Killer description and Suspect appearance

[Jonathan H]

That was not what you originally seemed to be saying, but OK we agree.

What about the rest of what I was writing, apart from that tiny point you extracted, or strained, from a much larger argument?

Do we agree on all that too; about the self-serving inevitability of memoirs, and so on?

Or, should I leave well enough alone ...

[Jonathan H]

The Gentile sailor William Grant Grainger was apparently confronted with a Super-witness, almost certainly Lawende, who said 'yes' it is the man I saw with Eddowes. He had definitely attacked a Whitechapel prostitute with a knife, and had no verifiable alibi for many of the 1888 murders. In 1910 his lawyer would claim that the police believed he was the Ripper.

Yet the police reaction in 1895 was, surprisingly, 'so what'.

I believe because unlike with Lawende saying 'no' to sailor Sadler in 1891, Macnaghten firmly believed that the fiend was the dead Druitt, and Anderson firmly believed it was the incarcerated Kosminski.

In the same article, which is our only surviving source about a positive witness identification for Grainger, Swanson is quoted as saying that the real chief suspect is dead.

[Trevor Marriott]

The Gentile sailor William Grant Grainger was apparently confronted with a Super-witness, almost certainly Lawende, who said 'yes' it is the man I saw with Eddowes. He had definitely attacked a Whitechapel prostitute with a knife, and had no verifiable alibi for many of the 1888 murders. In 1910 his lawyer would claim that the police believed he was the Ripper.

Yet the police reaction in 1895 was, surprisingly, 'so what'.

I believe because unlike with Lawende saying 'no' to sailor Sadler in 1891, Macnaghten firmly believed that the fiend was the dead Druitt, and Anderson firmly believed it was the incarcerated Kosminski.

In the same article, which is our only surviving source about a positive witness identification for Grainger, Swanson is quoted as saying that the real chief suspect is dead.

But we are also supposed to have had a "Super witness" who identified Kosminski at the seaside home. Like I have said before the witness statements are totally unrelaible and anything that subsequenty arose from them is also unreliable

[Chris]

That was not what you originally seemed to be saying, but OK we agree.

It's precisely what I was saying:
Obviously Swanson was wrong in saying that Kozminski "died shortly afterwards", but of course we don't know when the annotations were written, so we can't say that Kozminski was still alive at that time. Kozminski died in 1919, and Swanson in 1924.

http://forum.casebook.org/showpost.php?p=125862&postcount=40

I think I'll leave it at that.

[Jonathan H]

So, no comment about the rest of my post -- just that titchy point.

Thanks for helping me win a bet with a friend.

Dear Trevor

For what it is worth I subscribe to the 2006 Evans/Rumbelow theory that Anderson and Swanson [or just Anderson to Swanson -- my theory] suffered a self-serving memory jumble which means that by 1910 he, or they, have telescoped the embarrassing events of 1888 to 1891 -- into just 1888 and made it a much better story of police efficiency.

That the Sadler debacle and Lawende's no to that suspect has become fused with knowledge about Aaron Kosminski, who came to police attention only after he was incarcerated days before the Coles murder.

The point of all this is not the veracity of witnesses -- usually atrocious -- but rather that memory is a slippery business when it is fueled by a combination of wounded pride and professional vanity.

[Chris]

So, no comment about the rest of my post -- just that titchy point.

Thanks for helping me win a bet with a friend.

Believe it or not, I'm pleased to see you are posting here again. But based on past experience I think it will be better if I don't comment on your posts in the future. Had I reflected a bit before posting the comment above about Swanson's annotations, I should not have done so.

[Jonathan H]

I want to thank many posters, like 'Pirate Jack', because although we don't agree on much I respect the fact that he, and many others, will take apart a posting point by point and give an argument a thorough go -- and then a thorough going over.

[Tom_Wescott]

Chris and Jonathan,

As two very significant commentators on the only two viable suspects of the 'Macnaghten 3', do either feel that undue weight is attributed to these suspects considering that 'several' people were suspected following the Kelly murder and that Druitt/Kos/Ostrog seem to have been selected for circulation merely because they were beyond the reach of libel laws?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Jonathan H]

For what it is worth, no I don't.

The reason people were suspected after Kelly, most significantly Tom Sadler, is evidence, to my mind, that Druitt and Kosminski were completely unknown, at that time, to Scotland Yard.

When they did become known, it was to senior police only, eg. initially only Macnaghten because he investigated family rumours about two men who were already beyond the law.

Druitt was an appalling suspect because it meant admitting that they had been wasting tax-payer's money chasing a phantom. It was Druitt's death which locked in Kelly as the last victim, not the other way round.

I think a strong argument can be mounted that Macnaghten and Anderson, subsequent to 1891, went to their graves believing that their respective preferred suspects really were the fiend.

Perhaps both were entirely wrong -- one had to be wrong -- and Littlechild had a better sense of a more plausible contemporaneous suspect.

My theory is that for Macnaghten the problem was not the indentity of 'Jack' [it was Druitt] the problem was what to do about it?

How about nothing? But this was the Ripper, he believed.

Then came the potential for a scandal with Cutbush and questions from a Liberal Home Sec.

Imagine how galling that might have seemed in 1894. The tabloids were about to flay the police again, quite unfairly, when the Ripper had been six years in his grave!

Mac prepared a document for the Home Office to both reveal and conceal, and to muddy the waters by adding two much less likely suspects. Ostrog is a complete non-starter but is there so that CID does not look indecisive over two prime suspects. As I have written before; two is a crowd but three makes for a list.

