THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Generally there are between four and seven “classic suspects” as Jack the Ripper. They usually include Aaron Kosminski, Michael Ostrog, George Chapman (also known as Severin Klosowski), Nathan Kaminski, Walter Sickert, and Montague John Druitt. Note, of course, the predominance of immigrants of Polish-Jewish ancestry; clearly, Britons wanted Jack to be an “other,” an “outsider,” not one of their own fair boys. This bias comes into play frequently in the whole Jack affair. The German-born Sickert is the English artist included by Patricia Cornwell’s insistence. It should be obvious but must be stated nevertheless that all save one fails to demonstrate the attributes that I have just delineated.
—
There are other problems with those candidates as well. I leave to anyone with curiosity to turn to specifics in any of the hundreds of sources (“Casebook: Jack the Ripper,” casebook.org, is a superb starting spot). But let me lay out a perhaps larger and less obvious one not mentioned at Casebook. That is that each “theory” justifying each candidate is not really a theory at all. It is instead a new kind of rhetorical gambit which I call an “aggregation of confluence.” This technique does not point exactly at one man and explain how his attributes made it possible for him to commit these crimes and at the same time exclude all others. Instead, it examines the external circumstances of the suspect’s life and labor to search out facts that prove that he was there then—he was in Whitechapel, or at least London, on each of the nights in the fall of 1888 when the five women were slain. Then, usually, it examines his past for “similar” incidents or tendencies or it examines his future for the same, patches on a little penny-ante Freudian jabber and thus, ipso facto, the Ripper. Would that it were so easy.
Yes, they may well have been there, but that only proves opportunity and neglects to mention that in the immediate London area, there were at least five million other souls, nine hundred thousand of them in the East End, seventy-six thousand in Whitechapel, with the same opportunity. As for mental illness, it is neither here nor there. Any man’s life, examined closely enough, yields the occasional theme or practice of irrationality such as odd agitations, peculiarities of dress or habit, feuds in family, church, or workplace, tendencies toward melancholy, perhaps even explosions of ill-tempered (but never close to fatal) violence. From there, confirmation bias takes over and the declaration of guilt is issued. The only criterion appears to be proximity; no attempt is made to identify the attributes the killer must have had and locate them in the suspect pool.
—
In two widely publicized cases, forensic manipulations are involved. The thriller writer Patricia Cornwell submits in Portrait of a Killer that the DNA found on a stamp on a confessional letter sent the London Police was that of the artist Walter Sickert. It helps her case, she thinks, that Sickert was a moody, violent man and he was known to be particularly agitated by Jack. He even painted a picture called Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, which hangs in a Manchester museum and sees Jack’s figure disassembled into a shimmering series of broken reflections, which she interprets as a representation of a broken, perhaps even shattered, personality. But many artists, probably including Cornwell and me, have broken personalities and we are not serial killers and mutilators, we’re just rather annoying people. Moreover, in the end, even accepting the less rigorous mitochondrial DNA—as opposed to nuclear DNA—testing which she used and which only identifies groups, not individuals, she merely places him in the group of people who write crazy letters to the police. Since all gaudy crimes attract hundreds of confessional letters, why should this one be considered any more credible than any of the others? Surely there are thousands more crazy letter writers than serial murderers.
The second case is that of Russell Edwards, whose recent book Naming Jack the Ripper claimed that DNA findings identified popular suspect Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish hairdresser in Whitechapel, as the murderer. Again, passing on a discussion of the technical issues of the mitochondrial DNA testing and its much lower reliability than nuclear DNA, let’s briefly examine the nuts and bolts of this claim.
—
It seems specious on its face. Edwards believes that he is in possession of a shawl which Jack carried with him the night he killed Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square. He makes little of the fact that if so, because it was the night of the double event, Jack would have had this shawl with him during the murder of Elizabeth Stride. He would have had to have it with him over the course of his escape from Dutfield’s Yard which may have involved climbing and leaping and jumping. He would have had to have it with him on his 1,750-step walk to Mitre Square, where he met, then murdered, then mutilated Mrs. Eddowes. And… after all the trouble to take it along, he forgot it! He left it at the scene of the second murder and thus it has both Jack’s (i.e., Kosminski’s) and Eddowes’s (merely and not peer-reviewed) mitochondrial DNA upon it, linking them in the crime.
It gets better. The shawl, as a clue, is taken to the morgue and there it is given as a gift or souvenir to a policeman, whose family owned it until Edwards bought it at auction. Rather hard to believe, because by that time the Jack murders gripped the London and the world imagination so it seems quite unlikely these fellows would have let a clue disappear like that. And it gets even more ridiculous when one realizes that the crime was committed not in London but in the City of London, an administrative oddity of the great city which puts an entirely different municipal government in charge of a patch in the middle of a much bigger municipal government. Thus the shawl, if it exists (it is not recorded in the otherwise well-kept and highly professional City of London files of the crime), fell under the administrative purview of the smaller entity. But the policeman who claimed he received it was from the larger, surrounding entity, namely the London Metropolitan Police. Not only that, he was from an outlying district and had no clear business being in any proximity to the Ripper investigation. The policeman was, in other words, a complete stranger to the men he received the shawl from, not a colleague and constant morgue hanger-on whose friendship with the technicians might carry some weight. And finally and of course, there’s no documentation for any of this; it’s simply family lore, handed down generation by generation over one hundred–odd years. And of course there was no chain of custody to the shawl recorded, and no quarantine protocols were enforced, so it could have been touched, vomited or sneezed upon, spit on, used to wipe up baby’s poos, or anything that cloth is used for in a household. For over a century!
MONTY
Montague John Druitt was born August 15, 1857, in Wimborne, Dorset, to a stable, upper-middle-class family. His father was a doctor as would both a brother and a cousin become, suggesting a household well-fortified in medical reality, not a requisite for Jack suspicion, but not without some weight either. He was well educated, as befits the station of his people, at Winchester and New College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a third class degree in the classics. His time at both establishments was marked by intense involvement in debating societies, where he generally chose denouncing liberals and liberalism as his primary focus. That, of course, is another neither-here-nor-there phenomenon although—thin, I know—one might presume from it a certain emotional intensity of an awkward nature. It could also be argued—now it’s getting really thin—his conservative politics point to nativism and anti-immigration bias and from that it’s an easy leap to an anti-Semitism which evinced itself the night of the double event when Jack may have left what may have been an unfinished anti-Semitic graffito in a doorway.
Anyhow, a photo of the younger Druitt shows a handsome man with cleft chin, strong nose, steady eyes, tight mouth and his hair, abundant, parted after the Victorian fashion, down the middle. He wore no facial hair then. It’s the face of a soldier, a barrister, a politician: calm, unflinching, eyes fixed on duty ahead. It’s the face of the British Empire in the high Victorian age; nothing in it indicates that he was Jack the Ripper.
—
He comes to us in th
at identity via a memorandum from Inspector Melville Macnaghten, chief constable of Scotland Yard, which, in 1894, declared, “From private information I have little doubt that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer; it was alleged that he was sexually insane.” He repeated the claim in another file.
None of this is breaking news and will come as a disappointment to someone invested in dramatic discovery. Druitt’s guilt or innocence has been argued aggressively for a number of decades, and anyone with an even rudimentary knowledge of the case will recognize his name. In Pick-Jack polls of Ripperologists over the years, he comes in as high as No. 3 and as low as No. 9. Though that in itself is of no consequence, it shows how well and thoroughly he’s been examined. Three books (Autumn of Terror by Tom Cullen, Ripper Suspect: The Secret Lives of Montague Druitt by D. J. Leighton, and Jack the Ripper by Daniel Farson) have been written advocating his guilt and a fourth, Jack the Ripper: Case Solved 1891, was published in October 2015 by J. J. Hainsworth, an Australian, who picked up his trail in that country, to which many of Druitt’s relatives emigrated after his possible involvement became known. Perhaps the Aussie will come up with something that has thus far evaded me: actual evidence.
