the police career of Sir Melville Macnaghten

[perrymason]

To be fair, there are many instances when Macnaghtens comments are incorrect factually or partially misremembered, and he alludes to his having information or knowledge that we have no way of confirming. He took over Monro's former position during the Ripper cases, in June of 1889.....so he is only hands-on for the killing of Alice Mackenzie and none of the Canon.

Odd comments like....... "... although the Whitechapel Murderer in all probability put an end to himself after the Dorset affair..., certain facts pointing to this conclusion were not in the possession of the police until after I became a detective.".....what the hell does that mean, that some proof surfaced years later or someone just told him that after 1889?

I cannot comment on him as an investigator because I have no yardstick to compare his career with, but it seems to me that he had his opinions and others....not "certain information". The fact he liked Druitt for these Ripper murders based almost solely on some "private information" he had that MJ's family thought that he might be guilty and he committed suicide does say something about him I think. You would think if he knew the family privately and very well, he'd know Druitt wasnt a doctor for one thing.

Best regards

[lynn cates]

said to be

Hello Sam. Well, your statement:

"whence 'said to be'? It's surely as plain as a pikestaff that he was relying on hearsay, and not fact."

refers, of course, to his occupation. That does not necessarily imply hearsay of ALL his information.

I agree with Mike--I wish we knew what his private information was and also his (SY's?) later obtained facts.

(While you're at it, I'd be much obliged if you could dredge up Kosminski's "circs"--I mean, if you're not too busy. snicker!)

The best.
LC

[Sam Flynn]

Hello Sam. Well, your statement:

"whence 'said to be'? It's surely as plain as a pikestaff that he was relying on hearsay, and not fact."

refers, of course, to his occupation. That does not necessarily imply hearsay of ALL his information.

But it's enough, surely? If not, then the rest boils down to "private information" - not, please note, the official Ripper files.

Anyhow, I'm not about to get bogged down in Druitt when, as you've hinted, there are "other circs" in connection with other suspects on the Memorandum. These, too, suggest that Sir Melville wasn't always particularly fussed with establishing facts before committing pen to paper.

[Jonathan H]

Melville Macnaghten is a fascinating figure [to me at least] because he was ruling class, yet everybody comments on how affable and charming he was to people, whatever their rank in society.

He is also an amazingly modern figure in giving up the Indian plantations and wanting to be ... a cop!? Sure, he started at the top as an administrator but it was so less prestigious than what he could have done in industry.

Macaghten practically declassed himself.

And he wanted to be out there in the streets, where the action was, not stuck behind a desk.

The idea that Macnaghten was not immersed in and even obsessed with the Ripper mystery -- much more so than Anderson or even Swanson -- is borne out by his words and by his actions, and his 'errors'.

Macnaghten is often said to have arrived too late, in June 1889, to hunt the Ripper. His own memoirs disprove this. The Ripper hunt went from 1888 until 1891.

Plus Druitt and Kosminski only came to police atention in 1891, anyhow.

For what it is worth I have been proposing a new Macnaghten regarding the Ripper based on a reading of his memoirs in particular. That he knew it all.

That he deliberately, enthusiastically and relentlessly disseminated his 'Drowned Doctor' mythos to the public via literary cronies.

My theory of the few, fragmentary sources we have is that Druitt, as norted above, was not a contemporaneous suspect at all.

Macnaghten, alone amongst senior police, makes this vital admission in his memoirs, quoted by a previous poster. That 'certain facts' were unknown about the [un-named] Druitt until 'some years after' he joined the police.

This matched the emergence of [the un-named] Druitt in a ghastly story which has reached Tory MP [and near enighbour] Henry Farquharson in Feb 1891, about a suicided surgeon's son being the Ripper.

The Druitt family were convinced of their late Montie's guilt and this conviction, rightly or wrongly, was passed onto the family's MP, and then the police chief, Macnaghten [Farquharson and Mac were Etonians].

In the official version of his Report, I theorise, Macnaghten hid Druitt [and the MP] from the Liberal Home Secretary. Since the suspect's name would never be used in Parliament he was careful to blur the profile for the sake of a fellow gentleman's tragic family.

That ludicrous line, 'said to be a doctor ...', is thus a bureacratic dodge.

