Upon what basis did the Druitt family suspect Montague?

[RivkahChaya]

I've always been surprised that Whitchurch could justify a full-time resident vicar, even going back as far as 1888.

If you build it, they will come.

[Mayerling]

To Mayerling

I know what you mean.

How about if the cheques survived and the train pass, then a confession to his brother too which had lain at the bottom of the Thames.

They found the document marked for his brother William, did not open it (?) and sent a telegram. Handed it to him and he learned, posthumously, that his brother was [claiming to be] Jack.

Hi Jonathan,

Yeah, you got my feeling exactly. Without that kind of evidence, all you have is a floating corpse of a suicide. But if the police read the letter and it mentioned some fact that only the Ripper and the police knew, that would be another story. It had to be something like that.

Which is one of the reasons I wish the actual transcript of the coroner's inquest (rather than the reports of "basics") is needed. It would give more detailed information of the retrieval of Montie's corpse and the search of his remains.

Jeff

[Jonathan H]

To Mayerling

Or not.

Of course it would be valuable to have a transcript, but I doubt if there would be anything in it which tied the suicide of this minoir figure of the Victorian extablishment with the Whitechapel crimes.

A factor which Sir Melville obscured in his Report(s) but not in his memoirs, is that the self-murder of this 'Simon Pure' rang no alarm bells at Scotland Yard.

Why would it?

There was no sense that the Ripper was dead or that Kelly must be the final victim. That is all strictly and self-servingly retrospective. There was a theory at the Yard that the Ripper may have fled (Dr. Tumblety) but since there were subsequent 'Jack' murders this seemed to exonerate the American.

The public were not even told that Kelly was the final victim by an authoritative source until 1898!

The timing of Druitt's suicide did not fit because it obviously excluded Mylett, McKenzie, the Pinchin St. Torso and Frances Coles. Plus it was embarrassing because it meant that the killer had done away with himself for his own reasons and not because any police net was closing.

Of course this was all spruced up in Mac's version to Tatcho, which is the textual evidnece that the truth was unwanted and awkward.

[Cogidubnus]

Whitchurch

If you build it, they will come.

Hi Rivkah

Yes, but there had to be sufficient congregation, (or alternatively, in those days, sufficient patronage from the local gentry), to pay for such a full time cleric, his accomodation, and his household staff...a not inconsiderable cost...

A more commonplace solution in a sparsely populated rural area might be a part-time curate on behalf of a more distant vicar, or sometimes even an enlarged parish with a vicar administering to more than one church...

In this case I think I'd be inclined to assume a wealthy local patron...

All the best

Dave

[Robert]

According to Kelly's 1889 directory, the Hundred of Whitchurch Canonicorum had a population of c5500 in 1881. The Hundred of Whitchurch Canonicorum comprised 10 parishes, one of which was....Whitchurch Canonicorum!

Population 1891 was 837.

http://www.opcdorset.org/WhCanonicorumFiles/WhitchurchCanonicorum.htm

[Cogidubnus]

Whitchurch Canonicorum

Hi Robert

Nobody was tithing by then, so I suspect even a, (presumably widespread) rural parish of 837, wouldn't, by their Sunday offertory contributions, support a full time vicar...

I say "widespread" because if you'd ever been there you'd appreciate how few houses were central and how population density would even then be pretty low, (though having said that, the rate of church attendance would've been considerably higher than what we're used to in more recent times).

As a matter of interest, do we know who the local gentry, who perhaps subsidised the local clergy, actually were?

All the best

Dave

[RivkahChaya]

I don't understand what a "vicar" in the Church of England is, then. The Episcopal Church is the only place I've heard the term used, and it means something specific for them-- it means the person who functions as a rector, but in a non-self-supporting parish, which isn't then called a parish, it's called a "mission." The idea of a mission is that it become a parish, but that isn't always the case, and the Episcopal Church has some mission that it accepts as permanent. A vicar's salary does not have to be justified by the donations of the current population he serves, and his salary is paid by the diocese, not the parish.

The reason I'm familiar with this is because of my work as an interpreter. The Episcopal Church has been quite astounding in its outreach to Deaf people (Jews could learn some things, frankly), and have supported well over 100 Deaf people through seminary, as well as some hearing people who knew sign, and had the intention of working in the deaf community.

