Hutchinson's Description

[tellybelly]

After many years reading and pondering about the case I've now come to the realisation that Hutchinson's desription could be Druitt. The dress is certainly that of a man of Druitt's financial means and it could have been him dressing in his full glory for his last vicitm. Also some of the items described in the statement were also found on Druitt when he was pulled from water - kid gloves, goldchain, coat ( although we don't know what type ) etc. The appearance and age could also be close. Yes I know the statement is thought by many to be exagerrated or untrue but i think there's enough in ito make a possible link with Druitt who I also think disguised himself in different attire for different murders.

[Jonathan H]

To tellybelly

Hi, I believe the Ripper, based on surviving sources was Montie Druitt [and if not it may have been one of the other major police suspects: Tumblety and Kosminski].

Something convinced Druitt's family, his MP, possibly a Vicar and certainly the deputy Head of CID and later Assistant Commissioner that Druitt was 'Jack' -- which of course could all be mistaken. It is just that all these members of the ruling class are going against the expected bias of posthumously accusing one of their own?

There are a forest of books and articles and documents to machete through on this contentious subject, and so I recommend the following:

The primary sources, 'The Littlechild Letter' (1913) and 'Days of My Years' [1914] by Sir Melville Macnaghten, read alongside the secondary sources 'Autumn of Terror' (1965) by American leftist Tom Cullen, who believes the fiend was Druitt, and 'Scotland Yard Investigates' (2006) by Don Rumbelow and Stewart Evans -- who do not.

Plus the articles on Dr Francis Tumblety, 'The Rise of Walter Andrrews' and 'Tumblety Talks', both by R J Palmer, 'A Slouch-hatted Yank' by Evans, and also, most critically, 'The West of England MP -- Identified', by Andrew Spalleck, which arguably restored Druitt to his previous perch as the leading suspect.

Regarding George Hutchinson's alleged description of the man he saw with Kelly, yes it could be Druitt -- if the witness mistook the young barrister's age and ethnicity.

I subscribe to contrary the opinion of Tom Cullen that Hutchinson made the whole thing up, or exaggerated what he could see in the dim light, because the description is too suspiciously like the villainous Jew from sectarian cultural mythology. Therefore, nothing like Druitt.

Much more likely is that Druitt is the youngish, Gentile-featured sailor seen chatting amiably with the fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes as witnessed by German-Jewish trader Joseph Lawende -- though puzzlingly this was not at all the published opinion of Macnaghten. Lawende is the Ripper witness, not Hutchinson, whom Scotland Yard seems to have regarded as the best, or at least the most available, because of the possibly tight timing between the victim being seen alive and then dead.

[tellybelly]

Hutchinson cont.

Hi Jonathon

Tend to agree with a lot of your reply. I've favoured Druitt for many years. He has always been one of the, if not the leading suspect and in my own opinion was undoubtably implicated somewhere during Autumn of 1888 by a family member. Indeed, other than Tumblety and Kominski I have yet to be convinced on any other suspect put forward and the advancement of many new candidates in the last decade have little or no serious merit with at best plausible evidence and at worse picking a charcater - eg Robert Mann - and building a totally unfounded ase against. With regards Hutchinson's description I tend to think that Druitt definately does have the appearance of gentile Jew and given the space of time elapsing between the known photographs of him and the murders Hutchinson does seem to be describing an individual who could have been Druitt. I know in recent years there has been a lot written to suggest that Hutchinson fabricated the story but to my knowlege the police at the time took his description serioulsy.

Kind regards for your interest and reply

[Marc]

What would have been Druitt's motives for his killing spree ?

Read somewhere that suicidal tendencies weren't unheard of
in his family circles.
Do suicidal tendencies cope with known form of homicidal obsessions
and some serial killer profiles ?

Playing the devil's advocate, what could have mislead some/one of his relatives (McNaghten's comment) to believe Druitt was, or could be, JtR
whereas he wasn't ?

[Jonathan H]

Druitt's motive:

Mad people do mad things.

Sir Melville Macnaghten claimed that the un-named Druitt was a protean. sexual maniac who had no motive except a periodic lust to kill and mutilate dead women.

But why go all the way to the East End to satisfy your evil lusts, if you live in Blackheath?

Moreover, why keep going there when the Bobbies and many other people are looking for you? Why not trawl Hyde Park for victims -- or anywhere else?

The Marxist Tom Cullen argued in 1965, I think brilliantly but nobody else agrees, that Druitt was a sort of terrorist; a deranged social reformer, one who kept risking Whitechapel as his killing zone to bring to the attention of the 'better classes' the systemic poverty rotting right next door -- with considerable success.

The picture we gleen from Sims' writngs is of an English Gentleman tormented by his affliction. But this is a Gothic-literary cliche, lifted right out of Robert Louise Stevenson.

The MP Farquharson, Macnaghten in the Aberconway Rewrite and his memoirs, Major Griffiths, and George Sims, all claim that the murderer killed himself mere hours after the Kelly murder. The literary cliche suited the story they were propagating.

Actually, if Druitt was the fiend, he functioned perfectly well -- at least in public -- for three weeks after that atrocity, even winning a civil case for the Tory Party the day, or so, before he threw himself into the Thames.

That blows the symmetrical neatness of the alleged psychological implosion caused by what his defilement of that poor young person's body in that tiny room; blows the reassuring Edwardian theme of a Christian conscience breaking through the loathsome monstrosity, and pushing him to do the decent thing and now stagger towards the river and destroy himself.

This mistake in the timing of Druitt's death [although in the official version of his slippery Report, Macnaghten seems to be mathematically aware that he must have killed himself some weeks after the Kelly murder] might have come from the shattered family. Their own reassuring myth that at least our Montie was not walking around, or advocating in court, after doing THAT!

An argument against Druitt being the Ripper is that he came from a family shadowed by mental illness who may have come to believe, in some kind of histrionic way, that their member was the fiend, and who killed himself the morning after the most ghastly murder -- which is demonstably false.

Or, perhaps Druitt left a suicide note claiming to be the Ripper and they [and Macnaghten] accepted it at face value -- but it had no more validity than if he had claimed to be Napoleon or Jesus.

Another argument against Druitt being the Ripper is that the Ur-source amongst the meager documents, the Tory MP Henry Farquharson, may have been a mean-spirited, upper class twit who exploited some constituency gossip and enlarged and exaggerated it for his old Etonian pal, Macnaghten -- and that the latter swallowed it hook, line and sinker [neither man, of course, was a trained detective].

Everybody wanted to 'lay' this 'ghost ' to rest and Macanghten saw his opportunity, especially as Anderson, whom he did not like, had just made a dog's breakfast over the sailor suspect, Tom Sadler [whom Mac did believe was guilty of Coles' murder and thus regarded this as a complete debacle by his superior] who was neither proved to be 'Jack' or Coles' killer.

[Scott Nelson]

Or a real simple explanation for his candidacy: He was despondent and drowned himself in the Thames at the time when police were looking at suspicious suicides.

[Jonathan H]

To Scott

No, that's a lame and redundant explanation.

You don't understand this wing of the Ripper mystery at all, though you are hardly alone.

To understand it you have to realize that Macnaghten's 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' dovetails with the primary police sources; Druitt is a completely unknown figure to the Ripper hunters of 1888 -- hence the Gothic, evocative title.

The idea of the suspicious and convenient suicide was a deflective myth created by Macnaghten himself, in the 1894 official version of his Report, to steer the Home Office away from grasping the truth about Druitt [Mac even enhanced this smoke-screen by throwing in other, minor Ripper suspects].

A truth that Macnaghten admitted in his 1914 memoirs, which matches the 'West of England MP' story of 1891, which matches the debacle over Sadler days later.

Far from being a 'convenient suicide' Druitt was excruciatingly inconvenient because he had drowned himself two years before the police hunted 'Jack' for the Coles murder [and even more inconveniently Druitt was from a Tory family stumbled upon by a Tory back-bencher -- whilst a Liberal govt was in power].

Mac pushed this myth even further with the 1898 rewrite of his Report, in which Druitt becomes a major suspect, then pushed under the noses of Major Griffiths and George Sims, thus further creating the 'shilling shocker' of the dragnet closing in on the 'drowned doctor' -- who looked just like Sims.

The truth is that Montague Druitt as a Ripper suspect was unknown to police until 'some years after' he killed himself.

It had nothing to do with police trawling suspicious suicides.

In fact, 'police' never had anything to do with Druitt as the Rripper -- only Macnaghten as a police administrator with a penchant for playing the field detective, and only unofficially -- which is why maybe Anderson, Swanson, and certainly Abberline, Reid and Smith are completely out of the loop.

Even in the Mac Report, official version, in which Druitt is allegedly a minor contemporaneous suspect, Macnaghten admits that suspicion about Druitt, who was also 'sexually insane', originated not with police but with his own family -- who 'believed' he was the fiend.

In his cagey yet candid memoirs, Macnaghten claimed that the un-named Druitt was THE suspect, the only one worth mentioning, but that he was not contemporaneous, a great embarrassment to Scotland Yard.

[Rubyretro]

Hutchinson's description was very precise indeed when it came to the
watchchain and the tiepin supposedly worn by 'Astrakhan Man'. Druitt may have had a gold watchchain -like very many men of the time- but did he have one so unusual as to have red stone 'stamp' on the end ? Likewise, many men may have worn a tie pin in the form of a gold horse shoe, but if Druitt owned both the watch chain AND the tie pin then that would be compelling indeed...

...until then..

[spyglass]

Hi all,
Hutchinsons description is to detailed to ring true to me,as one author once pointed out...it is impossible to see certain colours in the darkness.
Red being one of them.

[Jonathan H]

You should check out Stewart Evans' latest, excellent article, in the second issue of the Case Examiner, on just this issue, as I think you will find it very rewarding.

[Rubyretro]

Spyglass -I think that it's clear that Hutch made his discription up; So it's clearly no good comparing it to Druitt.

Which doesn't stop Druitt being a suspect, of course.

[tellybelly]

How on earth - over 100 years on can you state that 'it's clear' that Hutchinson made up the description. You don't know this and neither do I or anyone else living today ! The only thing that we do know is that he made his statement to the police and from what we know had no obvious motive for doing so.

[Marc]

Hutchinson's credibility has been seemingly discussed at length on this forum and with IMHO convincing points on both sides.
Arguments eventually boil down to decide whether this gentleman was the period equivalent of a HD video and sound recorder, a simple lad looking for his 15' of fame, or JtR waiting for the path to MJK to be clear.

I must admit that I'd love to have a source from close investigators describing Hutchinson's answer to these questions :
- Why did you stay for more than half an hour in the dead of the night under rain in front of Miller's court entrance though you knew you had no money to pay for MJK services at that time ?
- If you feared so much for her, why didn't you try to knock on her
door after 30' ?
Hutch probably answered these questions, but sadly, we don't have his answers on hand.

One thing, among others, struck me when reading his 'testimonial' :
He always hear Astrakan Man words, but never MJK's.
In my experience, women voice is at a higher pitch, thus easier to hear at a distance (providing they don't whisper of course) than men's.
I can even hear my wife mumbling against me across our home

[Garry Wroe]

Hutchinson claimed to have overheard Kelly telling her pick-up that she'd lost her handkerchief, Marc, but I know where you're coming from. As for answers to questions, I wish we had Hutchinson's explanation as to how on the night under scrutiny he was seemingly the only person in the East End who believed Mary Kelly to have been sober.

Regards.

Garry Wroe.

[Jonathan H]

As a witness Hutchinson is a red herring, no pun intended, as he was not used again, or really ever mentioned again -- nor his description -- by anybody in later years [unless I am forgetting a source?]

Scotland Yard regarded Joseph Lawende as the key witness, and I think that Macnaghten [certainly not Abberline] is the key cop of the entire mystery, though ironically the latter eliminated the former, Lawende, from his accounts. This applies to an internal bureaucratic document [official version, 1894], a document masquerading as an internal bureaucratic one actually created for public dissemination [Aberconway version, 1898], and his own memoirs ['Days of My Years', 1914] -- and whatever disinformation he fed Sims over the years.

If Macnaghten knew all -- and a strong counter-argument can be mounted that he knew bugger all -- then it's 'case closed', historically speaking.

The Ripper was probably Druitt, who resembles the best eyewitnes description, at least generically, and was believed to be the fiend by his family, his MP, and the deputy head of CID/future Assistant Commissioner.

I subscribe to the theory [admittedly my own] that Macnaghten knew that the Lawende description of a 30-something, medium-heighted, moustachioed, Gentile put the tale perilousy close to Druitt for some really intrepid, nosy reporter/writer with limitless funds.

Therefore, to preserve the fictitious, 'Jekyllish' disguise of the middle-aged medico Mac switched the ethnicity of the witness and suspect in the Aberconway rewrite. We know for a fact that Major Griffiths himself altered a factual detail -- the Druitt 'family' becoming anonymous 'friends' -- probably to placate the publishers and their fear of the draconian libel laws -- which Anderson himself warily alludes to in 1910.

Regarding Lawende and 'Jack the Sailor', you would not expect a well informed Ripper-tragic like George Sims to fall for this bait-and-switch scam, but he did, completely and utterly -- or else he was in on the gentlemanly fix which is why Littlechild's awkward revelation went straight into a drawer?

The unintended consequence of the Mac/Griffiths/Sims' version of the witness being a beat cop, supposedly seeing somebody who resembled the un-named Kosminski with Eddowes, is that it inadvertently set in motion the Anderson/Swanson fantasy of the Judas witness at a police locale -- a claim which is not even hinted at before Sims' 1907 magnum opus.

All in my opinion, of course ...