In the rewritten version his Report for 1898 [the Aberconway Version] Macnaghten firms up Druitt as a middle-aged medico who lived at Blackheath with family.

Macnaghten also firms up his own certainty in this suspect, whereas in the official version he had downplayed police certainty and upgraded family belief.

The line 'no shadow of proof ...' in the official version is actually as silly as 'said to be a doctor ...' because the Druitt and Kosminski family suspicions about their members IS the shadow of proof!

The mystery of the Ripper is not who it was, but when he first came to police attention. Macnaghten spent twenty years burying that Druitt was a too-late suspect from the government, from his pals, and from the public.

Until his mempirs in which he admitted that the killer was a 'protean madman' who stopped only because his last victim was himself, and not because of any super-efficient police hunt.

For two years, Macnaghten writes, the police were embrassingly unaware that the Ripper was dead -- and by his own hand.

The myth of the police hunters closing on the Blackheath Doctor was projected to the public by Major Griffiths and later George Sims.

But I propsose that the puppet-master was Macnaghten.

I believe that Macnaghten was remarkably clever, and totally suscessful, at hiding Druitt [about whom I believe he knew everything] from tabloid vultures, at protecting the Yard from libel [Griffiths changed 'family' into 'friends'], and at giving quite a false impression [starting with his Report] that the Bobbies were closing inexorably upon the Fiend when he drowned himself in the Thames.

The perfect gentelmanly fix.

In my opinion, if you just put together the sources 'Sad Death of a Local Barrister', plus the 'Bristol Times and Mirror' titbit about the loose-lipped MP, plus Macnaghten's 1914 memoir chapter, 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' the case is solved.

That is historically speaking, not legally or forensically, for which a solution is long gone of course.

Macnaghten has, however, suffered from all his slyboots cleverness.

Instead of posterity remembering Sir Melville Macnaghten as the man who at least identified the Ripper posthumously, his 'mistakes' have not only cost him that perch, it inadvertently gave birth to Ripperology itself; the 'Royal Watergate' rose out of the ashes of the debunked 'Drowned Doctor', as did the hoax diary, and Cornwall's DNA Delusions, and so on -- yet also excellent arguments for the alternative police suspects, Kosminski and Tumblety.

[lynn cates]

solving crime

Hello Sam. Right you are! There's plenty of suspicion to go around. MM was probably aware of information that made Kosminski (or Kaminski?) a viable suspect.

I think the way to ensure a breakthrough is this case is to continue the slow plodding. I recall a line from the Manson movie, Helter Skelter (I will try to reproduce it from memory, Sir MM notwithstanding):

"That's not the way you solve crimes. You solve them by filling out forms--in triplicate."

The best.
LC

[Sam Flynn]

In the official version of his Report, I theorise, Macnaghten hid Druitt [and the MP] from the Liberal Home Secretary. Since the suspect's name would never be used in Parliament he was careful to blur the profile for the sake of a fellow gentleman's tragic family.

That doesn't quite square with Macnaghten giving his name "out straight", though. I mean, "said to be a doctor" isn't much of a smokescreen if Sir Melville announces him as "MJ Druitt" - hardly the most common combination - and goes on to give a description of the manner and date of his death.

Good post otherwise, Jon.

[lynn cates]

suspicions

Hello Jonathan. Off the record, I agree with nearly everything you said. I would, however, issue a caveat about "family suspicions." Both families had suspicions, yet both can hardly have been the "Ripper"--unless, of course the canon becomes re-fixed to admit of multiple serial murderers.

Moreover, we don't know what caused the Druitt family suspicions. It could have been anything from a bloody knife and clothing, all the way down to an unusual loss of appetite evinced by Monty's refusing a second watercress sandwich. "Why is he not eating? Guilty conscience? OH NO!!!"

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

Thanks Lynn, off the record [??]

I agree that both families could not be right, but rather that such compelling parallel suspicions, which convinced one senior cop [Macnaghten] for Druitt, and convinced the operational head of the case plus the head of CID [Swanson and Anderson] for Kosminski, is 'proof's shadow'.

That Macnaghten is burying that the police were too late to do anything about either suspect.

