WHAT DID THE POLICE KNOW?
We could go into many more suspects here—there are scores of them—but none of the theories has enough going for it to be taken seriously and they don’t shed enough light on the investigative process to warrant the space.
Was Jack, then, such an elusive, clever criminal genius? Not by any means. He knew the area and he was lucky. The dark corners and back alleys favored by the lowest rung of prostitutes, who had no place indoors to go with their clients, were the same ones that facilitated a killer like Jack.
Now it’s time to review those individuals the police considered suspects. And as we do that, let me profile the police actions themselves, based on the behavioral evidence they collectively left.
Did the police have a good idea in the end of Jack’s identity? They may very well have.
The fact is, the major police effort, the tremendous expenditure of resources and manpower, stands down rather quickly after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly—more quickly than after the previous murders. We have already noted that the police were really under the gun, being subjected to massive public and press criticism and condemnation. Would they have risked another murder by easing up on their presence in Whitechapel? Knowing the way bureaucrats and public servants respond to outside pressure, it is difficult to conceive that they would. So alternatively, we may speculate they had reason to believe that although the killer had not been captured and brought to justice, the reign of terror was over.
So who at Scotland Yard might have known or at least thought he knew?
We have three main sources for this: the MacNaghten Memoranda; Dr.(at this point, Sir) Robert Anderson’s 1910 memoir, The Lighter Side of My Official Life; and the so-called Swanson Marginalia, actually Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson’s handwritten commentary in his copy of Anderson’s book, which was released by his family after the 1987 publication of Martin Fido’s book The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper.
Sir Melville Leslie MacNaghten had been assistant commissioner in charge of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, having joined as assistant chief constable in 1889. We must therefore point out that his information would not have been firsthand, though he would have had access to all important information. The memorandum was written in 1894 and consisted of seven pages written in his own hand, marked “Confidential” and placed in his files. He names three likely suspects:
(1) A Mr M.J. Druitt, said to be a doctor & of good family, who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, whose body (which was said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31st Dec.—or about 7 weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane and from private info I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.
(2) Kosminski, a Polish Jew, & resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many circs connected with this man which made him a strong “suspect.”
(3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was subsequently detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man’s antecedents were of the worst possible type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.
In his memoirs, Robert Anderson speaks of a lower-class Polish Jew whom he does not name and states that the subject “was caged in an asylum, the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer at once identified him, but when he learned that the suspect was a fellowJew he declined to swear to him.”
This witness Anderson mentions is probably Joseph Lawende, the cigarette salesman who was believed to have seen Catherine Eddowes with the Ripper at the entrance to Mitre Square. The Polish Jew in question would be Aaron Kosminski, the second name in the MacNaghten Memoranda.
Kosminski was a hairdresser who moved to England in 1882. The records of the large Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, which would have handled most of the patients in and around Whitechapel, listed attacks of mental illness going back to 1885. By the late 1880s, he was known to wander about picking food scraps out of the street and would refuse food offered by anyone else. He would not wash and had at one point threatened his sister with a knife. From 1890 on, he essentially spent the rest of his life in asylums.
In the margin of his personal copy of Anderson’s book, where he talks about the Polish Jew and the witness who refused to ID him, Donald Swanson penciled:
because the suspect was also a Jew and also because his evidence would convict the suspect, and witness would be the means of murderer being hanged, which he did not wish to be left on his mind.
D.S.S.
He continues:
And after this identification which suspect knew, no other murder of this kind took place in London.
On the endpaper he wrote:
After the suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home [probably the police convalescent home in West Brighton where the suspect and the witness were apparently taken to get them away from the glare of London publicity] where he had been sent by us with difficulty in order to subject him to identification and he knew he was identified.
On suspect’s return to his brother’s house in Whitechapel he was watched by police (City CID) by day and night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards—Kosminski was the suspect—D.S.S.
THE REMAINING SUSPECTS
When I was asked to participate in Peter Ustinov’s television special in 1988 and offer a profile, I agreed with the understanding that I could only analyze the evidence, materials, and suspects presented to me.
The suspects they presented were Robert Donston Stephenson, who often went by the name of Dr. Roslyn D’Onston; Montague John Druitt and Aaron Kosminski, two of MacNaghten’s three suspects; Sir William Gull, the royal physician; and Prince Edward Albert, Duke of Clarence.
The only one of these five we haven’t mentioned so far is Stephenson, a self-publicizing con man who claimed to be a practitioner of magic. He was in Whitechapel at the right time and was known to be very interested in the Ripper murders, one time acting them out for startled onlookers. Since he was into witchcraft, these elements would surely have shown up in ritualized ways in the crimes. He would also have been able to bring his victims to a secure location rather than risking murdering them on the streets. Though the theory has its supporters, I have found nothing in his murky background that qualifies him as a good suspect.
