Charles Allen Lechmere was a meat cart driver from the east side of London for the Pickfords company. He is suspected by some as having been Jack the Ripper. He was long regarded as an innocent witness who discovered the body of Mary Ann Nichols, the first of the Ripper's five canonical victims. Lechmere was first proposed as a prime suspect for being Jack The Ripper, by journalist Christer Holmgren and criminologist Gareth Norris in the 2014 Channel Five documentary Jack the Ripper: The Missing Evidence.
Biography
Charles Lechmere was born on 5 October 1849, in the Strand, London, England the son of John Allen Lechmere and Maria Louisa Roulson. Charles Lechmere had a "broken home" growing up, having had two step fathers and never knowing his real father. Lechmere's childhood was also characterized by instability of residence, being raised in a series of different homes. Lechmere married Elizabeth Bostock in 1870 and had twelve children. Lechmere died in December 1920 at the age of seventy one.
Jack the Ripper suspect
Charles Lechmere was first proposed as a possible suspect for Jack The Ripper, by journalist Christer Holmgren and criminologist Gareth Norris in the 2014 documentary Jack the Ripper: The Missing Evidence. In Lechmere's testimony to the inquiry, he claimed that he was passing by to work when he discovered the body of Mary Ann Nichols at 3:40 AM on 31 August 1888, on Buck's Row when Robert Paul another bystander walking passed, saw him leaning over the body. Lechmere said that after he saw Robert Paul, he called him over to look at her ; no blood was visible, but by the time a constable found her shortly afterward, a pool of blood had pooled around her neck, suggesting the cut to her throat was very fresh when Lechmere and Paul were present. In addition, neither man reported seeing or hearing anyone else at Buck's Row that night, which had no side exits. It is thought that Lechmere may have murdered Nichols and then begun the process of mutilating her body when he heard the sound of Paul's footsteps, and then tried to portray himself as the discoverer of the body. The Jack the Ripper documentary also points out that Lechmere did not come forward until Paul mentioned him to the press, when he gave evidence of a man named "Charles Cross" at the inquest; Cross was the surname of one of Lechmere's stepfathers. The home address of Lechmere, visits to family, and route to work were also close to the times and places of other Jack the Ripper murders. His routes to work would have Lechmere passed three streets around roughly the same times as Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, and Annie Chapman were murdered. The murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes or the "Double Event", occurred on a Saturday, his only night off from work: Stride was killed in proximity to Lechmere's mother's house in the area he grew up as a child. Other similarities include the direct route from Stride's murder scene to the location of Eddowes's murder also followed the same path Lechmere's used for twenty years to go to work. Mary Jean Kelly was also murdered near his route he took for work, the time frame in which she is estimated to have been killed matches his route, although the day she was killed was a holiday and he may have had the day off from work.
