Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888

by Edwards, Russell

  On 4 February 1891, by now exhibiting serious mental problems, he was taken back to the workhouse, deemed insane and went to Colney Hatch and, later, Leavesden.

  Some researchers focus on the discrepancies in the various stories, but they were all recalled from memory at later dates, so this is understandable. There are many common themes and I think there is enough evidence to support my interpretation of events, which I am offering only as a justification for going down the route of pursuing Kosminski as the most likely suspect. If this was all I had to base it on I, like so many others, would simply be putting forward a theory, arguing a case. And however convincingly I argued it, there would always be doubt, a counter theory. But I was using my theory about Kosminski only as a shortcut to take me to the right man, in terms of scientific proof. All the way through my quest for the Ripper, it is science, not theory, that has been my ally.

  Like so many other researchers, I was intrigued by the assertion that there was a witness who identified the Ripper and there was a mysterious venue where this happened. I had a second conversation with Alan McCormack in 2009 when he suggested I should do some digging into who the witness was, so this was the next avenue I went down.

  Swanson said the identification took place at the ‘Seaside Home’ which on the face of it seems an unusual place to hold such an important event. However, during the Whitechapel murders, whenever news got out that a suspect had been taken to a police station, large crowds and interfering journalists would descend in numbers, so with a situation as sensitive as this, discretion would have been paramount. It makes sense that the police might look for a location outside London which was not a police station and yet was under their control, with staff who would understand the importance of not talking about it.

  Most researchers today accept that the ‘Seaside Home’ refers to the Convalescent Police Seaside Home in Hove, East Sussex. 51 Clarendon Villas (its correct address) runs parallel with Church Road, yards away from the corner of Sackville Road, and only a short stroll from the seafront. The building is still there today and is now private flats. Convalescent homes were often built by the coast, where patients could benefit from the clean air while they recovered from illness: philanthropic employers set them up for the benefit of their staff, especially those who worked in heavy industries or in cities with little access to country air (in later years, unions would provide them for their members). I have been to stand outside it twice, the first time when I initially established that it was the right place, having found it in the Brighton archive library. I went again, much later, when I was well and truly on Kosminski’s trail, and this visit caused a much stronger reaction in me. I felt myself shudder involuntarily, as I stood outside, knowing that he had been in one of those rooms.

  The logistics required to get the suspect from his home to the Seaside Home may explain Swanson’s use of the phrase ‘sent by us with difficulty’. East London was still buzzing with Ripper rumours and Ripper paranoia in 1890, and any obvious arrest of a suspect would have been seized upon by the voracious press – who wanted to keep the sensational story running – and the nervous public, so spiriting the suspect away had to be done without drawing any attention.

  But who was the witness? The clearest clue is in the claim that the witness was Jewish. Looking at the police files, there are three, possibly four, documented witnesses who saw the murderer and were able to describe him: Mrs Long in Hanbury Street, PC William Smith (possibly) and Israel Schwartz in Berner Street and Joseph Lawende at the entrance to Church Passage near Mitre Square. Unless Mrs Long and PC Smith were Jewish, and there is no evidence either way, but their names suggest they were not, then it falls to either Schwartz or Lawende who we know were Jewish. But which one?

  I concluded that it must have been Schwartz. One reason I plumped for him was because Joseph Lawende made the sighting of the man with Catherine Eddowes from across the road, Duke Street. Neither of his two companions, Harry Harris and Joseph Hyam Levy, paid much attention to the couple and even Lawende’s sighting was, he admitted, unsatisfactory. A description given by Lawende of the man he saw was set down in a report by Donald Swanson and published in the press. He was described as ‘age 30 ht. 5 ft. 7 or 8 in., comp. fair, fair moustache, medium built, dress pepper & salt colour loose jacket, grey cloth cap with peak of same colour, reddish handkerchief tied in a knot, round neck, appearance of a sailor.’

  According to Major Henry Smith, acting commissioner of the City police in 1888, he had apparently spoken to Lawende about his sighting at the time. Mistakenly describing Lawende as a German, Smith said in his 1910 memoirs that ‘I think the German spoke the truth, because I could not “lead” him in any way. “You will easily recognize him, then,” I said. “Oh no!” he replied; “I only had a short look at him.”’ It is difficult to believe that Lawende, who was always unsure about his ability to recognize the man if he saw him again, would be able to do so many months after the event, or that the police would expect him to.

  I believe Lawende was called in to identify James Sadler, the companion and alleged murderer of Frances Coles in February 1891, but he was unable to do so. Some researchers have suggested that this identification, made at the Seaman’s Home in Whitechapel, could have been confused in the minds of Anderson and Swanson with the passing of time, and unwittingly altered to become the Seaside Home. That said, it is difficult to reconcile this idea – Sadler, as far as we know, was not Jewish and yet both men had described the suspect as Jewish. And if Sadler is not Jewish, this negates the reason given by Anderson and Swanson for the witness’s refusal to testify.

