Sinistrari

by Giles Ekins

  Sunday 30th September 1888 -Elizabeth Stride - Dutfields Yard, 40 Berners Street, Whitechape

  Sunday 30th September 1888- Catherine Eddowes - Mitre Square, Aldgate, City of London

  Friday 9 November 1888 -Mary Jane Kelly - Miller’s Court, 26 Dorset Street, Spitalfields

  Thursday 20 December 1888 -- Rose Mylett - Clarke’s Yard, High Street, Poplar

  Wednesday 17th July 1889 Alice McKenzie - Castle Alley, Whitechapel

  Tuesday 10th September 1889 -Unknown female torso - Railway arch, Pinchin Street, Whitechapel

  Friday 13 February 1891 Frances Coles - Railway arch, Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel

  Of these eleven, five victims comprise what is known as the ‘canonical’ list of Ripper killings:

  Mary Ann Nicholls known as Polly, Annie Chapman known as Dark Annie, Elizabeth Stride known as Long Liz, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.

  All those on the ‘Whitechapel’ list were at one time attributed to the Ripper (usually by the yellow press), however, apart from those named above in the canonical list , they have been dismissed as possible victims of Jack the Ripper, although some ‘experts’ now consider that Martha Tabram might have been the first victim.

  Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered the same night, the so-called ‘the double event’

  I believe that Elizabeth Stride was not a Ripper victim, that, coincidental as it may seem, two killers were abroad in Whitechapel that night.

  In short, the exact number of the Ripper victims will never be ascertained with certainty; at least four, possibly six. Some Ripperologists claim eight victims; I do not however agree and believe that Nicholls, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly were his only victims.

  However, having said that, I do not in any way claim to be an expert on the matter.

  SUSPECTS

  Over time, the list of suspects has grown dramatically; at the last count over one hundred names have been put forward as the ’final solution’ to the Ripper mystery. Although many theories have been advanced, experts, in the main, have found none of the hypotheses credible or persuasive and most can be dismissed as being without substance.

  Of all the dozens of names put forward, contemporary police opinion only considered seven names, names that the officers actually involved in the hunt for the Ripper considered suspects:

  Montague John Druitt

  Aaron Kosminski

  Michael Ostrog

  John Pizer

  James Thomas Sadler

  Severyn Koskowski alias George Chapman

  Francis Tumbelty

  Montague Druitt.

  In a memorandum dated 23rd February 1894, Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaughton named three suspect including Montague Druitt, as a potential suspects. In the memorandum, Macnaughton claimed that Druitt was a 41-year-old doctor who committed suicide shortly after the Mary Kelly killing because the mental strain on him following his horrific murders had become too great.

  However, Macnaughton was incorrect to state that Druitt was a doctor; he was in fact a 31-year-old Dorset born barrister who worked as an assistant schoolmaster in Blackheath in order to supplement his income. Dismissed from this post, Druitt shortly thereafter killed himself by drowning in the Thames. Both his mother and maternal grandmother suffered from mental health problems and it is likely the dismissal from his post was due to his own mental instability. No other evidence links him to the Ripper killings; on the day of the first canonical murder Druitt was playing cricket in Dorset, he did not live in Whitechapel but rather several miles away in Kent.

  It would seem that he only reason for Macnaughton to name Druitt as a suspect was the coincidental timing of his suicide after the Kelly murder, even though the suicide was more than a month later,

  No other contemporary police officer supported the theory that Druitt was the Ripper.

  Aaron Kosminski

  Aaron Kosminski was a Polish Jewish barber admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891.

  ‘Kosminski’, without a forename was also named in the Macnaughton memorandum of February 1894. Two other contemporary police officers also favoured Kosminski as potential suspects; the head of CID Robert Anderson and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson. Again no solid evidence links Aaron Kosminki to the crimes except that Anderson in his memoirs stated that the Ripper had been identified as the Polish Jew Kosminski by the only person to ever witness the Ripper, who was a fellow Jew and since Jews would not testify against each other no prosecution could proceed. However Macnaughton stated that ‘no-one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer’ thus contradicting Anderson.

  Several other discrepancies appear in Anderson’s memoirs and Aaron Kosminki’s records show him to be a docile and harmless lunatic, who heard voices in his head and would only eat food from the gutter. He also refused to wash or bathe. Most do not consider him a viable suspect and no other officers supported Anderson’s contention.

  It has been suggested by some that there is confusion about the name Kosminski and that there was another person with the same or similar name who was the actual killer and who was confined to a lunatic asylum. There is a theory that a violently antisocial patient incarcerated in Colney Hatch Asylum under the name David Cohen, was in fact a Polish bookmaker called Nathan Kaminski. He had been treated for syphilis and vanished at the same time as David Cohen was admitted and that David Cohen was a name given to Jews who could not otherwise be identified. Or whose names were too difficult to for police to spell. The contention is that that officials confused the names of Kosminki and Kaminsky and that Macnaughton was in fact referring to Kaminsky as the killer but had perpetuated the mix-up over the unfamiliar names.

