RIPPING YARNS
Daniel Farson sifts
the facts to discover who Jack the Ripper was
MORE rubbish has been written about Jack the Ripper in this centennial year than ever before. The game of hunt the Ripper has been played harmlessly by amateur sleuths for years, but now people are starting to bend the rules. Numerous claims in the recent plethora of books are little more than fantasy: the basis for The Final Solution by the late Stephen Knight, linking the Duke of Clarence with an establishment cover-up, has been exposed as a hoax, and the 'secret' Home Office files referred to in the hype for the forth- coming television series, starring Michael Caine, have proved to be non-existent.
This week Scotland Yard revealed their Ripper material in the Black Museum to ITV, and Timewatch followed through 'Perhaps England should take drugs.' with 'Shadow of the Ripper' on BBC 2. There is an air of celebration, but when you see the photographs of the victims which I published for the first time in my own book in 1972, you realise there is nothing to celebrate. The first was Mary Ann Nicholls, a pathetic, 42-year-old prostitute who lacked the necessary four- pence to spend the night (31 August 1888) in a doss house. The Star reported: 'No murder was ever more ferociously and more brutally done. The knife, which must have been a large and sharp one, was jabbed into the lower part of the abdomen, and then drawn upwards, not once but twice.' Her head was nearly severed from her body; she had been disembowelled.
Though I have scant sympathy for mili- tant feminists, I can understand their rage when the Jack the Ripper public house in the East End, since renamed, sold a cocktail called the Ripper Tipple. At a recent horror film festival in Italy, where I spoke on the murders, a fellow Ripper- ologist , the genial Martin Fido, angered the American crime writer, Dorothy Uhnak, by appearing in the pub's T-shirt decorated with pictures of the victims. `What next,' she snarled, 'the mutilation of small children? That would be real cute!' She asked us if men might feel differently if the Ripper had been a woman, draping the genitals of her male victims over their shoulders. Yes, we agreed hastily, we might. Yet, when I mentioned the Ripper to the French film director, Claude Chab- rol, he exclaimed 'Oh, zat wonnerful man!'
In a curious way, while Count Dracula, created by my great-uncle Bram Stoker, has assumed the proportions of a real person, the Ripper has entered folklore. This is one explanation for the air of celebration, but though people prefer the myth to the reality it is time to state the truth.
Here are the facts, so often distorted. Five victims were killed within the square mile of Whitechapel in less than three months, causing a panic in London and a surge of compassion for the 'unfortunates' of the East End. The horribly precise nickname of the Ripper was probably the work of an enterprising journalist. Above all the murderer was never caught, so like Dracula he was endowed with the power of a superhuman. The panic was caused partly by the lack of motive and the gradual suspicion that he was a sex-killer, a new idea at the time and particularly disturbing for the Victorians who hid their lust under a surface respectability.
Writers have tried to identify the murderer ever since and though some theories are ingenious, most are pyramids of guesswork constructed on a single, false clue. In this way you can prove that the Ripper was Oscar Wilde or Marie Lloyd. One of few suspects who must be declared innocent was the Duke of Clarence, who was in Balmoral during one of the murders — a pity, for the royal connection was fun. All the Ripperologists, myself included, are fiercely protective of our individual suspects, like stage-struck mothers, but none of the claims has convincing evi- dence. My small claim to fame is simply that I discovered the name of the man suspected by the police at the time. This happened by luck when I included the Ripper in my television series (Farson's Guide to the British) in 1959 and men- tioned this to a marvellous old lady called the Dowager Lady Aberconway who gave me her father's notes which she copied after his death. He was Sir Melville Mac- naghten, who joined Scotland Yard just after the murders and became the head of the CID in 1903. It is fair to claim that he closed the file on the Ripper. Sir Melville named three men though dismissing two as lunatics — a Polish Jew and a Russian doctor — but accused the third: N.J. Druitt, a doctor of about 41 years of age . . . whose body was found floating in the Thames on 3rd December, i.e. seven weeks after the said [last] murder. From private information I have little doubt but that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer; and it was alleged that he was sexually insane.'
