by Trow, M. J.
Since the Colney Hatch records also refer to self-abuse as the cause of Kosminski’s madness, we cannot blame Macnaghten for following the scientific orthodoxy of the day. The fact is, of course, that the doctors were wrong. Masturbation does not cause madness, although other causes may give rise to a lack of inhibitions on that score. Like Isenschmid, Kosminski claimed to be rather superior, knowing ‘the movements of all mankind’ according to Dr Edmund Honchin, police surgeon to H Division. Although his mental and physical health declined at Colney Hatch, he fluctuated between quiet apathy and noisy hysterics. ‘Demented and incoherent’ he only once offered violence by threatening a (male) guard with a chair leg.
Charles Ludwig was a deranged hairdresser from Hamburg, Germany. He lodged in the Minories, not far from Pinchin Street, and came to the attention of the police on the night of Tuesday 18 September 1888 when he pulled a knife on one-armed prostitute Elizabeth Burns in Three King’s Court. She screamed and patrolling City policeman John Johnson came to her rescue. The attacker vanished in the darkness but was soon causing trouble at a coffee stall in Whitechapel High Street. In the eternal parlance of the street thug, then as now, he asked innocent bystander Alexander Frieberg what he was looking at. Ludwig flashed his knife again and another policeman, Constable 221H Gallagher, arrested him. He was charged at the Thames Magistrates Court with being drunk and disorderly and using threatening behaviour, but since this was not an isolated incident, he was probably in need of psychiatric help.
On Sunday 9 September 1888, two days before Elizabeth Jackson’s body parts began turning up, the landlady of the Pope’s Head pub at Gravesend contacted the police. Superintendent Berry took charge of what followed, talking to William Henry Pigott, himself a former policeman in Hoxton. Pigott had arrived at the Pope’s Head about four in the afternoon, having walked, he said, from Whitechapel. In his bag was a blood-stained shirt and his shoes seemed to have been recently wiped. He had been loudly proclaiming his hatred of women in the bar and he had an injury to his hand which he said had been caused by a bite from a woman in the backyard of a lodging house, probably in Brick Lane. He was interviewed by Inspector Abberline of H Division who was convinced he was not the Ripper and was released. It is not clear what happened to Pigott, but an institution of some sort seems likely.
Much of the police paperwork on John Sanders has been lost to time but he may have once been a serious Ripper suspect. The son of an Indian Army surgeon, Sanders was born in 1862 and joined the London Hospital, Whitechapel, at the age of 17. In 1880 he is described as an outpatient dresser, implying that he was a houseman entrusted with fairly mundane tasks. This may be because he was already showing signs of mental illness. Ordinarily shy and retiring, he became increasingly domineering and violent, threatening even his closest friends. He was transferred from one asylum to another until his death at Heavitree, Exeter, in 1901. Extraordinarily, Sanders seems to be one of three medical students at the London Hospital who were thought to be insane and all could be accounted for, the other two having gone abroad. The odds against three such men being in the same institution at the same time seem astronomical, but selection procedures for hospitals were vastly different in Victorian England.
In the context of the torso murders, G Wentworth Bell Smith is altogether more interesting. He believed prostitutes should be drowned. Smith was a Canadian who worked for the Toronto Trust Society in Finsbury Square and moved to 27 Sun Street, off the square, from Canada at some time in 1888. He suffered from religious mania, dashing off pages of his thoughts about God, vice and the appalling state of the world. He had noticed prostitutes walking through St Paul’s during divine service6 and his nocturnal wanderings took some explaining. He wore galoshes so that his tread was virtually silent, talked to himself and kept three loaded revolvers in his rooms. He often lay on the sofa and ‘foamed’.
On 7 August 1888, the night that the Ripper killed Martha Tabram, Smith arrived home at four in the morning with the story that his watch had been stolen in Bishopsgate. He told his landlord, Mr Callaghan, that he had to return to Canada urgently and left his lodgings, although he was known to be still in London a month later. Smith’s later whereabouts are unknown. Presumably he returned to Canada still railing about prostitution. He was certainly odd, but he was neither the torso killer nor the Ripper.
