The Ripper : A Discharged Inmate Of The Asylum

[Fisherman]

If this was the sort of information Sims had been fed, one can imagine what Macnaghten had been lead to believe.

You can say that again, Howard!

To me, it seems there was a suit fabricated as a result of the ongoing discussions amongst the people in charge of the stranded investigation. And that suit was made up of a very ugly cloth - it was the suit of a homicidal maniac, bouncing in and out of asylums. Griffiths mentions it in the mid nineties, and Sims speaks of it much later. And that suit is tried on all three of the Macnaghten contenders at some stage. They are all presented as the homicidal maniac with the worst possible antecedentia, and they are all asylum customers due to their homicidal urges. They are one and the same, when clad in this suit, with a few built-in discrepancies inbetween them, answering to details that were known. But essentially they are all the same man when "on the stand".
Take that suit off, and we have one con artist and thief, one troubled, cricketplaying barrister and a confused, feebleminded man, cared for by his loving family and looking for food in the gutter.

It took some shoehorning to make these guys fit the bill, but in the end, they were all forced into the bogey man role.

Someone is going to thrash my bum for calling Kosminski feebleminded, I know.

But there you are.

The best,
Fisherman

[Wickerman]

No, Jon. Sims did not have his facts right, but he was under the impression that the 'drowned doctor' had been in an asylum. Many of the 'facts' about Druitt, as we know, were not facts.

Ok Cris, thanks.

With that thought in mind (Sims being wrong), and, unless I am in confusion here, has it not been suggested that Sims obtained his information concerning Druitt from Macnaghten?

Which begs the question, did Mac. ever share the thought that Druitt had been in an asylum, I'm thinking, 'not'. So, is this an isolated case of Sims confusing his suspects, or did he have another source for the 'asylum' theory?

I'm inclined towards Sims being confused.

Regards, Jon S.

[Cogidubnus]

With that thought in mind (Sims being wrong), and, unless I am in confusion here, has it not been suggested that Sims obtained his information concerning Druitt from Macnaghten?

Which begs the question, did Mac. ever share the thought that Druitt had been in an asylum, I'm thinking, 'not'. So, is this an isolated case of Sims confusing his suspects, or did he have another source for the 'asylum' theory?

Where is Jonathan when we need him most?

It's always interesting to conjecture just how much Macnaghten did actually feed Sims...and how much was written "evidence" (vide the mutating memorandum) or how much mere verbal implication over drinkies at the club...

Instinctively recoilling from being a Druittist, I'm not sure I buy all Jonathan's conjectures regarding Mac's motives, but nonetheless he certainly makes some shrewd points...It may well be that Mac's motives are more concerned with defending his department, or even mere self-agrandisement, but I'd still love to hear what Jonathan has to say about the "asylum theory" as Jon puts it...

All the best

Dave

[lynn cates]

source

Hello Cris. Thanks.

Do you know the source on that? Didn't Andy Spallek find that originally?

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

mum

Hello (again) Cris. Thanks, I found it.

Wonder if Sims garbled the fact that Druitt visited his mum in the asylum?

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

Dagonet's Double?

Dear Dave

Since you asked ...

From 1902 to 1917 George Sims regularly described the 'drowned doctor' as having been -- prematurely and disasterously -- discharged from an asylum ('perhaps twice') where he had been diagnosed as not just insane, but suffering from a 'peculiar mania' which meant that he felt compelled to kill harlots.

In effect, Sims blames the penny-pinching state for the crimes.

This was one of two pieces of 'evidence' Sims reiterated many times which 'proved' to the 'police' (really just Mac, the other police knew nothing about Druitt) that he was 'the one and only Jack'.

That the 'doctor' had been professionally and officially diagnosed before the murders as a ticking bomb, and that he killed himself within hours of the Kelly atrocity: or for as long as it took for this 'shrieking, raving fiend' to stagger to the Thames and throw himself in.

The incriminating timing double bang of murder/self-murder was thus a confession in deed, rather than word.

But I argue that what Sims was fed by his pal Mac (eg. the asylum detail is in neither version of his 'Report') was a fictional distortion shielding the true facts.

