Read Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 Online
Authors: Russell Edwards
. . . there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the
Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel;
there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when ‘Chapman’ went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed
there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert
surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by ‘Chapman’s’ wife of the attempt
to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored . . .
It is hard to know whether Abberline
really
believed that Chapman was the Ripper or was just getting caught up in the heat of the moment, as he said in a later
interview that the
police were no nearer to knowing the killer’s identity in 1903 than they were in 1888. George Chapman, despite changing his method of killing (often
thought unlikely for a serial killer according to today’s research into the psychology of serial killing) still has his supporters, and an alleged comment by Abberline to arresting officer
Sergeant Godley after Chapman was apprehended – ‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last’ – continues to fuel his candidacy, although this remark by Abberline was first
reported only years later, in a book that came out in 1930.
Fuelling the speculation, and as alluded to in Abberline’s newspaper interview, is the fact that Chapman moved to Jersey City in the USA in 1891, following which it has been claimed that
several murders of a comparable nature to the Ripper crimes took place – in fact, there was only one murder of a prostitute that could have fitted the Ripper’s modus operandi. Chapman
returned to Britain the following year to begin his poison murders. These are so different from the brutal, seemingly random violence of the Ripper that I find it hard to believe they were all the
work of the same man.
The next suspect to be named by a senior policeman at the time is ‘Dr’ Francis Tumblety, an American ‘quack’. Tumblety’s name had been linked with
the Whitechapel murders as far back as 1888, mainly in the American press, but many subsequent researchers had missed the frequent references to his possible guilt that were made contemporaneously
after he fled from London that year. Tumblety was an unusual character and always seemed to attract trouble. He had been linked to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and apparently had
connections with Irish Fenian activities. He was a homosexual,
or at least bisexual, and was arrested on 7 November 1888 for ‘acts of gross indecency’ with
several other men, and was given bail for what was legally classed as a misdemeanour. Soon after, he skipped bail, left Britain and, via France, returned to his homeland under the alias of
‘Frank Townsend’. Once there, the press was full of stories about him being Jack the Ripper, something Tumblety – who enjoyed the notoriety – was more than happy to address,
admitting that he had been a suspect and that he had been questioned by the British police but insisting he wasn’t guilty.
His prominence as a worthy contemporary suspect was not truly appreciated until the discovery of a letter, written by former Special Branch Chief Inspector John Littlechild to journalist George
R. Sims in 1913, which came to light in the early 1990s during a sale from the collection of crime historian Eric Barton. The letter’s provenance was sound and led many researchers scurrying
back to the archives to find out more about this peculiar man.
Tumblety is a credible suspect and high on the list of possible Rippers. There were many press articles in which associates and those who had crossed Tumblety made it clear that he had a great
dislike of women. Littlechild himself mentions this in his letter, saying that Tumblety’s feelings against women were ‘remarkable and bitter in the extreme, a fact on record’.
But, as with all the suspects, the evidence that exists today is well short of conclusive. For example, it is possible Tumblety was still in police custody on 9 November 1888, in which case it
would have been impossible for him to have murdered Mary Kelly: some researchers dedicated to the Tumblety candidature have got round this by suggesting that Kelly was murdered by a copycat, and
that Tumblety was responsible only for the other
victims. As with George Chapman, the so-called Ripper-like murders in the USA in 1891–2 which led many to believe that
Jack had crossed the Atlantic, have been blamed on Tumblety who spent the rest of his life there before his death in 1903. In his defence, it is unlikely that Tumblety, as a homosexual, would have
murdered women as homosexual serial killers usually only target men. But this is all supposition.
In 1894, six years after the murders, the
Sun
newspaper claimed it knew the name of the Ripper and that he had been convicted of malicious wounding in 1891, deemed
insane and incarcerated at Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane in Berkshire. The newspaper did not actually give the man’s name, but said the identity was known to Sir Melville
Macnaghten, the Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan police CID, who had been appointed in 1889 after a career running his father’s tea plantations in India. Macnaghten took up his
post at the height of Ripper mania, because the police and public did not know then that the killings were over, and there was still a state of alarm in the East End. He would certainly have been
privy to all the information the police had gathered. After the
Sun
articles he wrote a memorandum, which was eventually put into the Scotland Yard files. The memorandum was not written
for public consumption. In it Macnaghten exonerated the man alluded to in the newspaper, Thomas Cutbush, of the crimes and then, importantly, named the three men he felt more likely to have been
the Ripper than Cutbush. He described them as, in his words:
(1) A Mr M. J. Druitt, said to be a doctor & of good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s
Court murder, whose body (which was
said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31st Dec. – or about 7 weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane [probably a reference to
homosexuality] and from private info I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.
(2) Kosminski, a Polish Jew, & resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, specially
of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many circs connected with this man which made him a strong
‘suspect’.
(3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was subsequently detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man’s antecedents were of the worst
possible type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.
I had first heard of the Macnaghten memorandum from Alan McCormack, and had read it straight away. It is a vital plank of genuine evidence, written as it was by a senior
ranking police officer who would certainly have known all there was to know, at the time, about the investigation. For me it was the mention of Kosminski that was of prime importance, but for other
researchers Druitt, because he was named first, was given the top slot.
Macnaghten’s original notes, upon which he based the final memorandum, were in the possession of his daughter, Lady Christobel Aberconway, and she showed them to broadcaster
Daniel Farson when he was researching a TV programme,
Farson’s Guide to the British,
in 1959. When the programme was aired, emphasis was placed on Druitt as
Macnaghten’s favourite, but he was only referred to as ‘MJD’.
Montague John Druitt was a teacher and barrister who, as Macnaghten mentioned, was found dead in the Thames on New Year’s Eve 1888. He was not a doctor as Macnaghten
wrote, which illustrates the cautious way we have to treat evidence, even when it comes with such good provenance. His mother had been plagued by mental illness and, according to a note found on
his body, Druitt feared he was going the same way. His suicide gave a perfect reason for the Ripper murders stopping when they did. Other authors in the late nineteenth century, usually from the
police or press, also alluded to the Druitt suicide without mentioning him by name: we can deduce from this that he was a favoured suspect among those who were close to the case.
Sometime before Macnaghten wrote his memorandum, a story about the Ripper’s supposed suicide appeared in the press saying that a ‘West of England’ member of parliament had
solved the Ripper case and that the murderer committed suicide on the date of the final murder suffering from ‘homicidal mania’. Another reference to a Ripper suicide came from the
journalist George R. Sims who spoke for several years from 1899 about a suspect who had drowned himself in the Thames at the end of 1888. Two books, written by Tom Cullen (
Autumn of
Terror
, 1965) and Daniel Farson (
Jack the Ripper
, 1972), made the case for Druitt. For some years he was suspect number one, until he was eclipsed by the sensational royal conspiracy
theories.
The third suspect, Michael Ostrog, is the least likely of the triumvirate. He was a petty thief, conman and fraudster, with a long history of arrests
and prison sentences behind him by 1888. But he had never been violent – the closest he came was pulling a revolver on a police superintendent after one of his arrests – and there is
nothing to support Macnaghten’s allegation that he was a homicidal maniac. When he was on a couple of occasions detained in an asylum rather than in prison, he was found to be suicidal, but
not a threat to others. Even his stays in the mental asylums were probably part of his well-practised ability to con: he possibly feigned madness to get a softer place to stay than prison. Some
reports have him in prison in France at the time of the Ripper killings, although other researchers disagree. But nothing about him seems to fit what we know about the Ripper: he was in his
mid-fifties at the time of the murders, and he was too tall at 5 foot 11 inches to fit any of the descriptions.
Which brings us to Macnaghten’s views on Kosminski.
In his memorandum, Macnaghten describes Kosminski as a Polish Jew whose insanity was brought on by years of indulgence in ‘solitary vices’, which we can assume is a
typically coy Victorian euphemism for masturbation, and as a result he was sent to an asylum. In 1892 Robert Anderson, who at that time was still Assistant Commissioner CID, said in an interview in
Cassell’s Saturday Journal
that the Whitechapel murderer was undoubtedly a homicidal maniac. Three years later, the writer Alfred Aylmer said in the
Windsor Magazine
that
Anderson had a very specific idea of the identity of the Ripper: ‘He has himself a perfectly plausible theory that Jack the Ripper was a homicidal maniac, temporarily at large, whose hideous
career was cut short by committal to an asylum.’
Anderson put his ideas into print in 1901 in an article on penology and in a book published later about his life as a senior police officer. He stated that ‘the
inhabitants of the metropolis generally were just as secure during the weeks the fiend was on the prowl as they were before the mania seized him, or after he had been safely caged in an
asylum’, presumably because he believed the victims ‘belonged to a very small class of degraded women who frequent the East End streets after midnight’, leaving respectable
citizens safe. So, early on, Anderson was making a stand for the identity of the Ripper having been known and that he had been safely taken out of circulation, which seems to confirm what
Macnaghten said in his memorandum. But it did not end there: in 1910, when Anderson published his memoirs, he put his cards on the table. In
The Lighter Side of My Official Life
he made an
assertion, without any sense of doubt whatsoever, that he and his force were aware of the identity of the Ripper:
One did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to discover that the criminal was a sexual maniac of a virulent type; that he was living in the immediate vicinity of the scenes of
the murders; and that, if he was not living absolutely alone, his people knew of his guilt, and refused to give him up to justice. During my absence abroad the Police had made a house-to-house
search for him, investigating the case of every man in the district whose circumstances were such that he could go and come and get rid of his bloodstains in secret. And the conclusion we came
to was that he and his people were certain low-class Polish Jews; for it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile
justice.
And the result proved that our diagnosis was right on every point. For I may say at once that ‘undiscovered murders’ are rare in London, and the
‘Jack-the-Ripper’ crimes are not within that category. And if the Police here had powers such as the French Police possess, the murderer would have been brought to justice. Scotland
Yard can boast that not even the subordinate officers of the department will tell tales out of school, and it would ill become me to violate the unwritten rule of the service. So I will only
add here that the ‘Jack-the-Ripper’ letter which is preserved in the Police Museum at New Scotland Yard is the creation of an enterprising London journalist.
Having regard to the interest attaching to this case, I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer and of the pressman who wrote the letter above referred to. But no public
benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer. I will merely add that the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly
identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him.
In saying that he was a Polish Jew I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact. And my words are meant to specify race, not religion. For it would outrage all religious sentiment to
talk of the religion of a loathsome creature whose utterly unmentionable vices reduced him to a lower level than that of the brute.