Kosminski is an extraordinary suspect, whom Mac backdates t[his incarceration] to March 1889 in both versions of his Report, and in the version he showed Major Griffiths beefed up with a police witness -- who never existed. The point is he was saying that the best witness [actually Lawende, but more convincing if you make it a Bobbie] saw a man talking to Eddowes, who in age and height at least, a pretty good fit to Kosminski. [In his memoirs Mac debunked this claim saying that the description was 'unsatisfying'].

As for why Macnaghten went for Druitt, to his grave, we will never know.

Yet if it was just a family's hysteria then surely Mac, who had such a positive, optimistic, even naive view of people, would have been the hardest to be convinced without incriminating evidence.

I think that if the family had, say, a written confession from Montie, the police chief would have said, no, no, your sibling was deranged. The asylums are choking with nutters claiming to be Napoleon! Wasn't your poor chap sacked from his school? That's explanation enough. He was overwrought with the disgrace, don't you see, and so on.

Instead, I am inferring that the Druitts [or a Druitt] showed Macnaghten something which was so devastating that it nullified the very arguments which have been made since 1959 AND 1965 [when his true identity was finally made public] as to why Druitt is such an unlikely suspect.

I think that Macnaghten had both a temperamental bias [Mr. Nice Guy] and a class prejudice [fellow toff] to get Montie and his family off the hook. He even had another unreachable suspect, Kosminski, to cancel out Druitt.

Yet none of that counted for anything compared to what Macnaghten came to learn about Druitt.

Thanks for the response Sam.

My counter-argument, for what it is worth, is that Druitt's name was not 'outright' because the only people who would actually see the name were Anderson, the Police Commissioner and the Home Sec.

Macnaghten knew the suspects would not be named -- they had never been arrested for the Ripper murders.

Let's turn the telescope around the other way.

Montague John Druitt, Ripper suspect, was completely unknown to the public from 1891 to 1959 [but his name only published in 1965].

If it was a fix, you have to give it its due.

Nobody ever found out that the middle-aged, unemployed, 'Drowned Doctor' who lived as a semi-invalid reculse with friends at Blackheath, actually hid, or stood in for, a young, drowned barrister AND teacher, who killed himself not the night of the Kelly murder but three weeks later. He did not live with family or friends at Blackheath either, but lodged at the school.

Hardly any researchers before 1959 -- when Dan Farson had Druitt's name handed to him on a plate by Macnaghten's daughgter -- ever really gave a serious, systematic go at getting at, or behind, the 'Drowned Doctor' of Major Griffiths and George Sims, let alone Macnaghten's cagey memoirs [no mention of middle-aged, or a doctor, or drowned, or Blackheath, and flat out denies he has ever been in an asylum].

In a sense why would you, when no less an authority than the famous George Sims, the Dominick Dunne of his era, had brought his enormous prestige on behalf of the 'Drowned Doctor' -- and being totally dismissive of Abberline, no less.

Sims had top police contacts, and one of them, Macnaghten, was a close pal.

Imagine if both versions of the Macnaghten Report were lost?

That means M J Druitt's name would be lost too.

We would have schools of opinion fighting it out on the Message Boards claiming that Druitt [let's say found by Chris Scott] was really the 'Drowned Doctor'.

With equally compelling arguments, another group would be arguing that critical details [in Griffiths, Sims and Mac's memoirs] do not match this drowned barrister and therefore this could not be him.

We would have a third group arguing that perhaps there was noboby behind the 'Drowned Doctor'?

Yet another group would argue that there must have indeed been such a medical man, but we have just not been able to find him? But he was clearly not Druitt.

The 'Droned Doctor' myth was so absolute that even the select few, Griffiths, Sims [and Richardson?] never knew that Macnaghten was manipulating them all. That in publishing the profile of the Ripper they were selling fiction which could never be traced back to its original figure -- not without the name.

It is instructive to read Dan Farson on all this. He claims that in 1959, with the Aberconway Version and the name 'M J Druitt' [a Thames-suicided, middle-aged, Blackheath doctor] right in front of him, his team of researchers could not initially find Montie?

That is because they were searching for the wrong birth-date AND dhe wrong death date.

For some reason the Aberconway Version has the date the body was pulled from the Thames as 'Dec 3rd 1888'. [Yet Griffiths has the correct date, Dec 31st, and Sims osillates between the two].

