by Paul Roland
The doctor and the Devil
Doctor Roslyn D’Onston (real name Robert Donston Stephenson) was what criminologists would today call ‘a police buff’ – someone who gets a thrill by deliberately bringing themselves to the attention of the investigators, teasing them with misinformation and tantalizing clues. For such people the police are a tenacious but unimaginative adversary against whom they believe they can pit their superior intellect. But there was a more sinister side to Dr D’Onston, one which may explain his bravado as an unconscious desire to be caught and thus saved from fulfilling his pact with the Devil.
D’Onston was a self-confessed Satanist who practised black magic and boasted of his inside knowledge of the murders. He got a vicarious thrill from the thought that his mistress and close friends believed he was Jack the Ripper. He was also an alcoholic and a drug addict who revelled in the nickname ‘Sudden Death’, a morbid appellation which persuaded some investigators to consider him a strong suspect in the Whitechapel murders. And he had the opportunity to stalk and kill the victims, as he lived within walking distance of the murder scenes. But what motive might he have had to murder and mutilate five women?
Was it gross arrogance and perverted pride or idle speculation that led him to write an article for the Pall Mall Gazette three weeks after the final murder in which he offered a motive for the Ripper killings? By suggesting that the killer had butchered the victims to obtain a heart and body fat for use in black magic rituals was he hoping to divert attention away from his own diabolical practices, or was he unconsciously confessing to the crimes and taunting the police to make the connection? In the article D’Onston described the mutilations in graphic detail and with obvious relish, which suggests that he might have written the piece to satisfy his compulsion to confess and also to boast of what he had got away with. But later he accused a colleague whom the police were able to rule out of their inquiries.
The only known photograph of Roslyn D’Onston, a Satanist who boasted of inside knowledge of the murders
A prime suspect?
It has been suggested that D’Onston may have accused another doctor knowing that he would be proven innocent so that the police would consider D’Onston a harmless eccentric with wild, unsubstantiated theories if his name came up as a suspect in subsequent enquiries, but those who knew Dr D. were not so easily fooled. His mistress, Mabel Collins, later claimed that D’Onston boasted of being Jack the Ripper and allegedly showed her physical evidence of his crimes. Collins subsequently confided her fears in a fellow Theosophist, Vittoria Cremers, who shared an apartment with D’Onston, after which Cremers made a thorough search of his rooms.
What she found there makes a convincing case for his claim to be the Whitechapel murderer: a small metal box containing several neckties encrusted with what appeared to be dried blood. These might have served as macabre tokens of his kills with which he could relive the thrill of the murder, or they may even have played a part in his satanic ceremonies.
D’Onston’s value as a prime suspect is strengthened by the fact that the notorious magician Aleister Crowley later took possession of the black box and claimed that it had belonged to Jack the Ripper.
As a bizarre postscript to this infernal affair, D’Onston recanted on his pact with the Devil shortly after the final murder and became a devout Christian, devoting the remainder of his days to writing a treatise on the Gospels.
Montague John Druitt (1857–88)
Sir Melville Macnaghten has a lot to answer for. Had he not named Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog in his infamous memorandum of 1891, they would never have been considered suspects in the Whitechapel murders. There is no hard evidence for assuming that any of them could have been responsible for the Ripper killings. Druitt was named because his death by drowning in the first week of December 1888 coincided with the end of the series of slayings and because his family suspected him of being the Ripper. It is true that his age at the time of the murders and his respectable appearance matched the descriptions given by several key witnesses, but he was a slight, slender man, not at all like the sturdy, broad-shouldered figure the witnesses described. There is also the matter of location. Druitt lived in Blackheath, not the East End, and it seems unlikely he could have slipped away from the murder scenes bespattered with blood and made his way back to Blackheath by public transport unobserved. Alternatively, he could have stayed overnight in a local lodging house, but his affluent appearance would have aroused suspicion.
Macnaghten, who did not join the Yard until June 1889, betrays his ignorance of the suspects by referring to Druitt as a doctor when in fact he was a barrister and schoolteacher. One can only assume that Macnaghten mistook the initials MD on Druitt’s belongings for a medical qualification or perhaps he assumed he had been a doctor as he came from a respected medical family. Either that or he was misled by errors in an earlier report. Whatever the reason, it is a careless mistake which is compounded by other errors – Druitt’s age, address and date of death – and assumptions, rendering the memorandum an item of historical interest but of little value to the investigation.
An unlikely candidate
So tenuous is the link between Druitt and the Whitechapel murders that one is tempted to consider the possibility that the real purpose of Macnaghten’s report was to submit a short list of candidates on whom the authorities could lay the blame should they be pressured to explain why they had failed to catch the killer.
Macnaghten’s suspicions are particularly unjustified in the case of Druitt, who was the son of a doctor, a graduate of Winchester College and an accomplished cricketer. In fact, he played in an important match in Dorset on 1 September, the day after the murder of Polly Nichols, and on 8 September he played at Blackheath only hours after the Annie Chapman murder – something perhaps only a real Dr Jekyll might have been able to pull off convincingly.
There are no reasonable grounds for Macnaghten’s assertion that Druitt was ‘sexually insane’. His abrupt dismissal from his teaching post at the Blackheath Boarding School for boys just a few weeks before his death may have been due to sexual misconduct or his increasingly erratic behaviour which Druitt feared might prove to be the first symptoms of insanity, a condition he was terrified he might have inherited from a member of his family. Druitt’s suicide note read: ‘Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die.’
There is no hint of dementia in the suicide note, only resignation and despair – not what one would expect from a tormented soul with the blood of five or more women on his hands. Moreover, the typical serial killer is driven by the need to prove his superiority over both his victims and the police. Few are known to have committed suicide, which would be seen as an admission of defeat.
Unfortunately Macnaghten’s musings were leaked to influential columnists such as George Robert Sims, who assumed it to be the Yard’s official line and so published speculation as fact, thereby adding to the many myths and misconceptions which have obscured the truth more effectively than the proverbial pea-souper London fog. In January 1889 Sims opined:
‘I have no doubt a great many lunatics have said they were Jack the Ripper on their death beds. It is a good exit . . . I don’t want to interfere . . . but I don’t quite see how the real Jack could have confessed seeing that he committed suicide after the horrible mutilation of the woman in the house in Dorset Street, Spitalfields. The full details of that crime have never been published – they never could be. Jack, when he committed that crime, was in the last stage of the peculiar mania from which he suffered. He had become grotesque in his ideas as well as bloodthirsty. Almost immediately after this murder he drowned himself in the Thames. His name is perfectly well known to the police. If he hadn’t committed suicide he would have been arrested.’
Secret misinformation
However, Macnaghten may not have been the only police official to have had suspicions regarding Druitt. In March 1889, Albert Backert, a founder of the Whitechapel
Vigilance Committee, demanded to know why the police had recently reduced their presence in the East End and was informed that he would be told the truth if he promised to take an oath of secrecy. He later wrote:
‘Foolishly, I agreed. It was then suggested to me that the Vigilance Committee and its patrols might be disbanded as the police were quite certain that the Ripper was dead. I protested that, as I had been sworn to secrecy, I really ought to be given more information than this. “It isn’t necessary for you to know any more,” I was told. “The man in question is dead. He was fished out of the Thames two months ago and it would only cause pain to relatives if we said any more than that.”’
It is not known to whom Backert (an unreliable source) had spoken, but it was certainly not Inspector Abberline, who poured scorn on the whole idea of Druitt having been a serious suspect. In 1903 he told a reporter, ‘I know all about that story. But what does it amount to? Simply this. Soon after the last murder in Whitechapel the body of a young doctor was found in the Thames, but there is absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was found at that time to incriminate him.’
Jill the Ripper
Hammer horror fans may be familiar with Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde, the studio’s cheeky re-imagining of R.L. Stevenson’s morality tale in which the good doctor’s feminine side takes the upper hand and slaughters young Whitechapel women to obtain the hormones needed for her experiments. Implausible though it might sound, Inspector Abberline seriously considered a similar, if less fanciful, line of inquiry at the time of the Ripper murders.
