Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  So, was the Crawford letter the key that led Sir Robert Anderson to the discovery of Aaron Kozminski as a suspect? Admittedly, it seems unlikely that an East End Jewish woman in such a predicament would have chosen to contact James Ludovic Lindsay, of all people, a member of the House of Lords, who lived in lavish surroundings in Westminster. On the surface of it, a meeting between two people from such completely opposite ends of the social spectrum may seem unlikely. Yet in 1888, Lindsay was a member of the Lords Committee on the Sweating System, and as such he had cause to interact with the sweaters of the East End, and he may have even traveled to the East End to inspect the sweatshops in person. It is unclear how, exactly, such a meeting might have taken place, but at the very least, the Earl of Crawford’s membership on the Sweating Committee presents an intriguing possible point of contact between him and the Kozminski family.

  Ultimately, it is difficult to come to any hard and fast conclusions about these disparate references to a female informant, and it is unclear whether any of them had anything to do with Kozminski. Trying to make sense out of the events in Kozminski’s life is difficult, to say the least. We know a few things for certain, and others may be inferred or guessed at. These are the pieces of the puzzle. They give us a very general idea of what may have happened and in what sequence. Yet we simply do not know enough to form the complete and true picture.

  Sir Robert Anderson. At the time of the Ripper murders, Anderson was the assistant commissioner (crime) and the head of the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department. He later wrote that Jack the Ripper’s identity was a “definitely ascertained fact” known to the police.

  Donald Sutherland Swanson circa early 1880s. Swanson was the man in charge of the Ripper inquiry and the author of the famous “Swanson marginalia” (see below).

  The “Swanson Marginalia,” Swanson’s penciled notes written in Anderson’s autobiography. The annotations are on page 138 (left) and the notes on the endpaper (right). Anderson wrote that the identity of Jack the Ripper was known to the police, but he refused to name the suspect. On the endpaper, among other notes, Swanson penciled in, “Kosminski was the suspect.”

  The Police Seaside Convalescent Home at 51 Clarendon Villas, Hove, circa 1890. This was possibly where Aaron Kozminski was identified by a witness whom Donald Anderson described as “the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer.”

  Melville Macnaghten’s famous memorandum (above) claimed that Aaron Kozminski “had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies.” Macnaghten added that “there were many circs connected with this man which made him a strong ‘suspect.’ ” Despite this, Macnaghten did not agree with Anderson’s “theory” that Kozminski was the Ripper.

  Mile End Old Town Workhouse.

  Aaron Kozminski’s July 12, 1890, admission to Mile End Old Town Workhouse. His name is misspelled “Kosorimski.”

  On February 7, 1891, Aaron Kozminski was admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, suffering from “mania” and “incoherence.” His medical certificate noted, “He declared that he is guided & his movements altogether controlled by an instinct that informs his mind.” The “Supposed Cause” of insanity was entered as “unknown,” but in red next to this was written “Self-Abuse”—a colloquial term for masturbation, then widely thought to be the cause of numerous disorders, including insanity.

  Leavesden Asylum for Imbeciles. Although Leavesden was nominally an “Imbeciles’ Asylum,” the main criteria for admission were that a patient be both chronic and not dangerous—and even these criteria were not closely adhered to, because Leavesden admitted both acute cases and dangerous patients.

  Leavesden Asylum Register of Patients, detailing Aaron Kozminski’s physical decline. The entry at the top noted that Kozminski had “Hallucinations of sight and hearing [and] is very excitable and troublesome at times.” On March 21, 1919, the night attendant S. Bennett noted, “Died in my presence at 5 AM.”

  Charles Booth, the son of a Liverpool cotton merchant, was a successful businessman and a dedicated philanthropist. From 1886 until 1903, he conducted extensive surveys into poverty, industry, and religion in the East End. In October 1888, at the height of the Ripper scare, one of Booth’s researchers was doing follow-up surveys of tailors living on Yalford and Settles streets, in the neighborhood where the Kozminskis lived.

  City detective Henry Cox spoke of conducting surveillance on a suspect who “occupied several shops in the East End, but from time to time he became insane.” “The Jews in the street soon became aware of our presence,” Cox wrote. “We told them we were factory inspectors looking for tailors and capmakers who employed boys and girls under age, and pointing out the evils accruing from the sweaters’ system.”

  A notice of the dissolution of a mantle manufactory partnership between Woolf Abrahams and the elusive Jacob Cohen—the man who testified regarding Kozminski’s insanity.

  The Great Synagogue on Duke Street. It was under the street lamp (bottom left) at the entrance of Church Passage that Kate Eddowes was last seen alive. She was talking to a man, later apparently identified as Aaron Kozminski.

  The Dolphin Pub was in this building at 97-99 Whitechapel Road (today occupied by the Islamic Bank of Britain). When Aaron Kozminski died in 1919, his brother Isaac was living upstairs with his son Mark and Mark’s wife.

  The center of the smallest circle containing the murder sites of the five canonic victims was a mere 350 yards from Aaron’s likely residence on Greenfield Street. (Some of the noncanonic victims are also shown.)

