Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888

by Edwards, Russell

  Around the time that the Anderson book and the Swanson marginalia were in limbo and before much information about them had been published, in 1986–7, freelance writer and broadcaster Martin Fido was preparing his own study of the Ripper case and, drawing from Anderson’s claims, undertook an extensive trawl through asylum records looking for the suspect. Aware that a ‘Kosminski’ had been put forward by Melville Macnaghten, he found an Aaron Kosminski in the records of Colney Hatch Asylum, where he had been incarcerated in February 1891, a date that was at odds with Macnaghten’s assertion that he had been ‘removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889’. Fido also felt that Aaron Kosminski was little more than a harmless imbecile and certainly not the homicidal maniac that the Ripper was meant to be. He also did not die shortly after being sent to Colney Hatch as was claimed in Swanson’s marginalia.

  Fido duly picked out another Jewish inmate, David Cohen, who died in October 1889; this man was from Whitechapel and was extremely violent and thus, in Fido’s opinion, fitted the bill better than Kosminski. But Cohen’s candidacy was not without its problems either: most obviously, the name was wrong. Fido got round this by suggesting that ‘David Cohen’ was perhaps a ‘John Doe’ name, in other words a blanket title given to those eastern Europeans with names that were difficult to pronounce. Also, according to Swanson, the identification took place at the ‘Seaside Home’, which is popularly believed to refer to the Police Convalescent Seaside Home in Hove on the Sussex coast, near Brighton. As this establishment opened in 1890, Cohen could not have been identified there as he had died the year before.

  Another boost to the case for Kosminski, apart from his presence at Colney Hatch as stated by Swanson, was the reason for his internment – ‘self abuse’ – a very specific diagnosis which obviously made a direct link with the ‘solitary’ and ‘unmentionable vices’ put down by Anderson and Macnaghten.

  It was all enough to confirm to me that Kosminski was the most likely suspect, and so I began to renew my research into his life which I had started in 2007. The most pressing need was to get a sample of his DNA, to compare it with the shawl.

  This was now my biggest task.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHO WAS AARON KOSMINSKI?

  From the moment Alan McCormack uttered those words: ‘We know who the Ripper is. We’ve always known,’ I have felt strongly that Aaron Kosminski is the right suspect. I’ve looked at all the others, and although there are some discrepancies among the assertions of the police involved in the case, I think the compelling evidence leads to him. So who is he? What do we know about him?

  The answer is that we don’t have a very full picture of this man who is the most famous murderer in the world. Records from the 1880s are shadowy at best, and with a foreign immigrant, even more so. But we do have an outline of his life.

  Soon after I bought the shawl I started the search for him, which led me in 2008 to the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), which are housed in the Farringdon area of London, and are the main archive for the Greater London area. The archives contain 105 kilometres of documents, maps, books, film, pictures and photographs of London, some of it dating back to 1067.

  I went to the archive because I discovered that the records of Colney Hatch Asylum, one of the two asylums he was held in at the end of his life, were stored there, and I spent a day trawling through them, photographing all the references to Aaron Kosminski. But I hit a wall when it came to getting the archives from the other asylum to which he was later transferred, Leavesden. I was not able to get into these archives because they were too fragile to be handled by a member of the public; however, I paid one of the professional archivists to do the research for me (see Appendix for a selection of documents). I was not the first researcher in the archives there: I saw Martin Fido’s name above mine in the log of who had been looking at Aaron Kosminski’s records, the man who had rejected him in favour of David Cohen as the Ripper. But I still find it remarkable that in all the years since he was put on the list of three top suspects, so little research had been done into him before.

  So what do we know? Who was Aaron Kosminski, and what triggered his gruesome attacks on the prostitutes of the East End in a few terrible months in 1888?