—
Druitt’s public life and career as an adult was difficult, haunted by failure, loss, severe interior doubt and, killing aside, what was surely bad behavior by Victorian standards. He decided to practice law but also had a passionate pedagogical inclination, and he taught at Mr. George Valentine’s School, in Blackheath, London, a distinguished public institution. He never married. As a solicitor, opinions on his success vary. As a teacher, all commentators understand but variously interpret the fact that he was fired from his part-time teaching post at Valentine’s. Though a reason has never been established, some suspect that homosexuality was involved, even child molestation. It is also true that he lost both of his parents within a few years immediately previous to 1888—his father died, his mother was sent to an asylum—and that insanity and a proclivity to suicide ran in the family. His mother died in the asylum and previous relatives had committed suicide; moreover relatives in later years committed suicide.
All these facts are open to interpretation and depending on one’s advocacy, they may be used to either bolster or attack the case.
What is not open to controversy is that he was a lifelong athlete, and that alone among the classic suspects he had the physical tools to accomplish the five murders that none of the others came close to possessing. His most public sport was cricket, where opinions vary as to his skills. He was clearly somewhere between average and better than average, his bowling being the strongest part of his game.
“Druitt was granted a spot in the Winchester First Eleven (cricket),” says Casebook, “and was a member of the Kingston Park and Dorset Country Cricket Club. He was noted to have had formidable strength in his arms and wrists, despite his gaunt appearance in surviving photographs. Druitt also became quite talented at Fives, winning the Doubles and Single Five titles at Winchester and Oxford.”
His efforts include championships for both Winchester and New College and a post-collegiate career, membership on traveling teams (in cricket clubs well-wired into the English aristocracy) and, as well, a hobby or third job as a “ringer,” that is, a bowler for hire who railroaded to villages on the outskirts of London and played in their ardent local leagues.
—
Many still find puzzling the fact that it can be proven (by newspaper records) that twice he proceeded by trains the day after Jack killings in the fall of 1888 and participated in such matches. To some, this is evidence that he could not be Jack. As it turns out, as many have determined, the physics of the travel—meaning the times of the murders juxtaposed to the times of the train journeys—works out, if barely. As a matter of factuality, yes, he could have committed the crimes and still traveled to and played in the matches.
However the real objection to this possibility is usually psychological. How, many wonder, could a man go from unleashing the most revolting slaughter upon the poor unfortunates and then blithely catch a train, travel, and spend the afternoon bowling for dollars. And at Druitt’s level of athletic sophistication, there could be nothing casual about his sports duty; he would have demanded of himself total immersion in the sport, total concentration of the mind and total engagement of his imagination. His paying clients would have accepted no less. How is such a thing possible?
Again, athletic ignorance seems to be at play here, and judgments are being issued by men who’ve never bowled, batted, caught, jumped, dodged, tackled, or sprinted a second in their lives. My argument—I have minor athletic credentials, including a long-ago state championship—is that not only is such a thing possible, it is probable, even mandatory. My theory of Druitt’s illness is that he was what might be called a “remorseful psychotic.” Most of the time he knew his impulses were evil, he hated himself for harboring them, he took pleasure in denying them for as long as possible; however, pressure and longing built, will evaporated, fantasy rehearsal became his predominant mind-set, and at a certain point, he could no longer deny them and he committed them in an almost masturbatory frenzy, increasingly barbaric at each outing. The crime scenes certainly support that theory.
