The Howlers of Hawley

Having said in a previous blog past that there was no way I was going to buy Michael Hawley's latest book, The Ripper Haunts and Jack the Ripper Suspect: Dr Francis Tumblety, I had to reverse my decision after reading the most extraordinary review of the book by Jonathan Menges in Ripperologist 171.

Mr Menges is a man who clearly doesn't learn lessons from past experience. Having been outrageously bamboozled by Michael Hawley in person, on a podcast in 2018, and made to look a fool, you'd think that surely Menges would be the one person who knows that nothing Hawley says or writes can be trusted.

But no. For whatever reason, Menges has allowed himself to be bamboozled all over again. This time by Hawley's book, despite me having already exposed the rubbish that Hawley is selling in it.

Let's go through it step by step.

THE BAMBOOZLING OF JONATHEN MENGES

Part 1 - The Review

Below is the key part of Menges' Ripperologist review as it relates to Tumblety as a Ripper suspect. I'm not at all interested in the part of the book (or review) which speculates that Tumblety might have been a so-called Railway Ripper in the United States and, indeed, Menges himself doesn't seem much impressed by this theory, which makes it all the more astonishing that he falls for Hawley's claim about having uncovered new evidence as a result of "new research" which, says Menges, "convincingly demonstrates" that Tumblety was likely at large and out of prison at the time of the Kelly murder. Equally astonishing is that Menges thinks that Scotland Yard's Inspector Andrews was roaming around the United States on some sort of unspecified Tumblety related business in 1888 even though this most certainly did not happen and was convincingly and officially denied at the highest level.

So here is the relevant extract from Menges' review:

"Before getting into the meat of the ‘Railway Ripper’ matter, Hawley uses the first few chapters to shore up subjects that have faced some criticism in his earlier written output.

An examination of the issue of Inspector Andrews being sent to the United States in December 1888 to search for “the Whitechapel fiend” is presented with new research that tends to verify that the trip actually took place, rather than being invented by a reporter, and that Andrews remained in America for weeks, not two days at the most, as has been argued. This points to the prospect that Scotland Yard considered Tumblety a serious suspect for the Ripper murders.

The author also revisits the eternal argument that Tumblety was remanded in Holloway Prison on charges of gross indecency from 7 November to 14 November and therefore could not have committed the murder of Mary Jane Kelly. Here, again aided by new research, Hawley convincingly demonstrates that Tumblety was likely released just a day or two after he was arrested and was therefore very capable of perpetrating the slaughter in Millers Court."

A few things are worth noting. Firstly, when Menges refers to Hawley using the first few chapters to "shore up subjects that have faced some criticism in his earlier written output" he is referring directly to criticism from me, especially in respect of the issue about whether Andrews remained in America, even though my name isn't mentioned as that critic, either in Menges' review or in Hawley's book albeit that my Ripperologist 163 article "The Prosecution of Francis Tumblety" is included in the bibliography. I'm not just imagining this, incidentally. Hawley did identify me by name as the critic in his March 2020 Ripperologist 166 article "Inspector Andrews' Orders to New York City. December 1888", and that article forms the basis of the first few chapters of Hawley's book (so there's nothing new in in it, in other words).

Part 2 - The Infamous Casebook Thread

New members and readers of this website may not know the full story of what happened in 2018 when I challenged Hawley about his last book on Casebook (thread: Jack the Ripper Suspect Dr Francis Tumblety) so it's worth recounting a brief history, especially as it directly involves Jonathan Menges.

What happened is that I exposed Hawley's nonsense and asked him a number of questions which he could not answer and which he evaded in the most devious and underhand fashion. One part of the nonsense that Hawley was trying to convince people was true, but is now apparently abandoned because it's not mentioned in this latest book, was that the Metropolitan Police had posted twelve constables at two London railway stations in November 1888 in order to intercept and arrest Francis Tumblety before he fled to the United States. While I was posting conclusive documentary evidence to refute this, Ally Ryder, the unhinged administrator of Casebook, in a flagrant breach of her own Forum's rules, which expressly allow challenging and questioning of published authors, outrageously closed the thread, falsely accused me of harassing Hawley, simply because I was asking him questions he couldn't answer, and stated she would be in touch with those involved, i.e. myself and Hawley (which wasn't true because she never contacted me, and I had to write to her after some weeks had passed without having heard from her).

When I did write to Ryder she refused to engage with me (instead quietly deleting the post I was complaining to her about without ever explaining to the members of the Forum why she'd done so) and it became clear to me that she hadn't even properly read the thread which she had closed.

Even worse is that it later transpired that Menges, who was not then the Forum moderator, just a regular Forum member, had secretly discussed my posts with Ally Ryder, even though Menges had himself posted in the thread and had been a malevolent and disruptive presence, attempting to "both sides" the issue, even though Hawley was telling outrageous lies and being so obviously evasive. At one point, Menges suggested that the discussion should stop on the daft basis that it was taking up too much server space (something he later said was just a joke, although it wasn't presented as such at the time).

Even worse than this is that it would seem that it was Menges who put the idea into Ryder's head that I was harassing Hawley because he didn't like the way I had treated that delicate warm hearted flower, Caroline Morris-Brown, a polite demure lady who, like Tumblety, wouldn't harm a fly, when responding to her diary nonsense in separate Forum threads. A completely inappropriate linking of two different subjects but one which demonstrated the power and influence of the Diary Mafia at the time.

The upshot of all this was that I resigned from Casebook on the basis that I wasn't willing to waste time posting on a Forum where the Admin was making false allegations about me which she wasn't prepared to either justify or retract, and I asked Ally Ryder to remove me from the membership list, a request which she disingenuously presented to her members as a decision on her part to ban me from the Forum which was not only untrue (she never at any time told me in our correspondence that I was banned) but was posted at a time when I was unable to respond with the true state of affairs anywhere online, hence the start of this website in its previous incarnation, which had originally been intended to provide information about my books, as a vehicle to post about issues relating to the Whitechapel murders.

The most amusing part of the episode was that a year after I resigned, in May 2019, I published a bombshell article entitled "From Commissioner to Asterisk" in which I set out the true position regarding my resignation from Casebook and wondered aloud if busybody Menges was one of the "several" people who, Ryder claimed, had reported the thread. It seemed a reasonable possibility. After all, he'd posted in the thread during my debate with Hawley that if Admin hadn't been on holiday at the time, "I'd just clue Ally in on the madness".

