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Saturday, November 07, 2009 - 10:28 AM
Michael Ostrog is the last and least plausible of Sir Melville
Macnaghten's three suspects. He was a thief and confidence man who used
many aliases. He often represented himself as an impoverished Polish
nobleman. He spent a good amount of his life in jail, but he was
completely unrepentant. In 1874, after Ostrog was convicted of stealing
a dozen books, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser summed him up:Ostrog
is no ordinary offender, but a man in the prime of life with a clever
head, a good education and polished manners, who would be certain to
succeed in almost any honest line of life to which he might devote
himself, but who, nevertheless, is an inveterate criminal...It is
impossible to gauge the mental condition of a man of such intellectual
and personal advantages, who would run the risk of ten years' penal
servitude for such a miserable stake. He spent
the next ten years or so in various prisons. It worked to Ostrog's
favor to occasionally show a little insanity during his trials so that
his behavior could be looked at in a softer light. Many people believed
that he was acting, but the ruse worked and he was transferred from
prison to a lunatic asylum where he registered himself as a Jewish
doctor. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
At the time of the Whitechapel murders, he
was wanted by the police for failure to report his whereabouts. Why was
Ostrog even a suspect? He had claimed to be a surgeon; he was a known
criminal; and he had been in a lunatic asylum. His lying had made him a
suspect even though he was no more a surgeon than he was a Polish
nobleman. His insanity was conjured up when it suited him. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire It
is worthwhile to compare Ostrog as a suspect anyway. He was not a
violent criminal and there is no record that he ever assaulted a woman.
More importantly, he was too old — in his fifties or sixties — in 1888
and he was too tall —5 ft 11 inches — to fit any of the eyewitness
descriptions of the killer. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Ostrog, like Druitt and
Kosminski, are not plausible candidates and may reflect the propensity
of high police officials to deny that they failed to catch such a high
profile criminal despite all the resources they had to use.
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