Marsh’s statement was made on Christmas Eve 1888. On Boxing Day D’Onston went to Scotland Yard and made a five-page statement explaining why he thought that Dr Davies was the killer. One night he had seen him act out the killing on an imaginary woman and after learning from Stead that the last victim had been sodomized wondered how Dr Davies knew.
There must have been a follow-up inquiry from the police but, if so, the documentation has been lost. Certainly no action was taken against Dr Davies.
Inspector Roots, who wrote the covering report on D’Onston’s statement, added that he was someone that he had known for twenty years. He was a Bohemian, drank heavily and carried drugs with him to sober him up and stave off delirium tremens. Recurring bouts of illness led to D’Onston’s gradual decline. He converted to Christianity and worked for eleven years on a book, The Patristic Gospels. He died in Islington Infirmary on 9 October 1916.
D’Onston’s illness, the alcoholism and the drugs that he had to take to stave off the delirium tremens would surely have incapacitated him from committing the Ripper murders. Having said that, W. T. Stead suspected him of the murders. He was not the only one. The police thought so too. He was arrested once on suspicion, although there is no surviving documentation to this effect. But supposing that he was the murderer, how to explain his mistakes? Why, for example, should he say that the Goulston Street graffiti was on the wall above the body of Catharine Eddowes in Mitre Square? Were such mistakes deliberate to convince people that although he had knowledge of the murders the mistakes proved he could not be the murderer? Or was it something less sinister? Inserting himself into the story may have been his way of being considered an authority on the murders and as a way of getting more work from his freelance journalism or borrowing money, as he had tried to do with Stead. As a private patient in the London Hospital, he would have been in a slightly more privileged position than the average patient to be aware of the stories and rumours that were current. He is not deliberately making mistakes to persuade people that he is not the Ripper. This is why he gets details wrong. He is recycling gossip. Either alternative has to be considered.
D’Onston is an interesting suspect chiefly because of where he was at the time of the murders. He is on the Ripper’s killing ground, he has the medical knowledge to commit the murders and mutilations; he has to be seen as one of the more heavyweight suspects.
Michael Ostrog
Ostrog’s name appears in the Police Gazette of 26 October 1888. His aliases are given as Bertrand Ashley, Claude Clayton and Dr Grant. At least another twenty were used, including Stanistan Sublinksy and John Sobieski. He was described as a Polish Jew, age fifty-five, height 5 ft. 11 ins. with corporal punishment marks on his back (presumably from a birching or flogging), dark brown hair, scars on the right shin and right thumb, two large moles on the right shoulder and one on the back of the neck. He was generally dressed in a semi-clerical suit. He served numerous terms of imprisonment, the earliest recorded in 1863 and the last in 1904. He did nine years of a ten-year sentence, given in 1874, and was released on licence in August 1883. In 1887 he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to six months’ hard labour for larceny. Additional police information was that he was a surgeon by profession and a desperate man.
Ostrog was a confidence trickster and sneak thief. He does not come into the category of a major criminal. The sums and property involved seem to be very small – a gold watch from a barmaid, two valuable books from an Eton schoolmaster – but this should not minimize the fact that he was a dangerous man. He was in possession of a loaded eight-chambered revolver when he escaped over a roof from the police in West London. In Burton-on-Trent he was already a prisoner when in the police station he pulled his revolver on the arresting officer who managed to grab him by the wrist and turn the muzzle back on him. Some of his behaviour shows obvious signs of insanity, which is what he pleaded in September 1887 when he received his Old Bailey sentence. A doctor told the court that he was only shamming but before the end of the month Ostrog was transferred from Wandsworth Prison to the Surrey Pauper Lunatic Asylum suffering from mania, cause unknown. He was described as recovered when discharged on licence on 10 March 1888, but failed to report to the asylum.
The police tried to trace him through the Police Gazette in October 1888 but it was not until 17 April 1891 that he was traced and brought before the Bow Street magistrates and committed to a workhouse where he was certified insane. Two years later he was diagnosed as recovered and resumed his career of small-time thieving with occasional bouts of imprisonment, sometimes with hard labour. He eventually disappears from the records in 1904. His place and date of death are not known.
Ostrog can be dismissed as a suspect. New research shows that, unknown to Scotland Yard, at the time of the Ripper murders in 1888 he was in custody in France, where in November he began a two-year sentence.
Joseph Barnett
Suggested as a suspect by Bruce Paley in his book Jack the Ripper. The Simple Truth.
Barnett was a London-born Irishman, thirty years old, a licensed porter at Billingsgate Fish Market. He and the Miller’s Court victim Mary Kelly were together for eighteen months. He had picked her up in Commercial Street and they began living together the next day. Their relationship was a mixture of violent quarrels and comfortable times. When she was not drinking Kelly was a nice and pleasant person. When drunk, she underwent a personality change and became very abusive. In appearance, she was about twenty-six years old of fair complexion, with light hair and attractive features. She would sometimes wear a black silk dress and often a black jacket which made her look shabbily genteel. The night of her murder she was wearing a linsey frock and a red crossover shawl. Neighbours said that she kept herself apart and rarely associated with them. Possibly this was through Barnett’s influence. His money was keeping her off the streets although she still seems to have stayed in contact with old friends. Barnett possibly played up to her sense of difference. He alone referred to her as Marie Jeanette Kelly, presumably a reference to time she had spent in France. To everyone else she was plain Mary Kelly.
The couple moved into Room 13, Miller’s Court, 26 Dorset Street eight or nine months before the murder. In the court there were six houses let out in tenements, mostly to women, the rooms being numbered. On entering the court from Dorset Street, there were two doors on the right-hand side. The first door led to the upper floors of Number 26. It had seven rooms. The first floor front, facing Dorset Street, was over a shed or warehouse, with large doors, which was used for the storage of costermonger barrows. Until a few weeks before it was the nightly refuge of homeless persons who went there for shelter; according to a Daily Telegraph report one of those had been Catharine Eddowes. The second door opened into Kelly’s room, which was at the back of the house, and about fifteen feet square. Dorset Street itself, although only a short thoroughfare was made up principally of common lodging houses. The officially registered number of beds for the street was about six hundred but the number of residents is said to have been about fifteen hundred. Nine doors down, at No. 35, and on the same side of the street as No. 26, was Crossingham’s lodging house from which Annie Chapman had been ejected on the night she was murdered two months before Kelly. At the top and bottom of the street there were public houses, the Britannia, known as ‘Ringers’ after the surname of the couple who managed it, on the corner with Commercial Street, was just across the road from Hawksmoor’s Christchurch and the Ten Bells.
According to Paley, the deaths of Emma Smith and Martha Tabram may have provoked a strong reaction in Kelly; she may even have known them and possibly there was a sense of relief that she was no longer working the streets. But at this point, for reasons not known, Barnett lost his job at the fish market where he had worked for the past ten years. His earnings became irregular. He worked in the fruit market where he sold oranges. The rent for their room, which was in Mary Kelly’s name, was four shillings a week. According to his evidence to the coroner’s court, whe
n she died they were twenty-nine shillings in arrears. His money had kept Kelly off the streets but as the tensions mounted between them the temptation for Kelly to turn again to prostitution must have been overwhelming. Paley believes it was at this point that Barnett decided to turn murderer to terrorize Kelly into staying off the streets. He would read her the newspaper accounts of the murders, and wrote the Jack the Ripper letters to the press to guarantee their publication and to fuel her terror still further. In this he seems to have been successful, but the lodging debt mounted and Kelly, tiring both of her confinement and possibly of Barnett himself, turned once more to prostitution. She brought matters to a head by bringing another prostitute to share their meagre room of only fifteen feet square. It seems likely that the cramped space must have forced the three of them to share the bed as well. After two or three days, Barnett could tolerate the situation no longer. He and his ‘wife’ had a violent quarrel and Barnett moved out of Miller’s Court and into a lodging house in New Street, next door to Bishopsgate police station.
