Is Kosminski still the best suspect we have?

[Abby Normal]

Bingo.

If the killer WAS identified, it predisposes that there was a hush-hush surrounding it, so that nobody should be able to find out the name. Nevertheless, the bigwigs that did the identifying were so pumped up by their own importance that they felt a need to gab about it anyway. And once they DID, they gave away a glaring ignorance about the suggested suspects.

It makes no sense whatsoever.

Nor does it make sense that the police would sit around doing nothing when one man after another gave away one suspect after another IF the killer HAD been plucked. If the Ripper was apprehended, the only clever thing to do would be to inform the police, down to the last PC about it, not necessarily disclosing the name if they feared legal actions, but nevertheless. It would save themselves the embarassment of flaunting their inability to agree with each other, and it would ensure that no policemen went on crusades of their own with the aim to catch the killer.

I dislike the argument that history demands that we place the contemporary suspects at the top of the list. The self same history tells us that the police got it very wrong in many cases, and we can be certain that men that were pointed a finger at were actually innocent, like Ostrog. So why not embrace history from that angle - the practical one - instead from the ideological angle?

The best,
Fisherman

The police knew some things we don't, and we know some things they didn't.

that's really the answer to the whole "who knows more" debate.

[Bridewell]

Why do you quote this version, and not the other?

In the other a witness, a cop no less, may have been able to place Kosminski with a victim.

Well said.

[Bridewell]

Who DID get a good look at the Ripper? Perhaps there is an altogether unknown witness who caught sight of our man and came forward, but whose identity was kept off the record?

The Aberconway version of the MacNaghten Memoranda, alluded to earlier by Jonathan H, includes a famous reference to such an individual:

"No-one ever saw the Ripper unless, perhaps, it was the City PC that was (sic) a beat near Mitre Square." (quoted from memory so apologies for any minor error of detail).

There is a fairly straightforward reason why his identity might be kept off the record.

I've always wondered why MacNaghten passed on to his daughter a version of the document which was so intriguingly different from the copy placed on file at Scotland Yard. Did he delete an error in the file copy or did he add an embarrassing fact to the other one? If the latter I would conclude that Anderson's witness was neither Schwartz nor Lawende but a City PC who was on duty that night, who was dismissed for reasons unknown in July 1889 and who had family links to East Sussex.

[GUT]

G'day Bridewell

If the latter I would conclude that Anderson's witness was neither Schwartz nor Lawende but a City PC who was on duty that night, who was dismissed for reasons unknown in July 1889 and who had family links to East Sussex.

Why those particular details as opposed to any other PC.

[Bridewell]

No the ones who are building facts are those who suggest that the police had enough evidence to make that person a suspect

Enough evidence to make that person a suspect?

The powers of arrest for an arrestable offence in our day required that a constable have "reasonable cause to suspect", not necessarily -at that stage -evidence.

Example: Burglary occurs at 3am on your patch; 200 yards away you see a man with 50 burglary convictions walking along the road. Evidence? None. Reasonable cause to suspect? I would have said so. You don't need evidence to make a person a suspect.

[PaulB]

I've always wondered why MacNaghten passed on to his daughter a version of the document which was so intriguingly different from the copy placed on file at Scotland Yard.

My understanding is that Macnaghten's papers were inherited by his daughter Julia Donner and then by her son Gerald Donner and then lost. Lady Aberconway borrowed the memoranda from her sister and her secretary copied it except for the part about the suspects which Lady Aberconway transcribed by hand. It is thought that the Aberconway version was a draft of the copy Macnaghten placed in the files.

[Bridewell]

G'day Bridewell

Why those particular details as opposed to any other PC.

If MacNaghten's reference to a "City PC" does in fact relate to an unnamed police witness (most think it a reference to Lawende), he (Harvey) is the likely candidate. Watkins was not on a beat near Mitre Square, because his beat passed through that location. Harvey's took him along Church Passage to the edge of, but not into, the Square. His personal file (held at the London Metropolitan Archive) retains the documents, references etc, justifying his appointment - but nothing else, no reason for the loss of his job, just the word Dismissed underlined and in heavy pencil. I'd like to know who removed those documents, when and why. There may be an innocent explanation but (to me) it is strange that the documents which justify his appointment are still there, but the documents which justify his dismissal are not.

[GUT]

If MacNaghten's reference to a "City PC" does in fact relate to an unnamed police witness (most think it a reference to Lawende), he (Harvey) is the likely candidate. Watkins was not on a beat near Mitre Square, because his beat passed through that location. Harvey's took him along Church Passage to the edge of, but not into, the Square. His personal file (held at the London Metropolitan Archive) retains the documents, references etc, justifying his appointment - but nothing else, no reason for the loss of his job, just the word Dismissed underlined and in heavy pencil. I'd like to know who removed those documents, when and why. There may be an innocent explanation but (to me) it is strange that the documents which justify his appointment are still there, but the documents which justify his dismissal are not.

I'd like to know who removed so many Ripper documents, because there may be a slight chance that the famliy still has them floating around.

[Bridewell]

My understanding is that Macnaghten's papers were inherited by his daughter Julia Donner and then by her son Gerald Donner and then lost. Lady Aberconway borrowed the memoranda from her sister and her secretary copied it except for the part about the suspects which Lady Aberconway transcribed by hand. It is thought that the Aberconway version was a draft of the copy Macnaghten placed in the files.

Thanks for the clarification, Paul. Would you not expect the "City PC" sentence to be amended in the final version rather than omitted altogether though? Something like:

"No-one ever saw the Ripper unless perhaps it was the City Police witness who, with friends, passed close to an alley that led to Mitre Square"?

[Scott Nelson]

Lackeys, toadies!

Stupid and spurious opinions!

The horse has left the barn!

Don’t have any perspectives of your own on the case!!

Objectivity long ago flew the coop!!!

[GUT]

Lackeys, toadies!

Stupid and spurious opinions!

The horse has left the barn!

Don’t have any perspectives of your own on the case!!

Objectivity long ago flew the coop!!!

What?

Who?

[Chris]

What?

Who?

It's an acrostic, referring to the recently discovered Czech slaughterman, Jaroslav Lstdo. Now there's a good suspect.

[lynn cates]

haiku

Hello Scott. Haiku, perhaps? (heh-heh)

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

The Cop is Lawende?

To some extent Christabel, the Lady Aberconway (after 1911) was estranged from her siblings, as she admits with bracing candor in her 1966 memoirs. She thus seems to have sought to preserve her father's legacy as the sleuth who cracked the Whitechapel mystery by making a copy of what she called his "notes", under the radar so to speak.

Lady Aberconway was totally vinidcated in this covert action by the fact that the original was 'lost', having never been brought forth to the public by her sister's family. In 1972, two years before she died, there was an attempt to sabotage what she had done by Phillip Loftus, a crony of her nephew (e.g. the fictitious 'third' version, in which her father is slandered as even more of a hopeless blunderer).

Only at this juncture did Lady Aberconway grasp that it was her father's memoir that should have been the document that secured the beach-head of history for Sir Melville--and wrote as much. Too late by then.

I subscribe to the theory that the 'Aberconway' version was written second, a theory first proposed by Don Rumbelow in 1975 (and not amended in 2013) and backed by Martin Fido in 1987.

In 1898, when he wrotehis so-called "notes", Macnaghten was attempting to sex-up the trio of suspects for public consumption--which they were.

The Polish madman gets a cop witness, which I think Mac cribbed from the famous moment of the Coles murder where the young PC believed he was seconds too late (though he did not claim to have seen a man) and this bit of maix-and-match certainly fooled Sir Basil Thomson, in the second version of his memoirs.

The cop witness is an attempt to bury Lawende who had seen a man whom Macnaghten believed not only resembled Druitt, it was the barrister.

In his his 1914 memoir Macnaghten dismisses the cop witness as nothing, but tellingly mentions that he saw a man and the victim a few minutes before the murder--aligning the tale with what Lawende had testified to rather than the way Sims had propagated it.

In Guy Logan's 1905 semi-fictional account of the Druitt solution the Polish and Russia suspects are dropped altogether. Lawende sees the Druitt figure (disguised with a fair moustahce) chatting with Catherine Eddowes.

I also believe that Macnaghten's linking the Polish suspect with a witness, first mentioned by Griffiths in 1898 and then by Sims in 1907, inadvertently set in motion Anderson thinking there had been a witness identification--and it had said yes to "Kosminski".

The cop witness became a cop location mixed in with the seamen suspects (Salder and Grant) creating the Seaside Home.

A previous poster said this kind of memory malfunction was not possible for Anderson.

Really?

In a 1908 interview the aged Sir Robvert Anderson, a very anti-socialistic, fundamentalist Tory, quite unfairly blamed the Liberal government, and the Liberal Home Secretary, William Harcourt, for putting him under undue pressure over this hysteria-driven 'crisis'. This administration had been out of power for two years by the time of the reign of terror. His default position is egocentric and partisan.

He also unfairly blamed a medico for busting a pipe at the Kelly murder, confusing and conflating that crime scene with that of 'Clay-Pipe Alice' in July 1889 (a telling slip as his fading memory was picking up signals, quickly smothered, that his sense of the case being unsolved went on for a long, long time after the Miller's Ct. atrocity.)

[Monty]

I am fully aware thank you but you like so many cant seem to come to terms with the interpretation of a suspect and what it takes for someone to be a real suspect.

It doesn't matter what the dogs were intended for, the point is that someone wanted to use them. What are blood hounds trained for tracking a scent !

"The bloodhound is a large scent hound originally bred for hunting deer and wild boar, but also used from the Middle Ages onwards for tracking human beings, and now most often bred specifically for that purpose.

This dog is famed for its ability to discern human odors even days later, over great distances, even across water. Its extraordinarily keen sense of smell is combined with a strong and tenacious tracking instinct, producing the ideal scent hound, and it is used by police and law enforcement all over the world to track escaped prisoners, missing people, lost children and lost pets"

So what were they wanting to use them for skydiving demonstrations !

And always used at SOC?

Read Broughs words. The dogs were also used as a deterrent. And they were quite effective at that.

You know what it takes to name a suspect? You chose Feigenbaum as Jack the Ripper...I don't need to say any more.

Monty