Another thought

[Trevor Marriott]

Another thought on Anderson,Swanson the marginalia and Macnaghten and I will now play devils advocate.

We know MM was the first to record the name Kosminski and we know how he describes the antecedents of that person.What we dont know from MM is which Kosminksi he was referring to, or what the grounds were for suspecting that person.

In Andersons book he does not mention a name of any kind nor does he refer any grounds for suspicion of the mad polish jew he refers to.

Now both the entries of MM and Anderson in effect corroborate each other as both refer to a mad polish jew so nothing untoward at this juncture

Now we add The Marginalia and Swanson to the mix. Now both Anderson and Swanson would without a doubt would have been aware of MM. So Swanson would also be able to refer to Andersons polish Jew by name if the marginalia is authentic that could explain the surname only again of Kosminski being mentioned.

However if the marginalia is not authentic and all of the annotations were not written by Swanson but another and that other sought fit to add this seaside home scenario to the pot and also add the name Kosminski because the name Kosminski has been around since the 60`s in any event. This could explain a lot.

Now I will not be drawn into suggesting who could have been responsible for that if that was the case but a motive could have been for persons or persons unknown to obtain finacial gain in some way or to enhance the Kosminski suspect theory again for financial gain.

When you think about if that did happen it was perhaps a stroke of genuius, someone coming up with the seaside home scenario that they knew could not be disproved, simply beacuse it never took place there would never be any record, or never be anyone to talk about it.

It should also be noted that all of the various ranks of officers made no mention of any ID identification in later years when giving interviews on the case. The only one who makes any reference to Anderson is Reid who comments only on Andersons polish jew theory.

I say again if this ID happened then it would have been recorded somewhere in some form and someone would have talked. The silence speaks volumes in my opinion

[Jonathan H]

Trevor

I disagree about the Marginalia being a forgery.

It is obviously real, for a number of reasons.

But my real point is that it is an assumption that Anderson and/or Swanson knew about Mac's Report, either version, when there is nothing in the extant record to suggest such a thing and much to suggest that they did not.

Information about 'Kosminski' could have been conveyed to one or both verbally by Macnaghten. there was nobody to investigate as he was be then 'safely caged.'

In fact, if the entire tale comes from Mac there was nobody to investigate at all because 'Kosminski' was supposedly deceased soon after he was sectioned in March of 1889. That is a detail lifted from Druitt.

That is why, reliant, on what Mac knew their knowledge is so off the mark about the real Aaron Kosminski -- but Mac's is not if you factor in Sims too.

[jason_c]

Another thought on Anderson,Swanson the marginalia and Macnaghten and I will now play devils advocate.

We know MM was the first to record the name Kosminski and we know how he describes the antecedents of that person.What we dont know from MM is which Kosminksi he was referring to, or what the grounds were for suspecting that person.

In Andersons book he does not mention a name of any kind nor does he refer any grounds for suspicion of the mad polish jew he refers to.

Now both the entries of MM and Anderson in effect corroborate each other as both refer to a mad polish jew so nothing untoward at this juncture

Now we add The Marginalia and Swanson to the mix. Now both Anderson and Swanson would without a doubt would have been aware of MM. So Swanson would also be able to refer to Andersons polish Jew by name if the marginalia is authentic that could explain the surname only again of Kosminski being mentioned.

However if the marginalia is not authentic and all of the annotations were not written by Swanson but another and that other sought fit to add this seaside home scenario to the pot and also add the name Kosminski because the name Kosminski has been around since the 60`s in any event. This could explain a lot.

Now I will not be drawn into suggesting who could have been responsible for that if that was the case but a motive could have been for persons or persons unknown to obtain finacial gain in some way or to enhance the Kosminski suspect theory again for financial gain.

When you think about if that did happen it was perhaps a stroke of genuius, someone coming up with the seaside home scenario that they knew could not be disproved, simply beacuse it never took place there would never be any record, or never be anyone to talk about it.

It should also be noted that all of the various ranks of officers made no mention of any ID identification in later years when giving interviews on the case. The only one who makes any reference to Anderson is Reid who comments only on Andersons polish jew theory.

I say again if this ID happened then it would have been recorded somewhere in some form and someone would have talked. The silence speaks volumes in my opinion

Sim's mentions the identification of the polish Jew suspect. The identification was described as being by a policeman so I assume this information came from Macnaghten. So, Macnaghten talked sometime before 1907:

"The policeman who got a glimpse of Jack in Mitre Court said, when some time afterwards he saw the Pole, that he was the height and build of the man he had seen on the night of the murder."

[Jonathan H]

The beat cop who saw a man resembling 'Kosminski' with Eddowes -- thus shoehorning this suspect into the 1888 investigation prior to his sectioning -- is Macnaghten's attempt to remove a man who resembled Druitt, or was Druitt as far Mac understood it.

In the official version of his Report, he could just blithely claim to his clueless Liberal masters that there were no witnesses, period.

But to Griffiths and Sims with their great interest in the case, especially the latter, he would have to assume that they might recall a top witness who saw a young, Gentile-featured man chatting with a victim.

He knew that Sims might recall that there had been a witness and of a Jack the Sailor' suspect (hence the 'confrontation' with Sadler, a Gentile Sailor) so he cheekily inverted the ethnicity of the witness and suspect.

It is in 'Aberconway', and therefore in 'Mysteries of Police and Crime' of 1898.

Sims never claimed to have actually seen this 'Home Office Report', hustled to him quite deceitfully as a definitive document of state, but Griffiths did, and it may have been conveyed verbally to Sims by Mac as well.

For though the is element is in Griffiths, Sims had something new to add in 1907; that the cop later saw this Polish Jew and thought he somewhat resembled the Polish Jew.

In my opinion, Anderson reading this remembered correctly that the witness was not a beat cop but a Jew (Lawende) but then he retained the incorrect element of Sims' tale: of suspect being a Jew as well: 'Kosmisnki'.

The story of Anderson's slam dunk witness confrontation, seemingly confirmed by Swanson in private, does not appear before 1907 -- before Sims' big piece.

Quite inadvertently, I think, Macnaghten set in motion the notion of the Polish suspect being seen with Eddowes and thus seen by a Jewish witness.

It is just a hop, skip, and a jump for a failing memory, one pained by the whole matter, to misremebering the Sadler confronation with Lawende, not by confusing those two suspects, as detractors of this theory often counter, but by doing what Mac-Sims had done: substituting one for the other. eg. Sadler does not exist anymore. The evenjts of 1891 do not exist anymore, just as they do not in the Sims' piece.

For here we have two sources: Sims in 1907 with the un-named 'Kosminski' placed with a victim in front of a witness, who then confronted the witness sometime later -- in this care a fictitious beat cop.

We have another 1891 press source which shows that there was a Jewish witness -- Lawende again -- who confronted a Ripper suspect, and the result was disappointing.

The policeman witness and 'Jack the Sailor' become arguably fused with 'Seaside Home'; a police location by the sea at which a witness confronts the Jewish suspect. With a disappointing result.

But, it's all ok, because hthe swine was sectioned and then dead.

[DVV]

I say again if this ID happened then it would have been recorded somewhere in some form and someone would have talked. The silence speaks volumes in my opinion

Hi Trevor.
Entirely agreed.
That all records had gone missing is already surprising, but that nobody corroborates Anderson is inconceivable if the ID ever happened.

[Trevor Marriott]

The beat cop who saw a man resembling 'Kosminski' with Eddowes -- thus shoehorning this suspect into the 1888 investigation prior to his sectioning -- is Macnaghten's attempt to remove a man who resembled Druitt, or was Druitt as far Mac understood it.

In the official version of his Report, he could just blithely claim to his clueless Liberal masters that there were no witnesses, period.

But to Griffiths and Sims with their great interest in the case, especially the latter, he would have to assume that they might recall a top witness who saw a young, Gentile-featured man chatting with a victim.

He knew that Sims might recall that there had been a witness and of a Jack the Sailor' suspect (hence the 'confrontation' with Sadler, a Gentile Sailor) so he cheekily inverted the ethnicity of the witness and suspect.

It is in 'Aberconway', and therefore in 'Mysteries of Police and Crime' of 1898.

Sims never claimed to have actually seen this 'Home Office Report', hustled to him quite deceitfully as a definitive document of state, but Griffiths did, and it may have been conveyed verbally to Sims by Mac as well.

For though the is element is in Griffiths, Sims had something new to add in 1907; that the cop later saw this Polish Jew and thought he somewhat resembled the Polish Jew.

