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 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 “& 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.”