by Robert House
In 1901, Anderson wrote an article titled “Punishing Crime,” in which he noted that the Ripper was “a cause of danger only to a particular section of a small and definite class of women, in a limited district of the East End; and that the inhabitants of the metropolis generally were just as secure during the weeks the fiend was on the prowl as they were before the mania seized him, or after he had been safely caged in an asylum.”9 It was really just a rewording of what Griffiths had said in 1895, although the statement was somewhat less vague, because it now seemed clear that Anderson was referring to a specific suspect, as opposed to a general theory that the Ripper was probably a lunatic. Moreover, whereas Griffiths claimed that the police had strong suspicions about three suspects, Anderson was more or less declaring that the police knew the Ripper’s identity. It is also relevant to note that Anderson’s reference to “mania” corresponds with the diagnosis of mania noted on Kozminski’s admission records at Colney Hatch asylum.
Anderson expanded on these vague hints in his 1907 book Criminals and Crime: Some Facts and Suggestions, when he alluded to “the fact of the fiend’s detention in an asylum.”
When I speak of the efficiency [of the CID] some people will exclaim, “But what about all the undetected crimes?” I may say here that in London at least the undetected crimes are few. But English law does not permit of an arrest save on legal evidence of guilt, and legal evidence is often wholly wanting where moral proof is complete and convincing. Were I to unfold the secrets of Scotland Yard about crimes respecting which the police have been disparaged and abused in recent years, the result would be a revelation to the public. But that is not my subject here10
The concept of “moral proof ” (or “moral certainty”) is one that Anderson mentioned several times when discussing the Ripper crimes. The statement here about “crimes respecting which the police have been disparaged and abused in recent years” is most likely a reference to the Ripper crimes, among others. As such, it is important to note that Anderson speaks of instances when the police were lacking sufficient legal proof to arrest a suspect, even though they had “complete and convincing” moral proof of his guilt. “Moral proof” refers to a concept in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that is defined as a degree of “intuitive probability” that was, as Descartes put it, “sufficient to regulate the conduct of one’s life even if it is in principle possible that we can be mistaken.”11 In other words, it implies a degree of probability sufficient for making practical decisions, if not quite an absolute certainty. On another occasion, Anderson again spoke of “moral proof,” this time clearly in reference to the Ripper murders:
Detractors of the work of our British Police in bringing criminals to justice generally ignore the important distinction between moral proof and legal evidence of guilt. In not a few cases that are popularly classed with “unsolved mysteries of crime,” the offender is known, but evidence is wanting. If, for example, in a recent murder case of special notoriety and interest, certain human remains had not been found in a cellar, a great crime would have been catalogued among “Police failures”; and yet, even without the evidence which sent the murderer to the gallows, the moral proof of his guilt would have been full and clear. So again with the “Whitechapel murders” of 1888. Despite the lucubration of many an amateur “Sherlock Holmes,” there was no doubt whatever as to the identity of the criminal, and if our “detectives” possessed the powers, and might have recourse to the methods, of Foreign Police Forces he would have been brought to justice. But the guilty sometimes escape through the working of a system designed to protect innocent persons wrongly accused of crime. And many a case which is used to disparage our British “detectives” ought rather to be hailed as a proof of the scrupulous fairness with which they discharge their duties12
The crime writer Hargrave Lee Adam later echoed this, stating, “Robt. Anderson has assured the writer that the assassin [that is, the Ripper] was well known to the police, but unfortunately, in the absence of sufficient legal evidence to justify an arrest, they were unable to take him. It was a case of moral versus legal proof.”13 As Adam said, Anderson “never tired of referring to this, because he felt keenly the injustice done to the police when they failed to catch and convict a criminal against whom there was a lack of legal proof.”14
That the police were hampered by legal procedures was clearly an important topic with Anderson, and it is a note that he hit over and over again. For example, in an interview published in the Daily Chronicle in 1908, he said, “No law hinders a police officer from going into a private house or private grounds to arrest a criminal. But the law gives him no right to enter for the investigation of the crime and the securing of evidence that may lead to the detection of the criminal.” Anderson added that he told the Home Secretary, “I could not accept responsibility for non-detection of the Ripper crimes, for the reasons, among others, that I have given you.”15 Anderson later expanded on the overall gist of his complaint in his 1910 autobiography, where he wrote, “It sometimes happens that the murderer is known, but evidence is wholly wanting. In such circumstances the French Police would arrest the suspected person, and build up a case against him at their leisure, mainly by admissions extracted from him in repeated interrogations.” Anderson went on to cite an example in which he attempted the “French procedure” in interrogating a murder suspect.
I sent for the man, my ostensible object being to satisfy him that the Police were doing their duty. As I cross-examined him on the case he gave himself away over and over again. In any French court a report of that interrogation might have convicted the criminal. In an English court it would have raised a storm that might have brought my official career to a close! I never tried that game again16
Anderson was clearly beating around the bush, eager to explain something that he was not supposed to be talking about. He made a similar statement in an article published in The Nineteenth Century and After in February 1908. In the article, titled “Criminals and Crime: A Rejoinder,” Anderson said, “The author of those murders [that is, the Whitechapel murders] was a lunatic, and if evidence had been available to bring him to justice he would have been sent to Broadmoor.”17 Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane was an institution “intended for the reception, safe custody and treatment of persons who had committed crimes while actually insane.” It is important to note that in order for a person to be admitted to Broadmoor, he or she had to be found guilty of a crime. Anderson’s quote contains three important points: the murderer was a lunatic; the police didn’t have sufficient evidence to “bring him to justice”; and the Ripper was not committed to Broadmoor, as some researchers and press reporters later claimed.
Still, Anderson’s statements up to this point were so nebulous that they attracted little attention, even though the ex-CID chief had certainly stated, on several occasions, that the Metropolitan Police knew the Ripper’s identity. It wasn’t until the publication of Anderson’s autobiography in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in March 1910 that he dropped the bomb.
One did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to discover that the criminal was a sexual maniac of a virulent type; that he was living in the immediate vicinity of the scenes of the murders; and that, if he was not living absolutely alone, his people knew of his guilt, and refused to give him up to justice. During my absence abroad the Police had made a house-to-house search for him, investigating the case of every man in the district whose circumstances were such that he could go and come and get rid of his blood-stains in secret. And the conclusion we came to was that he and his people were low-class Jews, for it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile justice.
And the result proved that our diagnosis was right on every point. For I may say at once that “undiscovered murders” are rare in London, and the “Jack-the-Ripper” crimes are not within that category. And if the Police here had powers such as the French Police possess, the murderer would have been brought
to justice. Scotland Yard can boast that not even the subordinate officers of the department will tell tales out of school, and it would ill become me to violate the unwritten rule of the service. The subject will come up again, and I will only add here that the “Jack-the-Ripper” letter which is preserved in the Police Museum at New Scotland Yard is the creation of an enterprising London Journalist.
In a footnote, Anderson added,
Having regard to the interest attaching to this case, I should almost be tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer and of the pressman who wrote the letter above referred to, provided that the publishers would accept all responsibility in view of a possible libel action. But no public benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer. I will only add that when the individual whom we suspected was caged in an asylum, the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer at once identified him, but when he learned that the suspect was a fellow-Jew he declined to swear to him18
Anderson’s autobiography caused quite a scandal in the government when it was published, not for what he wrote about the Ripper case, but instead for his “indiscretions” in revealing other state secrets—most notably, that he was the author of one of a series of articles published in 1887 in the Times that had been written to smear the reputation of Charles Parnell, the head of the Irish Home Rule movement. The most contentious aspect of the articles was the reproduction of some letters supposedly written by Parnell, expressing sympathy with extremist Irish terrorist groups. The letters turned out to be forged, and Parnell successfully sued the Times for libel. The Irish nationalists believed (correctly) that the British government was collaborating with the Times in a covert attempt to discredit the Home Rule party. Anderson’s revelation, some twenty-three years after the fact, that he was the author of one of the articles threatened to reopen an old and rather ugly wound. Scandal loomed. Anderson’s participation was in fact limited to writing some of the less important articles, which as he later explained was done to expose and thus thwart “dynamite plots then hatching in America in view of the approaching ‘Jubilee celebrations’ in London.” Such was the type of press manipulation regularly practiced by the secret service, but the exposure of such tactics was embarrassing. Because Anderson was the only member of the government who admitted to anything, he emerged as a scapegoat, and his “indiscretions” were lambasted in Parliament. As the Irish nationalist M.P. Jeremiah McVeagh charged, Anderson was “the connecting link between the government and the Times.” In other words, he was only “one of the villains . . . there were other sinister figures in the background.”19
The wolves were howling for blood, and several members of parliament suggested that Anderson should lose his pension. But the recently appointed Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, decided against such a drastic course of action. Churchill was in a difficult position, since he was clearly dealing with a person who was inclined to reveal whatever government secrets he thought the public had a right to know about. This meant that Anderson was a potentially dangerous figure. Denying his pension would have been like poking a tiger in its cage. Thus, Churchill decided merely to censure him. In the House of Commons, Churchill ridiculed Anderson’s revelations in Blackwood’s, noting, “They seem to me to be written in a spirit of gross boastfulness. They are written, if I may say so, in the style of ‘How Bill Adams won the battle of Waterloo.’ The writer has been so anxious to show how important he was, how invariably he was right, and how much more he could tell if only his mouth was not what he was pleased to call closed.”20 This got a round of laughter in the House. Churchill further described Anderson’s revelations in Blackwood’s as “the garrulous and inaccurate indiscretion of advancing years,” noting that “it would be intolerable if ex-police officers and ex-agents of the service should be allowed after retirement to publish without fear of consequence, secrets which might have come into their possession.” Such statements served the dual function of appeasing Anderson’s enemies in Parliament and discrediting the ex-CID chief in the court of public opinion, calling into question the veracity of the claims he had made in Blackwood’s magazine. None of this apparently had anything to do with Anderson’s statements about Jack the Ripper, which Churchill apparently included among what he referred to as the “minor revelations” in the articles. But the statements of both McVeagh and Churchill effectively made Anderson seem like an unreliable and somewhat geriatric boaster and buffoon. The same statements would later be wielded against Anderson by Ripperologists, who seemed inclined to believe that Anderson’s statements about the Ripper’s identity were hogwash.