  And of course the witness in the Seaside Home scenario identified the suspect as soon as he was confronted with him. Lawende drew a blank with Sadler, who could not have been Jack the Ripper anyway as he was at sea on the dates of most of the Whitechapel murders. Not only that, members of Swanson’s family who knew him in later life confirmed that he was in possession of all his critical faculties right into old age and so it’s highly unlikely he’d get this important point wrong.

  With Israel Schwartz we have none of these problems. From a distance of only tens of feet away, he saw Elizabeth Stride being attacked by a man, just fifteen minutes before her body was found only yards from the scene. He is the ONLY witness to see a Ripper victim being physically attacked, a major reason for me feeling sure it was him. I believe the man even acknowledged Schwartz’s presence, shouting ‘Lipski!’ at him, probably as an anti-Jewish insult aimed at Schwartz.

  Once I went back to Alan McCormack with my reasons for choosing Schwartz, he corroborated my reasoning, then he explained about the identification. He said that a confrontation took place, as opposed to a line-up. It was not an unusual technique at the time, whereby a suspect or person of interest would be placed in front of, or shown to, a potential witness, not always necessarily to make a confirmed identification immediately, but perhaps to unsettle and intimidate the suspect who the police were sure was guilty in any case. This could provoke the suspect, believing he had been identified, to unwittingly give more information, or even break down and confess willingly. The scenario Alan put to me is the one suggested by Anderson and apparently confirmed by Swanson. This is my summary of it:

  Aaron Kosminski was placed in a room at the Seaside Home. Israel Schwartz was led into the room by a police officer and confronted with Kosminski. He was then immediately led out of the room and asked if this was the man he saw attacking Elizabeth Stride on the night of her murder. Alan McCormack was adamant that there was what he described as ‘an unhesitating ID’. After a gap of ten minutes or so Schwartz was taken into the room again, and again there was a clear affirmation that this was the right man. But then the police asked Schwartz if he would be willing to testify to the fact, and he refused on the grounds that he could not bear to have it on his conscience that he had sent a fellow Jew to the gallows.

  Even though Aaron Kosminski had been clearly identified, the manner in which this identification w
as made was problematical, because to present it as evidence in court it would have to have been a full line-up of men from whom Kosminski was chosen. As a result, the police had the moral proof, but the legal proof was not good enough, a matter bemoaned by Robert Anderson who later said in his memoirs that if the British police ‘had powers such as the French police possess, the murderer would have been brought to justice’, meaning that such an identification would have been sufficient to officially arrest and charge Kosminski under the French legal system. Here, there were strict legal rules: there had to be a line-up.

  The police had probably never anticipated Schwartz’s refusal to testify against Kosminski or they would have staged a proper, legally watertight, identification. Alan McCormack stressed to me that there was no other evidence, and that there was never a conspiracy to keep the facts of the case hidden: the police simply could not proceed without Schwartz. I believe the fact there was a confrontation and not a line-up is the reason why Jack the Ripper has remained such a hot topic down the years: if Kosminski had been prosecuted and convicted, the Ripper case would be of interest only to experts studying serial killers, and would occasionally make a chapter in a compilation of historical crimes. It would not have spawned the books, films and whole Ripper industry that we have today.

  Schwartz’s position was invidious. As a Jew himself, he knew the prejudice against his race that was rampant at the time: if the Ripper was Jewish, it would feed into this growing anti-Semitism. And as far as his own community was concerned, he would possibly have been regarded as a traitor to have stirred up more bad feeling towards them all. He no doubt felt that, as the police were on to the right man, there would be no more deaths at the hands of this man, so his conscience would be clear on that account. He would not, as Swanson pointed out, have Kosminski’s death on his mind for the rest of his life. He had helped the police nail their man: as far as he was concerned it was up to them to keep the East End community safe from him.

  All criminal prosecutions rely on identifying the culprit. In some cases, it may be possible to establish identification through fingerprints, DNA or other forensic evidence, none of which was available to the police in 1888. Scotland Yard introduced its first Fingerprint Bureau in 1901. They literally had one eyewitness, who would not testify, and there was no other evidence.

  Without a clear identification, everything else they had against Kosminski was circumstantial, and there was little hope of getting more. His family may well have been able to help: it is hard to believe they did not at least suspect him. But if Schwartz would not testify against a fellow Jew, the siblings would certainly not testify against their own brother. Without enough evidence to arrest him and take him before a court, Aaron Kosminski was sent back to the home of his brother Woolf, after which he was watched day and night by the police until he was incarcerated in the asylum.

  But how could a seemingly harmless mental patient like Kosminski be a brutal killer who mutilated prostitutes? There are two examples of potential violence, the first being the threat against his sister with a knife, the other being an attempt to hit an asylum employee with a chair. Aggressive acts in themselves, but apparent ‘one-offs’ which do not necessarily give such a violent portrait as the behaviour of somebody like David Cohen, Martin Fido’s preferred suspect, who was also incarcerated in the Colney Hatch Asylum and proved to be a very difficult and violent patient to contain.

  It is probable that Kosminski was schizophrenic. Various different factors contribute to the development of schizophrenia, such as living environment, use of drugs and prenatal stresses, as well as, scientists today believe, a genetic pre-disposition. Kosminski was born when his mother was forty-five years old and life may have been hard, particularly after the death of Abram Kosminski when Aaron was at the impressionable age of nine years old. Soon after, Aaron was working in the family business, and some of his close family had already begun to leave Poland for the safety of London. There must have been a constant feeling of threat and insecurity among the Jewish population in Poland, and even as a child he would have picked up on the fears.

  Immigration from areas of social adversity has been recognized as a significant factor in the triggering of schizophrenia. Any immigration into a new country and culture raises the incidence of schizophrenia by four to six times, and it is even higher when immigrants are living, in their host country, in poor social conditions and as a minority group.

  The symptoms mentioned in the report by Dr Houchin are typical of schizophrenia. He said that Aaron ‘declares that he is guided and his movements altogether controlled by an instinct that informs his mind’ and that he knew ‘the movements of all mankind’. These are the sort of delusions often experienced by sufferers from schizophrenia. In the early twentieth century, psychiatrist Kurt Schneider listed the forms of psychotic symptoms that he thought distinguished schizophrenia from other such disorders. They became known as ‘Schneider’s first rank symptoms’ and have been described as delusions of being controlled by an external force, the belief that thoughts are being inserted into or withdrawn from the sufferer’s conscious mind and the belief that their thoughts are being broadcast to other people. Other symptoms, known as ‘negative symptoms’, reveal similarities with Kosminski’s deterioration while at Colney Hatch and Leavesden; these include blunted emotions, speech problems, asocial behaviour and lack of motivation.

  The violence of schizophrenics is something that has been the focus of media attention in modern times, even though schizophrenics are statistically no more violent than the general population. When they are violent, it usually takes place during ‘episodes’, outside of which the individual may appear to be normal, and it attracts attention because it appears, to those who don’t share the fractured delusions of the perpetrator, to be random, and therefore more alarming. Murder victims are overwhelmingly more likely to have been killed by a close family member or someone who knows them well, but it is the chance meeting with a deranged maniac that makes the headlines and fuels horror movies.

  The episodic nature of psychosis is why many extreme serial killers are able to get away with their crimes for long periods, and why even those closest to them are not always aware of what they are capable of doing when their delusional state takes over. Many notorious killers have been diagnosed with schizophrenia or have shown behaviour that strongly suggests they have it. They include David Berkowitz, the so-called ‘Son of Sam’, who apparently suffered from auditory hallucinations; Ed Gein, the inspiration for Robert Bloch’s Norman Bates in Psycho; Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ who murdered in response to voices from God telling him to do so; and Mark Chapman, who murdered John Lennon in 1980. Richard Trenton Chase, the ‘Vampire of Sacramento’, killed six people in the space of one month in Sacramento, California, sometimes indulging in necrophilia and cannibalism. He had been diagnosed as suffering with paranoid schizophrenia and sent to an institution in 1975, but responded so well to treatment that he was not considered a danger to the public and released in 1977 into the care of his mother. That year, he committed his first murder. There is an echo of Kosminski’s experience, because he, too, despite showing signs of mental illness and later being declared insane, was at one point returned into the care of his family.

  The eruption of schizophrenic episodes and the periods of calm between them possibly explains why somebody like Aaron Kosminski could appear harmless much of the time (such as during his court appearance for walking the unmuzzled dog) and yet be capable of terrible violence. The choice of victims all from a certain class of women suggests that he felt compelled by his delusions to wreak out his fury on them. Prostitutes were all around him on the streets of the East End, and their presence fed these delusions. Later, when he was confined in an asylum, his delusions were not aggravated by them, which may partly explain his lack of violence once incarcerated. But he was not calm: his notes show that he was ‘at times excited and violent’, that he had ‘episodes of great excitement’. Of cour
se, in the harsh custody of the asylum attendants, his violence was contained, as it was not when he roamed the streets of the East End. The description of his behaviour in the scant asylum notes we have is consistent with what would today be diagnosed as schizophrenia.

  Most serial murderers can consistently exhibit normal behaviour in certain situations, even in the presence of close family members, and their urge to kill can often lie dormant for many years. Two examples can be found: Dennis Rader, the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) killer, who had a number of periods when his killing spree paused for some time, on two occasions following the birth of his children; and Ted Bundy, a notoriously charming and cool character, who had a three-year hiatus from killing between 1975 and 1978.

  The onset of schizophrenia typically happens between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, and for young men is in their very early twenties, and follows a (typically) three-year stage where thoughts become more and more disordered. Aaron Kosminski celebrated his twenty-third birthday in September 1888, at the height of his killing spree, and when he was admitted to the asylum it was recorded that he had been mentally ill for six years: in other words, since he was twenty.

  Although it is invidious to try to diagnose from the patchy information we have, this would appear to be a textbook case. In today’s pharmacological world, anti-psychotic drugs can suppress the florid symptoms of schizophrenia, but these were not available then, and if his family ever hoped for help managing him, they would have been disappointed: permanent incarceration was all that was available then.