No known suspect pre 1895 was Jack the Ripper

[Phil Carter]

The police had no idea pre 1895 who the perpetrator was. Herewith statements made by various, each in their own timeline.

1. On October 23rd 1888

Dr. Robert Anderson, Ass. Comm, Met Police said (HO144/221/A49301C, f.117)

..but that five successive murders should have been committed, without our having the slightest clue of any kind is extraordinary, if not unique, in the annals of crime.

2. In August 1889, printed in the Pall Mall Gazette, 4th November 1889

Dr Anderson admits to " our failure to find Jack the Ripper as they call him" in an interview with American Journalist R.Harding Davis.

3. In June 1892, in Cassell's Saturday Journal, 1892

Dr. Anderson

..The mention of this appalling sequence of still undiscovered crimes...

4. On 1st September 1908, speaking retrospectively, Daily Chronicle

Dr Anderson said

I told Sir William Harcourt that I could not accept the responsibility for the non-detection of the author of the Ripper crimes..

referring to the destruction of clues (Clay Pipe, Writing on wall)

.................................................. ..........

5. On 28th may 1892, Cassell's Saturday journal

Chief Inspector Frederick George Abberline said

Theories! we were lost almost in theories; there were so many of them

6. On 24th March 1903, Pall Mall Gazette

Abberline, then retired and living in Bournemouth, said

We have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind.

.................................................. ...........

7. 3rd February 1893, Eastern Post and Daily Chronicle

Superintendent Thomas Arnold said

We had some of the finest men from all parts of London, but all their efforts were useless

.................................................. ...........

8. In November 1890, in The North American Review,

Commissioner James Monro said

Excluding the unique series of outrages in Whitechapel, - at the non-discovery of the perpetrators of which none grieved more than the Metropolitan Police, - I cannot call to mind half a dozen really serious cases of murder which, within the last five or six years, have remained undetected; and the number of such offences committed is really small.

and in Cassell's that same year he stated that the police had nothing positive in the way of clues about the identity of the Ripper.

.................................................. ...................

In 1891, after the murder of Francis Coles on 13th February that year, the police believed that they had found the Ripper.. Sadler. However, he was found not to be Coles' killer, and he faded into obscurity. The ripper still had not been found.

In 1895, the police, including Swanson, believed that Grainger (Grant) was the Ripper. Nothing was found to connect him with being Jack the Ripper either. But this shows that they were still trying to find Jack the Ripper.

In 1894, Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten wrote his now famous "memoranda" in which he first says

No one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer, many homocidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one.

He then goes on to list 3 most likely suspects, Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog.

But here Sir MM is writing of the suspicion in 1888. As has been clearly seen above, the Commissioner, the Assistant Commissioner, one Chief Inspector (Abberline), and one Superintendant had ALL said that nobody knew who the culprit was. This shows very clearly that Sir MM cannot have been writing from any basis of known fact.
It is confirmed a year later by Chief Inspector Swanson, who was chasing Grainger as the Ripper.

It therefore is quite simple.

No person known to have died (Cohen, Druitt et al) can have been the Ripper.
No person known to have been followed by any policeman, for ex. Sagar, Cox, (re Kosminsky, Cohen, Levy et al) could have been the Ripper.
No person known to have been locked up or incarcerated before 1895 could have been the Ripper either (Kosminsky, Le Grande et al)

Unless every single comment made by all the above men is a lie, (Anderson, Abberline, Swanson, Monro, Arnold) no person was known to have committed the Whitechapel Crimes by 1895.

That means that anything written before that date, pinning the tail on the donkey as it were, must be false. Sir MM must have known, by referring back to 1888 in his memoranda of 1894, that his writings were not true.

It also means that if Swanson was still chasing Jack the Ripper in 1891 (Coles-Sadler) and 1895 (Graham-Grainger).. then HE didn't believe that Kosminsky was the Ripper either at that time. That causes doubt as to why the same man would change his view completely in a copy of Anderson's memoirs from 1910, that Kosminsky WAS Jack the Ripper.

We can go around in circles over this. But the sheer fact is that by dint of actual dated comment, no person pre-1895 was thought to be Jack the Ripper.

If the Commissioner (Monro) didn't know in 1890, then it is obvious to see that none of his fellow officers under him knew either. The Assistant Commissioner(Anderson) to at least 1892 stated he didn't know.
Cheif Inspector Swanson (who reported directly to Anderson) still didn't know in 1895 because he tried to link Grainger as JTR, and Sir MM was Anderson's second-in-command, in 1894 didn't know either. Chief Inspector Abberline didn't know, as they were "swamped in theories" by 1892, and add to that Edmund Reid stated that nobody had a clue as to whom the killer was, and even the Inspector of Prisons, Arthur Griffiths said
in Windsor Magazine under the pen-name of Alfred Aylmer..

(of Anderson), talking of undiscovered crimes in 1895, that

Much dissatisfaction was vented upon Mr Anderson at the utterly abortive efforts to discover the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders.

Exit stage left any suspect..Kosminsky, Le Grande, Ostrog, Druitt, Cohen, Levy, you name him... all cannot have been Jack the Ripper, because the police themselves from the very top on down, all said that nobody was identified and the crimes were unsolved.

It comes from the collective horse's mouth.

I invite you all to discuss the above amongst yourselves at will, ladies and gentlemen.



kindly

Phil



Ref:
Howard Brown and his website jtrforums,
The Complete JTR A-Z (Messrs Begg, Fido and Skinner),
Scotland Yard Investigates (Evans and Rumbelow),
The Man who hunted JTR, Edmund Reid-Victorian Detective (Connell and Evans)
My sincere thanks to all of the above.

[Chris]

Exit stage left any suspect..Kosminsky, Le Grande, Ostrog, Druitt, Cohen, Levy, you name him... all cannot have been Jack the Ripper, because the police themselves from the very top on down, all said that nobody was identified and the crimes were unsolved.

Surely you mean these men "cannot have been proved to have been Jack the Ripper"?

[Phil Carter]

Hello Chris,

I meant exactly as I wrote. They cannot be Jack the Ripper because the Police, whomever they suspected, followed, checked up on etc must have cleared them pre 1895.. by dint of their own comments saying that

a) the case was unsolved,
b) that nobody was the known killer, and
c) that they still chased after JTR in 1895.

Ipso facto.. those checked out pre 1895, cannot have been Jack the Ripper, according to the police.

Whether the argument is THEN that they could have been and the police all got it wrong, told lies or exaggerated, is another matter entirely.

Up to 1895, the police didn't know who JTR was, and the crime was unsolved.

best wishes

Phil

[Chris]

I meant exactly as I wrote. They cannot be Jack the Ripper because the Police, whomever they suspected, followed, checked up on etc must have cleared them pre 1895.

But there's a difference between not being able to prove someone guilty and clearing them. Just because they were not in a position to charge anyone it doesn't mean they didn't still have suspicions about people.

[Phil Carter]

Hello Chris,

The police don't give an indication of "not being in a position to charge" any known suspect pre 1895 either.. unless you know of a statement or nine to that effect.. PRE 1895?

kindly

Phil

[Chris]

Phil

Sorry, I think we must be talking at cross purposes somehow. We know no one was charged.

What I'm saying is that none of the considerations you mention can prove that any known suspect was not the murderer - only that the police didn't have evidence to prove he was the murderer.

[Jonathan H]

To Phil Carter

Hard as it is when dealing with an entrenched paradigm, leave to one side what hocus pocus Macnaghten wrote for a Liberal goverment -- who never saw it -- and what he bedazzled credulous cronies with for Yard-friendly public consumption -- with himself kept well out of it (eg. Abberline and Littlechild were both totally clueless that the 'Drowned Doctor' alleged scoop originated with Mac) and just absord the following:

Primary Source 1:

The 11 February 1891 edition of 'The Bristol Times and Mirror' which is the linking source in the extant record between the sympathetic obits on Druitt, in 1889, and his unexpected re-emergence in the Macnaghten Report(s) as -- of all things -- a Ripper suspect, in the official version a minor one, and in the draft or rewrite he is the best bet:

'I give a curious story for what it is worth. There is a West of England member who in private declares that he has solved the mystery of 'Jack the Ripper.' His theory - and he repeats it with so much emphasis that it might almost be called his doctrine - is that 'Jack the Ripper' committed suicide on the night of his last murder. I can't give details, for fear of a libel action; but the story is so circumstantial that a good many people believe it. He states that a man with blood-stained clothes committed suicide on the night of the last murder, and he asserts that the man was the son of a surgeon, who suffered from homicidal mania. I do not know what the police think of the story, but I believe that before long a clean breast will be made, and that the accusation will be sifted thoroughly.'

Primary Source 2:

The only document by Macnaghten about the fiend with his knighted name on the line. In effect, the memoir chapter of 1914 is the de-facto third version of his Report. It matches Source One and [provisionally] solves the case.

CHAPTER IV.

LAYING THE GHOST OF JACK THE RIPPER.

I'm not a butcher, I'm not a Yid,
Nor yet a foreign Skipper,
But I'm your own light-hearted friend,
Yours truly, Jack the Ripper."
ANONYMOUS.

THE Above queer verse was one of the first documents which I perused at Scotland Yard, for at that time the police post-bag bulged large with hundreds of anonymous communications on the subject of the East End tragedies. Although, as I shall endeavour to show in this chapter, the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November i888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer.


' ... the man, of course, was a sexual maniac, but such madness takes Protean forms, as will be shown later on in other cases. Sexual murders are the most difficult of all for police to bring home to the perpetrators, for motives there are none ; only a lust for blood, and in many cases a hatred of woman as woman. Not infrequently the maniac possesses a diseased body, and this was probably so in the case of the Whitechapel murderer.'