Montie Druitt had never been sectioned, though his mother had (he had never been a doctor either, but his late father had been), plus the family may have been scrambling to get their homicidal sibling into an asylum after he vanished.

I do not think that Sims was in on this later shielding of the Druitt family -- which simultaneously enhanced Scotland Yard's rep.

Each detail of Sims' Jack profile can be traced back to Druitt, but only once you bend the pretzelish distortions back into their original shape.

- a friend and a brother were frantically trying to find Montie, and this becomes the anomic 'friends' who are also in touch with the police (likely Mac quietly meeting William in 1891).
- the police were, at one point, chasing an American quack doctor in 1888 whom they had arrested, becomes the super-efficient detectives about to arrest the English doctor but he had already drowned himself.
- Druitt was likely sacked from his school and cricket club for being AWOL, and this becomes a totally unemployed for years doctor figure.
- some substantial cheques were found on his body and he is turned into a fabulously wealthy semi-invalid who does not need to work at all.
- a season rail ticket was found on his body and the fiend becomes an idle recluse who does nothing but travel on public transport, at least until the next psychic explosion.

I have argued that what lay behind Mac's distortion of the 'doctor' having been an asylum veteran -- where his culpability for the Whitechapel crimes came from his own lips because that is what he said he wanted to do --is Druitt's confession to either a member of his family, or a priest -- or they were the same person, eg. Dorset Vicar Charles Druitt (the devastating leak about Montie as the Ripper comes from that region in 1891, due to Farquharson's geographical proximity, and not from Bournemouth or London).

Two new sources have been found where we can see Sims expounding about these same details.

One was found late last year by Chris Phillips, and it was put on this site:

From April 17th 1910, Mac used his proxy, Sims, to dismiss Anderson's claims about the Ripper:

'... Jack the Ripper was a Jew, and that the Jews knew who he was and assisted him to evade capture. The statement [by Anderson] went beyond ascertained facts. The mad Polish Jew, to whom Robert refers, was only one of three persons who were strongly suspected of being the genuine Jack. The final official report, which is in the archives of the Home Office, leaves the matter in doubt between the Polish Jew, who was afterwards put in a lunatic asylum, a Russian doctor of vile character, and an English homcidal maniac, one Dr---, who had been in a lunatic asylum. In these circumstances it was certainly indiscreet of Sir Robert to plump for ther Polish Jew, and to imply that many of the Jewish community in the East End were accessories after the fact.'

Interestingly this is the first time in the extant record that the 'final' official version of the Mac Report -- which does not favour Druitt over the other two -- is alluded to. I suspect because Mac, as Assistant Commissioner, wanted to have the document ready if he had to meet with any affronted Jewish leaders who might have come to complain about his predecessor's 'slander'.

We also have this, which I had not seen until recently:

"DAGONET'S" DOUBLE.

STARTLING REMINISCENCES OF THE "RIPPER" MURDERS.

The strange case of Adolph Beck, twice convicted erroneously for the crimes of his "double," has induced Mr. George R. Sims to relate in yesterday's "Referee" an extraordinary story of his own likeness to "the demented doctor who committed the terrible Jack the Ripper outrages."
"Twice," Mr. Sims writes, "a portrait of me was shown as that of a man who had been seen on several occasions in the neighbourhood on the night of its committal.
"A man who had seen Jack at a coffee-stall in the small hours on the night that two women were killed, and had noticed that his shirt cuff was bloodstained, took my portrait with him afterwards to Dr. Forbes Winslow, and said, "That is the man; on the night of the murders, long before they were discovered, I spoke to him. In conversation I said, "I wonder if we shall hear of another Jack the Ripper murder?" "You'll very likely hear of two tomorrow," was the reply, and the man walked hurriedly away."
At another time, Mr. Sims adds, his portrait was shown to one of the detectives engaged in the hunt for the miscreant.
The danger of being the "double" of such a criminal caused Mr. Sims on one occasion to accidentally run a dangerous risk: -
"I had borrowed from Paul Meritt, the dramatist, a long Japanese knife of a murderous character for melodramatic purposes, and putting it in a black bag, I had gone to the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel, late at night. I often wonder what would have happened if some one had cried out, "That's the Ripper," and my black bag had been opened."

WHO WAS THE MAN?

