How certain was Mac?

[Phil Carter]

but for some reason, people still seem to be interested in studying the case.

Hello Rob,

It seems to this unwise old sage that there is a semi-permanent state of impassé here.
We have-
Those like yourself who believe in the 'evidence' making Kosminski the main possible suspect.
Those like Jonathan who believe in the 'evidence' making Druitt the main possible suspect.
Those like Mike who believe in the 'evidence' making Tumblety the main possible suspect.
Those like Simon (and myself) who believe that the above 'evidence' examples are hogwash.
Those who believe in another possibility.

Now as things stand, unless either your good self, Mike or Jonathan can produce incontravertable police evidence showing that any of these men can be with (as near as hoped) certainty that X was the main possible suspect- the real evidence is that between 1888 and 1895 the police were STILL hunting Jack the Ripper. (Swanson included)
so until you, Mike or Jonathan have prima facae factually written official police evidence to show the above to be untrue (i.e they were NOT still hunting the Ripper) and that all the official statements of Anderson, Swanson and Co were false (i.e. That they actuajy had their man) then that is how it stands.

I understand you have additional material to present to us all later this year.
I understand Neil and Rob have material to be presented to us all (hopefully) soon as well.

For the sake of impassé - I hope that whoever brings what to the table actually cuts some of the fog away once and for all. Because the LAST thing we need is another 'marginalia' 'diary' 'MM' 'knife' '3rd hand 'hand-me-down' story' 'etc etc.

Our beliefs are what they are. I dont care who did what. All I want is to actually get to near the truth. That would be a fine change after yearr of utter rubbish.
(Personally I hope that the murders 1888-1895 were committed by 4 or 5 different men- and that Kos,Dru,Ost, Tum and a Royal corgie dog did the deeds in a cabal) haha!

Best wishes

Phil

[robhouse]

Thank you Simon. I appreciate it.

Yes, I agree. I would love to hear the truth, whatever that may be. I would not trouble me in any way if Kozminski didn't do it.


RH

[Simon Wood]

Hi Rob,

Of course people are still interested in the case. That's just how it should be.

But the truth, whatever it may turn out to be, should not unnecessarily trouble us.

We are not in a competition.

By the way, I very much enjoyed your book.

Regards,

Simon

[robhouse]

Hi Rob,

It's no good getting upset.

Good point Simon.

Who cares?

Another good point... but for some reason, people still seem to be interested in studying the case.

RH

[Simon Wood]

Hi Rob,

It's no good getting upset.

You believe Sir Robert Anderson and the "Swanson" endpaper notation.

Jonathan believes Macnaghten.

I believe that both Anderson and Macnaghten were talking horsefeathers.

One of us will eventually be proved wrong.

Who cares?

Regards,

Simon

[robhouse]

You claim that this simple summary comprises your entire theory. Yet you seem to forget your extensive rambling posts, which are necessary to butress your "simple" theory; claiming that Anderson and Swanson were completely absent-headed, and/or intentionally duped by "Mac"; your incoherent notions of a super-suspect, a fictionalized "Kozminski," Macnaghten pulling all the strings, manipulating the "primary sources by proxy", his cunning manipulations to shield (why?) an Etonian family, assuming that he would have a motive for doing so; your failure to realize that it would be massively egregious insubordination to do so; your assumption that Macnaghten was effectively "going rogue" within the MET; your assumption that the death of the Ripper and his later discovery would somehow put egg on the face of the police. (In my opinion, it would do the exact opposite. It would provide a very simple story, and closure, so the public could breath a sigh of relief.) Not to mention the simple incoherence of your posts, their ponderous length, your incoherent sentences. (Do you realize that your sentences frequently do not even make any sense at all?) Your incessant hijacking of other threads, your cheeky and annoying reference to "Mac", your repetitive use of "big words" like "redacted", "proxy", "polemic"; your preachy manner, making idiotic statements like "his propaganda fools you in 2012." This type of fantasy and rhetoric might be good enough for your students or your toadies on the message boards, but it doesn't fly with me. You challenge me of being "rude and offensive"... fine. I don't deny that your incessant preachy know-it-all ramblings annoy me.

You claim I am oblivious to my bias. I wrote a suspect book, promoting a suspect as a likely Jack the Ripper. You think I was aware of the dangers of that, the pitfalls? I tried to avoid them. I approached the sources in a circumspect manner, allowing for alternate interpretations. I made an argument that clarified why I think Kozminski is a valid suspect, and should be (in my opinion) the top suspect today, and why many of the reasons he has been dismissed are invalid. I don't particularly care if certain people on these boards agree with you, and seem to believe that I am "oblivious to my own bias" or that I am too dumb to be aware that I am "torturing the sources". Who are they anyway? Are they hiding in the corners, afraid to come into the light. Your cabal?

