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

by Robert House

  The pogroms caused thousands of Jewish refugees to migrate to the East End of London. Once again, fifteen-year-old Kozminski would have found himself in a similarly hostile environment, plagued by a festering distrust of the foreign invaders and characterized, once again, by Judenhetze and scapegoating. By 1888, the Jews were routinely being blamed for unfair labor practices, strike breaking, and unemployment in the East End.

  It is not a stretch to imagine that Kozminski may have begun to develop a general resentment of society and authority figures as a result of such factors. After noticing the inability of the Russian police to protect the Jews during the pogroms and later, amid the overwhelming criminality of the East End, Kozminski may have begun to perceive that the social system and the police were generally weak and ineffectual in stopping crime and violence. In addition, in both Russia and London, the police and other authority figures (for example, judges) often sympathized with the anti-Semitic sentiments of the mob. Likewise, at the highest levels of government authority, both Ignatiev’s commissions investigating the 1881 Russian pogroms and the British parliamentary inquiries into sweating and the alien question seemed to validate the notion that the Jews were in fact to blame for the outpouring of hatred and aggression against them. Kozminski must have perceived that both he and the Jews in general were being treated unfairly. Such a realization, combined with the volatile admixture of paranoid schizophrenia, might have caused him to mistrust adults and authority figures and led to the development of an antisocial (that is, psychopathic) personality.

  Along the lines of such an interpretation, the message “The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing” may be a key to understanding Jack the Ripper’s motivation to commit murder. Kozminski’s feelings of persecution may have developed into full-blown paranoid delusions, supporting, for example, the belief that he was being poisoned. If such factors worked their way into both Kozminski’s psychoses and his violent fantasies, then the murders might have been a sort of psychological retaliation against an anti-Semitic society that “blamed” the Jews for their own oppression. Indeed, the murders could be seen as a sort of climax to a decade of rising anti-Semitism, representing a rupture in the fabric of the East End tensions between Jews and gentiles.

  24

  Geographic Profiling

  Geographic profiling is a technique in which a mathematical model, based on a spatial analysis of the location of crime scenes, is used to predict the approximate location of a criminal’s residence. This technique, first proposed by D. Kim Rossmo, is now used in police jurisdictions in both the United States and Great Britain. Geographic profiling developed over time in association with a broad range of methodologies, including distance-to-crime research, demographic analysis, environmental psychology, landscape analysis, and psychological criminal profiling. In practice, geographic profiling relies on “certain known propensities of serial criminals,” such as “a tendency to hunt in known areas” and “a desire to disguise the home location.”1 The general idea is that a criminal’s behavior in a given environment is based not only on the external, physical, and geographical features of an area, but also on the criminal’s psychological and emotional perception of that area. Geographic analysis is partly based on “rational choice theory” as well, which holds that “patterns of behavior in societies reflect the choices made by individuals as they try to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs.”2

  Most modern researchers believe that Jack the Ripper was a resident of the East End, whose familiarity with the district’s mazelike streets, courtyards, and alleys helped him avoid detection by the police. In addition to the location of the crime scenes, a few other bits of evidence may suggest hints about where the Ripper lived. Ideally, all of these geographic elements would point to the address of the killer. For this reason, it would be nice to know exactly where Kozminski was living when the murders took place in the summer and the fall of 1888. Various sources tell us that Aaron Kozminski lived in the very heart of the district in which the murders were committed. George Sims, moreover, wrote about a Polish Jew suspect (clearly, a reference to Macnaghten’s “Kosminski”) who “was the sole occupant of certain premises in Whitechapel after night-fall. This man was in the district during the whole period covered by the Whitechapel murders.”3 We do not actually know for certain where Kozminski resided in 1888, but we can infer where he was probably living to a good degree of certainty.

  Kozminski’s two admissions to Mile End are the only known occasions when his address was ever recorded. On July 12, 1890, he was living at 3 Sion Square, the home of his brother Woolf Abrahams, and on February 4, 1891, he resided at 16 Greenfield Street with his sister, Matilda, and her husband, Morris Lubnowski. This suggests that Kozminski lived with Woolf for some time prior to July 1890 and then with Matilda and Morris for a period of time before February 1891—but obviously it does not tell us Kozminski’s home address in 1888. We can guess that Kozminski, as an unemployed schizophrenic, was unable to take care of himself, financially or otherwise. If Kozminski did not reside with family members, he may have been homeless at times, sleeping in poor shelters or on the streets. Yet it seems fairly safe to assume that he probably lived with his siblings during most, if not all, of the time he was in London, from 1881 to 1891. It is also possible that Kozminski’s siblings shared the responsibility of housing him, and that he stayed with all three siblings at various times. This means that we can narrow down Kozminski’s probable address during the Ripper murders to one of three likely locations: either 16 Greenfield Street (the home of Kozminski’s sister, Matilda, and her husband, Morris), 74 Greenfield Street (where Isaac lived and had his workshop), or wherever Woolf was living in 1888.