This produced a bizarre response from Menges on JTR Forums on 11 June 2019 in which, in a carefully worded statement hiding more than it revealed, he denied things which had never even been alleged. After claiming that I imagined he had "a great influence over Ally Ryder and her Admin duties" (something not said or suggested by me - I had simply wondered if he'd complained about the thread or discussed it with Ryder and, if so, what business was it of his to do so), he wrote: "Not once have I been asked nor have I ever provided an opinion on how Ally should choose to run Casebook. I had nothing to do with his thread being locked and I wasn’t aware of his departure from Casebook until long after it happened." Well that wasn't the issue and it wasn't what I'd been suggesting. The issue was whether he'd discussed the thread with Ryder and what he'd told her about it.

He posted again in August 2019 to deny that he'd reported the thread and also denied that he was a "very important and influential person at Casebook". This wasn't long, incidentally, before Ryder chose him as her important and influential moderator!

It wasn't until late October 2019 that he finally admitted the truth in a JTR Forums post: "I do speak to Ally Ryder a few times a week as we've been good friends for twenty years", he said, "and the topic of the thread came up".

Oh hallelujah. Finally! I already knew this because he'd told me in a private email in June but he'd told me at the same time that it was confidential and that I couldn't publish it, so I'd been unable to say so in my articles. But it took him until October before he finally made this information public. In the same email, he'd attempted to distinguish between formally reporting a thread using the report button and emailing Ryder about it. The possibility cannot be ruled out that, despite his denials, it WAS Menges who reported the thread to Ryder, even though he didn't use the report button to do so.

Of course he discussed the thread with Ryder! How could he have resisted getting involved in a matter that had nothing to do with him? He presented his discussion with Ryder as one favourable to me but refused to reveal his full exchange with her. To me, it seems obvious that he put the (false) idea into Ryder's head that I'd been harassing Hawley.

In his private email to me, Menges told me (outrageously and rudely) that he'd noticed a tendency on my part to "badger" other members of Casebook, with Caroline Morris being the specific example he mentioned. To me, this made it certain that he'd said something similar to Ryder which caused her to allege that I'd been badgering or harassing Hawley, even though she obviously hadn't read the entire thread when posting her ruling.

The irony that Menges introduced my diary posts into what should have been a completely separate discussion about my posts about Tumblety will not be lost on anyone and, if it was, as I still strongly suspect, Menges who, through his longstanding relationship with Ally Ryder, influenced her into concluding that I'd been harassing Hawley, this means that it was the diary that indirectly caused my departure from Casebook.

Following this disgraceful episode in Casebook's history, about which all participants have remained guiltily silent for the past six years, Menges even more disgracefully decided to prohibit any member from reproducing or quoting on Casebook anything written by me. Then, much later, in what must be the most baffling decision by any online administrator in the history of internet forums, Ally Ryder banned anyone from posting a link to any articles on this website, not due to anything I'd actually written on this website, or anywhere else, but because a member of her Forum had had the audacity to ask her why she'd deleted a link to an article of mine that he'd posted (something she subsequently claimed, questionably, was an accidental deletion) and, simply because he'd asked her why she deleted the link, she refused to allow any other member to post any link to this site in future. If you can understand the logic of this decision, you're a cleverer person than I am.

That, I think, is a fair summary of what happened in May 2018 and subsequently. With Menges refusing to post his secret communications with Ally Ryder (despite me having asked him to), it's impossible to know his exact role in the scandal but it's always seemed to me that he had manipulated Ryder into making her irrational ruling to close the thread, even though no actual rules had been broken, thus doing a massive favour to Hawley who was incapable of accepting legitimate criticisms of his book.

We may note at this point that Hawley seemed convinced during the thread that I was going to write my own book on Jack the Ripper and/or Tumblety and that I was challenging his own book because I was a future competitor of his, despite my denials of this. Hence, on 11 May 2018, he posted: "It's obvious as to your motive. Your online articles will be chapters in your future David Orsam book". Then, the next day: "And when you finally publish your book loaded with this crap, I will be honored to give you a review. Honestly. The fact that your signature statement is Orsam Books makes it clear this is your plan. Hurry up!". But here we are six years later and it still ain't happening.

What I think it's reasonable to infer is that Menges' attempt to pretend in his review that Hawley's imaginary new research has refuted the criticism (made by me) of Hawley's previous books was done for personal reasons to make a childish dig at me rather than due to any genuine belief on his part that Hawley truly has found something new, but, if he does believe it, one can only wonder how he has allowed himself to be so utterly bamboozled in 2024 after being bamboozled by the same person on the podcast in 2018.

Part 3 - The Original Bamboozling of Jonathan Menges

As for that bamboozling, here's a reminder of the key part of the podcast about the 12 constables (although it should be said that Hawley managed to successfully bamboozle Menges with all sorts of additional nonsense about Tumblety throughout the rest of the podcast):

Menges: I want to also talk about the whole twelve detectives…

Hawley: Oh yes.

Menges: ...being, although this was not a question submitted by a listener I should point out, it’s something that’s in your book and I follow the Casebook message boards, as we all know, so in your book you state that extra constables were summoned to search the train stations and inspect American travellers’ luggage in an attempt to find evidence against Tumblety, is what you suggest, but from the correspondence that was posted on Casebook, by Prowse and Monro and folks like that, the extra constables that were requested seemed to have been intended for passengers coming from America to Liverpool and then proceeding to London in an attempt to search for, like, explosives, as opposed to Tumblety who was, whichever way he was going, was going in the opposite direction so to me there didn’t seem to be any indication that they were requesting to search Americans’ baggage outgoing, they were concerned with searching American passengers’ baggage incoming, so would you like to address that one for us?

Hawley: Yes, sure the - now what I reported on was from Andrew Cook’s book with the - and Andrew Cook made a comment and mentioned about this report around November 20th 1888 of assigning these constables.  Now, you’re exactly right and when you look at the reports on Casebook that - and there are a ton of them now, I mean multiple pages where that, those twelve constables were absolutely assigned for what you said, but that was for the dates between the 1st March 1889 and February 28th 1890.  That’s not what Andrew Cook was – his, Andrew Cook’s concern was, when you read that November 20th 1888 report, it says that those additional constables, it says in that particular report it states that this year long reassignment – it doesn’t say “year-long” but it was basically that date – he says, does not take into account the twelve police constables who will be required for duty at Euston Station and St Pancras. So it says it does not take into account that, meaning the report about the November 20th, this right here is suggesting that they will be using some before those dates but all those correspondences between Home Office and Scotland Yard is for the enduring or the year-long event which is fine but that’s not what Andrew Cook was concerned about, he said that the ones that it was not taking into account, he was thinking that, again this is November 20th, so that would have been that it suggests that there were some people there before and so -

Menges: Well the correspondence that as far as I can tell that initially started the request for the inspection of Americans’ luggage for explosives was in the spring of 1888 so it would have been even months prior to the Whitechapel murders even commencing, now whether it went on to 89 and 90 I don’t know.  So are you saying that there was two separate requests that –

Hawley: No, I’m saying there was only one request, all those requests are for the March 1889 and 1890 which is exactly what all that correspondence was but Andrew Cook’s comments was the part where it says it does not take into account that. What he’s talking about is that there was something happening that does not take into account that, who will be required for the next year. So he said that was curious. So that’s what I said was cur- I said kind of basically the same thing as Andrew Cook is that - now by the way when I was making the comment about -

Menges: Now, explain to me again, I’m kind of confused. What does - I don’t have Andrew’s book in front of me, and it’s been years since I spoke to him – so what does he exactly say?

Hawley: So it’s a Home Office, apparently it’s 144 dash 222 dash 49500M, that particular one talks about, that report there says does not take into account the twelve PCs, the twelve PCs who will be required for next year. So all the correspondence before the Ripper murders and all that, focuses on: they need funding for a year-long twelve constables.  So that would not have nothing to do with Francis Tumblety but in this case it enhances (?) it when it says it does not take into account those.  That means that Home Office and them have knowledge of having some constables at these stations.  Now, the counter to that was that when he said this, and there is a November 23rd Board of Customs to the Secretary of State approval, talking about the new arrangements still to be worked out so when it says “still to be worked out” that must not mean that there were some constables that were, you know, already by November 20th at those stations but there were some constables that were at the stations maybe between there and the beginning of when they needed that year-long funding, so my point was that when I read that was there was that there was this suspicious little statement about “it does not take into account those” so there must be some constables that are there around that time. Were they for Francis Tumblety?  Well they might not be, that’s why it was only a side comment saying curiously this was going on at the same time. So -

Menges: And regardless of you know what they attempted to do, your book indicates that by travelling to visit his relatives in Bath he was probably dropping off a lot of his luggage.

Hawley: And surgical knives! (laughs)

Menges: Yeah, so whether they deployed extra constables to search for Tumblety’s belongings or not, he was able to circumvent that whole effort anyway by possibly depositing them with his relatives and you know he wasn’t - they didn’t catch him with anything anyway so it’s all kind of a moot point.

Hawley: Again, the comment - that particular spot right there, I could have completely eliminated the discussion with Andrew Cook’s comment about the twelve constables and it would bear no impact upon Littlechild having knowledge of Tumblety making it to Boulogne and this complete issue. So that was just one more thing that:  how curious that Andrew Cook talked about that so I wanted to add that. 

To the extent that anything Hawley said in that gobbledygook-filled segment made any sense (which it didn't), he was accepting that the 12 constables weren't deployed in 1888 but, at the same time, he was attempting to say that because Andrew Cook had believed that the 12 constables were connected with Tumblety, it doesn't matter whether he (Cook) was right or wrong because it was important for him (Hawley) to include it in his own book simply because Cook had said it. In fact, even here, Hawley was misrepresenting what Cook had written but that barely matters because Cook had, himself, misunderstood the evidence, as I had already explained on my website at the time. Needless to say, Hawley's interpretation of the phrase "does not take into account", which appeared in a letter by Assistant Commissioner Pearson of 20 November 1888 as bearing the meaning that, "there must be some constables that are there around that time", was quite wrong.

The 12 constables, which Cook had believed, due to his misunderstanding of Pearson's letter, might be related to Tumblety, had nothing whatsoever to do with Tumblety or Jack the Ripper: their deployment having originally been contemplated before the start of the Ripper murders, while their actual deployment did not occur at any time during the period of the Ripper murders. Their intended role was to check the luggage of individuals arriving from the United States at London stations for items related to Irish terrorism.

All Hawley had to do in the podcast with Menges was say that he'd made a mistake in including any mention of the 12 constables in his book, having been misled by Andrew Cook, and that he now understood that the12 constables were irrelevant to Tumblety but, as we can see, he was physically and psychologically incapable of doing such a simple thing, providing to Menges and his listeners, instead, a meaningless, rambling word salad of nonsense. Yet, Menges, who could easily have pinned him down, let him get away with it.

Nevertheless, after this podcast, I explained at length in multiple online articles where Hawley went wrong, both in respect to the 12 constables and many other points in his book. I know for a fact that Menges read those articles because he wrote to me about them. I'm pretty sure that Menges can read and comprehend English, although, I must admit, I'm starting to have some doubts about his abilities in this respect, so he was well aware of how Hawley had tried to mislead and bamboozle him.

Yet, and yet,.....as we've seen, we now find him in his Ripperologist review lavishing praise over Hawley's so-called "new research" in his book and his amazing ability to have located convincing evidence by which he has been able to answer his critics and demonstrate that Tumblety was both out of prison at the time of Kelly's murder in 1888 and being hunted in the United States by a Scotland Yard detective.

THE "NEW RESEARCH"

1. Tumblety's bail

So what is the "new research" which Menges assures us is in the book?

Well it cost me £7.86 to find out - thanks JM - but, of course, there isn't any.

In respect of the issue of whether Tumblety was in or out of prison at the time of Kelly's murder, it's literally non existent.  You can search as much as you want in the book and you won't find it.  I really don't know what Menges was talking about.  Hawley himself doesn't claim to have located any new evidence on this issue, so I can only think that Menges was hallucinating. Perhaps he had in mind that Hawley seems excited by the fact (which only recently seems to have registered with him) that the same magistrate who presided over Tumblety's hearings, Mr Hannay, granted bail to Hamilton de Tatham at both his remand and committal hearings in 1891.