Are you aware how much of a hypocrite you sound like saying that I am torturing the sources? You tend to toss the primary sources out wholesale, or massively rejigger them to suit your purposes. You basically toss out both Anderson's writings, and Swanson's marginalia, despite the fact that they were both in a position to know much more about the case than Macnaghten ever did. You ignore Macnaghten's own statements, for example: "A much more rational theory is that the murderer’s brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller’s Court, and that he immediately committed suicide, or, as a possible alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations, that he was by them confined in some asylum." This is a theory... obviously... a personal preference. Nothing more. It happens all the time on serial murder investigations. Read about the Yorkshire Ripper case, the Green River case. Obviously both Kozminski and Druitt were considered as possible suspects by the police. You somehow take what is a quite simple situation—probably a mere suspicion of his family, not unlike hundreds of other suspicions—and turn this into a knowledge, a fact, one that allows you to dismiss Kozminski, turn him into a phantom, a fictional suspect. Is this what you call remaining true to the sources? It is quite obviously not.

You have made a very specific accusation that I have "manipulated the primary sources." I would like you to give specific examples from my book of where I have done this.

But I don't expect you will. I expect you will continue with the Jonathan Hainsworth show. One would think that I would have the sense to simply ignore your posts in the future. And I hope I will.

RH

[Jonathan H]

That you call my theory 'incoherent' is also quite an 'accusation' but this is always something happening to you, isn't it?

You are never rude and offensive.

You can quote my opinion chapter-and-verse from previous threads about your stacking-the-deck in your book.

So don't pretend in your unearned indignation that this is all a rude shock.

I have written many times before that I think that your torturing of the sources to force that square peg into the round hole is sincere -- and not that of a hustler -- because you are so oblivious to your own bias.

Think I am alone here in thinking that?

In the previous post I compared it to being like a lawyer rather than an historian, arguing a brief which means eliminating alternate theories -- which you've predictably missed.

You say my thesis is incoherent and so I put it simply.

No comment from you, of course.

You want my critique again? Fine. Look it up, because I am not your phucking valet.

[robhouse]

I think you have manipulated the primary sources for your book.

That's quite an accusation. Do you care to provide any examples of where I have "manipulated the primary sources"?

RH

[Jonathan H]

To Robhouse

Thanks for the English lesson, and I appreciate that it was agony for you to have anything to do with me in order to defend the rules of grammar.

I think you have manipulated the primary sources for your book.

This what a lawyer does with a brief, but the best works of history -- though inevitably polemical and biased -- still allow the reader to make up their own minds because they show why other interpretations are not as strong, and are not afraid to display sources which contradict their thesis.

My thesis is that Sir Melville Macnaghten believed, rightly or wrongly, that Montague Druitt, an entirely posthumous suspect, was 'Jack the Ripper'. This upper class police chief successfully took steps to discreetly shield the deceased murderer's 'good' family from ruin and the Yard from the embarrassment of being too late; of having chased a phantom.

How is that incoherent?

Give Mac more credit: his propaganda fools you in 2012.

To Simon

I agree that both versions are stitched together, one deceitful fragment after another, the most glaring of which is to falsely claim a familial link between Cutbush and Cutbush.

That takes real cheek!

The Mac Report comes in two versions and that they contradict each other, to put it politely, is not just because one is a 'draft' and the other the finished copy.

This is because both mislead the reader (they certainly misled Griffiths and Sims) into assuming that Druitt was investigated by police either before he drowned or very soon afterwards (sims will have the police about to arrest the 'doctor' and discover that he has vanished, and so on).

Secondly, the so-called 'draft's' opinion was disseminated to the public via writers with prestige and authority. One of them said that it was a definitive document of state ...?

The other glaring shift is that in the 'draft' version the family are not sure Druitt is guilty but Mac pretty much is, whereas in the filed version Mac dismisses Druitt for a lack of hard evidence yet paradoxically concedes that he may have killed himself the night of the Kelly murder -- thus perfectly fitting his 'awful glut' litmus test -- that the family 'believed' he was the Ripper, and that their deceased member was a 'sexual maniac'.

I completely agree that deliberate and consistent gentlemanly fibbing is going on here.

But we must also remember that the official version was never sent. Perhaps Mac was never going to send it -- only archive it? It's official but it was dormant too, and unknown. It has no impact on the bureaucracy whatsoever.

Therefore the Cutbush dodge was only ever shown to the cronies for whom it meant nothing -- and who do not, as expected, refer to it.

On the other hand, the essential opinion of 'Aberconway' is that Druitt was probably the Ripper.

