Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (23 page)

Tumblety eventually returned to the USA and settled down with a female relative, whose house also served as his office. He died in 1903 of heart disease at the age of 73.

M
ONTAGUE
J
OHN
D
RUITT

Next on our list is Montague John Druitt, who came from a distinguished medical family, from Wimborne, Dorset. His father, William, was the town’s leading surgeon and his uncle Robert and cousin Lionel were also doctors.

In 1870 Druitt won a scholarship to Winchester College and later graduated to the University of Oxford. On 17 May 1882, two years after graduation, Druitt was admitted to the Inner Temple, one of the qualifying bodies for English barristers. He paid his membership fees with a loan from his father, which was secured against an inheritance legacy of £500 he had promised him (equivalent to about £45,000 today).

Druitt was called to the Bar on 29 April 1885, and set up a practice as a barrister. Five months later, in September 1885, Druitt’s father died suddenly from a heart attack. He left an estate valued at £16,579, which would be equivalent to approximately £1.5 million today.

Unfortunately for Montague Druitt, most of his father’s estate went to his wife Ann, three unmarried daughters, Georgiana, Edith and Ethel, and his eldest son William. Druitt senior had even instructed the executors of his will to deduct the £500 he had advanced to his son from his legacy, leaving very little money, if any at all, for Montague Druitt, although he did receive some of his father’s personal possessions.

Druitt rented legal chambers at 9 King’s Bench Walk in the Inner Temple. During this period, it was mostly just the very wealthy who could afford to take out legal action, and only one in eight qualified barristers was able to make a living from the law.

To supplement his income Druitt found work as an assistant schoolmaster at George Valentine’s Boarding School, 9 Eliot Place, Blackheath, London. The school had quite a long and prestigious history, with such distinguished students as Benjamin Disraeli. Druitt’s post came with accommodation in Eliot Place, and the long school holidays gave him time to follow up his law studies and pursue his interest in cricket.

Druitt continued his work at the school for the next three years, while simultaneously continuing with his legal career. People who knew him, including staff at the school, said that he seemed very happy during this period. He had a busy social life centred around sport, and was the secretary and treasurer of the local Blackheath Cricket Club as well as regularly turning out for other various teams.

In 1888, his mother’s health started to deteriorate, but unfortunately it was not just her bodily health, but her mental health as well. In July of that year, she attempted to commit suicide, which led to her being permanently hospitalised in a number of private asylums and clinics until her death. In trying to sum up Druitt, we need to remember that this was the same year that the Ripper murders began. It has been known in other such cases that losing a parent in such a way can have a significant bearing on an offspring’s life, and could even act as a catalyst for their descent into mayhem and murder. Mental illness certainly ran in Druitt’s family: his maternal grandmother and aunt had committed suicide and his sister was also to do so, although many years later.

By early December of that same year, Druitt’s brother William began to get worried about him, as he hadn’t heard from him for nearly two weeks, and normally they spoke on a regular basis. He contacted Druitt’s chambers, where he was told that he had not been seen for over a week. He then travelled immediately to the school in Blackheath, where he learned that his brother had got into serious trouble at the school and been dismissed nearly two weeks earlier. A note written by Druitt and addressed to William was found in Druitt’s room in Blackheath. It read: ‘Since Friday I felt that I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die.’

On Monday 31 December, Henry Winslade, a Thames waterman, discovered the decomposed body of Montague Druitt at approximately 1 p.m., floating in the water just off Thorneycroft’s Wharf, near Chiswick. He took the body ashore and notified the authorities. Police Constable George Moulston made a complete listing of possessions found on the then unidentified corpse:

1.   Four large stones in each pocket.

2.   £2 17
s
2
d
.

3.   A cheque for £50 and another for £16.

4.   Silver watch on a gold chain with a spade guinea as a seal.

5.   Pair of kid gloves.

6.   White handkerchief.

7.   First-class half-season rail ticket from Blackheath to London.

8.   Second-half return ticket from Hammersmith to Charing Cross dated 1 December 1888.

At the inquest into his death, a verdict was returned of suicide while of unsound mind.

William Druitt’s first thoughts on the subject were that his brother had been unable to cope with the loss of both his parents within the short space of three years. But then he started to hear rumours about why Druitt was dismissed from his post at Blackheath school. The authorities at the school would not divulge the reason, but after speaking to friends and colleagues of Druitt, William started to form his own ideas that his brother was dismissed for homosexual tendencies and for molesting students. This was, of course, nothing more than pure conjecture on William’s part, but as far as he was concerned, it could quite well have been the reason behind his brother’s suicide; the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.

If we accept this as fact, we have Montague John Druitt, a reasonably successful barrister, suddenly overcome with grief about being dismissed from his job at the school; what would happen if his vice was discovered by his friends and family? How would it be taken by his colleagues in chambers? Would he still be able to practise law at his firm? And probably more important to him, would he be able to bear the embarrassment of it all?

