A statement of 1913

[Chris Scott]

Pittsburgh Press
6 July 1913

Following out his observation regarding the necessity of the ideal detective "keeping his mouth shut," Macnaughton (sic) carried into retirement with him knowledge of the identity of perhaps the greatest criminal of the age, Jack the Ripper, who terrorized Whitechapel in 1888 by the fiendish mutilation and murder of seven women.
"He was a maniac, of course, but not the man whom the world generally suspected," said Sir Melville. "He committed suicide six months before I entered the department, and it is the one great regret of my career that I wasn't on the force when it all happened. My knowledge of his identity and the circumstances of his suicide came to me subsequently. As no good purpose could be served by publicity, I destroyed before I left Scotland Yard every scrap of paper bearing on the case. No one else will ever know who the criminal was - nor my reasons for keeping silent."

[Tom_Wescott]

And Scotland Yard didn't withdraw his pension and put him in jail for destroying their property?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Simon Wood]

Every scrap of paper bearing on the case, except the Memorandum.

[Tom_Wescott]

Ha ha. Good point, Simon!

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Stephen Thomas]

Pittsburgh Press
6 July 1913

Following out his observation regarding the necessity of the ideal detective "keeping his mouth shut," Macnaughton (sic) carried into retirement with him knowledge of the identity of perhaps the greatest criminal of the age, Jack the Ripper, who terrorized Whitechapel in 1888 by the fiendish mutilation and murder of seven women.
"He was a maniac, of course, but not the man whom the world generally suspected," said Sir Melville. "He committed suicide six months before I entered the department, and it is the one great regret of my career that I wasn't on the force when it all happened. My knowledge of his identity and the circumstances of his suicide came to me subsequently. As no good purpose could be served by publicity, I destroyed before I left Scotland Yard every scrap of paper bearing on the case. No one else will ever know who the criminal was - nor my reasons for keeping silent."

Hi Chris

That's pretty heavy stuff there.

MM ( Mr 'JTR was never caught' ) doing an Anderson?

Or an American journalist making things up?

'No one else will ever know who the criminal was- nor my reasons for keeping sillent'

Might MM actually have said that?

[DVV]

His "reasons for keeping silent" are now obvious.
Thanks to my friend Saucy.
Saucy Herfort.

Amitiés all,
David

[Jonathan H]

Another breakthrough find from Chris Scott, in my opinion.

This article makes perfect sense to me in terms of the theory of a Macnaghten as a Brer Fox operator who wanted to both reveal the identity of the Ripper whom he had found [and head off Anderson's ugly, sectarian exaggerations] and yet also conceal Druitt's identity from the vulture tabloids, spare the family -- and protect the Yard from even the whisper of a libel suit.

For example, what this reporter does not realize is that when Mac says that:

"He was a maniac, of course, but not the man whom the world generally suspected," said Sir Melville.

He may well mean the 'Drowned Doctor' Super-suspect, which had dominated the Edwardian Era, broadcast far and wide by his crony George Sims, with Mac as his only source [as Major Griffiths is also relying on Mac].

As in, the un-named Druitt was not a doctor, and Mac had no intention of confirming that he had drowned either [as his 1913 comments and 1914 memoirs both do not].

The man 'the world generally suspected' is a semi-fictitious figure, behind which Macnaghten himself was the architect.

"He committed suicide six months before I entered the department ..."

I think Mac regretted making this remark as it gave too much away.

Montie Druitt had in fact, almost exactly, committed suicide six months before Mac joined the Yard. Druiitt killed himself around about Dec 1st 1888 and Mac started as an Assistant Chief Constable on June 1st 1889.

Exactly six months.

Which blows Druitt's elaborate disguise; the middle-aged doctor who killed himself the morning of November 10th 1888 a 'shrieking, raving fiend' [Sims, 1907].

In his 1914 memoirs "Days of My Years" Mac, awkwardly, deflected his own comments here by blaming them on "an enterprizing journalist".

Who did what? Make them up? Not according to this article.

"My knowledge of his identity and the circumstances of his suicide came to me subsequently ..."

This is also a little more revealing than the opening of his chapter, "Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper" in which he admitted that "certain facts" about this suspect only came to police attention "several years after" he joined the Yard.

The press comments are more straight-forward: we had never heard of him at all [until in 1891 the West Dorset MP Henry Farquharson stumbled upon the Druitt story, somehow, and blabbed to his ten best friends, thus stupidly putting the Conservative Party and Scotland Yard in jeopardy from a potential 'Jack the Tory' scandal].

Again, I think his upper class discretion kicked in when he wrote his own book.

Mac is also in this press story far more candid about admitting that Druitt is his suspect, that he spearheaded the gathering of the intelligence on the un-named Druitt -- even stronger than the proprietary lines in the Aberconway version of his Report.

In other words, he does not bother with the fiction that Druitt was a 'police' suspect. It was a discreet, private investigation by a senior police official into a fellow gentleman who had committed suicide years before when the police were still fruitlessly hunting a serial killer who was embarrassingly already deceased. A suspect who could never be arrested or charged.

"As no good purpose could be served by publicity, I destroyed before I left Scotland Yard every scrap of paper bearing on the case."

Again, Mac is confirming what is obvious from the rest of the article. All documentation on this suspect is private and redundant -- there was nobody to officially investigate or arrest. they are my own private papers.

He is also, to put it bluntly, lying.

Mac had not destroyed the Aberconway version of his so-called 'Home Office Report' [Sims, 1903] and nor had he touched the official version gathering dust in the Scotland Yard archives. His own daughter, in 1959, mused that he was probably being deceitful to brush off his annoying nob pals.

Mac is also lying about the issue of 'publicity'.

From 1898, through the Edwardian years as Assistant Commissioner, Mac had been the puppet-master of the 'Drowned Doctor' mythos.

He had shrewdly combined elements of Druitt [self-drowned, English gentleman] and Tumblety [medico, affluent, under-employed, middle-aged, arrested in 1888] and overlaid Dr Jekyll -- and Sims' face -- to create a very satisfying suspect who never literally existed.

He loved manipulating the media, playing hide and seek about the Ripper's true identity.

"No one else will ever know who the criminal was - nor my reasons for keeping silent."

Certainly we can try.

The criminal, we know since 1959 -- 1965, was a young barrister, Montague John Druitt, who without Mac's own Report(s), would be completely unrecoverable from Mac's memoirs and Sims' writings [Littlechild was trying to deferentially alert his social superior to the truth in 1913; that the great 'criminologist' had been duped, by somebody, about this 'Dr D'].

The discovery by Andy Spallek in 2008 of Farquharson's identity make sense of why Mac kept it all a secret even in his internal police report.

It was partly because it was humiliating to the Yard that Druitt was a too-late supect [a reality buried in both versions] but also that the source on this suicided man was a gaffe-prone politician, now in Opposition, whose identity also had to be shielded from the Liberal govt. and Liberal Home Sec.

I am writing an article on this piece, whose limitation is that it is an American tabloid, one which maybe taking a more restrained story off the wire and simply hyping it all up.

[The Good Michael]

It also could have been PC Brown that MM was talking about. Druitt may have been suspected, but Brown never was.

Mike

[Jonathan H]

Can you elaborate?

[The Good Michael]

PC Brown, a Jewish policeman who served in the army and had no real relatives, was absent from duty the night Kelly died, and was pushed into resigning for absence from parade, it seems. He resigned on the 13th of November and killed himself on the 16th. He was never a suspect that we know of, and so I surmised that Druitt may have been, and so MM's statement doesn't appear to point to him. Brown was also courtmartialed, but I don't know the reason.

Mike

[Jonathan H]

I'm sorry Mike I can't follow your argument at all?

About either Druitt or PC Brown?

Mind you, it is very late here in South Australia.

It sounds very interesting.

You seem to subscribe to the theory that Mac did not know what the Hell he was talking about; that he knew nothing about the real Druitt. That is certainly arguable, and I have put the argument myself on these Boards.

Another way of looking at it, is that -- in his opening line -- Macnaghten is not referring to the 'Drowned Doctor', which he himself set in motion with the media-driven version of his Report, but rather Anderson's Polish Jew suspect of three years before -- which Mac ironically had also set in motion using 'Kosminski' as window dressing for the earlier, politically-driven version of his Report.

Therefore his opening remarks, if he made them, were yet another salvo in his internecine war with Anderson over the Ripper, stretching into retirement.

Yet I think that. taken in their totality and assuming they are accurate, Macnaghten is referring to both the forever-to-be un-named Druitt and disingenuously distancing himself from Sims' profile of the 'demented doctor', whilst claiming he destroyed documented evidence -- which may in fact not be true at all?

I see Macnaghten as wheels-within-wheels whereas Anderson is relatively easy to grasp; an overweening pride colliding with a self-servingly fading memory.

Neither mentions the other AT ALL in their respective memoirs.

I also think that Mac found Druitt, via Farquahrason, in 1891 and warned Anderson that this was probably the fiend. Anderson could not bear to be trumped by this insufferable 'Sherlock' wannabe, and thus launched himself on the Sadler fiasco days later. Later he grasped at the anti-Druitt, 'Kosminski', to deny Macnaghten his due for finding the real murderer and being able to face up to the culprit being 'one of us'. Anderson wanted to keep the killer as 'one of them'.

You see, Anderson always had to be right.

[The Good Michael]

Jonathan,

I was suggesting Brown as an alternative to Druitt. Macnaghten says that the killer was someone who was never suspected. By 1913, that wouldn't have included Druitt or Kosminski. Brown was just an alternative that I suggested as a possibility for who Macnaghten may have been talking about. I'm not necessarily in ernest on this, however, though I believe Brown to be a good candidate. I have no idea what Macnaghten thought.

Cheers,

Mike

[Chris Scott]

Hi Jonathan
I am posting the original of the section I transcribed which may be of use
Let me know if you want the whole article published
Chris S

[Chris Scott]

Here is the first part of the article leading up to the section I posted above:

[Tom_Wescott]

PC Richard Brown has been written about by Chris George at least twice in Ripperologist that I'm aware of. Once some years ago and again very recently following his giving a talk on the subject at the 2009 Ripper conference. Off the top of my head I cannot recall the specific details of Brown's suicide, but it's a rather creepy story and worth reading up on. Even though I don't regard Brown as much of a suspect, some people may have at the time, and Good Michael's observation that it might tie into the Druitt mythos is intriguing.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott