Whatever the truth, Fido’s theorizing does underline the point that these complex explanations were necessitated only by the shortage of original documentation. What is also often overlooked is that if the case had been solved, the investigators – that is Smith, Abberline, Anderson, Swanson, et al. – would not have been forced to try solving the case with hindsight and by contradicting one another in print. Similarly, too much weight can be given to the Macnaghten notes. These are often misinterpreted, and his three suspects – Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog – are assumed to be the only ones. This is a misreading of what Macnaghten has said. He offers them up only as alternatives to Cutbush, says quite clearly that ‘no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one’ and goes on to name as possible suspects the three men, ‘any one of whom would have been more likely than Cutbush to have committed this series of murders’. All three, as the notes make clear, were investigated (there is a reference to Druitt’s family); if the notes are taken in conjunction with the rest of Macnaghten’s statement, there was indeed not a shred of proof against Druitt, Kosminski or Ostrog.
Or Kaminsky.
Or David Cohen.
Dr Stanley
In 1929 Leonard Matters published The Mystery of Jack the Ripper. In it he claimed that his book was based on the death-bed confession of an English doctor named Stanley that he was Jack the Ripper.
In his original introduction, Matters said that he had found the confession printed in Spanish in one of the journals in Buenos Aires where he had worked for some years on an English newspaper. In a revealing phrase Matters said that he had built up a story around that confession; and it is tempting to ask if his story did not come first and the facts, which were well researched and make up two-thirds of the book, come second. Certainly it is hard to escape from the conclusion that the Dr Stanley part of the book is fiction. Matters himself said that he could not vouch for the genuineness of the story but thought that it was entitled to some credence. He went on, ‘That such a man of such a character and such a life story did really exist in 1888 it is beyond my hope to prove.’ He said that a search of the records of the General Medical Council of Great Britain had failed to find anyone who could be identified with Dr Stanley, but went on to argue that only by accepting the existence of this elusive personality was it possible to delineate the true character of the Ripper.
His story was allegedly based ‘on the recital of an anonymous surgeon in Buenos Aires who claimed to have been a student in London under the doctor, and to have been present when he died in the Argentine capital some thirty years ago’.
Matters begins by asking three questions. Why were all the Ripper’s victims prostitutes? Why did the Ripper kill only in the East End? Why did the murders stop after that of Mary Kelly?
His conclusions were: that it was only among prostitutes the Ripper could find the woman he was looking for; that he knew that he would find her in the East End; and that the woman he was looking for was Mary Kelly.
Matters says that Dr Stanley’s early career was an unbroken success. But his rapid fame as a brilliant young surgeon took a downward turn with the death of his wife when their son was only a few days old. This tragedy soured him and left him with a lasting contempt for his colleagues whose medical incompetence he blamed, to some extent, for her death. Gradually he withdrew into himself and lavished all his affection on the son, Herbert.
Matters quotes an anonymous contemporary who knew him at this time. (As he could not prove that Dr Stanley ever existed this was certainly a wonderful achievement!) ‘X’ was taken to the doctor’s house in Portman Square and shown his collection of pathological specimens in the doctor’s private museum. One of Dr Stanley’s self-appointed tasks was a compilation of the pathological history of cancer. His only regret was that life was too short to allow him to complete it but this would be done by his son who, as the doctor believed, would one day ‘be hailed as a saviour of humanity!’
‘X’ was led to speculate: ‘There was no doubt Dr Stanley had centred all his hopes on that boy, and, looking at his museum, he saw in it not only the proof that he was right in his theory and surgical methods but that his son’s future was wrapped up in his own victory over those he imagined to be his enemies.’ ‘X’ also wondered about the effect it would have on Stanley if anything happened to his son. Undoubtedly the consequences would be tragic. And this, Matters says, is precisely what happened.
Herbert Stanley met Mary Kelly on boat race night of 1886. He was then a brilliant medical student and only twenty-one. They spent a week in Paris together before he discovered that she was diseased. This is the first big flaw in Matters’ story. Kelly’s post-mortem showed no trace of any such disease. Matters continues that the disease had taken firm hold on the boy before his father found out a few weeks later what had happened to him. For nearly two years they fought the disease with different cures before young Stanley died of its effects. By then the father knew the details of the short-lived affair with Kelly.
From the dramatic way he talks about it, one would suppose that young Stanley was the only person ever to have been afflicted with this disease, the name of which Matters modestly withholds from his readers. The following facts should be borne in mind to put the story into some perspective. According to Dr Henriques, in Prostitution and Society Vol. 3, about 50,000 people were treated anonymously for venereal diseases in the London hospitals in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the same period, about 20 per cent of the army was infected with the disease, as compared with today’s figure of about 4 per cent. Most men seem to have accepted the risk as perfectly acceptable.
Both Donald McCormick and Robin Odell in their books make the point that venereal disease was a slow killer and that, if he had contracted it from Kelly, Herbert Stanley would not have died within so short a time as two years. But, as Odell points out, the main flaw in Matters’ argument has always been that, according to the medical evidence, Kelly was not infected with venereal disease: the only disease that she was suffering from was alcoholism. But before jumping to the conclusion that she could not have passed on the disease to young Stanley, Odell cautioned:
too much faith should not, in all respect, be placed on Dr Phillips’s remarks, for a woman can be a carrier of venereal disease without the disease itself being evident. Moreover, the causal organism of syphilis was not discovered until 1905, so that a doctor in 1888 could not have based his diagnosis solely on clinical evidence, which is especially difficult to establish in a woman (not to mention a case where the woman had been cut to pieces). If modern pathological examinations and blood-tests could have been made, they might well have shown that Kelly was a syphilitic.
The story goes on to describe Dr Stanley vowing to revenge himself on Kelly. This means scouring the East End for her. He spends a week or two to familiarize himself with the underworld and night life of London, creeping through alleys and back streets and learning how to dodge from one street to another without being seen. For his first encounter with a prostitute Stanley goes to Wardour Street where he knows that Kelly had once lived. To his dismay she is no longer there. He curses the woman now living in her old lodgings, and who, after she has listened to his tirade, slams her door and mutters, ‘My God! I’m glad I’m not Marie. If I was that man would kill me. Somebody ought to tell Marie, but I don’t know what’s become of her.’
Clearly this is fiction.
In spite of his statement that he could not prove the existence of Dr Stanley, Matters neatly dovetails into his story the evidence of a Mrs North who describes her meeting with a man she thought was a doctor, a man of forty-five to forty-seven years of age, sinewy and strong, of tremendous force and will. ‘His eyes were dark and glowed with fire,’ says Matters. Dr Stanley subsequently learns that Kelly is living in the East End, and disguises his appearance. ‘A change of attire; a slouching gait; a garbled form of English … or an imitated foreign accent …’ At the same time he resolves to kill all the women whom he questions, it does
not matter how many, so overwhelmingly strong is his desire for revenge. His first victim is Martha Tabram. Stanley panics and stabs her simultaneously with his surgical knife and triangular-shaped bayonet. Polly Nichols is his next victim and this time being calmer and more in control of himself he succumbs to another impulse and disembowels her for the specimen he wants for his surgical museum. He obtains further physiological specimens from Annie Chapman, Liz Stride and Catharine Eddowes who, before she is murdered, gives him the name and address of Kelly’s lodgings. Here again there is a blending of fact and fiction, because the other name that Eddowes used was Kelly and it would have been easy for Stanley, if his story had been true, to have assumed that she was the woman he was looking for. Eventually Stanley, after keeping observation on Mary Kelly, overhears her say that her man has left her and that she’ll be out on the streets unless someone pays her rent.
He follows her to Miller’s Court and, awaiting his chance, creeps into her unlocked room. Shaking her awake he reveals his identity and gives her a chance to speak before he kills her. She has only time to scream ‘Murder’ before he uses the knife. His revenge is complete.
Afterwards Stanley wanders the world for ten years, apparently without his famous collection, and finally settles down in Buenos Aires. There he lives for some years and, recognizing a former pupil of his, writes to him when he eventually succumbs to cancer, the disease for which he had striven to find a cure. When the pupil arrives to see him Stanley tells him that he has only an hour or two to live. He confesses that he is Jack the Ripper and gives the visitor £100 to pay for a modest funeral and the rest to do with as he likes. He wants his visitor to promise to do something for him, but he dies before he can tell him what it is.
As a postscript to this story it is worth including Leonard Gribble’s theory, put forward in an issue of True Detective (January 1973), in an article which he called ‘Was Jack the Ripper a Black Magician?’
Once again, the story is about a doctor avenging himself on the East End prostitutes who had given his son the disease from which he had died in an asylum for the insane. Each of his victims is a blood sacrifice; but, on top of this, the murders are committed in such a way as to coincide with certain phases of the moon since the doctor can build up an occult pentagram to give himself immunity from discovery. In fact, there are six victims. Martha Tabram is the first. Her murder has an occult significance; apparently 3 × 13 is an occult formula which is why she was stabbed thirty-nine times. Stride, however, is not a victim proper. Because the Ripper didn’t have time to complete his ritual slaying it was essential that he had to find a second victim quickly to make her death coincide with that particular phase of the moon. If he hadn’t murdered Eddowes immediately afterwards the efficacy of the pentagram would have been broken.
Kelly’s death and mutilation coincided with the final phase of the sacrificial period, which sealed the mystical pentagram and so brought the killings to an end.
George Chapman (Severin Antoniovich Klosowski)
George Chapman, whose real name was Severin Antoniovich Klosowski, was born on 14 December 1865 in the tiny Polish village of Nargornak. From December 1880 to October 1885 he was a surgical student in village practice. He completed his studies, which ended on 1 January 1886, with three months’ practical surgery at the hospital in Praga. He then applied for, but failed to get the degree of junior surgeon. At most he seems to have been a feldscher, a hospital attendant or ‘barber surgeon’. (This was a relic from the days when the professions of hairdressing and medicine were intertwined.) After a brief spell of military service he emigrated to England, arriving in 1888. His first known job was as a hairdresser’s assistant in a shop in the High Street, Whitechapel. For some reason he was known as ‘Ludwig’ Klosowski (or Zagowski), which the English pronounced ‘Schloski’.
Nothing is known in detail about Chapman’s career in Whitechapel at this time, except that it coincided with the Whitechapel murders. Ex-Detective Sergeant Leeson, in his autobiography, Lost London, conveys some information that is relevant. He says that ‘Chapman lived in Whitechapel, where he carried on a hairdresser’s business in a sort of “dive” under a public-house at the corner of George Yard’. If true, then this has some significance as it was in George Yard buildings that Martha Tabram was stabbed to death. However, Leeson’s statements must be treated with great caution, even when he is describing events with which he was intimately connected, such as the famous Siege of Sidney Street some years later. (In my book about this episode, I was able to check contemporary police documents and statements against his later statements in these memoirs. I found such alarming discrepancies between them that I decided Lost London was almost entirely untrustworthy.) In connection with this statement about Chapman, it should be borne in mind that Leeson did not join the Metropolitan Police until October 1890 and was not posted to Whitechapel until February 1891, and his statement must therefore be treated as second-hand evidence.
Fortunately we have the evidence of Abberline himself that Chapman lodged in George Yard. He had a shop in the basement of the White Hart public house, but as far as the records are concerned, he did not move there until 1890. Possibly there was some unrecorded period of temporary employment when Chapman was working and lodging there which prompted Abberline’s statement. Officially at the time of the murders he was at 126 Cable Street but still within easy striking distance of the murder sites.
It is known that Klosowski changed jobs and went to work for a barber in West Green Road, South Tottenham, and that he subsequently bought his own shop in the High Road, Tottenham. He was a poor business man and, the shop failing, he was reduced once more to the status of barber’s assistant. He worked for a barber in Shoreditch and then moved on to another shop in Leytonstone.
