The murder of Elizabeth Camp, 1897

[Mayerling]

Fascinating thread - it shouldn't have been closed down so soon.

In it's gathering of additional information it actually brought us to a similar point to the police investigation of 1897 - several interesting suspects but nothing solid enough to build a tight case on. Moreover, now that I have reread the whole thread I am noticing (quite delightedly) how Jonathan managed to show similarities in the actions of MacNaughton explaining what was discovered and in the process so mixing facts as to confuse pursuit by the public, and presumably protecting reputations of respectable families (glad that I see this again now).

Interesting mistake by Sims though - in his letter in the Daily Mail of 4 September 1908 he mentions the Merstham Tunnel Tragedy of Mary Sophia Money in 1905, but says this surely was an accidental death. That theory was raised at the time, but no theory really won out. And as events showed afterwards, there was a strong possibility that a failure in police investigations of the movements of Sophia's brother Robert may have overlooked an actual solution. In 1911 Robert killed one wife and his children, and seriously injured his second wife, and then killed himself. Of course, this would be unknown in 1908 or 1905, but it may have a really strong bearing on what caused Mary JSophia Money's death.

I have one or two other points I'd like to look into if I get a chance on the Camp Mystery.

Jeff

[Jonathan H]

Thanks Mayerling!

My initial sub-theory gained no interest, from anybody, and this was all several years ago.

Here's my summation of said theory:

In the seventh chapter of his memoirs, “RAILWAY TRAGEDIES”, Sir Melville recounts the horrific blitz-murder of a barmaid, Elizabeth Camp, on a train in 1897. Nobody was charged but the ex-chief believed he had identified the killer. Unfortunately the line-up failed to produce the desired result. In the same year it leaked about another police suspect; a young barrister who briefly went into a private asylum (it was confirmed by Chris Phillips that this second man had an iron-clad alibi) and then was discharged.

This innocent man was mentioned, but not named, in quite grotesque terms in "The Butte Weekly Minor" of December 2nd 1897, right along with the Ripper: "... consigned without trial the well-born and hitherto successful member of the bar whose homicidal mania has now been ascertained by the police to have led him to perpetuate the mysterious murder of Miss Camp ... It is probable that the true name will be kept from the public precisely in the same way as that of the author of the Jack the Ripper series of murders."

I argue that for his memoir, Macnaghten used details about this barrister suspect to semi-fictionalize and render libel-proof the real killer, who was himself disguised on the fateful day (with a false moustache). Characteristically this put Mac at odds with Anderson who claimed (Debra Arif thought quite accurately) that the timing of buying the facial prop cleared this oddball--thus denying Mac of his self-serving claim to have cunningly worked out that the killer was disguised on the fateful day.

Yet in this composite account Macnaghten also slides into details that were not true of either suspect but were likely inspired by another young barrister: Montague John Druitt: "Two or three days later the police at Blackheath found a man wandering about in pitiable plight. He was much travel-stained; he had evidently been sleeping out for some nights, and possessed no overcoat. He appeared half-witted, and though unshaved for many days had very little hair on his face ... His home he stated was on the River Thames, some forty miles from London. ... Some months after the man was ajudged insane and confined in a lunatic asylum, and as far as I know, died there". [My Italics]

After he read Macnaghten’s book in 1938 this claim of complicity triggered an affronted response from the innocent barrister’s psychiatrist, Dr. L. A. Weatherly: "I am glad the poor man died without ever knowing that he had been unjustly suspected of murdering Miss Camp."

But like Jack Littlechild with his maybe suicided Tumblety, the doctor in 1938 only seems to know half the tale Mac was spinning--and it’s the wrong half.

Consider also the "Illustrated Police News" of February 27th, 1897, in which an un-named police officer claims that the bar-maid’s killer may have instantly committed suicide: "Filled with horror, the repentant murderer escaped from the dreadful contact with his awful work at the earliest moment, and then sacrificed his own life in a frenzy of remorse ... the Thames, which flows not far from Wandsworth Station, offered what seemed to him, if the suggestion be correct, the easiest means of atonement". No other source from 1897, or afterwards, remotely suggests such a line of inquiry by the constabulary regarding Miss Camp’s killer.