Seen last night by an "Express" representative, Mr. Sims said he believed the coffee-stall keeper came across his portrait on the cover of the first edition of "The Social Kaleidoscope," in a shop in a side-street in Soutwark.
"It was a terrible portrait - taken, when I was very ill. My face was drawn and haggard, and surprisingly like the Ripper, whom only the coffee-stall keeper and a policeman ever set eyes upon.""Dr. Forbes Winslow was at that time engrossed in the mystery of the murders, and had written a good deal about it. That is why the coffee-stall keeper went to him with my portrait. On the occasion when I carried the black bag and Japanese knife I was in a bowler hat, I remember, and was standing among the people, close to the very spot where one of the worst murders was committed."
Mr. Sims said that he had not the slightest doubt in his mind as to who the "Ripper" really was.
"Nor have the police," he continued.
"In the archives of the Home Office are the name and history of the wretched man. He was a mad physician belonging to a highly respected family. He committed the crimes after having been confined in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac."
Source: The Daily Express, London, Monday August 1, 1904


I had argued for some time that the picture of the young Sims on the cover of 'The Social Kaleidoscope' (1879) was atypical as it showed the writer, for the only time, to have his hair parted in the dead centre and his face to be thin.

This is what Sims also argued in 1904.

Of course it means that the picture also resembles Druitt in his high school pics, minus the beard.

My theory is that you can trace the footfalls of Macnaghten's 1891 private investigation based on this picture.

In 1889, the original story was that a nutty pest had met with the Ripper several times and that he allegedly resembled Sims from the cover of a Dagonet poem, not his 1879 polemic about systemic poverty.

Then in March 1891, for the first time, Sims refers to the Druittish picture either because that was what the 'nut' originally meant, or because his close friend Mac had privately informed him of the resemblance to the 1879 picture -- perhaps anticpating that the Dorset-MP-Druitt story was about to break again. Between Feb 11th and March 1st Macaghten had met with William Druitt, or a Druitt, and so he knew what Montie looked like.

Yet the story did not break again in 1891 (it did in 1892, with Farquhrason dangerously named, but I think Mac smothered that leak in a mountain of distracting blather: eg. about the police keeping the real murderer under 24-7 surveillance).

Mac himself rebooted the Druitt story, almost unrecognisably, via Griffiths in 1898, minus the MP and Dorset, and only added the detail about the previous asylum incarceration of the 'drowned doctor' in 1902, and Sims ran with it.

Vicar Charles had died in 1900.

[mklhawley]

Excellent Jonathan.

Mike

[The Good Michael]

Taken in isolation, and bearing in mind the article is more than 20 years after the fact, there is no resemblance to Druitt here. It looks like more of the Polish Jew argument. It couldn't be Kelly because Kelly wasn't discharged. Of course one could grab all of Sims other mistakes, throw them together, and say, "See? This means this, of course." Kind of like what Creationists do.

Mike

[Fisherman]

Taken in isolation, and bearing in mind the article is more than 20 years after the fact, there is no resemblance to Druitt here. It looks like more of the Polish Jew argument. It couldn't be Kelly because Kelly wasn't discharged. Of course one could grab all of Sims other mistakes, throw them together, and say, "See? This means this, of course." Kind of like what Creationists do.

Mike

Correct, Mike.

Then again, the resemblance to the Polish Jew seems to be more of a resemblance to a crafty, homicidal maniac than to Kosminski. In 1889, Aaron spent his days walking other people´s dogs for them, the way a twelve year old boy would do.

But judging by the way things went down, Anderson started out by creating an acceptable figure for the killer´s role, and then, over the years, he and others tried their suspects in that role. So Kosminski became a crafty homicidal maniac with an asylum record, Ostrog became a crafty homicidal maniac with an asylum record and whaddoyuknow; it seems even Druitt became a crafty homicidal maniac with an asylum record.

One by one, they are all fit up to answer to the same picture.

So when, where and by what bid did the asylum-bouncing, homicidal maniac first surface? Before, at least, any suspicion was formed against the MacNaghten three, that´s my feeling.

The best,
Fisherman

[Cogidubnus]

More food for thought

Hi Jonathan

I knew you wouldn't let me down...apposite and interesting, as ever...

