Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (22 page)

Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been mentally ill since at least 1885. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter in the street, or on the floor, as well as a refusal to wash or bathe. The cause of his insanity was recorded as ‘self-abuse’, which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation. Because of his poor diet, he was always in a state of emaciation.

For some strange reason, the police didn’t seem to have a stable address for Kosminski, which might have been due to the fact that he moved in and out of various lodging houses. The police had been watching Kosminski for some time while he was living at his brother’s home in Whitechapel. They eventually took him, with his hands tied behind his back, to the workhouse and then to Colney Hatch Linatic Asylum, where he eventually died shortly after. When asylum records were checked later, however, they only showed Aaron Kosminski as living in Whitechapel, but they also noted the name and address of one, Isaac Kozminski, who may have been Aaron’s brother, residing at 76 Goulston Street. All the Ripper’s victims were murdered within walking distance of Goulston Street, and the bloodstained piece of apron that came from one of the Ripper victims, Catherine Eddowes, was also found there.

Aaron Kosminski’s case notes indicate that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, a fact that today is recognised in most serial killers.

Apart from his obvious mental illness, there was no real reason to connect Kosminski with the Ripper murders, other than his supposed ‘great hatred of women and his strong homicidal tendencies’.

M
ICHAEL
O
STROG

Number two on the list of suspects was Michael Ostrog, a Russian Jew, who was born in 1833, probably in Russia, but we are not sure. Ostrog was also known as Bertrand Ashley, Claude Clayton, Dr Grant Max Grief Gosslar, Ashley Nabokoff, Orloff, Count Sobieski and Max Sobiekski.

Ostrog was what we would probably call today a career criminal. This is not to say that he actually made a living from his crimes, because most of them were very petty to say the least:

For the next sixteen years, Ostrog continued to court the attention of the authorities for one reason or another:

Not a very impressive record at all, but like Kosminski, not one to particularly connect him as a suspect to the Ripper murders. Police records (not Abberline) had Michael Ostrog down as ‘A mad Russian doctor and a convict and unquestionably homicidal maniac’. Ostrog was said to be ‘Habitually cruel to women, and for a long time was known to have carried about with him surgical knives and other instruments; his antecedents were of the very worst and his whereabouts at the time of the Whitechapel murders could never be satisfactorily accounted for’. This account does not seem to tie in at all with the rather pathetic criminality we see in his criminal record.

Ostrog was certified insane while in Wandsworth prison, and was sent to the Surrey pauper mental asylum on 30 September 1887, where he was described as ‘50 years of age, Jewish, a surgeon, married and suffering from mania’. He was released on 10 March 1888 and continued his criminal career.

If the records of his birth were true, it would have made him at least 55 years of age at the time of the Whitechapel murders. This would make him much older than any of the eyewitness sightings of a Ripper suspect, who was usually described as 28 to 35 years old. Ostrog also did not match the suspect’s build or general description, which described the Ripper as a short, stout man, just a little taller than his victims, with fair to medium brown hair; whereas Ostrog was dark skinned with dark brown eyes, grey hair and was 5ft 11in tall.

The notes that Ostrog was a doctor, had some sort of medical training or carried surgical knives, and was habitually cruel to women, are also completely unfounded. There is absolutely no evidence throughout his long criminal career that Ostrog used violence on anyone, particularly women.

The whole case against Ostrog, as with Kosminski, seems to be based on his mental instability and ethnicity.

F
RANCIS
T
UMBLETY

Number three on the list of suspects was neither Jewish nor mentally disturbed; Francis Tumblety was born in Ireland in 1833, and along with his family, including ten brothers and sisters, immigrated to Rochester, New York, just a few years after his birth. Nothing much is known of his early years in the USA, but by the time he was in his early thirties, he was making a very good living by posing as an ‘Indian Herb’ doctor throughout the United States and Canada, and was commonly perceived as a misogynistic quack.

During the mid–1860s one of his patients died in mysterious circumstances. The police instigated an investigation into Tumblety and his methods, but not enough evidence could be found to link him to the woman’s death, and the case was eventually dropped. In 1865, he was arrested in St Louis and held in prison for three weeks, accused of being a conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was eventually released without charge, as he was found to be using an alias similar to the name of a wanted man at the time.

By 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, Tumblety had left the USA and had set up home in England. On 7 November of that year he was arrested and charged with engaging in a homosexual act, which was illegal at the time. He was granted bail while awaiting trial, which was scheduled to take place on the next magistrates’ court sitting on the 16th of the same month. Tumblety was re-arrested on the 14th and re-bailed on the 16th.

These dates are important, as they show that Tumblety was actually on the streets of London on 9 November, the date Mary Kelly was murdered.

Tumblety didn’t wait around for his trial to begin, and sometime between 14 and 16 November, he fled to France under an assumed name, and from there to the USA.

Tumblety’s notoriety preceded him, and the US newspapers soon discovered his whereabouts and printed reports of how his arrest in England was connected to the Ripper murders. The American press also claimed that Scotland Yard were trying to extradite him back to England, but these allegations were not confirmed by the British press or the London police, who stated: ‘There is no proof of his complicity in the Whitechapel murders, and the crime for which he is under bond in London is not extraditable.’

As with all of the suspects, there was no concrete evidence linking Tumblety to the Ripper murders but there was an abundance of circumstantial evidence; so much so, in fact, that the senior police officer in charge of Tumblety’s case was given the assistance of six English detectives and two clerks. This led to Tumblety becoming one of the major suspects in the Ripper case. After all, Scotland Yard would hardly assign a team of six detectives to a case where the suspect was only accused of an indecency charge. This action by the police threw suspicion on Tumblety of something far worse.

A former Union colonel from the Civil War period gave an interview with a newspaper, where he recalled attending a dinner party that Tumblety had thrown, in which he had showed guests to a small attic room where he kept what he referred to as his anatomical museum. The room was filled with glass jars and cases. Tumblety lined up a number of the jars on a table, and told his guests that they contained the wombs of women of every social class. He then proceeded to break into a long and vehement speech, in which he revealed that he had once been married to an older woman who had let him down badly when he found out that she was in fact a prostitute. He denounced all women, especially those he described as ‘fallen women’, like his ex-wife.

Tumblety was, if nothing else, a fantasist. He used to boast of having met Charles Dickens during his frequent trips to London, though there was no proof of this whatsoever.

When Tumblety arrived in London in 1888, he took lodgings in Batty Street, which is just a couple of minutes walk away from Whitechapel, which, in turn, is right in the heart of what was to become known as Ripper territory.

The landlady of the lodging house in Batty Street later reported that one of the lodgers had vanished after asking her to wash a shirt, which was steeped in blood. She never identified Tumblety as this lodger, but it is a very strong coincidence that he happened to be a lodger at that same address.

Tumblety was also alleged to be an Irish-American Fenian and possibly part of a plan to assassinate Arthur James Balfour, who at the time of the alleged plot was Chief Secretary of Ireland. Balfour later served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 1902 to December 1905.

It is also believed that he had a role in what became known as the Phoenix Park murders, which was the name given to the assassination on 6 May 1882 of Lord Frederick Cavendish, British Secretary for Ireland, and Thomas Henry Burke, his undersecretary, in Phoenix Park, Dublin. They were stabbed to death by members of the ‘Invincibles’, a terrorist splinter group of the Fenian movement.

A number of different men were arrested and tried for these murders, two of whom turned state’s evidence, five were hanged and three were sentenced to penal servitude. One man, who was apparently never caught, was someone whose description matched very closely to that of Francis Tumblety.

Being a misogynist or a fantasist, or even a member of an extremist political group, might well be damning features, if indeed proven to be true, but these features do not prove or disprove Tumblety’s involvement in the Ripper case. There was no doubt that there were some very strong indications that Tumblety was in some way involved in this case, which made Abberline, and the police in general, very suspicious of him; but it was not until after his death in 1903 that several other vital and very damning pieces of evidence came to light.

When an inventory of his personal belongings was taken after his death, it was noted that he had several pieces of extremely expensive jewellery, $1,000 in bonds and over $430 in cash. He also had two very cheap fake gold rings, which didn’t fit in at all with his general style and demeanour; their value was approximately $2, and they matched exactly the description of the rings that were taken from the body of Annie Chapman.

To sum up the evidence pointing to Tumblety’s involvement in the case, we have the following:

1.   Tumblety was known for his hatred of women.

2.   His wife had worked as a prostitute whilst married to him.

3.   He had a wide knowledge of anatomy and collected body parts in jars, which he readily showed to guests.

4.   The murders ceased when he fled the country.

5.   He was noted on police files at the time as a person of bad character.

6.   It was a fact that Scotland Yard contacted the New York Police Department for a copy of his handwriting. This was just after Catherine Eddowes’ death, which indicates that he was high on their suspect list.

7.   The rings thought to have belonged to Annie Chapman were found in Tumblety’s inventory after his death.

8.   He lived in the Whitechapel area at the time of Mary Kelly’s death.

These are all very strong points that add to the case against Francis Tumblety. There were other lesser points which nevertheless still scored against him, such as his use of aliases and the fact that Scotland Yard pursued him to New York after he jumped bail on what was a relatively small misdemeanour. If we add to these the other allegations, such as his involvement in the Fenian movement and the death of one of his patients in mysterious circumstances when he was posing as an ‘Indian Herb’ doctor during the mid–1860s, then I would say the case against him is very strong indeed.