  Michael Ostrog

  Named by Macnaughton without any evidence to support the claim; Ostrog was a Russian born professional con man and fraudster and there is no evidence to suggest he committed any crimes other than theft and fraud. He habitually used aliases and disguises but beyond that it is difficult to understand why Macnaughton included in him his list of three ‘top suspects’, none of whom stand up to close scrutiny Subsequent research indicates that Ostrog was in jail for petty offences in France at the time of the Ripper killings.

  John Pizer

  John Pizer was a Polish Jew who worked as a bootmaker in Whitechapel. Pizer was known as ‘Leather Apron’ and after the Polly Nicholls and Annie Chapman murders Police Sergeant William Thicke arrested Pizer on suspicion that he had carried out minor assaults on prostitutes. Many in Whitechapel believed that ‘Leather Apron’ was the Ripper even though the police concluded that ’there is no evidence whatsoever against him’. He had alibis for two of the murders and Pizer successfully sued for compensation from at least one newspaper that named him as the Ripper.

  James Thomas Sadler.

  Sadler was a friend of Frances Coles, the last of the Whitechapel murder victims. He was arrested but as there was little evidence to connect him to Frances Coles’ murder he was released. He was briefly considered as a Jack the Ripper suspect, but he could prove that he was at sea at the time of the murders. Sadler was named in Macnaughton’s memorandum of 1894 but although Macnaughton considered Sadler to be ‘a man of ungovernable temper and entirely addicted to drink, and the company of the lowest of prostitutes’, he thought it unlikely that there was any connection to Jack the Ripper.

  Seweryn Koskowski alias George Chapman

  Severyn Koskowski, also known as George Chapman, was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in April 1903. He was a serial killer who poisoned three bigamous wives with antimony, an ingredient found in Tartar Emetic that Chapman bought in 1887.

  In an article published in the Pall Mall Gazette in March 1903, the retired Inspector Frederick Abberline, a detective who had worked on the Ripper case, stated that he thought the multiple murderer Chapman, might be the Ripper, for no other reason that can be ascertained except that Chapman had killed three women. Reportedly, he said to Chapman’s arresting officer, ‘I see you’ve caught Jack
the Ripper at last’.

  No other officer shared this view.

  Could Severyn Koskowski – also known as George Chapman have been the Ripper?

  Born in Poland, a Roman Catholic who spoke Yiddish but little English, he possibly immigrated to England in March 1887, lived, and worked in and around Whitechapel. He had some medical training but worked as a barber. He married and moved to New York in 1891 returning to England in the summer of 1892.

  He then bigamously married three women whom he poisoned; for which he subsequently hanged. His killings took place in 1897, 1901 and 1902.

  The main reason why Chapman can be dismissed as Jack the Ripper is that it is extremely unlikely that a frenzied sexual killer who killed by strangulation and then mutilated his victims by a knife should, some nine years after the Kelly murder, turn to poison as his chosen means of killing.

  Chapman might have been a callous and calculating killer, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that he was Jack the Ripper.

  Francis Tumbelty

  See Appendix Two.

  Other suspects

  As has been indicated, over one hundred names have been put forward as suspects for Jack the Ripper of which the vast majority can be discarded.

  Some names which are of interest are as below:

  Prince Albert Victor – Eddy

  Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, was born in 1864 to Prince Albert Edward (Bertie) later to be King Edward VII and Princess Alexandria and might have ascended to the throne had he not died in 1892.

  The theory goes that Eddy was a syphilitic, and his brain softened by the disease, carried out the Ripper killings before being confined to a private hospital in Sandringham where he subsequently died, officially from influenza. The hypothesis further states that there was Royal conspiracy to cover up the facts. The theory that Eddy is the Ripper is supposedly based on the writings of Eddy’s doctor, Sir William Gull who treating him for syphilis. These writings no longer exist, if in fact they ever did., the theory falls apart as it can be proved that Eddy was not in London at the time of any of the killings.

  Lewis Carroll

  Without any concrete evidence whatsoever, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known under his pen name of Lewis Carroll, has been added to the list of Ripper suspects.

  The ’theory’ is that Dodgson and his Oxford colleague Thomas Bayne carried out the murders jointly and that he ‘confessed’ to the crimes in series of anagrams contained within his writings, however the theorist, in order to make his hypothesis work, leaves out or changes letters that don’t fit in.

  For example, take the following passage from ‘Nursery Alice’:

  ‘So she wandered away, through the wood, carrying the ugly little thing with her. And a great job it was to keep hold of it, it wriggled about so. But at last she found out that the proper way was to keep tight hold of itself foot and its right ear’

  The theory states that the passage is actually an anagram that reads:

  ‘She wriggled about so! But at last Dodgson and Bayne found a way to keep hold of the fat little whore. I got a tight hold of her and slit her throat, left ear to right. It was tough, wet, disgusting too. So weary of it they threw up – Jack the Ripper.’

  In order to make the anagram work three letters are substituted, including an ‘i’ for an ‘o’ to make the word Ripper.

  Based on the above and other similar distorted anagrams, it can safely be assumed that Lewis Carroll is not Jack the Ripper.

  Jill the Ripper

  Inspector Abbeline postulated that Jack the Ripper might be as woman. He raised the theory after the Mary Kelly killing, based on testimony given by a Mrs. Caroline Maxwell who lived in the area.

