Criteria for plausibility

[Tom_Wescott]

Yo Tom, why '1) Contemporary suspicion against him, '?

Surely the chances of him never coming under suspicion are just as great, or greater, than the alternative.

I still think he was a Mr Nobody, certainly not one of the frequent celebs that are put forward.

Hi Tel. I didn't think I would have t defend this. Mr. Kent's question was what criteria makes someone a suspect. I thought the most obvious would be contemporary suspicion. I don't see Koz or Druitt, et al as 'celebrity suspects', do you? Tumblety was a celebrity of sorts, but that doesn't negate the fact that he was also a legit suspect. My second one, as you'll notice, covers people WHO WERE NOT contemporaneously suspected. But for us to call them suspect, there has to be a reason, does there not? And my example was that something occurred following 1888 that makes them look suspicious for the 1888 murders.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[lynn cates]

little hope

Hello Boris. thanks.

I, too, try to keep an open mind. But I see little hope for those chaps as well.

Cheers.
LC

[moonbegger]

Evening all

For what its worth , i still find myself in the glorious position of not really having a main suspect , and only half a theory although i really do believe we have all the pieces to the Ripper jiggsaw puzzle laid out infront of us , they just need to be taken out of the ill fitting puzzles the are currently assembled within and pieced together correctly in the one true assembly ! only then will we be half way to finding out the whole truth . maybe

Moonbegger .

[lynn cates]

box

Hello MB. I think you have identified a serious problem. We have a jigsaw puzzle with:

1. Many pieces missing.

2. Some extraneous pieces that should be thrown back.

3. The BIGGEST problem: I believe that the lovely scene depicted on the box cover has NOTING to do with the pieces contained therein.

And there lies the rub.

Cheers.
LC

[Tel]

Yes Tom, I take your point but I guess what I was trying to say (in my own inept fashion) was that the real identity of JTR most likely won't be found in the pot of contemporary suspects.

As for the 'celebs' - I was thinking of those that have been presented by various proponents with more or less a straight face - HRH, Sickert, Gull, Vince van Gough (for Gough's sake) .... bit like being Cleopatra or Eric the Red in a past life, innit - never Joe Bloggs.

[Bridewell]

Yes, though he had the entire Force take credit for supposedly nearly catching the 'drowned doctor' between 1898 and 1913, until, as retirement loomed, he asserted his more dominant role, eg. the knowledge of his identity 'came to me subsequently' and 'I have destroyed' all the relevant papers -- the secret exits with him.

'I have destroyed' all the relevant papers

Hi Jonathan,

If MacNaghten claimed to "have destroyed all the relevant paperwork", I can see only two possibilities:
he was lying when he made the claim, or
the Memoranda were not documents he considered relevant.

Would I be right (knowing your preference for Druitt) in thinking that you believe him to have been lying?

Regards, Bridewell

[Jonathan H]

'The Honourable Schoolboy'

To Bridewell

I favour Druit because Macnaghten did; he implicity and explicitly debunked George Chapman, Aaron Kosminski, Michael Ostrog and Francis Tumblety.

Oh yes, demonstrably lying. There are loads of examples.

Not only had he not touched the unknown and unread official version of his 'Report' to he Home Office, he had not even destroyed the 'draft' version, which his family -- for some reason -- knew they must preserve as it began to rot.

There are numerous examples of Macnaghten being deceitful. A critical one is tellling Sims tat 'aberconway' which had no bureaucratic stausts whatsoever was a copy of a definituive docuemnt fo state (Griffiths presumably fell for this too).

Another critical bit of gentlemanly deflection was to hide the Druitt family as 'friends' in Griffiths in 1898. Even if this was the Major's idea, to libel-proof his book, Macnaghtena allowed this subterfuge to be perpetuated in Sims, over and over.

One of the great failings of secondary sources on this subject (even Cullen) was not to grasp this police chief's fictionalising of Ripper data, depending on Mac's audience. He was motivted, I think, by parallel needs: to protect the Druitt family, to protect the Valentine School, and -- with schoolboyish cheek -- to enhance the Yard's reputation (the last prankish stand he withdrew in his memoirs).

