Complete History of Jack the Ripper (67 page)

In following up this intriguing story Martin Howells and Keith Skinner contacted several of Monro’s other living descendants. No one knew anything of the papers mentioned by Christopher but one of them did produce, from the back of a cupboard in an Edinburgh suburb, Monro’s handwritten memoirs, written for the benefit of his children in 1903. To serious students of police history this document must represent a veritable gem. But, as Howells and Skinner discovered when they were permitted to see it, it contains no reference to the murders.

Despite this and other stories of documents once extant final, irrefutable proof of the murderer’s identity has consistently eluded us. The experience of Howells and Skinner is, indeed, very much par for the course in Ripper research. A similar fate befell Donald Rumbelow’s efforts to trace the surviving papers of Chief Inspector Abberline. His heart must have leaped when, in the records of the Hampshire Genealogical Society, he unearthed a scrapbook of the inspector’s press cuttings interspersed throughout with his handwritten notations. Once again, however, there was nothing, not even a press cutting, on the Ripper crimes.
⁴

Our century-old obsession with this case has wrung the reminiscences of senior police officers dry of every conceivable shade of meaning. It has repeatedly plundered the archives of Scotland Yard for relevant names. It has sucked into the quest living descendants of policemen and suspects alike. Sometimes, as in the instances we have noted, it has uncovered valuable incidental materials. But it has not put a name to Jack the Ripper. Where anything at all bearing upon the killer’s identity has come to light it has proved at best inconclusive, at worst downright fraudulent. In this context those who hunt the Ripper are vaguely reminiscent of the Spanish conquistadores,
those foolhardy adventurers of four centuries ago who, driven by shimmering visions of El Dorado, Cibola or Quivira, cut their way through steaming jungles or toiled across burning deserts to find at their journey’s end, not the riches for which their souls longed, but clusters of dirt villages or desolate plains.

Although no one was ever brought to trial for any of the Whitechapel crimes, claims that the identity of the killer was known, or at least strongly suspected, by the police are almost as old as the murders themselves. Unquestionably the best known story of this kind maintains that in the opinion of the CID the Ripper was a man who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Thames soon after the Miller’s Court murder. The person who did more than anyone else to broadcast this tale was the journalist and author George R. Sims.

Under the pseudonym ‘Dagonet’ Sims wrote a regular piece for
The Referee
in which he frequently adverted to the suicide in the Thames. Thus, in July 1902, he assured his readers that during the course of their inquiries the police reduced the number of suspects to seven and then, ‘by a further exhaustive inquiry’, to just three. They were ‘about to fit these three people’s movements in with the dates of the various murders when the one and only genuine Jack saved further trouble by being found drowned in the Thames, into which he had flung himself, a raving lunatic, after the last and most appalling mutilation of the whole series. But prior to this discovery the name of the man found drowned was bracketed with two others as a possible Jack, and the police were in search of him alive when they found him dead.’ Returning to the theme a year later, Sims wrote that ‘no one who saw the victim of Miller’s Court as she was found ever doubted that the deed was that of a man in the last stage of a terrible form of insanity . . . A little more than a month later the body of the man suspected by the chiefs at the Yard, and by his own friends, who were in communication with the Yard, was found in the Thames. The body had been in the water about a month. I am betraying no confidence in making this statement, because it has been published by an official who had an opportunity of seeing the Home Office Report, Major Arthur Griffiths, one of her late Majesty’s inspectors of prisons.’ If Sims is to be believed the case was closed. He never admitted to any doubt in the matter. ‘Jack the Ripper was known, was identified, and is dead,’ he declared in 1903. ‘Let him rest.’
⁵

Major Arthur Griffiths, writing in
Mysteries of Police and Crime
in 1898, was much more circumspect. ‘The outside public,’ he began, ‘may think that the identity of . . . Jack the Ripper was never revealed. So far as actual knowledge goes, this is undoubtedly true. But the police, after the last murder, had brought their investigations to the point of strongly suspecting several persons, all of them known to be homicidal lunatics, and against three of these they held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion.’

He described but did not name the three suspects. One, a known lunatic, was a Polish Jew. He was at large in Whitechapel at the time of the murders and was afterwards committed to an asylum. Another was an insane Russian doctor. Formerly a convict, both in Siberia and England, he was accustomed to carry surgical knives and other instruments about with him and, during the period of the murders, ‘was in hiding, or, at least, his whereabouts were never exactly known.’ The cases against these men, although based on ‘certain colourable facts’, were weak. Against the third suspect, however, ‘the suspicion . . . was stronger, and there was every reason to believe that his own friends entertained grave doubts about him.’ This man was also a doctor. He was insane or ‘on the borderland of insanity’. He disappeared after the Miller’s Court murder. And his body was found floating in the Thames on the last day of the year. ‘It is at least a strong presumption,’ concluded Griffiths guardedly, ‘that Jack the Ripper died or was put under restraint after the Miller’s Court affair, which ended this series of crimes.’
⁶

The police files were closed to the public. So there – for more than sixty years – the story of the drowned doctor rested.

Then, in 1959, the curtain of secrecy that had veiled the Thames suicide for so long was at last torn aside. The man who did it was Dan Farson, the journalist and television presenter, but it was all an unlooked for accident. At the time Farson was staying with Lady Rose McLaren in North Wales and he happened to mention that he was in the midst of preparing a television investigation on the mystery of Jack the Ripper. ‘That’s an extraordinary coincidence,’ said Lady McLaren. She explained that they were going to visit her mother-in-law, the Dowager Lady Aberconway, that very afternoon. And Lady Aberconway was a daughter of Sir Melville Macnaghten, who had been the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the CID from 1903 to 1913.

‘A few hours later at Maenan Hall,’ Farson afterwards recalled, ‘I explained my interest to Christabel Aberconway and she was kind
enough to give me her father’s private notes which she had copied out soon after his death. At the time I hardly realized the discovery that lay in my hands . . .’
⁷
What Farson was holding, in fact, was a copy of a draft report prepared by Macnaghten as Chief Constable of the CID in 1894. It was this draft that Griffiths had copied from in 1898 and to which Sims had alluded in 1903. It contained details, with names, of three men against whom the police held ‘very reasonable suspicion’ and it is still one of the most important documents that we possess on the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Farson’s programmes were transmitted by Associated Rediffusion in the series
Farson’s Guide to the British
in November 1959. Once he had been given the name of the man who had committed suicide it was, of course, a relatively simple matter for Farson to turn up his death certificate at Somerset House. It was displayed on the television screen but, in deference to a request of Lady Aberconway, Farson blanked out the name. He released only the suspect’s initials, M. J. D. It was a futile gesture for once the Macnaghten notes had been publicized on television there was little possibility of keeping their full contents a secret for long. Indeed, in a letter to
The New Statesman
of 7 November 1959, Lady Aberconway herself drew attention to the existence of her father’s notes. Tom Cullen published the full text – insofar as it treated of the three main suspects – in 1965. His text also followed Lady Aberconway’s copy of Sir Melville’s draft. Then the official copy of Macnaghten’s final report, which had all the while been slumbering undisturbed amongst the closed case papers at Scotland Yard, was also released. Robin Odell published the relevant section of this document in 1966.
⁸
There are significant differences between the Aberconway and official versions. So, before examining their contents, we will need to understand the relationship between the two.

Melville Macnaghten joined the Metropolitan Police as Assistant Chief Constable of the CID in June 1889, too late to participate in the Ripper inquiry. It was said of him, indeed, that he owned to only two disappointments in his life. One was that he was turned out of the Eton Eleven before a match with Harrow and the other was that he became a detective six months after the Ripper committed suicide and ‘never had a go at that fascinating individual’.
⁹
In 1890 he was promoted to Chief Constable and in 1903 to Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID, an office he held for ten years. He was knighted in 1908 and died in 1921.

On 13 February 1894 a series of sensational articles began in the
Sun
identifying the Ripper with a certain Thomas Cutbush. The
Sun
’s suspect had been arraigned at the London County Sessions in 1891 on charges of maliciously wounding one girl and attempting to wound another, and he had been pronounced insane and sentenced to be detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure. But he was not the Whitechapel murderer and the whole purpose of Macnaghten’s report was to refute the
Sun
’s claims. The official report is marked ‘confidential’ and dated 23 February 1894. No associated papers have survived. It seems probable, nonetheless, that it was prepared upon the instructions of the Chief Commissioner in response to an appeal for information from the Home Office respecting the statements being broadcast in the
Sun
.

The document held by Macnaghten’s descendants has been several times discussed
¹⁰
and there is no need to enter into the full ramifications of its history here. It appears to have been Macnaghten’s original draft and it passed, after Lady Macnaghten’s death in 1929, to Julia Donner, their eldest daughter. In 1950 Philip Loftus apparently saw it in the possession of Gerald Melville Donner, Julia’s son. Although, twenty-two years later, Loftus retained only the haziest impressions as to the document’s contents, he did remember that it was ‘in Sir Melville’s handwriting on official paper, rather untidy and in the nature of rough jottings.’
¹¹
Gerald died in India in 1968 and the present whereabouts of the draft are not known. By a lucky chance, however, the text was preserved by Christabel Aberconway, Julia Donner’s younger sister, for Christabel made a copy of her father’s notes, evidently in the early 1930s. It was this copy that was made available to Farson and Cullen.

Well, what does Sir Melville tell us? The relevant section of Lady Aberconway’s copy of the draft reads: