A cursory stay then, if it took place at all, would explain his omission from the Register of Voters for the City of London, which includes the names of lodgers as well as of tenants and owners. I have searched these registers from 1878 to 1889 and have not found the name of Druitt mentioned anywhere. Clearly, then, neither Lionel and certainly not Montague were ever lodgers for any length of time – although there is always the possibility that they might have stayed there occasionally, as infrequent guests. Had Montague’s stay, however, coincided with each of the murders then surely he would have come under suspicion. Unfortunately, without more facts this line of speculation is useless. The only conclusion that can be reached with any certainty is that Lionel Druitt was probably Dr Taylor’s locum when he resigned in 1879 (he is not mentioned in the obituaries) and that when he left after a brief stay the only practitioner in residence at 140 Minories was Dr Thyne, who is the only doctor registered at that address in 1880.
This still leaves us with Cullen’s other alternative that he might have changed his blood-stained clothes in his chambers in King’s Bench Walk. Yet this does not explain why, if he was going to the Temple, or even to the Minories, after leaving Mitre Square he should have walked in completely the opposite direction to both. The one fact which both men ignore is that he dropped part of Eddowes’ apron in Goulston Street. This means that the Ripper, like a fox, was doubling back towards the police who were running in his direction. At some point, with so many police in the area, they must have met.
How, then, did he get away?
The only way he could have done so was by bolting into one of the hundreds of lodging houses in the area. There has been a general refusal to accept that this was possible because they were so public and he would have been too blood-stained to have escaped notice. But would he? On 11 September The Times published the following piece in a long article about Annie Chapman’s murder and the inquiries that were then being made:
The woman Chapman was known in appearance to the policemen on the night beats in the neighbourhood, but none of those who were on duty between 12 and 6 on Saturday morning recollect having seen her. It is ascertained that several men left their lodgings after midnight with the expressed intention of returning who have not returned. Some men went to their lodgings after 3 o’clock, and left again before 6 in the morning, which is not an unfrequent occurrence in those houses. None of the deputies or watchmen at the houses have any memory of any person stained with blood entering their premises but at that hour of the morning little or no notice is taken of persons inquiring for beds. They are simply asked for the money, and shown up dark stairways with a bad light to their rooms. When they leave early, they are seldom noticed in their egress. It is then considered quite probable that the murderer may have found a refuge for a few hours in one of those places, and even washed away the signs of his guilt. The men in these houses use a common washing place, and water once used is thrown down the sink by the lodger using it. All this might happen in a common lodging house in the early morning without the blood-stained murderer being noticed particularly. The conviction is growing even, that taking for granted that one man committed all the recent murders of women in the Whitechapel district, he might in this fashion, by changing his common lodging house, evade detection for a considerable time.
It is also worth remembering that after the double event of 30 September he washed some of the blood away in a street, as Henry Smith relates. Just how many other times did he do this? And depending on just how these murders were committed hangs the whole question of how bloodstained he would have been.
Trying to work out the practicalities that he must have faced when he killed these women gives some of the answers. Assuming that these women went with him expecting to have normal sexual intercourse, it is hardly likely that they – and certainly not their clients – would have been lying down on one of those filthy courts or alleys in autumn and early winter weather. The alternative is that it would have been performed standing up against some fence or wall. If so, the woman would have stood with her back to the wall and lifted up her skirts. Now, remembering that these were ankle-length skirts and that most of these women were wearing three or four garments of similar length (Catharine Eddowes, for instance, was wearing a skirt and three petticoats), they would have stood with these garments bunched up clumsily in front of them. The man would then stand close. In this position she would have been completely vulnerable to any attack.
For a long time I assumed that she must have been standing so because of the bruising on nearly all the victims’ faces and to explain away the absence of any stab wounds in the chest or throat. The bruising is generally one of the things which is ignored, although a contemporary newspaper said at the time of Eddowes’ murder that one eye had been knocked out; this was wrong, but certainly it was very badly bruised and swollen, as the mortuary photographs show. Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman were similarly badly bruised about the face. From this, I thought that probably the Ripper had punched them several times in the face, which would have stunned them and given him enough time to get his hands round their throats to strangle them. This would explain why Annie Chapman was able to call out, which she could not have done if she had been seized from behind and her throat cut. Once they had been strangled, into unconsciousness at least, it would have been a simple matter for the Ripper to have knelt by their heads and swiftly cut their throats. This would explain why in the case of the four women he murdered in the street there was no blood-staining except under the bodies. If they had been alive when their throats were cut the blood would have spurted out in a three-foot jet.
On this evidence, then, it is obvious that the women were strangled first, with the exception of Mary Kelly.
There would be very little blood-staining on the killer. Blood would have seeped on to the ground and been soaked up by the clothing, as did happen, and after the mutilation the Ripper would have had bloodstains on his hands, cuffs, the bottoms of his trousers and his boots. Much has been made of the question of whether he was ambidextrous or left-handed, but this is hard to judge, particularly if he was kneeling by their heads when he cut their throats, as I believe he was. According to Sir Melville Macnaghten, ‘The theory that the Whitechapel murderer was left-handed, or, at any rate, “ambidexter”, had its origin in the remark made by a doctor who examined the corpse of one of the earliest victims; other doctors did not agree with him.’ According to the Westminster notes, the throats in the first four murders were cut from left to right, which makes the Ripper right-handed, and the women were lying down when murdered. Professor Cameron of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the London Hospital thought, from the Mitre Square drawings and photographs, that he was right-handed as the incision drags to the right, as would happen, and is deeper as more viscera are exposed.
Both Professor Cameron, and his predecessor Professor Camps, thought that the Ripper had probably always strangled his victims first. Professor Camps, however, pointed out a difficulty in The Investigation of Murder :
The approach of the doctors in all the Ripper cases appears to have been on the basis of accepting the obvious. Viewed in the light of other sadistic sexual murders, strangulation would usually be a very significant feature. It seems very possible that the Ripper silenced all his victims by strangling them for, in at least two cases, obstruction to the mouth is mentioned and the absence of bleeding is also a matter for comment. In all cases there was no sign or sound of a struggle, which tends to confirm this. Yet no effort was made to trace the typical injuries associated with this, with the result that the knife became at once the murder weapon and the means of mutilation. If this hypothesis were correct and had been realised, it is possible that the later victims might have escaped their fate, for throat-cutting is neither silent nor neat, whilst all prostitutes fear strangulation. To look for such marks is not a matter of inspired guesswork but a simple extension of the maxim that it is safer to proceed by excluding all possibilities than by
taking the short cut of accepting what is obvious. It is a major and very dangerous temptation to find what is expected and look no further.
The kind of injuries that Professor Camps was referring to are the showers of pin-prick haemorrhages (petechiae) which in cases of strangulation occur in the face and in and around the eyes, and the damage to the laryngeal structures, particularly the hyoid bone which is usually fractured. In fairness, however, to doctors such as Dr Phillips, the conditions they worked in were impossible. Most of their work had to be carried out in badly equipped workhouse mortuaries or in sheds like those which Dr Phillips and the coroner had protested about quite strongly at the early inquests, and which helps make the doctors’ acceptance of the obvious at least understandable.
In discussing these points, Professor Cameron offered me an alternative theory of his own. It was based on a case that he had investigated in 1968. The insight that it gives into this particular killer’s mind also suggests a motive for the Ripper killings that is at least as satisfactory as any other so far presented.
Briefly the facts of the case are that on 7 February 1968 a young bride was found brutally murdered in the bedroom by her husband when he returned home to the flat in Bromley, Kent. It was a seemingly ‘motiveless’ murder. She had fourteen incised wounds in the throat and four stab wounds to the neck, one of which had penetrated through to the front of the spine on the right side. There was bruising round the neck which indicated that there might have been partial asphyxiation at or shortly before death. There were marks on the right side of her mouth which might have been done by the left hand, if she was gripped from behind, leaving the right hand free. A knife with a serrated edge was the probable weapon but this was never found. Nor was there any evidence of sexual assault. A 26-year-old bank clerk was later convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The case was discussed at a meeting of the Medico-Legal Society on 10 June 1971. During it, the following exchange took place, the relevance of which is immediately apparent:
Mr Taylor asked whether Dr Cameron was satisfied that the actual blows and wounds could have been inflicted in the way suggested. It seemed a rather peculiar attack from behind, with one hand over the mouth of a girl who obviously struggled, to use a long knife, which had to be low down quite far in front and pushed in, causing four wounds which were so very close together through the neck and all accurately placed. This was done to a girl who was, no doubt, screaming and struggling. There was also a slit across, which apparently would have been taken with a knife held in probably a different manner. It all seemed to be ‘a bit too good to be true’.
Dr Cameron recalled his remarks that the deceased had exhibited evidence of asphyxia in the form of petechiae (pin-point haemorrhages) and that there was bruising around the voicebox. On examination he assumed that she could well have been partially asphyxiated and rendered unconscious before the actual knife assault occurred.
He was under the impression that, if the knife assault was from in front, it would have to be from the left hand in view of the distribution of the fourteen undercut-from-below-up wounds that were partly superficial and partly deep across the neck. His opinion was that it was more likely to have been inflicted from behind or certainly, if the body was on the floor, from the head end, with the hand gripping the face to give the abrasions to the right side of the mouth. In that position, to cause the fourteen wounds in the neck would be a sort of violin-playing effect with the serrated edge of a knife and undercut from below up. It would not then require much force to bring an eight-inch blade into contact four times through the already gaping hole.
Professor Simpson said that he could support those views from a similar kind of case which occurred on a railway train from Basingstoke. He thought that Dr Cameron had given a soundly-based reconstruction of the infliction of the wounds.