Cheers

Dave

[Jonathan H]

Oscar Wilde convicted of 'forgery'?

Thanks Dave and Mike

Sims persistently wrote that the fiend was so shattered by what he had done to Mary Kelly that he could not function for even 'a single day' as a normal person, or at least project a mask of normality.

This matches what Farquharson was telling people in the two sources we have from early 1891: the [un-named] Druitt killed himself the same evening as the final murder -- eg. it was his existential confession.

Yet in his 1914 memoir Mac widens the gap to a day and a night, possibly longer, ruining the melodramatic and incriminating compression of the timeline. Rendered Sims' tale as so implausible that Mac had to drop the method and the location of the likely murderer's suicide -- depriving readers of the colourful extinction of the Ripper in the Thames.

But he could not tell the story the way Farquharson and Sims did because the killer, covered in blood and demented, could not have wandered about the streets without anybody noticing until throwing himself in the river -- not for such a long time.

Therefore, unlike the MP and the journalist, Macnaghten knew that Druitt functioned in the immediate aftermath of Miller's Ct. before 'his own people' realized that he had 'absented' himself, which is textual evidence that Mac knew the true particulars about his chief suspect.

Here's something new:

At the inquest William Druitt [apparently] claimed that the deceased had no other living relative apart from himself and their sectioned mother.

If he said exactly this, and he may not have, then it was bald deceit.

It also means that if it was, in reality, a family member who noticed Montie was missing in London, and who informed William, then the older brother was locked into saying it was not one -- he had to say it was just a 'friend'.

From 1902, in Sims, the veiled version is that they are all 'friends' who are frantically trying to find their 'doctor' pal: eg. friends -- plural.

Is this standing in for family plural?

Did Mac adapt William's lie at the inquest -- if it was a lie -- and in the version he hustled to Sims turn all the family members who were looking for Montie, and who apparently knew by then that he was the Ripper, into concerned 'friends'.

Friends who had, in the veiled version, every reason to believe in the doctor's potential culpability because the latter had told doctors in an asylum that he wanted to savage harlots.

To Mike

When you take a source 'in isolation' you are doing exactly what fundamentalists do, whether religious or secular. They torture a source to fit their bias and do not let into the equation any other pesky and contrary data which could rock their boat.

For example the official version of Mac's Report is often quoted on these Boards as showing that Druitt was a minor suspect at best: eg. about there being not even the shadow of proof against any of the unlikely trio, which is fair enough as far as it goes.

About as far as it goes ... to read the bombshell lines below it.

For in the same document, one for file no less, Mac also writes that while the police were not certain as to what M. J. Druitt did for a living they were certain that 'he was sexually insane': eg. he got off on ultra-violence (so, of course, the family 'believed' as how could they not? Their member was Jack the Ripper so they believed he was ... Jack the Ripper??)

George Sims is always writing about 'Dr Druitt' as Jack, not anybody else (albeit the profile does become progressively Tumbletyesque): a fictitious variation of a real person, Montague John Druitt.

That's a fact we can can see when all the sources are examined together.

The question is did Sims know this; that he was peddling fact and fiction intermingled?

In my opinion I don't think so.

I think if he did he would have not have risked telling Frank Richardson, a minor comic writer, Druitt's real name. The latter disguises Druitt simply as 'Dr. Bluitt'. Fortunately the doctor layer still protects the family, though if they saw this reference they must have felt it coming perilously 'close to the knuckle'.

Sims felt confident in doing this, telling his cronies Druitt's name, because the deceased killer had no family (of his own), his friends already knew he was Jack (and who had informed the police, who also already knew) and as a doctor he had been unemployed for so long that that there were no patients to shock either.

The more critical question, therefore, is did Sims' source, Macnaghten, know this? Did he know that Sims' profile, which simultaneously protected the Druitts ('friends') and their Montie ('a doctor in the prime of life'), was just that -- a veiled mixture of fact and fiction?

Was the police chief creating 'substantial truth in fictitious form', as the 1899 Vicar succinctly puts it, because of a memory malfunction or was he doing it deliberately?

I argue the latter interpretation based on Mac's calculated deceit about other aspects, eg. that a 'final' version of his Report lay in the Home Office archive.