Partly out of sheer frustration but also no doubt driven by the desire to pursue all avenues, no matter how unlikely, Abberline discussed the idea that Jack might be a Jill with colleague Dr Thomas Dutton. Dutton agreed that it was conceivable that a midwife could have possessed sufficient surgical skill to have removed the reproductive organs, but he thought it more likely that a man might have dressed in women’s clothes in order to pass through the streets at night without attracting suspicion – which, incidentally, was a theory favoured by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Had Conan Doyle pitched his fictional detective against the Ripper we can assume this is the solution he would have chosen.
A murderous midwife?
Either scenario might explain the discrepancies in the witness statements in the case of the Mary Kelly murder. The police surgeons estimated her time of death as around 4am, but local resident Mrs Caroline Maxwell was adamant that she had seen Kelly between 8 and 8.30 that morning and again an hour later, having recognized her by her clothes, specifically a maroon-coloured shawl that she had seen Kelly wearing on a previous occasion. If Mrs Maxwell had not mistaken the sighting for the day before, and assuming that the police surgeons were correct in estimating time of death, the only other explanation is that the murderer was wearing her clothes. If it was a man he would not have fooled the stranger Mrs Maxwell saw Kelly talking to outside the Prince Albert public house on the second occasion, but another woman in Kelly’s clothes might have engaged in conversation to avoid arousing suspicion. That said, it seems more likely that Mrs Maxwell was simply mistaken as to the day, though when Abberline questioned her again she stuck to her story.
A psychopathic midwife might sound absurd, but female serial killers are not unknown and in the East End of the 1880s a female Ripper would have enjoyed certain obvious advantages. She would have been able to move freely through the streets and, if questioned, would be able to explain her presence in the neighbourhood in the early hours of the morning. If she was unfortunate enough to get bloodstains on her clothing that too could be explained away.
Method and motive
In 1939 William Stewart was the first to speculate that the killer might be a woman in his book Jack the Ripper: A New Theory. His theory hinged on the answer to four crucial questions:
1. Who could walk the street at night without arousing suspicion or having to explain their movements to friends or family?
2. Who would have a viable reason for wearing bloodstained clothing?
3. Who would have had the skill to perform the crude operations in near darkness at speed and under stress?
4. Who might have been able to extricate themselves from suspicion if discovered leaning over the body?
But if it was a woman, what motive could she have had?
Stewart considered the possibility that she might have been an abortionist and if so, she may have been betrayed by a married woman whom she had tried to help which would have meant a prison sentence. The Whitechapel murders might therefore have been her revenge. In support of this theory it should be reiterated that no one heard the victims cry out, which could be explained by the fact that midwives who worked among the poor were apparently trained to induce un-consciousness in intoxicated or violent patients by exerting pressure on the nerve centres around the collar bone.
The main problem with the mad midwife scenario, however, is that there is no obvious connection between the victims and their murderer. Mary Kelly was the only victim who was pregnant at the time of her death. Stewart also ignores the testimony of Albert Cadosch, who claimed to have heard a man and woman conversing on the other side of the fence in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street three minutes before something fell against the fence where the body of Annie Chapman was later found.
In support of his scenario Stewart raises the spectre of Mary Pearcey, who in October 1890 murdered her lover’s wife and child by cutting their throats and then wheeling their bodies in a barrow to a deserted street, where she dumped them. For those who doubt that a woman would have the strength to sever a throat with the force with which the Ripper despatched his victims Sir Melville Macnaghten said of Pearcey, ‘I have never seen a woman of stronger physique . . . her nerves were as iron cast as her body.’
A curious footnote to the case can be found in the fact that shortly before her execution Pearcey asked for a notice to be placed in a Spanish newspaper which read, ‘M.E.C.P. last wish of M.E.W. Have not betrayed.’
No doubt the conspiracy theorists will have much pleasure in speculating to whom those initials refer.
The lunatic fringe – Aaron Kosminski (1865–1919) and Michael Ostrog (1833–?)