This matches Mac sources-by-proxy, eg. Sims from 1899 to 1917, and Mac sources by himself in 1913 and 1914

That's the 'scrap of truth' which predates Mac's Report(s) and which originated with the family and was then picked up by the local Tory MP (and possibly the Vicar too) and was essentially revealed to the public, repeatedly, from 1898 to 1917: like it ot lump it, but the Whitechapel maniac was an English bourgeoisie.

The 1894 Report, either version, has been allowed to trump what Macnaghten said and wrote in 1913 and 1914. Said and wrote, moreover, without the shield of anonymity or constrained by short-term pressures-of-state and partisan politics.

This focus on the 'memo' at the expense of the memoirs is a grave historical error, in my opinion, which has distorted, and conitunes to distort, understanding of the subject.

The very title of the memoir chapter confirms what Mac had anonymously released trhough Griffiths: it's not a mystery, at least according to this police chief.

What he finally conceded which was new but obvious for anybdy who recalled the hunt for Sadler was that the real Jack's 'ghost' was only laid to rest 'some years after' he killed himself (eg. Mac did not know that Kelly was this killer's final victim until the story broke with Farquharson).

The too narrow a focus on the Report(s) has led a number of modern, secondary sources (some otherwise superb) to not analyse both versions of his alleged 'Home Office Report' and, worse, to simply eliminate either Mac's 1913 comments and/or his 1914 memoirs.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan,

What makes you so convinced—and this is hand-on-heart time—that in his 1894 report/memorandum Macnaghten wrote a scrap of truth about his trio of "more likely" suspects?

Regards,

Simon

[robhouse]

That a probable link between Macnaghten regarding Druitt as the Ripper is not worthless, except to the horoughly biased.

This is not actually a sentence.

Inevitably with you Rob, despite all your research and elegant prose, you over-reach by stacking the deck for the lay-reader and thus give the misleading and false impression that Aaron Kosminski was Scotland Yard's prime suspect (much later his fictional counterpart, 'Kosminski', was Anderson's and maybe Swanson's).

I gave my reasons in my book, and they are quite simple. Anderson was head of CID, Swanson was in charge of the Ripper inquiry. I assume that they were in a position to know more about the case than Macnaghten, who, as you are aware, was not even at the MET at the time of the murders. The more important factor is that Swanson corroborated Anderson's statement that Kozminski was a major suspect in a personal note. And, as I say in my book, it is not unusual for police officials working serial killer cases to have differing opinions about who is the top suspect. Macnaghten "preferred" Druitt as a suspect... this was his preference. He was clearly not certain that Druitt was the Ripper. This you seem unable to accept, but instead endlessly refer to "Mac" as a super detective, weaving intrigue behind the scenes for some unknown reason.

Also, I do not see why it is my responsibility when I am writing a book to refute every opinion or theory that is proposed by other authors. I am not a fan of Stewart's Sailor's Home theory... and to be honest, if I had tried to include that in my book, it would have just been a confusing distraction.

I don't honestly see any point in refuting your fantasies, such as your idea that Kozminski was a fictional invention of Anderson or Swanson.

Your theories are incoherent.

RH

[Jonathan H]

To Bridewell and Simon

I think that is a perfectly reasonable opinion/theory.

That a source like Macnaghten who can be shown to be deceitful on a subject in some bits, cannot be trusted in anything they say about it in other pieces.

Not without verification.

Fair enough.

I argue that the two 'West of England' MP titbits establish that Druitt, as a Ripper suspect, began independently of Mac and among his own 'people'.

I also argue for the primacy of his memoirs, the only document by Mac on this subject which, 1. were for public consumption under his own knighted name, 2. were composed from the relative freedom and safety of retirement, 3. that they match the real facts about [the un-named] Druitt, and 4. they match the primary sources on the 1888 to 1891 police investigation, the only police memoirs to do so ('Laying the Ghost ...' is the de-facto and definitive third version of his 'memo').

I further argue that if Mac was just a liar about the Ripper he would have happily repeated the colorful and vivid Drowned Doctor' mythos he had himself created through cronies, and with which the Edwardian public were already familiar.

In fact, he does no such thing -- even to some extent debunking his own propaganda.

If the 1899 'North Country Vicar' is writing about Druitt -- and he may not be; it's just a coincidence -- then that backs up this independent confirmation too.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Colin,

Regarding the "Ripper", Macnaghten was no more truthful than Anderson.

Regards,

Simon

[Bridewell]

"How truthful was Mac?"

[Scott Nelson]

OK, OK, you've got me pegged. I'm only 17. Now what was I supposed to making a counter-argument about? I honestly can't remember.