In 1889 he was introduced to one Lucy Baderski at the Polish Club in St John’s Square, Clerkenwell. They had known each other for less than four or five weeks before they were married on August Bank Holiday, 1889. Klosowski, however, already had a wife whom he had left behind in Poland. She came to London and tried to oust her rival from his affections, and for a short time both women shared the same house with him. Eventually, Klosowski’s legal wife realized the hopelessness of her situation and left. Afterwards he and Lucy Baderski went to live in Cable Street, close to the docks, before emigrating to America in 1890. In February 1891 Lucy left him because of his infidelities and returned to England alone.
According to Klosowski’s story, he followed her in 1893 (although there is evidence to show that this happened a year earlier). The couple were reconciled, but only temporarily. Klosowski did not try to get custody of the two children of the marriage, probably because this would not have fitted in too well with the image that he liked to project of himself as a widower or bachelor.
At the end of 1893 he met one Annie Chapman (not to be confused with the Ripper’s victim) and they lived together for about a year. After they broke up in December 1894 she found out that she was pregnant. He refused to help her, even to the extent of denying her a reference so that she could support herself and the child. The only legacy of this affair was that Klosowski borrowed from his discarded mistress the name of Chapman. This was to shake himself free of his tangled affairs which he did by suppressing totally the name of Klosowski. Years later, when he was questioned by the police, and asked if he was Klosowski, he replied: ‘I don’t know anything about the fellow.’ The change of name, says H. L. Adam, in his introduction to the Trial of George Chapman, may have been inspired by other more sinister ambitions having ‘for their primary purpose and idée fixe the pursuit, capture, and the destruction of women’.
He met his first victim when he was lodging with the Renton family in Leytonstone in 1895. Mary Renton’s married name was Spink. Her husband was a railway porter who left her, taking their son with him, because she was an alcoholic. Chapman had changed his lodgings, and soon after the break-up of this marriage he and Mary Spink, a small blonde woman with short croppe
d hair, were seen about a lot together. Eventually they announced that they were getting married. This was a polite fiction, since each was still legally married. After they had set up house, Mary Spink had £250 advanced to her from a trust fund of about £600. A further £350 was advanced to her two years later, in 1897, only a short time before she died. Chapman and Mary leased a barber’s shop in a poor part of Hastings but, because it was not very successful, they moved to a more affluent part of the town. Mrs Spink helped her husband by lathering and sometimes shaving the customers; she was popular with the customers and used to entertain them by playing the piano. These ‘musical shaves’ were very popular and the business prospered dramatically. In spite of this, Chapman gave it up within six months and returned to London as the landlord of the Prince of Wales tavern off the City Road.
While in Hastings he had by no means neglected his casual love affairs. He purchased an ounce of tartar emetic from a local chemist. Back in London, Mrs Spink, who seldom suffered from anything but a hangover, began to experience severe vomiting and stomach pains. Gradually her health broke down under these attacks and she became very emaciated. Chapman was very solicitous for his wife’s health and supervised the food and medicines that were given to her. She weakened steadily under these administrations and, on Christmas Day 1897, she died. The cause of her death was given as phthisis due to her emaciated condition.
A few months later he hired a new barmaid named Bessie Taylor, who was soon installed as the new but unmarried Mrs Chapman. Like her predecessor, she soon acquired the same haggard condition. To avoid arousing suspicion among the customers who had known his first wife, Chapman gave up the Prince of Wales tavern and moved to Bishop’s Stortford where he took over The Grapes. While they were there, Bessie Taylor went into hospital for an operation. Afterwards Chapman became even more brutal to her, to the extent of threatening her with a revolver. They moved to London again where he leased the Monument Tavern in the Borough. He continued to ill-treat his wife. This aggravated her condition, and she became steadily thinner and more frail. None of the doctors who examined her realized that she was being slowly poisoned. On 14 February 1901 she died. Cause of death was given as ‘exhaustion from vomiting and diarrhoea’.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 20