Alice Monaghan

[harry]

I have recently read of a claim by Alice Monaghan,that Sir Basil Thomson believed Alexander Pedachenko was the ripper.Sir Basil suceeded Sir Melville Macnaghten as assistant commisioner(1913).Does anyone know of Alice Monaghan and this claim.I have never heard mention of her before in relation to the Ripper,and there is nothing on the internet that lends credit to this claim.
There is also an illustration by a Sam Thomson accompanying the article.It shows a horseman viewing the body of Stride.

[mariab]

There is also an illustration by a Sam Thomson accompanying the article. It shows a horseman viewing the body of Stride.

Do you mean a “horseman“ as in Diemshitz leading his poney in front of Stride's body?
I've asked a bit around, and noone yet knows of the Monaghan lady. You would be pretty safe asking The Grave Maurice, he's a great collector of Rip lit.

[Tom_Wescott]

Sir Basil Thomson

Thomson did not think Pedachenko was the Ripper. J Hall Richardson reported that Thomson had said the Ripper was a Russian doctor who committed suicide in the Thames after the last Ripper murder. Clearly, Thomson had been exposed to the Macnaghten memoranda and either he, or Richardson in remembrance, confused the entries for Ostrog and Druitt. Unfortunately, there's no more to it than that. Later uninformed writers assumed Thomson's alleged Russian suspect must be Pedachenko.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

P.S. Since Alice Monaghan is not a suspect, the thread really shouldn't bear her name.

[mariab]

Since Alice Monaghan is not a suspect, the thread really shouldn't bear her name.

Or you could remove the thread into the “books“ sub-category, Harry.

[harry]

Pedechenko is the suspect.Thomson is the person referred to by Alice Monaghan.Monaghan is the person making the claim that Pedechenko was suspected by Thomson.I can'y see anything out of place except I maybe should have headed the thread Pedachenko.Big deal.

[Wolf Vanderlinden]

I’m not sure where J. H. Richardson fits into this but the suggestion that Sir Basil Thomson connected the Ripper specifically with Pedachenko comes from the 1962 edition of McCormick’s The Identity of Jack the Ripper. McCormick quotes from a letter he claims to have received from Thomson which states:

“When I was in Paris recently I learned in talks with the French that they had always thought the “Ripper” was a Russian named Konovalov, who used the alias “Mikhail Ostrog,” under which name Scotland Yard knew him as an ex-convict and medical student. They did not, however, describe him as a surgeon, but rather as a barber’s assistant.”

This letter has never been seen by anyone else and is most likely another one of McCormick’s fabrications (the last bit about the “barber’s assistant” seems to be an attempt to connect Severin Klosowski with Pedachenko, which was part of McCormick’s fanciful theory).

In The Story of Scotland Yard (first British edition, 1935) Thomson wrote:
“The belief of CID officers at the time was that they [the Whitechapel murders] were the work of an insane Russian doctor and that the man escaped arrest by committing suicide at the end of 1888.”

According to the A-Z:
“Eleven years earlier, he [Thomson] gave a similar opinion to Radio Times (3 October 1924), designated the doctor a student and the suicide as drowning in the Thames. This appears to confuse Michael Ostrog (the insane Russian doctor) with M. J. Druitt (the suicide recovered from the Thames on 31 December 1888) both named in the Macnaghten memoranda.”
The Complete Jack the Ripper A-Z, John Blake, 2010, page 513.

Interestingly, however, this garbling of Ostrog and Druitt does not appear in the 1936 first American edition of The Story of Scotland Yard. In this edition Thomson includes the general facts given in the Macnaghten memoranda and, later, writes: “The only clue was the fact that the man who ripped women up with what must have been a surgical knife had probably been at some time a medical student. In the belief of the police he was a man who committed suicide in the Thames at the end of 1888.” Thomson, therefore, supported Macnaghten’s opinions on the possible identity of the Ripper.

Wolf.

[Archaic]

Hello Wolf.

Thanks for posting that. It does sound like it was all very garbled and they managed to confuse the various suspects.

It's surprising to me that they would forget and confuse the details of so prominent a case. Do you think it's surprising?

They did not, however, describe him as a surgeon, but rather as a barber’s assistant.[/I]”

Maybe he was a Barber Surgeon?

Best regards,
Archaic

[Wolf Vanderlinden]

Hi Archaic.

It's surprising to me that they would forget and confuse the details of so prominent a case. Do you think it's surprising?

Not really. Thomson was interviewed (Radio Times, 1924) and was writing (The Story of Scotland Yard, 1935) years after the fact. He obviously knew about Macnaghten’s memoranda but probably wasn’t fixated on the case, which would explain why he seems to be going only on his memory.

What I find interesting is that for some reason he actually did do some research and rewrote the small section on the Ripper for the American edition of his book. I’ve always wondered how that came about.

Maybe he was a Barber Surgeon?

Yes, I think that’s what McCormack was leaning towards.

Wolf.

[Phil Carter]

Hello Wolf,

My personal interpretation of McCormack's work is indeed fanciful theory.
There are many things, imho, that he assumes, presumes and backs up very little of his evidence. I also have heard that it has been considered that he may well have invented parts of his own evidence to enhance his own theory. Unfortunate.

best wishes

Phil

[mariab]

By the way Phil, Mr Vanderlinden, Lynn Cates has recently discovered (through newspaper reports) that the alleged Rasputin connection advertized by LeQueux is probably a mixup, referring to a female anarchist named Anna Rasputina. (Debra Arif has looked this up, and agrees with Lynn's conclusions.)
If anyone's interested, this is discussed in the Kaufmann thread.

[Wolf Vanderlinden]

Hi Phil.

Yes, McCormack actually admitted that he had made parts of his book up but one can only conclude that most of it was faked by him.

Hi Maria.

By the way Phil, Mr Vanderlinden, Lynn Cates has recently discovered (through newspaper reports) that the alleged Rasputin connection advertized by LeQueux is probably a mixup, referring to a female anarchist named Anna Rasputina. (Debra Arif has looked this up, and agrees with Lynn's conclusions.) If anyone's interested, this is discussed in the Kaufmann thread.

Hmmm, I don’t actually see how that’s possible.

For one thing, Le Queux states that the document, Great Russian Criminals, from which he supposedly gathered his information on Pedachenko and the Ripper murders came from the Russian (Kerensky) Government and came, originally, from a safe in Rasputin’s house. That the Russian Government had given the material (described as a “huge mass of letters, telegrams, and compromising correspondence from the Empress and others”) to Le Queux because he was writing a book on Rasputin (Rasputin, the Rascal Monk, Hurst & Blackett, 1917) and that once he was finished with the material he gave it all back to the Russians but not before he made a copy of the relevant Ripper information.

If you believe that Le Queux was telling the truth, and I think he fabricated the whole thing, then you have to explain what Rasputin was doing with a typed manuscript in French – a language Rasputin didn’t speak – on the subject of great Russian criminals – a subject his daughter said he had no interest in – by a female anarchist. You also have to explain how this female anarchist was privy to secret Russian intelligence agency information which appeared in the document and explain why, since no one other than Le Queux has ever claimed to have seen this document, there is any reason to believe that someone other than its reputed author might have written it?

Since no evidence for the existence of Dr. Alexander Pedachenko has ever surfaced, and the whole story seems highly implausible and completely unsubstantiated, the likely answer is that Le Queux made the whole thing up. The question of whether Rasputin or Rasputina is sort of a meaningless irrelevancy.

Wolf.

[mariab]

Hi Mr. Vanderlinden,
My impression is that LeQueux was completely sloppy/creative with his story. If it was an entirely conscious fabrication, I'm not informed enough to say.

Pertaining to Anna Rasputina, there is a relevant post (# 197) in the Kaufmann thread with a newspaper clipping about her: http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=4566&page=3. Since the Kaufmann thread is quite a bit of a mess, moving in all possible directions, it would be more of interest to talk to Lynn Cates or to visit the recently ressurrected Vasiliev, saviour of lost souls thread, which features more consice discussion pertaining to this.

Quote Wolf Vanderlinden:
then you have to explain what Rasputin was doing with a typed manuscript in French – a language Rasputin didn’t speak – on the subject of great Russian criminals – a subject his daughter said he had no interest in – by a female anarchist. You also have to explain how this female anarchist was privy to secret Russian intelligence agency information which appeared in the document and explain why, since no one other than Le Queux has ever claimed to have seen this document, there is any reason to believe that someone other than its reputed author might have written it?
I'm not clear at all to which (French) document you are referring here. I can't imagine why you would say that Rasputin didn't speak French. The entire Russian court spoke French fluently.

I severely doubt the existence of a Dr. Alexander Pedachenko. As Tom Wescott said below in his post #3, it appears that Thomson had been exposed to the Macnaghten memoranda and that either he or J. Hall Richardson confused the entries of Ostrog and Druitt. Later uninformed writers assumed Thomson's alleged “Russian doctor“ suspect must be Dr. Pedachenko. What I find particularly hilarious is that Ostrog was most probably mixed up with Le Grand in the Macnaghten memoranda, while subsequently Ostrog got mixed up with Pedachenko. No wonder what's left for us to deal with completely lacks clarity...