Yet Mac's claiming, falsely, to have destroyed all his papers which identified Jack was, I theorise, to reassure the surviving Drutits that their terrible secret would die with him. nothing would be left behind at the Yard to incriminate mad Montie. It's rhetorical rather than literal.

This reassurance also exposed something real; that Mac alone at the Yard apparently knew about Druitt, and I think that this was true.

[Tom_Wescott]

I favour Druit because Macnaghten did; he implicity and explicitly debunked George Chapman, Aaron Kosminski, Michael Ostrog and Francis Tumblety.

But did he favor Druitt? If he told "loads of lies" about everything else, shouldn't we expect Druitt to be the red herring to end all red herrings, as far as Mac is concerned? After all, he called Charles Le Grand the "most desperate criminal" he's ever known, but surely Druitt, driven to suicide by his gluttonous mutilation of Kelly, would be a sight more desperate than a mere blackmailer?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Jonathan H]

To Tom

Good point, mate.

The reason I do not agree is because

1. Druitt as the Ripper does not begin with Mac, unlike 'Kosminski' and Ostrog (in the meagre extent record), he begins among his own (Tory) people/family in Dorset, though I appreciate that brother William lived in Bournemouth and Montie in London.

2. Mac's 'third' version of his 'Report'/'memo', the 1914 memoir chapter, is essentially accurate when measured against other sources. eg. Tumblety, Chapman, Kosminski and Ostrog are nothing, the police of 1888 were clueless about Druitt and for years after too, until information was received. He had never been institutionalised and therefore was not an inavlid recluse and may well have worked for a living. The killer did not kill himself within mere hours of his 'awful glut'. I am the policeman who laid his 'ghost' to rest (eg. not Anderson).

I think you raise an interesting notion about 'most desperate'.

But apart from Mac's hyperbolic style, I do not see it as a fit for Druitt.

According to Mac, the un-named Druitt imploded because he was in a tormented state after Miller's Ct. but not, as Griffiths-Sims had told the public, in a tortured state where he could not function except to stagger to a river (all the way to Chiswick??)

Druitt had twenty-four hours -- maybe longer? -- to go home and subsequently vanish from among his 'own people', and then commit suicide, eg. not a 'shrieking, raving fiend'. He apeared normal for he was 'Protean'.

Tormented, not desperate, and certainly not cornered by a fast-closing police dragnet as is his fictitious counterpart will be: Sims' 'mad doctor' who only narrowly escapes arrest by drowning himself the Thames as the cops and the pals close in ...

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Jonathan. You say Druitt is unique because suspicion started with his own people, and not with Mac. But couldn't this be so with the other suspects?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Jonathan H]

To Tom

Sure, in 'Aberconway' Mac even hints that this might have been what brought 'Kosminski' into the frame (though I think he was actually interpolating the Druitts there too).

The point is that in investigating Farquharason's 'doctrine' it became the police chief's too.

But on what evidence?

What made the family so sure even though the McKenzie and Coles' murders seemed to be by the same hand to?

Yet they and the MP remained 'adamant'.

Why ...? Why not grab at those quite thick straws for all they were worth?

Apparently to only hear the tale that Farquharason told was to be very impressed, to be, as weer a 'good many people', convinced.

Why?

Macanghten does not tell us in his memoirs. Just the bland claim of information received 'some years after' which was so hot it swept aside all other suspects. In fact, Mac is so assured and so smooth he makes no effort to tell a story where the reader could agree. Unlike Anderson he does not strain to overwhelm us, so conerned is he with not, as he puts it 'treading on any corned toes'.

That is why I theorise that the 'North Country Vicar' is about Druitt because it has a bombshell detail that, in just telling it verbally would indeed stop Victorian bourgeoiese dead in their respectable tracks -- the gentleman fiend had confessed to a priest.

It's a suspiciously too-comforting Christian tale of near-redemption; of a madman recognising the evil within himself and annihilating it, ala the ending of Jekyll and Hyde -- and to some extent Dorian Gray too.

I think, nevertheless, Macnaghten thoroughly checked Druitt's movements, his habits, and found no alibi, and that he really had confessed all to a clergyman. He interviewed that cleric, off the grid so to speak.

On the other hand ... we are not Victorians.

With what we can glean about serial killers Druitt does not strike us as being like ones we know about today, not because he was a barrister (Ted Bundy anynone?) or a respetable and successful member of his class and community (John Wayne Gacy?) and not because he had no prior criminal record (Jeffrey Dhamer) but because he confessed to a clergyman without having been taken into custody first.

After these monsters have been arrested they often talk and work with all sorts of people in prison, inlcuding chaplains.

But not before.

Plus, 'epileptic mania' is not a real condition and that is what the Vicar's Ripper suffered from.

Victorians thought that if yiou suffered from this 'condition' you could commit grotesque homicide, completely impulsively and randomly, and yet not remember doing it (Sims' Ripper exhibits classic epileptical/maniacal symptoms) while in the grip of an amnesiac 'seizure'.

If Druitt thought he was the fiend because he was having blackouts and was going insane, then they may have all had it round the wrong way: not that he was insane and thus committing murders -- in some kind of fugue state -- bur rather that he was insane because he thought he was committing the murders.

It's like everybody connected with this suspect thought they were living in 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' for real: the 'murderer', his family, the MP, the police chief, the Major, and the famous writer -- the latter who never wrote a classic as memorable, but who is still read, ironically, for his Hydish Ripper.

The theme of a respectable gent with some knd of monstrous -- and mitigating -- mental illness runs through all the Druitt sources, and it strikes some as quite wrong about real serial murderers of strangers, who have not yet been cornered by police.

[Fisherman]

Tom W:

"I say he must have one of the following - 1) Contemporary suspicion against him, or 2) Something that occurred in his subsequent history (after 1888) that would force us to look at him, such as implication in similar crimes. If neither is going for him, then I'm hard pressed to see how he could be called suspect."

Hi Tom!

"Criteria for Plausibility", that is the name of the thread. And in that context, you make a good case. Being among the contemporarily suspected candidates adds to the plausibility, generally speaking. The same goes for a subsequent criminal record.

Then again, what happens when we take a look at my favourite suspect, Charles Lechmere? Was he suspected at the time? No. Do we know of a criminal record on his behalf after 1888? No.

But we DO know that he can be geographically tied to the murder spots in a manner than no other suspect comes even close to. A few of the other candidates can be knit to one (1) murder spot, and thatīs it. Kosminsky? No ties to any of the spots. Druitt? Same thing. James Kelly?
I could go on for the longest time here.

And if Lechmere was the man who did it, then what does that tell us? Exactly - it tells us that he killed a number of women WITHOUT getting detected and forming any criminal record. Does that point to a man who would get on record for a number of offenses afterwards? I donīt think so; far from showing a propensity to get nailed for his deeds, he had instead proven an ability to stay away from the rap sheet.

So, Tom, much as your two criteria are quite useful, we can see that if we use them to do the sorting, then Lechmere would easily slip under that radar. Once again, if you take my meaning...

Does that mean that you are wrong? No - the criteria you have chosen ARE good indicators of "plausibility". The problem, though, is that they are less useful to point to culpability. They represent more of the picture you have of the Ripper.

Others would have chosen other criteria, like for example psychological issues. Some would say that we are looking for somebody who lived on his own. Some would say that we need to find a regular user of prostitutes. These are all more specific demands, less general than yours, but they also have a good deal going for them. Plus they are all also related to individual choices for what the Ripper would have been like.

My hunch is that this is a thread that makes for god discussion material, whereas it runs a tremendous risk of becoming a showcase of the many pictures out there of what the killer would probably have been like. If we manage to convince ourselves that he must have been of Mongolian descent, then Mongolian descent will be the best criterion of plausibility, by far.

But I think most of us would agree that too many too interesting and useful suspects would go lost with that approach.

To me, the same thing goes for your criteria, Tom. The killer may well have stayed undetected by the police, and likewise there are double possibilities for him staying away from forming a criminal record after the murders; he may never have perpetrated a crime again after 1888, or - perhaps more credible - he may have prolonged his record of staying undetected.

To me, the best criteria of plausibility is whatever we can find in direct relation to the murders that points to potential guilt. If we can point to a suspect having a connection to the murder spots, then that is a very good criterion for plausibility. If we can point to a suspect not telling the police the truth, then that too is a very good criterion for plausibility.

These are things that contribute practically to pointing a finger at somebody, whereas criteria like personality type only function in an ideological manner. In the choice of who was the knife killer between a thin, anemic frightened-looking young girl, well dressed and with a good background, and a terrifying, crew-cut bully with a rap sheet as long as the Nile, the "ideological" criteria of plausibility are only interesting up til the stage when we find bloodstains on the girlsīhands. Practical evidence always trumphs ideological stances - as well as "plausibility".

The best,
Fisherman

[Wade Aznable]

The other versions, which we could not access until 1959 and 2012

Hello Jonathan,
I haven't been following the boards very much, lately, and this "2012 version" you mention intrigues me a lot - but I know nothing about it.
Would you please give some detail about it? (IE, where can it be seen, when and how did it surface, and so forth).

Thank you in advance,
Wade

[Jonathan H]

To Wade

What I meant was that 'Aberconway', the nickname for the unofficial version of Mac's Report, or memo-- so named after Lady Christabel Aberconway, his daughter who preserved it -- was mostly, though not entirely published in 1965 by Tom Cullen in 'Autumn of Terror'.

It took until a recent issue of 'Ripperologist' magazine for the entire source to be published, though the relevant sections had been available for decades. Nevertheless, the full version contained bits and pieces which were also pertinent -- and arguably backed my 'case disguised' theory.

The filed, official version of Mac's Report, which is significantly different, first appeared in 1966 in Robin Odell's 'Jack the Ripper: In Fact and Fiction'. At least the relevant sections about the suspects.

In 1975, Don Rumbelow gained access to the complete version of this source and published it in 'The Complete Jack the Ripper', an excellent work -- which openly wondered in what order these two, non-identical twins were composed?

Part of the entrenched, arguably redundant, paradigm is the assumption that 'Aberconway' is a rejected draft and the official version is Mac's considered and definitive opinion. That the official version was known to other senior police figures.

There is no evidence for this assumption. It is a long-standing inference, not unreasonable, but which can be shown to be probably mistaken (eg. Littlechild has never heard of 'Dr D', Abberline says he knows but all of his information about the drowned suspect is wrong, Anderson makes no comment what-so-ever about Druitt yet believes in a parallel deceased suspect -- who isn't -- and so on).

More likely is that the official version was mothballed in 1894 and seen by nobody until 1966, while the unofficial version was composed in 1898 and is the definitive opinion for Macnaghten had that opinion disseminated to the public by credulous cronies (a politically bipartisan press offensive too, as Major Griffiths was a Tory and George Sims was a Liberal).

Macnaghten's chapter in his 1914 memoirs, 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper', is clearly his own adaptation of 'Aberconway' -- and therefore the de-facto third version of the same document. It is very instructive for what he leaves in and for what he leaves out, and for what he confirms and for what he debunks.

It is, in my opinion, Mac's definitive testimony about the case because, 1) it is his only public opinion under his own knighted name, and 2) because of the way it more accurately matches other primary sources than its twin predecessors regarding Scotland Yard's 1888 to 1891 Ripper investigation -- and about Montague Druitt.

[moonbegger]

Hello MB. I think you have identified a serious problem. We have a jigsaw puzzle with:

1. Many pieces missing.

2. Some extraneous pieces that should be thrown back.

3. The BIGGEST problem: I believe that the lovely scene depicted on the box cover has NOTING to do with the pieces contained therein.

And there lies the rub.

Cheers.
LC

Hi Lynn ,

Ha , Ha , i unfortunately totally agree .. especially with number 3 .

moonbegger ,