Anderson’s claim that James Monro had authorized him to write the Times article was also ridiculed in the House of Commons—as Jeremiah McVeagh put it, it was “another of Anderson’s Fairy Tales.” When Monro was asked whether he had in fact authorized the article, he replied,
I have no doubt that Mr. Anderson and I talked about [the articles], and I can quite imagine that I may have welcomed public interest being directed to the existence of a dangerous conspiracy. But such an expression of opinion was a very different thing from authorising an agent of mine to give information to the public. Such a course would have been opposed to all my training in a Service where communication on the part of officials with the Press was carefully limited. As a matter of fact, no such authority was asked by Mr. Anderson, and none was given to him by me. . . . A long time afterwards, Mr. Anderson informed me that he had written one or more of the articles, and I felt much annoyed21
In short, Monro admitted that his “expression of opinion” might have inadvertently given Anderson the impression that he supported the writing of the article, even though he did not actually authorize it. Above all, Monro seems to have been angry at Anderson’s indiscretions, because he firmly believed in the idea of keeping quiet about government secrets. Presumably, Monro likewise disapproved of Anderson’s statements about the Ripper case, although he never mentioned them directly.
As Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from November 1888 until June 1890, Monro must have been aware of all of the strong suspects in the Whitechapel murders case. As Andrew Morrison suggested, “It is possible that [Monro] was more informed about the case than most if not all his contemporaries. If anybody knew the truth about the events of 1888 it was him.”22 As Warren’s successor to the post of commissioner, Monro was Anderson’s boss between November 1888 and June 1890, at a time when Kozminski was probably “in the frame” as a suspect. It seems highly likely that Monro must have known all about Kozminski. And as we have seen, sometime prior to June 1890, Monro had “decidedly” formed an opinion on the case but was unwilling to elaborate on this to the press. Whatever Monro knew, he never publicly remarked on it, nor did he comment on Anderson’s statements about the Ripper’s identity.
Monro is said to have left some papers related to the Ripper case to his son Charles. The documents have never been found and were quite probably destroyed, but according to what Charles told his younger brother, Douglas, their father’s theory on the case was “a very hot potato,” a secret that he kept even from his wife. Monro’s grandson Christopher later recalled his grandfather saying, “Jack the Ripper should have been caught.”23 What Monro knew (or believed) about Jack the Ripper is not known. Yet the “highly private” nature of his thoughts on the case seems to imply a carefully guarded secret. Indeed, if several top police officials at the MET in fact knew (or strongly suspected that they knew) the identity of the Ripper but, as Anderson suggests, were unable to secure a conviction, then the whole situation must have been considered a state secret. If the government had revealed not only that Jack the Ripper was a Jewish immigrant, but also that he got away scot-free because the police were unable to secure sufficient evidence for a conviction, there would have been (at the very minimum) a scandal and quite possibly riots and social upheaval in the East End. A “very hot potato” indeed.
Anderson’s statements about the Ripp
er in his autobiography did not pass unnoticed. A harsh critic emerged in the form of Leopold Greenberg, the co-owner of the Jewish Chronicle. On March 4, 1910, Greenberg published an article in the Chronicle under the pseudonym “Mentor,” in which he pointed out that Anderson supplied no proof to back up his claim that the Ripper was Jewish, and he criticized Anderson’s “wicked assertion” that certain members of the “low-class” Jewish community would have protected the murderer from the police. The article read,
According to Sir Robert Anderson, the police “formed a theory”—usually the first essential to some blundering injustice. In this case, the police came to the conclusion that “Jack the Ripper” was a “low-class” Jew, and they so decided, Sir Robert says, because they believe “it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile justice.” Was anything more nonsensical in the way of a theory ever conceived even in the brain of a policeman? Here was a whole neighbourhood, largely composed of Jews, in constant terror lest their womenfolk, whom Jewish men hold in particular regard—even “low-class” Jews do that—should be slain by some murderer who was stalking the district undiscovered. So terrified were many of the people—non-Jews as well as Jews—that they hastily moved away. And yet Sir Robert would have us believe that there were Jews who knew the person who was committing the abominable crimes and yet carefully shielded him from the police. A more wicked assertion to put into print, without the shadow of evidence, I have seldom seen. The man whom Scotland Yard “suspected,” subsequently, says Sir Robert, “was caged in an asylum.” He was never brought to trial—nothing except his lunacy was proved against him. This lunatic presumably was a Jew, and because he was “suspected,” as a result of the police “theory” I have mentioned, Sir Robert ventures to tell the story he does, as if he were stating facts, forgetting that such a case as that of Adolph Beck was ever heard of. [Adolph Beck was wrongly convicted of robbery in 1907 as a result of wrongful identification.]