Anyway, most Deaf congregations are not self-supporting, and exist as sort of "attachments" to larger congregations, usually ones that have a separate, smaller chapel for them to use on Sundays. They are "missions," and the priests who work with them are vicars, except in some large cities, where the priest is employed by the church, and also performs some weekday duties for the whole church, and then he's (or she's) called a "curate," I think, or a "pastor," depending on specific things I don't entirely understand. The head priest is always called a "rector," though.

For a while, I was interpreting the adult education before the service at a church that had a Deaf priest, who was a vicar, and explained it to me.

So, that's where my understanding of the term comes from. I thought that a vicar might be sent to drum up a congregation, or even encourage people to move to an area-- you know, when the government wants a suburb to be viable, they'll build schools, and run them under capacity for a while, and I figured a government church might do the same thing.

[Robert]

Dave, I found this which gives the patron as the Bishop of Salisbury.

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=14000

In 1895 the curate of WC - one Rev Fripp - was promoted to vicar of a Cornish parish. I think Andy Spallek tried to find out if the Rev Fripp was related to King Crimson's Robert Fripp, but I don't think he was. I'm not sure now. Age creepeth on.

[Jonathan H]

Lawyers into Doctors?

A friend of mine came up with a new wrinkle on an old theory -- more a question really -- that since Mac via Griffiths-Sims turns Druitt, a barrister, into a doctor, and the people the mad physician 'confesses' to into anomic doctors, could Montie have confessed to his brother William, a solicitor?

Her new element is this: would such a confession, one brother to another, be protected by attorney-client privilege?

I don't think so. I don't think such a privilege existed at that time in English law?

Besides, Sims has the 'friends' as separate figures to the doctors in an asylum to whom the 'mad doctor' confides his maniacal desires to savage prostitutes.

[caz]

Not the Full Monty

To Caz

As usual you do not deal with the core of my argument -- two competing Jack-the-Surgeons one overtly fictionalized and one covertly, yet the former is a better fit for Druitt and yet the latter is, we know, about Druitt -- but that's your right of course.

I understand why you do not, because it is my strongest point and so it is to be ignored at all cost.

Hi Jonathan,

I have no problem with the Vicar’s Tale being loosely based on the Druitt conjecture, proposed in Macnaghten’s memorandum and fed to Griffiths and Sims. I do have a problem with it being based on a genuine confession by Monty himself, who asked the vicar - a relative - to reveal the truth after ten years, resulting in him going to the Daily Mail with the story, when he needn’t have done any such thing, and arguably would have chewed his own tongue off first. It makes so much more sense to me if this was a money-spinning yarn cooked up by Griffiths, who thought he knew the truth about the ripper and figured a supposed confession (served up as fact in fictional form, so it couldn’t be proved or disproved) would add spice.

I find it remarkable that you, of all people, are so quick to dismiss the North country Vicar as an hoax to drum up sales?!

Be careful, pal, that could turn out to be a very slippery slope.

I don’t follow you there, pal. If this is a reference to the Maybrick diary, I am quite satisfied that Sir Jim’s ‘confession’ was a hoax along similar lines, except that its author didn’t believe Maybrick was the ripper, and wasn’t expecting to produce a shilling shocker.

Plus the argument I was using for the authenticity of the Vicar -- that his tale is so ludicrous that if it were false it would be better written -- is exactly the one you, and others, have made for the dog's breakfast surrounding the provenance of 'Diary'.

I was actually on your side on that one and you could have ... oh well.

Not me, pal. You must be mistaking me for someone else. I accept the diary is false, so why would I argue that it would have been this, that, or the other ‘if’ false?

On the Cricket Club board was apparently William Valentine, the brother of George. Are we to believe the brothers did not confer on their mutually missing Montie?

The club would not dismiss a man if they thought that he was in such a state of mental distress that he had killed himself.They would not use the phrase gone abroad if they feared he was deceased.

