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

by Robert House

  Much of the BSU study focused on the quality of family relationships and on formative events in an offender’s childhood, such as sexual or psychological abuse. A large percentage of the offenders who were interviewed “revealed that multiple problems existed in family structures.” As one said, “The breakup of the family started progressing into something I just didn’t understand. I always thought families should always be together. I think that was part of the downfall. I had no male supervision.”16 Other subjects reported a change in “sibling order” as a result of reconstituted families, with new stepbrothers and stepsisters.

  In almost 50 percent of the cases in the FBI study, the killers reported the absence of the biological father before they reached the age of twelve. According to Douglas and Ressler, “The psychological and emotional disengagement” resulting from an absent father figure perhaps enhanced a sense of “negative human attachment or the disregarding of potential positive ones that might have been expected.”17 As one offender said, “I believe what caused the rapes on the street was when I was a kid I never had a dad around. He was gone.”18 This aspect of the generic profile of serial killers clearly fits Aaron Kozminski, whose father died in 1874, when Aaron was only nine years old. After this, Kozminski’s household was presumably dominated by females—specifically, his three older sisters (ages twenty-six, twenty, and seventeen) and his mother, Golda, who was then about fifty-two years old. The only other male in the family was Kozminski’s brother Woolf, who at the time of their father’s death was only fourteen years old. (Kozminski’s other brother, Isaac, had left Poland when Kozminski was five or six years old.) In 1881, Kozminski was separated from his mother when the family fled Russia. Arriving in London, he may have scarcely remembered or even recognized Isaac, who was fourteen years his senior. After the onset of Kozminski’s insanity around 1885, Kozminski’s older siblings seem to have assumed a role like parental figures in the reconstituted family structure, a fact that Kozminski may have resented.

  Instability of Residence

  The BSU report also showed that the majority of the interviewed killers grew up with instability of residence—half reported “occasional instability,” while another 17 percent disclosed “chronic instability or frequent moving.” The authors thought that “Frequent moving reduced the child’s opportunities to develop positive, stable relationships outside the family.”19

  This is another characteristic that seems to fit Kozminski. After moving to London as part of a massive wave of refugees, the Kozminskis found themselves in a strange and unwelcoming new city. The move itself must have been traumatic, and the family may have been fleeced by swindlers, as many Jewish immigrants were. They then probably stayed with Isaac or other relatives before finding more permanent residences. After this, Kozminski’s siblings apparently shared the responsibility of taking care of him. And following the onset of his insanity around 1885, Kozminski was quite possibly very difficult to live with and may have been shuffled back and forth between residences.

  Unsteady Employment

  Data from the BSU interviews indicated that only 20 percent of the interviewed killers reported “steady employment.” The vast majority (69 percent) said they had “unsteady employment,” and the remainder (11 percent) revealed their “unemployment.” Unsteady employment, according to Douglas and Ressler, led to a sense of failure in the real world, and to compensate for this, the offender would turn to fantasies, in which he was able to control the outcome of any situation. An offender might think that murder was an area in which he could rise above his failure, as a compensation or revenge for poor performance in other areas of life. The study also noted that 60 percent of interviewed offenders cited employment difficulties as a “precipitating stress factor” or trigger that caused them to start killing.

  From what little information we have about Kozminski’s employment, it seems that he was either unemployed or underemployed at the time of the Ripper murders. In 1891, Jacob Cohen stated that Kozminski had “not attempted any kind of work for years,” but it is not clear how many years Cohen meant. It is likely that Kozminski’s mental deterioration and his psychotic delusions made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for him to hold down a steady job.

  Compulsive Masturbation

  “Compulsive masturbation” was one of the most commonly reported traits of serial killers in the BSU study—more than 80 percent of the interviewed murderers said they engaged in compulsive masturbation in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The authors of the study theorized that the prevalence of compulsive masturbation among killers was the result of an ineffective social environment, which led to the development of negative personal traits, such as a mistrust of society at large and the inability to form close personal relationships. This, in turn, would cause a person to rely on fantasy “as a substitute for human encounter.” According to the report, “The personal traits critical to the development of the murderers in our study include a sense of social isolation, preferences for autoerotic activities and fetishes, rebelliousness, aggression, chronic lying, and a sense of privilege and entitlement. The murderers’ sense of social isolation is profound.”20

  The “cause of insanity” on Kozminski’s Colney Hatch admission record is given as “self-abuse.” This corresponds with Sir Robert Anderson’s statement that Jack the Ripper was “a loathsome creature whose utterly unmentionable vices reduced him to a lower level than that of the brute,” and Melville Macnaghten’s statement that Kozminski “became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices.” The term “self-abuse,” aka “the solitary vice” or “onanism,” was a Victorian-era euphemism for masturbation, which in the nineteenth century was thought to be the cause of numerous mental and physical disorders, including insanity. In fact, at one time almost 60 percent of medical and mental illnesses were thought to have been caused by masturbation. As one nineteenth-century expert claimed, “That insanity arises from masturbation is now beyond a doubt.” To combat the evils accruing from masturbation, various deterrents were prescribed, including mechanical restraints, male “chastity devices,” and physical discipline. Between the years 1856 and 1932, the U.S. Patent Office awarded more than thirty patents to antimasturbation devices, and one doctor even went so far as to invent a contraption that administered electric shocks to a sleeping boy’s penis on erection. Other forms of “punitive therapies,” such as penile cauterization, were experimented with.

  Although masturbation was certainly not the real cause of Kozminski’s insanity, it is an important factor in comparing him to the generic profile of serial killers. The fact that both Anderson and Macnaghten mentioned Kozminski’s self-abuse so prominently as the cause of his insanity suggests that Kozminski may have masturbated compulsively, and perhaps openly, for years. Indeed, it might have been difficult to hide such behavior from members of his family, given what were probably overcrowded living quarters, with little chance of privacy.

  The FBI’s Profile of Jack the Ripper

  In 1988, the centenary of the Jack the Ripper murders, FBI agent and self-proclaimed “mind hunter” John Douglas was asked to prepare a profile of Jack the Ripper for a television program called The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper. Douglas agreed to the task because he thought it might prove to be a useful tool for training agents and also because he found it “difficult to resist matching wits, even a century later, with the most famous murderer in history.” Roy Hazelwood, also of the BSU, assisted. The FBI’s profile was based on an analysis of the Ripper’s crime scenes, police reports, autopsy reports, postmortem photographs, victim histories, maps, and the demographics of the East End.

  The FBI profile described Jack the Ripper as a white male of average intelligence, in his mid- to late twenties, who was single and had never been married. Hazelwood and Douglas claimed that the Ripper was the type of killer who killed “as opportunity presents itself,” and thought that he “wasn’t nearly as clever as he was lucky.” He derived pleasure from post
mortem mutilation of his victims. According to Hazelwood, “By displacing or removing his victims’ sexual parts and organs, Jack was neutering or desexing them so that they were no longer women to be feared.”21 Among other things, the FBI profile noted that the Ripper lived near the crime scenes; had “poor personal hygiene, and a dishevelled appearance”; was a loner, who “had difficulty interacting appropriately with anyone, but particularly women”; “was mentally disturbed”; “was a sexually inadequate person, with a lot of generalized rage against women,” who “simultaneously hated and feared women”; and “did not have any degree of medical knowledge.”22 These aspects of the FBI’s profile clearly seem to fit Kozminski. Perhaps most important is the claim that the Ripper had “a lot of generalized rage against women,” and “simultaneously hated and feared women.” This fits Macnaghten’s albeit uncorroborated statement that Kozminski had a “great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies.”23