And also because his memoir gingerly tiptoes away from Sims' profile, whose source of course was Macnaghten. He also implicitly debunks Anderson's claims too: the Ripper was a 'Simon Pure' who, in graffiti (notice that the mis-spelling of 'Juwes' is cleaned up) raged against three Jews who disturbed him with Stride, plus there he asserts that there was no critical witness, and that the police were clueless for years that 'Jack' had killed himself 'soon after' Kelly.

I think that a strong counter-argument to all of the above is not affronted Orthodoxy's attempts to make Sims be writing about 'Kosminski', or somebody else, but rather that Macnaghten can be shown to be a deliberately unreliable source.

At point Christabel, as a curious child, ambushed her father as he walked through the door from work. She demanded to know why their family friend, Oscar Wilde had gone to prison. Nobody, she complained, would tell her. Without missing a beat Macnaghten said he was convicted of forgery -- but that Wilde was still a literary 'genius'.

Affable Mac was an overgrown schoolboy who badly, even obsessively wanted to solve the Ripper case himself -- to not be 'too late' -- and as a lover of literature, the macabre and the theater he had, perhaps, absorbed the 'lesson' of 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' too well.

[Cogidubnus]

Even making allowance for the times, I can't sympathise with this approach to Mac's relationship wth his daughter...From all accounts (including Kipling's) she's a bright little thing, albeit just a tad precocious - so I simply can't reconcile Mac as an overgrown schoolboy...fatherhood SHOULD have changed him by then...if it hadn't he's surely a fake?

Dave

[Michael W Richards]

"The final official report, which is in the archives of the Home Office,....

"In the archives of the Home Office are the name and history of the wretched man. He was a mad physician belonging to a highly respected family. He committed the crimes after having been confined in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac."

Source: The Daily Express, London, Monday August 1, 1904

I find it interesting that people suggest that there can be no files relevant to the Ripper investigations hidden within the confines of "National Security."

Of course its as unsupported a statement as the one that suggests a highly respected doctor was actually the culprit. Caveat emptor.

Cheers all

[Jonathan H]

The Changing Timeline?

The new 1910 Sims source found by Chris Phillips confirms, I believe, that it was likely Macnaghten who is the unidentified Scotland Yard official who was assuring a reporter that the Ripper's identity was on file at the Home Office:

From 'The Grey River Argus' of July 14th 1905:

'An official of Scotland Yard said that the identity of the actual perpetrator was known to the Home Secretary.

"He committed suicide in the River Thames, he declared, after the last murder, and his body was found a month later. There is absolutely no mistake about it. All the facts are set forth in official documents, and are too well supported by evidence to be disbelieved."

This article was about a delusional transient in New York claiming to be the fiend.

A confession which both Sims and somebody at Scotland Yard both rejected in favour of the un-named Druitt (whom else but Mac at the yard would know about a 'Home Office Report' which was never actually sent to that dept. of state?)

This double-act to head off an alleged Ripper confession was almost an exact re-run of what the famous writer and arguably Mac had done in 1899.

Sims was interviewed and dismisses it as absurd, then the unidentified police worthy was quoted.

A reasonable theory is that having interviewed Sims, the reporter simply extrapolated from his 1903 claims about there being an official 'Home Office Report' about the Ripper being a drowned doctor.

Is is just that you would expect such sleight of hand to include the icing on the cake: the report was by, asserted Sims, the [un-named] Police Commissioner.

Plus Mac was careful never to tell anybody outside his cronies that Druitt was a doctor; that colourful-chilling detail is also missing from the 1905 article which would seem unlikely if made up by a tabloid hack from Sims' 1903 account (Mac will also not use this false detail about the un-named Druitt in his 1913 comments and his 1914 memoirs.)

Plus the timeline has been altered -- again -- to exclude the time that Druitt remained functioning and alive between the final murder and his self-murder.

Sims in 1907, in 'Lloyds Weekly', will also adopt this redacted timeline, further obscuring the real person and again suggesting that it originates with Macnaghten:

'The third man was a doctor who lived in a suburb about six miles from Whitechapel, and who suffered from a horrible form of homicidal mania, a mania which leads the victim of it to look upon women of a certain class with frenzied hatred.

The doctor had been an inmate of a lunatic asylum for some time, and had been liberated and regained his complete freedom.

After the maniacal murder in Miller's-court the doctor disappeared from the place in which he had been living, and his disappearance caused inquiries to be made concerning him by his friends who had, there is reason to believe, their own suspicions about him, and these inquiries were made through the proper authorities.

A month after the last murder the body of the doctor was found in the Thames. There was everything about it to suggest that it had been in the river for nearly a month.'

When Mac first shared the 'Aberconway' version with Major Griffiths in 1898 either by showing it to him, or verbally, it was clear that 'Dr. Druitt' enjoyed about a three-week interval between Kelly and his own suicide:

' ... The third person was of the same type, but the suspicion in his case was stronger, and there was every reason to believe that his own friends entertained grave doubts about him. He was also a doctor in the prime of life, was believed to be insane or on the borderland of insanity, and he disappeared immediately after the last murder, that in Miller's Court, on the 9th November, 1888. On the last day of that year, seven weeks later, his body was found floating in the Thames, and was said to have been in the water a month ...'

So, the doctor disappeared and then was wandering around in some kind of tormented state before drowning himself for about three weeks.

That's messy and unlikely.

A month after the Major's book was published -- and his Ripper scoop much noted -- in Jan 1899 the 'North Country Vicar' (whose own name, he claims, must not be published because it will give away the name of the deceased murderer) claimed that the Ripper had time to confess all to a priest before dying -- how he conveniently expired is not provided.

That fits with the three week interval quite neatly: a tormented gentleman-physician sought some kind of grace or solace by coughing up all to an Anglican minister.

Yet a few days later Sims is wheeled out not to agree, but to rudely quash this Vicar's timeline -- which of course matches the real Druitt's interregnum -- with Sims even revealing it was the Vicar himself who heard the alleged confession:

'There are bound to be various revelations concerning Jack the Ripper as the years go on. This time it is a vicar who heard his dying confession. I have no doubt a great many lunatics have said they were Jack the Ripper on their death-beds. It is a good exit, and when the dramatic instinct is strong in a man he always wants an exit line, especially when he isn't coming on in the little play of "Life" any more.

I don't want to interfere with this mild little Jack the Ripper boom which the newspapers are playing up in the absence of strawberries and butterflies and good exciting murders, but I don't quite see how the real Jack could have confessed, seeing that he committed suicide after the horrible mutilation of the woman in the house in Dorset-street, Spitalfields. The full details of that crime have never been published - they never could be. Jack, when he committed that crime, was in the last stage of the peculiar mania from which he suffered. He had become grotesque in his ideas as well as bloodthirsty. Almost immediately after this murder he drowned himself in the Thames. his name is perfectly well known to the police. If he hadn't committed suicide he would have been arrested.'

The Vicar's tale further humiliates Scotland Yard, whereas Sims' 'shilling shocker' elevates the police to the triumphant-heroic status of almost nabbing the fiend -- they certainly knew his identity before he killed himself (itself a satisfyingly 'rough justice' finale).

My theory is that Macnaghten toyed, via Griffiths, with the timeline including the three week interval, though with 'Jack' AWOL no in court or teaching, but then shifted gears once the Vicar tried to publish his account.

Mac reverted to the late Farquharson's double-bang of one evening for both deaths.

To cement this fictional timeline, in 1905 and then 1907, Macnaghten has the date of the un-named Druitt's recovery from the Thames also pulled back from the correct Dec 31st (which Griffiths mentions) to about Dec 9th 1888.

In his memoirs Mac might have to choose a definitive date: late Dec or earlier in the month?

Instead he sidestepped the problem by not mentioning how and where the Ripper took his own life, or when his body was found -- shades of the Vicar. He also rejected the Farquharson-Griffiths-Sims vanishing date of the 9th extending it by by at least a day and a night so that 'Jack' can function, and then be found to be 'absented' by 'his own people'.

Again this inched the timeline back into alignment with the Vicar, eg. according to Mac in the one document on the case for public consumption under his own distinguished name Druitt did have time to confess to a priest, or somebody, about his dual identity -- hence the secret and shocking 'belief' of his own family.