by Robert House
Hazelwood argued that societal rejection and a sense of “social inadequacy” would drive a potential lust murderer “away from the expression of normal or healthy sexuality” to “a world in which [he] imagined increasingly sadistic and violent erotic encounters.” Such fantasies are reinforced through compulsive masturbation and typically revolve around paraphilias, or “sexual arousal to objects or situations that are not part of normative stimulation.” As he noted,
Lust murderers exhibit a progression of brutality, and each subsequent murder becomes more vicious and sadistic. Erotophonophiliacs establish a violently sexualized relationship in their minds that they have rehearsed repeatedly while masturbating. . . . They are impulsive and unable to escape their fantasy world. This is a sexualized imagined realm that is robust with themes of power, control, sex, violence and mutilation.
Moreover, Hazelwood added, for the lust murderer, “The onset of aberrant sexual proclivities was linked to a developmental change. This change included the transition from a normal sexualized fantasy life to that of a paraphilic masturbatory fantasy life.” This is especially relevant to our assessment of Kozminski as a suspect in the Ripper murders, because the psychological trauma induced by the family’s flight from Russia as part of a mass exodus of refugees fleeing anti-Semitism and oppression essentially coincided with the onset of puberty when Kozminski was fifteen years old.
Clearly, Jack the Ripper seems to fit this type of killer—a disorganized, primitive, and impulsive killer, whose murders were frenzied, involved postmortem mutilation, and exhibited a “progression of brutality,” each one “more vicious and sadistic” than the last. In fact, Hazelwood told me that the FBI came to the conclusion that Jack the Ripper was probably schizophrenic, largely because he fit the profile of a disorganized-type lust murderer. When I asked why this detail was not included in the FBI’s profile of Jack the Ripper, he responded,
When providing a profile, our “clients” are typically law enforcement professionals. It has always been my belief that including mental health terminology (i.e., “schizophrenic” or “psychopath”) would make the profile meaningful only to mental health professionals. However, providing the law enforcement client with the characteristics and traits of a schizophrenic or psychopath gives them specific and more helpful information.
“Jack the Ripper wasn’t good, he was lucky,” Hazelwood told me. “I don’t see how anyone who knows anything at all about violent crime can say that was an organized crime.” I asked whether he thought Kozminski, as a schizophrenic, would have been able to hide his insanity enough to convince his victims to go off with him as a client. “Kozminski fit like a hand in a glove,” he replied. “You have to remember that the victims were prostitutes, and all Kozminski would have had to say was, ‘I’ll give you a shilling for a blowjob,’ and they would have gone with him.”
26
Murder Will Out
Mordre wol out, that se we day by day;
Mordre is so wlatsom, and abhomynable
To God, that is so just and resonable,
That he ne wol nat suffre it heled be.
Though it abyde a yeer, or two, or thre,
Mordre wol out, this my conclusion.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”
In the summer of 2005, I stepped off a rickety train onto the railway platform of Kodawa train station. All around me, fields stretched toward the horizon, punctuated by a few isolated farm buildings. In the road sprawled out next to the station, I found an old man standing in front of his house, and with the help of my Polish phrasebook, I asked him how to get to the village center. He looked at me, confused, and started speaking to me in Polish. Seeing that it was obvious I didn’t understand, he held up five fingers and said something that sounded like “kilometers,” pointing north. “Djenkuja,” I replied. Then I turned around and started walking. “What the hell am I doing here?” I wondered, as I made my way toward Aaron Kozminski’s old home town. Even by Polish standards, it seemed that I was in the middle of nowhere. I passed by some cows grazing in a field, and wondered how many tourists had visited the town recently. Along the road, I met two teenage girls and asked them (in English) if I was going the right way to Kodawa. They replied yes and then broke out giggling, looking at me as though I were an alien from another planet.
When I finally got to the town center, I walked around looking at the old buildings and trying not to draw attention to myself. I had no idea where the old Jewish quarter had once been, and I realized there was no chance I would find Kozminski’s house, which was listed only as “number 25” in the town’s Book of Residents. Most of the buildings didn’t look that old anyway. I didn’t even bother trying to talk to anyone, because I realized that it would have been impossible to explain what I was doing there. So I just walked around, taking photos. “Could this nondescript place have been the birthplace of Jack the Ripper?” I wondered. The phrase “from hell” did not seem to fit. It would have been more accurate to have written “from nowhere.” After a while, I started to feel as though the whole trip was a waste of time, so I bought a hamburger, and then started walking back to the train station. In truth, however, I did go to Kodawa looking for something. But what was I looking for? What did I think I might find there? It was a fool’s errand. I was trying to solve one of history’s most notorious and confounding mysteries, and I was getting nowhere. I took a few photos of myself standing in front of the sign on the train platform, and then I left Kodawa, feeling just as confused as I had been before I came.
Of course, I was not alone. Trying to solve the Jack the Ripper mystery has been a pastime for armchair detectives like myself for decades. “Murder will out,” Chaucer once wrote. God would “not suffer its concealment,” he argued, although “things may lie hidden for a year or two.”1 Yet it has now been 120 years, and the truth of the Ripper case has not been revealed. During this time, countless people have tried to find some scrap of evidence that will solve the case once and for all. Researchers have put forth hundreds of theories and hundreds of suspects, and numerous books have boasted, “case closed” or “the mystery is finally solved!” None have yet succeeded in presenting a case that is even remotely convincing.
The problems in trying to solve the case are legion. No physical evidence from the period has survived, so there is no possibility of a DNA match or anything of that sort. Nor is it likely that someone will find a document in an attic somewhere that reveals the Ripper’s identity. Ripperologists, to their credit, tend to be skeptical of overly optimistic “solutions”—they do not like guesswork or speculation, and they detest blatant fantasy and overt fabrication. They like facts.
In the end, the real problem with Kozminski as a suspect in the Ripper case is simply how little we know about him. Of course, the police must have known a great deal about him. They must have had files on him, and it is possible that they had a stronger case against him than we will ever know. Yet even if we take Robert Anderson at his word, the police didn’t have sufficient evidence to convict Kozminski in a court of law. The police may have had circumstantial evidence or the statements of suspicious relatives, for example, but this wouldn’t have been good enough. If the police couldn’t convict Kozminski then, how can we possibly expect to prove his guilt today, beyond a reasonable doubt? The answer is that we cannot.
I previously discussed the Ripper’s escape route after the murder of Kate Eddowes and noted that on a map, it looks like an arrow pointing toward the center of a dartboard. The terminus of that arrow—the bull’s-eye, so to speak—was, in all likelihood, Jack the Ripper’s home. The arrow clearly points in the direction of Kozminski’s residence on Greenfield Street, but, of course, it only goes partway. After Goulston Street, the Ripper may have taken a turn and continued in some other direction, to another destination. The missing part of that arrow represents an unknown. In a sense, we might think of this as a metaphor for all of the “evidence” that seems to point to Kozminski as
a Ripper suspect. There are a lot of arrows, but each has a piece missing. None of them alone is sufficient to prove conclusively that Kozminski was the Ripper, but all of the arrows seem to be pointing in the same direction.
Ultimately, all that we have to work with is a complex jumble of fragmentary and often-contradictory statements, memoirs, and newspaper reports, from which we must try to imagine the whole picture. Some pieces fit, while others don’t, confusing matters further. Yet if we take a step back and look at all of the fragments together, the general form of a solution seems to emerge, even if the details remain unclear.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet was published in November 1887, just a few months before the beginning of the Whitechapel murders. This story marked the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, the cocaine-using London detective who solved crimes using a combination of observation and intellectual analysis. Holmes would serve as the archetype for countless detectives in novels and movies, including Johnny Depp’s portrayal of a highly fictionalized detective Frederick Abberline in the 2001 Ripper movie From Hell. In the movie, Abberline is depicted as an opium addict who solves crimes with the aid of drug-induced visions and dreams. Sherlock Holmes’s crime-solving techniques were grounded in a somewhat more practical methodology—so much so, in fact, that Holmesian deduction is now taught to members of the UK’s security services, MI5 and MI6. “The ideal reasoner,” Holmes once said, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.”2 Holmes was much like the modern criminal profiler, attempting to solve crimes given only the scantest, apparently most insignificant pieces of physical evidence. “You know my method,” Holmes said. “It is founded upon the observation of trifles.” In Conan Doyle’s stories, Holmes often solved problems by making a series of inferences from known or observed facts and then deducing the most probable explanation of them.
In the absence of any single conclusive piece of evidence, we must use similar tactics in assessing Kozminski as a suspect in the Ripper case. Specifically, we must compare the known facts of the Ripper case with what is known (or may be inferred) about Kozminski and then draw the best (and, if possible, the simplest) conclusion that explains these facts.
The Macnaghten memorandum, for example, is one of the more damning bits of “evidence” against Aaron Kozminski as a suspect, because it states that he “had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies.”3 As we have seen, however, the memorandum contains several factual errors regarding the other two suspects mentioned, and therefore we must be cautious here. On the other hand, only one statement about Kozminski in the memorandum is demonstrably incorrect, and much of what Macnaghten wrote about Kozminski was true. The real problem is simply that several of Macnaghten’s statements about Kozminski are not backed up by other sources—there is no reason to assume these statements are incorrect, but we cannot know for sure. If the statements about Kozminski’s hatred of women and about his “homicidal tendencies” are true, they would obviously have a great bearing on our understanding of Kozminski’s psychological makeup. A delusional schizophrenic hearing command-type auditory hallucinations is one thing, but a schizophrenic psychopath who hates prostitutes is a different beast altogether.
Sometimes, where there is a gap in our knowledge, another source may provide some support, if not full corroboration. For example, City detective Harry Cox spoke of conducting surveillance on a suspect who he thought was “not unlikely to be connected with the crimes.” The suspect, Cox said, “was a misogynist, who at some time or another had been wronged by a woman.”4 Generally, this statement seems to support Melville Macnaghten’s statement about Kozminski’s “great hatred of women.” On the other hand, it is not much of a stretch to assume that the Ripper had a great hatred of women, and it is impossible to know whether Cox’s statement was mere theory or a statement of known facts regarding the suspect in question.
It is difficult to combine all of the evidence against Kozminski and make sense out of it. As with circumstantial evidence, if enough is accumulated, one might reasonably infer guilt. While all of this seems suggestive of a possible solution, can we conclude that the police knew, without a doubt, that Aaron Kozminski was Jack the Ripper? Obviously, we cannot. Our knowledge remains too fractured, and there is too much room for reasonable doubt. Moreover, many of the ideas presented in this book are in the realm of speculation and theory. Despite many suggestions and plausible scenarios pointing to a guilty verdict, there is simply not enough here for us to draw any definite conclusions.
In the end, the most likely explanation is that several head officials at Scotland Yard considered Kozminski a very strong suspect in the case—probably the strongest suspect they had. The police obviously knew more about Kozminski than we know today, and there must have been something that convinced Anderson (and probably Donald Swanson) that Kozminski was the Whitechapel fiend. It is possible that the “evidence” against him was entirely circumstantial or inculpatory. And Scotland Yard’s one hope to secure a conviction, the identification by a witness, was probably not as conclusive as Anderson implied. No jury in its right mind would convict a suspect based on such evidence, as Anderson realized. Anderson’s “definitely ascertained fact” should therefore probably be interpreted more along the lines of a strong hunch . . . strong enough, indeed, to convince the head of the CID that that the Ripper’s identity was “a simple matter of fact” and not “a matter of theory.”
In another famous serial murder case, the Green River Killer prostitute murders in Seattle in the 1980s, the police for many years had a similarly strong hunch about a man named Gary Ridgway. Their hunch was based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence, but there was a lot of it. Ridgway had been arrested for soliciting prostitutes, and several prostitutes on the Sea-Tac strip actually suggested that he was the killer. Over the years, the police questioned Ridgway on several occasions and also searched his house and his vehicles. Ridgway admitted that he fished on the Green River, near the sites where some of the victims’ bodies were dumped, and even that he’d had “dates” with some of the girls who were murdered. On one of these dates, Ridgway began to strangle a prostitute, but when she begged for her life, he let go. The woman went to the police and picked Ridgway’s photo out in a police album. When Ridgway was questioned about the incident, he cooperated with the police and even admitted to strangling the woman for ten or fifteen seconds, after she had bitten him during oral sex. The police had no option but to release him. They never found any hard evidence to convict him. Despite this, King County sheriff Dave Reichart, the man in charge of the Green River investigations, was pretty convinced that Ridgway was the killer.
Unfortunately, Gary Ridgway was only one of about a dozen suspects on the task force’s A-list. There was no consensus among the detectives working the case—each had a different theory and a different favorite suspect. “You go to one detective’s desk,” said task force lieutenant Gary Nolan, “and he’ll have half a dozen names and he’ll swear one of them is the killer. Go to the next desk a couple of feet away, and that guy will have ten different names and he’ll swear up and down that one of them has got to be the Green River Killer—and both of them can give you lots of good reasons why.”5 Finally, in 2001, the police made a conclusive DNA match to a suspect. When detective Tom Jensen received the DNA results, he went to Reichart (then retired from the case) and handed him an envelope. He said that it contained a photo of the Green River Killer. “I don’t even have to open it,” Reichart said. “It’s Gary Ridgway.” Of course, he was right.
But what if there had not been any conclusive DNA evidence? If Ridgway had never been caught, Reichart may well have said something very similar to what Anderson said about the Ripper—something like, “We knew who the Green River Killer was, but we didn’t have the evidence to convict him.” He may have e
ven said it was “a definitely ascertained fact” that Ridgway was the killer. Such a statement would have been true, from Reichart’s perspective. Still, it would have been only a strong suspicion—a “moral proof” perhaps, but ultimately just a theory. Apart from the DNA evidence, there was nothing conclusive to prove that Ridgway was the Green River Killer, despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence.
Most Ripperologists today believe that the Jack the Ripper case will never be solved. Given the nature of the field, it seems highly unlikely that the experts would ever come to any consensus on a solution to the case, even if a plausible solution were presented. It would ruin the mystique and glamour of an unsolved mystery. I think it is likely that Aaron Kozminski was Jack the Ripper, but I am unable to prove it. Ultimately, the reader must come to his or her own conclusions. According to what we now know about serial killers, there is certainly nothing that disqualifies Kozminski as a suspect, nor is there any reason to believe Anderson was lying. In the end, Kozminski is probably the only known suspect against whom a plausible case may be made. Yet despite this, our modern case against him cannot reach the level of Anderson’s “definitely ascertained fact.” Unless new documents come to light, perhaps this is as close as we will ever come to solving the mystery. Like Jack the Ripper, Aaron Kozminski seems destined to remain an enigma, a shadowy figure lurking in dark corners, obscured by the fog of history and the human imagination.