Montague Druitt - Jack The Ripper Suspect

Jack The Ripper Suspect

On 31 August 1888, Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London. Her throat was slashed. During September, three more women (Annie Chapman on the 8th and Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on the 30th) were found dead with their throats cut. On 9 November 1888, the body of Mary Jane Kelly was discovered. Her throat had been severed down to the spine. In four of the cases the bodies were mutilated after death. The similarities between the crimes led to the supposition that they were committed by the same assailant, who was given the nickname "Jack the Ripper". Despite an extensive police investigation into the five murders, the Ripper was never identified and the crimes remained unsolved.

Shortly after Kelly's murder, stories that the Ripper had drowned in the Thames began to circulate. In February 1891, the MP for West Dorset, Henry Richard Farquharson, announced that Jack the Ripper was "the son of a surgeon" who had committed suicide on the night of the last murder. Although Farquharson did not name his suspect, the description resembles Druitt. Farquharson lived 10 miles (16 km) from the Druitt family and was part of the same social class. The Victorian journalist George R. Sims noted in his memoirs, The Mysteries of Modern London (1906), " body was found in the Thames after it had been in the river for about a month". Similar comments were made by Sir John Moylan, Assistant Under-Secretary of the Home Office: " escaped justice by committing suicide at the end of 1888" and Sir Basil Thomson, made Assistant Commissioner of the CID in 1913: " an insane Russian doctor escaped arrest by committing suicide in the Thames at the end of 1888". Neither Moylan nor Thomson was involved in the investigation.

Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten named Druitt as a suspect in the case in a private handwritten memorandum of 23 February 1894. Macnaghten highlighted the coincidence between Druitt's disappearance and death shortly after the last of the five murders on 9 November 1888, and claimed to have unspecified "private information" that left "little doubt" Druitt's own family believed him to have been the murderer. Macnaghten's memo was eventually discovered in his personal papers by his daughter, Lady Aberconway, who showed them to British broadcaster Dan Farson. A slightly different abridged copy of the memo found in the Metropolitan Police archive was released to the public in 1966. Farson first revealed Druitt's initials "MJD" in a television programme in November 1959. In 1961, Farson investigated a claim by an Australian that Montague's cousin, Lionel Druitt, had written a pamphlet that claimed knowledge of the Ripper's identity, but the claim was never substantiated. Journalist Tom Cullen revealed Druitt's full name in his 1965 book Autumn of Terror, which was followed by Farson's 1972 book Jack the Ripper. Before the discovery of Macnaghten's memo, books on the Ripper case, such as those written by Leonard Matters and Donald McCormick, poured scorn on stories that the Ripper had drowned in the Thames because they could not find a suicide that matched the description of the culprit. Cullen and Farson, however, supposed that Druitt was the Ripper on the basis of the Macnaghten memorandum, the near coincidence between Druitt's death and the end of the murders, the closeness of Whitechapel to Druitt's rooms in the Inner Temple, the insanity that was acknowledged by the inquest verdict of "unsound mind", and the possibility that Druitt had absorbed the rudimentary anatomical skill supposedly shown by the Ripper through observing his father at work.

Since the publication of Cullen's and Farson's books, other Ripper authors have argued that their theories are based solely on flawed circumstantial evidence, and have attempted to provide Druitt with alibis for the times of the murders. On 1 September, the day after the murder of Nichols, Druitt was in Dorset playing cricket. On the day of Chapman's murder, he played cricket in Blackheath, and the day after the murders of Stride and Eddowes, he was in the West Country defending a client in a court case. While writers Andrew Spallek and Tom Cullen argue that Druitt had the time and opportunity to travel by train between London and his cricket and legal engagements, or use his city chambers as a base from which to commit the murders, others dismiss the possibility as "improbable". Many experts believe that the killer was local to Whitechapel, whereas Druitt lived miles away on the other side of the River Thames. His chambers were within walking distance of Whitechapel, and his regular rail commute would almost certainly have brought him to Cannon Street station, a few minutes' walk from the East End. It seems unlikely, however, that he could have travelled the distance in blood-stained clothes unnoticed, and a clue discovered during the investigation into the murder of Catherine Eddowes (a piece of her blood-stained clothing) indicates that the murderer travelled north-east from where she was murdered, but Druitt's chambers and the railway station were south-westwards.

Macnaghten incorrectly described Druitt as a 41-year-old doctor, and cited allegations that he "was sexually insane" without specifying the source or details of the allegations. Macnaghten did not join the force until 1889, after the murder of Kelly and the death of Druitt, and was not involved in the investigation directly. Macnaghten's memorandum named two other suspects ("Kosminski" and Michael Ostrog) and was written to refute allegations against a fourth, Thomas Cutbush. The three Macnaghten suspects—Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog—also match the descriptions of three unnamed suspects in Major Arthur Griffiths' Mysteries of Police and Crime (1898); Griffiths was Inspector of Prisons at the time of the Ripper murders. Inspector Frederick Abberline, who was the lead investigative officer in the case, appeared to dismiss Druitt as a suspect on the basis that the only evidence against him was the coincidental timing of his suicide shortly after the fifth murder. Other officials involved in the Ripper case, Metropolitan Police Commissioner James Monro and pathologist Thomas Bond, believed that the murder of Alice McKenzie on 17 July 1889, seven months after Druitt's death, was committed by the same culprit as the earlier murders. The inclusion of McKenzie among the Ripper's victims was contested by Abberline and Macnaghten among others, but if she was one of his victims, then Druitt clearly could not be the Ripper. Another murder occasionally included among the Ripper cases is that of Martha Tabram, who was viciously stabbed to death on 7 August 1888. Her death coincided with the middle of Bournemouth Cricket Week, 4–11 August, in which Druitt was heavily involved, and was in the school holiday, which Druitt spent in Dorset. In the words of one of his biographers, "It scarcely left time for a 200-mile round dash to fit in a murder."