It took some digging around for Farson's team until they hit upon Druitt's death certificate for Jan 1889.

Lastly, I would also argue that Macnaghten was described by Hargrave Adams [sic] as a police chief who kept loads of secrets behind his charming smile.

Well ... not the Ripper?

If people are right that he was a bumbler who latched onto some hysterical, baseless gossip, and never bothered checking into Druitt's real biog, then Macnaghten is revealed as something of an unscrupulous opportunist -- even, dare I say it, a cad!

Because Macnaghten, if he was ignorant and made all these mistakes, 'hung' this tragic Blackheath doctor by releasing so much information to the Edwardian public -- who even knew what he looked like [Sims' doppelganger].

No name, of course, but what about the circles in which the late suspect moved who would immediatelty recognise the Dr. Sims-look-alike who took his own life in the Thames in 1888?

My God, Sims says that he was Jack the Ripper?? I used to be his patient! So did my wife?!

My reading of Macnaghten's character, as a jaunty, discreet, gentleman, is that he would never, ever, have allowed the 'Drowned Dcotor' profile to be propagated to the public if he thought it would cause alarm, or distress, or shame to the man's real family and/or real riends and/or real peers. [I think he did much the same fictionalising of Aaron for the Kosminski family, -- inadvertently giving birth of the Polish Jewish suspect confusion theories]

Macnaghten would only, in good conscience, propagate the 'Drowned Doctor' Super-suspect if he was quietly certain that the real too-late-suspect was unrecoverable -- and 70 or so years might as well be forever.

[Johnr]

It is pleasing to see such robust views on Macnaghten.

I find Jonathan H's theorising fascinating for its ingenuity.

Sometimes convoluted, it paints the affable Sir Melville Macnaghten as a scheming, Macchievellian yet affable and democratic administrator.

I should say I am pleased this thread has not gotten bogged down in just fucussing on Macnaghten's errors of fact in the Memorandum.

After all, did not Anderson and Abberline and Swanson(or more accurately his "marginalia") all commit errors in published sources?
Theirs were more public than Macnaghten's in his MM.

Although he did commit some errors in his memoirs and published interviews.

On one of the other threads, someone described the case where Macnaghten rushed to the murder site and intruded himself somewhat into the investigation.

I wonder if that marvellous poster could re-post that detail here please? (Sorry to have forgotten the poster's name, I'll try to find it).

Also, no-one has commented on my statement about the influence of the
Adolphe Beck mistaken identifications (twice!!) on the methodology of criminal identification under Macnaghten, in 1896 and 1904.

I suggest Macnaghten's MM errors deserve a thread of their own, so we can tease out a fuller picture of his entire policing career here. JOHN RUFFELS.

[Johnr]

Scattered Glimpses..

I wonder if Simon Wood will allow me, and the thread controllers will permit me to transplant his germane question about Macnaghten's police career from his very similar - though specialised - thread from last September?

MM's autobiography recounts how his May 1881 meeting in Bengal with Monro "changed my whole life's work."

His life's work appears to have changed very quickly, for two years after his meeting with Monro MM was in London discussing the Indian Criminal Procedure Bill at the Banqueting Rooms, St James's Hall [see—The Times, June 25th 1883].

Odd work for a tea-planter.

JOHN RUFFELS.

[lynn cates]

strong evidence

Hello Jonathan. Thanks. Again (off the record--we have many touchy anti-Druittists around these parts!) I must agree that the evidence held by Sir Melville was most likely of the strongest kind. But we cannot be sure. Would he had not destroyed some of it later--it would be interesting to see.

As I recall, there was a post on the Druitt boards that there was a local legend (in the vicinity of Monty's suicide) that "Jack the Ripper" was found drowned near here.

Do you think Sir MM was being coy when he interpolated his "The more I think on it . . ." line?

The best.
LC

[Jonathan H]

Hi Lynn

Coy?

Oh yeah.

I think Macnaghten was almost Pythonesque in the way he wrote about Montie the Ripper.

As in, 'certain facts' came to our attention 'some years after' he became a cop, about Druitt.

Yeah, as in his name, his family's suspicions, the evidence of his guilt, where he lived, what he did for a living, and so on. Just those few facts.

In other words everything.

After all, what would you not know in 1888 but did know in 1891? Either he was a Ripper suspect, and therefore investigated, or he was not?

