Days of My Years

[Jonathan H]

Druitt confessed

I have never been so foolish as to waste my time trying to convince you of anything, because your mind was closed long ago.

As expected you do not deal with the specifics of my argument, which was first made by Farson in 1972.

I reply for other posters who might be reading, and do not want the this Jack the Ripper site to be entirely bereft of Jack the Ripper.

Also that we are not just dealing with the MP or the police chief, but family members who are not likely to entertain such a hideous notion about one of their own without proof -- yet they 'believed' and from them it leaked out of Dorset in 1891.

All history is a matter of interpretation, though I understand as somebody taken in by the modern 'Diary' hoax you do not get that.

Plus we do know the likely evidence against Druitt:

http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=1341

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan,

Aside from MM and his memorandum, what else is there to suggest that the Druitt family ever suspected Montie of being Jack the Ripper?

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

To Simon

The breakthrough was the 2008 identification of the MP as a figure known to the Druitts and to Macnaghten, the latter also a member of the Old Boy Network.

That the story of Montie as the fiend, whether correct or not, originated in Dorset along the Tory-constituency grapevine (years before the 'memo', both very different versions, were composed by Mac).

The Jack the Ripper mystery was solved in 1891, and this solution was shared with the public -- in veiled form -- between 1898 and 1917, and then essentially forgotten by 1923, as both Macnaghten and Sims had died by then.

Worse, the Ripper as a doctor and a suicide became detached from each other; the former element was entrenched in pop culture but was untrue, while the latter element, though true, had disappeared into the fog.

When the Ripper's true identity was found, almost by accident, in 1959 -- a drowned barrister -- he did not match either the pop image nor what Mac had written in his 'memo' (but does in Mac's memoirs, but they were not a scoop), which is arguably how we get, half-a-century later, to the following primary sources being sidelined, ignored and/or misunderstood:

The 11 February 1891 edition of 'The Bristol Times and Mirror':

I give a curious story for what it is worth. There is a West of England member who in private declares that he has solved the mystery of 'Jack the Ripper.' His theory - and he repeats it with so much emphasis that it might almost be called his doctrine - is that 'Jack the Ripper' committed suicide on the night of his last murder. I can't give details, for fear of a libel action; but the story is so circumstantial that a good many people believe it. He states that a man with blood-stained clothes committed suicide on the night of the last murder, and he asserts that the man was the son of a surgeon, who suffered from homicidal mania. I do not know what the police think of the story, but I believe that before long a clean breast will be made, and that the accusation will be sifted thoroughly.'

'The York Herald' and 'The Yorkshire Herald', Feb 18th 1891:

'The member of Parliament who recently declared that 'Jack the Ripper' had killed himself on the evening of the last murder, adheres to his opinion. Even assuming that the man Saddler [sic] is able to prove his innocence of the murder of Frances Coles, he maintains that the latest crime cannot be the work of the author of the previous series of atrocities, and this view of the matter is steadily growing among those who do not see that there is any good reason to suppose that 'Jack the Ripper' is dead. So far as Saddler is concerned, there is a strong feeling that the evidence will have to be very much strengthened against him by next Tuesday, if he is to be committed for trial. His manner in the Thames Police-court was consistent with any theory.'

The 'North Country Vicar' discovery was almost as momentous because it explained why these people, including family members, believed Montie was guilty and why Macnaghten was so determined, at some calculated risk to his career, to both reveal and conceal the Ripper's identity.

'The Western Mail' 19 January 1899:

WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
DID "JACK THE RIPPER" MAKE A CONFESSION?

We have received (says the Daily Mail) from a clergyman of the Church of England, now a North Country vicar, an interesting communication with reference to the great criminal mystery of our times - that enshrouding the perpetration of the series of crimes which have come to be known as the "Jack the Ripper" murders. The identity of the murderer is as unsolved as it was while the blood of the victims was yet wet upon the pavements. Certainly Major Arthur Griffiths, in his new work on "Mysteries of Police and Crime," suggests that the police believe the assassin to have been a doctor, bordering on insanity, whose body was found floating in the Thames soon after the last crime of the series; but as the major also mentions that this man was one of three known homidical lunatics against whom the police "held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion," that conjectural explanation does not appear to count for much by itself.
Our correspondent the vicar now writes:-
"I received information in professional confidence, with directions to publish the facts after ten years, and then with such alterations as might defeat identification.
The murderer was a man of good position and otherwise unblemished character, who suffered from epileptic mania, and is long since deceased.
I must ask you not to give my name, as it might lead to identification"
meaning the identification of the perpetrator of the crimes. We thought at first the vicar was at fault in believing that ten years had passed yet since the last murder of the series, for there were other somewhat similar crimes in 1889. But, on referring again to major Griffiths's book, we find he states that the last "Jack the Ripper" murder was that in Miller's Court on November 9, 1888 - a confirmation of the vicar's sources of information. The vicar enclosed a narrative, which he called "The Whitechapel Murders - Solution of a London Mystery." This he described as "substantial truth under fictitious form." "Proof for obvious reasons impossible - under seal of confession," he added in reply to an inquiry from us.
Failing to see how any good purpose could be served by publishing substantial truth in fictitious form, we sent a representative North to see the vicar, to endeavour to ascertain which parts of the narrative were actual facts. But the vicar was not to be persuaded, and all that our reporter could learn was that the rev. gentleman appears to know with certainty the identity of the most terrible figure in the criminal annals of our times, and that the vicar does not intend to let anyone else into the secret.
The murderer died, the vicar states, very shortly after committing the last murder. The vicar obtained his information from a brother clergyman, to whom a confession was made - by whom the vicar would not give even the most guarded hint. The only other item which a lengthy chat with the vicar could elicit was that the murderer was a man who at one time was engaged in rescue work among the depraved woman of the East End - eventually his victims; and that the assassin was at one time a surgeon.

Sims is a primary source into the thinking of Macnaghten, who is the key primary source about the posthumous investigation into Druitt as 'Jack'.

George Sims, 'Lloyds Weekly' magazine, Sept 22nd 1907:

'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.

The horrible nature of the atrocity committed in Miller's-court pointed to the last stage of frenzied mania. Each murder had shown a marked increase in maniacal ferocity. The last was the culminating point. The probability is that immediately after committing this murderous deed the author of it committed suicide. There was nothing else left for him to do except to be found wandering, a shrieking, raving, fiend, fit only for the padded cell.

What is probable is that after the murder he made his way to the river, and in the dark hours of a November night or in the misty dawn he leapt in and was drowned.'

From 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper', 1914, by Sir Melville Macnaghten:

'Although, as I shall endeavour to show in this chapter, the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November 1888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer.

... The man, of course, was a sexual maniac, but such madness takes Protean forms, as will be shown later on in other cases. Sexual murders are the most difficult of all for police to bring home to the perpetrators, for motives there are none ; only a lust for blood, and in many cases a hatred of woman as woman. Not infrequently the maniac possesses a diseased body, and this was probably so in the case of the Whitechapel murderer. Many residents in the East End (and some in the West!) came under suspicion of police, but though several persons were detained, no one was ever charged with these offences.

Only last autumn I was very much interested in a book entitled The Lodger, which set forth in vivid colours what the Whitechapel murderer's life might have been while dwelling in London lodgings. The talented authoress portrayed him as a religious enthusiast, gone crazy over the belief that he was predestined to slaughter a certain number of unfortunate women, and that he had been confined in a criminal lunatic asylum and had escaped therefrom. I do not think that there was anything of religious mania about the real Simon Pure, nor do I believe that he had ever been detained in an asylum, nor lived in lodgings. I incline to the belief that the individual who held up London in terror resided with his own people ; that he absented himself from home at certain times, and that he committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888, after he had knocked out a Commissioner of Police and very nearly settled the hash of one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State.'

In 1913 and 1914, Macnaghten tried to put the 'drowned doctor' genie back in its bottle, and it didn't work. He was still too discreet.

Telling various fibs to various people over many years finally caught up with Mac in the sense that it later denied his place in history as the Super-sleuth who solved the mystery, albeit posthumously.

[Jonathan H]

Mac the Disinformer?

If you compare Mac's memoirs with both versions of his 'memo' you discover that he misled in the latter non-identical twin documents. eg. He gives the false, institutionally self-serving and misleading impression that Druitt was a suspect before he died (it sure fooled Griffiths and Sims, who were contemporaneous crime 'experts').

Primary sources between 1888 and 1891 show this cannot be so; that Druitt must have only come to police -- or just Mac's -- attention years after he killed himself, and sure enough the police chief concedes exactly this from the safety of retirement.

I have no serious doubt that when Macnaghten showed, or verbally conveyed, the bombshell contents of 'Aberconway' to Griffiths and then Sims, he knew that Ostrog was not only not a Russian doctor -- any more than Druitt was an English doctor - but that he had been cleared of the murders by late 1894.

But the Chief Constable did not care because the 'Michael Ostrog' he hustled to his literary cronies (Sims is a lot more credulous than Griffiths) was a fictional variation of the real, habitual criminal, unrecognizable without the name -- even to the 'suspect' himself.

It was pure disinformation (and perhaps a private, self-amused revenge by the most fanatical of Old Etonians), and a 'suspect' whom he dumped completely from his memoir -- arguably a tacit concession that Ostrog is not a legit suspect at all, and the less said about the better.

We know that Mac, as an old Boy, was at his beloved Eton the very day in 1873 that Ostrog made one of his periodic robberies, and we have a letter he wrote to an asylum, years later, wanting to be kept informed about the Russian con man and malingerer.

Is it really credible that when, in 1898/9, Mac showed/conveyed to them his supposedly definitive 'Home Office Report' (another deception) which said that Ostrog was really a Russian doctor, and that he hated women, carried surgical knives and whose whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be found -- that he believed any of that?