Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (22 page)

Frederick George Abberline was a modest, courteous man of high morals who was as reliable and methodical as the clocks he repaired before he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1863. During his thirty years of service, he earned eighty-four commendations and rewards from judges, magistrates, and the commissioner of police. As Abberline himself matter-of-factly put it, “I think [I] was considered very exceptional.”

He was admired, if not cherished, by his colleagues and the public he served, and does not seem the sort to deliberately outshine anyone, but took great pride in a job well done. I find it significant that there is not a single photograph of him that anybody seems to know of, and I don’t believe this is so because all of them “walked away” from Scotland Yard’s archives and files. I would expect that “pinched” pictures would have been recirculating for years, their prices mounting with each resale. It also seems that any existing pictures would have been published at least once somewhere.

But if there is even one photograph of Abberline, I do not know of it. The only hint of what he looked like is to be found in a few sketches published in magazines that don’t always spell his name correctly. Artistic versions of the legendary inspector show an indistinct-looking man with muttonchops, small ears, a straight nose, and a high forehead. In 1885, it appears, he was losing his hair. He may have slumped a bit and doesn’t impress me as particularly tall. As was true of the mythical East End monster Abberline tracked but never caught, the detective could disappear at will and become anybody in a crowd.

His love of clocks and gardening says a great deal about him. These are solitary, gentle pursuits that require patience, concentration, tenacity, meticulousness, a light touch, and a love of life and the way things work. I can’t think of many better qualities for a detective, except, of course, honesty, and I have no doubt that Frederick Abberline was as true as a tuning fork. Although he never wrote his autobiography or allowed anyone else to tell his story, he did keep a diary of sorts, a hundred-page clipping book about crimes he worked interspersed with comments written in his graceful, generous hand.

Based on the way he assembled his clipping book, I would say that he didn’t get around to it until after his retirement. When he died in 1929, this collection of newsprint remnants of his shining career remained the property of his descendants, who eventually donated it to a person or persons unknown. I knew nothing about it until early in 2002 when I was doing further research in London and an official with the Yard showed me the eight-by-eleven book bound in black. I don’t know whether it had just been donated or had just turned up; I have no idea whether it actually belongs to Scotland Yard or perhaps to someone who works there. Exactly where this little-known clipping book has been since Abberline pasted it together and when it turned up at Scotland Yard are questions I can’t answer. Typically, Abberline remains mysterious and offers few answers even now.

His diary is neither confessional nor full of details about his life, but he does reveal his personality in the way he worked cases and in the comments he wrote. He was a brave, intelligent man who kept his word and abided by the rules, which included not divulging details about the very sorts of cases I expected and hoped to find hidden between his clipping book’s covers. Abberline’s entries abruptly stop with an October 1887 case of what he called “spontaneous combustion” and do not resume until a March 1891 case of trafficking in infants.

There is not so much as a hint about Jack the Ripper. One won’t find a single word about the 1889 Cleveland Street male brothel scandal that must have been a briar patch for Abberline, as accusations included the names of men close to the throne. To read Abberline’s diary is to think the Ripper murders and the Cleveland Street scandal never happened, and I have no reason to suspect that someone removed any related pages from the cuttings book. It appears Abberline chose not to include what he knew would be the most sought-after and controversial details of his investigative career.

On pages 44-45 of his diary, he offers an explanation for his silence:

I think it is just as well to record here the reason why as from the various cuttings from the newspapers as well as the many other matters that I was called upon to investigate—that never became public property—it must be apparent that I could write many things that would be very interesting to read.

At the time I retired from the service the authorities were very much opposed to retired officers writing anything for the press as previously some retired officers had from time to time been very indiscreet in what they had caused to be published and to my knowledge had been called upon to explain their conduct—and in fact—they had been threatened with actions for libel.

Apart from that there is no doubt the fact that in describing what you did in detecting certain crimes you are putting the criminal classes on their guard and in some cases you may be absolutely telling them how to commit crime.

As an example in the FingerPrint detection you find now the expert thief wears gloves.

The opposition to former officers writing their memoirs did not deter everyone, whether it was the men of Scotland Yard or the City of London Police. I have three examples on my desk: Sir Melville Macnaghten’s
Days of My Years,
Sir Henry Smith’s
From Constable to Commissioner,
and Benjamin Leeson’s
Lost London: The Memoirs of an East End Detective.
All three include Jack the Ripper anecdotes and analyses that I think the world would be better without. It is sad that men whose lives and careers were touched by the Ripper cases would spin theories almost as baseless as some of those offered by people who weren’t even born at the time of the crimes.

Henry Smith was the Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police during the murders of 1888, and he modestly writes, “There is no man living who knows as much of those murders as I do.” He declares that after the “second crime”—which may have been Mary Ann Nichols, who was not murdered in Smith’s jurisdiction—he “discovered” a suspect he was fairly sure was the murderer. Smith described him as a former medical student who had been in a lunatic asylum and had spent “all of this time” with prostitutes, whom he cheated by passing off polished farthings as sovereigns.

Smith conveyed this intelligence to Sir Charles Warren, who did not find the suspect, according to Smith. It was just as well. The former lunatic turned out to be the wrong man. I feel compelled to add that a sovereign would have been unusually generous payment for an Unfortunate who was more than accustomed to exchanging favors for farthings. The damage done by Smith during the Ripper investigation was to perpetuate the notion that the Ripper was a doctor or a medical student or someone involved in a field connected with medicine.

I don’t know why Smith made such an assumption as early as the “second case,” when no victim had been disemboweled yet and no organs had been taken. Following Mary Ann Nichols’s murder, there was no suggestion that the weapon was a surgical knife or that the killer possessed even the slightest surgical skills. Unless Smith simply has the timing wrong in his recollections, there was no reason for the police to suspect a so-called medically trained individual this early in the investigation.

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 wildcats, foxes, or 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 “& 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 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 topcoat 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.