I presume that the brothers would have conferred on the nature of the ‘serious trouble’ Monty got into at the school, which had led to his dismissal. The details were never spread abroad (and I don’t mean broadcast overseas), but whatever the serious trouble was, it was evidently enough for the cricket club to follow suit and dismiss Monty in his absence. They couldn’t know that he had gone off to top himself until his body washed up and he was identified. This is regardless of when they first knew about either of the notes alluding to suicide. I don't know when William Druitt handed Valentine the one addressed to him. So while I agree that neither the school nor the cricket club was likely to have dismissed anyone they believed may have committed suicide, it was arguably the serious trouble that did it for them. They would certainly have used the phrase ‘gone abroad’ for someone who had blotted his copybook at his place of work and taken off in disgrace. There is no suggestion that either establishment would have taken Monty back, had he returned with a good explanation for his absence and begged them to reconsider.

Love,

Caz
X

[Jonathan H]

To Caz

My apologies. I have mistaken you for another poster who is tiresomely a pro-'Diary' fanatic.

I had not realized we both agreed that it is an obvious fake.

You are still not dealing with my core argument bout the Vicar's Tale, but from your last post I think that is because you sincerely do not understand it.

Perhaps I am putting it obscurely.

Plus the Vicar does not claim that the murderer himself wants his confession published -- that's my conjecture.

Are you suggesting that William Druitt with-held Montie's note for George Valentine? Did he conceal his brother's note for himself? What did it really say?

The Cricket Club would not write in the official minutes that Druitt had gone abroad -- either literally or figuratively -- because they would have known, by then, that they might be dealing with a tragic suicide.

Unless as that 'Acton, Chiswick ...' primary source claims it was after Dec 21st, the date he was dismissed from the club, that the suicide note was found by the older brother -- on Dec 30th.

Which also means that it is more likely that he was dismissed from the school for the same reason; for being unaccountably AWOL abroad.

Which would also fit with the brother arriving so late as Montie was not missing, just overseas -- exact location unknown. It was the lack of contact at Christmas that set off alarm bells.

That's a theory based on painfully limited data.

It is arguably stronger than the older theory -- always a very tenuous one -- because it fits much better the other primary sources: eg. the 'West of England' MP bits, and Macnaghten's various sources by that chief and on his behalf, and the other 1889 primary sources about Druitt's death in which his dismissal from the lesser of his two vocations goes unmentioned, eg. is not linked to his demise (nor is it in the one source which mentions it at all).

We will have to agree to disagree.

[Jonathan H]

The Vicar was a Spoiler who was spoiled

Unless I am misunderstanding you, Caz?

It is very early here.

Do you mean you accept that the Vicar's tale is about Druitt?

In late December 1898, Major Arthur Griffiths, Her Majesty's Inspectors of Pirsons, and thus an officer of the state, as well as a crime 'expert', an establishment hobnobber with the likes of the top police administrators, and so on, eg. an unimpeachable establishment worthy, brought out his massive book 'Mysteries of Police and Crime'.

There was a chapter on police failues, and the media and readers would have expected the Whitechapel mystery to be found there.

There is internal, textual evidence that Griffiths was originally going to write off the case as quite unsolved, as a failure -- as he had in earlier magazine writings -- when at the last moment he added a startling bit to the book's introduction:

'The outside public may think that the identity of that later miscreant, "Jack the Ripper," was never revealed. So far as actual knowledge goes, this is undoubtedly true. But the police, after the last murder, had brought their investigations to the point of strongly suspecting several persons, all of them known to be homicidal lunatics, and against three of these they held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion. ...'

Not only did Scotland Yard have a prime suspect, they had three of them.

This was somewhat confusingly put. There were three, but two were easily dismissed (?)

What a shame, as those two -- a Russian-Pole and a Russian -- both sectioned into madhouses, were just the kind of swine acceptable to the 'better classes' rather than one of their own.

The third was a middle-age, English doctor who had drowned himself in the Thames.

That he was a medical man made sense of course: eg. 'anatomical knolwedge'. He had apparently suffered a total breakdown immediately after the Kelly atrocity and vanished for three weeks.

A month after that his body was fished from the river. The doctor's own 'friends' had the gravest suspicions about him, though why is not made clear.