As the years passed Anderson's ego-driven solution was to redact -- quite sincerely -- Kosminski back into the investigation of 1888 and completely eliminate the Sadler fiasco, which is the actual time Kosminski, too late, came to police attention.

Mac does the same thing via Griffiths and Sims, partly to head off Anderson's politically incorrect musings and partly to get it to the public that they really had solved this mystery. He did this by having the police already on the un-named Druitt's trail before he topped himself in the Thames. Yet he seems quite aware, in his memoirs, that this was utter fiction -- without admitting he was its author.

I don't agree that the libel laws did not apply to Druitt and Kosminski. Whilst the dead cannot sue the living sure can. Especially if the libel is that they knew their member was the fiend and did nothing. Anderson makes direct reference to the libel issue, so does the unknown writer of the 'West o England MP' story, and Griffiths is careful to alter 'family' into 'friends' -- which Sims amplifies. Likewise, Mac steers clear of any details in his memoirs which a surviving Druitt could claim pointed to Montie -- even omitting how or where the suspect killed himself.

Sorry, have to go to work ...

[Natalie Severn]

Jonathan,
They didnt know who he was or where he lived.
Had they known so would Henry Smith,The City of London Police Chief.He didnt and told us ,very clearly that even twenty years later nobody knew-he [the ripper] had them all completely beat!.Smith added that Robert Anderson had made a reckless assertion-and he did not know who the Ripper was and Littlechild bears it out.

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Jonathan,

But there's a point that confuses me regarding the theory that all the mistakes Anderson and Swanson make regarding Kos are the result of confused geriatric thinking. Don't the same level of mistakes appear in Macnaghten's write-ups of Druitt? Since we obviously can't accuse him of geriatric thinking, isn't the only workable explanation that Druitt was never investigated at all in relation to the murders, that Macnaghten himself never actually spoke to any of Druitt's friends or family, and therefore Druitt was just a neat little theory Macnaghten had? On top of this, we have the problem with him being homosexual, and the scheduling difficulties suggested by his cricket-playing. Wouldn't all this make Kosminski a much more likely suspect than Druitt? What makes you select Druitt above all others as the most likely Ripper?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Jonathan H]

To Tom,

That Macnaghten may be as confused as Anderson/Swanson is I think a very reasonable opinion.

That getting it wrong in Aberconway about Druitt's occupation, age, the timing of his suicide -- and at a pinch that he thought he lived with family at Blackheath -- is just appalling.

How can I seriously pin my hopes on this cop's veracity as to Jack's true identity.

Here's another.

The identification of the MP as a Druitt family near-neighbour may mean that Mac only spoke with Farquharson -- and was told a story which was simply hysterical family gossip, full of rubbish, which this amateur Sherlock chose to believe because anything his despised chief believed, Macnaghten would go the opposite way.

Another is that Stewart Evans makes a very compelling point about the Mac Report, official version. It has less errors and it is an official document. But it also in theme claims that Druitt is a minor figure -- just more likely than Cutbush. As in, Druitt, Kosminski, Ostrog are not much in themselves, but that gives you an idea of how worthless a suspect Cutbush is. Every other document by Mac; the Aberconway version, whatever mythical details he fed Sims, his own memoirs, are not of the same evidentiary value -- historically speaking -- compared to what the CID Deputy was actually willing to commit to an official Scotland Yard document, albeit addressed and sent to nobody.

That is, Druitt was a minor suspect. In fact, hardly a suspect at all, no matter what you may cagily claim in your self-serving memoirs twenty years later.

Here's another. I am claiming that Mac was deceitful. But surely that cuts both ways? He lied about Aberconway being a 'Home Office Report' copy to Griffiths and Sims, and he lied about destroying every scrap related to this suspect -- so his daughter and the surviving bits show.

Then how can you trust him on anything to do with this mystery?

I have to go and meet parents at my school and will have to come back later with the counter-argument, and you can judge its merits, or lack of ...

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Jonathan,

So now you're saying Druitt's not a good suspect? That's what I thought when I read your essay, but then you told me I had it wrong and that you were arguing he IS a good suspect. Now you say he was just a minor suspect of no consequence - merely better than Cutbush. Just so I'm clear, do you think Druitt was the Ripper?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Jonathan H]

Oh, yes I think Druitt was probably the Ripper, and I think very strong historical arguments can also be made for both Tumblety and Kosminski. Which is the strongest, is a matter of opinion.

Of course they may have all been innocent of the Whitechapel crimes [two of them had to be] but the senior police opinions of these suspects is as close as we can get to the heart of the mystery. A legal or forensic solution was impossible then and will forever remain so.

The idea that because senior police disagreed automatically cancels out each of their opinions is a reasonable line to take but not the only one. Since there was only one murderer it maybe that only one senior policeman really knew what he was talking about, and the others 'only thought they knew'.

What I was trying to show in my articles and my posts was that I am fully aware of the arguments opposed to Druitt.

Whichever article you read ['Druitt's Ghost', 'The Drowned Doctor Red Herring', or 'Clerical Sphinx'] they are meant to be structured the same way. To put the argument against and then the argument for; to try and show why I think the latter outweighs the former.

I have to go to work, and will return as soon as I can to put as simply as possible the argument for Macnaghten and Druitt.

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Jonathan,

I've read 'Clerical Sphinx' about the clergyman you think Druitt confessed to, but I thought that was kinda out there. I also read the most recent one, which I believe I've said a few times. That's the 'Red Herring' article. I liked that one very much, but was confused by how you presented it. It seems very anti-Druitt, and I could see it rather convincing someone that Druitt wasn't the Ripper. Since you think he was, I find that approach odd. But I liked your reasoning in it.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott