Druitt in the confessional?

[Mayerling]

Hi Chris,

I was thinking of that archive you mentioned with Wallace's notes for the book. Actually I wonder how much it really will say. I recall that in THE SUNDAY GENTLEMAN part of the chapter on Bell was dealing with an argument Wallace had with Adrian Conan Doyle (Sir Arthur's surviving son) who insisted it was his dad who was the real Sherlock Holmes (pointing to Doyle's work in the George Edalji and Oscar Slater cases) while suggesting that Bell was at best a model for some minor characteristics of the character.
Wallace insisted that Bell was acknowledged by Doyle to be the real model.
Of course, if the archives has anything of interest (like some autobiographical writings by Dr. Bell) it might be of some interest.

Best wishes,


Jeff

[Jonathan H]

Of course it's Druitt

I just wanted to say to anybody new that 2007/2008 were extraordinary years for trying to piece together the jigsaw of this subject, with so many pieces missing or misunderstood.

We had R. J. Palmer's momentous discovery of an interview with Dr Francis Tumblety, arguably the leading police suspect of 1888, and the two critical articles which it generated: Palmer's own 'Tumblety Talks' and Stewart Evans' 'A Slouch-Hatted Yank', both indispensible and both accessible on this site.

We also had Andrew Spallek's discovery of no less than the holy grail of so-called 'Ripperology' since 1959; the elusive bridging source between the 1889 articles on Druitt's inexplicable suicide and his seemingly bizarre re-emergence, in Macnaghten's Report(s), as a leading police suspect for the Whitechapel murders.

Spallek found an 1892 source which identified the 'West of England' MP (Keith Skinner had found the original 1891 source in 1991 in whuch the pol is not named). Henry Richard Farquharson, an upper crust Tory had partisan and geographical links to the Dorset Druitts, and also to fellow Old Boy from Eton, Melville 'God Old Mac' Macnaghten (his article, 'The West of England MP -- Identified' is also on this site).

What this re-established with a vengeance was that this police chief did once have access to a source who at least had accurate biographical data about Montague Druitt.

In one stroke the Farquharson-bridge smashed to smithereens the theory, long calcified into an accepted 'fact', that a bumbling Macnaghten -- supposedly forgtetful when he was renowned for his uncanny powers of accurate recall -- had shanghaied into the case a tragic innocent by mistake.

But also in 2008, and arguably just as momentous, were the sources published here by Chris Scott, about the 'North Country Vicar' and his overt mixture of fact and fiction about a suspect, an Anglican gentleman who suffered some kind of periodic mania and confessed to a priest before expiring.

Sims, Mac's mouthpiece, disparages the Vicar's tale for the very reason that makes it closer to the real Druitt than his own propagandist 'drowned doctor': the timing of the murderer's death after Miller's Ct.

At last the veiled 'evidence' against Druitt was comprehensible, at least as to why it seemed so persuasive to his family, to the MP and to the police chief -- even posthumously.

Behind Farquharason's mistake of the existential confession; of the incrimiating timing of the murder and immediate self-murder so melodramatically amplified later by Sims, was, in reality, a 'Protean' figure who could be normal on the surface for some time after Kelly and yet tormented enough beneath -- but still compos too -- in order to confess all to a clergyman.

The connecting theme between all these sources is that the gentleman murderer was seriously ill, in some kind of private mental agony.

And behind the 'confession' in deed, as believed by Edwardians, was a literal confession in word.

I see some posters lamenting that we will never know, never learn the identity of the fiend -- about a case which was arguably solved at the time and here is a big glimpse into why.