Except that, in broad outline, this was a very familiar figure to Victorians: it was Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Henry Jekyll and his homicidal alter ego Mr Edward Hyde -- for real!

It is the beginning of the consolidation of the Ripper in pop culture as the top hat toff, complete with cape and medical bag -- even though no such description was ever made by these sources (Sims would later claim the fiend was well-dressed while prowling the East End, and sported a naval beard.)

One of the key themes of Griffiths was that the police were hot on the trail of these suspects in 1888.

What has been missed by some secondary sources is how much of a propaganda coup this was for Scotland Yard, or at least was trying to be.

Apparently the police, far from being flat-footed, outwitted and clueless, suspected three plausible madmen, and one of them had a terminal meltdown after what was done to poor Mary Kelly. For three weeks he was non compos and then, overcome with revulsion, topped himself in the Thames.

What a very satisfying finale.

It was even comforting: a bestial fiend was compelled by some kind of remaining sliver of conscience to do the right thing.

Was Griffiths really saying that had the doctor not killed himself, he would have been arrested?

Where was he for three weeks? Hiding in a bolt-hole? That takes some ability to function doesn't it?

Newspapers zeroed in on this completly unprecedented revelation of a trio of prime, police suspects as it was so out of kilter with what they recalled -- and could check -- from 1888 to 1891.

Then in early Jan 1899 came the Vicar tale, covered in the both the popular press and the police magazine.

This did not reveal how the Ripoper died, though 'epileptic mania' hinted at suicide. The story certainly did not rule out self-murder. the Vicar also claimed the fiend was a doctor, at least 'at one time'.

Were they the same suspect?

If so it was a blow for it was not Yard-friendly; the police are not actors in the story at all.

It seemed, nevertheless, to match Griffith's revelation because of that three weeks where Jack was in some kind of tormented state and in such a state, could he not have confessed to a priest?

The reaction of two popular writesr is instructive here.

The right-wing, best-selling William LeQueue, who might be expected to support the Tory administrators of the police, dismissed the 'drwoend doctor' solution as purest propaganda. He had been in Whitechapel in 1888, and he had police contacts and there was no dragnet closing on an English doctor. LeQ claimed the tale must be a restrospective 'excuse' (in 1923 he would come up with his own mad Russian dcotor and madcap Russian plot -- and source).

The left-wing, best-selling George R. Sims, whom we might expect to also disagree with such a tale as also unknown to him in 1888, and to perhaps side with the Vicar, or at least have no interest in promoting Tory-friendly propaganda, instead parrots and cements the establishment line:

He completely rewrites the Vicar's story, ridiculing it in the process, and crunches the timeline from a three-week interregnum to just as long as it took for a blasted mine to stagger to the river the same night-morning (a revival of the MP's incorrect timeline from 1891, thought this was not known to the public, or Sims).

Bizarrely, Sims makes no effort to ridicule the Vicar's tale for it's obvious flaw: it's an admitted mix of fact and fiction, with the clerical author refusing to admit which is which.

No, he steers right away from the Vicar's claim of 'substantial truth in fictitious form'.

Sims as Dagonet in the January 22, 1899 issue of 'The Referee':

'There are bound to be various revelations concerning Jack the Ripper as the years go on. This time it is a vicar who heard his dying confession. I have no doubt a great many lunatics have said they were Jack the Ripper on their death-beds. It is a good exit, and when the dramatic instinct is strong in a man he always wants an exit line, especially when he isn't coming on in the little play of "Life" any more.

I don't want to interfere with this mild little Jack the Ripper boom which the newspapers are playing up in the absence of strawberries and butterflies and good exciting murders, but I don't quite see how the real Jack could have confessed, seeing that he committed suicide after the horrible mutilation of the woman in the house in Dorset-street, Spitalfields. The full details of that crime have never been published - they never could be. Jack, when he committed that crime, was in the last stage of the peculiar mania from which he suffered. He had become grotesque in his ideas as well as bloodthirsty. Almost immediately after this murder he drowned himself in the Thames. his name is perfectly well known to the police. If he hadn't committed suicide he would have been arrested.

This is the police version back in the saddle.

For it represents an escalation.

What was hinted at in Griffiths is stated boldly in Sims: yes, he was about to be arrested. The super-efficient police must have missed him by mere hours.

So, the once thought to be failed investigation has metastasized, in just days, from a strong suspicion in Griffiths to a near-triumph in Sims -- and since Jack satisfyingly killed himself, all's well that ends well.

The Vicar was telling a tale with similar comforting themes; a killer who was mentally ill and made a confession of the soul before he also, thankfully, shifted off this mortal coil to answer to an higher judgment.

In 1902 and 1903 Sims escalated further, revealing that the doctor, now a rich, unemployed, recluse, had been previously diagnosed in a madhouse as a homicidal, ticking bomb and that Griffith's information came from a definitive document of state composed and lodged at the Home Office by the Commissioner (this is kept vague -- does he mean Warren in 1888?)

This diagnosis could not happen after the Kelly murder, of course, because there was no time. It had to be [redacted] back into the past. For the doctors to know he wanted to savage harlots he would have had to have told them: that's a confession of sorts.

Culpability thus comes from Jack's own lips just like the Vicar -- no wonder the 'friends' were so panicked. The mystery is why they did not go to the police after the first or second murder?

Of course we know what Victorians and Edwardians could not.

The drowned dcotor is really a semi-fictionalised suspect too: Montie Druitt.

All of this shaping and reshaping of the data for public consumption was orchestrated, arguably, by a single, secretly smirking source: Melville Macnaghten, a Tory with Liberal pals like Sims (and who had of course briefed Griffiths with the 'Aberconway' sexed-up version completely altering the public perception of the Ripper case as a police failure).

The Commissioner's Report sent to the Home Office is really a Report by the Assistant Commisioner of 1903, when he was Assistant Chief Constable at CID in 1894, and it was never sent anywhere near the Home Office.

This version was shown only to credulous cornies (and family). It had no official status whatsoever.

The true official version, which is significantly different (Druitt is a minor suspect, might not be a doctor, but paradoxically was definitely a madman who gained sexual pleasure from violence) never left the Yard's archives.

I argue that the Vicar's Ripper is probably Druitt too as the particulars fit him better, and the reason given for his not being Jack by Sims -- that he had no time to confess anything to anybody -- is clearly wrong, and again fits Druitt.

Montie Druitt had three weeks, as Griffiths implied -- and then that window of late 1898 was rudely closed by Sims a few days after the Vicar in 1899.

Of course these could all be just a series of coincidences.

[Jonathan H]

Conan Doyle and the Crimes Club Book

A previous poster put me onto a new book about various gentleman, some famous wrters like Conan Doyle, and a Crimes Club they belongded to in the Edwardian Era.

The previous poster had witten that the book claimed that Macnaghten and/or Sims' suspect was really 'Kosminski'.

I have the book and have read the book, and I can highly recommend it.

The chapter on George Sims is [mostly] very good, especially at covering his contribution to freeing Adolf Beck.

A disappointment -- though a very minor one -- is that the author, Stephen Wade, does not know what he's talking about when it comes to Mac-Sims-Druitt and that's because of an obvious lack of reserach into the various sources.

The Ripper is of marginal interest to the author and so it is brushed past with just the following:

'Sims also figured on the margins of the Ripper case. As he noted, as a journalist in 1888, he followed the Ripper crimes "at close quarters". His story about the Ripper murders was that, on the night of the double murder (the last two killings), a coffee-stall merchant had chatted with a customer and said, "Jack the Ripper's about tonight perhaps". The man replied, "Yes, he's pretty lively just now [...] you may hear of two murders in the morning."

Sims relates that his book, "The Social Kaleidoscope" was out, and the stall keeper saw Sims' picture on this. He pointed out Sims and said, "That's the man!" Of course, this was absurd and led nowhere. As far as Sims is concerned, he wrote with complete confidence that the Ripper had thrown himself in the Thames, and that his body was found after being in the river for a month. He added, "But there were circumstances which left very little doubt in the official mind as to the Ripper's identity." Possibly he was referring here to the suspect Montague John Druitt, who committed suicide in the Thames in December 1888, but there is doubt about this, because Sims wrote that the man at the coffee stall looked like Sims as he was in 1888. The picture we have of Druitt is nothing like Sims. In fact, of the three manin suspects itemised by Sir Melville Macnaghten in 1894, a chief constable at the time, Michael Ostrog looks most like Sims, as Ostrog was drawn in a Metropolitian Police publication after a warrant for his arrest was issued. Yet Ostrog was detained in a lunatic asylum. There is a remarkable similarity between the two sketches, and Sims' anecdote adds some weight to the argument for Aaron Kosminski being the Ripper.'

Ps. 91-92
'Conan Doyle amd the Crimes Club: The Creator of Sherlock Holmes and His Criminological Friends.'
by Stephen Wade
Fonthill Media Ltd, 2013


That dog's breakfast above must not be seen as typical of the book, because it is not. The new work is both fascinating and informative, and about so many other cases very well-researched.

But on Sims and the Ripper ...?

- The double murder is not traditionally thought to be the last murder, but the second to last -- and that is how Sims describes it.

- There is no question from an analysis of all the pertinent sources that Sims is parroting Mac's opinion and his fictionalized profile of 'Dr. Druitt', and not Ostrog or Kosminski because all three suspects are clearly mentioned by the same author.

In his 1907 piece, Sims asserts that the true identity of Jack is between the drowned, English, middle-aged doctor and a young, American medical student-weirdo who was alive long after (arguably Mac's omelette servings of both Druitt and Dr. Tumblety).

- The picture of Sims on the cover of 'The Social Kaleidoscope' is not from 1888, but 1879. It bears a remarkable resemblance to Druitt because it is the only picture of Sims in which the latter's face is so thin and his hair appears to be parted in the dead centre. Ostrog looks older, rougher and of Slavic-feature in the police sketch, and every other picture.

- The coffee-stall onwer was not saying that Sims was the fiend, just that that picture of the author looked like the suspicious man he ecountered.

- Far from going nowhere, the witness was taken seriously by Forbes Windlow (for what that is worth) and was interviewed by the police, or so Sims claims.

How Wade leap-frogs from Ostrog to Aaron Kosminski is beyond my hillbilly brain?

Confirmation of my theory that the picture of Sims was very atypical (hence its resemblance to Druitt, rather than Sims as he usually appeared) came with my stumbling upon this source on another Ripper fan's website:

"DAGONET'S" DOUBLE.

STARTLING REMINISCENCES OF THE "RIPPER" MURDERS.

The strange case of Adolph Beck, twice convicted erroneously for the crimes of his "double," has induced Mr. George R. Sims to relate in yesterday's "Referee" an extraordinary story of his own likeness to "the demented doctor who committed the terrible Jack the Ripper outrages."
"Twice," Mr. Sims writes, "a portrait of me was shown as that of a man who had been seen on several occasions in the neighbourhood on the night of its committal.
"A man who had seen Jack at a coffee-stall in the small hours on the night that two women were killed, and had noticed that his shirt cuff was bloodstained, took my portrait with him afterwards to Dr. Forbes Winslow, and said, "That is the man; on the night of the murders, long before they were discovered, I spoke to him. In conversation I said, "I wonder if we shall hear of another Jack the Ripper murder?" "You'll very likely hear of two tomorrow," was the reply, and the man walked hurriedly away."
At another time, Mr. Sims adds, his portrait was shown to one of the detectives engaged in the hunt for the miscreant.
The danger of being the "double" of such a criminal caused Mr. Sims on one occasion to accidentally run a dangerous risk: -
"I had borrowed from Paul Meritt, the dramatist, a long Japanese knife of a murderous character for melodramatic purposes, and putting it in a black bag, I had gone to the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel, late at night. I often wonder what would have happened if some one had cried out, "That's the Ripper," and my black bag had been opened."

WHO WAS THE MAN?

