played cricket, and Druitt's mother was committed to Tuke's asylum in 1890. Another suggestion is that Druitt knew Harry Wilson, whose house, "The Osiers", lay between Hammersmith station and Thornycroft's wharf, where Druitt's body was found. Jack the Ripper suspect On 31 August 1888, Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London, with her throat slashed. During September, three more women (Annie Chapman on the 8th, and Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on the 30th) were found dead with their throats cut. On 9 November 1888, the body of Mary Jane Kelly was discovered. Her throat had been severed down to the spine. In four of the cases the bodies were mutilated after death. The similarities between the crimes led to the supposition that they were committed by the same assailant, who was given the nickname "Jack the Ripper". Despite an extensive police investigation into the five murders, the Ripper was never identified and the crimes remain unsolved. Shortly after Kelly's murder, stories that the Ripper had drowned in the Thames began to circulate. In February 1891, the member of parliament for West Dorset, Henry Richard Farquharson, announced that Jack the Ripper was "the son of a surgeon" who had committed suicide on the night of the last murder. Although Farquharson did not name his suspect, the description resembles Druitt. Farquharson lived from the Druitt family and was part of the same social class. The Victorian journalist George R. Sims noted in his memoirs, The Mysteries of Modern London (1906): "[the Ripper's] body was found in the Thames after it had been in the river for about a month". Similar comments were made by Sir John Moylan, Assistant Under-Secretary of the Home Office: "[the Ripper] escaped justice by committing suicide at the end of 1888" and Sir Basil Thomson, made Assistant Commissioner of the CID in 1913: "[the Ripper was] an insane Russian doctor [who] escaped arrest by committing suicide in the Thames at the end of 1888". Neither Moylan nor Thomson was involved in the Ripper investigation. Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten named Druitt as a suspect in the case in a private handwritten memorandum of 23 February 1894. Macnaghten highlighted the coincidence between Druitt's disappearance and death shortly after the last of the five murders on 9 November 1888, and claimed to have unspecified "private information" that left