Days of My Years

[Smoking Joe]

Thanks Caz and Jonathan for replies.
I believe there is an "undercurrent" of hostility towards anything Druitt related ....by some anyway. Im glad at least one other sees it too,that makes me feel less paranoid. And yes similarities can be seen in the JFK "conspiracy loony community"
Caz brings up some interesting questions and points too.Both of you have a far better grasp of this particular issue than I. Im not ashamed to admit that. Maybe I should listen more and write less........But I have to say Jonathan's theory intrigues me.....a great deal.

[Jonathan H]

To Smoking Joe

And that is what it is, a theory.

The best counters to it are not that Macnaghten was lazy or ill-informed about Druitt's particulars -- which tortures and distorts an entire range of primary sources -- or that Druitt was gay, but that argued by people like Adam Went; that since this police chief was so deceitful how can anything he claims be trusted?

Or by R J Plamer, as in how do you know Mac is not appropriating details from a minor suspect -- and he characterised Druitt as an almost-nothing suspect for file -- in order to hide Dr. Tumblety (a suspect he most certainly does not name in any extant record, but whom Littlechild has been told by somebody that he supposedly took his own life after Kelly)?

Or how about Mac took two suspects he knew to be probably innocent, Druitt and Tumblety, and created the wholly fictitious 'Drowned Doctor' because he could not stomach, for publicity reasons, Anderson's over-reach about a mad Jew and vile East End Jews? This line can be argued by examining the Camp murder of 1897. I am indebted here to the research of Debra Arif and Chris Phillips. It can be argued that for his memoirs, Mac combined two demontrably innocent suspects and created a guilty one -- who never literally existed.

Sound familiar?

To Caz

The breakthough of the MP articles (the ur-text found by Skinner in 1991, the MP's name by Spallek in 2008, and another vital one by Begg in 2011 which is after Coles was killed) is the convincing primary evidence that Macnaghten had an Old Boy source who knew the family.

Furthermore Farquharson's error, the double bang of murder and self-murder by Montie is not repeated by Mac in his 1914 memoirs, essentially matching the real Druitt. But Mac does repeat that 'his own people' knew he was 'absented' which broadly matches William Druit trying to find his missing sibling.

We have textual evidence that Macnaghten reshaped or allowed others to reshape the data to avoid libel trouble: the Druitt family of 'Aberconway' became the 'friends' of Griffiths and Sims.

Mac certainly never corrected this alteration.

Furthermore in 1910, Sims writes that the 'Home Office Report' says that the English doctor had been diagnosed as a dangerous lunatci in an asylum.

Neither version does.

Mac is deceiving his pal for propagandist reasons.

Which leads me to your biggest and most redundant error, though it is as the heart of the Old Guard's foundation or shield against the hated resurrection of the Druitt theory-solution.

You write that Macnaghten only gave 'broad hints' to his cronies about his three alleged suspects.

That's just untrue.

Major Arthus Griffiths, though clearly skeptical, copied or was told verbally the salient sections of the so-called draft version and wrote them in his big book 'Mysteries of Police and Crime'.

It's almost word for word, and rhus provides textual confirmation of Chritabel Aberconway's copy (and not Loftus' alleged memory of her older brother's version, now lost).

That single para in the intro of griffiths' book caused a media sensation. Most papers repeated it verbatim. Because apparently the police had not just one good suspect, they had three. And the best was an English medical man who was so shattered over what he had done that he immediately threw himself in the Thames river!

A ghastly tale -- better a low-life foreigner -- but at least this gent did the right thing at the end. That is satisfying. The notion that he went about his business, arguing in court, playing cricket, teaching boys, would have been beyond the pale.

That would have made him 'Protean' indeed!

Just a couple of months later, in early 1899, the much more widely read Goerge Sims -- who might have been expected to scoff at this 'revelation' based on the scathing things he had written about the police in 1888 to 1891 -- confirmed the scoop.

Morover Sims added details over the years: the Ripper had definitely been the drowned doctor who was a wealthy recluse and asylum veteran. He also definitely killed himself within maybe less than an hour after Miller's Ct. because his mind was destroyed. There was just enough functionality to get to the river and hurl himself in. Otherwise he would jhave been found wandering, covered in blood and unable to speak coherenrly -- and therefore sectioned.

The police were not tipped off by the frantic frends -- they already knew due to an exhaustice inquiry. The arrest warrant had been issued; had he not dronwd himself the mad doctor would have been arrested tried and convicted (and either executed or permanently sectioned. In 1902 Sims blames the state cutbacks for having unleashed onto the streets, in 1887, this human ticking bomb!

It is a measure of Mac's slyness that he picked Sims for all this balderdash.

He must have known that Anderson would keep parroting his caged lunatic Jew theopry -- which arguably came from Mac -- that Abberline would dimiss the drowned man because he was out of the loop, that Littlechild would wonder if that was Tumblety, that Major Smith would reject such a definitive conclusion, and that Reid would hang onto Coles as the final victim, and so on.

Yet the prestige of Sims with all classes trumped them all, ironically trumped even Mac's memoirs of 1914 when he tried to throttle back on the Dr Jekyll-for-real scenario.

When both Mac and Sims died, the image of Jack-the-Surgeon, the Top Hat Toff. became both stubbornly embedded in culture and yet detached from the 'Drowned Doctor'; became immortal, to the detriment of secondary sources understabding what this was originally all about (in hindsight, Dan Farson was a disastrous choice by Christabel to assert her father's bona fides to having identified the fiend).

Therefore in terms of the public and the press, Macnaghten had engineered a public relations coup for the Yard, though it did not outlast his own death; that Sctoland Yard were about to arrest Jack and knew exactly who he was. And he had killed himself so that is some kind of rough justice,

In private, or rather at the office in the 1890's, Mac lived with the perpetual anxiety that the Druitt story could erupt out of Dorset again as it had in 1891 (and may have done so again in 1899 with the Vicar?) and so the Cutbush near-miss sufficently alarmed him to get Druitt on file. He would be somewhat submerged by being bookended with suspects he believed were not suspects at all, while concealing that he was a posthumous suspect and yet trying to square the circle he implied he was a dcotor -- and certainly was a sexual maniac. Wow, that's a Pushme-Pullu mutation!

If Asquith read this out in the Commons -- no names of course -- the Druitts would still be shielded from the press. Nobody would associate the drowned dcotor with MP Farquharson's suiidal surgeon's sonof 1891. He even gambled by having the Cutbushes related.

But he never sent it, and may hever have sent it if asked so not that much of a gamble. It was put there as insurance if the Druitt story re-emerged. Once that crisis passed he began his anaonymous campaign with the public to convince them, half-deceitfully, that the 'police' were on top of the Ripper case at the time. For example they knew at the time that Kelly was the final vcitim. This bit lasts to this day on this site and ther other one.

It did not convince everybody in the Edwardian Era, and it left several cops scratching their heads, but it worked with most for the time he was assistant Commissioner and that sufficed.

From the safety of retirement, Mac tried to concede that Jack was not know to police for years after he killed himself, he had not been in an asylum and he did not kill himself instantly after his 'awful glut'.

It didn't work. Readers did not even realise he was talking about the drowned Doctor Suepr-suspect because in a snese he wasn't. He had to debunk Sims without Sims knowing it, and it was just too difficult to bring off.

His memoirs do not even make it into a load of modern, secondary sources as they are considered so non-revelatory.

Today, seeing behind Mac's curtain -- behind the Wizard of Oz's humbug with flashes and bells -- it has inadvertently pepetuated a 'mystery' long ago solved, and discredited the cop who solved that mystery.

[Bridewell]

The problem is, we don't have a convincing link back from Mac to the family

Walter Ernest Boultbee might be the man.

[Jonathan H]

The Tory MP for West Dorset, Henry Farquharson, is much more likely than Boultbee, but I understand why that obvious connection must be sidelined here.

Mac's memoirs give the impression that there was no go-between; the 'certain facts' simply came directly from the Ripper's 'own people', leading to a 'conclusion' and a 'belief' -- though only 'some years after' Jack had killed himself.

In the veiled version of Mac's 1891 investigation (in Sims: in 1903 and 1907) the 'friends' are in direct contact with the relevant authorities, who supposedly already know and are fast closing on the 'mad doctor'.

What many do not ask themselves here is why did Macnaghten allow to have changed 'family' into 'friends' for public consumption?

[Stephen Thomas]

And yes similarities can be seen in the JFK "conspiracy loony community"

So where did the 'magic bullet' come from, Joe?

And where are the sightings of a floppy haired private school toff near the JTR murder scenes?

[Jonathan H]

There are obvious differences between the two sets of Buffs which these criminal cases have inspired.

The Jack the Ripper murders were allegedly solved by the 1890's, and this 'official' solution was shared with the public in the Edwardian Era, but this solution -- never actually official at all -- fell away with the demise of its proponents and so Whitechapel became a mystery again for amateur sleuths, starting in 1923.

That there was a major police suspect in 1888, a dodgy doctor, was forgotten in its particulars -- a flamboyant, Irish-American -- while simultaneously becoming a permanent icon of popular culture, to this day.

The longer the gap between the deaths of Sir Melville Macnaghten (and Sir Robert Anderson) the greater the misunderstanding that it was claimed and propagated that the police had solved the mystery at the time (whether they actually had, or one had and not another is a matter of on-going historical debate)

Whereas the critics of the Warren Report were investigating a crime which had, comparatively speaking, just happened.

There was also a stronger political dimension with the latter triggering amateur sleuthing, and not just because it was the murder of a US President.

This is because the Dealey Plaza Buffs were [mostly] leftists who could not believe or accept that a fellow Leftist -- albeit one who never attended meetings or marches -- had done the terrible deed, or that a Communist could have even been living in Dallas (rather than it turning out that Kennedy had been shot by a Bircher or Klansman as was initially surmised). Oswald's murder in police custody, on live TV, 'sealed the deal' for this traumatised minority that it must be a right-wing/governmental frame-up.

There were secrets the American state was concealing about Oswald. It was also concealing attempts by the CIA to kill Castro -- a potential motive for Oswald -- but the Buffs never found anything of value because they started from a false premise: Oswald was framed (apparently LBJ went to his grave believing that Castro was behind Oswald) and thus began the torturous distraction of second and third gunmen, and magical bullets and allegedly bumped-off witnesses, and so on.

Had Lady Aberconway turned over her father's 'notes' to a professional historian, one backed by the resources of a university and the time to research, he or she might have found Tumblety, at least in the US press, have found Aaron Kosminski in asylum records, have found all the Sims sources -- which show that Macnaghten routinely indulged in a-good-yarn disinformation -- and found the 'West of England' MP sources: arguably the critical bridging source.

No such historian was probably available in 1959.

In the history of so-called Ripperology, if you put to one side the hoaxers and the hustlers, there have been a small group of dedicated and serious writers and researchers who did their best, on their own time and hampered by cruelly limited resources have, over decades, found the vital sources listed above.

Whereas no Dealey Plaza Buff found much of anything of substance that the Warren Commission's lawyers had not already found (and all eventually declassified by the 1970's).

[Michael W Richards]

So where did the 'magic bullet' come from, Joe?

Hi Stephen,

On that point above, I saw a documentary a few years back and in it they explained how the Senators front passenger seat had been moved slightly in preparation for use that day...it was moved 6 inches towards the drivers seat to allow the President and First Lady easy access to climb past and into the back seat.

Moving the Senator into the path of the bullet...and so, no more magic bullet.

You would think the Warren Commission had this information though.

Its an interesting case as well....and hardly resolved to any universal satisfaction....kind reminds me of another old case ......

Cheers Stephen

[Jonathan H]

Actually GovernorJohn Connally was sitting in front of JFK, on an angle and was also wounded by the same non-magical bullet. He lived despite his wounds.

The bullet was somewhat defirmed on its side but not deformed from the top because it was tumbling out of the President, and had thus slowed and enetred the gov. sideways. That's why FBI tests fired at the bones of goats never matched, as the bullets were flattened -- the test was wrong.

But leftist buffs went in the other direction.

Yes, that does sound like another case ...

Senator Ralph Yarborough was sitting, very unhappily, two cars back with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife Lady Bird.

[Mayerling]

Hi Stephen,

On that point above, I saw a documentary a few years back and in it they explained how the Senators front passenger seat had been moved slightly in preparation for use that day...it was moved 6 inches towards the drivers seat to allow the President and First Lady easy access to climb past and into the back seat.

Moving the Senator into the path of the bullet...and so, no more magic bullet.

You would think the Warren Commission had this information though.

Its an interesting case as well....and hardly resolved to any universal satisfaction....kind reminds me of another old case ......

Cheers Stephen

Hi Stephen, Mike, Jonathan, and all,

Let's face it, like President Lincoln said (when Secretary of State Seward suggested declaring war on Great Britain in 1861, to cause a patriotic burst in the seceeded Confederacy, so that they would rejoin the Union against a common foe), "No Mr. Secretary, only one war at a time!" Would to God later Presidents (who will be nameless) had considered the wisdom of that advice.

Here, one major mystery at a time.

I am willing to see a link now and then between Jack and Whitechapel with other crimes (Doc Tumblety's link to the Lincoln Assassination; the connection with Fenian plots against the British Government from 1882 onward; the criminal careers of Bury, Deeming, Cream, Chapman, and possibly Mrs. Pearcey and even H. H. Holmes, but the connections are (if anything) only light at this point. Similarly, due to possible connections with the Irish problems, the "Parnellism and Crime" matter intrudes a little (it should - Whitechapel is in 1888, and "Parnellism and Crime" occurred in 1887-1889).

The similarities of the Kennedy Conspiracy theorists to the people on this and related web sites dealing with Whitechapel are that we have intense interest in the cases. Jack Kennedy's murder was one of a series from 1962 through 1981 (from the Medgar Evars case, to the President's, to Malcolm X's, Martin Luther King's, and Bobby Kennedy's, through the shooting of Govenor George Wallace, the attempt by Samuel Byck to kill Nixon by ramming a jet plane into the White House, the attacks on President Ford (one by "Squeaky Fromme, a desciple of Charles Manson), and the shooting of Ronald Reagan (I have left out several victims of Klan violence in the South and even a conspiracy theory regarding the killing of John Lennon).

It is quite common for conspiracy and Presidential death to be compatible.
Twenty years ago they dug up President Zachary Taylor's body to see if his sudden death in 1850 was from "Cholera Moerbus" or arsenic. In the 1850s the deaths of President William Henry Harrison, President Taylor, and a weird large fatality of guests at the Buchanan inauguration ball at the Willard Hotel were suggested to be linked to a vague poisoning plot. Then came President Lincoln, and the "Baltimore Plot" of 1861, and the assassination of the President in 1865. When Garfield was shot in 1881 his crackpot assassin Guiteau yelled he was a "Stalwart" branch Republican, and Vice President Chester Arthur was now President. Arthur was suspected for awhile of plotting against his chief. The assassination of William McKinley in 1901 was connected to Leon Czolgosz, a self-claiming anarchist. Soon it was linked to anarchist lecturer Emma Goldman (who was not connected). And later, when Warren Harding died suddenly (of a coronary thrombosis) in 1923, rumors circulated (aided by a scurrilous book by a con-man and murderer named Gaston Means) that Harding was poisoned by either his wife Florence, or by Attorney General Harry Daugherty, or committed suicide to avoid impeachment.

It is useful to see the similarities of these various crimes and the literature that they spur on. However, one major crime is sufficient. If I ever feel that there was an ancestor of Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby or Police Officer Tibbett or President Kenedy in Whitechapel in 1888 I may bring it to our attention. But it will not really require a full developement of the connection as there is seventy five years seperating Whitechapel and Dallas.

[I will only add this one connection, but it came in the 1940s. Jack Kennedy had a sister Katherine (nicknamed "Kick") who married the Marquis of Mitford Haven in 1942 or 1943. The Marquis was killed in the war, and Kick (tragically too) died in a plane crash in 1948. The Marquis was the heir to the Duke of Devonshire, so he was a member of the Cavendish clan. That meant the Kennedys had married the same family that Lord Frederick Cavendish (of the Phoenix Park Assassinations of 1882) was a member of. But since Kick's marriage was twenty years before the death of her brother Jack, and since the Phoenix Park Assassinations are only noted by us with respect to the anti-British plots by Irish Fenians in the 1880s (and the "Parnellism and Crime" investigation) this is, at best, a very weak tenuous connection to Whitechapel.]

Jeff

[Jonathan H]

The connection is arguably s state of mind, among some, that both crimes were unsolved by officialdom.

[Mayerling]

The connection is arguably s state of mind, among some, that both crimes were unsolved by officialdom.

Hi Jonathan,

True, but there was a form of closure in the Lincoln Assassination (though not without controversy about Mrs. Surratt, and Dr. Mudd, and Stanton's heavy hand approach). If you have executions and prison sentences it is not the same as no public closure with an arrest and trial or full exposure.
One can argue about who backed Booth's schemes (the Confederate Government, or Stanton in a power play, or Northern industrialists and bankers who were not ready for the war to end), but it is not the same as leaving the bulk of the public uncertain as to who committed the crimes.

Jeff

[Jonathan H]

The public between 1898 and 1917 were arguably not uncertain about who committed the Ripper crimes.

They did not know the name -- why would they, about a man who was deceased and could never be charged -- but, as Sir Melville had done anonymously and then via himself, they had been reassured that Jack's identity had been definitively ascertained.

People who actually followed all the bits and pieces would have noticed dissent among police, but in his 1913 press conference and 1914 memoirs Mac brought that to an end.

Or at least tried to.

By 1923, the case was relaunched to a new audience as a 'mystery' which the police had not solved.

The Top Hat Toff image escaped into the ether, minus the tormented self-murder.

[caz]

Hi Jonathan,

One of the arguments you make - and it's an entirely reasonable one on the surface - is that people like Farquharson, Macnaghten, Sims, Griffiths and the Druitts themselves, would surely have had a strong natural bias against "one of our own", ie the English toff, be he doctor, barrister or schoolmaster, being mixed up is such vile crimes against the poorest dregs of humanity to be found down Whitchapel way. You go on to argue that this implies they must all have been in on such devastating evidence against Druitt for the ripper murders that it was enough to overturn even the strongest natural bias. Again, that sounds reasonable enough.

But if that were the case, would there not still have been a natural reluctance to admit that an English gentleman and scholar had been this most notorious of killers? They all did a spectacular job of keeping this devastating evidence to themselves, so they had no real need to spread the word abroad that it was some posh doctor what dunnit. Yet that doesn't appear to have worried any of the Druitt fanciers, especially not Farqhi, who could have gone discreetly to the police with his embarrassing inside knowledge about a fellow English toff and let them do the rest, instead of acting like it was the best and juiciest bit of gossip he had ever come across and blabbing to the papers.

In fact, many people across all classes were more than happy to embrace the idea of a fully qualified Doctor Ripper, apart from the few in the medical profession who would have done their best to throw cold water on the very notion. So I'm not so sure that there is much evidence among the middle and upper class Druitt believers of throwing hands up in horror and keeping lips pursed, when faced with the terrible news that "one of them" was, or was likely to have been the Whitechapel whore slaughterer. On the contrary, all the blabbing, whether it be to the papers, in books and personal memoirs, or even in Mac's private memo, point to the exact opposite. None of them seem to have minded "outing a toff" in the slightest.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

I'm not saying that would make Druitt any less of a suspect, just that the 'evidence' against him may not need to have been quite so devastating in nature to make believers out of fellow English gents.

Love,

Caz
X

[Jonathan H]

To Caz

I have answered this many, many times before -- to you too -- yet you always bring this up as if I have never considered this line of counter-argument, and have never answered it.

This is the last time.

If you don't understand, that's your problem, and if you don't agree that's your right.

The Druitt family, or at least certain members, were in a frantic state between Montie's vanishing act and his body turning up a month later in the Thames. He had confessed to a clergyman -- who may or may not have been a family member too -- that he was the Ripper and, incredibly, the story checked out as true.

At the inquest William lied about when he last saw his brother, lied about him only recently becoming a part-time teacher and he lied about there being any other relations (and I suspect he made up the suicide letter too).

They all got away with it.

But there was a time-bomb.

A condition of Montie's full confession was that the truth be revealed in ten years. The clergyman insisted to the family -- and may have been a family member himself -- that this would have to be done; the mentally ill Montie's wish would have to be honoured as a matter of honour.

But in 1891 the secret prematurely leaked out of Dorset (where cousin Charles, a Vicar resided) and was picked up by the loose-lipped Tory MP. He told his ten best friends and it, inevitably, leaked to the press. The murder of Coles and the arrest of Sadler a few days later did nothing to cause any doubt in Farquharson's mind. When he was confronted by a reporter he said he remained adamant.

The story was about to go Supernova, especially once Sadler was discharged.

Instead it was still-born.

I believe because Melville Macnaghten conferred with Old Etonian Farquharson told him to shut up, as the story had very embarrassing implications for the already dented image of the Yard -- and could cause problems for the Tory Party.

The Chief Constable then privately met with William Druitt, and perhaps the clergyman too.

With every conceivable bias to debunk this unlikely tale of a surgeon's son -- and to exonerate a chappie in no position to enjoy the prtoection of due process -- Macnaghten instead also 'believed'.

Mac also discovered that the cleric was going to release the story in 1899, the anniversary of Montie's burial. As was his managerial style he effected a compromise: release the story if you must but not the whole story (eg. omit Dorset and his suicide) and claim it is a mixture of fact and fiction by changing the title from Whitechapel to 'Whitechurch'. The clergyman agreed and may have even created a buffer by having yet another cleric, who was not a family member, release the story.

Since a fictional shield was going to be deployed later by the family, Macnaghten had the idea that he would so too if the need arose and the Yard needed protecting. Otherwise he would committ nothing to file.

The Cutbush tabloid story of 1894 inspired Mac to prepare for the entire story to surface out of Dorset again if the Clergyman felt the need to exonerate the madman mentioned in the papers. He made a report which had included fictional elements that Druitt might have been a doctor, but was a suspect at the time of the murders --and definitely was a sexual maniac. It's just that the police did not have enough evidence to arrest him, and so on.

Mac also threw in minor suspects who could not be the Ripper but would look good read out in the Commons (bloody Slavic swine!) and he even experimented with making Cutbush related to a retired policeman to make it appear to be some kind of lawdry, personal vendetta against a family tragedy.

But Cutbush story died and he never sent it. But he did file it just in case, so that it could be said that Druitt, if the story all came spilling out, was a police suspect in 1888/9 -- which he most certainly wasn't.

In 1895 there was another potential crisis over William Grant. He might have been arrested as the fiend and the cleric might be moved to surface. Instead Mac gave Anderson (and Swanson) Druitt, but dressed up as 'Kosminski', eg. a suspect lond dead who had been protected by his family-tribe. Sure enough Anderson began telling people about how he had identified the Ripper.

In 1898, as the 'North Country Vicar' prepared to release his 'substnatial truth in fictitious form' Macnaghten ruthlessly quashed the clerical tale in the 'Drowned Doctor' vice either end of the Jan story with Griffiths and Sims. His cronies were told that they were accessing a definitive 'Home Office Report' and the Major remained sceptical while Sims was totally credulous.

It was actually the 1894 report, never sent. sexed-up for the writers: Druitt was a middle-aged doctor; Kosminski had maybe been seen by a beat cop; Ostrog carried surgical knives (by then Ostrog had been exonerated, officially, but he was too juicy to let go).

The critical factor was Sims saying the Vicar was wrong because the real Jack was not compos nor had the time to confess anything to anybody. Whereas the real Druitt did.

Furthermore, the police according to Sims, were about to arrest the mad surgeon, eg. it was a very close run thing.

And the Mac Offensive could not have worked better.

The Vicar's tale was instantly forgotten while Sims' profile would be the consolidation of the top hat toff with medical bag.

With Sims, and as Mac became Assistant Commissioner for CID in 1903 -- with the coast clear so to speak -- he indulged in further elaboration about the Ripper via Sims, all fictitious. For example in 1910 Sims will claim that the 'Report' states that the doctor had been sectioned in an asylum as a homicidal lunatic with a fixation on savaging harlots. Neither version says that. It is just another example of Mac's reshaping the data for polemical reasons.

In 1913 and 1914 Mac tried to establish that the Ripper's identity was his discovery, and not Anderson's -- the 'secret' had 'come to me' -- and 'that remrakable man' was not a suspect for years, had not killed himself instantly after his 'awful glut', that he was 'Protean' and had never been 'detained' in an asylum (yet Mac had to be careful not to tip off Sims that he had bee peddling fiction too).

Ironically the pop profile proved much too strong -- because Mac was too austere mentioning neither doctor nor drowned -- and thus the tormented Ripper who took his own life gave way in the 1920's to the omnipotent top hat toff who was never caught. never identified and who just vanished into the fog ...

What you will never get is that when the next generation of researchers in the 1920's tried to find the drowned doctor he did not seem to exist (because he didn't, literally) and therefore Druitt remianed unrecoevrable without the exact name.

This was true from 1891 to 1959. Once the name was dound then the drowned not-a-doctor was found. Farson, knowing little of Macngahten and without the time to find out, assumed that the police chief had a memory malfunction.

This was always a ludicrous and unlikely theory if you knew anything about this police chief. That 'Aberconway' was a but one link in a chain of sources in which Druitt was being both revealed and concealed was not even considered.

Yet that is what all the sources by Sims, a Mac-source-by-proxy, teaches us: the Druitts were being hidden.

This was fortutious for them, wasn't it? Just by accident? a police chief renowned for his amazing memory screws it all up regarding the case which he was obsessed.

How lucky for them ...?

But surely it is much more likey it was by design (eg. we can see 'family' changed into 'friends' in Griffiths and Sims) by Mac's design who is deceitful not forgetful.

He would argue he was simply being discreet, but he is also being a deft propagandist.

Remarkably Mac's long redundant Jack-the-Surgeon ruse misleads people like yourself to this day.

That is my interpretation, for what it is worth, of the limited and contradictory fragments currently available to us.

[caz]

Hi Jonathan,

Apologies for the delay in replying - real life intervened.

What I do 'get' is what you admit yourself: that this is your interpretation of the limited source materials. If the known facts had proven your interpretation to be correct, I doubt you'd be wasting time on a message board trying to convince the likes of me.

One of your arguments in support of Druitt as ripper is that those who believed it at the time must have had extremely sound reasons for so doing, in order to overcome a strong natural bias against suspecting 'one of their own' of these heinous crimes. Naturally, such arguments would be entirely redundant if you could simply cite the evidence they had access to, and if it was indeed far more than proof's shadow, but we both know that's not going to happen. In the above post I can't see where you directly addressed my point that I have seen nothing to suggest that the likes of Farquhi and co would have been remotely reluctant about pointing the finger at someone of Druitt's standing and class as a matter of principle or bias, nor that they only did so because they felt morally forced by the evidence to concede it must be true. On the contrary, it was all Farquhi could do to stop himself from shouting his solution from the rooftops, and one has to wonder how strong his evidence could have been, if it was second, third or fourth hand by the time the whispers reached his ears.

Love,

Caz
X