Complete History of Jack the Ripper (68 page)

The corresponding passage of the final report, preserved in the Scotland Yard files at the Public Record Office, reads:

M. J. Druitt was Sir Melville’s principal suspect. Since 1959 he has inspired a great deal of research and today we probably know much more about him than the police did at the time. The details of his career have been published many times
¹⁴
so a brief summary will suffice here.

Montague John Druitt, the second son of a surgeon, William Druitt of Wimborne in Dorset, was born on 15 August 1857. He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and graduated in 1880 with a third class honours degree in classics.

Upon leaving university, Druitt took a teaching post at a boarding school at 9 Eliot Place, Blackheath. This establishment prepared boys for the universities, the army and the professions. Its headmaster, George Valentine, lost little time in introducing Druitt to the local elite. In 1881 he proposed his new master for membership of the Blackheath Hockey Club and in the same year Druitt began to play for the Morden Cricket Club of Blackheath.

A year later Druitt embarked on a second career in the law. On
17 May 1882 he was admitted to the Inner Temple. He financed his studies by borrowing against a £500 legacy of his father and, on 29 April 1885, was called to the Bar. The Law List entry for 1886 states that Druitt was of the Western Circuit and the Winchester Sessions. In 1887 he was recorded as a special pleader for the Western Circuit and Hampshire, Portsmouth and Southampton Assizes.

Druitt’s last years were marred by tragedy. His father died of a heart attack in 1885 and his mother, Ann (née Harvey) Druitt, subsequently slipped into mental illness and was admitted to the Brooke Asylum in Clapton in July 1888. Yet by that time Druitt himself seems to have been financially secure. He taught at a respected private school and his work as a special pleader was lucrative – at least he left an estate worth £2,600, more than can be accounted for by his father’s bequest, a posthumous inheritance of £1,083 from his mother and his earnings as a teacher. His social standing, moreover, was considerable. When Morden Cricket Club merged in 1885 with the Blackheath Cricket, Football and Lawn Tennis Co. Druitt became a director, being appointed treasurer and honorary secretary. His fellow directors included Rowland Hill, one of England’s most renowned rugby footballers, Dr Lennard Stokes, a distinguished sportsman and captain of the England rugby team, and R. H. Poland, a wealthy fur broker. In 1883 Druitt was nominated for membership of the MCC by C. R. Seymour, an Old Harrovian and barrister who played for MCC and Hampshire and who would become a Wiltshire and Hampshire JP, and by the celebrated cricketer Vernon Royle, then a Hertfordshire curate and assistant master at Elstree School. He was elected on 26 May 1884 and his subscriptions were fully paid up at the time of his death. In both the MCC Candidates’ and Members’ Books Druitt’s address is recorded as 9 Eliot Place, Blackheath.

Druitt’s suicide at the end of 1888 must, therefore, have come as a profound shock to many of his acquaintances. Commenting upon it, the
Southern Guardian
of 5 January 1889 noted that he was ‘well known and much respected in the neighbourhood. He was a barrister of bright talent, he had a promising future before him, and his untimely end is deeply deplored.’

Druitt’s body was found floating in the Thames off Thorneycroft’s Wharf, Chiswick, by Henry Winslade, a waterman out in his boat, at about one o’clock p.m. on Monday, 31 December 1888. He brought the body ashore and notified the police. PC George Moulson 216T,
who searched the dead man, found that he was fully dressed except for a hat and collar. His possessions included £2 17s. 2d. in cash; two cheques on the London and Provincial Bank, one for £50, the other for £16; a first-class season ticket from Blackheath to London on the South Eastern Railway; the second half of a return ticket, Hammersmith to Charing Cross, dated 1 December; a silver watch and a gold chain with a spade-guinea attached; a pair of kid gloves and a white handkerchief. The body was rather decomposed and had obviously been in the water for some time but there were no marks of injury upon it. In each pocket of the top coat PC Moulson discovered four large stones. Although there were no other papers or letters on the body, the cheques must have carried Druitt’s name. William Druitt, a Bournemouth solicitor and Montague’s elder brother, was eventually contacted and subsequently identified the corpse.
¹⁵

What blackness of the soul induced Montague Druitt to take his life we cannot tell. We do know that he was discharging his social duties at least as late as 19 November because on that day the minutes of a Blackheath Cricket, Football and Lawn Tennis Co. board meeting record that he proposed that ‘an acre of land be taken behind the grand stand at a similar proportionate rent to that paid for the present land.’ But the only evidence directly bearing upon the cause of his suicide was presented at the inquest. It was held before Dr Thomas Diplock at the Lamb Tap, Chiswick, on Wednesday, 2 January 1889, and concluded that Druitt took his own life whilst of unsound mind. Unfortunately the coroner’s papers have not survived. Our knowledge of the testimony given, therefore, rests almost entirely upon a report in the
Acton, Chiswick, and Turnham Green Gazette
of 5 January. The key witness was William Druitt:

The main difficulty in the interpretation of this extract is the ambiguous reporting of the date 30 December. For careful study of the passage will demonstrate that the date can be read either as that upon which Druitt lost his job or as that upon which William made inquiries at the school. Probably the first meaning was intended because if one of Montague’s friends was sufficiently concerned to apprise William of his disappearance as early as 11 December it is unlikely that William would have procrastinated for another three weeks before making inquiries. If 30 December is meant to be the date of Montague’s dismissal, however, it is incorrect, for by that time his body had been in the river for the best part of a month. One explanation of this difficulty would be that 30 December is, in fact, a misprint for 30 November.

