Complete History of Jack the Ripper (69 page)

No police officer other than Macnaghten ever accused Druitt
²¹
so we must examine his position very carefully. And the harder we do that the less tenable it appears to be.

First, the ‘evidence’. ‘From private information,’ Sir Melville wrote, ‘I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.’ Now, Druittists have contended that this cryptic statement proves that the family’s alleged suspicions about Montague were divulged to the police by one of their number. However, close scrutiny of the wording affords no grounds for any such belief. Macnaghten’s use of the phrase ‘I have little doubt’ indicates that he was not
absolutely certain
that Druitt’s family suspected him. The suggestion of uncertainty is telling. It implies most strongly that the informant was
not
one of Druitt’s immediate family and that Macnaghten was relaying suspicions garnered, at best, at second hand. Common sense, too, suggests that Druitt’s close kin are unlikely to have been the source of Macnaghten’s information. For if they really did suspect Montague they are hardly likely, once he was dead, to have broadcast their fears to the police or anyone else. Such an action would only have exposed them to the risk of unnecessary distress and embarrassment. There is the further point that had Macnaghten’s source been a close relative of Druitt he would have been able to furnish him with accurate biographical data about the dead man. But, as we will presently discover, many of the things Macnaghten wrote about Druitt are now known to have been wrong.

Attempts to identify the informant must of necessity be speculative. He may have been a distant relative of Montague or a family acquaintance. We do know that there were tenuous links between the Macnaghten and Druitt clans. Sir Melville’s father, the last chairman of the East India Company, appointed Druitt’s aunt’s brother to the board in 1855. And Walter Boultbee, who worked at the Yard as private secretary to Macnaghten’s friend and patron James Monro,
married Ellen Baker, niece of Alfred Mayo, a friend and distant relative of Thomas Druitt, in 1885. It is now exceedingly unlikely that we will ever discover the precise nature and source of Macnaghten’s information. Nevertheless, it does not seem to have been better than secondhand and may well have been mere hearsay.

Whatever the source, suspicion alone carries little weight. During the murder scare any abnormal behaviour was apt to invoke a charge that the disturbed or eccentric individual was Jack the Ripper and innumerable innocents fell under suspicion. As the
Times
observed, ‘it seems at times as if every person in the streets were suspicious of everyone else he met, and as if it were a race between them who could first inform against his neighbour.’
²²

Macnaghten’s interpretation of the murder evidence is no more persuasive than his ‘private information’ about Druitt. There is little to substantiate his view that the mutilation of the victims evidenced changes in the disposition or mental state of the murderer. As explained in the previous chapter, the extent of the injuries inflicted seems to have been directly related to the amount of time at the disposal of the killer. More, Macnaghten’s contention that they progressively increased throughout the series is only true if the Tabram and Stride slayings are excluded from the toll. There are good grounds, however, for including both. And if Martha Tabram is included as a Ripper victim Macnaghten’s argument collapses completely for this first killing was as ferocious as anything that followed it. The notion endorsed by Macnaghten and Camps that sexual serial killers cannot abstain from murder has never been more than an unverified assumption. More recent experience, as already noted, seems to demonstrate the contrary. Even if it were true the abrupt termination of the Ripper killings might be explained by any number of scenarios other than suicide – by the incarceration of the murderer in asylum or prison, by his emigration, or by his death from accident or natural causes. Despite the dramatic increase of such crimes in recent decades, both here and in the United States, no major offender is known to have committed suicide.

In the end, though, it is Macnaghten’s readiness to accuse Druitt without verifying even basic facts about him that most discredits his case. For it is quickly apparent from Sir Melville’s writings that he knew almost nothing about his suspect. Macnaghten believed that Druitt resided with his own people and absented himself from home at certain times. MCC records and Druitt’s involvement in
Blackheath’s sporting activities, on the other hand, alike suggest that he lived at his school at 9 Eliot Place, possibly as senior resident master. Macnaghten thought that Druitt committed suicide ‘on or about the 10th of November’. This was three weeks too early. The correct date was probably 1 December. Certainly it cannot have been sooner. Macnaghten asserted that Druitt was about forty-one years old at the time of his death. In fact he was thirty-one. Above all, Macnaghten wrote of him as a doctor. His true professions were those of schoolmaster and barrister.

