Portal:University of Oxford/Selected biography/57

Montague Druitt (1857–1888) was one of the suspects in the Jack the Ripper murders that took place in London between August and November 1888. He came from an upper-middle class English background, and studied at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. After graduating, he took a position at a boarding school and pursued a parallel career in the law; he qualified as a barrister in 1885. His main interest outside work was cricket, which he played with many leading players of the time, including Lord Harris and Francis Lacey. In November 1888, he lost his post at the school for reasons that remain unclear. One month later his body was found drowned in the River Thames. His death, which was found to be a suicide, roughly coincided with the end of the murders that were attributed to Jack the Ripper. Private suggestions in the 1890s that he could have committed the crimes became public knowledge in the 1960s, and led to the publication of books that proposed him as the murderer. The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, however, and many writers from the 1970s onwards have rejected him as a likely suspect.