His retirement comments about the Fiend in 1913 are just so classic, English upper class twitish:

'That remarkable man ... most fascinating of criminals ... of course he was a maniac ...'

Macnaghten also claimed that he knew exactly who the un-named druitt was, and that he had destroyed evidence of his guilt.

Again, this confirms that the information on this suspect was purely private and not official. The Report he wrote in 1894 and perhaps again in 1898 were an attempt to bury this embrassing fact.

In 1913, upon his retirement, and his memoirs the following year, Macnaghten was as candid as he was prepared to be about being the police chief who solved the mystery.

The closest I have to a 'smoking gun' that Macnaghten is a Cheshire Cat playing a game with his peers and posterity is the following:

1. His memoirs, in which you would expect to see the 'Drowned Doctor' mythos reach its apotheosis, reveal nothing of the kind. They are both candid and cagey. The biggest bombshell being that the un-named druitt was not a contemperanous suspect at all, directly contradicting his internal Report which claimed that there was 'no shadow of proof'.

That in no way proves that Druitt was the Ripper, and never could. But the sources, particularly 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper', proves to me that Macnaghten, with all his heart, thought Druitt was the Ripper.

Do you know that almost no books on this mystery even mention those memoirs [Paul Begg is a sharp-eyed exception] and none, I know of, attempt to nut out what Macnaghten means by its chapter title. To me, for what it is worth, the title is the key to solving the mystery, historically speaking.

and

2. George Sims swatted Abberline away in 1903 claiming that there had been a Home Office Report by the Commissioner, Macnaghten, and this was 'definitive' and 'final' and 'conclusive'.

This file showed that there had been an 'exhaustive' and 'systematic' investigation of the middle-aged medico, the Blackheath recluse, and he was about to be arrested as the Fiend but escaped justice in the Thames.

In fact, we have known since 1959 -- 1965, there was no such Report to the Home Office. Sims [and Griffiths?] was being completely misled by his chum, Macnaghten, about the status of the Report which was probably prepared for that office of state but never sent there, or anywhere.

Even more startling, and further evidence of gentlemanly deceit, is that the version which Griffiths and Sims were working from is actually a 'draft' or, in fact, a rewrite of that Report [it's not a memo].

One which completely shifts the balance of the 1894 original's meaning and emphasis.

In the original,Macnaghten is saying, in very slippery prose, that Druitt, and co., were more likely than Cutbush to have been the Ripper. This is despite the Druitt family being 'believers' in their Montie's guilt. Worse, Macnaghten seems unsure what Druitt did for a living?

This is all cleaned up and firmed up in the version shown to the reliable writer/flunkies, except that the family are down-graded to 'fairly good', and now Macnaghten is certain about Druitt's guilt, not these Blackheath trash.

Why would Sims think it was such a hallowed report? Because Macnaghten told him it was, and this was deceit.

In my opinion it was deceit to avoid admitting to the pair tof writers hat Druitt was a too-late suspect, that he was never officially investigated at all. Something which Macnaghten -- I think to Sims' shock -- owned up to in 'Days of My Years'.

By the way, Lynn, as far as the incriminating evidence goes, I think that Macnaghten was handed a confession by Montie, which he made between Kelly's death and his own, recorded by an Anglican priest, who passed it on to a Vicar, who passed it to Macnaghten, who destroyed it.

The 'canonical five', about which Macnaghten is so certain, came from Druitt himself.

[lynn cates]

sexual insanity

Hello Jonathan. Thanks! There are persistent rumours about the confession made to an Anglican priest.

I wonder the Druitt descendants don't make this all public? Surely it would be better that leaving the lingering suspicions?

Have you any insight about the nature of the "sexual insanity" allegation?

Cheers.
LC

[Johnr]

Data about Macnaghten attending the scene of the crime

Sorry to interupt your anticipated answer to the above question on evidence of MJD's "sexual insanity", Jonathan, but I have just found this.

I have searched for and found that other reference to Macnaghten’s police career on the thread
“Macnaghten Memorandum”. It was two posts by “Jason_C” and dated 14th and 15th June, 2009.

A link is provided to the facts of this first use of fingerprinting in an English case. Macnaghten attended the murder scene. And chastised a PC who handled the murder weapon.