Recognizing the fragility of the case against Druitt, later writers have tried hard to unearth more credible evidence against him. No one has succeeded.

Donald Rumbelow wondered whether Montague might have been one of the three insane medical students investigated by the police after the Hanbury Street murder. Macnaghten tells us, however, that Druitt only became a suspect some years after he himself had joined the force in 1889. And although Druitt may have contemplated a medical career at one time he had never been a student at the London Hospital. The three suspected students had all attended this institution but a search of the student registers there by Howells & Skinner did not discover Druitt’s name.
²³

One of the most indefatigable Druittists was Dan Farson. When preparing his television programmes in 1959 he made an appeal for information on the Ripper from the public which elicited a deluge of replies. One correspondent, a Mr A. Knowles, told him that he had once seen a document in Australia entitled ‘The East End Murderer – I knew him.’ After many years Mr Knowles’ memory was understandably vague but he apparently recalled that the document had been written by a Lionel Druitt, Drewett or Drewery and that it had been privately printed by a Mr Fell of Dandenong in 1890. The significance of Knowles’ letter was seemingly enhanced by the revelations of another correspondent – Maurice Gould of Bexleyheath. Gould had been in Australia from 1925 to 1932 and there he had encountered not one, but two, men who claimed to know the identity of Jack the Ripper. One of them was a freelance journalist named Edward MacNamara. MacNamara claimed that a man called Druitt, who had once lodged with a Mr W. G. Fell of Dandenong, had left Fell papers proving the Ripper’s identity. Somehow MacNamara had gained possession of them but, according to Gould, he ‘would not part with [the papers] unless he received a
considerable sum, £500 I think, which I had not got in those days.’ The second man, McCarritty or McGarritty, was sixty when Gould met him in 1930: ‘I lost track of him in a little place called, I think, Koo-Wee-Rup, near Lang-Lang, where Fell, also an Englishman, at times looked after him.’
²⁴

These tales do not inspire confidence. The contents of Knowles’ letter cannot now be verified because Dan Farson’s dossier of letters and papers, containing the original, was stolen from Television House during the time he was working on his programmes.
²⁵
And as it stands Gould’s story is, quite frankly, unbelievable, for if MacNamara had the Druitt papers why did he not publish their secrets himself? In any case both informants, thinking back over many years, would unquestionably have been extremely confused over dates and other details. Yet Farson, knowing that Lionel Druitt, Montague’s cousin, had emigrated to Australia in 1886, was tantalized by these clues and soon found an opportunity to pursue his search for Jack the Ripper in the land of the Southern Cross.

With Alan Dower, a ‘laconic and rather tough’ special correspondent of the Melbourne
Truth
, he drove into Western Gippsland, southeast of Melbourne, in 1961. The results were disappointing. The places certainly existed. They found Koo-Wee-Rup and Lang-Lang. But of ‘The East End Murderer’ there was not a trace. ‘At Lang-Lang I saw the end in sight,’ recalled Farson, ‘when I heard of a storekeeper called Fell – but when I met him he said he was no relation of the Fell who printed the document.’ The last echo of the story was heard at the nearby town of Drouin. There Farson met the elderly Miss Stevens who remembered Dr Lionel Druitt and said that he had practised there in 1903. ‘Someone in Victoria can still finally solve the riddle of Jack the Ripper,’ Dower concluded. ‘British TV investigator Dan Farson and I are sure of this having travelled 250 miles through West Gippsland this week seeking documents and records that would provide the few missing clues.’

Subsequent research has not justified this optimism. Many attempts to trace ‘The East End Murderer’ have been made in Australian libraries, newspaper files and archives but without result. No one by the name of Fell is known to have lived in Dandenong in 1890 and in that year Dr Lionel Druitt definitely began to practise in St Arnaud, Victoria. It is just possible that Knowles saw the unrelated Jack the Ripper story that appeared in a supplement to the
St Arnaud Mercury
of 29 November 1890. But a more likely explanation is that Knowles’
date of 1890 is wrong and that both he and Gould were transmitting hazy memories of the Deeming affair of 1892.

