The "Canonical Group" defines the Ripper...but accurately?

[Tom_Wescott]

But, wait a minute, are you to tell me that you consider Kosminski as a possible suspect? Was he not a bit too disorganized for that?

I don't believe we have a choice but to consider Kosminski a suspect, because investigators did. Do I think he was the Ripper? No, not really, but I keep my mind open. My list of suspects actually likely to have been the Ripper is short, only two: 1) Charles Le Grand, 2)Kosminski.

Two very, very different people. Was Kosminski 'disorganized'? Yes, in the 1890's, but I don't know that he was in 1888.

In the case of Druitt and Tumblety, much information has surfaced that gives us good reason to scratch them off the list of 'suspects likely to have been the Ripper', although the jury is still out for me on Tumblety, pending the publication in August of part 3 of RJ Palmer's excellent series in Casebook Examiner. In the case of George Chapman, there never really was a case made to begin with. He was suspected 14 years later because he poisoned some women and lived in Whitechapel. That's it. But he IS a suspect.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[mklhawley]

[QUOTE=Tom_Wescott;138063]I don't believe we have a choice but to consider Kosminski a suspect, because investigators did.

This statement deserves to be re-read. We do not know all they knew and experienced. Hindsight has its advantages, but it would be great to live through their day-to-day life.

Sincerely,

Mike

[mariab]

suspect interrogation

I'm not even sure if 4 hours of interrogation is enough for a suspect with such a close association to the victim as Barnett. Today he would have probably been interrogated more than once, and for close to 16 hours each time! And we don't have all the information of what has been asked, or what has NOT been asked, especially re. Barnett's whereabouts on the nights of the earlier murders. He was out of his job since July 1888, we don't know exactly what he was doing day or night, he lived with Mary Kelly until shortly before her murder, but she was out at nights working, so Barnett's whereabouts are not documented. It's interesting that almost all information we have about Kelly is through him, and mostly non-corroborated. One has to wonder if they let him go so soon because they thought he had an alibi (as Kelly's time of death was probably not established correctly), and since they were concentrating on a Jewish suspect (re. Kosminski, Hutchinson's testimony, and the testimony of a Jewish witness with an identity kept secret). So I can't help but have my doubts about the investigation re. Barnett. (I've always thought, wouldn't it been nice to have a videotape of his and Hutchinson's interrogation?! )

Sadler re. Cole's murder appears more like a coincidence, someone whot got mugged on the street at aprox. the same time, but who knows?

Hunter:
Macnaghten followed the contemporary stereotypical beliefs of the type of person who would commit such atrocities in order to counter the theory promulgated in the press at the time that Cutbush was Jack the Ripper.

Totally agree with this. And possibly another reason why Barnett was dismissed so quickly, since the police would not imagine a “normal, inoffensive looking guy“ commiting such atrocities.

As for Macnaghten never having named any suspects before The Sun run Cutbush as a suspect and Macnaghten responded with Kosminski/Druitt/Ostrog, I've just realized that his Memoranda are reproduced in the “Official documents“ archive, so I'm just gonna go read them now...

[mariab]

suspects

I truly wish there were some way to have more ample documentation pertaining to this cases and to the Victorian era in general...!

to Tom Wescott:
About this Le Grand chap I really need to read more. Wasn't he on the vigilantes committee? For some reason he's not included in the Casebook's suspects list.
Wow, Kosminski as suspect no. 2? For me he looks too young, weak, and sick. And I don't think that epileptics kill. Kaminsky/Cohen, on the other side, totally. And I believe that Mr. Fido has managed to explain this controversy in a satisfactory fashion, esp. if someone goes and attempts further research about the Polish immigrants in London and finds more information.
Druitt, absolutely not.
Tumblety, despite being mainly interested in men, I don't know. I'll definitely read RJ Palmer's new publication. Does it contain info about Tumblety's whereabouts between all his travels, or about (non) corroboration of the anecdote that he kept body parts in his office etc.?
For Chapman, I know that the MO change is a problem, but who knows? He was living right there during the murders, shortly after the “canonical“ 5 he got married and attacked his wife with a knife, there was a murder reminiscent of Whitechapell in NJ when he was there, and then he kept poisoning his wives the one after the other, in London, where he knew he could not risk suspicions by slaughtering them. Serial killer? Definitely. Serial killer with a changed MO for convenience? Rare, but who knows?
So I suppose that my list of suspects would be
1) Barnett, 2) someone local, unknown, quiet and inconspicuous (like Barnett or Hutchinson, but not necessarily them)
3) Kaminsky/Cohen or some other Jew (but NOT Kominski)
4) Tumblety, IF it turns out that he really kept pieces and parts
5) Chapman

Best regards,
Maria

[Jonathan H]

To Hunter

The 'canonical five' was created by Macnaghten and nobody else. Everybody follows him, like it or not.