We now know that he was awarded some sort of job settlement payment from his school, so if these conjectures are correct, he would have left the school with his two settlement cheques in his pocket, as indeed was found on his body when it was fished from the Thames. He would have skulked home with thoughts of suicide entering into his mind. The next morning, after writing the suicide note to his brother, he then would have headed towards the Thames, pausing only to gather some stones, four of which he placed in each pocket. A slight pause maybe, and then he would have thrown himself into the icy waters of the Thames, his body not to be discovered until 31 December, almost three weeks later.

These assertions all sound very laudable, but they have never been proven; they are nothing more than assertions. Also, they most definitely do not link Druitt to the Ripper murders in any way, yet the chief constable of Scotland Yard, Melville Macnaghten, considered Druitt to be his prime suspect; a theory which no other police officer, including Abberline, supported.

Macnaghten’s suspicions of Druitt seemed to be based entirely on the fact that Druitt killed himself very shortly after the last Ripper murder, of Mary Kelly, and that the murders stopped immediately after that. Add to this the fact that, at the inquest into Druitt’s death, a verdict was returned of suicide while of unsound mind. As we know, almost anyone of an unsound mind at that time was classed as a possible suspect, so in that respect Druitt was the perfect suspect in Macnaghten’s mind. In Macnaghten’s memoranda that was published later he describes Druitt as being ‘sexually insane’.

It was possible that Druitt’s mind was slowly deteriorating. The death of both his parents within a relatively short period, and the committal of his mother, might well have played a heavy part in the matter. Mental illness certainly seemed to have played a large role in the Druitt family. Ann Druitt, his mother, was later to die at the Manor House Asylum in Chiswick in 1890, after suffering from depression and paranoid delusions. Her mother before her had committed suicide, and her sister had also tried to kill herself. Even Druitt’s oldest sister ended up killing herself in old age by jumping from an attic window.

When all the facts are weighed up, there is no real evidence to support Macnaghten’s theory of Druitt being the Ripper, other than that he vaguely fitted some witness descriptions of average height, between the ages of 30 to 35, and had a moustache. This is a description that probably would have fitted half the population of London at the time.

If we add to this the fact that Druitt was living at his school accommodation in Blackheath at the time of all the murders, this alone would have made it almost impossible for him to commit the crimes, and then commute back to Blackheath in the early hours of the morning, sometimes possibly covered in blood, without anyone even noticing him. We also need to bear in mind that there was no all-night train service between London and Blackheath during this period. In 1888 the last train left Blackheath for London at 12.25 a.m. and the first train leaving London for Blackheath was at 5.10 a.m.

As all the Ripper murders were committed in the early hours of the morning, this would have meant the killer, if it were Druitt, either had to remain relatively close to the area until daybreak, when the first train was ready to leave, or had to walk home, which would have taken him several hours. If he was also covered in blood, it would have been almost impossible for him not to have been discovered.

With so many factors pointing against his theory, why then did Macnaghten stick so adamantly to his claim that Druitt was the Ripper? There have been allegations that Macnaghten was not kept up to date on all the information regarding the Ripper case, as he didn’t join the force until a year after the first Ripper murder, in the summer of 1889; as such he had to rely completely on reading police reports, rather than actual groundwork, which other detectives such as Inspector Abberline could.

If the allegations against Macnaghten were true, then he certainly would not have wanted to be thought of as some newcomer to the case, and so decided to stamp his authoritative view on it. In his memoranda, Macnaghten says: ‘From private information I have little doubt but that his [Druitt’s] own family believed him to have been the murderer.’

There was absolutely no evidence on record of any member of Druitt’s family, or anyone else of any significance, ever making such a statement. As everyone knows that all witness statements made to the police have to be entered in police records, and as none exist to support this claim of Macnaghten, we can only assume that it was fabricated by someone at some point.

Whatever Macnaghten’s reasons for laying the blame of the Ripper murders on Montague John Druitt, whether it was to show his apparent inside knowledge of the case or to finally wind it up as far as Scotland Yard were concerned, Abberline was most definitely not in agreement with him.

In an interview with the
Pall Mall Gazette
in 1903, when Abberline was asked if he agreed with Macnaghten that the Ripper was known to have been dead soon after the autumn of 1888, Abberline replied as follows:

You can state most emphatically that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago. It is simply nonsense to talk of the police having proof that the man is dead. I am, and always have been, in the closest touch with Scotland Yard, and it would have been next to impossible for me not to have known all about it. Besides, the authorities would have been only too glad to make an end of such a mystery, if only for their own credit.

Macnaghten’s document on the subject, then, contains nothing more than his personal opinions, and is not the official view or definitive solution.

13

Abberline’s Number One Suspect

S
EVERIN
K
LOSOWSKI