Frederick Deeming was executed in Australia on 23 May 1892 for the murder of his wife Emily Mather. Following his arrest newspaper gossip, both there and in Britain, linked him with the Whitechapel murders. The London
Globe
, for example, printed the claim of an East End dressmaker that Deeming, using the name Lawson, had been in London on the night that Stride and Eddowes had been killed, and this story was splashed across the Melbourne
Evening Standard
of 8 April 1892 under the headline: ‘JACK THE RIPPER: DEEMING AT ALDGATE ON THE NIGHT OF THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS.’ Another rumour, denied by Richard S. Haynes, Deeming’s lawyer, averred that he had actually confessed to some of the Whitechapel crimes. Deeming was a multiple murderer. Before emigrating to Australia in 1891 he murdered a former wife and four children and entombed their bodies beneath the floor of Dinham Villa, a cottage he rented at Rainhill in Lancashire. But he was not the Ripper. Notwithstanding the tales of the press the best evidence we have places Deeming in South Africa in the autumn of 1888.
²⁶

That the Knowles and Gould stories were inspired by Deeming is suggested by a similarity of names. Shortly after his arrival in Melbourne Deeming assumed the alias of Druin or Drewen. He rented a house in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor, through which the main Dandenong Road ran. And his third fiancée – who may have been his intended next victim – was Kate Rounse
fell
. In the case of Gould the Deeming origin of the story was proved beyond reasonable doubt when, in 1986, Martin Howells and Keith Skinner traced and re-interviewed Dan Farson’s old informant. Gould’s new account was only marginally more convincing than the original yarn but he did now disclose that his conversation with Edward MacNamara about Jack the Ripper had taken place within the context of a discussion of the Deeming case. Gould, then eighteen, had met MacNamara in a famous Melbourne pub called Young’s. Their talk had passed from Deeming to Jack the Ripper, at which point MacNamara had fished ‘two or three handwritten sheets’ out of his pocket. These Gould had taken to be the Ripper’s confession.

The researches of Howells and Skinner, incidentally, demonstrate how treacherous reminiscent evidence can be. Maurice Gould told Dan Farson that the original owner of the Ripper papers had been a Mr W. G. Fell of Dandenong. Howells and Skinner, however,
eventually learned from Australian researcher John Ruffels that W. G. Fell had in reality been the name of a storekeeper who had employed Gould back in 1930. By writing his former employer into the tale Gould seriously misled Farson. Farson, indeed, met W. G. Fell without realizing it for he was the very same Mr Fell with whom Farson and Dower had spoken of Jack the Ripper at Lang-Lang in 1961!

The Australian connection, in short, was a colossal red herring drawn across the trail by fading memories and tall tales. Its failure throws us back upon Macnaghten and leaves the case against Druitt seriously flawed by a lack of tangible evidence. What is left? Well, Professor Camps insisted that Druitt was the
type
of man we should be looking for. So, in the light of what we now know about both the murderer and Druitt, how far does Sir Melville’s suspect fit the bill?

There is no simple answer. For example, it might be supposed that Druitt’s professions of schoolmaster and barrister disqualify him as a suspect because of his lack of medical knowledge but he is by no means as ill a fit in this respect as many of the other suspects on offer. Although the Ripper probably did possess some degree of medical knowledge it is impossible to say how much. After studying the medical sketches of Kate Eddowes’ injuries, Professor Camps was convinced that the killer had been no surgeon. He continued: ‘One should then consider other people who might have surgical knowledge but be, as it were, in the early stages of medical knowledge, and might have . . . the opportunity of access to books.’
²⁷
This could well be a perfect description of Druitt. Intelligent and educated, he was raised in an environment of medical men and medical books. His father (William), uncle (Robert) and cousin (Lionel) were all doctors and Montague may well at one time have contemplated such a career for himself.

There are, nonetheless, considerable difficulties in identifying Druitt with the Ripper.