The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper

by Paul Begg

  Sir Arthur Diosy, later a member of ‘Our Society’,39 was aggrieved by this suggestion, mainly because he claimed to have had similar ideas as early as October 1888.

  According to him, among the quests of these people in the East is the elixir vitae, one of the ingredients of which must come from a recently killed woman. Diosy got quite excited when he heard of the bright farthings and burnt matches which he said might have formed the ‘flaming points’ of a magical figure called a ‘pentacle’ at each angle of which such points were found, and according to ritual certain ‘flaming’ articles had to be thus disposed. Diosy said later that he had paid a visit to Scotland Yard to place his theories before the authorities, but had been received without enthusiasm, as one can well understand.40

  As for Stephenson, he later became a Ripper suspect himself.41 In 1890 he was living in Southsea with his lover, the novelist Mabel Collins, and it was here that he met Collins’s friend Baroness Vittoria Cremers. After first finding Stephenson inoffensive, Cremers would later become uncomfortable in his company and on one occasion she saw him drawing an upside-down triangle on his door, apparently to keep out an evil presence. In the late 1920s or ’30s, Cremers told journalist Bernard O’Donnell42 that she once went into Stephenson’s room without him knowing and under the bed she found seven neck-ties in a tin case that were stained with what appeared to be dried blood. Cremers became convinced, along with Mabel Collins, that Stephenson was Jack the Ripper. The ties later supposedly came into the possession of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who boasted that they had belonged to the Ripper. He went on to name the man as Stephenson.43

  One other singularly notable theory as to the identity of the killer made its debut in September 1888, when Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne wrote to The Times with a lengthy correspondence which made a case that probably would have had its readers puffing with exasperation:

  All strange, Sir, as it may appear to you and the generality of your readers, it is within the range of my belief that one or both these Whitechapel murders may have been committed by female hands. There are details in both cases which fit in well with language for ever used where two of these unfortunates are in violent strife; there is far more jealousy, as is well known, between such women in regard to those with whom they cohabit than is the case with married people where one may suspect the other of sin against the marriage vow.

  There are, I have no doubt, plenty of women of this class known for their violent temper, with physical power to commit such a deed. As to the nature of their sex forbidding belief that they could so act, how many of them are altogether unsexed, have no one element in character with female feeling?44

  Strange though it may have seemed to people at the time, the idea of a female Ripper (or ‘Jill the Ripper’ as the theory is often called) would be picked up more than once in the first half of the following century. It has been said that Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, felt that the murderer could have been a woman or at the very least a man who dressed as such to evade detection, an idea posited by many correspondents to the press and police throughout 1888. Such potentially wayward conjecture was a demonstration of the great lengths that contemporary theorists were prepared to go to in order to find meaning in what appeared to be a completely meaningless series of murders, bereft of any potential benefit to the perpetrator. To this extent some, like Mrs L. Painter from the Isle of Wight – after suggesting a female killer – could only assume that the murders were committed by some animal which had escaped from a private menagerie and in a letter to the police on 3 October 1888 stated that the creature:

  would be swift, cunning, noiseless and strong, standing over its work until a footstep was heard and then vaulting over fence or wall, disappearing in a moment, hiding its weapon perhaps high up in a tree or other safe place, and returning home to shut itself up in its cage’.45

  11.

  Anecdote and Memory

  By the final years of the nineteenth century the Jack the Ripper murders, seemingly now past, were perhaps far enough away for commentators to begin naming their suspects, although much of the reasoning behind this was often anecdotal. What began was a new era of theorizing which relied on specific sources of information, rather than trying to fit the murderer into some form of preconceived archetype.

  In February 1894, the Sun published a series of articles under the title of ‘The Story of Jack the Ripper. Solution of the great murder mystery. His personality, career and fate’ which claimed to have identified the murderer.1 Although no name was given, the suspect under discussion was actually Thomas Hayne Cutbush, who had been sent to Broadmoor in 1891 after he had maliciously wounded a woman by stabbing her in the buttocks. Apparently he had also stabbed six girls, committed murderous assaults on a co-worker, a servant girl and a relative and had threatened to murder a doctor and another individual. His general behaviour obviously suggested insanity, hence his committal to the asylum, and the Sun believed that it had its man.

  The publication of these confident claims led Melville Macnaghten to react in an official capacity on 23 February 1894. Macnaghten was appointed assistant chief constable of the CID in July 1889, too late to be directly involved with the main Ripper investigation. Nonetheless, his new position and connections would have made his knowledge of the case significant, and it was with this in mind that he penned a memorandum refuting the Sun’s claims, as well as naming Cutbush. But the report had greater significance than just disproving a theory, for in his attempt to exonerate Cutbush, Macnaghten named what appeared to be three other contemporary suspects:

  No one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer; many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one. I may mention the cases of 3 men, any one of whom would have been more likely than Cutbush to have committed this series of murders:

  (1) A Mr M. J. Druitt, said to be a doctor & of good family – who disappeared at the time of the Miller’s Court murder, & whose body (which was said to have been upwards of a month in the water) was found in the Thames on 31st December – or about 7 weeks after that murder. He was sexually insane and from private information I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer.

  (2) Kosminski – a Polish Jew – & resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies: he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many circumstances connected with this man which made him a strong ‘suspect’.

  (3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was subsequently detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man’s antecedents were of the worst possible type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.2

  On the face of it, Macnaghten seemed to be merely stating that any of the three individuals mentioned were more likely than Cutbush to be the murderer, without appearing to favour any one in particular or saying that any were indeed Jack the Ripper. The notes also stated, quite unequivocally, that ‘the Whitechapel murderer had 5 victims – & 5 victims only’, they being Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly.

  The first name on Macnaghten’s list, ‘M. J. Druitt’, was Montague John Druitt. A rather unhappy character, it seems, he was born into a respectably well-heeled family, was Oxford-educated and became a schoolmaster before being called to the Bar in 1885. However, he was no doubt of unsound mind and left a note in his pocket, found after his death, which apparently read: ‘Since Friday I felt that I was going to be like mother, and it would be best for all concerned if I were to die.’3 Though he was not a medical man himself (and this is where Macnaghten got it wrong), there were many doctors in his immediate family, and his cousin Lionel had a surgery in the Minories in the 1870s, on the edge of the City of London near Aldgate and close to the murderer’s theatre of operations. But he was
found dead in the Thames on the date Macnaghten specified.4 Interestingly, three years prior to the memoranda being written, a story about the Ripper’s supposed suicide appeared in the provincial press, stating that a ‘West of England’ Member of Parliament had declared that he had solved the Ripper mystery and that the murderer was ‘the son of a surgeon’ who suffered from ‘homicidal mania’ and committed suicide on the date of the final murder.5 The following year, the Western Mail6 stated that Henry Farquharson MP was credited with such a theory, which on the face of it appeared to pre-empt Macnaghten in terms of what he said about Montague Druitt.

  In 1898, Arthur Griffiths in his Mysteries of Police and Crime, had this to say about the Whitechapel murders and the close similarity with Macnaghten’s statements cannot be ignored:

  But the police, after the last murder, had brought their investigations to the point of strongly suspecting several persons, all of them known to be homicidal lunatics, and against three of these they held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion. Concerning two of them the case was weak, although it was based on certain colourable facts. One was a Polish Jew, a known lunatic, who was at large in the district of Whitechapel at the time of the murder, and who, having afterwards developed homicidal tendencies, was confined in an asylum. This man was said to resemble the murderer by the one person who got a glimpse of him – the police-constable in Mitre Court. The second possible criminal was a Russian doctor, also insane, who had been a convict both in England and Siberia. This man was in the habit of carrying about surgical knives and instruments in his pockets; his antecedents were of the very worst, and at the time of the Whitechapel murders he was in hiding, or, at least, his whereabouts were never exactly known. The third person was of the same type, but the suspicion in his case was stronger, and there was every reason to believe that his own friends entertained grave doubts about him. He also was a doctor in the prime of life, was believed to be insane or on the borderland of insanity, and he disappeared immediately after the last murder, that in Miller’s Court, on the 9th of November, 1888. On the last day of that year, seven weeks later, his body was found floating in the Thames, and was said to have been in the water a month. The theory in this case was that after his last exploit, which was the most fiendish of all, his brain entirely gave way, and he became furiously insane and committed suicide.7

  And as early as 1899 George R. Sims – a journalist and playwright with very good police connections – had been talking of a suspect who had drowned himself in the Thames at the end of 1888.8 What is evident from the statements of Macnaghten, the press reports about Farquharson, Griffiths’s reminiscences and Sims’s hints is that much of the information they put forward is obviously similar. Indeed, Griffiths’s mention of ‘the police-constable in Mitre Court’ as the only person who got a look at the murderer could be found in a draft version of Macnaghten’s notes, transcribed by his daughter Christobel (later Lady Aberconway),9 which were not for official consumption, although the mistake of referring to ‘Mitre Court’ appeared to be Griffiths’. As far as official records were concerned, no City policeman saw a man near Mitre Square, and the possibility that Macnaghten is referring to another officer (perhaps Metropolitan PC William Smith, who saw a man with Elizabeth Stride on the same night) suggests that, coming late to the Whitechapel murders case, Macnaghten was using second-hand or anecdotal information passed down by those who were more active at the time. In fact, Griffiths probably got his information in the same manner, most likely from Macnaghten, and Sims used Griffiths as his source.

  Macnaghten’s notes (or the ‘Macnaghten memoranda’ as they are popularly known), in mentioning two other individuals, Michael Ostrog and Kosminski, serve up more food for thought. Ostrog’s inclusion was somewhat of a mystery; from what is now known of him he appears to be little more than an audacious confidence trickster and thief, using a number of aliases throughout his criminal career and exhibiting no homicidal characteristics. In July 1888 he was arrested for stealing a microscope and sentenced on 14 November, which goes a long way to suggest that he was in France at the time of the murders. But the veracity of Macnaghten’s suggestions was not necessarily nullified by such odd inclusions, thanks to the citation of Druitt and the other suspect, ‘Kosminski’, who is somewhat more problematical. In the anecdotal world of police reminiscences, his inclusion is significant.

  In 1907 Sir Robert Anderson (he was knighted on his retirement in 1901) published comments on the Whitechapel murders in his book Criminals and Crime,10 where he declared that the perpetrator had been ‘caged in an asylum’. As early as 1895, he was reported as stating that ‘Jack the Ripper was a homicidal maniac, temporarily at large, whose hideous career was cut short by committal to an asylum’11 and again in 1901, in a short article on penology.12 Anderson published his memoirs13 in 1910, in which he shed some light on the supposed author of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and expanded on his previous brief comments:

  And the conclusion we came to was that he and his people were certain low-class Polish Jews; for it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile justice.

  And the result proved that our diagnosis was right on every point. For I may say at once that ‘undiscovered murders’ are rare in London, and the ‘Jack-the-Ripper’ crimes are not within that category. And if the Police here had powers such as the French Police possess, the murderer would have been brought to justice. Scotland Yard can boast that not even the subordinate officers of the department will tell tales out of school, and it would ill become me to violate the unwritten rule of the service. So I will only add here that the ‘Jack-the-Ripper’ letter which is preserved in the Police Museum at New Scotland Yard is the creation of an enterprising London journalist.

  Having regard to the interest attaching to this case, I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer and of the pressman who wrote the letter above referred to. But no public benefit would result from such a course, and the traditions of my old department would suffer. I will merely add that the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him.

  In saying that he was a Polish Jew I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact. And my words are meant to specify race, not religion. For it would outrage all religious sentiment to talk of the religion of a loathsome creature whose utterly unmentionable vices reduced him to a lower level than that of the brute.

  But in a serialized version of the memoirs published in Blackwood’s Magazine prior to the book, Anderson had also said that the suspect was put into an asylum, after which he was identified by the witness. Anderson obviously stuck to his story, and his comments were given some weight by pencilled annotations made by his good friend Chief Inspector Donald Swanson in a copy of the Lighter Side of My Official Life, sometime between 1910 and Swanson’s death in 1924. Where Anderson had written about the identification, Swanson’s ‘marginalia’ added that the witness would not testify:

  because the suspect was also a Jew and also because his evidence would convict the suspect, and witness would be the means of murderer being hanged which he did not wish to be left on his mind. D.S.S

  On the endpaper of the book, Swanson added that:

  After the suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home where he had been sent by us with difficulty, in order to subject him to identification, and he knew he was identified.

  On suspects return to his brothers house in Whitechapel he was watched by police (City CID) by day & night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back, he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards – Kosminski was the suspect. DSS

  The combination of references to ‘Kosminski’ as being a Polish Jew, his indulgence in ‘solitary’ or ‘unmentionable vices’ as set down by Macnaghten and Anderson and the apparent confirmation
of the identification and incarceration in an asylum by Swanson sets up the seemingly obvious chain of thought that Macnaghten’s ‘Kosminski’ was the same man discussed by Anderson and Swanson. But was ‘Kosminski’ Jack the Ripper? None of these obviously well-informed men gave a first name to this most intriguing of suspects, and it was not until just after Swanson’s marginalia were made public in 1987 that a suggestion was made – Aaron Kosminski.

  Aaron Kosminski,14 born in Kłodawa, central Poland, in 1865, appears in the records of Colney Hatch asylum, where he was incarcerated in February 1891. The cause of his insanity was ‘self abuse’, which again appears to confirm what had been said about him in the observations of those former senior officers. Swanson mentions ‘Kosminski’ being taken from his brother’s house for the identification; Aaron was taken from his brother Wolf’s house to the Mile End Old Town workhouse in 1890 (where he was deemed as having been insane for two years) prior to being sent to Colney Hatch. Unfortunately, there is also much about Aaron’s life that conflicts with the claims of those senior police officials. Macnaghten and Swanson said that he died soon after being admitted to the asylum, but Aaron Kosminski died at Leavesden Asylum in 1919. Except for one alleged incident where he threatened his sister with a knife, he appeared to be non-violent, later becoming an incoherent imbecile and in fact, when researching this matter in 1987, author Martin Fido was so unimpressed by the lack of any violent or homicidal characteristics that he rejected him and chose another Colney Hatch inmate, the more volatile David Cohen, as a potential candidate for the insane Polish Jew suspect.15 According to Fido, Cohen seemed to be the only Whitechapel Jew whose incarceration fitted the timescale given by Anderson. Though his research was meticulous, Fido put forward the rather odd possibility that David Cohen was indeed ‘Kosminski’ and that the name was just a ‘John Doe’, or general sobriquet given to Jews whose names were difficult or impossible to pronounce.