
Inspector
Username: Jon
Post Number: 184
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 23, 2004 - 10:26 am: |
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Hi Tim.
You are referring to Detective Inspector Harry Cox of the City Police.
In fact, if you can lay your hands on a work by Nick Connell and Stewart Evans, 'The man who hunted Jack the Ripper', chapter 22 should answer many of your questions.
I can summarize it for you if you need it.
Regards, Jon |
Timothy_
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, December 04, 2004 - 6:28 pm: |
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Yes, if you could please summarize it, that would be great.
(word filler word filler word filler word filler word filler word filler word filler word filler for 25 words) |
Chris Phillips
Chief Inspector
Username: Cgp100
Post Number: 679
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, February 07, 2005 - 5:37 pm: |
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I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on Henry Cox's suspect. His account is printed on pp. 638-644 of Evans and Skinner's Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook.
Some particular questions spring to mind:
Can Cox's description of the street he watched be reconciled with Sagar's mention of "Butcher's Row"?
What was Cox referring to when he wrote "It was not easy to forget that already one of them [the "brutal crimes"] had already taken place at the very moment when one of our smartest colleagues was passing the top of the dimly lit street"? Does it refer to the street in which one of the murders took place? (If so, which?) Or the street that Cox was watching?
Can anyone tell me where the "model lodging-house" is, where the suspect met a woman, after Cox had followed him from "St George's in the East End"?
Chris Phillips
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Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 4046
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 08, 2005 - 4:30 am: |
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Hi Chris
I'm tempted to say that "one of our smartest colleagues" can only refer to White. On the other hand, though, surely if White did actually clearly see someone leaving the scene of a murder, he would have been asked to look at Cox's man. If he did, the result seems to have been negative.
By the same token, if both
1. White saw someone leaving the scene of a murder, and
2. The police later came to suspect Druitt,
then one would have thought that White would have been asked to look at Monty's photos.
Robert |
Phil Hill
Detective Sergeant
Username: Phil
Post Number: 99
Registered: 1-2005
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 08, 2005 - 12:57 pm: |
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I say again, we have to be VERY careful about White's evidence. In judicial terms it is "hearsay". The words used (after his death) have clearly been worked on by a journalistic hand. We do not know that White approved the account, agreed with it, or was even aware of it.
So any supposition or theory based on what White may or may not have seen, or told others he had seen, is going to be very unstable and unreliable.
Sorry to sound a negative note,
Phil |
Chris Phillips
Chief Inspector
Username: Cgp100
Post Number: 681
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 08, 2005 - 1:40 pm: |
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Phil
I agree the story about White has to be treated with great caution. But the account of Cox's activities purports to have been written by Cox himself, so it's in a rather different category.
I must say when I looked at that phrase, White sprang immediately to mind. But looking at the details again, I suppose PC Harvey's visit to Church Passage, at about the time Catherine Eddowes must have been killed, comes pretty close.
Though it seems a bit doubtful whether Cox would have described as "one of our smartest colleagues" a man dismissed from the force a few months later.
Chris Phillips
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Phil Hill
Detective Sergeant
Username: Phil
Post Number: 101
Registered: 1-2005
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 08, 2005 - 2:05 pm: |
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I think many accounts got garbled over the years - and the idea of "I just missed Jack" caught on, as a game everyone sought to play.
We have the sink that Major Arthur Griffiths (?) claimed to have seen with bloodstained water in it in Dorset St; we have the White story... details are wrong; sites don't match with descriptions. I'm not saying men lied, only that in their memories later events merged with earlier ones, and wishful thinking was translated into what they remembered so vividly.
In retrospect that late summer and autumn of 1888 must have seemed a period of intense excitement and unrepeated tension - they had been involved in the creation of a legend, and then played their part in their memoirs in helping that legend evolve.
Phil |
AIP
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 08, 2005 - 3:29 pm: |
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It was Major Smith of the City Police who gave the sink with bloodstained water story. |
Phil Hill
Detective Sergeant
Username: Phil
Post Number: 107
Registered: 1-2005
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 09, 2005 - 1:06 pm: |
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Thank you for the correction - I clearly got my "majors" in a twist!! |
R.J. Palmer
Chief Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 531
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 11, 2005 - 12:17 pm: |
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Chris P. - My 2 cents; not worth much, I'm afraid. Cox states elsewhere in the article that the murders stopped as soon as the suspect was watched, so it seems to me that this indicatest that his phrase 'the dimly lit street' in "It was not easy to forget that already one of them (ie., murders) had already taken place at the very moment when one of our smartest colleagues was passing the top of the dimly lit street", refers, not to the suspect's street (since he wasn't being watched yet) but to the top of a street near a crime scene. Thus, it also seems to indicate a murder in which the body was discovered rather soon, since the time of death is shown to synchronize with the PC's known activity. I'm puzzled by the word 'colleagues' --I don't know if Cox means a fellow City PC, or whether he's touching his hat in the direction of the Met. Possibly the former. All in all, I think it is likely that he refers to the murder of Eddowes. One might be tempted to associate this with the shadowy (and controversial) claim of a City PC near that scene. Sir Basil Thomson in his history of Scotland Yard called this fellow "PC Thompson." Not, certainly, the PC Ernest Thompson who found Francis Coles, since he wasn't with the force yet---I think he joined at the end of 1890. Confusingly, there was another PC Ernest Thompson, not with the Met, but with the City of London Police, who went on to be Chief Superintendent. (See Times obit., 12 Oct. 1936). Unfortunately, it can't be him either, since he didn't join the force until about 1894. (According to the article he retired in 1935, and had been with the City Police for 41 years). This is, in itself, interesting, though, since the obituary states of Thompson: "As a young constable he helped in the search for the perpetrator of the Jack the Ripper murders'. Which seems to show that the City of London Police were still looking for the murderer in 1894. It's a mess. Cheers, RP |
Chris Phillips
Chief Inspector
Username: Cgp100
Post Number: 694
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 11, 2005 - 12:35 pm: |
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R. J. Palmer
Thanks for those thoughts.
One other interesting thing about Cox's account is that he says that "after the last murder I was on duty in this street for nearly three months."
If the "last murder" is Kelly, depending how soon afterward the observation started, three months would come reasonably close to the time "about March 1889" when Macnaghten said Kosminski was removed to a lunatic asylum.
Admittedly Cox doesn't say that his suspect was removed to an asylum at the end of the period, though he says he "was forced to spend a portion of his time in an asylum in Surrey."
Chris Phillips
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