M.P. Farquharson-Druitt -- A New Source

[Cogidubnus]

Hi Bridewell

Isn't it the point though that McNaghten isn't from a police background...he always looks to me more like a politician than a policeman...and you know what that means...

Dave

[lynn cates]

"Not tonight honey--I'm not in the mood."

Hello Mac.

"The fella's running round stabbing people in the street! Dunno about you but I'd be more than slightly disappointed in the event someone stabbed me, and not exactly prone to empathy. I'd be thinking: "yeah, that's pretty vicious"."

Well, given the target, I'd think him a bit of a clown.

"Never really understood the idea that a potential suspect who stabbed someone in the street is less likely to have been Jack."

Hard for me to answer this, as I don't believe in Jack. I suppose the theorists think that he was cunning and secretive. But Cutbush was neither.

"I suppose it comes down to what you think of Jack and his motivations."

Right. Not to mention whether you believe there was a Jack or not.

"Me: I think he was a cunning, wild, opportunist operating on instinct rather than some controlled, skilled woman slayer operating within the realms of reason."

I wonder whether such a chap would have eluded the police for long?

"Cutbush would fit my view of Jack pretty well."

Very well. So says AP Wolf.

"I think Jack simply loved cutting people up with a knife - no great mystery - and that wouldn't rule him out of stabbing someone outside the WMs in the event he was in that sort of mood."

I see. Well, sort of.

Cheers.
LC

[Fleetwood Mac]

Hello Lynn,

I wonder whether such a chap would have eluded the police for long?

Why not? As long as he didn't get caught red handed he's long gone by the time the police undertake their search. And his escape suggests he was a nimble, fleet of foot character.

[lynn cates]

wild

Hello Mac. Well, I was thinking about your "wild" adjective.

Cheers.
LC

[Bridewell]

Honour

Hi Bridewell

Isn't it the point though that McNaghten isn't from a police background...he always looks to me more like a politician than a policeman...and you know what that means...

Dave

Hi Dave,

Such dishonourable activity may be more likely in a politician - but it's still dishonourable. The Druitt's shame would have been nothing compared with Macnaghten's, had he been caught doing what is alleged.

I know where Jonathan is coming from, but I can't relate to the logic attributed to MacNaghten which argues, in effect, that the best way to remove suspicion from someone who wasn't suspected is to say that he was and, thereby, (which is what has since happened) create suspicion where none previously existed. I don't see why he would write the Memoranda to clear a man who is only suspected at all by virtue of the Memoranda's existence.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Cogidubnus]

I know where Jonathan is coming from, but I can't relate to the logic attributed to MacNaghten which argues, in effect, that the best way to remove suspicion from someone who wasn't suspected is to say that he was and, thereby, (which is what has since happened) create suspicion where none previously existed. I don't see why he would write the Memoranda to clear a man who is only suspected at all by virtue of the Memoranda's existence.

Hi Bridewell...but it is said that the very best lies are when someone tells you the exact truth, but in such a fashion that nobody will believe it...

All the best

Dave

[lynn cates]

exact truth

Hello Dave. In which case there are many exact truths to be found attached to the case.

Cheers.
LC

[Cogidubnus]

You are probably quite right Lynn...but if the lies are well enough presented, how could you ever tell?

Dave

[Jonathan H]

Mac the Sly

On the other site another example of Mac's charming duplicity; of shaping the data to fit the specific audience.

http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=14729

Notice how it is claimed that the true identity of the Ripper will allegedly perish with him?

As if ... only he knows at Scoltand Yard? What if other significant police figures outlive Macnaghten?

After all, don't they know the secret too?

[lynn cates]

shadow

Hello Dave. Excellent question. Once a lie is presented, it casts a shadow on all else.

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

true crime

Hello Jonathan. I suppose Mac perceived himself to be the real "true crime" afficionado at the Yard?

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

To Lynn

I find it suggestive that Cox wonders if Mac is playing with an empty hand?

And calls him 'SherlockHolmeslike' when Anderson has a similar refrain about irritating amateur Sherlocks. Did he mean his boyish No. 2?

If you read Mac's memoirs you discover that he was, or claims to have been at the scene of crime after crime, including famously catching a burglar in his own home.

In a scene that reads like Wodehouse via Python he claims to have, by himself, found one of the critical harlot witnesses who got the wrongly convicted Adolph Beck off the hook. This man had been the victim of both incredible bad luck involving multiple witness mis-identification, but also the cruelty of a legal figure who had not let on that he knew that Beck was probably wrongly banged-up (this case was huge in the Edwardian Era, and led to creation of the English Court of Criminal Appeal.)

Though publicly exonerated, Beck's life was essentially destroyed -- along with his health.

From 'Days of My Years' (1914) Chapter IX 'The Strange Story of Adolph Beck', p. 93:

'Notwithsatnding his awful experiences, he always struck me a being a light-hearted lover of pleasure, and, mercifully, for him, I do not think the horrors of his wrongful imprisonment had weighed on him quite as heavily as they would have on most other men. He had the mercurial disposition of many of our continental friends [Beck was Norwegian] ... When we met for the last time, one Sunday evening in Hyde Park, he bent over my hand and called me his "preserver".

Also, George Sims crusaded effectively about this ****-up by the state -- and received a foreign knighthood from the King of Sweden for his efforts on Beck's behalf -- and said in his memoirs that the police were not that happy with his scathing columns.

Did Mac, who claims that the police had nothing to reproach themselves about regarding this miscarriage of justice, quietly pay back his pal by the disinformation in his big Ripper piece of Sept. 1907 for 'Lloyds-Weekly'?

[lynn cates]

ego

Hello Jonathan. Although the words "Scotland Yard" have always inspired near veneration in me, you are probably right--a good bit of ego and back scratching going on.

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

Abberline's Ignorance?

To Lynn

PaulB and I have been debating whether Abberline 's 1903 comments diminish Druitt as a suspect (we don't agree, of course).

On the surface you would think it had to -- and it has done with most secondary sources -- because here was a top detective, known for competence and integrity, putting the kibosh, in public under his own name, regarding the drowned man suspect.

But look closer and you see that Abberline, in 1903, is guessing, or his memory is contaminated by memories of another suspect. Also he is biased, inevitably, in his need to impress upon the reporter with whom he is conversing -- somewhat unexpectedly -- about Chapman being the Whitechapel terror.

Pall Mall Gazette
24 March 1903

... When a representative of the Pall Mall Gazette called on Mr. Abberline yesterday and asked for his views on the startling theory set up by one of the morning papers, the retired detective said: "What an extra- ordinary thing it is that you should just have called upon me now. I had just commenced, not knowing anything about the report in the newspaper, to write to the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mr. Macnaghten, to say how strongly I was impressed with the opinion that 'Chapman' was also the author of the Whitechapel murders. Your appearance saves me the trouble. I intended to write on Friday, but a fall in the garden, injuring my hand and shoulder, prevented my doing so until today."

Abberline is completely oblivious that Macnaghten is not only the advocate of the drowned man Ripper at the Yard, but is also the orchestrator of the same suspect's public profile via Griffiths and Sims (nobody seems to have known this, eg. Littlechild).

... "There are many other things extremely remarkable. The fact that Klosowski when he came to reside in this country occupied a lodging in George Yard, Whitechapel Road, where the first murder was committed, is very curious, and the height of the man and the peaked cap he is said to have worn quite tallies with the descriptions I got of him. All agree, too, that he was a foreign- looking man,--but that, of course, helped us little in a district so full of foreigners as Whitechapel. One discrepancy only have I noted, and this is that the people who alleged that they saw Jack the Ripper at one time or another, state that he was a man about thirty- five or forty years of age. They, however, state that they only saw his back, and it is easy to misjudge age from a back view."

Abberline is again ignorant that the key Whitechapel witness, Jospeh Lawende, described a Gentile-featured man and therefore possibly an Englishman. And sure enough the Ripper suspect this German-Jewish immigrant was 'confronted' with, Sadler, in 1891 -- and possibly Grant in 1895 -- were both of such local ethnicity, and both were sailors. Plus Lawende must have seen something of the face of 'Jack' for him to describe him as having a small, fair moustache.

Pall Mall Gazette
31 March 1903

... it is contended that the Whitechapel murderer has long been known to be beyond the reach of earthly justice ...

We know now that Macnaghten believed that his chief suspect was deceased (he was) and so was the chief suspect of Anderson and, perhaps, Swasnon (he wasn't).

... "You can state most emphatically," said Mr. Abberline, "that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago. It is simple nonsense to talk of the police having proof that the man is dead. I am, and always have been, in the closest touch with Scotland Yard, and it would have been next to impossible for me not to have known all about it. Besides, the authorities would have been only too glad to make an end of such a mystery, if only for their own credit."


In fact, Anderson forthrightly had begun telling certain people, eg. Grffiths in 1895, that there was no mystery; that Jack was a locked-up lunatic. This opinion, under his prestigious name, was communicated to the public at large, and he was taking the credit.

In 1898 Macnaghten, much less forthrightly but more cannily in terms of manipulating public opinion, had also begun hustling to the public that the police were onto the real 'Jack', the drowned doctor -- in 1888!?

Everybody knew that Griffiths and Sims had cosy police contacts.


"I know," continued the well-known detective, "that it has been stated in several quarters that 'Jack the Ripper' was a man who died in a lunatic asylum a few years ago, but there is nothing at all of a tangible nature to support such a theory.

Except the opinion of no less than the Assistant Commissioner?

And Major Griffiths had claimed that a local lunatic had been somebody seriously considered by the 'police'. Apparently the Polish Jew suspect resembled the man seen with the fourth victim, according to no less than a beat cop.


Our representative called Mr. Abberline's attention to a statement made in a well-known Sunday paper, in which it was made out that the author was a young medical student who was found drowned in the Thames.
"Yes," said Mr. Abberline, "I know all about that story. But what does it amount to? Simply this. Soon after the last murder in Whitechapel the body of a young doctor was found in the Thames, but there is absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was found at that time to incriminate him. A report was made to the Home Office about the matter, but that it was 'considered final and conclusive' is going altogether beyond the truth. Seeing that the same kind of murders began in America afterwards, there is much more reason to think the man emigrated. Then again, the fact that several months after December, 1888, when the student's body was found, the detectives were told still to hold themselves in readiness for further investigations seems to point to the conclusion that Scotland Yard did not in any way consider the evidence as final."


Notice how Abberline seems to be saying that, yes, there was a medical student -- the dominant motif is youth -- and, yes, there was a Home Office Report about him, but only the timing of his suicide was potentially incriminating (eg. anatomical knowledge plus mad enough to top himself). But there were other Ripper-style murders (he again seems oblivious that, subsequent to Kelly, there were English ones too) and yet the patrols were still going after the 'student' was fished from the Thames.

None of that matches Druitt, except the Thames River suicide, a detail which does not, here, originate with Abberline.

Druitt was not the subject of a Home Office Report in 1888, or any other year -- not one that arrived at that dept. of state. He was not a young doctor or medical student but a [relatively] young barrister and teacher. As a Ripper suspect he did not surface, un-named -- in the press -- until 1891, and then again, Phoenix-like, in 1898, but by then unrecognisably so.

The thrust of Abberline's timing is that this was a report written in 1888-9, and not as late as 1894 because subsequent events proved that this was not much of a suspect at all -- as it proved the 'Report' baseless.

Abberline is responding to a tale which he assumes is about a minor suspect and has been exaggerated in importance by a tabloid. I am sure he is confident that he speaks to the truth as he knows it. Because, I think, his memory has been contaminated by another case involving a suspect 1) who was a young, medical student, 2) who was mad, 3) who was the subject of a Home Office Report, and 4) who was somehow off the scene during, or just after the 1888 murders. Perhaps one who also killed himself?

I had no idea which case until I read the 1991 version of the 'A to Z' and discovered that John Sanders matched three of the above four criteria, though he 'vanished' not killed himself and was off the scene.

Here is the 2010 version from the same excellent resource, p. 454:

'Some garbling of Sanders may lie behind the frequent suggestions that Scotland Yard believed the Ripper to be a medical student ... sometimes confusing him with M. J. Druitt in the suggestion he drowned himself in the Thames.'

I would go further and postulate that Macnaghten did see Abberline, at some point prior to that 1903 interview, and misled him as blithely he did others.

For Littlechild and Abberline are arguably quite similar in their responses to the veiled-Druitt story, ten years apart.

Both, from memory, shift the 'drowned doctor' tale towards suspects they know; eg. possibly Sanders and definitely Tumblety -- with five almost identical elements.

Both ex-policemen are, to varying degrees, 1) ignorant that the police Ripper investigation kept going until it's desultory climax in early 1891, 2) believe that Sims has it quite wrong, 3) agree that the suspect was a physician of sorts, 4) that the suspect committed suicide, definitely in the case of Abberline's mad medical student and might have done in the case of Littlechild's American quack deviant, and 5) both men are completely ignorant of Mac's leading role in the 'drowned doctor' saga.

[lynn cates]

templates

Hello Jonathan. Thanks for this. It seems well thought out.

I agree with you about the "left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing" (my paraphrase) aspect of the case.

And we also have broad agreement about what you call "super suspects" and which I call "templates."

So we seem to have:

1. A drowned doctor/medical student/Jekyll and Hyde type.

2. A mad fiend who went about at night and who was sectioned, then the killings stopped.

I agree that Druitt and (your/A-Z's conjecture) Sanders may have provided impetus for #1. I think Kosminski, Cohen, Levy, et al may have formed the skeleton of #2.

What I CANNOT understand is how professional law enforcement officials could have bungled so badly. It gives me no concern that the culprit/s was/were not caught. But surely SY should have gotten the bloody suspects right and without conflating them?

Cheers.
LC