This is just a suggestion, so if it's not to peoples' liking please don't metaphorically jump on me from a great height.  I know there is already a thread for myths so I don't want to create a redundant thread.  I've noticed that some people like to speculate about possible mysteries and other people find them too silly for words.  My thinking was that if there was a thread for such matters then people who had an interest could post there and people who found such things distasteful could avoid it like the plague.  There are some legitimate historical mysteries like what happened to the Mary Celeste and who was Jack The Ripper?  (I know the latter at least has been discussed on this board already; I'm mentioning them as examples of bona fide mysteries). I'm certainly not thinking about way-out ideas like whether man actually landed on the moon in 1969.  If nordmann or anyone else thinks that would be too frivolous an idea for a thread then let it wither on the vine (or even delete it).  I know this is a history website and not a speculation website.  I wondered if such a thread might prove a happy medium.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

This is just a suggestion, so if it's not to peoples' liking please don't metaphorically jump on me from a great height.  I know there is already a thread for myths so I don't want to create a redundant thread.  I've noticed that some people like to speculate about possible mysteries and other people find them too silly for words.  My thinking was that if there was a thread for such matters then people who had an interest could post there and people who found such things distasteful could avoid it like the plague.  There are some legitimate historical mysteries like what happened to the Mary Celeste and who was Jack The Ripper?  (I know the latter at least has been discussed on this board already; I'm mentioning them as examples of bona fide mysteries). I'm certainly not thinking about way-out ideas like whether man actually landed on the moon in 1969.  If nordmann or anyone else thinks that would be too frivolous an idea for a thread then let it wither on the vine (or even delete it).  I know this is a history website and not a speculation website.  I wondered if such a thread might prove a happy medium.

Lady,

there is in my humble opinion no too frivolous a thread. BTW, lady, I learned today: "wither on the vine". I thought only we, in our Southern Dutch dialects, had some colourful sayings...and as I had a quick look to Google...it seems to be a metaphor from the bible...

To come back to the subject. I like the threads from Dirk very much. But always a lack of time to "compose" an elaborated answer. I had even a thought how the figures only visible from the hight, could have been constructed from beneath...

Having a full day work load...every day!...as going on café with the partner and reading the daily papers and drinking some "cafés" and some limonades..I can only do some work for the boards in the evening...and if you don't believe it...it is under the title of your thread: "whatever"...

Kind regards from your soulmate Paul.

PS: I searched first for the meaning of "soulmate".
PPS: In my connotation it is more: close friend, mate having the same thoughts and thinking...

I thought I had found a mystery but I note that nordmann already mentioned this one briefly in the Jack the Ripper thread.  I hadn't realised this before but apparently some years ago (about 12) an American toxicologist studied some flesh remaining from the (partial) corpse found beneath Dr Crippen's house and believed to have been that of his wife.  Collection had been made of microcondrial DNA of a couple of Mrs Crippen's great-nieces and a match couldn't be established with the remains.  I also read that modern tests found the flesh to have male markers.  While I could find something about the microcondial DNA findings I couldn't find anything online where a scientist had said the flesh had XY chromosomes.  (That doesn't mean that no scientist stated that the remains were male - just that I couldn't find any evidence of proof rather than speculation online).

Dr Crippen didn't really help himself by running away with his girlfriend and there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to make him look suspicious.  I think it's possible that in modern times the microcondial DNA evidence could have created the possibility of reasonable doubt, but then again if he thought his wife was alive there was a possibility she might return so why did he move his girlfriend into his house to live with him?

There certainly was a corpse - or part of a corpse - buried under Dr Crippen's house and the man with whom Dr Crippen alleged Mrs Crippen had eloped testified that he hadn't run away with her - and there hadn't been a transatlantic ship (to carry Mrs Crippen and her boyfriend) sailing at the time alleged by Dr Crippen.

There has been speculation as to whether Dr Crippen had dabbled in abortion (his homeopathic practice apparently was not doing too well) and something went wrong and the corpse of a woman undergoing an abortion was disposed of.

If the corpse WAS male then whose body was it.  Could it have been one of Mrs Crippen's boyfriends?

Did Mrs Crippen leave on her own or with a different boyfriend and if she did leave had she crossed the Atlantic at all?

Could Mrs Crippen have suffered from Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (in which case remains would identify as male)? I actually think that scenario is one of the least likely but I want to account for as many eventualities as I can.

Some people have wondered why Dr Crippen would have dismembered the corpse if he had administered poison because poisoners sometimes try to pass off the death of the victim as natural causes.  My reasoning would be because he wanted to hide the body.

Then, the most obvious answer is often the right one.  Dr Crippen had bought some poison of the type found in the remains.  Some people think he might have intended to make his wife drowsy rather than kill her.  That's plausible I guess and could explain his not particularly expert disposal* of the corpse.  He could have just panicked.

* Though the parts of the body not buried in Dr Crippen's cellar have never to the best of my knowledge been found.

The policeman who investigated the matter was inclined to believe Dr Crippen when he said his wife had left him.  If Dr Crippen had "sat tight" instead of running away he might have lived longer.  He did always protest his innocence.

For my tuppence worth I feel there is enough room for reasonable doubt in the matter though bearing in mind the amount of circumstantial evidence things don't look very favourable for Dr Crippen.

I have always been interested in true crime, especially those with some doubt attached to them. We are in the process of pruning our books, and I have found quite a number (I mean dozens!) which often duplicated the crimes so we were able to throw out quite a lot of those, and Jack the Ripper theories have mostly been debunked so I threw out most of those. Mostly my crime books are about British crimes, but there was the American Black Dahlia one. 

I thought the Red Barn murder was a mystery but apparently not. So I am not sure why that one is the first that comes to my mind. We have several in New Zealand that have caused controversy - the most famous one is the Crewe murders where someone (Arthur Allan Thomas) was jailed for a long time, then pardoned and given a large sum of money. No-one knows yet who committed this crime. Another very famous one was the kindergarten children's accusations against worker Peter Ellis who has just died but his supporters are still hoping for a pardon. It was at the time when there was quite a lot of hysteria about this sort of thing. Pre-schoolers talking about big black penises always struck me as a little odd. Both of those would be known to the vast percentage of NZ residents. 

I remembered Ruth Ellis, too, and looked her up in wikipedia: it is amazing how many of her family committedd suicide or were otherwise affected by depression, etc.

I'll have to look up the cases you mention, Caro.  There were a couple of "Satanic panic" cases in the UK in the 1980s.  I think one child involved brought a legal action against the relevant council when she became an adult.  Not that there aren't children who are abused, sadly, but fake cases can take resources away from the genuine cases.  The Black Dahlia case was never solved was it?

Caro and Lady in retirement,


Have a read through some of these links. Some of the cases are really interesting .


https://www.geni.com/projects/Famous-and-Leading-Court-Cases-UK-and-Ireland/31010



https://www.famous-trials.com/



http://www.noumenal.com/marc/nbtfacsimile.pdf



Btw,

on the last link mentioned you have to scroll down a bit before the actual cases are shown.

Actually just as a matter of interest when reading through some of the historical trials  especially in the 1920's up to the 1950's( some of them are not even mentioned in these links ) I am always amazed at the fact that as soon as some Scotland Yard inspector and his sergeant are called in to investigate the crime a arrest is made within a few days , some times even within 24 hours.

And the suspect is usually considered not very bright, some type of person moving from place to place , someone of no fixed address and even upon times a foreigner with very little knowledge of the English language.


I sometimes wonder how many suspects of murder in the early 1900's were actually guilty of the crime they were charged with.


Dirk

And then after a few days the newspapers write that Inspector (so and so   FROM THE YARD has solved the crime.

I suppose we always hear about the solved cases.  There have been cases that have remained unsolved of course (I won't go into those here) and I have read of DNA enabling "cold" cases to be solved.  Then again, as I tend to listen to the radio or podcasts sometimes these days, I was listening to something where a lady was talking about the "CSI* effect" - apparently in a number of cases DNA doesn't necessarily come into play in the solving of a crime and old-fashioned sleuthing solves the case.  From what I remember of my legal secretarial work the burden of proof in a criminal case for the prosecution case is supposed to be 98% whereas in a civil case it is 60%.

I haven't read all of Dirk's links because there were a great many trials and some were very complex.  I was interested to read the 1722 "Somerset v Stewart" case and was glad judgment was in favour of the black man, though by modern standards** the technicality that the former slave should be released because he was currently in England with the implication that if he had been in one of the then colonies he would have remained a slave is abominable.

* "CSI Effect" - if I've understood it correctly, this means that some of the general public think forensic evidence plays a greater part in the solution of crimes than it actually does because of what has been shown on various TV crime shows.  [url=https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › CSI_effect]https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › CSI_effect[/url]  There was a TV show in the early 2000s called CSI (the initials standing for Crime Scene Investigation) about cases solved by a fictional team of crime scene investigators in Las Vegas.  I enjoyed it though I'm not sure how realistic it was (for example, the crime scene investigators sometimes interrogated witnesses or suspects - I'm pretty sure in real life that would be left to the police but I'm not sure about USA police procedure).

** I'm applying 21st century standards to something that happened in the 18th century.  I was taken to task (not nastily) on the Charlemagne thread for judging Charlemagne perhaps too harshly because I was applying 21st century standards to something that had happened in his period in power.

I read a sceptic (as far as I can tell) blog today about "German measles parties".  The blogger I think was intimating they didn't take place.  I can remember hearing about "German measles parties" in the 1960s when I was a teenager though I've never met anyone who attended one.  The idea was (this being before there was a Rubella vaccine) that if there was a breakout of Rubella parents of a child with German measles would invite his/her female friends so that they might possibly catch the disease while they were prepubescent and thereby avoid the danger of catching the disease during their childbearing years.  Does anybody know if German measles parties in fact took place or are they are urban myth.  I'll link the article I read in case anyone fancies reading it:-[url=eusa-riddled.blogspot.com/2020/01/some-things-get-started-by-others.html]eusa-riddled.blogspot.com/2020/01/some-things-get-started-by-others.html[/url]

Editing because the link does not appear to have 'taken'.  If anyone wants to google it, it is:-

eusa-riddled.blogspot.com/2020/01/some-things-get-started-by-others.html

http://eusa-riddled.blogspot.com/2020/01/some-things-get-started-by-others.html

LiR, you wouldn't believe it, but in a paper of two days ago, there was some fake news about an "eenhoorn" (unicorn) washed ashore on the Belgian coast with a photograph brought in a serious manner as if real news. Just near the text an advertisement for a "searcher", which would indicate for payement, what was fake and not...

The stupid ones (I don't said average American ones, as in my opinion in Europe (including England) there are as many as over the pond) are thus two times cheated. They nearly believed the fake news and then paid a real "agency" to avoid that, even if they are not sure this advertisement is also fake...I think...

Kind regards from Paul.

I've listened to a podcast "American Hysteria" - an episode about the Furby toy (an early robotic toy from the 1990s). The lady behind the podcast is a sceptic as far as I can tell or certainly errs on the sceptic side.  I can remember a work colleague buying Furbies (sp???) for his nephew's children back in the 1990s.  The toys were programmed to start off speaking something akin to baby talk and then evolve over time to speaking proper English.  Of course some of them malfunctioned and certain people believed that the Furbies were 'spying' on them or teaching their kids bad language.  Of course children can play roughly with toys and some youngsters inadvertently reset the factory settings on the robot part of the toy so that the toy started speaking in languages other than English. It seems there are some folks who thought it was "them" (whoever "they") are spying and some people put it down to the work of Old Harry!

(In case anyone wonders what I'm talking about - Old Harry is a slang name for an entity depicted with horns, cloven hooves and a long tail).  I don't want to write in such a way that a google search might bring people with 'unusual' ideas to this site.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

(In case anyone wonders what I'm talking about - Old Harry is a slang name for an entity depicted with horns, cloven hooves and a long tail).  I don't want to write in such a way that a google search might bring people with 'unusual' ideas to this site.

 
LiR, of course that was the thing I wanted to do. Thanks for the explanation before I started...

Kind regards from Paul.

PS. I am very suspicious on the internet and look always first to the "about us", although sceptics as I, can also be lurred.  I guess even "our" nordmann...

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