Neither was Alois Szemeredy, the first man to be named as the Whitechapel murderer in a full book written in 1908. He described himself variously as an American surgeon and an Austrian sausage-maker and probably deserted from the Austrian army before sailing to Buenos Aires where he may have carried out a series of armed robberies and perhaps even murder. He was committed to a lunatic asylum in 1885 and returned to Vienna seven years later. He committed suicide while in police custody there on further robbery charges. There is no link with London, let alone Whitechapel, but rumours of his being Jack were circulating via the Daily Graphic in 1892.
The men we have met so far have been odd, even dangerous, but they were not (with the possible exception of Szemeredy) murderers. James Kelly was. An upholsterer by trade, he moved to London in 1878 when he was 18, living with a family called Lamb in Collingwood Street, Bethnal Green. Three years later he met 20-year-old Sarah Brider and moved in with her and her family at 21 Cottage Lane. The pair were married on 4 June 1883 and they lived unhappily ever after. He was suffering from an abscess on the neck and violent headaches which caused unpredictable mood swings. In a row with Sarah in June 1883, Kelly stabbed her below the left ear. Treated at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, she died on 24 June and Kelly stood trial for her murder at the Old Bailey in August. He was reprieved three days before his execution date and sentenced to life imprisonment in Broadmoor, despite the fact that examining doctors could find no evidence of insanity.
On 23 January 1888 James Kelly escaped from that institution and extraordinarily remained on the run for the next thirty-nine years, including a brief return to England in 1896 when he again got away from the authorities in Liverpool Docks. On 11 February 1927 he turned up at the gates of Broadmoor and asked to be readmitted. He died there in September 1929. Author James Tully has tried to convince the world that James Kelly could be the Whitechapel murderer7 but the actual evidence is very thin. If not Jack, then could Kelly have been the torso murderer? Emphatically not. Two of the murders took place while the mad upholsterer was a child. For the 1888 and 1889 murders we have no idea where he was, but bearing in mind his correspondence in connection with this 1896 return came from New Orleans, it is unlikely that he was hanging around in London. Above all, James Kelly seems to have acquired an evil reputation out of all proportion to his crime. The only person he is known to have killed is his wife and that was in the heat of the moment. There was no attempt to conceal the crime, no attempt at dismemberment and little hard evidence to suggest that Kelly had murderous intents against anyone except the unfortunate Sarah.
Dr Thomas Neill Cream was in a different category altogether. Born in Glasgow in May 1850, Cream moved with his family to Quebec when he was 4. The boy worked with his father in the lumber business until 1872 when he enrolled in McGill College, Montreal, to study medicine. Richer than most students, he led a flash life, glittering with jewellery and driving a carriage and pair. In line with what may have been borderline schizophrenia he also taught in a Sunday school. Cream graduated MD in March 1876 but the theme of his farewell address was, oddly perhaps, ‘the evils of malpractice in the medical profession’. In two examples of unscrupulous behaviour before he left Canada, Cream started a fire in his Montreal lodgings in order to claim the insurance. Having got Flora Brooks pregnant, he was forced by her father to marry the girl but promptly left for Britain to further his medical studies. When he heard that his wife had died of consumption in August 1877, Cream demanded $1,000 under the terms of the marriage contract. In the end, he accepted $200.
Cream’s name first appears in London in October 1876 when he attended a course of lectures at St Thomas’s Hospit
al. He probably lodged in Lambeth Palace Road. On 13 April 1877 he obtained a double qualification in medicine and surgery from the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. No sooner had he obtained his degree than he was back to Canada, this time Ontario. The death of a chambermaid, Kate Hutchinson, may have been Cream’s first murder. His story was that she approached him for an abortion (illegal of course in both Canada and Britain) and that she had committed suicide when he refused. Since her body was found in a privy behind Cream’s lodgings, it seems highly likely that he killed her with chloroform. He moved to Chicago to avoid the limelight.
Here he carried out a series of abortions and in 1888 came under police suspicion over the death of Julia Faulkner. There was insufficient evidence against him and he embarked on a career of blackmail the following year. It was then that he took up with a married woman, Julia Stott, whose aged husband Daniel suffered from the epilepsy that Cream claimed to be able to cure. The old man died twenty minutes after taking Cream’s medicine, but a coroner might well have passed this off as coincidence and the cause of death natural had not Cream made a big fuss about the incompetence of the chemists who made the mixture up. He demanded an exhumation and four grains of strychnine were found in the dead man’s stomach. He and Julia Stott were charged with second degree murder. She was acquitted; he became Prisoner No. 4374 at Joliet, Illinois’s State Penitentiary.
After applying pressure on the system, Cream obtained a reduction of sentence and was released at the end of July 1891, obtaining the fortune his dead father had left him. He arrived in London on 5 October 1891, comfortably after all the crimes attributed to Jack and the torso killer were over. He moved into lodgings at 103 Lambeth Palace Road near St Thomas’s Hospital and the river ‘finding there’, as W Teignmouth Shore wrote in 1927, ‘the victims whose slaughter brought him to the scaffold’.
We are not concerned with the details of Thomas Neill Cream’s crimes; he was not the Ripper nor the torso killer. What is important is the ease with which he picked up prostitutes and their vulnerability. His first victim was 19-year-old Ellen Donworth who lived at 8 Duke Street off Westminster Bridge Road. Inevitably, in the journalese of the time, her death became ‘the Lambeth Mystery’. Interestingly, Cream’s technique was to write to these victims, asking them to meet him at a certain time and place. Unlike the Ripper’s targets who were random, Cream’s were personally chosen by him and ‘groomed’ to an extent before he struck. Ellen died of strychnine poisoning but not before she was able to describe her attacker – ‘a tall gentleman with cross eyes, a silk hat and bushy whiskers gave me a drink out of a bottle with white stuff in it’.8
Four days after Ellen’s death, Cream wrote to the deputy coroner for East Surrey, George Wyatt, to the effect that he could provide evidence as to who killed her, in exchange for £300,000. It was signed ‘A O’Brien, detective’.
The next target was Matilda Clover. She was 27 and lived in a room in Lambeth Road, with her 2-year-old child. She had recently separated from the boy’s father – or rather he had abandoned her; an all too familiar picture. She was an alcoholic and at first it was assumed that her death on 20 October 1891 was due to a lethal mix of drink and the bromide of potassium prescribed for her by her doctor. She was buried in Tooting Cemetery on the assumption that death was due to natural causes. If Cream had not written two anonymous letters to total strangers that Matilda had died by strychnine poisoning, he might have got away with the perfect murder.
Emma Shrivell, 18, and Alice Marsh, 21, shared lodgings in Stanford Street. They were both from Brighton and, typical of girls lured to London by the ‘Whittington Syndrome’, found that the streets were not, after all, paved with gold; in fact they took to those streets to make a living. They had a room each and paid 7s 6d a week rent. Comparing this with Mary Kelly’s 4s 9d we have some understanding of the hierarchy among prostitutes. They were both poisoned by Cream on 11 April 1892 when he shared a meal of beer and tinned salmon with them. What he did not share were the three capsules of strychnine he passed to them both.
On 30 April, it was decided to exhume Matilda Clover. There was strychnine in her stomach. From the middle of May onwards Cream was being watched by the police but he continued to pick up prostitutes, even offering what he called ‘an American drink’ to Violet Beverley of North Street, Kensington Road. Luckily for her, she refused. His peculiar behaviour, including attempts to implicate others, led to Cream’s arrest by Inspector Tunbridge of the CID who had been in charge of the Rainham Mystery case five years before. The doctor was formally charged with the murder of Matilda Clover on 18 July and subsequent charges included Ellen Donworth, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell. He was also charged with sending threatening letters and the attempted murder of Louisa Harris aka Lou Harvey, whom Cream probably assumed he had actually killed. It turned out that Cream had picked the woman up on 20 October and after a couple of evenings at music halls and hotels, he gave her two capsules which she pretended to take but actually threw into the Thames near Charing Cross underground station.
