Jack the Ripper

Montague Druitt

noreply@blogspirit.com (steve c) — Sun, 7 May 2006 10:34:34 +0200

Montague John Druitt was born in 1857 in Dorset, the son of a surgeon. Druitt graduated with a degree in classics and went to teach at a boarding school in Blackheath. He was very oriented towards sports and played hockey and cricket. In his spare time he studied law and became a lawyer.

In 1885 his father died and a couple of years afterwards his mother was institutionalized for depression and paranoid delusions. His family had a very pronounced history of depression and suicide.

Despite the tragedies in his life and a genetic propensity towards depression, Druitt prospered financially and socially in the 1880s. He was very secure financially and had inherited money from both parents. He had a very good teaching position and had become very active in many sports. The social circles in which he moved were very respectable.

However, all was not as well as it seemed because his body was found floating in the Thames River at the end of December 1888, where it had been immersed for weeks. He had been dismissed from his teaching position, probably around the end of November. He left a suicide note, which was found by his brother: "Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die."

There does not seem to be any real evidence as to why Macnaghten considered him a serious suspect. The only suggestion is that cryptic message of Macnaghten's: "from private information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer." Macnaghten claimed he had destroyed all of the relevant documents, so the answer may never be known. Thus far, no one has been able to come up with any credible evidence to suggest that Druitt was even a violent person or "sexually insane," as Macnaghten stated, let alone Jack the Ripper. Chief Inspector Abberline who was the most knowledgeable person in the police department about the Ripper murders did not consider Druitt a suspect.

Philip Sugden compares Druitt to the eyewitness accounts of the Ripper. While Druitt is within right age category and wore a moustache, his build is too slight to have been described by any of the eyewitnesses. The person they saw was anywhere from medium build to stout. Also, Druitt hardly looked foreign or Jewish. He did not live nor frequent the East End and there was no train service between his lodging in Blackheath and London that would allow him to commit the murders and return home. Plus in the death of Annie Chapman at 5:30 a.m., it would have been very unlikely that Druitt could have murdered her, cleaned himself up and caught a train back to Blackheath in time for a cricket game he played at 11:30 a.m.

In summary, Macnaghten was no fool and he certainly had access to all Ripper suspect records, many of which no longer exist. So, there may have been some important evidence about Druitt to support his suspicion. However, without that evidence, it is difficult to see why Druitt is a suspect. One can explain his suicide at the end of November as the tragic end of a losing fight with hereditary depression. With so many people in his family afflicted with mental illness, he may have recognized the symptoms in himself and committed suicide.

The Maybrick Diaries

noreply@blogspirit.com (steve c) — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:53:12 +0100

In 1992, Ripperologists were provided a rare opportunity to sharpen their teeth. Michael Barrett, a scrap metal dealer from Liverpool, came forward with a diary reputedly written by a cotton broker named James Maybrick who died in 1889. In this diary, James Maybrick confesses to being Jack the Ripper.

Barrett says that his friend Tony Devereux gave him the diary, but Devereux never explained how it had gotten into his hands. Devereux was dead and his family had no knowledge of the diary at all.

For over 100 years, scholars wondered why the Ripper murders had begun suddenly in August of 1888 with the murder of Polly Nichols and then stopped just as abruptly in November of that same year with the murder of Mary Kelly. The Maybrick diary, if it was authentic, provided the answer.

If James Maybrick were Jack the Ripper, his death in 1889 would explain why the murders ended when they did.

James Maybrick was a cotton merchant who began his business in London in the early 1870's. He traveled to the United States to open an office in Virginia and returned several years later. He had contracted malaria in the U.S. and was taking a combination of arsenic and strychnine to keep it under control. The medication was addictive and he continued to take arsenic until his death.

Maybrick brought home with him a beautiful, wealthy and socially prominent wife. 18-year-old Florence Chandler (Florie) was less than half Maybrick's age, but they fell in love immediately and married soon afterwards.

The 1880's brought bad luck to the business and marriage of the Maybricks. Poor economic conditions in the U.S. and England hurt them financially at a time when they overextended themselves. In 1888, James and Florie and their two children moved into a huge mansion outside Liverpool. James Maybrick escaped his financial worries with increasing amounts of drugs, arsenic included, plus another woman. When Florie found that despite their financial straits, that her husband was supporting a mistress and his illegitimate children, she gave up on him. She took up with a younger man.

In April of 1889, Florie bought some fly papers and soaked them to get out the arsenic to prepare a cream for her face, which had broken out just before some big social event. At the same time, James Maybrick, who was continuing to take his arsenic powders, became sick and died May 11, 1889.

Florie was charged with murdering her husband with arsenic. After a very hasty and unfair trial, she was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. The judge had not allowed any evidence of James Maybrick's long arsenic addiction to be introduced into the trial. She spent 15 years in jail before she was finally released. The judge in her trial was the father of J.K. Stephen, the tutor of Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), and who was a Ripper suspect. The judge died a few years later in a hospital for the insane.

While Maybrick was never a suspect during his life, his alleged diary focused an enormous amount of scrutiny on him after 1992. Many experts analyzed both the diary and the life of James Maybrick. The actual volume in which the diary was written was from the Victorian times, but such volumes are available in antique shops. Quite a few pages at the beginning of the volume had been removed, suggesting that it might have been partially used for some other purpose before it became the Maybrick diary. Several experts claimed the ink was modern.

Ripper expert Martin Fido found many anachronisms in the text and Scotland Yard determined that the handwriting had been altered to add Victorian flourishes. More problematic is that there were inaccuracies in the accounts of the murders that seem to have been taken from newspaper accounts. For example, Philip Sugden says of the murder of Mary Kelly,

We are told that the various parts of her body were strewn 'all over the room,' that her severed breasts were placed on the bedside table and that the killer took the key of the room away with him. None of these statements are true.

John Douglas and Mark Olshaker reject James Maybrick as a Ripper candidate based on his personality and history:

Even more to the point, how does a fifty-year-old man with a family, children, and no sociopathy suddenly blossom into a disorganized serial killer? He can't, and doesn't. Anyone who thinks his situation through enough to decide that he wants to kill prostitutes to get back at his wife but must do so on trips to another city, where he'll hide out, stalk women of the night, rip them up, and then return to his own world and home, would not exactly be disorganized. No one plans that carefully, then goes into such a frenzy of sexual pathology.

Finally, in 1995, a number of experts who labeled the Maybrick diary a brazen hoax are backed up by Michael Barrett's confession: "I, Michael Barratt (sic) was the author of the original diary of 'Jack the Ripper' and my wife, Anne Barrett, hand wrote it from my typed notes" Even so, the Maybrick diary is still a subject of controversy, despite the evidence that it was a forgery.

From Hell: Royal Conspiracy, Concludes

noreply@blogspirit.com (steve c) — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:46:46 +0100

One variation of the theory has Dr. Gull, whose intellect has been impaired by a stroke, becoming a kind of Masonic ritual executioner. Not only does Gull go to great lengths to create the belief that a sex-crazed doctor has perpetrated the series of murders, he also weaves into that creation some obscure ancient Masonic lore. Gull's Masonic group, which is the virtual Who's Who of the London upper class, includes top police officials like Sir Robert Anderson who help Gull in his efforts to protect the throne.

Everybody loves a conspiracy theory and no doubt this one will endure for a long time despite the fact that there is no evidence to support it and quite a lot of reason to doubt that there is any truth to it at all.

There did exist a woman named Annie Crook who worked in a shop in Cleveland Street and she had an illegitimate daughter named Alice Margaret.

But there is nothing to connect her to a relationship with Eddy, whose sexual preferences were rumored to be men rather than women. Homosexuality was against the law in Victorian England and a man of Eddy's social standing would have to be very discreet if he were homosexually inclined.

Cleveland Street was the home of a brothel that catered to wealthy homosexuals. The brothel was raided, giving rise to strong rumors that Eddy was one of the patrons there, but there is no existing evidence of his presence there at the time of the raid.

Also, there is nothing to connect Annie Crook to Mary Kelly or to connect Mary Kelly to any of the other victims of Jack the Ripper. There is no evidence to suggest that they even knew each other at all and it is most unlikely that they were a tightly knit group of friends or it would have been discovered in the interviews that police had with the families and friends of each victim.

The victims of Jack the Ripper were murdered where they were found, not in a coach or at some other location. Also, from witnesses in the crime scene areas, it is very unlikely that more than one man carried out the crimes.

Regarding Dr. Gull's ability to be Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow in The Complete Jack the Ripper points out:

"Medically the slight stroke that Gull had in 1887 was the first attack of severe paralysis. Although he recovered from it, its effects were serious enough to prohibit him from further medical practice. Taken with the fact that he was 70 years old at this time, this is surely enough to cast doubts on the story of his roaming about WhitechapelFinally, Gull did not die in a lunatic asylum. He died at home on 29 January 1890, after a third stroke which left him speechless."

Also, there is nothing to suggest that the Ripper murders had anything whatsoever to do with the Masons. Nor is it known whether Dr. Gull, Sir Robert Anderson or any of the other high level police officials involved in the Ripper murders were even members of the Freemasons.

Would the Crown have resorted to the flamboyant murder of five unfortunate women in order to protect itself? Donald Rumbelow explains the Royal Marriages Act, which was designed by George III to prevent his sons from marrying against his wishes:

"Under this Act, any such marriage as that between Eddy and Annie could have been set aside as illegal, since (1) Eddy was under 25 years old at the time of the marriage; and (2) he had married without the Queen's consent."

Finally, as John Douglas and Mark Olshaker state in The Cases That Haunt Us, the frenzied butchery of the Ripper murders is the "work of a disorganized, paranoid offender," not a person who "could continue functioning and interacting with people in a relatively normal way. Dr. Gull simply does not fit this profile.

There are a number of variants to the Royal Conspiracy Theory. One has Eddy being Jack the Ripper. Suffering from tertiary syphilis, he goes into murderous rages and haunts the streets of Whitechapel in search of victims. That is, until his keepers catch on to this and lock him up until his death from syphilis.

There is no supporting evidence for this variation either. Royal records show Eddy as a victim of the influenza epidemic of 1892. Also, several years after the Ripper murders in 1891, Eddy was named the Duke of Clarence, not a title that would have been bestowed on a person that was violently insane from tertiary syphilis. While Eddy did not possess a brilliant mind, he was always considered a nice person and was not in any way inclined to violence.

While there were rumors about Eddy's sexual proclivities during his lifetime, there was never any indication that police or anyone else at that time thought of him as a suspect in the Ripper murders. Indeed, Eddy had pretty unshakeable alibis for all of the murders, often being far from London when they occurred.

Another variant on the Royal Conspiracy Theory was that Eddy's tutor at Cambridge, James Kenneth Stephen, was Jack the Ripper: after Eddy ended a homosexual relationship with his tutor, Stephen committed the murders for revenge.

While it was true that Stephen was Eddy's tutor, there is no evidence of a homosexual relationship between them. A few years after Eddy left Cambridge, Stephen's brain was seriously damaged in an accident and he eventually died in an asylum. The emotional and mental problems that plagued Stephen after his accident gave rise to some violent phrases in his poetry, but that certainly doesn't add up to being a serial killer. Like the other variations of the Royal Conspiracy Theory, this one has no evidence to support it either.

Variants of the Royal Conspiracy will continue to prosper because they lend themselves to movies and books. They are dramatic stories that explain Jack the Ripper in motives that we can all understand unlike the frenzied evil that drives a brutal serial killer.