This was, I postulate, Macnaghten’s dress rehearsal for disguising Montie Druitt at the end of the following year; to create a precedent in the public mind using another sensational case for a rush-to-the-Thames finale. It failed to gain tabloid traction, but the cross-fertilization lodged in the police chief’s mind ending up in an intertwined state in "Days of My Years".

It is arguably another example of textual evidence that Sir Melville Macnaghten knew that Montie Druitt was a young lawyer and not a middle-aged doctor.

It is also evidence, I think, that Macnaghten is the source for Anderson/Swanson confidently believing 'Kosminski' was deceased, defense lawyer George Kebbel thinking William Grant had also expired long before, Littlechild thinking that the American might have topped himself after he absconded, and Abberline thinking that the insane, young medical student suspect, who was the subject of a Home Office report, had drowned himself.

Only Macnaghten's suspect was actually deceased at the time of the murders, and by his own hand (and by drowning).

[Mayerling]

Thanks Mayerling!

My initial sub-theory gained no interest, from anybody, and this was all several years ago.

Here's my summation of said theory:

In the seventh chapter of his memoirs, “RAILWAY TRAGEDIES”, Sir Melville recounts the horrific blitz-murder of a barmaid, Elizabeth Camp, on a train in 1897. Nobody was charged but the ex-chief believed he had identified the killer. Unfortunately the line-up failed to produce the desired result. In the same year it leaked about another police suspect; a young barrister who briefly went into a private asylum (it was confirmed by Chris Phillips that this second man had an iron-clad alibi) and then was discharged.

This innocent man was mentioned, but not named, in quite grotesque terms in "The Butte Weekly Minor" of December 2nd 1897, right along with the Ripper: "... consigned without trial the well-born and hitherto successful member of the bar whose homicidal mania has now been ascertained by the police to have led him to perpetuate the mysterious murder of Miss Camp ... It is probable that the true name will be kept from the public precisely in the same way as that of the author of the Jack the Ripper series of murders."

I argue that for his memoir, Macnaghten used details about this barrister suspect to semi-fictionalize and render libel-proof the real killer, who was himself disguised on the fateful day (with a false moustache). Characteristically this put Mac at odds with Anderson who claimed (Debra Arif thought quite accurately) that the timing of buying the facial prop cleared this oddball--thus denying Mac of his self-serving claim to have cunningly worked out that the killer was disguised on the fateful day.

Yet in this composite account Macnaghten also slides into details that were not true of either suspect but were likely inspired by another young barrister: Montague John Druitt: "Two or three days later the police at Blackheath found a man wandering about in pitiable plight. He was much travel-stained; he had evidently been sleeping out for some nights, and possessed no overcoat. He appeared half-witted, and though unshaved for many days had very little hair on his face ... His home he stated was on the River Thames, some forty miles from London. ... Some months after the man was ajudged insane and confined in a lunatic asylum, and as far as I know, died there". [My Italics]

After he read Macnaghten’s book in 1938 this claim of complicity triggered an affronted response from the innocent barrister’s psychiatrist, Dr. L. A. Weatherly: "I am glad the poor man died without ever knowing that he had been unjustly suspected of murdering Miss Camp."

But like Jack Littlechild with his maybe suicided Tumblety, the doctor in 1938 only seems to know half the tale Mac was spinning--and it’s the wrong half.

Consider also the "Illustrated Police News" of February 27th, 1897, in which an un-named police officer claims that the bar-maid’s killer may have instantly committed suicide: "Filled with horror, the repentant murderer escaped from the dreadful contact with his awful work at the earliest moment, and then sacrificed his own life in a frenzy of remorse ... the Thames, which flows not far from Wandsworth Station, offered what seemed to him, if the suggestion be correct, the easiest means of atonement". No other source from 1897, or afterwards, remotely suggests such a line of inquiry by the constabulary regarding Miss Camp’s killer.

This was, I postulate, Macnaghten’s dress rehearsal for disguising Montie Druitt at the end of the following year; to create a precedent in the public mind using another sensational case for a rush-to-the-Thames finale. It failed to gain tabloid traction, but the cross-fertilization lodged in the police chief’s mind ending up in an intertwined state in "Days of My Years".

It is arguably another example of textual evidence that Sir Melville Macnaghten knew that Montie Druitt was a young lawyer and not a middle-aged doctor.

It is also evidence, I think, that Macnaghten is the source for Anderson/Swanson confidently believing 'Kosminski' was deceased, defense lawyer George Kebbel thinking William Grant had also expired long before, Littlechild thinking that the American might have topped himself after he absconded, and Abberline thinking that the insane, young medical student suspect, who was the subject of a Home Office report, had drowned himself.

Only Macnaghten's suspect was actually deceased at the time of the murders, and by his own hand (and by drowning).

Hi Jonathan,

It was my latching on to the "Ur-text" version of the Macnaghten method of official obfuscation that made me feel re-energizing this old thread was necessary. I started seeing your patterns later brought out in the studies about Montie.

There is though an interesting side point that I latched onto when I read the very first comment on this thread, in which reference was made to an article in the "Butte Weekly Miner" for 2 December 1897 of an article that suggested a link between the unknown murderer of Elizabeth Camp with a similar unknown killer of one Emma Matilda Johnson near Windsor in September 1897. You see, that name and date were familiar to me from a book I have. The book is called "Guilty, or Not Guilty?" and was published by Duffield in 1929. It's author is Guy B. H. Logan!

It is a pretty up-to-date book for one written in 1928/29. The last couple of murders in it that I saw (in terms of chronology) are the Browne & Kennedy murder of Constable Gutteridge in 1928, and the killing (near Bude) of Richard Roadley by William Maynard around the same time. Long, as was his want in writing his books, usually devotes a whole chapter on a particular case, though sometimes he will discuss a slew of similar homicides. In Chapter XII he deals with "Mysterious Murders of Women", and writes this:

"On the 13th of September, 1897, a young servant girl, Emma Johnston, was murdered in a lane at Windsor, and the perpetrator got clean away. When, three months later, a similar crime was committed in the same neighborhood, the victim being a Mrs. T.P. Smith, a veritable panic began in the Royal borough, and the dark roads and lanes about were avoided for months afterwards. There is reason to believe that these murders were the work of the same hand, probably some homicidal maniac, but though every source of information was explored and a large reward offered, the deaths of the women went unavenged."

Logan's next paragraph, by the way, mentions still another murder of that period: "In the same year, on the 19th August , a Mrs. Saunders, otherwise Francis, was discovered to have been strangled in her room at 236 Cator Street, Peckham, and the assassin was never caught."

Forgetting Mrs. Saunders, I concentrated on Emma Johnston and Mrs. T. P. Smith near Windsor. Notice how Logan mentions that there was some cause to believe those two murders were linked and due to an unknown madman. One wonders who suggested this to Logan.

Is it possible these two and Camp are linked? Anything is possible. Perhaps also Mrs. Saunders. But my curiosity is noting Logan's presentation of the "maybe solution" here. Doesn't it strike you like his performance regarding the solution of the Jack the Ripper matter three decades earlier?

Jeff

[Jonathan H]

Great analysis, Mayerling, and very interesing.

Logan again, eh?

[Mayerling]

An odd coincidence

I have not been on this thread for about three days, as I was starting to look up what I could on the Camp Murder. I read the article in the website on the Railroad Police (an interesting website by the way). But I just found something when looking at the "Find-a-grave" website. An Elizabeth Camp is listed, who died in 1897, but was buried in Cincinatti, Ohio.

When I looked at what it said at Find-a-grave, there was not much, but there was a cite of another website

http://www.springgrove.org/sg

the rest of the citation was not working but this part was.

It refers to Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinatti, Ohio, and I found by plugging in "Elizabeth Camp" where it asks for the name of the deceased, the following.