But if this is what Menges thinks convincingly demonstrates that Tumblety was at liberty at the time of Kelly's murder, he obviously doesn't understand the issue. For the issue is not so much whether Tumblety was granted bail or not at the remand hearing (there's always been a reasonable chance that he was). Rather, it is whether he was able to satisfy his bail conditions within 24 hours. If he needed 48 hours, as he obviously did after his hearing on 14th November, he would still have been in prison on the morning of 9th November, making it, I think, practically impossible for him to have been in Whitechapel in time to murder Kelly, even if he was released on bail in the morning of that day, once the prison governor started work.

In any event, I already wrote about De Tatham's bail in my online article "Tumblety's Bail Revisited" back in November 2015 when I said:

"In the case of Hamilton de Tatham we have an actual example of the same magistrate, Mr Hannay, granting bail to a man charged with gross indecency at his remand hearing.

Hamilton de Tatham's bail was also increased at his committal hearing.  Assuming that Tumblety was bailed by the magistrate as opposed to a judge in Chambers, it is almost certain that, if Tumblety had been released from prison on bail following his committal hearing on 7 November, his bail was increased at his committal hearing on 14 November, causing him to be sent back to prison, otherwise he would have been recorded in the After-Trial calendar as having been bailed at the police court prior to 16 November.  But the example of de Tatham shows that such an increase was possible."

De Tatham's case, incidentally, is somewhat different to Tumblety's because he never went to prison from Marlborough Street Police Court, being at liberty, on bail, following both his remand and committal hearings. The Central Criminal Court shows him as being received into custody for the first time on 6th May which was the day of the start of his trial (a prisoner had to surrender themselves into custody for this purpose). By contrast, Tumblety was sent to prison following his first remand hearing.

As for whether Hawley actually does convincingly demonstrate with any of his other arguments that Tumblety was out of prison at the time of Kelly's murder, don't make me laugh.  He makes blunder after blunder, howler after howler, in his transparent efforts to reach the conclusion he likes, all amazingly missed by the easily bamboozled Menges who must have read the book with his eyes closed and brain switched off.  I'll discuss this in more detail separately below.

2. Inspector Andrews in New York.

With respect to the issue of whether Inspector Andrews conducted enquiries about Tumblety in New York in December 1888, the "new" research turns out to be an agency newspaper report of something Andrews is supposed to have said in Montreal in December 1888 which I originally posted in one of my online articles back in May 2019 (and which Hawley first woke up to in his Ripperologist 166 article from March 2020 "Inspector Andrews' Orders to New York City, December 1888").  So it's not new research at all.  In fact, I posted a better example in 2019 because the report I reproduced was from the Montreal Daily Witness, a newspaper published in Montreal, surprisingly enough, whereas Hawley's chosen newspaper, the Ottawa Daily Citizen, dated a day later, was published in a city over 200km from Montreal, so that newspaper obviously didn't have a reporter of its own present.  This is that article from the Montreal newspaper (now posted by me now for the THIRD time in five years):

In that article, as we can see, Andrews was quoted as saying, "I quite expect a similar experience in New York".   Hawley swallows this as the gospel truth, ignoring the fact that the report also claims that Andrews said there was a reward of some £15,000 (i.e. $75,000) in London for anyone who found the killer, whereas the truth, as Andrews would have known perfectly well, was that there were only two rewards being offered in London at that time which totalled a mere £600.  Andrews is not likely to have got that figure so badly wrong which suggests that the quote was a fabrication, and that the bit about about going to New York was also a fabrication based on a widespread but inaccurate assumption that it was his next destination because, it was wrongly reported, he'd received orders to arrest the Whitechapel murderer.   

We know for a fact that Inspector Andrews did not go to the United States at any time in December 1888 because this is categorically confirmed in writing at the highest possible level in the official records about which there can be no room for doubt.   Hawley gets excited by an 1889 newspaper report in which the Home Secretary is said to have admitted in Parliament that Inspector Andrews went to America in 1888, but this is something we've always known.  It's just that in the 1880s, America included Canada.  All Henry Matthews was doing in the House of Commons in 1889 was confirming that Inspector Andrews had gone to Canada.  He wasn't saying, as Hawley seems to believe, that he'd ever set foot in the United States.  We know why Andrews went to Canada.  It was to escort a prisoner to Toronto under the normal extradition procedure.  

Reliable contemporary newspaper reports confirm that Inspector Andrews left Toronto on 18 December headed "for Europe" (via Montreal) and then left Montreal for Halifax on 20 December, sailing back to England on the SS Sarnia on 22nd December, so that he couldn't possibly have visited New York that month, something, as I say, subsequently confirmed by official memoranda held at the National Archives.   The issue about whether Andrews did or did not visit the United States in 1888 is dead.  He most certainly did not.  Dodgy American or Canadian newspaper reports, in circumstances where there was all kinds of ignorant speculation about what the Scotland Yard inspector was doing at the time (including hunting Fenians for the Times and inducing Henri Le Caron to come to London to testify before the Parnell Commission), cannot, and do not, for one second contradict what we know to be hard fact.

With the laughingly so-called "new research" out of the way, where else does Hawley go wrong in his book that Menges decided to ignore with his Nelsonian blind eye?

THE HOWLERS

HOWLER 1: TUMBLETY'S ARREST

Hawley notes correctly that the Central Criminal Court calendars for November and December 1888 state that Tumblety was arrested for gross indecency.  He goes on to say:

"In view of this and other corroborating evidence, sometime before November 7, 1888, Tumblety was arrested on suspicion.  According to the November and December Central Criminal Court calendars, he was then received into custody at Holloway prison on November 7.  Under nineteenth century British law, the Writ of Habeas Corpus mandated that within twenty-four hours of incarceration and identification, the prisoner must either be charged with the crime and presented to the judicial branch of the government (i.e. the police court magistrate) or be released.  This is the reason Tumblety was released after being arrested on suspicion of the Whitechapel crimes".

This is a lot of mumbo jumbo in which Hawley elides, and confuses, two totally separate things, namely (a) Tumblety's actual known arrest on the gross indecency/indecent assault charges and (b) his unconfirmed arrest on suspicion of being the Whitechapel murderer.  

