Montague Druitt

Montague Druitt
Druitt c. 1879
Born	(1857-08-15)15 August 1857 Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England
Died	Early December 1888 (aged 31)[1]
Body discovered	River Thames, near Thornycroft's torpedo works, Chiswick, on 31 December 1888
Resting place	Wimborne cemetery
Alma mater	New College, Oxford (BA) Inner Temple
Occupation(s)	Teacher and barrister
Employer(s)	George Valentine's school, Blackheath
Known for	Suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders

Montague John Druitt (15 August 1857 – early December 1888)^[1] was an English barrister and educator who is known for being a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

Druitt came from an upper-middle-class English background, and studied at Winchester College and the University of Oxford. After graduating, he was employed as an assistant schoolmaster at a boarding school and pursued a parallel career in the law, qualifying 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, Druitt lost his post at the school for reasons that remain unclear. One month later his body was discovered drowned in the River Thames. His death, which was found to be a suicide, roughly coincided with the end of the murders 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.