Until Mac discreetly put the 'C-5' out there in the public domain, via Griffiths in 1898, the number of victims were in dispute: six or eight or even fourteen?? -- but there was some consensus that the last one was probably Coles.

That Kelly, rather, is the last victim was created by Mac due to the timing of Druitt's suicide -- not the other way round.

You write that Mac may have been a cop with little knowledge of those five murders. This is possible. I subscribe to the alternative theory, based on the way Mac writes about himself, and the way people who knew him write about him; that he was all over the Ripper case -- interviewing people, studying evidence, racing down to Whitechapel for any murder, and so on.

The self-styled Super-Cop, a hands-on administrator with a marvellous memory, a discreet political player.

There is an argument which can be mounted that Mac knew all.

Many big guns regard this argument as unconvincing, Stewart Evans and R J Palmer among them.

Yet where did the -C-5' originally come from?

I think from the Druitt family, rightly or wrongly.

You also write that Druitt fit into Mac's preconceived prejudice of what the killer should have been like.

I believe you are falling for the sly, disengenuous way Mac wrote the official version of his 1894 Report; that here are some minor suspects who fit some musings about suicide and incarceration, etc.

I ask you to step back and consider that Druitt, virtually alone among plausible suspects, is the exact opposite of the biased profile of the time regarding the Ripper:

Druitt was English rather than foreign, a Gentleman rather than a prole, a Gentile rather than a Jew, respectable rather than a criminal, a resident of Blackheath rather than Whitechapel, outwardly sane rather than crackers, and a barrister rather than a physician.

Mac picked the opposite of the conventional profile of his era.

In 1896 Major Griffiths wrote that there was some official specultation that the Ripper might be a real-life 'Jekyll and Hyde' -- but that there was no hard evidence for this fanciful speculation, whatsoever.

And not two years later ... we find Griffiths writing that the Ripper probably was a Dr Jekyll after all, and that this was police opinion from on high [which meant not putting the Ripper mystery in his chapter about police cick-ups, in 'Mysteries of Police and Crime'] and eerily paralleling Stevenson's famous fiction.

We have known for some time, of course, that Druitt as the Ripper was just Mac's opinion, his 'going rogue' if you like, and furthermore that this middle-aged Jekyll figure was in fact both young and not a medical man.

In terms of historical methodology, that Mac, an Etonian, would pick of all people, Druitt, an Oxonian, as the fiend, and hang onto him, and reshape him, and fictionalise him, and publicly disseminate bits of him, and publicly take bits back -- that he would accuse 'one of us': a fellow member of the 'better classes', a tragic chappie with no ability to defend himself, is the clincher that Montie is the major suspect of the case for a major, not minor, police figure.

[lynn cates]

questions

Hello Jonathan. As usual, you have presented a lucid and well reasoned piece.

I was wondering if you could answer a couple of questions for me--and they involve only pure speculation.

1. Regarding Sir MLM's fixing of the canonical 5: how much of it, percentagewise, do you see as a result of:

A. Dr. Bond's medical opinion.
B. Private information from the Druitt family (especially as regards dates, etc.).
C. A possible confession from Monty to the vicar.

2. Regarding Sir MLM's suspicions about Monty as the Ripper: how much of it, percentagewise, do you see as a result of:

A. Private information from Farquaharson.
B. Private information from the Druitt family.
C. A possible confession from Monty to the vicar.
D. Monty's suicide, its date, and its possible significance to the overall narrative.
E. Some other source.

Thank you for any thoughts you might have on these.

Cheers.
LC

[Hunter]

In regards to the C5, Lynn has almost answered for me. It was Bond, not Macnaghten, who first linked the C5 together. He also created a profile of the murderer, with some references right out of Krafft-Ebings' work - which Bond had likely read - that Mac seems to pick up on as well. So, for much of it, Mac was 'parroting' what Bond had concluded and probably based his personal suspects on what we now know were faulty presumptions about lunatics. Throw in some rumors about family suspicions and medical knowledge and you've got a 'package' suspect. Druitt fit the biased profile very well with his mental instability and suicide.

I've been working on an article about this subject and hope to have it up for the Examiner in the near future.

[lynn cates]

3 views

Hello Hunter. I look forward to your article.

There seem to be 3 views regarding the 2 Macnaughten memoranda with respect to the canonical 5 and who "Jack" was:

1. A reliable indicator about "Jack" and his true identity as murderer of exactly 5 women.

2. Grasping at straws to concoct a story.

3. Out and out duplicity.

You seem to prefer 2; Jonathan Hainsworth 1; Simon Wood 3.

Is that fair or am I off base?

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

To Lynn

The Loose-lipped MP and the Close-mouthed Vicar:

It's just my theory trying to make sense of the scraps, but I think Macnaghten knew all, from multiple sources.

He met with the MP, he met with the Druitt family, he met with the cleric to whom Druitt had confessed, and he worked out Montie's movements in terms of his legal, teaching, and sporting duties -- and it all fit like a bloody glove.

I think that first Mac tracked down MP Farquharson and made him cough up all he had learned, from presumably somebody in his Dorset constituency, about a respectable, local, Tory family's thermo-nuclear secret -- and then promptly and stupidly told his ten best friends -- nearly precipitating a heart-stopping 'Jack the Tory' scandal for his own party, the twerp!

Of course the 'son of a surgeon' story had leaked, and now Mac was going to plug that leak.

Mac assured Farquy/the Tories/the Druitts that he would be extremely discreet. That their family and political member's true, traceable identity would never be revealed -- and this promise was kept through the Edwardian era, right up until 1965, from the public's point of view.

Mac's one-man, below-the-radar, investigation may have also been conducted with some urgency if the assistant chief constable feared that Tom Sadler -- whom he perhaps believed had killed Frances Coles -- was about to get off because he was mistakenly and desperately being fitted for the Ripper crimes too -- by that stubborn, pious, vain Anderson?

Temperamentally, the jaunty, 'Hail Fellow, Well Met' Mac would want to believe that the story about this Montie Druitt being the Ripper was some ghastly mistake.

How could it be 'one of us'?

And a champion cricketer at that??

Wasn't he sacked from that boys' cramming school? Perhaps that's why he topped himself?

Is not his mother as mad as a March Hare? The apple does not fall far from the tree, you know, and so on.

I think he met with the family, or just the brother William, and -- to his own surprise -- left shocked and convinced.

Mac saw something, or was even handed something for his archive, and from that moment he believed -- rightly or wrongly -- until his death that Druitt was the fiend. From that moment he believed he knew exactly whom the Ripper had killed, and whom he had not.

Hence the 'Canonical Five' was born -- excluding Coles.

Until the 1899 'North Country Vicar' story was discovered a couple of years ago, by Chris Scott, I had wondered why on earth Mac had taken the risk of revealing Druitt -- admittedly in libel-proof disguise -- to the public at all?

Mac must have known that other cops like Abberline and Reid would know straight-away that it was a con; that they were never chasing an English doctor in 1888?

I think that between 1891 and 1894, a disconcerted Mac also discovered, perhaps face to face, that a cleric had the same information -- from Montie.

The truth about his tormented reign of evil which would be, the cleric said, disseminated to the public, though in semi-fictional form, in ten years ['Solution to a London Mystery', or something like that] as that was the last wish of the repentent murderer

This was a truly bizarre time-bomb, not for the family whom would be protected by this fictional shield ['at one time a surgeon'], but rather for the police who would be revealed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Ripper's demise -- did not even know about it!

Mac wanted the public to think they had known about the 'Doctor', whilst he was alive, and since this was deceit he would have to propagate this Yard-friendly balderdash without his own fingerprints being visible.

Hence the need to use literary cronies who would be let in on the Biggest Secret at Scotland Yard: the name of the fiend.

Of course, they would not be told the next biggest secret -- that the police had never heard of Druitt for over two years. They had been chasing a phantom.

That is why Mac got in first, in 1898, with his Aberconway rewrite for Griffiths [and Sims], claiming quite falsely that it was a copy of a definitive Home Office Report. This would muddy the waters, so to speak, about a gentleman/doctor suspect.

eg. Far from being an unknown suspect, the Bobbies practically pushed the Doctor into the river, as they were that close to nabbing this real-life Jekyll and Hyde!

It worked a charm.

The media embraced Griffiths, who reeked of establishment connections and authority, and the public embraced the famous writer and criminologist George Sims and his paradigm of the top hatted toff with a black bag, even though Sims never used this actual cliche image.

To the surprise of much of the media and public [and retired field detectives] who thought the Ripper murders took place, albeit with growing infrequency, over several years Major Griffiths established the 'C-5' -- and that the Ripper operated for only a brief 'autumn of terror'.

This was all new, essentially a recasting of the story.

Yes, a rewrite of the case this time from the murderer's point of view eg. Druitt, whose 'ghost' Mac had 'laid' to rest.

In 1899, nearly to the day of his funeral, Druitt's weird last wishes were honored by yet another cleric, an un-named North Country Vicar, to whom the truth had been passed on -- and who was written off as dotty.

A journalist who went to pry loose from the Reverend what was fiction, and what was real in his account, came away empty-handed and so the document was never published -- much to our detriment as researchers! [the glimpse we have of its contents does not say the gentleman suicided, just 'died', somehow, some interval after Mary Kelly, though not on the same night -- which fits the real timing of Druitt's self-murder]

Sims actually opens his 'Drowned Doctor' certainties of 1899 by disparaging this un-named cleric. To do this, Sims had to completely misrepresent the story as a death-bed confession to the gullible Vicar himself -- which it clearly is not.

What I do not think the pompous Sims ever knew was that in saying that the Vicar story was a tall tale, he did not realize, as did not the Major before him, that the story they were credulously peddling to the public -- as 'Scotland Yard/Home Office' definitive opinion -- was also, as the Vicar put it:

'substantial truth in fictitious form'

I would be hard pressed to better sum up the Macnaghten/Griffiths/Sims version of the 'Drowned Doctor' suspect.

Griffiths [from Mac] and the 'North Country Vicar' story are the only two sources from 1898/9 which claim that the Ripper murders ended with Kelly AND that he was a medical man, of otherwise unimpeachable character.

I believe that Sims received two shocks about which he made no public comment: in 1913 from Littlechild, in private, and from Macnaghten -- his chum -- in public, from his cagey/candid memoirs of 1914.

[lynn cates]

further

Hello Jonathan. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer these questions.

Do you think Mac would have made a slightly better job of it had he not mentioned Monty's name and had just referred obliquely to him--much in the same manner as Sir Robert did (we presume) to Kosminski?

Do you know if Ruffles or Spallek ever traced the name of that vicar?

Cheers.
LC

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan and Lynn,

We appear to have a surplus of surplices.

Rocky Mountain News [Colorado]
17 January 1892

WHITECHAPEL CRIME
Possible Discovery of the Identity of Jack the Ripper - Curious Legacy of a Priest

London, Jan. 2.

" . . . It is understood that the death of a Catholic priest in the East End of London has placed some important revelations in the hands of the police. There can be no doubt that the priest, under the seal of confession, died possessed of information that might have led to the arrest of the murderer or murderers of the wretched women known as "Jack the Ripper's" victims. That the priest had qualms of conscience regarding the sanctity of confession, even in connection with such atrocities, is evinced by the sealed packet he left behind him addressed to Sir Edward Bradford, chief of London's police department. On the package was inscribed, in the dead priest's handwriting, 'This is to be opened after my death - my lips must never reveal it.'

"Beyond the above, carelessly mentioned by a garrulous official who has since been severely reprimanded for his indiscretion, no further information can be obtained from the police. Whether it will lead to the detection of the Whitechapel fiend is a problem difficult to solve . . ."

Regards,

Simon

[lynn cates]

confession

Hello Simon. Well, I must confess that this story portrays matters in a different light, since it seems 2 denominations and 2 geographical locations are referred to in these priest stories.

Is it possible that here, indirect evidence is referred to--say, something from one of the C5 (as, perhaps, Mary Kelly)? In other words, could Mary (whom Barnett reported as living in fear for her safety) have confessed something that would give away an identity? Whereas the Anglican priest heard, say, a direct confession by the murderer?

Just a thought.

Thanks.

Cheers.
LC

[Simon Wood]

Hi Lynn,

Yes, it's quite an ecclesiastical conundrum.

To further whet your appetite and add a little fuel to the fire, here's the opening line of the 1892 Rocky Mountain News article I posted -

"A royal commission is to investigate the now almost forgotten Whitechapel murders . . ."

Regards,

Simon

[claire]

the now almost forgotten Whitechapel murders . . .

chance'd be a fine thing

[Roy Corduroy]

Simon, you posted that article before and I find it intriguing.

Appeared in a Denver paper, byline London. The writing style of the original article seems from a British newspaper. Could I get a second opinion from my UK friends on that. What do you think?

Roy