Prince Eddie and Gull we have already considered. So let’s consider the remaining two here, Druitt and Kosminski, plus the third MacNaghten suspect, Michael Ostrog.
Ostrog was an immigrant, probably from Russia or Poland, a known criminal and possibly a doctor. He was too old and too tall to match the witness accounts. He was imprisoned in September of 1887 but transferred to Surrey Pauper Lunatic Asylum when he displayed signs of insanity (probably faked), then released in March 1888. Since he was sentenced to prison for theft in Paris on November 18, it’s unlikely he was even in London at the time of all of the Ripper murders. He surfaces again in London in 1904, partially crippled and living in the St. Giles Christian Mission.
The police were definitely paying attention to him and were concerned during the murder series when he failed to report to them as directed. That he was in and out of mental institutions also probably had something to do with MacNaghten’s interest in him, but again, I find nothing compelling in the facts we know to suggest that he might be the Ripper. Nothing else in his background suggests a propensity toward the type of savage violence we see in these crimes, and despite the mental illness, he seems too organized and “together” to fit the personality I’d be looking for.
Which gets us to Montague John Druitt. Druitt is an interesting suspect primarily
because of when he died. He was pulled out of the Thames on December 31, 1888, and police estimated he’d been in there more than a month. His coat was weighted down with stones, and he had cash on him and two checks from the boys’ school in Blackheath where he’d taught. They were probably severance checks, and the supposition is that he had gotten into trouble for sexual advances to some of the students. Though he has been described as a doctor, he was, in fact, a schoolteacher who was just beginning to make his way as a junior barrister. There was some mental instability and a history of depression in his family, and after his father died, his mother was placed in an asylum.
I have always been a little surprised by the weight given to Druitt’s candidacy as the Ripper. Aside from his untimely but convenient death, nothing really ties him to the crimes, including any known association with Whitechapel. There is no evidence of violence in his background, and a man doesn’t just jump full-blown into the kinds of crimes we’re talking about.
But Aaron Kosminski looked good for the murders. A Polish Jewish immigrant hairdresser with a history of mental illness and a reported dislike of women, he fit the eyewitness descriptions, the disorganized personality, and the police descriptions. The escalation of mutilation and depravity in the murders was dramatic, and the Mary Jane Kelly kill certainly strikes me as the work of a guy pretty much at the end of his mental rope. That is not to say that he’d turn himself in, as Edmund Kemper did, or kill himself. Rather, it suggests that he might not be able to continue functioning on his own much longer. And a guy who is so paranoid he eats garbage off the streets rather than accept food from anyone would tend to fit the bill.
His is also the only name that comes up in all three of the key documents (though Anderson does not mention him by name). According to Swanson, when Kosminski was placed under surveillance, the killing stopped. Though some have questioned the recollection of all three former cops, there is no compelling reason to think they were wrong in the essence of what they were saying. Martin Fido has extensively researched the lives and writings of all three men, and he states that everything else Robert Anderson wrote, on subjects far diverse from the Ripper murders, is accurate and creditable. So there is no reason to doubt him here.
My subject, it will be noted, was an immigrant Jew, the very type many of the citizens of Whitechapel suspected, feared, and despised. Is his Jewishness a significant factor in either the profile or the commission of the crimes? No. Jack the Ripper had to be a poor East End local. A significant number of poor East End locals at that time were immigrant Jews. There are sick and murderous individuals in every definable race and ethnic grouping. That’s it.
Although Kosminski seemed to fit my profile and evaluation, I cautioned on the show that a hundred years after the fact, I could not prove that he was the actual killer. What I said was that Jack the Ripper would either be Aaron Kosminski or someone like the man I was describing. And I stand by that.
But, as I learned in the years after the airing of the show, there are a couple of problems with Kosminski, information I had not been given at the time. For one thing, Swanson turned out to be wrong on one critical fact: Kosminski did not die shortly after the murders, but actually lived in asylums until 1919! During that time he was often dissociative but not violent and never gave any indication of being the Ripper. I would expect a paranoid individual of this nature to talk frequently of this. Kosminski seems too docile and passive to have been a predatory animal nightly on the hunt for victims of opportunity.
Reenter Martin Fido. He had also believed that the man the police referred to as Kosminski was the answer to the Ripper mystery, but the problems struck him as just as real as they did me. Knowing that the Polish Jew description from Anderson was more reliable than the name, Fido exhaustively checked the records of all the prisons and insane asylums in the area. And of all the names he went through, he came up with one fascinating candidate.
David Cohen was a Polish Jew, twenty-three years of age at the time (exactly the same age as Kosminski), whose incarceration at Colney Hatch fits precisely with the end of the murders. He had originally been brought by police to Whitechapel Infirmary on December 12, 1888, when they “found him wandering at large and unable to take care of himself.”
Unlike Kosminski, Cohen was violently antisocial and was kept in restraints. When he was given any clothing, he would rip it off his body. He spoke little, and when he did, it was a foreign language that attendants took to be German. Though we know he was in Whitechapel at the time of the crimes, we don’t know where he lived or if he actually had a job.
He became ill on December 28, and while he gradually regained some of his strength during the spring and summer of 1889, he suffered a relapse and died on October 20. The cause of death was put down to “exhaustion of mania.” This diagnosis, rather crude by modern standards, still fits in perfectly with the profile. The killer and mutilator of Mary Jane Kelly was at the end of his emotional rope.
His address had been given as 86 Leman Street, an unlikely possibility since this was the address of the Protestant Boys’ Club. However, Fido quickly discovered that number 84 was the Temporary Shelter for Poor Homeless Jews, which seemed completely logical. But this home only accepted newly landed immigrants for two weeks. Immigrant Jews taken in by their fellow immigrants in this way were often listed for employment in one of the traditional Jewish trades, either tailor or shoemaker. Cohen is listed as a tailor, but it is certainly possible that he had been a shoemaker. The connection of shoemakers with Leather Apron would have been enough to change the designation for his own protection.
It’s easy to see how 84 Leman Street could be mistranscribed as 86, but how do you confuse Kosminski and Cohen? Well, one possible way was explained to Fido. Cohen was a John Doe–type surname often given to Jewish immigrants whose actual surnames were difficult for Englishmen to pronounce or spell. It is therefore possible that the City Police were following Kosminski while Scotland Yard was following Cohen. The Yard knew their man had died, but weren’t certain of his real name.
The situation is further complicated by another fellow, generally referred to as Nathan Kaminsky, an immigrant Jewish bootmaker, the same age and general description as both Kosminski and Cohen. He was treated for syphilis in a workhouse infirmary shortly before the murders and then suddenly and inexplicably vanishes from the records. He lived right in the heart of the Ripper’s comfort zone. There are no death records for him.
So I think there is every chance that these three immigrant Polish Jews with documented emotional problems were combined and confused by the various police officials and agencies. I don’t set much store in elaborate conspiracies and cover-ups, but I’ve seen enough bureaucratic gaffes and fumbles in my time to believe quite heartily in them. And yet, what is the element of truth or consistency that runs throughout the three accounts and also squares with the profile of the Whitechapel Murderer?
As we have seen, it’s impossible to be certain of the true identity after all these years, but the behavioral evidence as to the type of individual he was is plentiful and compelling. Therefore, I’m now prepared to say that Jack the Ripper was either the man known to the police as David Cohen . . . or someone very much like him.
CHAPTER TWO
LIZZIE BORDEN
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
This is the way the most famous and notorious American murder case of the nineteenth century has chiefly been remembered. But if the unnamed authors of this rather cruel ditty were being responsible and accurate, they would have recast their verse into something less tuneful yet somewhat more in line with the established facts of this officially unsolved case:
An unknown subject took a hatchet
And gave Lizzie Borden’s stepmother nineteen whacks;
Ninety minutes after that deed was done
He or she gave Borde
n’s father ten plus one.
The one being sufficient to cause death; the other ten constituting out-and-out overkill. But as we’ll discover, this was a behaviorally different type of overkill than what we saw in the Whitechapel murders.
What was it about this brutal daytime murder in a small but prosperous New England town at the height of the Industrial Revolution that struck such a nerve, not only in New England but, within days, across the nation and around the globe, just as Jack the Ripper had four years previously? For one thing, proper, well-to-do women just didn’t get accused of cold-bloodedly hacking people to death. If the Whitechapel murders were about the potential for random brutality and the loss of public innocence regarding the presence of evil in a confident and complacent world, this case was about the potential for violence lurking within seemingly normal families, and the even more profound and searing loss of innocence that implied.
It’s difficult to avoid the interesting, almost uncanny parallels to another instance of officially unsolved, allegedly domestic murder that would take place 102 years later and an entire continent away: the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman outside her condominium in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles in 1994. Both cases involved an upstanding, well-off, community-pillar defendant, represented by the finest legal team money could buy, who vigorously proclaimed innocence of the savage mutilation murders of one male and one female victim by bladed weapons that were not found at the scene. Nor had virtually any blood been found on either defendant. Both offered substantial rewards for information leading to the killer—rewards that were never claimed. And in both cases, the world was riveted to every word uttered in trial, during which each defendant chose not to take the stand to give her or his own account of what had happened. In fact, the only words both defendants uttered in open court were single sentences proclaiming their innocence.
The Cases That Haunt Us Page 9