Seen last night by an "Express" representative, Mr. Sims said he believed the coffee-stall keeper came across his portrait on the cover of the first edition of "The Social Kaleidoscope," in a shop in a side-street in Soutwark.
"It was a terrible portrait - taken, when I was very ill. My face was drawn and haggard, and surprisingly like the Ripper, whom only the coffee-stall keeper and a policeman ever set eyes upon."
"Dr. Forbes Winslow was at that time engrossed in the mystery of the murders, and had written a good deal about it. That is why the coffee-stall keeper went to him with my portrait. On the occasion when I carried the black bag and Japanese knife I was in a bowler hat, I remember, and was standing among the people, close to the very spot where one of the worst murders was committed."
Mr. Sims said that he had not the slightest doubt in his mind as to who the "Ripper" really was.
"Nor have the police," he continued.
"In the archives of the Home Office are the name and history of the wretched man. He was B]a mad physician belonging to a highly respected family. He committed the crimes after having been confined in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac[/B]."

Source: The Daily Express, London, Monday August 1, 1904, Page 5


In 1910, furthermore, Sims castiagted Sir Robert Anderson in print for plumping for the Polish Jew suspect over the Mad Dr ....., calling them 'Fairy Tales' and making unfair and cruel jokes about the ex-chief being an anti-Semite.

The whole thrust of Wade's analysis is wrong too.

The great George Sims did not see himself as 'on the margins' of the Ripper case because he believed he was part of the tiny Inner Circle who were let in on the Big Secret by Macnaghten (Major Griffiths was another -- and the Major had actually been allowed to see the definitive 'Home Office Report').

The Big Secret was that the Ripper case had been solved in 1888 and the drowned, mad physician was Jack -- this real life Dr. Jekyll was about to be arrested no less! Instead of being Scotland Yard's most humiliating debacle the detectives of CID were within hours of nabbing the fiend, it was so nearly one of their greatest triumphs!

Or so the Cheshire Cat misled Alice to believe ...

[Jonathan H]

http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=18114&page=2

On the other site from which I am banned, Jeff gets told that Aaron Kosminski could not have told anybody -- whilst incarcerated -- that he was Jack the Ripper.

Well, maybe.

But we cannot be sure. Significant-senior police of the day had interest -- more than an interest -- in 'Kosminski' and therefore his mouthing off in the madhoisue may have been what quietly brought Scotland Yard's attention towards him in nthe first place.

Then we are told, as if a fact, that Druitt never confessed anything to anybody about being the fiend.

Again, maybe.

We do not have his suicide note which so neatly and tidily wrapped up the inquest into his death.

A man who would have known his handwriting, George Valentine, did not testify.

A note in which Montie allegedly only alludes to killing himself.

And why?

Because he was worried he was going mad like mother?Why not see one of your relatives who was a doctor instead of carefully and elonrately destroying yourself while, arguably, leaving people with the notion you have gone abroad?

Or was it that he was 'going' to be sectioned like his mother?

Why? What had he done? Had he told somebody he had done something insane?

Plus if this source is Druitt then he may have confessed after all:

Western Mail
19 January 1899

WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
DID "JACK THE RIPPER" MAKE A CONFESSION?

We have received (says the Daily Mail) from a clergyman of the Church of England, now a North Country vicar, an interesting communication with reference to the great criminal mystery of our times - that enshrouding the perpetration of the series of crimes which have come to be known as the "Jack the Ripper" murders. The identity of the murderer is as unsolved as it was while the blood of the victims was yet wet upon the pavements. Certainly Major Arthur Griffiths, in his new work on "Mysteries of Police and Crime," suggests that the police believe the assassin to have been a doctor, bordering on insanity, whose body was found floating in the Thames soon after the last crime of the series; but as the major also mentions that this man was one of three known homidical lunatics against whom the police "held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion," that conjectural explanation does not appear to count for much by itself.
Our correspondent the vicar now writes:-
"I received information in professional confidence, with directions to publish the facts after ten years, and then with such alterations as might defeat identification.
The murderer was a man of good position and otherwise unblemished character, who suffered from epileptic mania, and is long since deceased.
I must ask you not to give my name, as it might lead to identification"
meaning the identification of the perpetrator of the crimes. We thought at first the vicar was at fault in believing that ten years had passed yet since the last murder of the series, for there were other somewhat similar crimes in 1889. But, on referring again to major Griffiths's book, we find he states that the last "Jack the Ripper" murder was that in Miller's Court on November 9, 1888 - a confirmation of the vicar's sources of information. The vicar enclosed a narrative, which he called "The Whitechapel Murders - Solution of a London Mystery." This he described as "substantial truth under fictitious form." "Proof for obvious reasons impossible - under seal of confession," he added in reply to an inquiry from us.
Failing to see how any good purpose could be served by publishing substantial truth in fictitious form, we sent a representative North to see the vicar, to endeavour to ascertain which parts of the narrative were actual facts. But the vicar was not to be persuaded, and all that our reporter could learn was that the rev. gentleman appears to know with certainty the identity of the most terrible figure in the criminal annals of our times, and that the vicar does not intend to let anyone else into the secret.
The murderer died, the vicar states, very shortly after committing the last murder. The vicar obtained his information from a brother clergyman, to whom a confession was made - by whom the vicar would not give even the most guarded hint. The only other item which a lengthy chat with the vicar could elicit was that the murderer was a man who at one time was engaged in rescue work among the depraved woman of the East End - eventually his victims; and that the assassin was at one time a surgeon.

This became the following nine days later:

Illustrated Police News
28 January 1899

IDENTITY OF "JACK THE RIPPER"
A SECRET OF THE CONFESSIONAL

To the long list of "solutions" of the great "Jack the Ripper" mystery, there is now added another - possibly the final one, possibly not.
It comes from a clergyman of the Church of England, a north country vicar, who claims to know with certainty the identity of the most
terrible figure in the the bloodstained annals of crime - the perpetrator of that horrible series of East end murders which ten years ago startled the whole civilised world.
The clergyman in question declines to divulge the name of the culprit, being unable to do so without violating the secrecy of the confessional. He states, however, that he obtained his information from a brother clergyman to whom the murderer made a full and complete confession.
The vicar writes:-
"I received information in professional confidence, with directions to publish the facts after ten years, and then with such alterations as might defeat identification.
The murderer was a man of good position and otherwise unblemished character, who suffered from epileptic mania, and is long since deceased.
I must ask you not to give my name, as it might lead to identification."
The ten years were completed on November 9 last year, the final murder of the "Ripper" series having taken place on November 9, 1888, in Miller's Court. There was a time when everybody had his pet theory as to the murders, but apart from speculation quite a number of solutions of the mystery have had a more or less substantial foundation of probability.
Major Arthur Griffiths, one of Her Majesty's Commissioners of Prisons, hints, in his new book, "Mysteries of Police and Crime," that the police
believe the assassin to have been a doctor, bordering on insanity, whose body was found in the Thames soon after the last murder of the series. He adds, however, that this man was one of three whom the police suspected. Then there was the madman who was traced to Broadmoor some five or six years ago, and against whom there was believed to be conclusive evidence; while Professor Bell of Edinburgh, who was a prominent figure in the investigation of the Ardlamont mystery, used to declare that he also had definitely "spotted" the culprit.
The clergyman who now comes forward with the latest identification declares that the assassin died shortly after the last murder of the series.


That the Vicar is a real person with a real claim is not disputed. That's a post-modernist interpretation where everybody is a liar and a cynic.

Notice that the element that the assassin was 'at one time a surgeon' has been dropped.

As has the fact that it was a new idea that the murderer stopped with Kelly.

As has the Vicar's line about "substantial truth under fictitious form".

Did Macnagthen, who was also covertly mixing fact with fiction, brief the police magazine's editor about this story?

[Roy Corduroy]

Jan 19, 1899 The Western Mail wrote We have received (says the Daily Mail) from a clergyman of the Church of England, now a North Country vicar, an interesting communication ...
... we sent a representative North to see the vicar, to endeavour to ascertain which parts of the narrative were actual facts. But the vicar was not to be persuaded, and all that our reporter could learn was that the rev. gentleman appears to know with certainty the identity of the most terrible figure in the criminal annals of our times, and that the vicar does not intend to let anyone else into the secret.

The Daily Mail received the letter and their reporter travelled north to see the vicar. But the story does not appear in the Daily Mail (London) yet did run in the Western Mail (Cardiff)

Or did I miss something. Any help is appreciated.

Roy