How Are The Mighty Fallen

[Phil Carter]

"Criminal Reform" 1904.

Hello Mike,

Indeed it is. I just came across this from 28th December1904 from the same source. It has the title "Criminal Reform" I found this interesting and relates to Sir Robert Anderson's views on criminals. Apologies to all if seen before.

best wishes

Phil

[Steven Russell]

Surely, Macnaghten's reference to the truth lying at the bottom of the Thames is a clear indictment of Druitt? While I do not believe MJD was the Ripper, it seems to me that Macnaghten certainly might have.

Best wishes,

Steve.

[The Good Michael]

Steven,

But it seems that Mac found Druitt to be a convenient answer so far after the fact. There is no real evidence that he knew anything.

Mike

[Steven Russell]

Steven,

But it seems that Mac found Druitt to be a convenient answer so far after the fact. There is no real evidence that he knew anything.

Mike

I agree. All I am saying is that the "bottom of the Thames" comment clearly refers to Druitt, an assertion which previous posters have disputed.

Best wishes,

Steve.

[Jonathan H]

Actually Montie Druitt was not a convenient suspect, he was extremely INCONVENIENT, because the excruciating implication was that the police had been chasing a phantom for over two years -- and covering themselves with egg over Sadler mere days after the real, very dead, Ripper surfaced in the 'West of England MP' titbit.

This is what is meant by Macnaghten's chaptyer title: 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper', about which -- so far as I know -- nobody has ever, ever commented on the meaning of this allusive title

Being such an inconvenient suspect generated the need of Mac to redact Druitt BACK INTO THE 1888 investigation, via Griffiths and Sims, disguised as a real-life Dr Jekyll.

Mac came close to admitting all this was fiction in his memoirs, not that some people on these Boards will read, or re-read them.

Perhaps that is Mac's ultimate comeuppance?

These cliches which swirl around RipperLand are just so hopeless, so lame, so dogmatic, and removed from common sense, except, of course, that they are a way of not facing 'the unbearable'; that it could be the original suspect after all.

Macnaghten had no reason to choose Druitt and every reason to exonerate a fellow Gentile Gentleman, to rescue him perhaps from hysterical family gossip.

It's possible that Mac was a dunderhead who let himself be fooled by his old Etonian pal Farquharson, another dunderhead.

Yes, that is possible.

Macnaghten may have thought he knew what he was talking about, but he didn't.

Yes, that's certainly possible.

But what so many people here cannot deal with is that the opposite is possible too.

That Macnaghten had in MP Henry Farquharson a source who knew perfectly well who Montie Druitt was, and what he had done for a living, and his correct age, and so on.

Here was a politician who could have uniquely believed that Jack the Ripper had voted for him?

Therefore, the police chief may have known everything. He may have seen evidence, from the Druitt family, which overwhelmed his own prejudice against the Ripper being 'one of us', and which he later destroyed.

That's possible TOO.

But for some people here that the entire amateur inquiry could be turn full circle back to what ... 1965, then back to 1959, and before that 1898 when the un-named Druitt first appeared before the public, in garbled form, and then to 1891 when the case was solved to the satisfaction of the Deputy Head of CID, later the Assistant Commissioner. One, unlike Anderson, who was never associated in the public mind with the police failure, and thus with no known axe to grind, and nothing to prove.