The assumed arrest on suspicion of committing the Whitechapel murders has nothing whatsoever to do with what is in the Central Criminal Court calendar, nor with Tumblety's incarceration at Holloway prison, which was entirely related to the indecency charges.  Yet, to the uninformed reader, Hawley makes it sound like the calendars not only confirm that Hawley was arrested on suspicion of murder prior to 7th November but that he was released from prison within 24 hours because the police didn't have enough evidence to charge him with the Whitechapel murders.

So we can see that in the first sentence, Hawley says:

"In view of this other corroborating evidence, sometime before November 7, 1888, Tumblety was arrested on suspicion."

The "this" in that sentence is Tumblety's inclusion in the Central Criminal Court calendars. But this has precisely nothing to do with any arrest on suspicion of being the Whitechapel murderer.  It's an entirely separate crime.  So it can't possibly tell us that Tumblety was arrested on suspicion of murder. 

What other "corroborating evidence" is Hawley talking about?  There isn't any, other than American newspaper reports and Tumblety's own reported statements which could well have been false (and Hawley himself admits that Tumblety lied about being charged with the Whitechapel murders).

It's impossible to fathom why Hawley talks about the Writ of Habeas Corpus immediately following a sentence saying that Tumblety was received into custody at Holloway prison on 7th November.  The two things have nothing to do with each other.   When he was received into custody at Holloway prison, Tumblety had already been properly and lawfully charged before a magistrate with indecent assault, which was the very reason he was in prison on remand, so habeas corpus didn't apply.   But Hawley is making it seem like the authorities couldn't hold him in prison for more than 24 hours and thus had to release him on the 8th November which is entirely false. He could legally have been held in prison on remand until his committal hearing, and from his committal hearing until his trial, had the magistrate so wished. If he was at liberty on the 8th, it's because he made bail on the 7th and needed a short amount of time to find sureties.  Nothing to do with habeas corpus. 

Even if we separate the two charges out, and assume that Tumblety was arrested on suspicion of being the Whitechapel murderer (which is far from certain, even though Hawley tells us it's a fact), it's still misleading to say that the reason for his release was due to habeas corpus.  It might simply have been that the police, upon investigation, had no reason whatsoever to think he was the murderer and thus let him go. 

HOWLER 2 – THE INSIDE INFORMATION

Hawley claims – and I promise this is true - that we have "inside information" about what happened immediately following Tumblety's arrest (implying that we know what occurred in the police station).  Really?

Well, no.  It turns out that he was referring to Littlechild's 1913 letter in which Littlechild says that Tumblety was, in his mind, a likely suspect.  The problem is that Hawley doesn’t stop to consider for one second that this might simply have been a personal opinion of Littlechild based on little more than the sensational reporting he'd read in the newspapers about Tumblety in 1888 and 1889.  Instead, he claims that because this was Littlechild's view, it suggests that "top Scotland Yard officials had a serious discussion about him".  Not really.  Or, if they did, they must have eliminated him because he wasn't included in Macnaghten's 1894 memorandum for the Home Office which listed Scotland Yard's three favourite suspects, none of which were Tumblety.   

HOWLER 3  - TUMBLETY'S REMAND HEARING & HABEAS CORPUS

Hawley says:

"Because the Writ of Habeas Corpus in nineteenth-century British law mandated that a prisoner be presented to a magistrate within twenty-four hours of their arrest, we know that Tumblety had his remand hearing in front of Marlborough [sic] Police Court Magistrate James Hannay on or about November, 7 1888".

This is nonsense.  The reason we know that Tumblety had a remand hearing on 7th November 1888 has absolutely nothing to do with habeas corpus.  We know that he had a remand hearing on 7th November because the calendar tells us he was received into custody, i.e. at Holloway prison, that day. The only way he could have been received into custody at Holloway Prison on 7th November is if he'd been remanded there from a police court earlier that same day. It's got nothing to do with habeas corpus, about which Hawley is obsessed (and it's not 24 hours in any case:  if a prisoner was arrested on a Saturday evening they couldn't be brought before a magistrate until Monday morning).

HOWLER 4 – DATE OF REMAND HEARING

Hawley says that Tumblety's remand hearing  "was held at Marlborough Street Police Court on or about November 7".   But we know the exact date.  It must have been 7th November because there's no other way Tumblety could have ended up in Holloway prison on remand that day.  All prisoners on remand in London were taken from the police court to Holloway prison on the same day as their remand hearing.  So there is no "about" needed here. It just shows a lack of understanding of the process.

HOWLER 5 – TUMBLETY AS A SCOTLAND YARD SUSPECT

Hawley claims that Tumblety's inclusion as a suspect at Scotland Yard is corroborated by the fact that Robert Anderson "corresponded with US chiefs of police requesting background information on Tumblety".  But, at this time, Tumblety was a fugitive from English justice and, from what was reported in the US press, Anderson was clearly replying to an offer by the US authorities to provide information, as opposed to initiating any correspondence. According to the press reports, in response to that offer, he asked for "handwriting and all details" of Tumblety.   Hawley refers to what appears to be a headline in the San Francisco Examiner above a purported transcript of a telegram by Robert Anderson which headline reads "HIS HANDWRITING" and seems to think that it's certain that Anderson wrote those words in capital letters!  Thus he tells us to "Notice how Anderson capitalized "HIS HANDWRITING" as the title of his cable to Crawley". A normal person would think this was down to the editor or sub-editor of the newspaper. Indeed, a normal person would reflect that cables didn't have titles. This level of strange assumptions fills the book

Hawley also argues that because Littlechild remembered in 1913 that Tumblety had been charged at Marlborough Street Police Court with the indecency offences (while misremembering other details) this means that "high ranking police officials took Tumblety seriously at the time of the murders".   Well, no. It doesn't even necessarily mean that Littlechild took him seriously as a Ripper suspect, let alone other officials.  It may be that Tumblety was of interest for other reasons which is why Littlechild remembered that particular detail.

