Druitt family

[Tammy Green]

I second your post Paul!

Lots of facts have gone missed from this case, at least Jonathan is trying to fill in between those huge spaces , and not throwing a totaly unrelated suspect.

Druitt is a part of this historical case, and it deserves to look upon him in depth, maybe at last we can understand why did he became the suspect of choice of a major Police chef at the time, whether he was the ripper or not.

We need researchers like him, didn't you notice how he dismissed Lionel Druitt story (which supports the candidacy of M Druitt as the ripper) by pointing that it had been a mixed between Druitt and Deeming!

With respect!

Tammy!

[Tammy Green]

Isn't it possible he simply mistyped D for T ?

I think its worth considering.

Sorry Howard, that cannot be the case, I may make a mistake when I am writing a name, but when I want to point to a person using only the first letter of his name, there cannot be a chance for such a fault.

Thank you

Tammy

[Sam Flynn]

Isn't it possible he simply mistyped D for T ?

Tricky on a QWERTY keyboard, I'd have thought, How. I wondered whether such keyboards had been invented at that point, and they certainly had been; 1868 to be precise.

Here's a Victorian typewriter that might have been made for ripperology:

[Paul Butler]

Do we know if Littlechild was typing himself, or possibly dictating to someone else like a secretary? Mixing up the letters would be plausible if the latter, although it would mean his proof reading was a bit rubbish.

[Cris Malone]

Sorry Howard, that cannot be the case, I may make a mistake when I am writing a name, but when I want to point to a person using only the first letter of his name, there cannot be a chance for such a fault.

I agree, Tammy. Otherwise, Littlechild's complete statement "I never heard of a Dr D. in connection with the Whitechapel murders but amongst the suspects, and to my mind a very likely one, was a Dr. T. (which sounds much like D.) "
would make little sense.

And... welcome back to the fray, Jonathan.

[Adam Went]

Hi all,

Tammy:

I am reluctant to speak too much about Levy at this point in time, as my friend Tracy I'anson will be doing a presentation on him at the Ripper conference in London later this year.

Suffice to say that a number of connections have been made between major people and places involved in the Ripper case, and Levy. He ticks quite a number of the boxes, and in my opinion is the best suspect of the past 20-30 years.

You need not be concerned about the GSG as the Ripper didn't write that. If we're comparing Druitt to Levy, then yes, there's a heap more facts (as opposed to hypothesis) which bring Levy closer to the case than Druitt - but that could be said for most suspects, as Macnaghten aside, there's nothing substantial on Druitt at all.

I am sorry to be so vague, but if you want to know more about Levy then you really are best served to follow Tracy's postings.

Anna:

I think it is possible that this "Mad Jewish" suspect could also be something of a hybrid between a few different contemporary suspects, just as the "Drowned Doctor" suspect we've been talking about on here is probably likewise.

Jonathan:

So, you agree that there are no equivalent families to the Druitts accusing each other of being the Fiend. And you have no answer to the question about accidental or deliberate disguise?


No, what I said was that the belief at the time was that the suspect was from the dregs of society and most likely mad. Such beliefs spread like wildfire and that is why you have so many stories about different suspects ("so and so saw this person") in the press at the time. Plenty of middle class suspects have arisen since 1888, but this question of whether they were suspected by friends or family is a nonsense one. How would we know? There's not even any proof that this was the case with Druitt - you're just believing hearsay.

The Lionel Druitt story does not date from the Late Victorian Era but from the 1960's when Daniel Farson mis-recalled a story about Deeming. Lionel Druitt has nothing to do with this and never did.

Agreed. He is an interesting character in his own right however, and provides a good insight into the overall mentality and attitudes of the Druitt clan. At the same time as his cousin was allegedly ripping women apart in London, Lionel was debating in the press about the differences between sewerage systems in London and Australia. Go figure.

Or, so I claim from my padded cell.

I don't claim to know what other posters have said to you over the journey, but the thing is, Jonathan, that if you're going to spearhead such an outlandish theory, then you need to be prepared to defend yourself and your arguments and not bemoan the nasty nature of Ripperologists every time somebody questions you.

This is the problem with suspect-based research. You run the risk of viewing everything that comes up in terms of "how does this fit in with my suspect?" rather than viewing it objectively. I've mentioned before how i've very rarely seen you post on any subject within Ripperology unless it involves Druitt in some capacity.

As it is, you've dodged a number of the points I raised in my last post. But allow me to ask just one more question: Do you genuinely believe that if, hypothetically, Montague had died in December 1889 instead of December 1888, for instance, that he would still be the suspect that he is today? Or would he never have been mentioned in relation to the case at all?

Paul:

Rarely, if ever, have I been tempted to post anything on a Druitt thread, my abiding interest being in the diary. Being that sort of masochist I know what it's like when a perfectly good and plausible theory is shouted down by the mob who have little or nothing useful to add beyond their own prejudices.

I'm not sure who this is aimed at, but I for one have always attempted to be respectful towards Jonathan, even though I thoroughly disagree with his position on Druitt. So for me, it's not about rubbishing the theory, it's about holding it accountable against what i've listed before - known facts and reasonable assumptions.

Because those pesky, annoying facts just get in the way of a good story, don't they? So just to recap in Druitt's case:

- There is no motive (aside from a beat up story of mania)
- There is no criminal record / no history of violence
- No proof that he was anywhere near any of the murder sites; indeed the cricket game at Blackheath indicates the opposite
- Doesn't fit the majority of witness descriptions of a man of "foreign appearance"
- Was not suspected by any of the known police officers who were actually involved in the original investigation, during or after 1888
- Despite all these stories of mania and the like, he maintained a busy work and sporting life right until the end, and nobody every came forward to say "well he was acting a little bit odd..."

But yes, apart from all that, he's a great suspect! Those things are all facts. The case against Druitt is built out of hearsay. Again, if it makes me a nasty poster for pointing out these inconvenient truths, then so be it.

Yes, I too have been intrigued to read Jonathan's theories over the years. But I for one am here to discuss those facts and reasonable assumptions (Occam's Razor) - not fantastic stories. If I want one of those i'll go and read a Dan Brown novel, or something.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Jonathan Hainsworth]

Thanks Paul and Tammy and Cris!

All the best to the three of you.

Aside to Tammy: Macnaghten wrote that the [un-named] Druitt definitely wrote the graffiti, and I think that is probably true.

To Adam - relax, mate, they are not talking about you.

I was recently accused of being mentally ill in a public forum. How would you respond to that, Adam? I have seen you give as good as you get. I am sorry to say that you are buried deep in the bosom of Buff-dom to call my theory "outlandish" (which according to you means I deserve to be abused). Druitt was disguised for public consumption. It is, to use your favorite word, "a pesky fact". But was it deliberate or by accident? That is not an outlandish question to ask because it must be one or the other.

Occam's Razor would say that the odds against it being an accident or a coincidence are pretty high. The shorter, simpler answer is that it was by design, and, sure enough, we can see it happening because "family" in the memo(s) was changed to "friends" for Griffiths' book. We know that this was not a lone accident, because if Macnaghten had thought that Griffiths had made a mistake he would have made sure that Sims did not repeat it. Instead, Sims has the brother, William, searching for his missing sibling under the same layer of disguise: the friends searching for the mad doctor who has vanished from the place in which he was residing (a detail not in P.C. Moulson's Report, nor in the memo(s)).

Those are very pesky facts. Macnaghten wrote family, and Griffiths turned this into friends. The 1889 Chiswick source has the brother searching for his vanished brother and the friends in Sims are searching for their vanished pal. That's a textual match. How did Macnaghten and Sims know that? Or how about, since Mac was meticulous, how could he not know that?

The question is, Adam, can you face the facts you don't like. Or will you always party like it's 2007?

Your fall-back position that my theory is all over your head, anyhow, is a strange one. For how can you be so sure you are correct, if you so blithely admit you don't understand the whole picture?

And it's a bit rich that I am expected to answer your questions when you refuse point blank to answer mine.

The short answer is: no, it would make absolutely no difference when Druitt committed suicide as to his becoming, not just a suspect, but the solution for a number of people who lived at the time. Some of them knew him personally or were members of his own family; his own people.

The longer answer is: that the Whitechapel murders lasted between mid-1888 and early 1891. As Macnaghten admitted in his 1914 memoir, the timing of the un-named Druitt's suicide did not fit with the perception by the police, press and public, e.g. that all the murders between those two dates were by the same maniac called "Jack The Ripper" by a hoax letter.

Your constant returning to the propagandist memo(s) timeline, of a short "autumn of terror", rather than the protracted contemporaneous perception is so 1913. You are being fooled by Mac's "awful glut" spin, e.g. that the police knew that Kelly was the last victim of a particular killer at the time it happened. You are not alone in this error. Nearly every secondary source falls for it too.

In 1914 Macnaghten admitted that the autumn-terror-timeline was just not true. What really happened was that information arrived "some years after" the Kelly atrocity, about a minor suspect who had taken his own life in 1888, and it proved to be decisive and definitive.

Why? Because "certain facts" about what the the killer's "own people" informed Macnaghten was known only to the police and to The Ripper. Macnaghten would have done just about anything for the Druitts to be wrong. For example, he could have pointed out that there were subsequent Jack murders after Montie's suicide. But it cut no ice with either the family or the police chief (and others in-the-know). Instead Mac agreed, and had to come up with ways of creating a soft-landing for his friend Majendie, for the Druitts and for the Yard.

That's not "hearsay", Adam. Not from their point of view. Which is not our point of view and never can be. All we can do is make a judgement about the credibility of those people making the claims that they do.

Orthodoxy says Mac is rubbish. My interpretation is that he was well-informed and reliable.

Don't try and wriggle out of it. At first, you wrote that the Druitts were just like other families of the day - you described them as practically legion - who suspected or accused a family member for no good reason.

But no other family is so establishment-prestigious, and no other family has a police chief in their corner agreeing with them, along with some other toffs who are not family members.

I would just add that Montague Druitt, based on his last high school photos, is a very good, generic likeness for Joseph Lawende's Jack-the Sailor. Hutchinson's description would certainly fit a Druitt-in-disguise. A witness, probably Lawende again, reportedly identified William Grant as the man he saw chatting with Eddowes. And Grant also resembles Druitt.

So Druitt is a good fit for the best eyewitness description: a Gentile, about 30, of medium build, with a fair mustache.

What Ripper Orthodoxy does to obscure this obvious and inconvenient fact is to throw all the witness descriptions into the mix and say that he is not a good fit (who could be?) as he was not foreign, or not something else.

But the police did not use a parade of witnesses, they used Lawende, apparently, in 1891 (Tom Sadler: no) and 1895 (William Grant: yes). Therefore the latter suspect, the one who resembles Druitt, maybe got a confirmation from the best witness - best because the timing between seeing the victim and finding the victim's body is so tight.

There is no such thing as "suspectology" or "Ripperology". These are made-up terms by and for hobbyists. Like "experts" who believe "mutes" (cattle "mutilations") are by aliens, and are called "Mutologists". It is not that they do not want the Ripper case solved, rather that it is unbearable to contemplate that it may have been solved at the time and the solution [broadly] shared with the public (this historical line also applies to those believe Anderson's Polish madman to to be the solution).

There are not "suspect" books, just books about the crimes and times of Jack-the-Ripper, authors who perceive the case differently - often very differently.

And people can change their minds.

Which is what I did a decade ago when I thought the primary sources pointed most strongly towards Dr Tumblety, and then my interpretation and my understanding of the material - rightly or wrongly - turned me towards Druitt, because I realized that the Orthodox 'fact' that Macnaghten was mis-informed was fundamentally flawed, even untenable.

[Paul Butler]

I do wonder how the suggestion that self important senior establishment figures of the day, like Mac, dressing up facts for public consumption could be described as "outlandish". More like "commonplace" I should think.

I like Jonathan's theory. It makes sense of quite a few of the known facts of the case, and the suggestion that Druitt's family probably suspected him of being Jack doesn't mean they were right of course.

The problem with your "pesky facts" Adam, is that they are rather selective and could be used to argue against any number of other suspects besides Druitt.

[Jonathan Hainsworth]

Spot on, Paul!

And you make an astute observation that people can believe all sorts of things - passionately, sincerely and literally - and still be quite mistaken.

I would just add that I don't think Macnaghten would have wanted to believe, posthumously, in Druitt's guilt. It was such a headache; personal and bureaucratic - as his memoir offers a glimpse of. Why commit to it if you could wriggle out of it by simply dismissing the evidence as unproven, as nothing more than delusional.

Adam says that Druitt made for a great suspect, story-wise. Well, maybe. But not from Mac's point of view at the time. He admitted in 1914 that they had a few facts about this suspect in 1888, but "certain facts" arrived years later which elevated him to the likely solution.

What a debacle, at least in terms of public relations - Mac's obsession.

[Abby Normal]

I agree, Tammy. Otherwise, Littlechild's complete statement "I never heard of a Dr D. in connection with the Whitechapel murders but amongst the suspects, and to my mind a very likely one, was a Dr. T. (which sounds much like D.) "
would make little sense.

And... welcome back to the fray, Jonathan.

Hi Chris and Tammy
Agree.
Chris, Good catch. And not only that, dr. D was probably in reference to druitt to begin with.

[Abby Normal]

Thank you Jonathan for the excellent post.

Then when Druitt's own respectful family suspected him of being nothing other than Jack the ripper back then, who are we after 130 years and without all the informations they had , not to suspect him too ?!

I don't have a suspect by the way, but when a respectful family like Druitt's introduce one of their members to me as being Jack, I find myself automatically suspecting him too, until of course they are doing that for fame and glory, which is completely not the case here.

When I look at Druitt's photos, I could swear this is not a face of a killer, but then again, wasn't that also the victim's feelings when they accompanied their killer to the last spot ? Didn't Kelly allow him to enter her room and sleep on her only bed ?! I find the man described by Hutchinson a perfect match to Druitt with the information we still have in hand.

If his family suspected him, we MUST suspect him too.

Am I totaly out of track here?!

Thanks!
Tammy

Hi Tammy
The provenance with druitt being the ripper starts with McNaughtons statement.
Which was:

From private information I have I have little doubt that his own family suspected this man of being the WC murderer..


To me it sounds like he heard from someone who told him that Druitts family thought this, not that he heard it directly from a family member.

So hearsay and rumor perhaps?

[Jonathan Hainsworth]

To Tammy

That is true: the line is meant to be read as I heard this from somebody who knew the family - or read it in a file.

Then you have to ask: what is the purpose of the source, who is it written for, what potential danger or troubles does it pose to the person who wrote it or to the institution for which they work?

I argue that Macnaghten had a motive to put some bureaucratic distance between himself and his own belief in the Druitt solution.

Then you have to step back and measure this source against other sources, which claim that the chief did confer with the family directly, and a judgment of the person writing it. Are they the type who would settle for hearsay or rumor, or secondhand claims that could damage the Yard?

In my opinion that trail leads to one conclusion: Of course Mac conferred directly with family members. Wild horses could not have stopped him.

[Jonathan Hainsworth]

Another way of looking at it is that the Macnaghten Report(s) is the first time that M. J. Druitt is named as a Jack the Ripper suspect (official version) or likely Jack the Ripper solution (Draft or Rewrite version). That's true for sure.

But it is not the first time that Druitt enters the extant record as the solution to the case, albeit un-named.

This earlier source, arguably, torpedoed the paradigm - always a shaky one - of Montague Druitt being named wrongly by Macnaghten simply because the chief was under-informed and inattentive, or even just made it up:

"The Bristol Times and Mirror" Feb 11th 1891:

"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."

Whether by accident or by design - I argue the latter - Druitt was being disguised by the MP, because the bits here are partially factual (a surgeon's son who killed himself, suffered from mania) and partially fictional (blood-stained clothes, committed suicide immediately). Why do this? Partly I think because the Ripper was the deceased nephew of a very prestigious and also deceased physician - and because of the libel laws which the reporter mentions fearfully.

Two days later on Feb 13th 1891 Frances Coles was murdered by what was perceived by most at the time as the same Whitechapel killer as of the previous victims. Therefore the MP's "doctrine" was surely discredited. Apparently interviewed directly the MP was having none of that and his position remained adamantine.

"The York 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 ...he maintains that the latest crime cannot be the author of the previous series of atrocities..."

In 2008 the MP was identified from an 1892 source, "The Western Mail" of Feb 26th 1892. An article which asserted confidently that the MP must be completely wrong because the police were, allegedly, trailing a living prime suspect and an arrest was, allegedly, imminent:

"Mr. Farquharson, M.P. for West Dorset, was credited, I believe, some time since with evolving a remarkable theory of his own on the matter. He believed that the author of the outrages destroyed himself..."

Born the same year as Montie Druitt, 1857, Henry Richard Farquharson died young in 1895 from natural causes. He was a backbench, Tory MP, a wealthy landowning squire, an Old Etonian - like Macnaghten - and lived less than ten miles from the Druitts in Dorset.

This source was the greatest breakthrough in the case, historically speaking, since the Aberconway Papers named the likeliest suspect. The MP was one of the sources of Macnaghten's second stream of information about a minor Whitechapel suspect who in the first stream was nobody important and who was, furthermore, wrongly believed to be, or "said to be ..." a doctor, or "young doctor", or "medical student" (Abberline, 1903).

Guess who told the cops that lie?

The MP source is the bridge between the Mac Report(s) and the laudatory obits about the drowned barrister in 1889. It is the source both Tom Cullen and Dan Farson needed to find but they settled for damaging nonsense instead (the former elevated a pitiful hoax, and the latter a memory malfunction, as the missing bridging source).

[Adam Went]

Hi all,

Jonathan:

I was recently accused of being mentally ill in a public forum. How would you respond to that, Adam? I have seen you give as good as you get. I am sorry to say that you are buried deep in the bosom of Buff-dom to call my theory "outlandish" (which according to you means I deserve to be abused). Druitt was disguised for public consumption. It is, to use your favorite word, "a pesky fact". But was it deliberate or by accident? That is not an outlandish question to ask because it must be one or the other.

I seem to have some vague recollection of you once stating that you had presented my arguments to a group of your pupils, who had - surprisingly - sided with you on the argument. Mocking me when i'm not even able to defend my arguments. You're so wound up in your own theory that you couldn't even get Abby's name correct in response to her! But let's not get tied up in the past, shall we?

Can you please point out where I said you deserve to be abused? What I said was, you need to be prepared to defend your theories. If somebody has played the man and not the ball and you feel aggrieved by it, ignore it, report it to the moderators, do whatever you have to do. But dragging it from one forum to another or one topic to another isn't achieving anything and only gets us off track.

Those are very pesky facts. Macnaghten wrote family, and Griffiths turned this into friends. The 1889 Chiswick source has the brother searching for his vanished brother and the friends in Sims are searching for their vanished pal. That's a textual match. How did Macnaghten and Sims know that? Or how about, since Mac was meticulous, how could he not know that?

The question is, Adam, can you face the facts you don't like. Or will you always party like it's 2007?

Then let me ask you this. IF the family was in possession of incriminating information about Montague and IF they didn't say anything until after the fact - say, until they spoke to Macnaghten when or after he came to his position in 1889 - would they not then legally be doing something akin to perverting the course of justice?

I can somewhat understand why the need for secrecy if the man couldn't be brought to justice anyway, but it's a different ball game if they knew something when Montague was still alive but choose to say nothing until long after he had died? Bearing in mind that Monague lived for at least another two months after the Double Event. That's quite a time lapse!

Your fall-back position that my theory is all over your head, anyhow, is a strange one. For how can you be so sure you are correct, if you so blithely admit you don't understand the whole picture?

By keeping it simple. By sticking to the facts and removing the hearsay. When you do that there's a whole bunch of the theory that you can just cancel out, lest you over-complicate something that really should be fairly easy to work out.

Your constant returning to the propagandist memo(s) timeline, of a short "autumn of terror", rather than the protracted contemporaneous perception is so 1913. You are being fooled by Mac's "awful glut" spin, e.g. that the police knew that Kelly was the last victim of a particular killer at the time it happened. You are not alone in this error. Nearly every secondary source falls for it too.

In 1914 Macnaghten admitted that the autumn-terror-timeline was just not true. What really happened was that information arrived "some years after" the Kelly atrocity, about a minor suspect who had taken his own life in 1888, and it proved to be decisive and definitive.


Well, no, we all know that the original belief was that the murders were grouped together until 1891. But of course Macnaghten didn't come into the picture with his Druitt theory until after that anyway, with the benefit of hindsight.

There's any number of suspects who only became 'suspects' following their death, incarceration for other crimes / insanity, etc.

I would just add that Montague Druitt, based on his last high school photos, is a very good, generic likeness for Joseph Lawende's Jack-the Sailor. Hutchinson's description would certainly fit a Druitt-in-disguise. A witness, probably Lawende again, reportedly identified William Grant as the man he saw chatting with Eddowes. And Grant also resembles Druitt.

So Druitt is a good fit for the best eyewitness description: a Gentile, about 30, of medium build, with a fair mustache.


If they're the photos I think you're referring to, they were taken about a decade before the Ripper murders. Do we have a clear description of what Montague looked like in 1888? Surely he must have been in some cricket photos or something?

Hutchinson? Really? I mean I think there's some truths in his testimony but such an elaborate description has to be somewhat exaggerated under the circumstances in which he had the sighting.

Truth is, there are plenty of conflicting statements on the description of the Ripper. Some of them probably weren't even the Ripper given that these women were, for the most part anyway, soliciting themselves. But if the composite image is anything to go by, or even vaguely close, then Druitt it most definitely is not.

I have tried, Jonathan, to answer all of the salient points in your posts, but I would be here until Christmas if I was to try and respond to everything, and as i've said before it would achieve nothing because it is YOUR theory. I haven't deliberately dodged any of your arguments and i'm sorry if you think this is the case. If there's a list of questions you'd like me to respond to as opposed to reading between the lines, then by all means, post them up.

Paul:

The problem with your "pesky facts" Adam, is that they are rather selective and could be used to argue against any number of other suspects besides Druitt.

I would argue that if you compare Druitt to any of the other major suspects, no matter how poor the cases against them may be, at least they have something going for them. They lived in the area, they had a history of violence, they were suspected by somebody involved in the case, etc etc. Druitt, on the other hand, has NOTHING going for him at all in regards to any of those things. The entire case against him is built out of supposition and hearsay, having been given publicity by Macnaghten who was about as far away from London as you can get in 1888.

In fact, if his sporting commitments are anything to go by, then there's arguably more reason for him not being the Ripper than anything. He's one of the few suspects who we can sort of track with any degree of confidence, given how busy his life must have been.

So the facts are not "selective" at all - they are simply the most basic of known facts which any suspect, new or old, should he measured against when deciding whether they're a serious candidate or not.

Abby:

To me it sounds like he heard from someone who told him that Druitts family thought this, not that he heard it directly from a family member.

So hearsay and rumor perhaps?

Absolutely.

The other thing is that, reading between the lines, i'm not convinced that Druitt was particularly close to his family. When his father died in 1885, most of his estate was left to the other children and Montague, in comparison, missed out. His mother then went into an asylum, and Montague himself, as his suicide note shows, was obviously concerned about the genetic possibilities of insanity. It took some time before anyone seriously wondered where Montague had got to after he disappeared (a full two weeks, maybe more, had passed before he was taken out of his official roles at the Blackheath cricket club, assumed to have gone away, not having met any harm) which again indicates that he probably didn't have too many close relationships with anyone who was checking up on him and his welfare.

So was there some bad blood? Most families, if we're honest, have that to some degree. I won't pretend to have any idea why that would be the case, but my concern is, was Montague close enough to any of his family members in 1888 for them to even be able to comment on his mental state or his likelihood of being JTR? And if such comments were ever made - and that is a huge IF - were they borne out of that bad blood as opposed to any definitive information which has close family / associates were actually in possession of? The whole thing is highly questionable given the circumstances, I think.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Jonathan Hainsworth]

The problem is, Adam, that you are so wound up in your own theory, of Druitt's innocence, that you have missed the boat on this debate completely.

I was addressing Tammy because that new poster is following this debate closely - unlike your good self - and so another's posting, and my subsequent counter-point was addressed as such.

I could equally ask you: why are you only having a go at me - your usual whipping boy - when others, like Tammy, don't agree with you? In case you missed it, on May 10th 2018 Paul Butler, who also does not agree with you - but is not accepting that Druitt was actually the Fiend either which is fine by me and always has been - wrote this to you, matey:

"I do wonder how the suggestion that self important senior establishment figures of the day, like Mac, dressing up facts for public consumption could be described as "outlandish". More like "commonplace" I should think.

I like Jonathan's theory. It makes sense of quite a few of the known facts of the case, and the suggestion that Druitt's family probably suspected him of being Jack doesn't mean they were right of course.

The problem with your "pesky facts" Adam, is that they are rather selective and could be used to argue against any number of other suspects besides Druitt."


Plus I was actually defending you, Adam, in an Aussie/blokey way, but, oh well, you have missed that too. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.

Your response about the Macnaghten memo is especially weak. Your summary of what the police knew between 1888 and 1891 does not match either document. You are so confused you are actually making my point and then bashing me over the head with it. It's like you can't take yes for answer?

It doesn't affect my respect and affection for you, because I think you are the sort of person who needs a face-to-face dialogue to comprehend what's going on - and that's probably true of all of us, to one degree or another, in this limiting and distorting age of social media.

What you are only "vaguely recalling" is that your very first responses to me and my theory, way back when, were so ugly and so personal that my students noticed it and followed it. They found your manners, or lack of them, the shocker, more so than the argument and counter-argument. You were posting in a public forum, e.g. it was not private correspondence, so people had a right to read it. In effect, you "mocked" yourself.

But you ask, nevertheless, a very potent and important question. A bit like the classic Watergate question by Senator Howard Baker re: Nixon's complicity - What did the President know and when did he know it?

I think that William Druitt and Vicar Charles Druitt knew, for a fact, that Montague was The Ripper before he killed himself, as he had confessed, and it was lucid. Once he was deceased they were still in a perilous position because of that element, and because they could not let an innocent man go to the gallows. Sadler's arrest I think put them under great pressure, and this fits with Macnaghten writing from retirement that the second stream of bombshell information about this initially minor suspect arrived some years after his suicide.

Based on further research I also now think that the Crawford Letter and the Farquharson "doctrine" were both caused by attempts of certain Druitts to have their cake and eat it too: how do we make sure that nobody goes down for Montie's crimes whilst protecting our clan - our name - from social ruin?

These efforts failed miserably as I think Anderson tried to convince the female he met - who with-held her name as she had an aristocratic go-between - that the monster was still at large. To what must have been their abject horror, the MP was so excited at knowing Jack's identity - and he had met the killer - that he went ahead and blabbed to his friends in London (though at least Farquharson had initiated the mixing fact and fiction as a precaution against libel).

By a wonderful stroke of luck the Druitt family was then approached by a police chief who was quite different from other Scotland Yard detectives or administrators: upper class, an Old Etonian, public relations-obsessed, and a compassionate gent - Melville Macnaghten. One who, furthermore, had his own vested interest in making sure that the whole truth never came out. Mac's close friend at the Home Office, Colonel Vivian Majendie, was inconveniently connected by a marriage to the Druitt clan.

That's one of those pesky facts too, not hearsay or rumour.

Or, are we to believe that we know of this connection (only since 2015) to the Druitts but Macnaghten and Col. Majendie (and their mutual pal, George Sims) did not know?

Occam's Razor would say that this is extremely unlikely. That of course they knew and, as you would expect, they acted upon that knowledge.