Just a few months later Chapman met his final victim, a young woman named Maud Marsh, whom he hired as barmaid at the Monument Tavern. From a letter that was produced at his trial, it is clear that she held out against him for some time before moving in with him as Mrs Chapman No. 3. Her pathetic lie that they were husband and wife did not deceive her parents, who were suspicious of Chapman and never trusted him for one moment. Within a short time Maud began to suffer from the same pains and symptoms as had her predecessors. Solicitous as ever, Chapman insisted on preparing her food and medication himself. Mrs Marsh eventually suspected that her daughter was being poisoned and called in another doctor to examine her. His visit precipitated the final tragedy. Chapman gave his wife a final massive dose of poison and she died the next day. The local doctor, warned by telegram by Dr Grapel (who had examined her) that his patient was being poisoned, was too late to save her. He refused to issue a death certificate and Chapman’s fate was sealed when the post-mortem showed traces of arsenic. He was arrested on 25 October 1902, the day of Edward VII’s coronation. Only then was it discovered from his private papers that he was also Severin Klosowski. He was charged with the murder of Maud Marsh, and subsequently with the murders of Mary Spink and Bessie Taylor. Their bodies when exhumed were found to be in a remarkably good state of preservation, one of the surest indications of poisoning by arsenic.
Chapman’s trial began on 16 March 1903 and lasted four days. His only friend, it seemed, was his Polish wife who begged to see him. This he refused to agree to. His defence counsel did not call for any new evidence or witnesses on his behalf. The only thing he would do was play for the jury’s sympathy, by claiming that Chapman was a ‘hated alien’. This line was unsuccessful, and the jury took only eleven minutes to bring in their verdict of guilty. He was hanged at Wandsworth prison on 7 April.
Chapman has always been a leading Ripper suspect. This can be attributed, in part, to H. L. Adam who, when he edited the Trial of George Chapman, was able to draw upon the knowledge of ex-Chief Inspector Godley who had not only arrested Chapman but had worked with Inspector Abberline on the Ripper investigation. Godley is clearly the source for Adam’s statement that Abberline thought that Chapman and the Ripper were one and the same person; when Godley made his arrest Abberline told him, ‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!’
The arguments in favour of Chapman being the Ripper can be briefly summarized as follows: that he may have been working in White chapel at the time and had the necessary surgical skill to have committed the killings and the mutilations both quickly and efficiently; that the description of the man who was seen with Kelly was – yet again! – an accurate description of Chapman himself; that the Americanisms such as ‘boss’ in some of the Ripper correspondence suggest an American background, which Chapman certainly had from his three-year sojurn there, although this carelessly overlooks the fact that he only acquired such a background two years after the murders; the callous joking of some of the Ripper correspondence, which was typical of his brutal humour; that the last murder was committed while Chapman was still in London and that the similar murders were committed in the immediate area of Jersey City which was where he opened his shop in America. This last point does not hold up, since a thorough search of contemporary records shows that the only murder which could be possibly referred to as such was that of ‘Old Shakespeare’, real name Carrie Brown, who was knifed and mutilated in New York in April 1891.
The case against Chapman’s being the Ripper must necessarily hinge on the character of the Ripper himself, whoever he was. In an attempt to understand it, the following extract is taken from Krafft-Ebing’s Aberrations of Sexual Life, edited by Dr Alexander Hartwich.
From the observations to be now recounted it emerges with utter clarity that the perverse urge in murders for pleasure does not solely aim at causing the victim pain and – most acute injury of all – death, but that the real meaning of the action consists in to a certain extent imitating, though perverted into a monstrous and ghastly form, the act of defloration. It is for this reason that an essential component of murders for pleasure is the employment of a sharp cutting weapon; the victim has to be pierced, slit, even chopped up. The correlation between pleasure-murder and defloration is further confirmed by the fact that the chief wounds are inflicted in the stomach region, and in many cases the fatal cuts run from the vagina into the abdomen. In boys an artificial vagina is even made in pleasure-murders.
Comparatively often the killing of the victim results from strangulation [my italics], that is to say, in the simplest manner, without any weapon being used, and certainly in some way linked with coitus, as before or after it, seldom as a substitute. But it would seem as if the said act usually failed to satisfy the murderer, so that afterwards the corpse is hacked to bits, in which connection it is especially the genitalia, and in the case of women also the internal genital organs, which are concerned. In an extremely grisly manner one can connect a fetishistic element too with this process of hacking up the victim, inasmuch as parts of the body – and here again it is particularly the genitals which are concerned – are removed, and in a certain degree made into a collection.
It is obvious that individuals as seriously psychopathic as the perverts in this group may also display the most diverse other sex-deviations, such as e.g. homosexuality, paedophily and fetishism. At the same time there is a high degree of hypersexuality and especially before and during the act.
The point that I am making here is that this is an instantly recognizable portrait of the kind of man we know that Jack the Ripper must have been.
But can we also say that is a portrait of George Chapman?
Clearly it is not. Coincidences such as Chapman living in Whitechapel at the time of the murders seem meaningless once the portrait of the sadistic murderer has emerged. Jack the Ripper could never have made the change from a murderer of this type to the coldly calculating wife-poisoner of Chapman’s ilk. It is impossible to fit the two characters into the same frame, and on this ground alone Chapman should not be considered a candidate for the Ripper.
Dr Pedachenko
To understand Donald McCormick’s The Identity of Jack the Ripper it is essential to know something of the Klosowski/Chapman theory, since the author uses it as a springboard for his own theory. His primary source material was the (unpublished) three-volume Chronicles of Crime by the graphologist Dr Dutton, already referred to in connection with the handwriting analyses of the Ripper correspondence (pp. 117–27). Unfortunately these ‘chronicles’ were either lost or destroyed after Dr Dutton’s death in 1935, and when McCormick came to write his book, nearly twenty-seven years later, he was obliged to fall back on the notes which he had taken in 1932 and then forgotten about. McCormick described Chronicles of Crime as being ‘not a single narrative, but rather a collection of impressions and theories which he noted at various periods’. Apart from the Ripper case, ‘they covered a number of other interesting cases’. So it is fair to assume that McCormick has built his theory on the notes that he took of Dr Dutton’s jottings. This is a major weakness of his book. The reader, if he is to have any confidence in these findings, has a right to expect an accurate recounting of facts that he can check. Unfortunately, where this is possible, McCormick often undermines the confidence of his readers. The most glaring example is in his retelling of the Siege of Sidney Street case, where he takes two well-documented incidents – the murder of three London policemen and the siege itself – and turns it into a single incident, although the events happened several miles apart and with nearly three weeks between them. He made the same mistake in A History of the Russian Secret Service, published in 1972, which he wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Deacon.
According to McCormick, Dr Dutton was friendly with Inspector Abberline who discussed this case with him on more than one occasion. From Inspector Godley’s statement, although the genuineness of it has been challenged and may have been a H. L. Adam invention, we know that Abberlin
e congratulated him on having caught the Ripper when he arrested Chapman in 1902. But, according to Dutton, he changed his mind – more than fourteen years after his original investigation, if Dutton is correct. McCormick goes on:
What finally convinced Abberline that he had made a mistake in thinking Klosowski was the Ripper was his discovery that the Polish barber-surgeon had a double in London and that this double, a Russian and also a barber-surgeon, sometimes posed as Klosowski for reasons which were not apparent … Could this be the same Russian surgeon hinted at by Sir Basil Thomson and others, the character named as Ostrog by Sir Melville Macnaghten? Or could it be the Russian named by William Le Queux as Dr Alexander Pedachenko?
As the story is rather complicated I shall break it down, as McCormick did, into the Russian and English sources.
Russian source. In 1923 the journalist and amateur spy, William Le Queux, published his autobiography, Things I Know About Kings, Celebrities, and Crooks. He was a name-dropper on a grand scale as can be readily judged from some of his chapter headings – ‘What I Know about Kings’; ‘Evenings with “Carmen Sylva”, Queen of Roumania’; ‘What the Sultan of Turkey told me’. In fact, he was a good high-society gossip columnist with a lot of readers, and there is probably truth in his claim that, after the murder of Rasputin, ‘the Kerensky government handed to me, in confidence, a great quantity of documents which had been found in the safe in the cellar of his house, in order that I might write an account of the scoundrel’s amazing career.’ Among the papers was an incomplete manuscript called ‘Great Russian Criminals’ which, to his amazement, contained the truth about the Jack the Ripper murders. Here is part of the extract that he copied before he returned the manuscript.
The true author of these atrocities was disclosed by a Russian well-known in London, named Nideroest, a spy of our Secret Police, who was a member of the Jubilee Street Club, the Anarchist Centre in the East of London. One night in the club the identity of ‘Jack the Ripper’ was revealed to him by an old Russian Anarchist, Nicholas Zverieff. The mysterious assassin was Doctor Alexander Pedachenko, who had been on the staff of the Maternity Hospital at Tver, and lived on the second floor in the Millionnaya, but had gone to London, where he lived with his sister in Westmoreland Road, Walworth. From there he sallied forth at night, took an omnibus across London Bridge and walked to Whitechapel where he committed his secret crimes.
Alexander Pedachenko, according to Zverieff – whose record appears in the reports of the Secret Police – was aided by a friend of his named Levitski, and a young tailoress, called Winberg. The latter would approach the victim and hold her in conversation and Levitski kept watch for the police patrols, while the crimes and mutilations took place. Levitski, who had been born in London, wrote the warning postcards signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ to the Police and Press. It was through Levitski that Zverieff knew the truth.
Before giving the rest of the quotation, which is an explanation of the above, it is worth examining this statement in a little more detail, for every one of these facts comes from the man called Nideroest – even though he claims to be passing on the information given him by ‘the old Russian Anarchist Zverieff’.
The only information that Le Queux gave about Nideroest’s background was a single sentence that he had ‘found out that a man named Nideroest was a member of the Jubilee Street Club and was known in connection with the Anarchist affray at Tottenham, and also with the Sidney Street affair’. When his book was published, The Star was quick to comment that he ‘lets a large cat out of the bag when he reveals that the disclosure of the author of these atrocities originates with a Russian well known in London, named Nideroest, a spy in the Russian police …’
Nideroest first hit the national headlines in January 1909 when he used a false name to get into the hospital where one of the Tottenham Outrage gunmen, who had shot two persons and wounded numerous others, was lying wounded. Nideroest did this by pretending to be his brother. He was arrested before he could get to the wounded man and there is a photograph of him in the Daily Mirror of 27 January 1909 being led away. In court next day Detective Inspector McCarthy said that he had known him for some years and that four years earlier he had concocted a bogus story about bombs being made in Whitechapel. He was not an anarchist but a casual journalist. Nideroest’s only explanation for his behaviour was that he had gone to the hospital to work up a sensational interview and that it was only by pretending to be a relative that he could get in. The bench discharged him with a reprimand. It was this and the Sidney Street incident, after which Nideroest claimed to have helped the famous Peter the Painter escape from the house, that led Le Queux’s reviewers – who were clearly well aware of the facts – to denounce Nideroest as an ‘unscrupulous liar’.
The other and more important point, which McCormick omits to mention, is that in 1909 Nideroest was only twenty-four years old, as his photograph confirms. This means that he was three years old in 1888. So, whenever that interview with Zverieff took place, it must have been at least fifteen years after the Ripper murders. Indeed, one can pin it down even more accurately. According to Nideroest, the facts were given to him in the anarchist Jubilee Club. This club was not opened until 1906, and so it must have been after that date. McCormick, later on, offers further proof of Pedachenko’s existence by quoting an extract from an Ochrana Gazette which he had been shown by a Russian exile, Prince Belloselski (who had been given this lithograph copy by Myednikov, former head of the Moscow Ochrana, the Secret Police). This gazette was a confidential Secret Police bulletin, issued twice a month to the heads of sections to keep them up to date on what was happening in revolutionary circles. McCormick quotes one of the items contained therein:
KONOVALOV, Vasilly, alias PEDACHENKO, Alexey, alias LUISKOVO, Andrey, formerly of Tver, is now officially declared to be dead. Any files or information concerning him from district sections should be sent to the Moscow Central District of Ochrana. Such information, photographs, or identification details as may still exist might refer to KONOVALOV, PEDACHENKO or LUISKOVO either individually or collectively. If documents held by you do not contain these names, they should also be examined for any information concerning a man, answering to the description of the above, who was wanted for the murder of a woman in Paris in 1886, of the murder of five women in the East Quarter of London in 1888 and again of the murder of a woman in Petrograd in 1891.
KONOVALOV’s description is as follows: Born 1857 at Torshok, Tver. Height medium. Eyes, dark blue. Profession, junior surgeon. General description: usually wore black moustache, curled and waxed at ends. Heavy, black eyebrows. Broad-shouldered but slight build. Known to disguise himself as a woman on occasions and was arrested when in woman’s clothes in Petrograd before his detention in the asylum where he died.
This document was dated January 1909, but the actual date of receipt most probably was in the latter half of the previous year. What makes a close examination of it so fascinating is that it is asking for – not giving – information about the wanted man. The authors are not even sure that any ‘information, photographs, or identification details’, exist. The names are the permutations under which they might find him; but if these failed to throw up any information then their files were to be searched for ‘a man’ answering the description and wanted for various murders. Even more astonishingly, they knew that he was arrested in Petrograd and that he died in an asylum. With this information available to them, why had not they been able to trace him? Why did they have to put out a general appeal for any existing photographs, information or identification details? The fact that they had not been able to find him strongly suggests that, between the two control dates of 1906 and 1908, Nideroest had fed back the story which he claimed had been told to him by Zverieff, and the Ochrana had published it in turn in the hope of finding some confirmatory evidence.
But if the records did not exist, then what is the explanation for the second half of Le Queux’s extract from the ‘Great Russian Criminals’ M
anuscript:
The report of Nideroest’s discovery amused our Secret Police greatly, for, as a matter of fact, they knew the whole details at the time, and had themselves actively aided and encouraged the crimes, in order to exhibit to the world certain defects of the English police system, there having been some misunderstanding and rivalry between our own police and the British. It was, indeed, for that reason that Pedachenko, the greatest and boldest of all Russian criminal lunatics, was encouraged to go to London and commit that series of atrocious crimes, in which agents of our police aided him.
Eventually at the orders of the Ministry of the Interior the Secret Police smuggled the assassin out of London, and as Count Luiskovo he landed at Ostend, and was conducted by a secret service agent to Moscow. While there he was, a few months later, caught red-handed attempting to murder and mutilate a woman named Vogak and was eventually sent to an asylum, where he died in 1908.
After the return to Russia of Levitski and the woman Winberg the Secret Police deemed it wise to suppress them, and they were therefore exiled to Yakutsk. Such are the actual facts of the ‘Jack the Ripper Mystery’ which still puzzles the whole world.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 21