Criteria for plausibility

[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]

'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.

[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

[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.

[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

[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]

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

[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

[bolo]

Hi Jonathan and Lynn,

for me, what Anderson and Littlechild (and Mac) wrote about the Ripper has a certain ring to it. I can't help but thinking they were blowing things out of proportion in order to save face in front of their respective audiences.

Specially Anderson must have had a huge problem with a prominent unsolved case such as the Ripper murders that fell under his authority so he gradually built up some sort of legend that was not a complete fabrication but stretched the truth a little too much.

In other words, from what I've read about their suspects, their lives and personalities, I do not put much weight in their Ostrogs, Druitts or Tumbletys. They seem like dead ends to me, even though I try to keep an open mind about it, who knows what further research will bring.

I apologize in advance for these probably incredibly noob-ish comments.

Regards,

Boris

[Jonathan H]

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.

Until then it was not known, eg. by Abberline and Littlechild, that Mac had anything much to do with the Ripper case at all eg. his [posthumous] investigation of Druitt in 1891, when 'certain facts' led to a 'conclusion' about the 'remarkable' and 'fascinating' multi-faceted ('Protean') Druitt.

[lynn cates]

solution

Hello Jonathan. Thanks. Of course, such lack of knowledge as you suggest likely enhanced the "unsolved case" point of view.

You are suggesting that it was solved, but not by the Met--only Mac--and after a few years, if I understand properly.

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

To Stephen Thomas

The Macnaghen Report(s) were arguably composed for separate audiences, and for separate agendas.

The version disseminated -- anonymously -- to the public, and which artfully hides Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog, also hid that the English 'doctor' was an entirely posthumous suspect, something which Mac conceded in his 1914 memoirs.

Which reminds me that often today's secondary sources do not bother to even mention that there are non-identical versions of this source, let alone try and figure out why?

And thus modern econdary sources spin ever further away from the primary sources, and the likely historical truth.

In the other version -- for the official archive -- Mac silkily made the point that Druitt might have been a doctor and then again he might not have been -- and he wasn't.

Mac's 1914 memoirs dump Ostrog -- as we do -- and dump the Polish Jew and the dump the American medico suspects (Sims, 1907) and dump that the Ripper was an affluent, invalid recluse who had been sectioned. They concede that he was not a police suspect between 1888 to 1891, and that he was long deceased anyhow. They also concede that this 'Protean' maniac had a diseased mind and [probably] body, and that he did not kill himself mere hours after the 'awful glut' of Miller's Ct. -- and Druitt didn't.

What I can never get through to certain people is that Macnaghten debunked key elements of his own Report(s) bringing the 'de-facto' third version, 'Laying the Ghost ...', into alignment with facts we know now are correct. The other versions, which we could not access until 1959 and 2012 (unofficial) and 1966 and 1975 (official) have been both indispensable and redundant since the eve of the First World War.

To Lynn

Yes it's possible.

But much more likely, based on what little we have, is that they knew nothing about Druitt, and next to nothing accurate about [Aaron] 'Kosminski' except what they had been hustled by Mac (the latter knew, unlike Anderson and/or Swanson that the Polish Jew was alive, not dead 'soon after', and that he was not sectioned until a long time after Kelly, not 'on the prowl' for 'mere weeks').

Arguably, hands-on Macnaghten knew all about all the suspects, and he had no doubts about one of them.

[lynn cates]

shouted down

Hello Jonathan. Do you think it possible that part of the "unsolved" aspect of the case came about from the fact that both Anderson and MacNaughten's theories were "shouted down" by other coppers?

Cheers.
LC

[Stephen Thomas]

Once you dismiss the egocentric, error-riddled Anderson as unreliable ....

As opposed to the non-egocentric and non-error riddled memorandum?

[Jonathan H]

What Mystery?

To TomTomKent

Another way of approaching it is that the notion that the 'Jack the Ripper' case was not solved to some contemporaneous police's (or to a policeman's) satisfaction is a creation of secondary sources.

That it is almost entirely a modern conceit with little historical merit.

Specifically this false notion gained traction in the popular mind with William Le Queux who, in 1923, rebooted the Ripper as a mystery which had confounded all police, but which he, Le Queux, a lucrative, right-wing fantasist-alarmist, had of course solved (when arguably he had done no such thing).

Therefore, this notion of an unsolved mystery is mistaken, according to critical primary sources by one, or more, significant police figures.

That what you have here is an historical subject in which, overall, secondary and modern sources have smothered, quite unconvcingly, the primary material written by the cops who were there and that some of the top cops claimed that Jack's identity was firmly established -- as far as you could against a suspect who could never receive due process.

How could this be so?

For example, the 'West off England' MP article and the memoirs of Sir Melville Macnaghten do not appear -- at all -- in 'Scotland Yard Investigates', or 'The Ultimate JTR Source Companion'. And there are many which include one but not the other, or neither.

That is how often excellent secondary sources, once a paradigm takes hold, can be also literary monuments to unconscious and entrenched bias, while honestly professing not to be.

The writings of George Sims, in his heyday very famous and influential -- and a Mac source-by-proxy -- gets very little attention in most secondary sources (nor do Mac's 1913's comments upon retirement).

This inherent and modern bias against Macnaghten (and Druitt) deforms most secondary accounts because only by leaving out these sources you can make a seemingly plausible case that only Sir Robert Anderson made such definitive claims as to having identified the Whitechapel fiend.

Once you dismiss the egocentric, error-riddled Anderson as unreliable -- its hardly difficult -- you can maintian the rebooting of the mystery, as an unsolved mystery, on the weak premise that no other police chief was so certain and pushy with his suspect choice, arguably a position based on sand for it rests on omission; on ignoring those critical sources mentioned above.