HOWLER 6  - THE SECRET HEARING

Hawley claims that Tumblety's case was "treated differently" than other cases of gross indecency because it was normal for remand hearings to be in open session but, he says, as if it's a fact, Tumblety's remand hearing was in a private session.  It's hard to know what is going on in his head. If the NVA prosecuted the case at Marlborough Street, how does Hawley think that Hannay was persuaded to hold the case in camera?  Does he think one of the NVA lawyer's slipped the magistrate a note that Tumblety might possibly, maybe, be Jack the Ripper, so the hearing needed to be a secret?  It defies logic or common sense. His basis for stating that the case was held in camera is on the flimsy ground that the hearing wasn't reported in the newspapers (as far as we know, although we don't have all the late editions) but he fails to understand that not every police court hearing from all the London police courts was, or could be, reported.  There would only have been a single court reporter at Marlborough Street Police Court who wouldn't have been able to be present at every single hearing and, in any case, no newspaper had space to report them all. Sordid details of male indecency cases would likely not have been an editor's ideal story to include in their newspaper.  In addition, it was common practice for lawyers of wealthy clients to bribe the court reporter to not report their client's case for such offences and keep their name out of the newspapers.  So it cannot be assumed that Tumblety's hearing was in private, as Hawley does. There are too many other possible reasons why we can't find any newspaper reports.

HOWLER 7 – OFFICIAL RECORDS

When discussing Tumblety's bail arrangements, Hawley says, in an attempt to build up some kind of significant mystery around the matter: "Strangely there are no official Central Court records on Tumblety's case".  This is absolutely untrue.  Leaving aside the Calendars, the surviving Central Court records contain (a) the indictment, recording the charges against him, (b) a record of Tumblety's adjournment hearing, and (c) a Certificate of Indictment recording Tumblety's failure to appear for his trial.   But the Central Criminal Court records are totally irrelevant to the issue of bail at the time of Kelly's murder which was set at the police court on 7th November.  Tumblety's case didn't reach the Central Criminal Court until Monday 19th November 1888 (although Hawley says that the grand jury found a true bill against him on 18th November, a Sunday, which didn't happen), so god only knows why Hawley is babbling on about the Central Criminal Court records at this point in his book. 

HOWLER 8 – TUMBLETY'S BAIL

Hawley correctly points out that Tumblety was allowed bail at the 14th November committal proceedings because the records show that he was bailed from prison on November 16th.  He then says: "It makes no sense that a magistrate would have offered bail at the committal hearing and not offered bail at the remand hearing".  This is absolutely not correct at all because it did happen in many cases. Each application for bail was different and treated on its own merits.  One could certainly argue that it is reasonable to think that, because he was offered bail on 14th November, Tumblety could equally have been offered bail by the same magistrate on the 7th, but that's only partially helpful because if that process followed the same timescale as the bail offered on 14th November (i.e. two days for him to make the bail), it would mean that Tumblety was only released on the morning of 9th November, too late, surely, for him to have been realistically able to murder Kelly.

Further, Hawley is simply wrong to say that "Tumblety always had a large sum of money on his person and would have been able to immediately post bail" and that, because he carried a large roll of cash with him, "Tumblety posting bail is a certainty".   Ignoring the fact that cash bail wasn't how it was done in 1888 - instead two sureties would have been required to stand bail - we know that this definitely did not happen in Tumblety's case because if Tumblety had pulled cash out of his pocket to make bail on 7th November, he wouldn't have ended up in Holloway prison later that same day. He would have been able to walk straight out of the police court.  The fact that he did end up in prison that day means that he didn't immediately post bail that day in any form, least of all in cash. So Hawley is putting forward a definitely false argument in favour of Tumblety being free at the time of Kelly's murder.    It's astonishing that Menges doesn't seem to have noticed this fundamental schoolboy mistake for his review.

HOWLER 9 – NON EXISTENT EVIDENCE

Hawley says that, "based on overwhelming evidence", Tumblety was "released on bail by November 8".  He doesn't at this point remind his readers what the "overwhelming evidence" is. For good reason because, of course, it doesn't exist.   One can certainly argue that there is overwhelming evidence to support the proposition that Tumblety could have been released on bail on November 8th but the true position is that we simply don't know either way if Tumblety made bail on the 8th November or not.  It's impossible to say with any degree of certainty.  If he was the killer, then of course he was out on bail and, unfortunately, this is how Hawley thinks, and how he ensures his arguments are purely circular.

HOWLER 10 - THE ROLE OF THE NVA IN TUMBLETY'S PROSECUTION

Referring once again to me without naming me, Hawley writes:

‘Some have suggested that if Scotland Yard took Tumblety seriously as a Ripper suspect, it would have had the DPP prosecute the case’.

He then goes on to say that, as the DPP had the authority to take over a case if it was dissatisfied with the National Vigilance Association prosecutors, who were actually due to prosecute Tumblety, ‘it would have kept a close eye on the case’.

This is a non sequitur.  The fact that the DPP had the theoretical ability to take over a private prosecution doesn't lead to the conclusion that they kept a close eye on this particular private prosecution out of the thousands that were happening every year.

In any case, unmentioned by Hawley to his readers (if any such exist), it wasn’t only the DPP, a.k.a. the Treasury Solicitor, who could have prosecuted Tumblety but also the Metropolitan Police themselves through their solicitors, Wontner & Co. But they would not have been able to take over a prosecution initiated by the NVA.  If the prosecution of Tumblety had been important to Scotland Yard, the Home Office would have instructed the Treasury Solicitor (DPP) to take control of the prosecution, or would have given permission for the Metropolitan Police’s solicitors to do so, rather than leave it to a third-party agency which was wholly outside of the control of the authorities.  But Hawley decides to ignore the possibility of the Metropolitan Police prosecuting Tumblety themselves as if it didn't exist so that he can misrepresent the argument against him as if the only possibility was for the DPP to run the prosecution.

It makes no sense for the authorities to have allowed the National Vigilance Association to prosecute the case against Tumblety if the purpose of the prosecution was to hold him so that they could investigate him for the Whitechapel murders, or whatever Hawley's theory is about the matter.  And he is quite wrong, in any event, to say that the DPP could simply have taken over the case at will if they weren’t happy with the way it was being prosecuted.  He seems to think that they could have taken over the case in the middle of the trial.  He is wrong about that. The time to take over the case would have been after committal and before the case reached the Old Bailey. Once the prosecution had commenced at the Old Bailey, as it had in Tumblety’s case, it was too late.  It just wouldn’t have happened.  Had Tumblety's trial at the Old Bailey commenced, the police and the DPP would have had no involvement in it.

