Complete History of Jack the Ripper (70 page)

We know little about Druitt’s appearance. What we have accords with descriptions of the murderer in some particulars but not in others. Druitt became thirty-one in August 1888. Of the five most important witnesses who gave descriptions of men seen in the company of one or other of the murder victims only one – Elizabeth Long – gave an estimate of age inconsistent with this. She thought that the man she saw talking with Annie Chapman in
Hanbury Street was over forty. But she acknowledged that she did not see his face and the other witnesses all gave estimates very close to Druitt’s known age: PC Smith (twenty-eight), Israel Schwartz (thirty), Joseph Lawende (thirty) and George Hutchinson (thirty-four or five). A photograph of Druitt shows him sporting a small moustache. Three of the key witnesses mention such a moustache, although Smith said it was dark, Schwartz brown and Lawende fair. And Druitt sprang from the professional class. His body, when recovered from the river, was said to have been well-dressed. Admittedly, the man Lawende saw with Kate Eddowes had the appearance of a sailor. But the other important witnesses spoke of a ‘shabby genteel’ (Long), respectable (Smith and Schwartz) or even prosperous-looking (Hutchinson) man. On the other hand Druitt’s build does not accord well with the Ripper evidence. Photographs depict Druitt as a slender, even gaunt, man. Only two of the chief Ripper witnesses mention build. Lawende, however, described a man of medium build while Schwartz spoke of a rather stout, broad shouldered figure. Then two if not three of the witnesses indicated a foreigner. Elizabeth Long’s suspect ‘looked like a foreigner’, George Hutchinson saw a man of ‘Jewish’ appearance and, as we shall see, Joseph Lawende evidently later identified a Polish Jew.

Even less is known of Druitt’s personality than of his appearance. His school record suggests a self-confident, competitive spirit. At Winchester he was a prominent member of the debating society. Many of his topics were political. In one debate he praised Gladstone as the ‘only redeeming point’ in the Liberal Party, in another he denounced Bismarck’s influence as ‘morally and socially a curse to the world’, and in his final appearance he defended the record of his own generation against those of its predecessors. ‘The old theory of government was “man is made for States”,’ he contended. ‘Is it not a vast improvement that States should be made for man, as they are now?’ Druitt’s passion for sport, especially cricket, blossomed at an early age. In 1876 he won a place in the Winchester First Eleven and while still at Oxford became a member of the influential Kingston Park and Dorset County Cricket Club, the principal club side in his native county. The sporting evidence depicts a man with considerable strength in his arms and wrists. He excelled at Fives, which is played with the hands rather than with a bat, and won the Double Fives and Single Fives titles at both Winchester and Oxford. On 9 March 1875 he came third in a ‘throwing the cricket ball’ event at
Winchester with a throw of more than ninety-two yards. All this suggests that Druitt would have possessed the strength, confidence and presence of mind necessary to have committed the murders. But there is nothing to corroborate Macnaghten’s claim that he was sexually insane and no evidence of attacks on women or any act of violence whatsoever.

Furthermore, the Ripper knew and probably lived in the East End. Druitt, as far as we can tell, had no connection with it. Dan Farson, discovering the fact that Lionel Druitt, Montague’s cousin, assisted Dr Thomas Thyne at 140 Minories in 1879, suggested that Montague may have visited Lionel at the surgery there. Unfortunately for this line of speculation there is no evidence that the cousins were particularly close. Montague was born and bred in Dorset; Lionel was born in London and raised at 39a Curzon Street, Mayfair. Additionally, Lionel’s sojourn in the Minories seems to have been of the most temporary kind. In both 1878 and 1880 the
Medical Register
and the
Medical Directory
record him at 8 Strathmore Gardens, Kensington. Montague, of course, was still a student at Oxford when Lionel was assisting Dr Thyne. Martin Howells and Keith Skinner wondered whether Druitt could have walked through Whitechapel on his way to visit his mother after her committal to the Brooke Asylum in Clapton in July 1888. This hypothesis is not entirely implausible in that the asylum was less than two miles northeast of Whitechapel. It does, however, ignore the facts that Druitt seems to have normally travelled by train and that Ann Druitt, after only two months at the asylum, was transferred on leave of absence to an establishment in Brighton, where she remained until 1890. There is thus no provable or even probable link between Druitt and the murder district.
²⁸

Did Druitt, then, have a known base from which he might have made murderous forays into the East End? MCC records, which give his address throughout as 9 Eliot Place, Blackheath, suggest that he was a resident master at George Valentine’s school. But the absence of an all-night train service between London and Blackheath makes it difficult to believe that the Ripper could have operated out of a base there. In 1888 the latest train calling at Blackheath left London Bridge Station at 12.25 a.m., the earliest Cannon Street Station at 5.10 a.m. The approximate times of the six murders in the autumn of 1888 were 2.30, 3.40, 5.30, 1.00, 1.44 and just before 4.00 a.m. On the nights of the Tabram and Stride and Eddowes killings at
least, therefore, a Blackheath murderer would have had perilous hours to survive before catching a homeward-bound train and might necessarily have had recourse to a common lodging house. Although not impossible such conduct would have incurred considerable risks, especially, perhaps, for a well-dressed stranger.

Appreciating this difficulty, Tom Cullen argued that Druitt’s chambers at 9 King’s Bench Walk, near Victoria Embankment, were the Ripper’s lair. We know from the Law Lists of 1886–7 that Druitt did retain chambers at this address, and these would have been within walking distance of the East End. However, the Ripper’s known movements on the night of the double murder are very damaging to this hypothesis. After cutting down Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard before one, he walked westwards to Mitre Square in the City, where, between 1.30 and 1.45, he killed and mutilated Kate Eddowes. Now, if his base had been in King’s Bench Walk the murderer would then have continued westwards, away from the police activity stirred up by his crimes and towards the safety of his chambers. Instead, he turned in the
opposite
direction, plunging deeper into the East End and leaving a blood-stained piece of Kate’s apron in Goulston Street to the northeast.

Finally, Druitt’s known cricket fixtures for August and September 1888 cast real doubt upon whether he can have committed three of the murders. Martha Tabram died on Tuesday, 7 August. But on 3 and 4 August, the previous Friday and Saturday, Druitt played for Bournemouth against the touring Parsees at Dean Park, Bournemouth, and on 10 and 11 August, the succeeding Friday and Saturday, he was at Dean Park again, this time playing for the Gentlemen of Dorset in a match against Bournemouth. It is entirely possible, therefore, that when Martha Tabram was butchered Druitt was on the south coast, perhaps staying with his brother William. Indeed, one wonders whether he spent any of the school vacation that summer in London. For on 22 August a Druitt played for Bournemouth against Sir William Bathurst’s XI at Salisbury and on 1 September, the day after Polly Nichols was killed, Montague is positively known to have played for Canford, Dorset, against Wimborne at Canford. By 8 September, the date of the Hanbury Street murder, Druitt had returned to the capital. At 11.30 that same morning he played for the Blackheath Cricket Club against the Brothers Christopherson on the Rectory Field at Blackheath. Druitt could have killed Annie Chapman. It would have been possible for him to have murdered her
in Spitalfields at 5.30 and then to have caught a train to Blackheath and to have washed, changed and breakfasted in time to turn out on the Rectory Field by 11.30. Nevertheless, it must be conceded that bearing in mind the probability that Annie’s killer had been prowling the East End streets for most of the night such a scenario does seem distinctly unlikely.
²⁹

Nothing we have learned categorically rules Druitt out of the picture. Still, the absence of hard evidence against him, coupled with the objections we have noted, compels us to regard him as an improbable suspect.

Those who have championed the Druitt theory will doubtless continue to do so in the belief that credible evidence must once have existed against him even if it doesn’t now. They will remind us of Macnaghten’s destroyed papers. And they will point out that the bulk of the Yard files have also been lost. My own feeling is that if all the relevant records had survived we would be very disappointed in their content. As explained, there are good grounds for believing that Macnaghten heard secondhand suspicions at the very best, put about when such suspicions against men of unsound mind were commonplace. It is noteworthy, too, that in both versions of the 1894 report the only evidence to which Macnaghten alludes is designated ‘private information’. This surely implies that no
official
inquiry into Druitt’s alleged connection with the murders was made or, if it was, no incriminating evidence was uncovered. In this context there is one last, very important, piece of testimony. It comes from the Scotland Yard detective most intimately involved in the Ripper hunt – Chief Inspector Frederick G. Abberline.

Interviewed for the
Pall Mall Gazette
in 1903, Abberline firmly rebutted any suggestion that the CID knew for certain that the murderer was dead. ‘You can state most emphatically,’ he said, ‘that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago. It is simple nonsense to talk of the police having proof that the man is dead. I am, and always have been, in the closest touch with Scotland Yard, and it would have been next to impossible for me not to have known all about it. Besides, the authorities would have been only too glad to make an end of such a mystery, if only for their own credit.’ To prove his point he produced recent documentary evidence which, according to the
Gazette
’s man who saw it, ‘put the ignorance of Scotland Yard as to the perpetrator beyond the shadow of a doubt.’ The journalist ventured to draw Abberline’s attention to
George R. Sims’ claims. ‘Yes,’ the detective replied, ‘I know all about that story. But what does it amount to? Simply this. Soon after the last murder in Whitechapel the body of a young doctor was found in the Thames, but there is absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was found at that time to incriminate him. A report was made to the Home Office about the matter, but that it was “considered final and conclusive” is going altogether beyond the truth.’
³⁰

If Druitt was not the killer can a credible case be made out against No. 2 or No. 3 on Macnaghten’s list? No. 2, the Polish Jew named by Sir Melville as Kosminski, is of particular interest to us. For no less an authority than Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID at the time of the murders, categorically asserted – and on more than one occasion – that he was Jack the Ripper.

I
T WAS ONCE SAID
of Sir Melville Macnaghten that his head was ‘crammed full with official secrets’. The description might have been applied with even greater justification to his predecessor, Sir Robert Anderson. For when he retired and accepted a knighthood from a grateful King Edward VII in 1901 he had notched up twenty years in gathering and processing intelligence on Fenian activities for the Home Office and another thirteen as Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in charge of CID. Anderson’s was a retirement punctuated by only infrequent references to the Jack the Ripper murders. But the few he made have given rise to immense speculation.

Readers of his book
Criminals and Crime
(1907) were told that the identities of the murderer and of the author of the infamous letter to the Central News had both been established. There Anderson categorically asserted that the killer had been ‘safely caged in an asylum’ and that the ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter had been penned by an ‘enterprising journalist’. No names were given, no proof cited, but three years later Sir Robert fed more details to the public.

His memoirs, ‘The Lighter Side of My Official Life’, were then being serialized in
Blackwood’s Magazine
. Part VI (March 1910) contained some remarkable revelations: