A native of East London, Lechmere has long been regarded as merely a witness at the crime scene, but since the 2000s, true crime writers have named Lechmere a potential Jack the Ripper suspect, largely due to him providing authorities with an alias surname and circumstantial inconsistencies in his testimony.

[15] Charles Lechmere married Elizabeth Bostock on 3 July 1870, at Christ Church, in the parish of St George in the East.

[11] His mother married Joseph Forsdike on 29 July 1872, at Bethnal Green, and Charles Lechmere signed the register as a witness.

[41] Lechmere's possible guilt was further discussed by John Carey in 2002;[42] by Osborne in 2007,[43] by Michael Connor in four issues of The Ripperologist between 2006 and 2008.

[48] Mainstream awareness of Lechmere grew in 2014 when journalist Christer Holmgren and criminologist Gareth Norris explored the case against him in the 2014 Channel Five documentary Jack the Ripper: The Missing Evidence.

"[53][54][55][56] A 2014 TV documentary claimed that Lechmere did not appear at the inquest until after Paul had been quoted in the press to the effect that another man had been present.

[citation needed] At the inquest, Lechmere gave his name as Charles Allen Cross, using the surname of his police constable stepfather; later investigators found that no-one named Cross was listed in the census records for the address he supplied, meaning that his true identity was a mystery for well over a century.

[citation needed] Holmgren argues that geographic profiling, developed decades after the Ripper murders, can help narrow down likely suspects by analyzing their established movements and habitual locations in comparison to crime scenes.

[citation needed] The murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on the same night (the so-called "Double Event") took place further south—and in the small hours of a Sunday, likely the only day Lechmere would not have been travelling from home to work.

Stride was killed in proximity to Lechmere's mother's house and in the area he grew up in; the locality in which Eddowes was murdered would have been well known to him, as it was on the logical route to Broad Street from at least one of his earlier addresses.