The president asked whether there was a great deal of bloodstaining. The photographs did not appear to show very much bloodstaining in the room.
Dr Cameron replied that there was quite extensive bloodstaining, but it was only beneath the body. His impression was that the body had been assaulted actually in the bedroom, where it was found.
The president remarked that that suggested that ‘the deceased was possibly at least semi-conscious before the knife attack took place’.
Dr Cameron said he would have thought that she was probably partially assaulted near the kitchen and ran, losing her slipper outside the door, towards the bedroom to get away. The bedroom was the furthest part of the flat, and probably that was where she was actually attacked.
The president asked whether the strangling component might have occurred first.
Dr Cameron replied that in his opinion, it did occur first.
The main points which have to be borne in mind are that there was a partial strangulation of the victim, bruising on the face and very little blood in the flat, most of it being under the body and soaked up by the victim’s clothes, as happened with the Ripper’s victims.
Now with this case in mind, Professor Cameron thought that the most likely position that the Ripper and each of his victims would have taken up would have been with her bending forward and the Ripper standing behind; again, remembering her heavy garments – five in all – she would have found it easier in this position to have flicked them forward over her back. Possibly, she might have had anal intercourse – which used to be a common way of birth control with these women – rather than normal vaginal penetration. In this position, anyway, it would have been a very simple matter for the Ripper to have strangled her. As he was doing so, he could have battered their faces against the wall, which could explain the facial bruising on three of them. It might even explain why Stride was still gripping the bag of cachous, which in this position she may have gripped even tighter in her final spasms until she lost consciousness. If the Ripper had then cut their throats while still holding them from behind, the risk of staining his clothes with blood would have been minimal.
Such an explanation also gives us a possible motive for the murders other than the normal one of sadistic cruelty. The murderer, in the 1968 case referred to by Professor Cameron, had assaulted two previous victims in precisely the same manner from behind and each time with a knife. When he was seventeen he had been put on probation for three years for breaking into a girl’s house armed with a knife and attempting to have sexual intercourse with her. Six years later he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for assault occasioning actual bodily harm against a middle-aged woman whose bedroom he had broken into. Apparently he was impotent but he could overcome this by a sudden attack on a woman.
According to the Canadian graphologist’s analysis of the ‘From Hell’ letter that was sent to Mr Lusk, the writer was probably a latent homosexual. Might this suppressed homosexuality have created a similar impotency in Jack the Ripper and caused him to act in identical manner? Such a possibility makes a much more acceptable theory than the one which sees him as a social reformer dedicated to the cause of slum clearance in Whitechapel and the erection of model dwellings. Tom Cullen puts forward this latter, very persuasive theory; but it ignores the reforms which had been going steadily forward for more than a decade and wrongly credits the Whitechapel murderer with reforms which rightly belonged to the newly created London County Council.
This has taken us slightly away from Montague Druitt but it does help us towards a more convincing picture of the Ripper.
The question has already been asked as to whether the Ripper was homosexual. Alternatively, was Montague Druitt homosexual, and was it perhaps homosexual activity that brought about his sudden dismissal from the Blackheath school? Whatever it was, it was this dismissal and a letter he wrote to the headmaster threatening suicide that probably brought him to the attention of the police. Attempted suicide was a criminal offence and was then punished with the gaol sentence, but this would have been preferable to the tragic and unnecessary waste of this young man’s life. Possibly t
he headmaster, when he received Druitt’s letter, tried to trace him through his friends who probably went to the police to help them only as a last resort, before they contacted Druitt’s brother one week later. Naturally the police would have gone to the Temple and searched his rooms and it is there that they might have found either Druitt’s bloodstained clothing or some other evidence which suggested that they had found the Whitechapel murderer.
And this is where my contribution to the Ripper story comes in.
When I was researching my first book I Spy Blue I shared the Guildhall Records Office every Monday afternoon with the Inspectress of the Sir John Soane museum, Miss Dorothy Stroud who was also researching a book. Gradually she discovered my interest in crime and one day she gave me Jack the Ripper’s knife. I must admit that I groaned inwardly, as I thought it most unlikely that it was the actual weapon until she told me the following story. In 1937 she was an assistant editor on Sporting Life. The editor was Hugh Pollard, whose pro-Fascist sympathies led him to fly Franco into Spain for the civil war. One day he was getting rid of many of his personal things. He came into the office and plumped on the desk in front of her a box which he said contained Jack the Ripper’s knives. The box had two knives, of which I now have one, and was lined with blue silk, heavily bloodstained. Miss Stroud took one knife and her friend took the other. (They then burned the box because of the bloodstains.) During the war Miss Stroud used hers as a carving knife and later as a gardening knife. The blade became very nicked and eventually she broke it when cutting a privet bush. Fortunately she kept the pieces, which she gave to me. The Guildhall Museum, without knowing what it was, told me that it had been made in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The knife, contrary to what I thought at one time, is an amputation knife made by Weiss, a firm of surgical instrument makers in Bond Street.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 18