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Warren at last resigned on 10 November, the day after the final Ripper murder. There had, according to historical consensus, been five Whitechapel murders between 31 August (the date of Monro's official departure) and 9 November. During this time Anderson had been occupied with the Parnell Commission as it looked into the truth of the allegations in
The Times
linking Parnell to the dynamitards. Matthews privately dismissed him as ‘a tout for
The Times'.

Monro emerged from his exile at the Home Office. On 24 November, the Cabinet having discussed his candidacy at length, his name was submitted to Queen Victoria who was graciously pleased to appoint him Commissioner.

Anderson was officially, and openly, Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID. With Monro's guidance in navigating the waters of ‘ordinary' crime as well as political crime, he got on top of the job.

The Metropolitan Police breathed a collective sigh of relief and the line of communication between the four-man Special Branch, the Assistant Commissioner and the Home Office once again included the Commissioner.

Had it been generally known that the man strongly suspected of being Jack the Ripper had been in police custody in November, but had been allowed, probably by men working for the CID, to escape, there would have been an outcry. Francis Tumblety's position as chief suspect had been common knowledge in the United States in his lifetime. In England it did not emerge in public for over a hundred years. Even then it came into the light of day only after years of dogged research sparked off by the discovery of a letter from Littlechild.

In 1912, in retirement, the ex-Chief Inspector explained in a private letter to a journalist that Tumblety, a fifty-five-year-old American ‘quack' doctor who was in London at the time, was very likely the culprit.
²⁰
He was a homosexual abortionist and a violent misogynist. He practised what he called ‘Indian medicine', using herbs and potions and carrying out abortions, all over America. He never stayed in one place for long and always had plenty of money. His appearance was flamboyant and his conversation full of hatred and violence towards women. He used aliases – and decades before at the time of President Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth had used the name Booth, which, allied with his general eccentricity, had been enough to get him arrested, briefly. While living in Washington DC during the 1860s he owned an anatomical collection which included wombs he kept in specimen jars.

He had spent time in London before, notably in 1882 when he may have been that ‘Dr Hamilton Williams' who bought the surgical knives used to kill Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke in Phoenix Park. According to a Ripperologist called Nick Warren, ‘Dr Williams' was a Fenian who had a practice in Demerara, British Guyana, and ‘hung around the capital for several weeks attempting to gain employment with the Irish revolutionaries, only to be refused by them because of his ‘violent language'.
²¹
There are indications that Williams and Tumblety were one and the same.

The pathology departments of two London teaching hospitals had been asked in the months before the Ripper murders for the wombs of women for which the buyer, ‘an American doctor' would pay a high price. They declined to discuss this with the press, which may indicate that the police had told them to keep quiet because they were already on the trail of the very same American doctor. Tumblety was of Irish extraction and had relations in Liverpool, where he would have disembarked from America. There were almost certainly members of the transatlantic crew who spied for the British – John Patrick Hayes, for instance, one of Jenkinson's Irish-American informants, was a ship's engineer.
²²
There could in other words have been enough of a link to ‘Doctor Williams' to make Tumblety of more than passing interest to the Sections B and C – the Special Irish Branch and the Port Police – who by 1888 (though not in 1882) were watching the ports for characters just like him. This seems to be confirmed by the Home Secretary's memo to himself of 22 September: ‘Stimulate the police about Whitechapel murders. Monro might be willing to give a hint to the CID people if necessary.'
²³

In October Scotland Yard asked the San Francisco police for a sample of Tumblety's handwriting. In November he was arrested for offences under the 1885 Amendment to the Criminal Law Act, that is, what were then called ‘unnatural' offences involving men or boys. The
New York Times
of 19 November wrongly alleged that Tumblety (a well-known character there) had been held on suspicion of complicity in the Whitechapel murders but ‘when proved innocent of that charge was held for trial in the Central Criminal Court' on these other, less serious charges.

Tumblety hadn't been found innocent at all and nor had he been held for trial. There was insufficient evidence to charge him with murder and he was granted bail on the Criminal Law Act offences. He promptly skipped the country. As ‘Frank Townsend' he boarded
La Bretagne
at Le Havre on 24 November – the very day that Matthews wrote to Her Majesty submitting Monro's name as Commissioner.

On the evidence, it was cock-up rather than conspiracy. There seem few possible reasons other than incompetence why bail was not more strongly opposed. It later emerged that the two men who stood bail in the sum of £1,500 had known Tumblety for only a couple of days. Tumblety seems to have lived in London in shabby rooms in the East End and to have had only casual acquaintances,
²⁴
and if this was the case then the police had no particular reason to think he would be able to put up a large bail or find anyone who could. £1,500 was an enormous sum. Even so, once bail was offered and granted, Tumblety should have been shadowed constantly.

The senior policemen working on the case were CID detectives, not Williamson's Special Irish Branch men. They were Chief Inspector Swanson at Scotland Yard, who reported to Anderson and, later, Monro; Inspector Moore, the senior man, and Inspectors Abberline and Andrews, in H (Whitechapel) Division; and as many men as could be mustered on the ground. After the trial Tumblety is said to have ‘immediately fled south'. Had he fled north, he would probably have left by railway to Liverpool for the transatlantic boat. What is certain, though odd, is that around 20 November, twelve extra constables were deployed at Euston and St Pancras Stations in order to examine the belongings of passengers arriving
from
America.
²⁵

He had money and at that date needed no passport, so his fastest escape route was to the South Coast and across the Channel. The Port Police in France could have been telegraphed by way of warning but there are no surviving papers to say that they were. Tumblety got out of England. He took a ferry to Boulogne, travelled to Le Havre apparently unregarded, and embarked for America.

The procedure – as in the case of Walsh above – for getting cooperation from the French police was tortuous and by no means immediate. The Commissioner must send a formal note to the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary must request that the Foreign Office contact the Ambassador in Paris. The Ambassador in Paris would be informed of the gravity of the case in writing from the FO. (In the case of Walsh, the Ambassador had been warned to expect Melville to call; he did not warn his staff, who would not at first allow Melville to see him, and Melville had to get in touch with London again,
et cetera, et cetera.
So human error could draw out red tape even further.) The Ambassador would contact somebody in the Ministry of Grace and Justice – and in this case, would have to convince him that the man was a
Jack L'Eventreur
suspect, not just a hounded homosexual. The Minister would speak to the Prefect of Police, the Ambassador would send a wire to Consul Bernal in Le Havre who would speak to M. le Préfet locally, and so it went on. In short, ‘Frank Townsend' could cross the channel and be on a boat to America while telegrams flew between London and Paris and a Special Branch man gritted his teeth on the dock at Le Havre.

Melville was the Special Branch man at Le Havre and anecdotal accounts from within the family relate that he was indeed involved in the pursuit of the Ripper.
²⁶
It was not, however, until the discovery of the Littlechild letter in February 1993 that these accounts took on a new perspective and meaning. It seems clear from the actions of the London police in alerting the NYPD and in the immediate despatch of detectives for America, that there was a prompt awareness of Tumblety's exit via Le Havre. It is equally difficult to believe that Melville would have stood by and done nothing to try and prevent ‘Townsend's' departure, and yet his past experience of the French authorities demonstrates the extent to which he was bound by cumbersome procedures that could have made action inadvisable or impossible. Crucial police files on the Tumblety case have disappeared; whether the fact that the police had allowed him to slip through their fingers was the reason behind the cover-up and indeed the missing files must therefore remain open to speculation.

And all this happened in the two key weeks of November when the police force was without a Commissioner. Anderson, as the next senior man in charge, could have set the whole arrest-and-extradition case in motion but did not. He was distracted by concerns about the Parnell Commission. Or maybe he was not asked. But that he seems to have failed in his duty is implied by Monro's reticence in later life, broken only by his response whenever the Ripper case came up that it was ‘a very hot potato'.
²⁷

Tumblety was chased back to New York. He passed the week-long voyage in his cabin, arrived on Sunday 2 December, bundled his bags into a cab and set off for lodgings on East 10th Street, closely followed by two American detectives.

Inspector Andrews and two other policemen pursued him to America, apparently via Toronto, but they did not arrive until 23 December.
²⁸
Before they arrived, in fact within a day of Tumblety's landing, an English detective whose identity and purpose were perfectly obvious was seen parading jauntily about outside his lodgings. A New York newspaper, most likely getting its slant on the case from the New York police whose chief had been publicly dismissive of the efforts of British detectives, ridiculed this deterrent approach. The New York police, many of whom were of Irish extraction, were strong supporters of the Fenian cause and would never help English detectives on principle; and certainly there was no reason to arrest Tumblety on American soil. However, it seems that in this case Chief Inspector Byrne of the NYPD was doing his best to get the Ripper watched while evidence-gathering continued in London; he told a reporter from
The World:

I simply wanted to put a tag on him so that we can tell where he is. Of course he cannot be arrested for there is no proof of his complicity in the Whitechapel murders, and the crime for which he was under bond in London is not extraditable… If they think in London that they need him and he turns out to be guilty our men will probably have an idea where he can be found.
²⁹

‘Complicity' is interesting; it could imply that the Yard thought more than one murderer was involved.

In London, the papers – with the sole exception of an article in February in the
Pall Mall Gazette
– said not a word about the hunt having moved to America. By now Tumblety had been lost. It seems he may have gone to Central America, there to commit a remarkably similar run of murders in January 1889.
³⁰
The papers of Inspector Andrews, who was involved with the Ripper hunt from the start and pursued him to America, have been lost or destroyed. Abberline and Moore were H-Division men who by 1888 were based at Scotland Yard. In the summer of 1889 Abberline was taken off the Ripper case to investigate the Cleveland Street homosexual brothel scandal. Moore stayed until the investigation fizzled out in 1892, and then investigated other murders in London, with notable successes in solving serious crime in the French and Italian communities in Soho; he probably knew Melville well as they had been near contemporaries in Peckham in the 1870s.

The third man, Andrews, who pursued Tumblety to America, retired in August of 1889, at the age of forty-two, with thrombosis in his leg. Nothing further is known of him.

Writing in 1912, Littlechild stated his belief that Tumblety had committed suicide after leaving Boulogne. MacNaghten, in a report produced in 1894, believed that the murderer had fled to America and there died in a lunatic asylum; but MacNaghten did not officially join the Metropolitan force until nineteen months after the last murder. In fact Francis Tumblety died of a heart attack in St Louis in 1903, having booked into a hospital run by an order of nuns founded in Dublin. He died under the name Frank Townsend and he left almost $140,000.
³¹
One can only speculate about the extent to which his wealth played a part in his escape.

The Melvilles returned to England in December of 1888 (just after Tumblety's escape). They went back to Brixton, to 51 Nursery Road, which was just around the corner from Tunstall Road where they had lived in that summer when William was born but Margaret Gertie died. Now Kate Melville, wife and mother, caught pneumonia, and on 19 March 1889 she too died.

It was a terrible homecoming. When the condolences of friends and relations and colleagues were accepted, and the funeral was over, Melville was left with Kate and William, James and Cecilia, respectively aged seven, six, four and two, to bring up alone, and a job that demanded work at all hours. He had only recently started living in England again after a five-year absence. New men had joined his colleagues, much had happened since he left, and he had to readjust in order to fit in; and now he had lost his dear Kate.

The children were new to England. William and little Kate must go to school. All the children had suffered the loss of their mother and must be looked after. There must be a live-in housekeeper, so Melville hired a woman he judged competent and kind, and got on with his job.