  The time of death for Mary Kelly was estimated to be between 3.30 and 4.00am on Friday November 9th, 1888, based on both the medical evidence of body temperature and the degree of rigor mortis, and the majority of testimony given by those who claimed to have seen or heard her the night she was killed.

  However, Caroline Maxwell testified that she had seen Mary Kelly on two separate occasions several hours after she was believed to have died according to the medical evidence. She described in detail the clothes worn by the woman she saw and positively identified a particular shawl.

  Abbeline believed Caroline Maxwell was telling the truth of what she had seen and raised the supposition to Dr. Thomas Dutton, ‘Do you think it could be a case of not Jack the Ripper but Jill the Ripper?’ his theory being that the killer, a woman, wore Mary Kelly’s clothing in order to disguise herself. Dr. Dutton replied that it seemed doubtful, but if it were a woman committing the crimes, the only kind of woman capable of so doing would be a midwife. A midwife would have the same rudimentary anatomical knowledge that the killer displayed in the removal of organs from the bodies and could explain away any blood stains on her clothing if apprehended.

  The theory rests only on Caroline Maxwell’s ‘sighting of Mary Kelly’ after she had been dead for some hours. The supposition that the killer might be a midwife and therefore would not attract attention, even if there were blood on her clothing has no solid basis fact.

  There is another theory raising the idea that the killer might be a murderess, Joseph Barnett., a companion of Mary Kelly suggests that Mary Kelly had definite lesbian tendencies, in that Kelly threw Barnett out of her housing and took up with Maria Harvey and that Kelly was then killed by a jealous lesbian lover.

  This theory does not of course hold any validity for the other the Ripper murders.

  Interestingly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, suggested that the Ripper might have dressed in woman’s clothing in order to avoid capture. This does not however explain why the victims, known prostitutes, would go off with a woman to those dark corners where they conducted their business since there would be no financial gain for them; all the women were desperate for money on the nights of their murder.

  Jill the Ripper does not hold up as a convincing suspect.

  The Lodger

  A story entitled ‘The Lodger’ was published in McLure’s Magazine in 1911. In the story, written by Marie Belloc-Lowndes, a retired couple try to earn some extra income by renting out rooms in their home but are not successful and face the prospect of financial hardship until a single gentleman takes one of the upper rooms at a higher rate than usual.

  With the extra income, the husband can once again afford to buy a daily newspaper from which he follows the details of a string of prostitute killings by a lunatic known as ‘The Avenger’.

  The lodger is a quiet gentleman who spends his days reading the Bible, but leaves the house late at night, not to return to the early morning. The wife becomes suspicious, the lodger’s nocturnal disappearances coincide with the killings and the wife begins to suspect that their lodger is none other than ‘The Avenger.

  The story was immensely successful, becoming a best-selling novel and was made into at least three films, including what is generally accepted as the first film made by Alfred Hitchcock.

  The author claimed to conceived the idea from a snatch of dinner conversation in that a guest told another that his mother’s butler and cook had once rented rooms to Jack the Ripper.

  However, before the publication of Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes story, the urban myth that Jack the Ripper had rented rooms in the Whitechapel area, was already established, put forward by amongst others, the painter Walter Sickert, (now himself named as a suspect) who claimed he knew the identity of the Ripper since he once occupied his former rooms. Sickert claimed that several years after the Ripper killings, he took rooms in a house owned by an elderly couple in Mornington Crescent in Camden. It was they who told him a previous lodger had been Jack the Ripper, a solitary man who went out at night, who had been out late the night of the murders, would rush out to buy the newspapers after each murder and who habitually burned his clothing. Eventually his health failed and his mother took him back to Bournemouth where he died shortl
y afterwards.

  Sickert supposedly wrote the name in the margin in a copy of ‘Casanova’s Memoirs’ which he then gave to Albert Rutherford, however Rutherford could not deciphers Sickert’s handwriting and the book was lost in the Blitz. An interesting story, but that is all that it is. Why did the couple not disclose their suspicions to the police, even if they were scared to do so whilst he was their lodger, after his death there would have been no danger? Similarly, why did Sickert not report this information to the police?

  However, there is a far more significant ‘lodger’ story, the lodger at No 222 Batty Street, which is dealt with in more detail Appendix Two.

  Carl Ferdinand Feigenbaum

  Carl Ferdinand Feigenbaum was executed in the electric chair in New York’s Sing Sing Penitentiary on the morning of 27th April 1896, the 19th man to be electrocuted at Sing Sing.

  Feigenbaum was executed for the murder of his landlady in New York and it was one of his defence lawyers. William Sanford Lawton, who stated in an interview with the ‘New York Advertiser’ that ‘I believe that that Carl Feigenbaum, whom you have just seen put to death in the electric chair, can easily be connected with the Jack the Rippers murders in Whitechapel, London.’ He further added, ‘I will stake my professional reputation that if the police will trace this man’s movements carefully for the past few years their investigation will lead to London and Whitechapel,’

  The story caused a brief sensation in North America but the story soon died and was largely forgotten.