  The producers of the TV show presented Douglas and Hazelwood (and the other panelists) with five Ripper suspects and asked whether any of them fit the profile. Both Douglas and Hazelwood came to the conclusion that Kozminski was the strongest suspect on the list. “Our profile fit one of the suspects almost dead bang,” Hazelwood said. “That doesn’t mean he did it. It simply means he fit the characteristics and traits that we believe would have been possessed by the individual known as Jack the Ripper. And that was an individual by the name of Kozminski.”24

  One of the classifications used in the FBI’s profiling model for serial killers is the differentiation between organized and disorganized killers. Generally speaking, an organized offender is intelligent and controlling, plans the crimes in advance, and is socially competent. This type of offender is responsible for the archetype of the “Hollywood” serial killer—a highly intelligent monster like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, outwitting the police at every turn. Disorganized killers, on the other hand, are less socially competent and more impulsive, and their crimes are often opportunistic and random in nature. According to the FBI, a disorganized-type killer is usually a person of “low intelligence or low birth-status in the family,” who often has an instable work history and is unmarried, either living alone or with parental figures. He is “preoccupied with obsessional and/or primitive thoughts” and “may have developed a well-defined delusional system.”25 He is fearful of people, is often sexually incompetent, and may have sexual aversions.

  The FBI profile of Jack the Ripper shows that he fits the description of a disorganized-type serial killer. “We thought that,” said Hazelwood, “because of the locations where he committed four of the five crimes. They were outdoors—they were on the streets or in a courtyard—a very high-risk crime. In other words, whoever this person was, was almost oblivious to the risk. All the bodies were very quickly discovered. So there’s not a lot of planning that went into those crimes.”26 “I don’t see how anyone who knows anything at all about violent crime can say that was an organized crime,” Hazelwood later added.27 The disorganized offender also generally uses a “blitz style attack” and kills suddenly, often from behind, as the Ripper probably did. The study noted that a disorganized offender often “depersonalizes the victim. Specific areas of the body may be targeted for extreme brutality. Overkill or excessive assault to the face is often an attempt to dehumanize the victim.” In addition, with a disorganized killer, “Any sexually sadistic acts, often in the form of mutilation, are usually performed after death.” The Ripper seems to fit all of the previous characteristics. Laura Richards, of Scotland Yard’s Homicide Prevention Unit, stated that the Ripper is “certainly no Einstein. We know that he’s a risk-taker, he’s impulsive, irresponsible, but this is someone who hasn’t been detected, and you can say 80 percent of that’s probably due to chance and luck, and 20 percent may be down to his tactical planning around what he’s done.”28

  Many of the characteristics of a disorganized killer also fit what we know of Kozminski. Kozminski was of “low birth-status,” being the youngest child in the family, and had an instable work history, as noted in his asylum records. He was single and lived with parental figures (siblings) who took care of him. He was also obsessed with delusions, as is made clear in his Colney Hatch file.

  A Motivational Model

  One of the biggest questions in any serial killer case is why? How could a man have so much hatred and anger that he could unleash such fury on innocent women? The FBI’s study in this regard focused on the effect of negative formative events and environmental factors in the development of a serial killer–type mentality. Specifically, the study theorized that an “ineffective” and hateful social environment (especially during childhood) might cause a potential killer to develop “cognitive distortions” and negative attitudes, which would later provide a justification for his violent acts toward others. As the study noted, “Many of the murderers felt they were not dealt with fairly by adults throughout their formative years.” In addition, the BSU study theorized that because the offenders believed “that they live in an unjust world, fantasy emerges as an important escape and a place in which to express emotion and control regarding other human beings.”29

  Many modern criminologists theorize that Jack the Ripper must have experienced traumatic events in his life that left him with a sense of powerlessness and humiliation—plagued by feelings of inadequacy, crippled by resentment and anger, and desiring revenge against the society that had wronged him. According to Richards, there is often “something that’s traumatic, something around physical, emotional, or sometimes psychological abuse which has led [violent serial offenders] to become the person they are. Powerless people would always seek to take the power back, and I put Jack the Ripper in that bracket. . . . The Ripper’s cruelty had its roots in something he himself had suffered.”30

