Robert Sagar

[Chris]

I've now put together an article on Robert Sagar for the Wiki section:

http://wiki.casebook.org/index.php/Robert_Sagar

[Stephen Thomas]

Excellent stuff, Chris. Well done.

For what it's worth I believe that the MM Memorandum is what is called these days in the UK a 'dodgy dossier' and that if one reads between the lines it is perfectly obvious that the case was cleared up sometime between the Kelly and McKenzie murders on the basis that in the real world the McKenzie case could quite easily have been a JTR murder and MM says it wasn't.

5 victims and 5 victims only? How on earth could he know that if the case was unsolved? The Sagar story methinks is very relevent on this basis.

[tji]

Hi Chris

Just read your article. Interesting read, well done. It seems like he got through the ranks through hard work and sheer determination.
I was a little surprised to see someone could fail a medical because of a varicose vein though. Glad to see it didn't put a stop to his career.

Tj

[Jdombrowski89]

I am in agreement with tji. Rather fascinating stuff compiled here. It is also a fascinating story that could be told with Detective Cox and Sagar with their stories of tracking an unknown suspect in the wake of these murders. Throws into perspective the separate parallels that the City/Met were working on.

Once again, excellent work,

Justin

[Chris]

Here's one more short report of Sagar's retirement, this time from the Sunday Chronicle of 8 January 1905. There's nothing here that's not in the reports we already know about, but the interesting thing is that - as for the little article in the Daily Mail of 9 January - this matches word for word parts of the report that appeared in the Seattle Daily Times on 4 February. So it seems the English original of the Seattle report is still waiting to be found, probably in a newspaper of 7 January or earlier.
___________________________________________

DETECTIVE FOR 25 YEARS.
Inspector Sagar Retires from the London Force.

One of London' best-known and most successful detectives - Inspector Robert Sagar, of the City police - has just retired on pension after twenty-five years spent in tracking some of the most noted criminals of the day. A unique circumstance is attached to Inspector Sagar's career. So far as is known he is the only detective in the kingdom who has never worn the familiar blue uniform. He is a Lancashire man, and was educated at a grammar school in his native county.

[Chris]

Here's one more short report of Sagar's retirement, this time from the Sunday Chronicle of 8 January 1905. There's nothing here that's not in the reports we already know about, but the interesting thing is that - as for the little article in the Daily Mail of 9 January - this matches word for word parts of the report that appeared in the Seattle Daily Times on 4 February. So it seems the English original of the Seattle report is still waiting to be found, probably in a newspaper of 7 January or earlier.

Here's another article apparently based on that unidentified original. Unlike those in the Sunday Chronicle and Daily Mail, this one, from the Gloucester Citizen, 9 January 1905, does mention the Aldgate butcher theory, which it claims the City Police "fully believed", but other than that phrase there's no new information in it:

[Chris]

And here's one more Sagar report, from the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser of 11 January 1905. It's evidently based on the known report in the Morning Leader of 9 January 1905, though with some rewording:

[Scott Nelson]

The bit in the Gloucester Citizen about the third possibility to Sagar's story, "...This was a manaic in one of our public asylums whom the police went to see in order, if possible, to clear the mystery for ever."

..sounds like the attempt to identify a suspect in an asylum (or the seaside home). Could Anderson's suspect have been identified in an asylum? Did the police ever visit Ostrog in an asylum in France?

[Jonathan H]

Vindicated -- again?

What a great, great find!

And a source that, arguably, by a textual analysis alone, backs the theory that Sims is deliberately disguising Druitt to protect the latter's family.

For it says that Sims is with-holding information to prevent the Ripper's family from being destroyed.

The article then mentions Cutbush, albeit not by name, and the Liberal newspaper, 'The Sun', and its flop-scoop of 1894.

We see, yet again, the perplexity of other reporters that a well-regarded field detective from 1888, in this case Robert Sagar, is being shoved aside by the great Dagonet, the source of his information (Macnaghten of course) unrevealed.


'Mr. Sims, from information which came under his notice, has told me on more than one occasion he is convinced that these murders were committed by a medical man who afterwards committed near the Embankment. This man was well-known in London as subject to fits of lunacy and he belonged to one of the best families in town. It is consideration for his relatives which has prevented "Dagonet" [Sims] from making a full disclosure of such evidence as he possesses. ... But the doctor in Sims' theory was never in the asylum.'


Let us just consider this source at face value:

Sims must have known he was running a risk that a famous and noble family, based in London and who had produced a physician--who was also well-known to be crackers and had killed hismelf in the Thames--would be close to being exposed by just by these bits of data, at least among the rarified, superp-respectable circles in which they travelled?

But there was ... no risk of exposure for the Ripper's family.

Either by accident or design, George Sims has lain a false trail by slight, fictitious distortions that render the real identity of the fiend and his family unrecoverable.

The Druitts were not based in London, but Dorset. They were prominent there, not in the metropolis.

Montague was not a medical man, but the son of one, and was not known (as in diagonsed?) to be insane, or suffering from periodic 'fits' (as with epileptic mania?) except when he was posthumously judged to be temporarily deranged (not by a doctor) as the only explanation for his inexplicable suicide.

The last line is quite wrong, about the mad doctor not having been in the asylum, though ironically correct about the real killer.

Sims-Dagonet had been writing in "Mustard and Cress" since 1902, three years before, that the "mad doctor" had been sectioned "twice" in an asylum. He would repeat this in 1903, 1906, 1907, 1910 and 1917.

Again, not true of Montague Druitt and therefore another bit of fictitious data that kept him, and by extension his family, safely hidden.

This was done, I think obviously, by design.

[Jonathan H]

By the way, the 'embankment' referred to in the article, from where the mad doctor supposedly jumped, from is in Central London.

Yet Macnaghten had read, at the very least, P.C. Moulson's report on the recovery of Druitt's corpse. That report would have told him about the season trail pass (which he mentions in 'Aberconway') and the location of the suicide --Chiswick!

[Tom_Wescott]

And here's one more Sagar report, from the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser of 11 January 1905. It's evidently based on the known report in the Morning Leader of 9 January 1905, though with some rewording:

[ATTACH]15871[/ATTACH]

George Johnson, huh? More like George Jackson.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[lynn cates]

beside the sea side . . .

Hello Scott. That's a good question.

Wonder whether any public asylum had a connotation regarding the sea?

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

So, on we go even unto the end of the age ...

Aaron Kosminski did not die at that time--in fact was still alive--and never went to Australia. Plus Sagar means in the aftermath of the Coles' murder, not Kelly.

The reference to Liberal T. P. O'Connor and "The Sun" has nothing to do with Aaron Kosminski and the Seaside Home. It is about the paper's big scoop from early 1894; claiming that the police knew that 'Jack' was a lunatic in Broadmoor, eg. Thomas Cutbush.

[Chris]

Could Anderson's suspect have been identified in an asylum? Did the police ever visit Ostrog in an asylum in France?

I suppose the other intriguing possibility raised by that report is that when Sagar mentioned a "lunatic asylum", it was just his way of referring to Australia ...

[GUT]

G'day Chris

It is almost spectacular that the killer was able to kill, mutilate and get away without being caught, given the usual numbers of individuals on the streets at all hours of the night,

As an Aussie would say B U G G E R off.