Melville Macnaghten

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Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten CB KPM (16 June 1853, Woodford, London −12 May 1921) was Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of the London Metropolitan Police from 1903 to 1913. A highly regarded and famously affable figure of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras he played major investigative roles in cases that led to the establishment and acceptance of fingerprint identification. He was also a major player in the pursuit and capture of Dr. Crippen, and of the exoneration of a wrongly convicted man, Adolph Beck, which helped lead to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.

When he prematurely retired in 1913 due to illness, Macnaghten claimed to journalists that he knew the exact identity of Jack the Ripper, the nickname of the unknown serial killer of poor prostitutes in London's impoverished East End during the late Victorian era. The police chief called the killer "that remarkable man",^[1] but refused to name him or divulge details that might identify him, except to reveal that he had taken his own life at the end of 1888. Macnaghten further claimed that he had destroyed the relevant papers to keep forever secret the deceased killer's identity. Since 1965, the public has known that Macnaghten's suspect was Montague John Druitt, a country doctor's son and young barrister who inexplicably drowned himself in the River Thames in early December 1888. The source of Macnaghten's alleged "private information" about Druitt has two candidates, both only uncovered in the early 21st century. One is a Tory politician, H. R. Farquharson,^[2] who lived near the Druitts and also went to Eton with Macnaghten, and the other is Colonel Sir Vivian Majendie,^[3] a very close friend of the police chief and whose clan was related to the Druitt family. It is likely both men, in succession, were the unnamed sources of information for the police chief regarding the drowned barrister being strongly suspected of being the Ripper by his closest relations.

Since 1959, Macnaghten has been known for a major report written in the 1890s on the Ripper case, naming three possible Jack the Ripper suspects.^[4] There are two versions of this document, one that was filed in the archives of Scotland Yard. It was, however, a copy of the privately held version in the possession of his daughter, Christabel, Lady Aberconway – the version which strongly advocated "M. J. Druitt" as the likeliest suspect to have been the Whitechapel assassin – that was revealed in 1959. Macnaghten's opinion that the case was likely solved, and that it was a "Protean" maniac who had taken his own life, had already been confirmed in his 1914 memoir, "Days of My Years" (London, Edward Arnold) though Druitt was not named (and no other suspects are mentioned as possibilities).

More recently, French writer Sophie Herfort has argued that Macnaghten himself was responsible for the Jack the Ripper murders.^[5]