According to Barnett he was playing whist in his lodging house until 12.30 a.m. on the morning of the murder. Paley believes that he subsequently went back to Miller’s Court to reason with Kelly, to beg her to take him back and give up prostitution. Kelly, we know, had been drinking for most of the day and evening and another violent quarrel resulted, possibly there were taunts of Barnett’s sexual and financial inadequacies, and it ended in her death and brutal mutilation. (On a personal note, I remember talking to Tony Mancini who was tried for the murder of Violette Kaye in 1933 for the Brighton Trunk murder. He was acquitted of the murder but years later admitted to it. I asked him what was the breaking point which provoked him to kill Violet. He said she was drunk, they quarrelled and throwing herself back on the bed with legs in air and opening wide she gestured and said, ‘That’s what you’re here for.’ That was Mancini’s breaking point. If Paley is correct, possibly something similar may have happened to Barnett.)
Barnett was detained for four hours of questioning by Inspector Abberline later that afternoon, and his clothes examined for bloodstains, before being released. Clearly the police were satisfied that he was not involved in Mary Kelly’s death.
Others have agreed with Paley that Barnett was Kelly’s murderer, but not with his scenario. The general agreement is that Barnett murdered Kelly after a violent quarrel and then, to make her death look like a Ripper killing, mutilated the body in the way that he thought from the press reports the other four bodies may have been mutilated. The possibility is that the Kelly killing had nothing to do with Jack the Ripper.
If so, then this could give us another suspect.
Despite my earlier ‘Day of Judgement’ remark I have long had a suspicion that a possible suspect could have been Timothy Donovan, the deputy at Crossingham’s lodging house, at 35 Dorset Street. I believe, but cannot prove, that he is the same Timothy Donovan who died on 1 November 1888, of cirrhosis of the liver, phthisis and exhaustion, just a few days before the Miller’s Court murder of Mary Kelly. His address on the death certificate is given as 7 Russell Court, St George’s in the East, which was south of the Commercial Road. Berner Street would have been the nearest murder location. His profession is given as labourer. His job at the lodging house may have been only a casual one, as the title ‘deputy’ suggests, but because of his health too. The first four murders were on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This pattern suggests someone who is in work with staggered rest days. If it is the same man, then by removing Kelly from the frame there is a plausible scenario for making Donovan a suspect.
Donovan was twenty-eight years old. It is Donovan who turns Annie Chapman away on the night she was murdered and subsequently gives evidence to the coroner’s inquest as to what had happened. He said that he had known her for about sixteen months and that she had lived at the lodging house for the past four months. It was Donovan who identified her body. Donovan knew John Pizer (‘Leather Apron’) and gave an interview about him to the press. He said that some months before he had ejected him from the lodging house for offering violence to a woman. More damningly – perhaps it was done to divert suspicion away from himself – he said that when he had last seen him he was wearing a deerstalker hat such as worn by the suspect seen talking to Chapman. Almost certainly Donovan knew two of the other victims: it is highly likely that he would have known Kelly, and possibly also Eddowes as we know that at some point she slept in the shed which was the partitioned-off section of Kelly’s room. Curiously, both Eddowes and Kelly had said that they knew who Jack the Ripper was. Was this why they were murdered? Eddowes, in fact, boasted to her partner John Kelly that she was going to collect the reward. As lodging-house deputy, being known to the victims, Donovan could have approached any of them with impunity and without necessarily arousing suspicion.
The lodging house would have given Donovan the necessary bolt hole from the police where he could clean up without risk of being disturbed. Interestingly Sir Henry Smith says that it was in Dorset Street that the murderer stopped to wash his hands and that the blood-stained water was still running down the drain when he got there. It makes sense if Donovan did this just before he went indoors.
Finally, the fact that there were no murders in October could be easily explained by a rapid deterioration in Donovan’s health, with his death on 1 November being the reason why the Jack the Ripper murders came to an end.
Dr Francis J. Tumblety
Tumblety has to be the most important suspect to surface in the past two decades. Completely missed by other authors, he surfaced in a 1913 letter by Chief Inspector J. G. Littlechild to George R. Sims, writer of perhaps the most famous and definitive Victorian ballad, ‘It was Christmas Day in the Workhouse’. This letter eventually came into the possession of Stewart Evans, owner of possibly the largest collection of Ripperana in the world. It is a key document in every sense. Written by somebody who was at the heart of the investigation, it names the author(s) of the original Jack the Ripper letter to the Central News Agency and names Dr Tumblety as the man suspected to have been the Ripper.
Quack doctor, charlatan and misogynist, the Irish-American Francis Tumblety was born in 1833 in Ireland. The family moved to Rochester, New York when he was quite young and as a teenager Tumblety sold books (this seems to have been a euphemism for pornography) and papers on the canal boats plying between Rochester and Buffalo. He disappeared about the age of seventeen and when he returned home ten years later is was as a ‘great physician’. For somebody who had been described as ‘utterly devoid of education’ only a decade before, this might have been a striking achievement, except that his qualification was non-existent. His medical training had been acquired in a hospital in Rochester. In appearance he was a walking advertisement for his quackery. His flamboyance, his eccentric dress (including on occasions plumes, medals and big spurs), his white horse and the greyhounds and other dogs that followed him, attracted the customers. His profits from the medicines that he peddled, such as the ‘Tumblety Pimple Destroyer’ and ‘Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills’, brought him a good living and occasional brushes with the law. One patient died from his atrocious malpractice and there was an accusation of attempting to procure an abortion for a prostitute. Several times he escaped from towns just one step a head of the law. He was not always so lucky. He was arrested and temporarily imprisoned for three weeks on suspicion of being involved in President Lincoln’s assassination. It was in this Washington period that his hatred of women was made evident. At an all-male, chiefly military, dinner party he savagely denounced all women, especially prostitutes, ‘cattle’ was one of his epithets, before showing his guests into a room where one side was filled with large wardrobe-size display cases containing anatomical specimens; over half of them contained uteri from ‘every class of woman’. His explanation for his extreme misogony was that he had once been married and that he discovered only after their marriage that his wife was a prostitute who was still plying her trade.
The authors Evans and Gainey believe that on reaching London during a visit in June 1888, instead of staying in hotels as formerly he took up lodgings at 22 Batty Street, off the Commercial Road, which was adjacent to Berner Street where Stride was killed. This, they believe, was his base when he killed Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes. According to newspaper reports the German landlady heard her American lodger return home early on Sunday, 30 September, the morning of the Stride– Eddowes murders, and later that day found that the shirt he had asked her to wash was wet with blood on the cuffs and part of the sleeves. As Evans and Gainey speculate that the Stride killing was a non-Ripper murder the blood-staining has to refer to the Eddowes killing. The landlady reported her suspicions to the police and they staked out the house hoping the lodger would return, which he never did. There were variants of this story in the newspapers. All of this is speculation.
In October 1888 Scotland Yard asked the San Francisco police to send specimens of Tumblety’s handwriting, which they had offered to forward. They repeated the request on 22 November, asking that they should be forwarded immediately. On 7 November, two days before the Kelly murder, Tumblety had been arrested on charges of gross indecency with four named men. The date when one of these offences was alleged to have taken place was 31 August, the day of the Polly Nichols murder. He was remanded on bail of around £300 but, once released, jumped bail and fled to France. On 24 November, using an alias, he boarded a French steamer for the seven-day crossing to America. A report had already been published in the New York Times that he had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the Whitechapel murders, but it was later said that, not having enough evidence to hold him for the murder charges, the police had arrested him for these lesser offences.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 28