Jack the Ripper: The Murders, the Mystery, the Myth by Stapleton Victor

Author:Stapleton, Victor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jack the Ripper: The Murders, The Mystery, The Myth
ISBN: 9781472806086
Publisher: Osprey Publishing Ltd

Montague John Druitt. (Mary Evans)

Suspects of the Day – The ‘MacNaughten Memoranda’

Three of the four remaining Ripper suspects of the day are named by police official Sir Melville MacNaughten in the most famous, and arguably most significant, surviving documents relating to the Jack the Ripper case. Interestingly, the documents, known as the ‘MacNaughten Memoranda’, seem to have been produced not in the course of official record-keeping but in response to a speculative article in the popular press. A piece in The Sun newspaper of 13 February 1894 had sought to indentify one Thomas Haines Cutbush as the Ripper. Having escaped from Lambeth Infirmary Asylum in March 1891, Cutbush carried out two separate knife assaults on women in Kennington. There were some suggestive aspects in Cutbush’s profile, but these were not close enough to consolidate a connection with the Ripper, and MacNaughten, in going on record to say this, thought it also time that he set down his own insider view of the three most likely suspects to have been Jack the Ripper. In MacNaughten’s order, these men were a Mr M. J. Druitt, a Polish Jew known as Aaron Kosminski, and a Russian doctor, Michael Ostrog.

Montague John Druitt

Druitt was of the gentleman class. MacNaughten’s notes describe him as a doctor, though he was in fact a schoolteacher with a legal training who was working at a boys’ boarding school in Blackheath at the time of the Whitechapel Murders. Forty-one-year-old Druitt had studied at Winchester and Oxford, and played cricket with the Blackheath Cricket club. Beneath the respectable veneer, all was not well, however. For unknown reasons, Druitt was dismissed from his teaching post in November 1888, and, leaving suicide notes for his employer and family, he went missing shortly afterwards. The MacNaughten Memoranda place the disappearance at the time of the Miller’s Court murder and relate how:

[his] body (which was said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31 December – or about seven weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane and from private information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.

Druitt was clearly a serious suspect in MacNaughten’s eyes, and while the retired police official felt by 1894 that the full truth would never be known, he remained of the view that it ‘did indeed, at one time lie at the bottom of the Thames, if my conjections be correct’. It would be helpful to know more of the ‘private information’ to which MacNaughten was privy, for the case against Druitt seems to hinge largely on the circumstantial connection between the end of the murders and Druitt’s suicide. Certainly, Inspector Abberline, interviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1903, was unconvinced:

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.

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