  Aaron Kozminski’s grave. The headstone was made out of a soft sandstone. The inscription, now almost completely worn away, once read:

  AARON KOZMINSKY WHO DIED 24TH MARCH 1919 AGED 54 YEARS DEEPLY MISSED BY HIS BROTHER, SISTERS, RELATIVES AND FRIENDS

  May his dear Soul Rest in Peace

  A theatrical version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde premiered at the Lyceum Theatre on August 4, 1888, just two days before the murder of Martha Tabram. The London Times’s review of the play described Richard Mansfield’s performance as “morbidly fascinating.” Much like the twentieth-century serial killer Ted Bundy, Jekyll was “constantly haunted with a horror of the crimes of his other self.”

  Part Four

  A Modern Perspective

  22

  Not Guilty?

  “The fact is, we have all been a great deal puzzled because the affair is so simple and yet baffles us altogether.”

  “Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing that puts you at fault,” said my friend.

  —“The Purloined Letter,” Edgar Allan Poe

  When the Swanson marginalia were revealed in 1987, Charles Nevin of the Daily Telegraph penned an article declaring that “Sensational New Evidence” had emerged in the one-hundred-year-old case: “After all the increasingly bizarre suspects, and all the ingeniously constructed theories, a piece of hard evidence: nothing less than the identification of Jack the Ripper by the solid, stolid Scots Chief Inspector who investigated the Whitechapel murders.” Nevin’s article described Martin Fido’s recent discovery of Aaron Kozminski in asylum records and briefly summarized what was known about the suspect, noting that among Ripperologists, “deep analysis has already started.” He then put forth the million-dollar question “Is the case really closed?” For an answer, Nevin turned to author Donald Rumbelow, who was then arguably the world’s leading Ripper expert. Rumbelow pointed out that the marginalia actually proved very little, except that the police suspected a man but did not have sufficient evidence to convict him. According to the article, Rumbelow could not “conceive of a serial sexual killer of increasing intensity who could survive without killing again between 1888 and 1891.” In conclusion, he gave an explanation that would become a mantra to “anti-Andersonites” for years to follow. “We’re dealing with old men’s memories,” he said. “The case is not closed.”1

  It was not long befo
re the debate quickly degenerated into a muddled mess of obfuscation and confusion. In 1994, Philip Sugden wrote The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, widely and deservedly considered the best book yet written on the subject of the Ripper murders. In the book, Sugden referred to Kozminski as a “sad and pathetic suspect” and described Sir Robert Anderson’s statements about the Ripper as “addle headed nonsense,” based on “lapses of memory.” Anderson had become senile and confused, Sugden argued, and was living in a sort of fantasy world—over the years, the ex-head of the CID gradually convinced himself that he had solved the case and wanted to boast of it. Of course, this meant that Donald Swanson must have been confused or lying as well, because he corroborated most of what Anderson wrote about Kozminski. The only logical explanation, in Sugden’s opinion, was that both men were experiencing the same brand of revisionist self-delusional thinking. As Sugden put it, “Anderson and Swanson had come to inhabit a world of wish dreams.”2 Other Ripperologists followed Sugden’s lead until eventually Anderson’s “definitely ascertained fact” about the Ripper’s identity had been rejected by the majority of experts in the case.

  Given the apparent zeal with which Ripperologists chose to dismiss the unambiguous statements of the head of Scotland Yard’s CID, one wonders how much “deep analysis” actually took place. In fact, it seems the main objection to Kozminski as a suspect was simply that in the minds of many Ripperologists, he just did not fit their “profile” of the Ripper. Yes, Kozminski was insane, and, according to Melville Macnaghten, he had homicidal tendencies and a “great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class.”3 And yes, he threatened his sister with a knife and lived in the very heart of the Ripper’s hunting ground. But his Colney Hatch admission also indicated that he was a compulsive masturbator and that he ate food out of the gutter. This clearly did not fit the popular image of Jack the Ripper as a suave and sophisticated killer, roaming the foggy London streets wearing a top hat and a tuxedo and carrying an ominously suggestive black leather bag.

  An additional problem was that Kozminski’s transfer to Leavesden Asylum for Imbeciles led many researchers to conclude that Kozminski was little more than a drooling idiot. Fido, for example, noted, “No sexual serialist had ever been an imbecile.” Fido admitted that he did not pay much attention to Kozminski as a suspect and dismissed him almost immediately.4 Likewise, Sugden referred to Kozminski as “a harmless imbecile.” Kozminski’s Leavesden case notes were cited in support of this theory. One entry, for example, stated that he was “Dull and stupid in manner,” while another read that he “cannot answer questions of a simple nature.”5 Yet what is often ignored is that Kozminski’s surviving Leavesden case notes begin in 1910, almost twenty years after the murders. Kozminski’s Colney Hatch case notes, on the other hand, generally described him as “demented,” “excitable,” and “incoherent,” which are symptoms that are consistent with his diagnosis of “mania.”6

  More important, the claim that Kozminski was an “imbecile” in any sense of the word is simply wrong. In the nineteenth century, the word imbecile was a strictly defined medical and legal term for one of three classifications of insanity. According to the Asylums Act of 1845, an imbecile was a person who was both non compos mentis from birth and incurable—this would now be referred to as mental retardation or an intellectual disability. The idea that Kozminski was an imbecile was apparently based on both an inaccurate understanding of the history of British asylums and a clumsy interpretation of Kozminski’s medical records. It seems that Fido and Sugden simply assumed that all patients in Imbecile Asylums were actually imbeciles. As we have seen, however, the main criteria for admittance to Leavesden were that a patient be both incurable and not disruptive. As a result, Leavesden and other “Imbecile asylums” housed various categories of the sick poor, including both lunatics (insane people) and imbeciles (mentally handicapped people). The 1901 census of patients at Leavesden Asylum confirms this, for on the page listing Kozminski, almost half of the twenty-five patients were categorized as “lunatics” (48 percent), and the rest (52 percent) as “imbeciles.” Kozminski was recorded as a “lunatic.”7

  In fact, there is no document that ever refers to Kozminski as an imbecile. On the contrary, both Dr. Houchin’s medical certificate and Henry Chambers’s committal order list Kozminski as a “person of unsound mind,” another legally defined medical term that, according to author David Wright, was “used more or less interchangeably” with “lunatic.”8 Of course, this is consistent with Kozminski’s probable diagnosis of schizophrenia. It is likely that Kozminski was admitted to Leavesden because his disease was clearly incurable and because by 1894 his schizophrenia had degenerated to the point where he was catatonic and thus not disruptive. In the asylums of the late nineteenth century, however, no one cared very much to differentiate between incurable lunatics and the mentally retarded. There was no treatment for any of them, so they were all simply thrown in together and managed.

  Another common argument against Kozminski as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders is that as a schizophrenic, he would not have been able to engage his victims in conversation without arousing suspicion, nor would he be “together” enough to carry out the murders and avoid detection. The assumption, again, is that Kozminski was visibly and uncontrollably psychotic—essentially, a drooling idiot wandering around mumbling to himself. Such perceptions are based, at least in part, on Dr. Houchin’s statement that Kozminski “refuses food from others because he is told to do so and eats out of the gutter for the same reason,” and Jacob Cohen’s statement that Kozminski “goes about the streets and picks up bits of bread out of the gutter.”9 Yet we must remember that Kozminski ate food from the gutter because his “instinct” told him to do so, which suggests that he may have been under the paranoid delusion that he was being poisoned. As we shall later see, if Kozminski was a paranoid schizophrenic (as opposed to a disorganized schizophrenic), he may have been more highly functioning and able to hide his disorder from others. Finally, keep in mind that Houchin’s medical certificate was written more than two years after the last canonical Ripper murder, and Kozminski’s behavior in February 1891 should not be taken to represent what he was like in 1888. The fact that Kozminski was able to speak in his own defense for the dog-muzzling charge in December 1889 supports this contention.

  Another point raised against Kozminski as a suspect in the Ripper case is that he was listed as “not dangerous to others” in asylum records. Of course, the “nonviolent” aspect of Kozminski’s admission entry appears to be contradicted by the fact that he had threatened to attack his sister with a knife. In addition, while at Colney Hatch, Kozminski was described as “at times excited & violent,” and on at least one occasion he attempted to attack an asylum attendant with a chair. Yet we must remember that Kozminski was brought to Mile End Old Town Workhouse by his family, and it seems highly unlikely that they would have offered up any information that would incriminate Kozminski as the Ripper, especially since, according to Swanson, they had just gone through the ordeal of being under police surveillance. Along the same lines, it has been argued that if the police believed Kozminski was the Ripper, they would have informed the asylum staff that he was dangerous, regardless of what the family told the asylum officials. Despite what the police may have believed about Kozminski, however, they clearly lacked sufficient evidence to convict him, and it is unknown whether the police had any involvement in Kozminski’s committal at all. Even if they did, the police would not have wanted the public to discover that they suspected they knew the Ripper’s identity but were unable to convict him. The police may have decided that the best solution was to put the Ripper away quietly and hush up the whole affair. They must have been aware that if they had informed the asylum staff that Kozminski was a Ripper suspect, word would almost certainly have leaked out. As researcher Chris Phillips noted,

  If [the police] did communicate their suspicions to Colney Hatch, where would those suspicions have been noted
? Given the sensitivity of the situation, would they necessarily have been entered in the documents that survive, which would have been routinely accessible to so many of the asylum staff? Or would they have been made known to senior staff, and communicated to others on a “need to know” basis?10

  Much of the debate over these points is mere speculation, admittedly. We still do not know enough to answer these riddles. Still, if we step back from the fray and look at all of this with a fresh perspective, the widespread dismissal of Kozminski as a Ripper suspect may start to look surprising. After all, Anderson and Swanson were unarguably in a position to know more about the case than anybody else, and most Ripperologists (apart from Fido) now concede that Kozminski was almost certainly “Anderson’s suspect.” Aside from a few errors in the Swanson marginalia and the Macnaghten memorandum, the chain of reasoning is clear and scarcely disputed. So, why has Kozminski been dismissed as a suspect?