The link provided by Jason-C (thanks Jason) is:-

<<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fingerprints.../dp/1841157392>>

JOHN RUFFELS.

[Jonathan H]

The trouble is, Lynn, we do not know who knew what in the Druitt family?

My guess is that Montie's generation all knew, and it died out with them.

There is a report somewhere I read, I cannot think where now, [maybe in Farson?] in which a Druitt descendant was contacted in the late 60's and thought it was marvellous that he had an ancestor who was the Fiend.

In other words, news to him.

What I find extraordinary is that no pictures of the adult Druitt seem to have survived? At least, none that we know of, or none that are forthcoming.

'Sexual insanity' means to take erotic pleasure from the infliction of torture and murder. Macnaghten muses in his memoirs that the Roman emperor Nero may have suffered from this sickness.

In his twin Reports Macnaghten shifts between claiming that there was an allegation Montie was a sadist [Aberconway rewrite version], and citing it as a given fact [official filed version].

I think that was because Macnaghten had to be careful not to make Druitt look too good a suspect or Major Griffiths would start pondering as to why the Yard had not nailed this suspect before his suicide?

This is why the 'good family' of the official 1894 version are down-graded to 'fairly good' in the 1898 version shown to the Major. This is an in-built excuse. It blames the Druitts, who in Aberconway lived with their mad middle-aged sibling at Blackheath [all fictitious] and perhaps should have known earlier that he was the Ripper.

They had a 'suspicion' and alleged that 'Dr Druitt' suffered from sexual insanity.

In the filed version, four uears before, the family are certain he is sexually insane and 'believed' he was the Fiend. And that is in the version in which Druitt is not meant to be seen as a prime suspect.

Anyhow, I think that Montie killed Kelly and had some kind of mental crisis, which is the origins of the myth of the doctor who killed himself that very night 'a raving, shrieking fiend' after his 'awful glut'.

Actually real life was more complex than Sims' 'shilling shocker' served up to the Edwardian public.

Montie confessed to an Anglican priest, and from that moment the clock was ticking to either turn himself in, have himself institutionalised like his mother, or face arrest and probable execution.

He went about his usual routine of teaching and special pleading and cricketing as he pondered his options. I think that Montie was not sacked whilst alive [only one dodgy source mentions this and nobody else], but if he was, he may have engineered it to have a public excuse ready for his family.

A multiple murderer chose self-murder.

He told his cricket club he was going abroad, perhaps to 'disappear' [after he was found trying to have relations with Mrs Valentine, or something] and so he weighed his body down with rocks in the hopes that he would seem to have just vanished somewhere on the Continent.

It' didn't work and his corpse floated to the surface on the last day of 1888.

I think that the priest had instructions from a tormented, imploding Montie to publish the truth at the safe distance of a decade, though to suppress his name. This is where the 'Canonical Five' comes from -- from the murderer. The priest died, but passed on the confession and the instructions to publish in ten years, to a fellow clergyman, later a North Country Vicar.

In 1891 the terrible family secret leaked in Dorset to of all people the Tory MP. The Druitts were members of this party, and the day, or so, before his suicide Montie had won a civil case on behalf of the Conservatives.

Perhaps it was the Servants' Grapevine, or a leak from the Vicarage, or whatever but Farquharson was mesmerized by what he was told. It became his 'doctrine' and he could not stop telling people -- and so it leaked again this time to the press. But here it was effectively halted.

Enter Macnaghten, who met with Farqy, and later William Druitt. The latter was anxious that the family name be kept out of it. As a lawyer nobody had to tell him that you cannot libel the dead, but the family could be provoked to sue if it was claimed that they knew their sibling was the Ripper -- and did nothing about it.

[From 1898, Griffiths and then Sims mythologise the family into alarmed 'friends' who contacted the police once their deranged 'Dr Jekyllish' pal vanished. In Sims' story the friends discover that the police ALREADY know all about the dodgy doctor, and are frantically trying to locate him too.]

Macnaghten agreed to never reveal Montie's identity, or at least not to reveal it in such a way that the press and public would learn the name. That the fmaily could be identified, even by their ciricle of peers.

And this was completely successful.

So successful that Druitt is not considered a top suspect by many researchers today.