In my opinion, Anderson reading this remembered correctly that the witness was not a beat cop but a Jew (Lawende) but then he retained the incorrect element of Sims' tale: of suspect being a Jew as well: 'Kosmisnki'.

The story of Anderson's slam dunk witness confrontation, seemingly confirmed by Swanson in private, does not appear before 1907 -- before Sims' big piece.

Quite inadvertently, I think, Macnaghten set in motion the notion of the Polish suspect being seen with Eddowes and thus seen by a Jewish witness.

It is just a hop, skip, and a jump for a failing memory, one pained by the whole matter, to misremebering the Sadler confronation with Lawende, not by confusing those two suspects, as detractors of this theory often counter, but by doing what Mac-Sims had done: substituting one for the other. eg. Sadler does not exist anymore. The evenjts of 1891 do not exist anymore, just as they do not in the Sims' piece.

For here we have two sources: Sims in 1907 with the un-named 'Kosminski' placed with a victim in front of a witness, who then confronted the witness sometime later -- in this care a fictitious beat cop.

We have another 1891 press source which shows that there was a Jewish witness -- Lawende again -- who confronted a Ripper suspect, and the result was disappointing.

The policeman witness and 'Jack the Sailor' become arguably fused with 'Seaside Home'; a police location by the sea at which a witness confronts the Jewish suspect. With a disappointing result.

But, it's all ok, because hthe swine was sectioned and then dead.

Jonathan

You raise some valid points but at the end of the day there are many ambiguites in the references you quote. The point is that the people who would have and should have known about this ID parade had it taken place in the way described in the marginalia say nothing to corroborate it either at the time of the murders and by that I am including Coles in the category because we know Swanson was looking at her murder and in fact beyond as being the work of thr Ripper, or in later years.

"You pays you money and you takes your choice as they say"

[Trevor Marriott]

Sim's mentions the identification of the polish Jew suspect. The identification was described as being by a policeman so I assume this information came from Macnaghten. So, Macnaghten talked sometime before 1907:

"The policeman who got a glimpse of Jack in Mitre Court said, when some time afterwards he saw the Pole, that he was the height and build of the man he had seen on the night of the murder."

So if Simms knew where did he get his information from ?

[Jonathan H]

Trevor

We do not entirely disagree.

I was probably too convoluted, sorry.

I am saying that the Swanson Marginalia is authentic but unreliable, or rather reliably repeating Anderson's memory mish-mash. So we disagree on this aspect.

On the other hand, I do not think that 'Kosminski' -- as in Aaron Kosminski -- was ever the subject of an affirmative (or negative) witness confrontation, at the Seaside Home or anywhere else.

So we agree on that aspect, and for the same reason.

Such an extraordinary tale would be well known, would leak like a sieve. Even if other police did not think it was such a clincher, they would at least know about it.

In 1988 I was at a party and had forgotten to set my video to record the Peter Ustinov program on the Ripper. So I was trying to catch it, in fragments on a television, over the music and dancing and kissing, and the like.

I knew the Royal stuff was a modern hoax and so none of that caused me bother.

Later I caught the Druitt bit, and was aghast to discover that the 'police' had made so many glaring errors about this 'suspect'. It made no sense? How could they be so incompetent?

Then later I caught the jaw-dropping bit about a Jewish witness who said, yes, this man is the Ripper but subsequently refused to testify against a poor, mad, Jew! They even showed a sketch of the bearded suspect falling to the ground, with his hands tied behind his back and surrounded by cops.

Or, so my memory tells me.

But I just thought, I must be missing so much of this program as this can't be right?!

For if the 'police' had such an awesome witness and a prime suspect -- in custody -- who knew he had been identified, then it's not a mystery.

How on earth did the doctor, who is really a barrister, get roped into it all ...?

A generation later I still have the same reaction to Anderson's 1910 version of the story (except for the already sectioned bit in the mag) that it would not be possible to keep this a secret, not from senior police. Not from Macnaghten for a start. Whether others agreed with the witness' veracity, it would still be the most famous story of the whole saga.

I think Anderson was right. It's not a mystery. It's just that he had the wrong deceased prime suspect (his was not even dead!)

[Jonathan H]

To answer your question, Trevor, I believe that Sims is [anonymously] Macnaghten's mouthpiece, and through him the police chief provided the public with a mixture of fact and fiction about Druitt.

I don't think Sims knew that his hot info. was such a discreet mixture.

[Trevor Marriott]

To answer your question, Trevor, I believe that Sims is [anonymously] Macnaghten's mouthpiece, and through him the police chief provided the public with a mixture of fact and fiction about Druitt.

I don't think Sims knew that his hot info. was such a discreet mixture.

Jonathan
To me the Druitt issue does not cause me problem only as far as the hearsay regarding private information etc etc which is all in my opinion there is in relation to his suspect viabilty.

Kosminski on the other hand is totally different because we have a senior police officer directly involved puportedly writing annotations describing a significant breakthrough in this mystery of which there is no written record or an verbal comments to support this and he actually put a name to this suspect, whereas MM in relation to Druitt simply gives details of Druitts antecendents and suggests the man he is referring to could have been the ripper. In fact MM does the same with all the likely suspects he names, and this is a problem to me I have to ask why he didnt give details of why these came under suspicion.

If you look through many of the remaing files in the archives there are many other reports and correspondence within those files relating to suspects, most contain details as to what brought them under suspicion to name one John Donkin as well as details about how he came under suspicion there is even a copy of his criminal record still on file, Clearly a suspect clearly much paperwork on him but despite all of this it lies in a normal file.

Now call me old fashioned but if there was ever such a specific suspect file then why wasnt his file added or any of the others that are shown in the remaining files. I think someone posted some form of a suspect list from one of the files but I dont recall seeing his name on it and I would argue that that list was just a list setting out the names of people who among many had been put forward and not a specific suspect list in the true sense.

What you and other Druitt fans have done is very simliar to Martin Fido you have gone looking for a suspect to fit who MM writes about. Now there is absolultely nothing wrong in that correct way to do it, and what you have finished up with is Druitt who fits the bill, but not totally because of the doctor/barrister issue. Then you have the press angle. It is a fact that the press are guilty now of printing misleading articles and i have no doubt the same applied back then, the same can be said for press men who initiate this misleading information. It is so easy for a press man to forumlate a story and manipulate it in such a way that it will have maximum impact again especially if it sells newspapers.

So I would suggest that as far as Simms and any others reporters are concerned anything they have written or said should be subjected to very close scrutiny and not taken and accepted as gospel on face value.

[Jonathan H]

Trevor

We seem to be at cross-purposes.

I think that Macnaghten personally investigated Druitt -- several years after he killed himself -- by interviewing the MP, and then his family. He knew perfectly well that Druitt was not a doctor, and thus did not confirm this semi-fictional profile in his memoirs.

I thus reject the paradigm that only Anderson made such definitive claims about knowing the fiend's true identity, and do so because the certainty of the MP, of the family, of the North Country vicar, and of Macnaghten in 'Aberconway', and in 1913, and in 1914, is a straight through-line.

I am not taking the press accounts as gospel.

I am saying that Macnaghten manipulated the media, with enormous success, via an ecumenical propaganda offensive via a Tory worthy, Major Griffiths, and a Liberal gadfly, George Sims, but the pair were not on in this.

How successful?

At the time of the late 1890's, into the 1900's, good cops such as Swanson, Littlechild, Divall, Anderson and Abberline began to fall under the self-serving spell of the brief 'autumn of terror' -- the exception was Edmund Reid.

[Shelley]

Now I will not be drawn into suggesting who could have been responsible for that if that was the case but a motive could have been for persons or persons unknown to obtain finacial gain in some way or to enhance the Kosminski suspect theory again for financial gain.

Didn't the Behavioral Unit in Quantico have a go and named Kosminski , Aaron Kosminski as a likely suspect for JTR?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378432/Jack-Ripper-FBI-dossier-reveals-chilling-profile-released-100-years-late.html

Yet again, if evidences are lacking, a different suspect will turn up on the basis of such lacking evidences and information.

At my stab in the dark years ago before i knew of this computerized behavioral Unit at Quantico, find a suspect for JTR, i briefly swayed to Aaron Kosminski too, however i am resolved to thinking that i'll never ever know and am just learning the character plots and human sufferings along the way, just the why's and cause along with effects. I am at present resolved to that one and in much agreement with Philip Hutchinson.