—
Spent as if having ejaculated (though, for the record, he—or rather Jack—left no trace of having done so), he felt crushing remorse. This theme will come into play later, but one can see how his sports offered him an escape from his pain and self-hatred. The match was so all-encompassing a universe that it drove out of his mind images of the red death he had visited upon the unfortunate the night before. One might go so far as to suggest that the date to play was his triggering mechanism, not the moon phase, the weather, the temperature, the kabala, the demands of Masonic ritual, or the Satanist’s pentagram. Knowing he had a match, knowing that he would naturally slip into the forgetful, healing bliss that intense sport brings with it, he gave vent to his feelings on the night before.
But cricket is not the vessel that contains the real relationship between his murderer’s life and his athletic life. Instead, and I am amazed that no one else has picked up on this, it was his immersion in the game of Fives, or Eton Fives, that most prepared him for his killings.
—
At this arcane sport he was indeed truly distinguished, one of his country’s best. Fives is a wall-ball sport, in which either singly or in two-man teams, players used gloved hands to smack a cork and rubber ball (in size between a golf ball and a baseball) off a three-wall containment and score points by hitting shots their opponents cannot return. The floor isn’t just flat as in all other hand- and racket-ball sports, however; at a certain point it is broken down the middle by a two-inch ledge meant to trip and spill the unwary and, oddly to my experience, it also features a blockage on the left side, a sort of cement abutment extending outwards from the left-side court wall about ten inches and rising to about five feet in height, which complicates the angle calculation that lies at the heart of winning strategy, as well as promising the forgetful a brutal comeuppance. The bruise factor in high-level play must be astonishing. (If I had to guess, I’d say the abutment is a relic of the first court, at Eton, which cannot have been a court at all but just a niche in the wall, which the boys put to ingenious athletic use.) The rules are necessarily rigid, and I won’t go into them, because I have no idea what they are. My ignorance of them, however, doesn’t preclude the observation that the basic shot in Eton Fives, one which Druitt must have mastered and brought off many thousands of times, is almost identical to, and depends upon the same obligations and principles, as the killing stroke he utilized on the Whitechapel streets four times.
The problem to be solved is intercepting a small target with a precise swing, bringing hand to target with full strength and full speed. In one, the hand wears a glove; in the other it grips the knife. In one the target is a moving ball, in the other it is a briefly stationary couple of inches o
f neck, shielded in tough bone. Whichever, the perpetrator needs superb hand-eye coordination, superb vision, superb body management, superb confidence. He must read the flight of the target, move to position himself appropriately, manage his feet to the most efficient launch position, set his hips, load his arm, and deliver. Then he must keep his head down, his eyes on the target, transfer his weight from one hip to the other as he rotates toward his interception, thus uncoiling a deeper throb of power, guiding the arm in flight while making subtle grip alterations for spin or to keep the knife at right angles to the neck, remaining firm at contact and, another necessity, following through, keeping his head down, and his concentration absolute.
But let us not forget the anomaly of Mary Jane Kelly. Recall that many have argued that he killed her with his left hand, pinning her head to the mattress with his right. That feels most logical given his position vis-à-vis hers. To justify, these acolytes argue for ambidextrousness as the facilitating factor. But is true ambidextrousness really necessary? Jack is not required to pitch both ends of a double-header with separate arms or play a piano concerto for one hand both lefty and righty. His threshold of off-hand usage is merely to administer a deep, straight, powerful cut to a sleeping woman’s exposed neck.
The key here again must be Eton Fives. It is an ambidextrous sport, and it requires considerable usage and development of the weak hand to excel, as Monty surely had achieved. It is not a racquet sport, like racquetball or squash but a glove sport, like American handball. Thus there is no backhand, as speeds are too fast and the area too limited for the turn and dip and re-grip and footwork reset of a tennis or racquetball backhand, to say nothing of the fact that no co-equal obverse striking face is available for a return shot from the weak side. The players wear gloves on both hands and when compelled to do so, they will intercept and counterstrike the ball with the weak hand, in order to offer a defensive shot to prolong the point until a winner is possible. Monty must have done this thousands of times.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 24