However, first the Cutbush potential scandal of 1894 triggered Macnaghten to preprare for the Home Secretary a veiled version of Druitt's identity.

But why mention Druitt at all?

Because Macnaghten was caught between knowing who the Ripper was, but also knowing that the whole story made the Yard look like chumps all over again as they only indentified him -- by accident -- two years after he was dead, and two years after they had investigated a sailor, most famously, for being an infamous murderer who was already a 'ghost'.

Plus, if the story was not disseminated very carefully the Druitts could sue.

The time-bomb for Macnaghten was that he had learned, perhaps also in
1891, that there was a Vicar who was, quite bizarrely, committed to realeasing the truth about Montie in 1898. Actually Jan 1899 the anniversary of his Anglican burial.

The Vicar was not only going to withold Montie's name but also factual details about him. In a piece he would send to the newspaper he called it 'substantial truth in fictitious form'.

This is exactly the strategy of what Macnaghten would also do to reveal and conceal the Ripper.

The reason the Vicar's story was a time-bomb is that it there was one thing clear in that jumble. That the police were not hunting this suspect. That his decition to confess, and to kill himself, were entirely his own business.

That would have to be quashed.

Macnaghten rewrote the suspects section of his Report and told Major Griffiths, a reliable crony, that it was a copy, or 'draft', of a definitive Hoe Office Report.

The Major's scoop, reeking of establishment approval, trumped the Vicar whose story appeared several months later in Jan 1899.

The Vicar was interviewed by a reporter from the paper, who were unhappy with the cleric's article: 'The Whitechuch (sic) Murders -- Solution to a London Mystery' because they could not knowingly publish material which was untrue, but he would not budge -- about what whic bits were fact and which fiction.

The Vicar only volunteered that the long, dead murderer was 'at one time a surgeon'. A very strange line, the first cousin I think to Macnaghten's 'said to be a doctor'. However, it never occurs to the reporter that this too could be a fictional overlay.

So here we have the doctor detail, by an English clerical gentleman who maybe fibbing, a detail which is strongly echoed in Griffiths and Sims' 'Drowned Doctor' -- which conventional wisdom asserts was due to Macnaghten's ignorance.

This maybe so,

I think that Macnaghten quashed the Vicar's story with his own version of the Montie myth and it worked.

In 1899, having been shown Aberconway, Sims dismisses the Vicar story but does so by quite distorting it; claiming that it is a cleric who recently heard the dying confession of a criminal who claimed to be the Fiend. That's not what the Vicar was saying at all.

The weird Vicar story, with instructions from the murderer to publish the truth, sort-of, in ten years, in 'The Western Mail', maybe a glimpse into the inception of the myth which buried Montie Druitt for 70 odd years.

Or it's about somebody different.

If they are the same person then the Griffihs version of the 'Drowned Doctor' became the paradigm, not the Vicar's 'Ex-Surgeon' whom had plenty of time to confess after Kelly.

They cannot be the same suspect, if you read Griffiths and Sims, because there was no time fore the killer to confess; he plunged himsefl into the Thames the night or next morning of the Miller's Court atrocity.

Farquharson, Macnaghten's Report(s), Griffiths, Sims and Macnathten's memoirs all consur on this point.

Jack the Confessor he was not.

Except that we know from the primary sources that Druitt killed himself three weeks after Kelly's murder. Plenty of time to see a priest.

The Vicar story is actually in alignment with the real Montie, if it is about him at all?

The overall point is that I think the sources we have on Druitt are not all there ever was, eg. just scraps with Macnaghten fumbling and stumbling around.

I think they are the tip of a massive iceberg which is long melted.

I think the Druitt family were left traumatised and shattered in the revelatory aftermath of Montie's suicide.

No only did they think he was a sexual sadist, and a murderer but also Jack the Ripper?! That's quite a leap!

But if the family knew him to have hurt prostitutes before, and as an Oxonian was frequenting the East End to help the poor for Toynbee Hall, and if the brother found a blood-stained sailor's outfit, and a bloody knife ...?

And then a priest came forward to tell them what the missing Montie had told him, then of course they 'believed', and of course it was Farquarson's 'doctrine', and of course the Vicar was 'certain', and of course Macnaghten had 'strong opinions' and a 'very good idea'.