Kosminski, by all accounts, was an even less likely suspect than Druitt. Macnaghten only named him because he was Swanson and Anderson’s chief suspect although there is no hard evidence to connect him. Again, Macnaghten passes judgment based on crucial errors and assumptions. Kosminski was indeed incarcerated in Colney Hatch asylum shortly after the cessation of the murders in 1891. However, he did not die soon afterwards as Macnaghten states – he was committed in 1894 – but 28 years later, during which time he did not commit any crimes or exhibit any signs of serious violence. In fact, he was a docile imbecile for most of his life and could not have been responsible for the brutal attacks which Macnaghten suspected him of. He had been a familiar figure in the East End, where he scavenged for scraps of food in the gutter and complained of hearing voices in his head. He was dirty and dishevelled, not the man of ‘shabby genteel’ appearance the witnesses had described. He cut a pathetic figure. No prostitute would have touched him and he would have been unaware of their presence.
The official file at Colney Hatch describes Kosminski as being ‘apathetic as a rule’ and ‘incoherent’. On only one occasion was he recorded as having threatened a member of staff with violence. If one thing can be stated with certainty, it is that Kosminski would not have been found guilty if he was on trial today.
Michael Ostrog
A habitual offender
The third suspect named by Macnaghten was a habitual thief and a compulsive liar, but there is no evidence to suggest that he ever killed anyone. Again, there is a nagging suspicion that he appears in the memorandum merely to give the impression that the police had their eye on a number of men whom they could have called in for questioning at any time, when in fact they had no definite leads at all.
Michael Ostrog, a Russian immigrant, had a police record st
retching back to 1863, when he was arrested in Oxford for burglary under the alias Max Gosslar and sentenced to ten months’ hard labour. On his release, he travelled to Bishop’s Stortford, where he conned money from several of the more trusting inhabitants while posing as a Polish aristocrat until he was unmasked as a fraud and sentenced to a further three months’ imprisonment.
The next entry in his police file is dated July 1866, when he was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude for theft. He was released in May 1873, only to reoffend six months later when he received a ten-year sentence. In September 1887 he was certified insane, following an incident in which he had tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train while handcuffed to a police escort.
A suspect vanishes
Less than six months later Ostrog was discharged and roaming the streets of Whitechapel during the ‘Autumn of Terror’, presumably no saner than he had been before his confinement in the asylum. On 26 October he was listed as being at large for failing to report at a police station as a condition of his release and was listed as ‘dangerous’. Yet he had exhibited no signs of violence other than the desire to die under the wheels of a train in the company of a gaoler.
It can only be assumed that he fitted the profile of the Ripper – a mentally unstable individual who had boasted of having rudimentary medical training. But his subsequent behaviour contradicts Macnaghten’s assessment that he was a ‘homicidal maniac’. He was arrested in 1891 and again in 1894 for petty theft, but on neither occasion did the police take the opportunity to charge him with the Whitechapel murders. On his release from prison in 1904 he vanished and was never heard of again.
Two strong candidates: James Kelly (1860–1929) and ‘GWB’
There is no evidence to connect wife-murderer James Kelly with Ripper victim Mary Kelly, but on the morning after Mary’s murder the police raided James Kelly’s lodgings only to discover that he had fled to Dieppe. Two days later, on 12 November, a police official whose initials were CET added a note to James Kelly’s file querying what steps had been taken to arrest him, although it is not clear whether this was in reference to his wife’s murder or the Whitechapel murders in general. The timing may have been purely coincidental. However, it is known that Inspector Monro took a keen interest in the whereabouts of James Kelly, who had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic in Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum from which he had escaped in January 1888. Kelly had murdered his wife because he believed she had infected him with venereal disease, but during his stay in Broadmoor he became convinced that he had caught it from the whores of Whitechapel. Unfortunately, after his escape from the asylum his movements are unknown. He may have been lodging in Whitechapel and exercising revenge on the prostitutes who he blamed for infecting him, or he may have gone to ground elsewhere in an effort to evade the police who had a warrant for his arrest. There is no way of knowing for certain, but he remains a strong candidate.