A date of 30 November for Druitt’s dismissal makes sense. We do not know when he threw himself into the river. A death date of 4 December, exactly one week before William learned of his disappearance, is inscribed upon his tombstone. According to William’s story, however, he was told on 11 December that Montague had been missing for
more
than a week and a suicide date of 1 December, the date of the unused return ticket from Hammersmith to Charing Cross, is more likely. Perhaps, then, Druitt was dismissed from the school on Friday, 30 November, and committed suicide the next day. Such a reconstruction would be consistent with his alleged suicide note, presumably penned on the day of his death, to the effect: ‘Since Friday I felt that I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die.’

It is possible – although there is no evidence of it – that the cheques found on the body were written by George Valentine in settlement of Druitt’s teaching salary. We do not know why he was dismissed. Some writers have suggested that he was a homosexual, that his offence was molesting his young charges, but this is mere conjecture. Whatever the reason, by itself the dismissal is not likely to have prompted Druitt’s suicide. He was still a qualified barrister and,
with his social connections, might have acquired another teaching post. To a personality already disturbed, however, it could have proved the final straw. In this context it is important to note that depression and suicidal urges blighted the lives of several members of the Druitt clan and may have been inherited traits linked with diabetes. Ann Druitt, Montague’s mother, who died at the Manor House Asylum in Chiswick in 1890, suffered from depression and paranoid delusions and once tried to kill herself by taking an overdose of laudanum. Ann’s mother had committed suicide whilst insane and her sister had also once suffered from mental illness and had attempted suicide. Montague’s niece, the daughter of his sister Edith, told Dan Farson in 1973 about a strong streak of melancholia in the family. His eldest sister, Georgiana Elizabeth, for example, had committed suicide by jumping from an attic window when she was an old woman.

What is conspicuously absent from this portrait of the ill-fated barrister is the existence of any verifiable links with the Jack the Ripper murders or even with Whitechapel. So just how serious a suspect is Druitt?

The main, indeed the only, reason why Druitt stands high on the list of suspects is because Macnaghten held a strong conviction that he was the Ripper. Writing the official version of his report, he cautiously mentioned Druitt only as one of three men, ‘any one of whom would have been more likely than Cutbush to have committed this series of murders.’ But there is no doubt that privately he believed Druitt to have been the killer. ‘Personally, after much careful & deliberate consideration,’ he tells us in the draft, ‘I am inclined to exonerate the last 2 [Kosminski and Ostrog], but I have always held strong opinions regarding no. 1, and the more I think the matter over, the stronger do these opinions become.’ Twenty years later, in his autobiography, he affirmed his belief that the ‘individual who held up London in terror resided with his own people; that he absented himself from home at certain times, and that he committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888.’
¹⁶

Macnaghten did not join the force until the summer of 1889. His views, however, are not easily discounted for he had access to the files and, more important, to the officers who had investigated the murders. Furthermore, inquiries continued intermittently until 1895 and two of Sir Melville’s names – Druitt and Kosminski – did not become suspects until after he had taken up his post at
the Yard. Macnaghten made this plain in relation to Druitt in his autobiography: ‘Although . . . the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November 1888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer.’
¹⁷

Nevertheless, it is much easier to demonstrate that Macnaghten thought Druitt was the Ripper than it is to explain why. The only
evidence
to which he alludes is mentioned in the enigmatic statement that ‘from private information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.’ Writers who promote the Druitt theory usually contend that the source was one of Montague’s relations – his brother William is the conventional choice – but in truth we know neither the source nor the nature of Macnaghten’s information. And we are never likely to know. For Macnaghten, interviewed by the
Daily Mail
in 1913, claimed that although he had ‘a very clear idea’ who the Ripper was and how he committed suicide he would never reveal what he knew. ‘I have destroyed all my documents,’ he said, ‘and there is now no record of the secret information which came into my possession at one time or another.’
¹⁸

A careful study of Macnaghten’s writings on the Ripper suggests that his accusation of Druitt owed as much to his ‘theory’ of the murders as to anything he may specifically have heard about the suspect. He attributed just five killings to Jack the Ripper, the first that of Polly Nichols, the last that of Mary Kelly, and was greatly impressed by the fact that the extent of the mutilations generally increased throughout this series. It reflected, in Macnaghten’s view, less the circumstances in which the individual murders had been committed than the deteriorating mental state of the killer. He was a sexual maniac and such a man, in the grip of a progressively worsening condition, could scarcely have abstained from killing after the Miller’s Court affair. Rather, contended Macnaghten, it was far more likely that ‘after his awful glut on this occasion, his brain gave way altogether and he committed suicide; otherwise the murders would not have ceased.’
¹⁹
These views certainly help to explain why Sir Melville found Druitt such a plausible suspect and the argument is as potent today as it was then. Many latter-day students of the case undoubtedly find the drowned barrister so intriguing precisely because his death would furnish us with a tidy explanation of the
increased ferocity and abrupt termination of the killings. A good, recent example of such thinking came from the late Professor Francis Camps, the eminent pathologist. Writing a foreword to Dan Farson’s book, Camps asserted that the crimes ‘increased in the degree of mutilation, each one being worse than the last’ and that ‘murders of this type only stop when the murderer is either dead or incarcerated.’ As for Druitt, the professor told Farson ‘this is the type of person you’re looking for. He wouldn’t have stopped had he lived.’
²⁰