Donald Swanson

When his employer decided to retire from business early the following year Swanson spotted an advertisement in The Daily Telegraph by the Metropolitan Police appealing for new applicants.

He married his wife Julia Ann Nevill (born in Hoxton in 1854 to a licensed victualler) on 23 May 1878 at All Saints Church, West Ham in Essex.

Other cases he was involved in include recovering the stolen jewels of the Earl of Bective's wife and the stolen Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Thomas Gainsborough, as well as acting against 'rent boys', blackmailing homosexual prostitutes in 1897, and in preventing the Jameson Raid from starting a war in South Africa.

On 15 September 1888 Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, issued a memorandum to Dr. Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), placing Swanson in overall charge of the investigation into the 8 September murder of Annie Chapman in Hanbury Street, Spitalfields.

Although he declined to write his own memoirs following his retirement, Swanson did collect a small number of published reminiscences by his contemporaries.

Among these were two books by his former superior, Dr. Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Police - Criminals and Crime (1906) and The Lighter Side of My Official Life (1910).

Anderson wrote that the only person to get a close look at Jack the Ripper identified him "the moment he was confronted with him" but refused to testify.

On suspect's return to his brother's house in Whitechapel he was watched by police (City CID) by day & night.

Macnaghten, however, thought that Montague Druitt was more likely to be the killer, and he did not mention anything about any alleged identification of Kosminski that had been withdrawn by a witness.