page_title: Montague Druitt
section_title: Jack the Ripper suspect
hierarchical_section_title: Montague Druitt / Jack the Ripper suspect
caption_attribution_description: Journalist George Robert Sims (1847 - 1922), circa 1910.
context_page_description: Montague John Druitt was one of the suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders that took place in London between August and November 1888.
  He came from an upper-middle-class English background, and studied at Winchester College and the University of Oxford. After graduating, he was employed as an assistant schoolmaster at a boarding school and pursued a parallel career in the law, qualifying as a barrister in 1885. His main interest outside work was cricket, which he played with many leading players of the time, including Lord Harris and Francis Lacey.
  In November 1888, he lost his post at the school for reasons that remain unclear. One month later his body was discovered drowned in the River Thames. His death, which was found to be a suicide, roughly coincided with the end of the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper. Private suggestions in the 1890s that he could have committed the crimes became public knowledge in the 1960s and led to the publication of books that proposed him as the murderer. The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, however, and many writers from the 1970s onwards have rejected him as a likely suspect.
context_section_description: On 31 August 1888, Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London, with her throat slashed. During September, three more women (Annie Chapman on the 8th, and Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on the 30th) were found dead with their throats cut. On 9 November 1888, the body of Mary Jane Kelly was discovered. Her throat had been severed down to the spine. In four of the cases the bodies were mutilated after death. The similarities between the crimes led to the supposition that they were committed by the same assailant, who was given the nickname "Jack the Ripper". Despite an extensive police investigation into the five murders, the Ripper was never identified and the crimes remain unsolved.
  Shortly after Kelly's murder, stories that the Ripper had drowned in the Thames began to circulate. In February 1891, the MP for West Dorset, Henry Richard Farquharson, announced that Jack the Ripper was "the son of a surgeon" who had committed suicide on the night of the last murder. Although Farquharson did not name his suspect, the description resembles Druitt. Farquharson lived 10 miles (16 km) from the Druitt family and was part of the same social class. The Victorian journalist George R. Sims noted in his memoirs, The Mysteries of Modern London (1906): "[the Ripper's] body was found in the Thames after it had been in the river for about a month". Similar comments were made by Sir John Moylan, Assistant Under-Secretary of the Home Office: "[the Ripper] escaped justice by committing suicide at the end of 1888" and Sir Basil Thomson, made Assistant Commissioner of the CID in 1913: "[the Ripper was] an insane Russian doctor [who] escaped arrest by committing suicide in the Thames at the end of 1888". Neither Moylan nor Thomson was involved in the Ripper investigation.
  Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten named Druitt as a suspect in the case in a private handwritten memorandum of 23 February 1894. Macnaghten highlighted the coincidence between Druitt's disappearance and death shortly after the last of the five murders on 9 November 1888, and claimed to have unspecified "private information" that left "little doubt" Druitt's own family believed him to have been the murderer. Macnaghten's memo was eventually discovered in his personal papers by his daughter, Lady Aberconway, who showed them to British broadcaster Dan Farson. A slightly different abridged copy of the memo found in the Metropolitan Police archive was released to the public in 1966. Farson first revealed Druitt's initials "MJD" in a television programme in November 1959.
  In 1961, Farson investigated a claim by an Australian that Montague's cousin, Lionel Druitt, had published a pamphlet in Australia entitled "The East End Murderer — I knew him", but the claim has never been substantiated. Journalist Tom Cullen revealed Druitt's full name in his 1965 book Autumn of Terror, which was followed by Farson's 1972 book Jack the Ripper. Before the discovery of Macnaghten's memo, books on the Ripper case, such as those written by Leonard Matters and Donald McCormick, poured scorn on stories that the Ripper had drowned in the Thames because they could not find a suicide that matched the description of the culprit. Cullen and Farson, however, supposed that Druitt was the Ripper on the basis of the Macnaghten memorandum, the near coincidence between Druitt's death and the end of the murders, the closeness of Whitechapel to Druitt's rooms in the Inner Temple, the insanity that was acknowledged by the inquest verdict of "unsound mind", and the possibility that Druitt had absorbed the rudimentary anatomical skill supposedly shown by the Ripper through observing his father at work.
  Since the publication of Cullen's and Farson's books, other Ripper authors have argued that their theories are based solely on flawed circumstantial evidence, and have attempted to provide Druitt with alibis for the times of the murders. On 1 September, the day after the murder of Nichols, Druitt was in Dorset playing cricket. On the day 
caption: George R. Sims appears to identify Druitt with the Ripper, albeit obliquely, in his autobiography.
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