Hawley’s bizarre argument is that the police positively wanted the NVA to prosecute the case so as not to alert Tumblety that he was a Ripper suspect, but this is absurd.  Had the police conducted the prosecution, that wouldn’t have told Tumblety or his solicitors anything, least of all that he was a Ripper suspect, if this was something so important to hide from him.  Why would it? The police and the DPP routinely conducted such prosecutions.  Hawley says: ‘If the DPP was used, Tumblety’s legal counsel would have known immediately that his case was being treated differently…’  This is both false and nonsensical.  By 1888, the DPP through the Treasury Solicitor had prosecuted indecency offences involving William Henry Carter (1885), Charles Burleigh Harte (1886), Richard Moffatt (1886) and Henry Valentine Pickering (1887) .  Given that such prosecutions were routine, why would any suspicion have been attached to a similar prosecution of an indecency offence in 1888?

Even worse is how Hawley’s argument is totally inconsistent.  On the one hand he claims that the authorities deliberately allowed or encouraged the NVA to prosecute Tumblety so that his solicitor didn't get suspicious that his case was very important, yet, on the other hand, he thinks that Tumblety’s case at the police court was held in camera which, being so unusual, would obviously have flagged to that exact same solicitor that the case was very important to the authorities!  He just argues both ways, or rather says whatever he thinks is consistent with Tumblety being thought at the time to be the Ripper.

HOWLER 11 – TUMBLETY'S WARRANT

Hawley says that the warrant for Tumblety's arrest for his failure to appear for his trial was "curiously" not issued until 10th December 1888. But there's nothing curious about it.  He hadn't committed any (further) arrestable offence until he failed to show for his court appearance on10th December which is why a warrant was issued on that date, and not before.  Even if the police had thought that Tumblety was the Whitechapel murderer (for which there is no evidence that they did), they couldn't have arrested him while he fled the country because, in going to France in November, he was doing nothing illegal.  I don't know how many times I have to say this but no one (by which I really mean Hawley and Simon Wood) seems to understand it.

HOWLER 12 – SURVEILLANCE

Hawley still thinks that detectives were secretly following Tumblety around Europe even though there's no evidence of such a thing and it absolutely did not happen.  The guy is delusional.  For the hundredth time, Scotland Yard did not need to physically follow someone in order to be able to track their movements across Europe (or anywhere else).

HOWLER 13 –  INSPECTOR ANDREWS

Hawley notes, reluctantly, that the official records tell us that the Assistant Commissioner of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, Robert Anderson, confirmed to the Home Secretary on 17 March 1890 that Inspector Andrews "was not in the United States at all" in 1888 and that any story that he was there was "a stupid fabrication".  This was in a document I discovered in the National Archives and first posted online in 2015 (although I am not attributed by Hawley with the discovery).   Anderson separately confirmed in writing to the Home Secretary that "there was no English police officer within the United States" between 20 and 25 December 1888, the very period Hawley fancies that Andrews was in New York.   We can see that Anderson carefully refers to "the United States", not to "America", because Andrews most certainly was in America at the time, specifically Canada.  A supposed discovery that Inspector Andrews was in "America" in December 1888 does not get Hawley anywhere because that's uncontroversial. We've always known it.

Hawley refers to inaccurate newspaper reports which had Inspector Andrews going to, and indeed arriving in, New York in December 1888 but he doesn't mention the inconvenient (but accurate) report in the Montreal Daily Star of 22nd December 1888 headlined "Returned to England" which stated that Inspector Andrews left Halifax on the evening of 20th December and: "returns to England by steamer "Sarnia" next Monday" by which it must have meant that he would board the Sarnia leaving Canada on Saturday 22nd December to return to England on the following Monday, 31st December.  

Hawley doesn't mention this inconvenient evidence at all.  He seems to believe every single newspaper report, so how does his brain compute this one? Does his head simply explode?

Hawley also refers to a short article in the Daily Telegraph, which said that Andrews arrived in New York, as a "firsthand account", thus contradicting himself from his March 2020 Ripperologist article in which he frankly admitted that: "none of the information in this article is new, and all of it originated in the first New York World article".   Of course it did! It's an article cribbed from other press stories by someone writing in their home or office.  It's certainly not written by anyone who physically saw Inspector Andrews arrive in New York (and, needless to say, no one did).

HOWLER 14 – THE MONTREAL BRIEFING

Bizarrely, Hawley thinks that when Inspector Andrews revealed that Scotland Yard had denied offers from American detectives to find the Whitechapel murderer on salaries and payment of expenses by saying "we can do that ourselves you know", he was talking about finding the Whitechapel murderer in New York. This argument makes absolutely no sense. I've dealt with it in detail in the past but the short point is that the only place anyone would sensibly be hunting the Whitechapel murderer in December 1888 was England. For Inspector Andrews to have been publicly saying "we can find Tumblety ourselves you know", which must be how Hawley interprets it, would mean that the inspector not only believed that Tumblety was the Whitechapel murderer but assumed that the press reporters in Montreal thought so too. Yet, as Hawley well knows, Inspector Andrews was on record as having told a Canadian newspaper point blank that Tumblety was "not the Whitechapel murderer". In any case, finding Tumblety in the U.S. was hardly going to be difficult. The idea that half a dozen detective agencies had approached Scotland Yard offering to locate Tumblety in the United States on payment of salary and expenses but Scotland Yard wanted to do it themselves is beyond ridiculous. Yet Menges says not a word about this nonsense in his review.

HOWLER 15 – THE USELESS DETECTIVE

Hawley still relies on the highly questionable American newspaper reporting about the hapless comedy English detective prowling around outside Tumblety's apartment in New York as proving the existence of a Scotland Yard officer chasing Tumblety in New York.  But it can't be true because no Scotland Yard detective would have been sent to New York for this purpose.  It wasn't how Scotland Yard operated in a country where they had no powers.  Hawley seems to think that a detective would have been sent to investigate the movements of Tumblety in America like they (apparently) investigated the movements of Thomas Sadler in the UK but there's no comparison between a police investigation into someone in the United Kingdom (who had, in fact, been arrested for murder) and an investigation into a United States citizen who was in the United States (having been arrested in the UK for a non-extraditable misdemeanour). If, for any reason, they had needed to do that, they would either have telegraphed the American police or hired private detectives in the US. They definitely wouldn't have sent a Scotland Yard detective out to the U.S. for the purpose. The idea that they might have done so is nothing more than a fantasy on the part of Hawley.

HOWLER 16 – POLICE IN AMERICA

Hawley says daft things like: "What is now difficult to dispute is that Tumblety was, in the eyes of Scotland Yard at the peak of the murders, a Jack the Ripper suspect significant enough to have detectives spend time and resources in America", and, "There can now be little doubt that the investigation on Tumblety continued in North America"  I suppose it makes him feel better to say such ridiculous evidence-free things of this nature, but no Scotland Yard detectives were spending time and resources in America on anything to do with Tumblety. And I repeat that this notion was conclusively disproven in an official memo by the Head of the C.I.D. to the Secretary of State which confirmed that no Scotland Yard detectives were in the United States at the time.

HOWLER 17 – MISSING THE OBVIOUS

A baffled Hawley asks why Tumblety's name is missing from British records involving the Whitechapel murders.  One obvious answer presents itself.  He was never considered a suspect for the murders at the time, other than in the (mainly American) press. 

In this respect, one of the only two reasons given by Littlechild in 1913 that Tumblety was a very likely suspect was because there were no more murders after he left England in late November 1888. This obviously wasn't a reason why Tumblety would have been considered a suspect at any time while he was in England. The other reason provided by Littlechild was that he had an extreme hatred of women, suggesting that there was, in fact, zero evidence against the man held at Scotland Yard in respect of the actual murders.

HOWLER 18  - TUMBLETY IN THE BRITISH PRESS

Hawley claims that British papers were "totally silent" on Tumblety, not commenting on him until February 1889.  This is false. The London Evening Post stated in its issue of 10 December 1888 that "Tumblety was taken into custody on November 18 on suspicion of being the Whitechapel murderer", something they probably took from the American press. I posted a transcript of this report on Casebook on 24 January 2015.  The Glasgow Mail referred to Tumblety possibly being the Whitechapel murderer on 22 December 1888 under the headline "IS THIS THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERER?".  The same story appeared in the Dundee Courier on 26 December 1888. 

From his false premise, Hawley speculates that Scotland Yard was responsible for keeping Tumblety's name out of the British press. He doesn't seem to consider the libel laws which prevented newspapers from accusing individuals, especially wealthy ones, of being murderers. Not to mention that the notion of Tumblety being Jack the Ripper seems to have originated as a fictional story in the American press.  Hawley thinks it was all a big conspiracy to prevent any mention of him in the papers. I seriously doubt that Scotland Yard gave two hoots.

HOWLER 19 – TUMBLETY IN THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL COURT RECORDS

We've already seen that Hawley is stupidly puzzled by the absence of information relating to Tumblety's bail in the records of the Central Criminal Court even though that court had nothing to do with his bail arrangements at the police court. He also says that Tumblety's case, "should have been recorded in official Central Criminal Court records, as all other gross indecency cases committed up by the magistrate were. Yet it is missing".  I have no idea what Hawley is talking about here but it is definitely nonsense.  Tumbelty's case IS recorded in the official Central Criminal Court records and it is no different in this respect to any other gross indecency case.  It really is astonishing the utter rubbish this guy is prepared to include in his book.

HOWLER 20 – TUMBLETY 'S ABSENCE FROM THE SCOTLAND YARD RECORDS

Hawley says that the "archived records of Scotland Yard" make no mention of Tumblety "in the Whitechapel murder case or any other case", even though Littlechild said Scotland Yard had a large dossier on him.  This is a non sequitur of illogical thinking.  Littlechild never said that Scotland Yard had any kind of dossier on Tumblety in respect of the Whitechapel murders.  In any case, most records relating to suspects are missing so nothing can be gleaned from this, although Hawley seems to think it indicates, "a nineteenth-century concerted effort to erase him from having ever been connected to the Whitechapel murders case".  A simpler explanation is that Tumblety wasn't connected with the case at all. 

As for other records not connected with the Whitechapel murders, hardly anything has survived from that period, certainly not dossiers on individuals. So to wonder why the dossier on Tumblety hasn't survived is daft.

HOWLER 21 - NEW YORK SUN ARTICLE

Hawley claims that Arthur Brisbane was the first person to report why Scotland Yard suspected Tumblety in an article published in the New York Sun on 25 November 1888 which stated that Tumblety was arrested because, "one theory is that some American medical institution wants specimens of the female uterus" which was clearly speculation on the part of the author. In Hawley's mind (but not in reality) the article was written in London on 18 November 1888 by Arthur Brisbane, who, rather than send it across by telegram: "To reduce expenses, he sent it on a steamer, making it to New York in a week". Although stated as a fact, I've already disproved it. In an article I published on 25 May 2019 entitled "The Euston Incident". I demonstrated that it was impossible to put a hard copy article on a steamer from England on 18th November to reach New York in time for it to be included in a newspaper published on 25th November. No actual steamer made such a journey within that timescale. The story in the New York Sun of 25 November 1888 was just another speculative report probably written by a staffer, not by Brisbane.

HOWLER 22 - THE TALL MAN

There was, I'm sure, more than one tall man in London in 1888.   Yet, in Hawley's mind, and in his book, every tall man must be Tumblety.  It's fair enough to say that any description of a tall suspect might have been Tumblety but it's hardly a "matching description", which is how Hawley words it, simply to be tall.

American Ripperologists

Hawley and Menges may be Americans but that's no excuse.  If you are setting yourself up as a Ripperologist with expertise regarding the Whitechapel Murders you have to possess at least a basic understanding of English criminal law procedure.    You can't be making serious blunders of the nature of those set out above, especially in respect of how prisoners were bailed.  Yet Menges didn't bat an eyelid in his review

Hawley and Menges

In his JTR Forums post of 11 June 2019, Menges bridled at the hint of me suggesting that there was "a very close relationship between myself and Hawley" (although, notably, he didn't actually deny it). It was somewhat surprising, therefore, that we find Joe Chetcuti recording in a JTR Forums post during June 2024 that when he met Mike Hawley for the first time in Canada, "Jonathan Menges just happened to phone Mike during our casino get together". Oh really! Here is the post:

Let us not forget that Menges once described Hawley as "amongst the top Tumblety researchers active in the field of Ripperology today". We know he's interviewed him for his podcast on a number of occasions and now we find him telephoning him for an unspecified reason. Was he really the best person to write an objective review of Hawley's book?

I think not.

LORD ORSAM

8 October 2024