Now it was my turn to play detective and at first this proved difficult, for Sir Melville wrote from memory. Druitt's body was not registered until 1 January 1889, and there are discrepancies regarding the date of its discovery. He was 31 (not 41) and a barrister and schoolmaster instead of a doctor. The pathologist, the late Keith Simpson, told me he thought it unlikely that the Ripper was a doctor, for his obsession would have been satisfied by his work or noticed by his colleagues, but he did believe that the Ripper had a medical background. This fits Druitt perfectly: his father was a surgeon and JP at Wimborne in Dorset; his uncle was a doctor; and his cousin Lionel once had a surgery in the Minories in the heart of the Ripper's territory. Montague Druitt had access to medical instruments such as a post-mortem knife which was probably the murder weapon, even though his father was dead and Dr Lionel emigrated to Australia before the killings.
It was in Australia that I hoped to confirm the existence of a pamphlet The East End Murderer, 1 Knew Him by a Lionel Druitt or Drewery, printed private- ly by a Mr Fell in a village east of Melbourne. I found the place and an old lady who remembered Lionel, even a Mr Fell who was no relation. Probably the reference to this pamphlet was a red herring, and the question remained what evidence justified Lionel in making such a claim when he was out of England at the time? The answer was supplied in the Cricketer, an unlikely publication except that M.J. Druitt was a noted cricketer himself. Irving Rosenwater discovered that Captain Edward Druitt, Montague's youn- ger brother, departed for Australia early in 1889 — 'an unusual procedure for a regular officer' — and assumed that Edward 'ac- quainted Lionel with the sad and recent facts' and was probably anxious to 'remove himself from the scene of potential embar- rassment in England.'
This is guesswork, but the existence of Edward and three sisters is significant when you learn that William Druitt, an older brother, perjured himself at the inquest on Montague. Though a reputable solicitor at Bournemouth he testified that he was the only surviving relative apart from their mother Anne who was confined to a private insane asylum in July 1988, two miles north-east of Whitechapel. As a recent book suggests, if Druitt visited his mother from his school at Blackheath at the weekend, he would have travelled through Whitechapel and his mind could well have been disturbed by her condition. Though William tried to protect the family at the inquest, he gave his mother's insanity as the explanation for Montague's suicide, referring to a note which had been left for him — `Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die.' William lied. Why? This leads us back to Sir Melville's statement: 'I have little doubt but that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer.' Yet Druitt was highly respectable, edu- cated at Winchester and Oxford, a barris- ter with chambers in the Temple (within walking distance of Whitechapel), and a schoolmaster, though he was sacked after seven untroubled years following the last murder. He was a popular sportsman, which leads Colin Wilson, a former Rip- perologist, to declare that Druitt must be innocent because no cricketer would be capable of murder — evidently he has not watched the game recently!
As Druitt was the last man to be suspected, there had to be evidence against him. As new information comes to light, the case seems overwhelming. Firstly, the pattern fits — the final murder of Mary Kelly on 9 November was the most terri- ble, the only one to be committed indoors so that he was able to spend the night cutting up her body. After this bloodbath — it took the doctors hours to reassemble her as a human being — he could go no further. He had to be caught, killed or take his own life, as he did when he drowned himself in the Thames. Sir Melville Mac- naghten concluded that 'after his awful glut his brain gave way altogether'. Equally, as he walked into the dawn, satiated yet empty, he might have realised what he had done, revealed this in his suicide notes to his brother and George Valentine, the head of the school at Blackheath, before taking his own appalled and appalling life. The police visited Albert Bachert, the founder of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, in March 1889 and told him he could call off the vigilantes' search for the Ripper because he had been 'fished out of the Thames two months ago and it would only cause pain to relatives if we said any more than that'. Undoubtedly this was Druitt. This does not prove Druitt's guilt once and for all, but these are the facts and I am 99 per cent certain that this is the answer. An American documentary, to be presented by Peter Ustinov and shown this autumn, will use the latest investigative and forensic skills of the FBI before asking viewers to telephone in with their own choice among the suspects. They tell me they are sure of the outcome — Druitt did
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