Card 60926 [a typed card]

Place of Birth: England

Parents Christian and Elizabeth Bott

Late Residence: 749 Clinton Street, Cincinatti, O.

Deceased: August 27, 1897

Age: 64 years,

Died: Cinti. Hosp. [Cincinatti Hospital]

Died: apoplexy

Interned: August 29, 1897 10 A.M.

Undertaker: F. A. Bailey

Ordered by do. & Mrs. Mary M. Kirby

Lot: Single Sec.: 9 Lot: 2506

Grave: $15.00.

Our Elizabeth Camp had been killed in February 1897. If there was some connection (I doubt it, but if there was), this was half a year later.

Jeff

[Debra A]

Thanks Mayerling!

My initial sub-theory gained no interest, from anybody, and this was all several years ago.

Really, Jonathon? No interest at all?!

[Jonathan H]

To Debra

That's exactly right. That's what always happens.

Though I didn't you mean you, or Chris, who are credited by me for finding the info and for fairly considering and rejecting my theory.

I just mean, generally, I thought this was evidence to support my overall thesis about Macnaghten and his propagandist m.o., and it generated no response.

Similarly I have recently set up a heretical thread about the Ripper not really being a mystery and it fizzled out, as expected, after a single response.

[Mayerling]

Hi Jonathan, and Hi Debra,

I tend to think that on this and other boards there are cycles where some thread attract more attention than others. For example the triple essay(s) by David (which we both commented on) or the "Favorite "Wildcat" Candidate". I know I am interested in your book coming out on your full theory. And I was glad that my curiosity on the unsettled Camp Mystery made me reread this thread and see your earlier settling on the MacNagten trick of making statements that covered up part of the story to protect the innocent.

On the other hand we have the other problem: who did slay Elizabeth Camp?
In case we can safely rule out Montie.

But who did it?

Problems about being stuck on a house in New York City is how to research here - I decided to look over the Brooklyn Eagle for February 1897. Like most U.S. major city papers (Brooklyn was the fourth largest city in the U.S. in 1897 - they still claim that today on some of their billboards). I found one item which (like the lead about the dead woman in Cincinatti with the same name and year of death) is interesting but doesn't help much.

It was in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of Sat. February 27, 1897, on page 2:

This column was one of those, "what's currently occupying their attention in England", that most newspapers had as filler for the inside of the paper. 1897 was a kind of dull year. The McKinley administration would begin in March 1897, so this was the closing portion of the second Cleveland administration. There was increased agitation regarding Cuban independence in the U.S., and there a sense of unease in South Africa between the Boer Republics and their British neighbors (only one year before they had the Jameson Raid).

The snippet I copied out of the column:

"The murder of Miss Elizabeth Camp, a barmaid of Walworth, in a railway carriage of the London and Southwestern line on February 11 last is still a mystery and has caused wisespread agitation for the adoption of American cars. The board of trade has taken up the matter and it's president, C. T. Richie, writes that, while no plan is meeting with general approval, yet the question is receiving the best attention of the department.

"A somewhat similar case occurred on the Great Western railroad yesterday. On the arrival of the express at Slough toward midnight a Mrs. Charlton was discovered screaming and clinging to the footboard of the train. She charged the other occupant of the carriage with robbery and attempted murder. A window was broken and the carriage was strewn with money. There were other signs of a severe struggle."

I noticed in descriptions of the Camp murder it was revealed that a green change purse belonging to Elizabeth was missing. Perhaps the killer was a thief, armed with the pestle if he had to silence his struggling victim (it made far less noise than a gun, as those used by Muller in 1864, Lefroy in 1881, and Parker in 1901, and Dickman in 1910). Still it was a curious weapon to use - and it was never traced. But getting back to Mrs. Charlton's terrible experience, perhaps it was the same man here, only less lucky regarding silencing his victim - or perhaps simply a copycat.

Jeff

[Jonathan H]

To Mayerling

Hard to say. Debra made a good case on the thread that Macnaghten was wrong about the suspect with the false moustache based not just on what Sir Robert Anderson wrote, but also what a primary sources claimed about his movements on the day. But maybe they are both mistaken?

I have a different take re: threads about Macnaghten and Druitt dying a quick death.

This police chief having a lousy memory or being poorly informed is a foundation stone of Ripperology, mostly an inadvertent one because the theory that his errors were not deliberate had long calcified into a fact. This was partly due to vital sources not having been discovered, while others were neglected and/or misunderstood.

But for too many this no longer holds as an excuse to not even consider that Macnaghten, acclaimed in his own day for his elephantine memory and hands-on obsession with the most sensational cases, maybe knew what he was talking about.

This is exactly the same line of argument used by a number of authors and researchers to rehabilitate Sir Robert Anderson, which is why, ironically, some of the most venomous barbs have been hurled my way from that faction (not Begg of course). Instead of a hail fellow well met for pursuing a parallel line of argument based [partly] on police memoirs, it has been cruelly rejected as no room at the inn for another police chief and his chief suspect. It's like those scenes from "Life of Brian", where the various Hebrew splinter groups hate each other more than the Romans.

[Roy Corduroy]

I have a different take re: threads about Macnaghten and Druitt dying a quick death.

This police chief having a lousy memory or being poorly informed is a foundation stone of Ripperology, mostly an inadvertent one because the theory that his errors were not deliberate had long calcified into a fact. This was partly due to vital sources not having been discovered, while others were neglected and/or misunderstood.

But for too many this no longer holds as an excuse to not even consider that Macnaghten, acclaimed in his own day for his elephantine memory and hands-on obsession with the most sensational cases, maybe knew what he was talking about.

This is exactly the same line of argument used by a number of authors and researchers to rehabilitate Sir Robert Anderson, which is why, ironically, some of the most venomous barbs have been hurled my way from that faction (not Begg of course). Instead of a hail fellow well met for pursuing a parallel line of argument based [partly] on police memoirs, it has been cruelly rejected as no room at the inn for another police chief and his chief suspect.

For one thing, I've noticed a lot of energy has been expended arguing against the Anderson Ripper solution. Some of it nothing but bombast and outright character assasination, after all, isn't Anderson every modern person's favorite target - a white male Christian, police chief authority figure, charged with spying on Irish nationalists, accused of anti-Semitism for his Ripper claims, - how perfectly awful can one person be to modern sensibilities? Yet, we also benefit from the reasoned inspection of factual material on Anderson, such as SPE has done, on the boards and in print. Point is Sir Robert is a juicy subject. Melville Macnaghten meanwhile has become somewhat the forgotten man. Hopefully your book going to print will change that JJ.

Roy

ps I mean think about it. Macnaghten may be accused of making errors or forgetting things, but nobody has really drug his name through the mud yet, right? I mean GAWD he ran a PLANTATION

[Mayerling]

For one thing, I've noticed a lot of energy has been expended arguing against the Anderson Ripper solution. Some of it nothing but bombast and outright character assasination, after all, isn't Anderson every modern person's favorite target - a white male Christian, police chief authority figure, charged with spying on Irish nationalists, accused of anti-Semitism for his Ripper claims, - how perfectly awful can one person be to modern sensibilities? Yet, we also benefit from the reasoned inspection of factual material on Anderson, such as SPE has done, on the boards and in print. Point is Sir Robert is a juicy subject. Melville Macnaghten meanwhile has become somewhat the forgotten man. Hopefully your book going to print will change that JJ.

Roy

ps I mean think about it. Macnaghten may be accused of making errors or forgetting things, but nobody has really drug his name through the mud yet, right? I mean GAWD he ran a PLANTATION

Hi Roy,

The problem really is that every generation reads it's own sensibilities in interpreting past generations and it's figures of significance. When we think of the more "liberal" American figures of the nineteenth century, say Abe Lincoln or "Mark Twain", we forget that they casually could use the "N" word when discussing African-Americans, yet both men ended up respecting African-Americans. Twain/Clemens even mentions in one of his writings how much he misses minstrels shows of the past calling them "N***** shows". To him it was normal.

Rudolph Valentino, in describing how indifferent Italians were when he visited his old homeland - at the height of his Hollywood superstardom - said that he was just another "W" word to the Italians. He used the term.

I have seen awkward quotes from Theodore Roosevelt, W.S. Gilbert, Jules Verne and others whom I think well of for the most part that would lead to public outrage today. Hell, look at the nasty comments on Mexican immigrants that Donald Trump used that has caused reactions, and Trump (while I think obnoxious) said things without derogatory racial names being said.

All this shows is how people behave in their time in a way that mirrors acceptable terminology for their own times. Anderson's comments certainly showed his views on certain types, but even he backtracked a bit about what kind of Jews he meant in his "anti-Semitism", regarding only the worst portions of the Jewish community. If it is anything I have actually seen a comment of a similar nature made by Frederick Wensley during World War I about young Jews whom he was arresting whom he felt had been avoiding war service (Wensley and his wife lost two sons in the war, and his feelings can just be imagined - it was not fully merited but one can imagine why it was said).

I can only add that when we are not around (say in the year 2215) boy are they going to have a field day about how bigoted we were in our day!

Jeff

[GUT]

Same here.

My dad had a native "Nanny" and thought of her as a 2nd mother, she is buried with his family under the family surname. He has nothing but respect for the indigenous Australians, his Aunty was said to know more Aboriginal dialects than any other person in her day [because she took the time and effort to learn the language and get to know them], the natives called her Mother and it is clear that she cared deeply for their welfare, providing food medical attention and shelter, but she [in some letters we have seen] called them 'Blacks" today that would almost get her lynched.

[Jonathan H]

Thanks Roy

My book will attempt to set right what went awry with Lady Aberconway all the way back in 1959.

The dowager, who was estranged from her siblings, had made long-range efforts to protect her late father's legacy as the man who probably solved the Ripper case--albeit posthumously. She was now revealing that the Scotland Yard sleuth had a definite, and documented, opinion, that she had covertly copied, about the identity of the Ripper--just as definite as Sir Robert Anderson.

Yet from the moment she revealed this document (which confirmed what was in his memoir chapter, itself a more candid variation of the same document) her father's solution was already in jeopardy.

Because of the middle-aged doctor turning out to be a young lawyer, Dan Farson assumed that Macnaghten had a poor memory. Had their been time, and there was not, further research about Sir Melville would have shown this to be unlikely to the point of implausible.

Although Tom Cullen found Major Arthur Griffiths, and therefore could see that the suspect contents of the "memorandum" had been reproduced there (and that the Druitt family had been disguised as friends) the implication that this was a document vetted for public consumption was not considered.

Instead, for all his acrimonious rivalry with Farson, the brilliant American journeyman writer cemented the unlikely notion that Macnaghten had a flawed memory or was poorly informed.

By 1974 Lady Aberconway tried, somewhat, to put the genie back in the bottle re: the memo, and to reassert the primacy of her father's memoir - but it was too late. The year before lingering disappointment over the drowned not-a-doctor had morphed into the entertaining tabloid TV series in which fictional detectives 'uncovered' the Royal Conspiracy and Cover-up.

I do not think that Sir Robert Anderson was anti-Semitic, and Macnaghten's jokey accusation via Sims, to that effect, in 1910 is grotesquely unfair. On the other hand, the value of that Sims' source is that we see a crony of the Assistant Commissioner pointedly denying that any Hebrews helped the Polish suspect to avoid justice, Gentile or otherwise.

[Debra A]

To Debra

That's exactly right. That's what always happens.

Though I didn't you mean you, or Chris, who are credited by me for finding the info and for fairly considering and rejecting my theory.

I just mean, generally, I thought this was evidence to support my overall thesis about Macnaghten and his propagandist m.o., and it generated no response.

Similarly I have recently set up a heretical thread about the Ripper not really being a mystery and it fizzled out, as expected, after a single response.

I was just teasing, Jonathon.
I'm glad Jeff bumped the thread because there is a huge amount of information I'd forgotten on here.

[GUT]

Do we have a new date for your book Jonathon?