  In this context, the anti-Semitic persecution that Kozminski experienced, both in his youth in Russia and again in his teens and young adult life in London, may provide a plausible explanation for his general anger toward society. As we have seen, the Whitechapel murders did not cause the anti-Semitism in the East End of London—instead, they merely aggravated a festering hatred of Jews that had already risen to the surface. The East End Jews were blamed for various things prior to the murders—high unemployment, unfair competition, overcrowding, and so on—and as a result, anti-Semitism in the East End was on the rise during the decade that led up to the Ripper murders. It seems possible that the escalation of anti-Semitic tension and rhetoric in late 1887 and early 1888 may have been a trigger that caused the Ripper to go beyond fantasizing to actually committing murder.

  Was it merely a coincidence that the Ripper murders started just as anti-Semitism in the East End reached a fevered peak? The murders began in the middle of the public outcry against sweating in the Jewish tailoring industry, while two government commissions loomed: one to investigate Jewish immigration, and the other to investigate the “social plague” of foreign-born sweaters and tailors, who were perceived as taking jobs away from native-born English citizens. Kozminski’s family was at the receiving end of all of this blame and derision, which came not only from native-born English, but also from Jewish socialists, primarily those of the Berner Street club, who were among the most outspoken opponents of the oppressive masters in the tailoring industry. Both Jews and sweaters in the tailoring trade undoubtedly perceived the commissions as official government sanction and sympathy for anti-Jewish and antisweating sentiments in East London. The Kozminski family was targeted in both instances. The situation was tense, and by early 1888, the newspapers had suggested that pogroms might break out in the East End. The House of Lords Committee on Sweating met for the first time on March 16, 1888, just two weeks before the murder of Emma Smith, the first of the officially documented Whitechapel murders. On June 27, 1888, the London Tailors’ Association met at a hall on Goulston Street to address a large audience about the evils of the sweating system. On
ly ten days later, Martha Tabram was brutally murdered in the George Yard Buildings. Goulston Street was, of course, the location of the chalked message, possibly left by the murderer, which read, “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

  Anti-Semitism in the East End ratcheted up another few notches in the weeks leading up to the murders of Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes. It was widely reported that the police were looking for a Jewish suspect, and the much-publicized apprehension of John Pizer added more fuel to the fire. The police were clearly worried about the possibility of riots against the Jews. And indeed, riots very nearly broke out on September 15, when the East London Observer reported, “It was repeatedly asserted that no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible crime as that of Hanbury-street and that it must have been done by a Jew—and forthwith the crowds proceeded to threaten and abuse such of the unfortunate Hebrews as they found in the streets.”31 The Goulston Street graffito must be considered in this context, because it expressed a theme that had widespread currency at the time—specifically, blaming the Jews.

  As an immigrant Jew, Kozminski had essentially been blamed for his whole life. In Russia, the Jews were called leeches, despised as a mistrusted alien presence, and blamed for exploiting the Russian peasantry. Such views were unofficially endorsed by the Russian government, which itself unfairly blamed the Jews for various societal problems. In the 1870s, the decade of Kozminski’s adolescence and early teenage years, there was a further increase in anti-Semitism in Russia. The decade began with violent anti-Jewish pogroms in Odessa in 1871. Ten years later, the Jews were wrongly blamed for the assassination of Czar Alexander II, which led to much more widespread and devastating pogroms across the southwestern regions of the Pale. The Jews were even blamed for the pogroms themselves, because the government declared that Jews had “innate views that nourished the hostility of their neighbors, especially among the lower classes.” While the Jews were robbed and beaten, the Russian authorities stood by, in some cases powerless to stop what was happening, and in others completely disinterested in protecting the Jews from attack. The general sentiment was that the Jews deserved whatever happened to them. They were constantly reminded that the violence of the pogroms came about as a direct result of their own collective guilt.