  One likely possibility is that Kozminski lived with Woolf. Woolf was closest to Kozminski in age, and he is listed as “nearest relative” on Kozminski’s workhouse and asylum records. Unfortunately, Woolf’s address during the time of the Jack the Ripper murders in the summer and the fall of 1888 is still a mystery. He lived at 62 Greenfield Street in July 1887, but by 1888 he had moved, and his address remains unknown until March 1889, by which time he had moved to 34 Yalford Street, a narrow street parallel to Greenfield Street. It is possible that Woolf lived on Yalford Street during the Ripper murders, but this is still not known for sure. Yalford Street was a narrow street of rundown slum houses inhabited by very poor Jews. The tenements were overcrowded and dilapidated. A sanitary inspector reported in 1884 that many houses on the street were “without water supply or dustbins, that the woodwork was rotten through filth, that the stones of the yard exuded when trodden upon damp filth, and that overpowering smells, from the condition of the houses, pervaded the interiors.”4 If nothing else, this sounds like a fitting description of the street where Jack the Ripper would have lived. In any case, it seems almost certain that Woolf resided in that immediate vicinity in 1888, because, although he moved several times in the 1880s, he never strayed far from Greenfield Street.

  The other likely possibility, as previously discussed, is that Kozminski may have inhabited the workshop of his other brother, Isaac, at the time of the murders. This hypothesis is compelling because it provides a secluded location where Kozminski “could go and come and get rid of his blood-stains in secret,” as Anderson wrote.5 Several sources would seem to back up such a theory. Sims, for one, spoke of a Polish Jew suspect who was the “sole occupant of certain premises” in the East End.6 And Henry Cox mentioned conducting surveillance on a suspect who occupied several shops. Either way, it seems almost certain that Kozminski lived on either Greenfield Street or Yalford Street in 1888, and we may use these addresses interchangeably in our geographic profiling model, because they are so close to each other.

  One of the simplest applications of geographic profiling is circle theory, developed by David Canter, the director of the Centre for Investigative Psychology, which is based at the University of Liverpool. Circle theory proposes that if all of the crime scenes of a single offe
nder are placed within a circle on a map, the offender’s residence would probably lie within that circle, close to the center. Often, there is also a “buffer zone” in the immediate vicinity of the offender’s home in which no crimes will be committed. Thus, for the most simple geographic analysis of the Jack the Ripper murders, one would draw the smallest circle that contains the murder sites of the five canonical Ripper victims: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Kelly. The center of this “smallest circle” is located 260 feet north of St. Mary Matfelon Church on Whitechapel High Street.

  By all accounts, St. Mary Matfelon was the epicenter of the earliest Whitechapel murders. The murder of Martha Tabram occurred only eight hundred feet from St. Mary’s. Emily Holland also claimed that she last spoke to Nichols, the first “canonic” Ripper victim, “nearly opposite the parish church” at the corner of Whitechapel High Street and Osborn Street. The man whom the Star reported had been seen wiping his hands shortly after the Stride murder was sitting on a doorstep in Church Lane, adjacent to St. Mary’s church. And Emma Smith (who admittedly is not thought by most researchers to have been a Ripper victim) claimed that she was accosted by two or three youths who began to follow her from St. Mary’s. The distance from St. Mary’s to Isaac Abrahams’s workshop on Greenfield Street was a mere eight hundred feet. In short, Kozminski could have walked from his likely residence on Greenfield Street to any of the murder sites in only a few minutes. The distance from Isaac’s shop to Dutfield’s Yard, the site of the Stride murder, was only about nine hundred feet and can be walked in about three minutes. Moreover, the largest apparent buffer zone within the smallest circle containing all of the murder sites is centered around Whitechapel Road just north of Fieldgate Street, and slightly to the east of the circle’s center. The center of this zone was just a one- or two-minute walk from Isaac’s shop.

  In reality, geographic profiling is more complex than this, and crime scenes are often distributed in complex spatial patterns. As Dr. Karen Shalev, of the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, pointed out, one problem with circle theory is that “the use of the two furthest crimes as an indicator of the criminal range makes a judgement about the behaviours of an offender throughout a crime series by examining the information from only two crimes, and then further generalises these behaviours to the entire series. Second, all the remaining crimes are being ignored.”7 Another problem is that the offender may live in numerous different residences during a crime series.

  Also contributing to the difficulties in this method, according to Joshua David Kent, are “the psychological and physical boundaries that, among other impedance factors, conspire to distort an already complex analytical investigation.”8 For example, a recent spatial analysis of the Ripper crimes by Colin Roberts used not a circle, but instead an oval tilted at a slight angle (approximately parallel to Whitechapel Road). According to Roberts, the oval shape was a better approximation of the spatial distribution of the crime scenes, on account of “the mobility provided by Aldgate High Street/Whitechapel High Street/Whitechapel Road.” Based on his model, Roberts claimed, “There was merely a 22 percent likelihood that Jack the Ripper resided in closer proximity to the murder-site epicenter than did Aaron Kosminski.”9

  It should be noted that all of the Whitechapel murders—with the exception of the murder of Stride at Berner Street—occurred north of Whitechapel High Street/Whitechapel Road/Aldgate High Street, and it is possible that this major thoroughfare was a sort of psychological boundary in the mind of the Ripper. Kozminski lived in the area south of Whitechapel High Street/Whitechapel Road and may have considered the area around his home a sort of buffer zone in which he did not commit any murders. Such behavior is addressed by Canter, who described two models of offender behavior, known as the “marauder” and the “commuter” models. The marauder model assumes that an offender will “strike out” from his home base in the commission of his crimes, whereas the commuter model assumes that an offender will travel some distance from his home base before engaging in criminal activity. According to Rossmo, “For any crime to occur, there must have been an intersection in both time and place between the victim and the offender.”10 In the case of Jack the Ripper, a sexual predator who targeted prostitutes, this means he had to go where the prostitutes were—which is to say, Spitalfields. In 1889, Arthur G. Morrison referred to “White’s Row, or Dorset Street, with its hideous associations,” and described Fashion Street, Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street, and Wentworth Street with “dark, silent, uneasy shadows passing and crossing—human vermin in this reeking sink.”11 This was the center of the high-crime area, the area with the greatest incidence of prostitutes, and, we may assume, as the police did in 1888, the Ripper’s primary hunting ground.

  By contrast, the area south of Whitechapel High Street and Whitechapel Road was at least somewhat more respectable. For example, Morrison described walking around in the Jewish residential neighborhoods south of Whitechapel High Street, in the vicinity of Mansell Street, Great Alie Street, and Leman Street, as follows: “The houses are old, large, of the very shabbiest-genteel aspect, and with a great appearance of being snobbishly ashamed of the odd trades to which many of their rooms are devoted.” He added, “We are tired, perhaps, of all this respectability.”12 The areas in the vicinity of Greenfield Street were somewhat worse, according to Booth’s 1889 Poverty Map, but still better than the “vicious, semi-criminal” areas around Flower and Dean Street and Dorset Street. For example, when speaking of Berner Street, P.C. Smith noted, “Very few prostitutes were to be seen there.”13 The location of the murder sites seems to suggest that the Ripper’s preferred hunting area did not generally include the more respectable areas south of Whitechapel Road, including Greenfield Street and thereabouts. We can guess that the Ripper would not normally go searching for prostitutes in this area, especially if it was closer to his own residence.

  In certain cases, however (especially with a disorganized or psychotic killer), if an opportunity arises when the killer feels comfortable enough to kill with minimum risk, he may choose to kill outside his normal activity space. “Routine Activity Theory,” developed by Larry Cohen and Marcus Felson in 1979, explored this concept and found that sometimes serial killers would commit murders with little or no planning. Stride’s murder may fall into this category, a fact that may explain the anomalies in that particular murder, such as the comparatively early hour of the event. If Kozminski was Jack the Ripper, he may have considered the Stride murder site to be riskier, because he was only about a fifth of a mile away from his residence, probably within what he considered his buffer zone, in a somewhat respectable area inhabited mostly by immigrant Poles and Germans.

  Apart from the murder sites, the only geographic clue to the Ripper’s residence was the bloody apron found in Goulston Street, along with the chalked message, “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” It is likely that this clue indicates the general direction of the killer’s residence, because after the Eddowes murder, the Ripper would have wanted to return to the safety of his home as fast as he could. It is clear, simply by looking at a map, that the apron was dropped along a route in the general direction of Kozminski’s residence. But let’s go a step further. If we assume that Kozminski had just murdered Eddowes in Mitre Square and wanted to get back to Greenfield Street as safely and quickly as possible, which way would he have gone? On a map, the most direct route would have been to walk south on Duke Street and then northeast along Aldgate/Whitechapel High Street. The problem is that this would have required Kozminski to walk along a busy main thoroughfare, which was likely to be populated with people and police. In fact, if the killer had taken this route, he would have walked right past Detective Halse and two other City detective constables who were, at the time, standing at the corner of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street, near St. Botolph’s Church.

  Clearly, the Ripper would have preferred to take an alternate route, which would allow h
im to skulk along, unseen, on the dark back streets. The most obvious alternative would have been to walk down Wentworth and Old Montague streets, a route that snakes along roughly parallel to, and to the north of, Whitechapel High Street. The most direct way to get to this street from Mitre Square was via St. James Place, then northeast along Stoney Lane and past Goulston Street, where the apron was ditched. Kozminski would have continued walking along Old Montague Street until he could slip down an alley and quickly cross over Whitechapel Road to Fieldgate Street to his home. Anyone who studies a map of the area will come to the same conclusion—simply, that the Ripper dropped the apron along what would have been the safest direct getaway route leading from Mitre Square back to Kozminski’s likely residence. In fact, if this route is plotted on a map, it looks somewhat like an arrow pointing toward a bull’s-eye, the center of which represents (generally speaking) both Kozminski’s home and the center of the smallest circle containing all of the murder sites.

  So it seems that every geographic analysis of the Ripper murders fits with a model that has the Ripper living at or near Kozminski’s presumed residence on either Greenfield Street or Yalford Street.

  25

  Schizophrenia and Violence

  Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.