Cream was found guilty at the Old Bailey and hanged by Thomas Billington at Newgate on 15 November 1892. His alleged last words before the hangman jerked the lever and cut him short were ‘I am Jack the …’, which has led the poisoner to be suggested as a potential Ripper. He was certainly a disturbed and twisted character, but the phrase, if he said it at all, is very in keeping with his extraordinary arrogance and the need to continually draw attention to himself. He was an abortionist, would-be blackmailer and arsonist before he ever embarked on a career of murder. He was almost certainly addicted to morphine and possibly pornography, in that he carried lewd photographs with him. He was also a sadist. While his actual relations with prostitutes were probably ‘normal’, his use of strychnine was calculated to cause maximum pain. Other poisons, to which he had access and whose properties he must have known, were less appalling in their effects.
W T Shore summed Cream up in the way only 1920s writers could:
We may picture him walking at night the dreary, mean streets and byways of Lambeth, seeking for prey, on some of whom to satisfy his lust, on others to exercise his passion for cruelty; his drug-sodden, remorseless mind exalted in a frenzy of horrible joy.
Whatever exactly he was, the halter was his just reward.9
The halter was also the just reward for George Chapman, another killer walking dreary, mean streets. And Chapman has been put in the frame as the torso murderer. But then, he has also been suggested as Jack the Ripper …
Chapman’s real name was Severin Klosowski, although the original spelling was probably Severiano, the name on the murder warrant against him for the death of Maud Marsh. He was born in 1865 in Nagornak, Poland, the son of Antonio and Emile and became an apprentice surgeon at the age of 15. Between 1885 and 1886 he was a student at Praga Hospital, Warsaw, and qualified as junior surgeon in 1887. He reached England in the June of that year. Like Cream, Klosowski was a child at the time of the Battersea and Putney murders, which fact alone rules him out as a viable suspect in the torso case. The Rainham corpse had also been found by the time Klosowski got to London. The only other writer on the torso case, R Michael Gordon, implies that Klosowski is both the Ripper and the torso killer, even though the MO of the two are totally different and only the most prurient tabloids of the time tried (largely unsuccessfully) to link the two. Klosowksi’s importance here is that his arrival in 1887 means that at the end of the decade and into the next there was not one, but four serial killers at work in one city, even if that city was the largest in the world.
We have no clear indication why an apparently promising medical student should suddenly leave his native home and travel west. R Michael Gordon suspects some scandalous malpractice and he is probably right. In the long tradition of barber-surgeons stretching back to the Middle Ages, Klosowski worked for Abraham Rudin, a hairdresser in the India Dock Road. Between 1888 and 1890 when the Ripper and torso killings were taking place, he ran his own barber
shop in a basement below the White Hart, a pub which still stands on the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard where Ripper victim Martha Tabram had met her end in August 1888.
By this time Klosowski was living with Lucy Baderski from Walthamstow. He may have gone through a form of marriage with her and a son was born in April 1890. The family moved frequently in these months, from Greenhill Street to Commercial Street to Cable Street, around the corner from the site of the body drop in Pinchin Street. On 3 March 1891 the little boy died and the parents emigrated to America. This was of course the time for Eastern European Jewish migration; both Britain and America were seen as lands of golden opportunity. By February 1892 however, Lucy was back after a row with Klosowski and she was pregnant again. Although he soon joined her, the relationship was not a happy one. Klosowski was a serial philanderer and almost certainly already had a family back in Poland. The birth of a daughter in May did nothing to improve things and Lucy left him soon after. She was lucky.