RIPPER SUSPECT The Secret Lives of Montague Druitt.

Hardback, 1st edn. What was it that led to a cultured classicist, schoolmaster and barrister being implicated in the most famous unsolved murders of all time? One of the most popular of all Ripper suspects, Montague Druitt appears on the surface an unlikely serial killer. Born into a comfortable bourgeois family, he was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and played cricket for a number of strong club sides. But there was another side to the agreeable Mr Druitt and, in 1894, Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten named Druitt as the murderer. Druitt moved in the artistic and aristocratic circles that overlapped with London's secretive homosexual culture and included another Ripper suspect, the Duke of Clarence. in 1888, at the height of the furore about the Ripper murders, Druitt was summarily and mysteriously dismissed from his post at a boys' school. A few weeks later, shortly after the killing of Mary Kelly, the Ripper's last victim, Druitt was found drowned in the Thames. But was his death suicide or murder? With 35 illus., Appendix, Bibliog. and Index. 208pp. 8vo. h/back. F. in Vg+ dw. which has a small closed tear to top r/h corner of fr. cover.