How would any other police know anything about this posthumous suspect if Macnaghten, known for affability but also for his reticence and discretion, kept his mouth shut?

[Monty]

Macnaghten did not state that Ostrog, Druitt and Kosminski as the most likely suspects, he stated the men were more likely than Cutbush to have comitted the murders.

These men were picked out because Macnaghten felt the case against Cutbush was poor when compared against other names obviously banded about at Scotland Yard.


Monty

[Phil Carter]

Hello Chris,

Respectfully, that's decifering the actual words of the police wrongly Chris.

They, the police, said, pre 1895, they had no evidence that ANYONE was the murderer. They also said the case was unsolved.

That "ANYONE" must therefore include any known suspect before 1895.

What it means is that any comment made AFTER 1895 goes against what was known PRE 1895.

That means that Swanson DIDN'T KNOW pre 1895, that Kosminsky was Jack the Ripper, (as he apparently said in the marginalia that he was the Ripper) ....Otherwise he would never have tried to bang Grainger to rights for being JTR.
In addition, Francis Coles was murdered 13th feb 1891. Kosminsky was locked up on the 7th February. Swanson and Co were STILL chasing Jack the Ripper then.
That's two examples of Swanson and Co still chasing JTR after Kosminsky was locked up, Druitt was buried, Le Grande was in jail, Cohen was dead, etc etc etc

So do please kindly explain to me how AFTER 1888, anyone PRE 1895 can then subsequently be called Jack the Ripper if the Ripper was still undetected and the murders were still being investigated in reference to still trying to catch the criminal responsible?

The police said it themselves at the time Chris. For at least 7 years they said it. And in that time, Druitt and Cohen had died, Kosminsky was in an asylum, and Le Grande was in prison. Ipso facto, there was no suspicion to name anyone as Jack the Ripper from that time period of 7 years. 1888-1895.. including all those previously named and many many others.

Hello Neil,

Agreed. They were just more likely than Cutbush. As it is, the police were still chasing Jack the Ripper in 1891 and 1895. therefore, any known suspect wasn't JTR in their eyes PRE 1895. They all said so themselves.


Hello Jonathan,

You can quote MM from his book, written many years after 1895 if you wish..but the quotes directly from the police, from their own mouths, at the time, just quash every view PRE 1895 that they knew the identity of the killer. They all said they didn't.


kindly

Phil

[Chris]

Phil

I don't think you're reading what I've actually written.

I'm simply saying that if the police suspected X but were unable to prove he was the murderer, that doesn't tell us that X was not the murderer. It just means the evidence wasn't there.

[Ally]

Two words: Gary Ridgway

[Heinrich]

The police botched the job and everybody knew that at the time, not least themselves. Interviewing and clearing a suspect when evidence was neither followed up on nor gathered, compounds their inefficacy. They had plenty of evidence at-hand to make a case against Joseph Barnett in the murder of Mary Kelly but they let him go after one interview. For sure, the Metropolitan Police conducted their investigation with astounding ineptitude.

[Trevor Marriott]

Phil

I don't think you're reading what I've actually written.

I'm simply saying that if the police suspected X but were unable to prove he was the murderer, that doesn't tell us that X was not the murderer. It just means the evidence wasn't there.

But there has to be some evidence to suspect X in the first instance.

[Wickerman]

..... They had plenty of evidence at-hand to make a case against Joseph Barnett in the murder of Mary Kelly but they let him go after one interview.

Which is why they took over 4 hours to go over his story, and presumably check it out before letting him go. If there had been any misgivings about Barnett's story the press would have been all over it, remember the fiasco over Pizer?

Regards, Jon S.

[Jonathan H]

To Ally

For me the Green River killer comparison does not apply, because he was a contemporaneous suspect -- eventually caught via DNA.

Neither Montague Druitt or Aaron Kosminski were known to the Ripper police hunters until one was long dead and the other was 'safely caged', several years after he had 'got better' -- if this madman was the killer.

In my opinion, anyhow.

To Monty

A person has to make a judgement as to whether the official version of Mac's 'Report', in which Druitt is nothing, trumps the unofficial-alternate version disseminated to the public, wherein Druitt is everything, and his 1913 comments upon retirement in which Druitt is everything ('That remarkable man ... I have very clear idea of who he was ...'), and his memoirs in which Druitt is not only everything he is the thing; the only suspect worth metnioning because 'certain facts' led to a 'conclusion' but only years after this 'protean' maniac had killed himself.

To Phil Carter

Knowledge of Druitt as the Ripper originated not with the police but with his family who 'believed'. This leaked in Dorset in 1891, probably along the Tory grapevine becoming Farquharson's 'doctrine'. Macnaghten investigated and then, I argue, told nobody else at the Yard.

That would explain why Abberline and Reid think they are dismissing some tabloid beat-up, whilst Littlechild thought it was a garbled version of Tumblety -- and perhaps Anderson did too?