  Aaron Mordke Kosminski was born in Klodawa, in the Province of Kalish in central Poland, on 11 September 1865, the son of tailor Abram Josef Kozminski and his wife, Golda Lubnowski. They were described in an undated entry in the Klodawa Book of Residents as ‘petty bourgeois’, which suggests that they had a reasonable standard of living. Aaron was the youngest of seven children, although his oldest sister, Pessa, only lived until she was three, and died long before he was born. His next sister, Hinde, was born seventeen years before he was, in 1848, followed by a brother, Icek (who later adopted the Anglicized name of Isaac), born in 1852. Next was a sister, Malke (who also changed her name to Matilda), and then another sister, Blima, born in 1854. Closest in age to him was his brother Woolf who was five years his senior. By the time Aaron was born, his mother Golda was forty-five, and she had spent twenty years giving birth and rearing children.

  Klodawa is a small town about ninety miles from Warsaw, with a salt mine which formed the backbone of its economy, and which is still the largest salt mine in Poland. The town has a chequered and mostly unhappy history of being invaded and handed around between different states: in the seventeenth century it was destroyed by the Swedes, then it was ruled by Prussia, followed by a spell as part of the Duchy of Warsaw. It was part of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, an autonomous state ruled by the tsars of Russia, from 1815 until a rebellion against Russia in 1863, which was suppressed and the area became a province of the Russian Empire. It formally became part of Russia in the year that Aaron was born.

  If his home town had a fractured history, the Jewish community within it had an even more troubled past, having at times been expelled from the town. By the time of Aaron’s birth, almost a quarter of the population was Jewish. His father Abram was a tailor, and from everything we know about the work his sons did when they came to London, it’s clear he apprenticed them to his trade.

  In about 1871, when he was twenty, Isaac was the first of the family to move to London, with his young wife Bertha, probably moving to escape the poverty of Klodawa, and to work in a larger population: there may not have been enough tailoring work in a town of less than 3,000 inhabitants.

  Aaron was only eight or nine years old when his father died, at the age of about fifty-four, after Isaac had already left Poland. We don’t know the cause of his death, but the impact on the family must have been huge. Hinde and Matilda were married by then, and no longer living with the family. Their father’s death certificate lists him as leaving a widow and three children living at home, presumably the youngest three, Blima, who was sixteen at the time, Woolf, fourteen, and the much younger Aaron.

  They must all have felt the death of the father acutely, for financial reasons as well as emotional ones. But perhaps Aaron, so much the youngest, was more affected than the others. I am not going to attempt to explore the psychology of separation and loss at such an early age in any depth, but we know today how profoundly children’s lives are influenced by losing a parent at a crucial stage of their development.

  In a patriarchal society, the head of the family was now Woolf, a young teenager who had to support his mother, sister and little brother. Aaron was no doubt recruited to work: it was normal for children as young as ten to be employed. Blima may also have worked in the family business until her marriage.

  We know almost nothing about the life of his sister Blima, although she changed her name to Bertha Held, from which we can deduce that she married and also, because of the anglicized first name, left Eastern Europe. Matilda married her cousin Mosiek (later changed to Morris) Lubnowski. They moved to Germany where their first two children (they had four) were born and after at least two years there they moved to London.

  His oldest surviving sister, Hinde, married Aaron Singer, ano
ther tailor, in Poland and had two children there, born when their uncle Aaron was only ten and then twelve years old.

  Other than this, very little is known about Aaron’s childhood in Poland. What we do know is that brother Woolf and his wife Brucha (another cousin, who also anglicized her name to Betsy) emigrated to London in 1881, when Woolf was twenty. Fifteen-year-old Aaron probably went with them and joined the thousands of Jewish refugees who were now descending upon the East End to escape the pogroms, the Russian violence towards Jewish communities.

  Whether Golda travelled with them is not known: she may have come later with her daughter Matilda, who lived in Germany when she first left Poland (and it’s a possibility that Aaron, too, went with her) because we have records of Golda living with Matilda in London, and she is buried there. Hinde, who now went by the name Helena (and later was known as Annie) also travelled to London with her family at about the same time. It is possible that her husband came earlier: there’s a reference to him fleeing Poland after a scandal, and he appears to have been a bit of a ladies’ man who, much later, deserted his wife and family. The Singers stayed in London for two or three years, where two more children were born, before leaving for America in 1885, where they settled in Boston.

  The journey from Klodawa to London was undoubtedly horrendous, with border guards demanding bribes and robbers taking advantage of the defenceless travellers. Crossing the North Sea typically took two or three days, crammed with other emigrants in dirty, smelly conditions. The Kosminskis were fortunate compared to most of their fellow travellers: they had somewhere to go in London, and someone to greet them. Isaac was living there with a successful tailoring business, and he was relatively comfortably off in his new homeland. By 1885, three of the Kosminski siblings, Isaac, Matilda and Woolf, were renting houses in the East End in Greenfield Street (now Greenfield Road), off Commercial Road, and which was described as a relatively respectable street for the neighbourhood, inhabited by ‘a rather superior class of people’, according to Charles Booth’s survey carried out in 1888. Before they left for America, Helena and her family, the Singers, also lived in Greenfield Street.

  With their new anglicized first names, the Kosminskis changed their surname to Abrahams, simply because it was easier to pronounce and spell than Kosminski, although Aaron, at least, seems to have preferred the old name. Perhaps he felt he had lost so much already – his father, his homeland, his language – that he was not prepared to surrender his name, too.

  Woolf and his family, and Matilda and hers, may have found it harder to settle in London than Isaac did. Both families are recorded as moving to different addresses, all either in Greenfield Street or very close by, in the next few years (Woolf lived at four different houses in the street, as well as in the nearby Providence Street, Yalford Street and Berner Street, where he had lived next door to the scene where Elizabeth Stride would later be murdered). We don’t know which of his siblings gave Aaron a home: perhaps they all took care of their youngest brother at different times, but as they all had children themselves, and Golda to house, conditions must have been cramped. It would be unlikely he lived separately: young single people in those days would normally live with family.

  Isaac was prospering in a small way, and by 1888 he had fourteen employees and a workshop in the yard behind his house, one of fifteen similar workshops along one side of Greenfield Street, which shows that the Jewish tailoring business was well established. One reason for this is that they were making clothes for women: previously all tailoring in Britain had been done for men, and women were dressed by home dressmakers.

  However, with so many people in the business, and keen competition, it is understandable that relative newcomers like Woolf struggled to make a mark. Matilda’s husband Morris was a shoemaker, and he too appears to have found it hard to make ends meet in the early days in London, probably because shoemaking again was not a new trade in the area and there would be established competition.

  Although the East End was a popular place for the Jewish settlers to congregate, they were, by 1888, experiencing a backlash of anti-Semitism, being accused of stealing jobs from unemployed British-born nationals; of undercutting each other on price so much that the wages they paid were not enough to sustain their employees; and there were firebrand Jewish Socialists condemning the low-waged rag trade workshops. It was an unsettling time for the immigrants, and it must have seemed to the Kosminski/Abrahams family that they had lived their entire lives under anti-Semitism.

  Whichever branch of his family he was living with, in 1888, when the Ripper murders happened, Aaron was close enough to the scenes of all the crimes to have easily got there and to have escaped. I’ve traced the routes, I know these short distances well. On the night of the double murder, when he was interrupted at Dutfield’s Yard, he was compelled to strike again, and I believe he was only successful because of the proximity of his home to the scene. There was a hue and cry in the streets, with police and public hunting him, yet he needed to strike again on that significant date. Living just on the edge of Whitechapel meant he could commit the murder with time to carry out his ritual mutilations, and still get back to the safety of his home, which would be either in Greenfield Street (with Isaac or Matilda), or Providence Street or Yalford Street, where we know Woolf was living at about this time (we know he lived in both streets from the dates his children attended local schools, but we don’t know exactly when he moved to each new address). All these streets give easy access to the crime scenes.

  Immediately after the murders, the records on Aaron Kosminski are scanty, with just one tantalizing glimpse of him. In December 1889, he appeared in court after being arrested for walking an unmuzzled dog in Cheapside. Fear of a rabies outbreak had led to a law requiring all dogs to be muzzled. Aaron’s appearance in court was reported in the press. Lloyds Weekly News said:

  Police-constable Borer said he saw the defendant with an unmuzzled dog, and when asked his name gave that of Aaron Kosminski, which his brother said was wrong as his name was Abrahams – Defendant said that the dog was not his, and his brother said it was found more convenient to go by the name of Abrahams, but his name was Kosminski – Sir Polydore de Keyser imposed a fine of 10s and costs, which the defendant would not pay as it was the Jewish Sunday and it was not right to pay money on Sunday. He was given ’til Monday to pay.

  Another report in the City Press said:

  Aaron Kosmunski appeared to a summons for having a dog unmuzzled in Cheapside. When spoken to by the police he gave a wrong name and address. Defendant: I goes by the name of Abrahams sometimes, because Kosmunski is hard to spell (Laughter). The defendant called his brother who corroborated that part of the evidence relating to his name. The Alderman said he would have to pay a fine of 10s and costs. Defendant: I cannot pay, the dog belongs to Jacobs, it is not mine. The Alderman: It was in your charge and you must pay the fine, and if you have no goods on which to distrain you will have to go to prison for seven days.

  The brother present at the court was probably Woolf, who was certainly using the name Abrahams. It is interesting that Aaron, who was twenty-four, was accompanied by his older brother; it is not clear why he had to come along and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to assume that Aaron was having any sort of difficulty, either with language or ability, to understand what was happening, although he probably needed help paying the fine.

  From there, Aaron Kosminski disappears briefly from the historical record. When he reappears in 1890, it is in the records of the Mile End Old Town workhouse. On 12 July, Aaron was taken there by one of his brothers, again probably Woolf. The exact reason why he was taken there is not clear, although it was probably because Aaron had begun to show unmistakable signs of being mentally disturbed and Woolf may well have hoped there was treatment available, or at least to get a diagnosis: the record shows that the ‘cause of seeking relief’ was ‘Qy Insane’ which meant ‘query insane’, a common enough entry for pauper admissions at the time. Workhouse
s were institutions providing basic care for those who had reached the very bottom of the social ladder, with no means of support and no accommodation. They were also used to house the mentally ill and the elderly, and they were dirty, overcrowded, unsanitary places: a refuge of last resort.

  On admission Aaron was described as ‘destitute’. We can only guess that he was behaving sufficiently unusually for the family to be worried enough to seek help. His occupation was given as ‘hairdresser’ and his address was 3 Sion Square, Woolf’s home. His religion was recorded as ‘Hebrew’, and he was classified as an ‘able bodied man’ in terms of which meagre diet he would be allocated.

  There is nothing in any records I have found to show that he ever worked as a hairdresser, and with the family history of tailoring it is a surprising occupation, but there is equally no reason to doubt the information given on his admission papers to the workhouse: perhaps he did, at some point, work as a hairdresser. He was discharged back into the care of his brother three days later and it is unlikely that he saw a doctor or was given any help. Perhaps the family felt guilty about leaving him there, perhaps they worried that without more secure accommodation he would be able to resume his murders. We will never know.

  Six months later, Aaron was readmitted to the workhouse, and this time his address was given as 16 Greenfield Street, the home of his sister Matilda and her husband Morris Lubnowski, which shows the family probably shuttled him around between their homes. The date was 4 February 1891, and it appears that his mental health had now deteriorated to a state that the family, who had been sheltering and supporting him, could no longer cope. On his admission the register of patients stated that he was suffering from ‘mania’ and he was examined by a doctor, Edmund Houchin, who wrote a report on his findings and declared Kosminski insane: