Patricia Cornwell - Portrait Of A Killer - Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

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."

If Abberline had to do this in the Tower of London bombing case, one can be sure that during the Ripper murders he was often up all night and in the Home Secretary's office first thing in the morning for briefings. In the Tower bombing, Abberline arrived "immediately after the explosion" and suggested that all people on the scene were to remain there and be interviewed by the police. Abberline conducted many of the interviews himself, and it was during this process that he "discovered" one of the perpetrators through "the hesitation in his replies and his general manner." There was quite a lot of press about the bombing and Abberline's excellent detective work, and if four years later his presence seemed to fade, it was probably because of his supervisory position and his discretion. He was a man who worked relentlessly and without applause, the quiet clockmaker who did not want attention but was determined to fix what was wrong.

I suspect he anguished over the Ripper murders and spent much time walking the streets at night, speculating, deducing, trying to coax leads out of the foggy, filthy air. When his colleagues, friends, family, and the merchants of the East End gave him a retirement dinner in 1892, they presented him with a silver tea and coffee service and praised his honorable and extraordinary work in the detection of crime. According to the East London Observer's account of the appreciation dinner, H Division's Superintendent Arnold told those who had gathered to celebrate Abberline's career that during the Ripper murders, "Abberline came down to the East End and gave the whole of his time with the object of bringing those crimes to light. Unfortunately, however, the circumstances were such that success was impossible."

It must have been painful and infuriating for Abberline when he was forced in the fall of 1888 to confess to the press that "not the slightest clue can at present be obtained." He was used to outwitting criminals. It was reported that he worked so hard to solve the Ripper murders that he "almost broke down under the pressure." Often he did not go to bed and went days without sleep. It wasn't uncommon for him to wear plain-clothes and mingle with the "shady folk" in doss-house kitchens until the early hours of the morning. But no matter where Abberline went, the "miscreant" was not there. I have to wonder if his path ever crossed Walter Sickert's. It would not surprise me if the two men had talked at one time or another and if Sickert had offered suggestions. What a "real jolly" that would have been.

"Theories!" Abberline would later thunder when someone brought up the Ripper murders. "We were lost almost in theories; there were so many of them." By all indications, it was not a pleasant subject to bring up with him in later years, after he had moved on to other cases. Better to let him talk about the improved sanitation in the East End or how he solved a long string of bond robberies by tracing clues that led to an unclaimed hatbox in a railway station.

For all his experience and gifts, Abberline did not solve the biggest crime of his life. It is a shame if that failure gave him pain and regret for even a moment when he worked in his garden during his retirement years. Frederick Abberline went to his grave having no idea what he had been up against. Walter Sickert was a murderer unlike any other.

Mary Ann Nichols's body remained at the mortuary in Whitechapel until Thursday, September 6, when her decomposing flesh was finally allowed privacy and rest.

She was enclosed in a "solid-looking" wooden coffin and loaded into a horse-drawn hearse that carried her seven miles to Ilford Cemetery, where she was buried. The sun shone only five minutes that day, and it was misty and rainy.

The next day, Friday, the British Association's fifty-eighth annual meeting took up important topics such as the necessity of lightning rods being properly installed and inspected, and the vagaries of lightning and the great damage it and wild geese could do to telegraph wires. The hygienic qualities of electric lighting were presented, and a physicist and an engineer debated whether electricity was a form of matter or energy. It was announced that poverty and misery could be eliminated if "you could prevent weakness and sickness and laziness and stupidity." One bit of good news was that Thomas Edison had just started a factory that would begin producing 18,000 phonographs a year for?20 or?25 each.

The weather had been worse this day than yesterday, with no sunshine reported at all, and squalls roared in from the north. Heavy rain and sleet smacked down, and Londoners moved about in a cold mist, going to and from work and later to the theaters. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was still drawing large audiences at the Lyceum, and a parody of it called Hide and Seekyll had opened at the Royalty Theater. The play She was reviewed in that day's paper as "a formidable experiment of dramatizing," offering a murder and cannibals at the Gaiety. At the Alhambra, one of Walter Sickert's favorite music halls, the doors opened at 10:30 P.M. with a cast of dancing women and Captain Clives and his "marvelous dog."