Upon what basis did the Druitt family suspect Montague?

[pinkmoon]

Hi Jason

I'm conscious of our drifting off-topic for a Druitt thread, (possibly my own fault), but nonetheless we just don't know how many contacts/clients were traced/eliminated...we do know the police were very thorough (vide for example Swanson's comments at the end of his 30th November memo to the Home Office)...

I can't imagine many clients being prepared to come forward voluntarily though, can you?

Frankly I've always seen a Druitt-type presenting in this role as being a fish totally out of water...just doesn't seem to fit at all...and at the height of the paranoia, surely the briefcase-carrying toff would've been the object of huge suspicion were he merely to appear in the area?

All the best

Dave

we need to remember that a lot of people who were in the area at the time of the murders we up to no good themselves.I have always thought that some one might well have seen killer at work or even disturbed him and not gone to the police.

[Wickerman]

Hi Caz,

I like that phrase (and you are not the only one who uses it) of "innocent slumming". Think of the situation - in a normally dangerous neighborhood for middle class types not usually found there - in an especially dangerous period with a horrendous serial killer on the loose - in a geographic area known for "penny a dozen" prostitutes - after dark (presumably 10 P.M. to 4 A.M. or so). What would be innocent about being there for somebody like Montie or my imaginary straw man "X"? Are they admiring the architecture or the design of the various streets? Doing research for sociological papers ("The Sex Lives of East End Socialists and Communists in a Time of Panic - An Answer to Mr. Charles Booth")? "Innocent slumming" indeed.

Love,

Jeff

Hi Jeff.

There are accounts (Fishman?) of middle-class types who would rent a room in Whitechapel for a few days to sample the night life. Not all of them may have appreciated the danger they exposed themselves to. Some may have been lucky, and others found out the hard way.
The fact remains, outsiders did choose to 'doss' among the dregs of humanity for the 'thrill' and cheap sex.

[Mayerling]

we need to remember that a lot of people who were in the area at the time of the murders we up to no good themselves.I have always thought that some one might well have seen killer at work or even disturbed him and not gone to the police.

Actually, the killer may have counted on this very point when considering all his actions.

[Mayerling]

Hi Jeff.

There are accounts (Fishman?) of middle-class types who would rent a room in Whitechapel for a few days to sample the night life. Not all of them may have appreciated the danger they exposed themselves to. Some may have been lucky, and others found out the hard way.
The fact remains, outsiders did choose to 'doss' among the dregs of humanity for the 'thrill' and cheap sex.

There is an old French phrase which translates (loosely) into "thrill of the gutter". I suppose it is a universal idea for people into getting sex (despite safety and certainly health hazards) without being "observed" by people they know.

[Graham]

Maybe Druitt's family did genuinely wonder if Monty was the Ripper, but I wonder how many other families thought likewise concerning their absentee or behaving-strangely sons, grandsons, nephews, cousins and so forth.

Graham

[Wickerman]

Maybe Druitt's family did genuinely wonder if Monty was the Ripper, but I wonder how many other families thought likewise concerning their absentee or behaving-strangely sons, grandsons, nephews, cousins and so forth.

Graham

Dozens, if not hundreds.
Given his position as Chief Constable, he would naturally be aware of the numerous false accusations wasting police time and causing unnecessary paperwork.
Which then begs the question, why was this instance deserving of Mac's attention?

[Graham]

Which then begs the question, why was this instance deserving of Mac's attention?

Which is what has puzzled me for years and years. There must have been lots of corpses dredged out of The Thames almost on a daily basis, and I'd suggest that very few of them were actually identifiable. Druitt's mortal remains seem to have been more or less in one piece, as were his possessions discovered on his person. The letter he wrote, and which was found at Valentine's school, in which he referred to his probable insanity, perhaps caused Sir Mac and others at Scotland Yard to think - "Body in Thames for a month? Well, we know who he was, and he wrote a letter referring to his going bonkers? Well, could be The Ripper, couldn't it? I mean, we need a suspect, don't we? Papers asking questions, and so forth."

On the old boards, I posed the question that the cheque, season-ticket, etc., found on Druitt's corpse seemed to be in relatively pristine and readable condition for perishable items that had been in the cess-pit known as The Thames for 'upwards of a month'. In other words, had Druitt's body really been in the river for that length of time? What condition was his body in? I never really got an answer to these questions.

Maybe someone did tip Mac the wink that Druitt was not your ordinary, everyday suicide; we'll never know. I'm only slightly concerned that Mac got Druitt's profession wrong, and such a basic detail does, for me at least, somewhat blur his, Mac's, reliability.

Donald McCormick (Mr Reliable himself) wrote that he had heard that Druitt was being blackmailed by some unknown person accusing him of being The Ripper, and this is why Druitt went slightly bonkers. Sickert also wrote of a Ripper suspect he had heard of as being Drewitt, or Hewitt, and that he had mentioned this to Mac when they met (or so Sickert claimed) at the Garrick Club. However, Sickert described 'his' Druitt as a 'veterinary student'. It must also be taken into account that Mac claimed he had personally destroyed a lot of documents pertaining to the Ripper Case, and that although he claimed to know who the Ripper was he would never reveal the identity, and further that what he destroyed was 'secret information', and gone forever.

I sometimes get the impression that Mac, who was what Dr Johnson would have described as a 'clubbable man', also liked his readers to think that he knew more than he actually let on, perhaps thinking that a slight air of mystery would do him no harm. Maybe.

Thanks as ever to the good old A-Z for some of the above information.

Graham

[Jonathan H]

There is nothing tin the extant record to even suggest that Druitt was considered a Ripper suspect by the police before he died, when he died, after he died--not until some years after. Not until it leaked out of Dorset in 1891.

This belief was initially harboured only by the family, or at least certain mebers of the family.

Even then there is nothing in the police records outside of Mac's Report(s) that even hint that he was known to anybody else at the Yard. The exception is Abberline in 1903 but he gets so much wrong about the 'medical student' and is, furthermore, anxious to dismiss that story in favour of his Chapman solution that he is arguably very unreliable.

The first time anybody in the public, the police force (excepting Mac) and the Home Office were informed about this allegedly strong suspect, a doctor who had drowned himself in the Thanes at just the right time, was in 1898 in Major Griffiths' "Mysteries of Police and Crime". And that this susp-ect was known to the police at the time of his death and resrufacing in the river.

Actually, an unidentified police officer told a newspaper the year before that a murderer of a woman on a train (Elizabeth Camp) had been so overcome by what he did that he rushed to the Thames and drowned himself.

There is nothing in the other sources on the Camp murder about such a police notion.

I think this is Macnaghten leaking a story, one he knew to be a mixture of fact and fiction, as a dry run to see if it would fly.

The following year he used it again with the un-named Druitt and mostly got away with it. By then I think he had told Abberline that medical studnt suspect of 1888, John Sanders, had drowned himself, had told Jack Littlechild that Tumblety was believed to have taken his own life in France, had told Divall that the murderer died in an asylum in the States, and told Anderson and/or Swanson that the Polush suspect had died in an asylum soon after being sectioned in early 1889.

[Lechmere]

Blimey.
Mac the serial fibber.
He must have found it difficult remembering what he had told to who.
He was also lucky that the different people he told different lies to didn't compare notes.

[Jonathan H]

Acording to his second daughter and his colleagues Macnaghten had a superb memory.

If Mac really is the arhictect of so much disinformation, and most here think this is extremely far-fetched, then I imagine it was carried out with relative ease because certain police had retired, others were in different lines of communication and rank, and so on.

It wasn't luck.

[caz]

Hi Caz,

I like that phrase (and you are not the only one who uses it) of "innocent slumming". Think of the situation - in a normally dangerous neighborhood for middle class types not usually found there - in an especially dangerous period with a horrendous serial killer on the loose - in a geographic area known for "penny a dozen" prostitutes - after dark (presumably 10 P.M. to 4 A.M. or so). What would be innocent about being there for somebody like Montie or my imaginary straw man "X"? Are they admiring the architecture or the design of the various streets? Doing research for sociological papers ("The Sex Lives of East End Socialists and Communists in a Time of Panic - An Answer to Mr. Charles Booth")? "Innocent slumming" indeed.

Love,

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I take your point, but I was merely observing that from any third party point of view, given your scenario, the two men - Monty and "X" - would have been in exactly the same position, with "X" having to explain himself no less than our Monty.

It would be like Monty worrying about "X" having recognised him in bed in a West End brothel. Both in the same pickle if one tried to make something of it.

Love,

Caz
X

[pinkmoon]

Surely all the sensational reporting in the press would have attracted some morbid siteseers.

[Stephen Thomas]

Maybe Druitt's family did genuinely wonder if Monty was the Ripper, but I wonder how many other families thought likewise concerning their absentee or behaving-strangely sons, grandsons, nephews, cousins and so forth.

A very good point, Graham. In the late 70s when Peter Sutcliffe was on the loose the police set up kiosks all over West Yorkshire to allow people to anonymously say who they thought was the Yorkshire Ripper and many hundreds if not thousands of people blamed their own family members. Mostly it was women accusing their husbands .

[Stephen Thomas]

Surely all the sensational reporting in the press would have attracted some morbid siteseers.

Yes, lots of people came to see the sites and lots still do to this day.

[Simon Wood]

Hi All,

We only have Melville [Memory Man] Macnaghten's word for Druitt's family ever having suspected Montie of having been the Ripper.

Why should we believe him?

Regards,

Simon