Smith's overtures to Charles Warren apparently evoked no response, and Smith took it upon himself to put "nearly a third" of his police force in plainclothes and instruct them to "do everything which, under ordinary circumstances, a constable should not do," he says in his memoirs. These clandestine activities included sitting on doorsteps smoking pipes and lingering in public houses, gossiping with the locals. Smith wasn't idle, either. He visited "every butcher's shop in the city," and I find this almost comical as I imagine the commissioner - perhaps in disguise or a suit and tie - dropping by to quiz slaughterhouse butchers about suspicious-looking men of their profession who might be going about cutting up women. I feel quite sure the Metropolitan Police would not have appreciated his enthusiasm or violation of boundaries.
Sir Melville Macnaghten probably detoured if not derailed the Ripper investigation permanently with his certainties that were not based on firsthand information or the open-minded and experienced deductions of an Abberline. In 1889, Macnaghten joined the Metropolitan Police as assistant commissioner of CID. He had nothing to recommend him but twelve years of work on his family's tea plantations in Bengal, where he went out each morning to shoot wild cats, foxes, alligators, or maybe have a go at a good pig sticking.
When his memoirs were published in 1914, four years after Smith published his recollections, Macnaghten restrained himself until page 55, where he began engaging in a little literary pig sticking that was followed by amateurish sleuthing and pomposity. He alluded to Henry Smith as being "on the tiptoe of expectation" and having a "prophetic soul" since Smith was in hot pursuit of the murderer weeks before the first murder had even happened - according to Macnaghten. Smith considered the August 7th slaying of Martha Tabran as the Ripper's debut, while Macnaghten was certain that the first murder was Mary Ann Nichols on August 31st.
Macnaghten goes on to recall those terrible foggy evenings and the "raucous cries" of newsboys shouting out that there had been "Another horrible murder…!" The scene he sets becomes more dramatic with each page until one can't help but get annoyed and wish that his autobiography had been one of those quashed by the Home Office. I suppose it is possible Macnaghten heard those raucous cries and experienced those fatal foggy nights, but I doubt he was anywhere near the East End.
He had just returned from India and was still working for his family. He did not begin at Scotland Yard until some eight months after the Ripper murders supposedly had ended and were no longer foremost on the Yard's mind, but this didn't keep him from deciding not only who Jack the Ripper probably was, but also that he was dead and had murdered five victims " amp; 5 victims only": Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddows, and Mary Kelly. It was Melville Macnaghten's "rational theory" that after the "fifth" murder of November 9, 1888, the Ripper's "brain gave way altogether" and he most likely committed suicide.
When the young, depressed barrister Montague John Druitt threw himself into the Thames toward the end of 1888, he unwittingly cast himself as one of three main suspects Macnaghten named in Jack the Ripper's bloody drama. The other two, lower on Macnaghten's list, were a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski, who was "insane" and "had a great hatred of women," and Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor who was committed to a "lunatic asylum."
For some reason, Macnaghten thought that Montague Druitt was a doctor. This erroneous supposition was passed down the line for quite a long time, and I suppose some people may still think Druitt was a doctor. I don't know where Macnaghten got his information, but perhaps he was confused because Montague's uncle, Robert Druitt, was a prominent physician and medical writer, and Montague's father, William, was a surgeon. I am afraid that Montague or "Monty" will always remain a bit shadowy because it does not appear there is much information available about him.
In 1876, when he was a dark, handsome, athletic nineteen-year-old, Druitt enrolled at New College, Oxford University, and five years later was admitted to the Inner Temple in London to pursue a career in law.
He was a good student and an exceptionally talented cricket player, and worked a part-time job as an assistant at Valentine's School, a boys' boarding school in Blackheath. Homosexuality or child molesting - or both - are suggested as the reasons why Druitt, a thirty-one-year-old bachelor when he died, was fired from Valentine's School in the fall of 1888. Macnaghten claimed in his memo that Druitt was "sexually insane," which in the Victorian era could have referred to homosexuality. But Macnaghten backs up his accusation with nothing more than so-called reliable information that he supposedly destroyed.
Mental illness ran in Druitt's bloodline. His mother was committed to an asylum in the summer of 1888 and had attempted suicide at least once. One of Druitt's sisters later committed suicide as well. When Druitt drowned himself in the Thames in the early winter of 1888, he left a suicide note that indicated he feared he would end up like his mother and thought it best for him to kill himself. His family archives at the Dorset Record Office and the West Sussex Record Office turned up only one letter of his, which he wrote to his uncle Robert in September 1876. Although Druitt's handwriting and language do not resemble anything found in alleged Ripper letters, even to consider making a judgment based on this isn't meaningful or fair. In 1876, Druitt wasn't yet twenty years old. Handwriting and verbal performance can not only be disguised - they also tend to change as one ages.
Druitt became a suspect in the Ripper murders for the convenient reason that he happened to commit suicide not long after what Macnaghten considers the last Ripper strike on November 9, 1888. The young barrister was probably guilty of nothing more than a hereditary mental illness, and perhaps what fatally tipped the scales against him was acute distress over whatever he allegedly had done to be fired from Valentine's School. We can't know his mind or feelings at that point in his life, but his despair was sufficient for him to put rocks in the pockets of his top coat and jump into the frigid, polluted Thames. Druitt's body was recovered from the water the last day of 1888, and it was supposed, based on the degree of decomposition, that he had been dead for about a month. At his inquest in Chiswick, the jury returned a verdict of "suicide whilst of unsound mind."
Doctors and lunatics seem to have been popular Ripper suspects. B. Leeson, a constable at the time of the Ripper murders, states in his memoirs that when he began his career, the training consisted of ten days' attendance at a police court and a "couple of hours" of instruction from a chief inspector. The rest one had to learn through experience. Leeson wrote, "I am afraid I cannot throw any light on the problem of the Ripper's identity." However, he added, there was a particular doctor who was never far away when the crimes were committed. I guess Leeson was never far away when the murders were committed, either, otherwise he couldn't possibly have noticed this "same" doctor.
Perhaps Frederick Abberline refrained from writing about the Ripper cases because he was smart enough not to trot out what he didn't know. In his clipping books, every case he includes is one he personally investigated and solved. The news articles he pasted on pages and underlined (precisely, with a straight edge), and his comments are neither copious nor especially enthusiastic. He made it plain that he worked very hard and wasn't always happy about it. On January 24,1885, when the Tower of London was bombed, for example, he found himself "especially overworked, as the then Home Secretary Sir Wm. Harcourt wished to be supplied every morning with the progress of the case and after working very hard all day I had to remain up many nights until 4 and 5 A.M. the following morning making reports for his information."