Complete History of Jack the Ripper (3 page)

Ostrog was admitted to Banstead on 7 May 1891. The admissions register notes that his physical condition was ‘much impaired’ and that he ‘has delusions of various kinds and is paralyzed on one side of face, muscular tremor due to sclerosis’. Two years later, on 29 May 1893, he was discharged ‘recovered’.

It was to the Banstead incarceration that Macnaghten undoubtedly referred when, in 1894, he said that Ostrog was ‘detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac’ subsequent to the Whitechapel murders. He knew about it because on 7 May 1891, the day Ostrog was admitted, it was Macnaghten himself who wrote to the Medical Superintendent at Banstead about him on behalf of the Convict Supervision Office. ‘I shall feel obliged if you will cause immediate information to be sent to this office in the event of his discharge,’ he said, ‘as the Magistrate [at Bow Street] adjourned the case
sine die
, in order that he (Ostrog) might be again brought up and dealt with for failing to report himself if it is found that he is feigning insanity.’
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Ostrog’s movements during the next year are obscure. In June 1893 he was arrested for a robbery at Canterbury. Apparently he ‘feigned’ insanity and then, while being taken to Dover for deportation to France, escaped. In the following November he was believed to have stolen two books and a silver cup at Eton College. This run of thefts terminated with Ostrog’s arrest in June 1894. Clearly his ‘delusions of exaggeration’ had not deserted him for on this occasion he was claiming to be a ‘professor of bacteria’ and a French Republican with ‘eighty millions in the Bank of England’. The magistrates at Slough Petty Sessions were not impressed. They committed him for trial at Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions.

Curiously enough, when Ostrog was brought to trial at the beginning of July, he was convicted of an offence he did not commit. The charge was one of obtaining three gold watches and chains by false pretences from a jeweller’s shop at Eton in 1889. Several witnesses swore that Ostrog was the man who had done it and, although he
vehemently challenged their evidence in court, he could not shake them. ‘Look at me! Look at me! I’m not the man,’ he cried at Frederick Rowell, the shop assistant. ‘Yes, you put it on very well, old chap,’ replied Rowell. Ostrog protested that he could not have been the fraudster because at the time of the offence he had been in a criminal lunatic asylum in France. Not surprisingly, in view of his repeated lies, the jury did not believe him. And he cannot have enhanced his credibility with them when he explained that he had returned to England hoping to sell an invention to the Royal Navy – a lifebelt that would enable a man to swim around the world! He was sentenced to penal servitude for five years with police supervision for a further seven. However, soon after the trial, the French authorities verified Ostrog’s story. After just twelve weeks in prison he was released and awarded £10 compensation.
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We next hear of him in 1898. On 15 September that year Richard Wells, a cadet’s servant at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, saw him coming out of the room of one of the cadets. When books were found to be missing from the room Ostrog was given into custody. Under the name of Henry Ray he was convicted the next day at Woolwich Magistrates’ Court and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour for six weeks.
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Ostrog’s last known offence occurred in 1900. In August a microscope belonging to Colonel James Mulroney of the Indian Medical Service was pilfered from the London Hospital Medical College. Only a short time after the theft Ostrog pawned the instrument for £3 at the shop of John Arnold in Lewisham High Road. He was eventually apprehended on 8 December and it was Arnold himself who procured the arrest. Ostrog was foolish enough to try to sell the pawn ticket to a neighbouring chemist and Arnold, having learned from the police that the microscope had been stolen, gave him into custody when he saw him hanging about the street. The culprit was brought to trial under the name of John Evest at the County of London Sessions, Clerkenwell, in December 1900. By this time he was partially paralyzed and in sentencing him to five years’ penal servitude Mr Loveland, the deputy chairman, told him that ‘if his health was bad he would be well cared for in prison and he would not be set to any work he could not do.’
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Ostrog’s imprisonment began in Wormwood Scrubs but he did not complete the full term. On 17 September 1904 he was released on licence from Parkhurst. He would, he assured the authorities, earn his
living as a doctor and he gave his intended address as 29 Brooke Street, Holborn.
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It is the last glimpse we have of him.

A description of 1904 gives Ostrog’s height as only five feet eight and three-quarter inches. By then he was aged and decrepit and his brown hair was turning grey and thinning on top. It is probable that his sad and wasted life came to an end in some workhouse institution shortly after his release from prison. But no record of Ostrog’s death has yet been discovered. Apparently he died, as he had lived, under an assumed name.

Ostrog’s height, age and infirmities suggested that he could not have been the Ripper but I could not conclusively rule him out using English sources alone. There were, in fact, two serious gaps in the record of his criminal activities in England: the periods 1883–7 and 1888–91. It turned out that these two periods were linked.

The clue to his disappearance in 1888 lay, of course, in his own claim to have been serving a prison sentence in France at the time the Eton fraud was perpetrated in 1889. Further research at the Archives Départementales de Paris unearthed the record of his conviction and it was this document that cleared the mystery up.

Ostrog was convicted on 14 November 1888 under the name of Stanislas Lublinski alias ‘Grand Guidon’. He told the French police that he was a doctor and that he had been born in Warsaw on 5 March 1835. This biographical data sounds authoritative but since Ostrog was probably no more truthful in France than in England we had best treat it with caution.

The offence for which he had been arrested was the fraudulent removal of a microscope belonging to a certain Monsieur Legry in Paris. Fortunately for us, however, there was more to his case than that. It was also established that he had been in France before, that he had been given an earlier sentence of more than a year’s imprisonment, and that he had eventually been expelled from the country by ministerial order dated 9 June 1886. In 1888, then, there were three strikes against Ostrog: returning to France without the government’s permission, defrauding Monsieur Legry of his microscope, and being a repeat offender, all punishable with terms of imprisonment under articles 8, 401 and 58 respectively of the penal code. He was sentenced to serve two years in prison and pay costs assessed at 448 francs and 85 centimes.

It should be noted that the date 14 November 1888, five days after the murder of Mary Kelly, was that of Ostrog’s conviction. The conviction record does not tell us when Ostrog re-entered France
that year, or even when he stole the microscope. That information might be established by further research. But, crucially, it
does
tell us the date of his arrest by the French police in Paris – 26 July 1888. So there we have it. During the late summer and autumn of 1888, when Jack the Ripper was slaughtering prostitutes in London, Ostrog was in custody in France. He was completely innocent of any involvement in the crimes.

Exonerating Ostrog was a worthy exercise in itself, of course, but the results of the inquiry have much wider implications. They throw considerable doubt upon the value of Macnaghten’s report, long used both as a source of general information on the murders and as a platform from which to launch accusations against Druitt and Kosminski as well as Ostrog.

Some of the things Macnaghten wrote about Ostrog have checked out. The
Police Gazette
notices prove that he was regarded by the police as a serious Ripper suspect and that attempts were made to establish his whereabouts at the time of the murders. It is also important to remember that the British police knew nothing of his sojourn in France until the summer of 1894, several months after Macnaghten had penned his report. Having said all that, we would still have to conclude that Macnaghten comes out of the Ostrog evidence very badly.

His characterization of Ostrog was grossly unfair. Ostrog’s later convictions were identical in character to those before 1888. His record was by no means ‘of the very worst’. Not a single one of his thefts or deceptions involved violence or the threat of violence and there is nothing whatever to substantiate Macnaghten’s claim that Ostrog was habitually cruel to women. Even when writing of events within his recent personal knowledge Macnaghten was extremely misleading. Ostrog was not ‘subsequently detained . . . as a homicidal maniac’. He was arrested in 1891 for failing to report while under police supervision and committed to an asylum as a lunatic found wandering at large. The medical evidence submitted at the time of his committal explicitly stated that he was not dangerous to others. Macnaghten was well aware, too, that there were serious doubts about Ostrog’s insanity. It was widely believed in police circles that he faked insanity to escape long prison sentences. In 1894 Dr Morris of Reading Gaol, who had observed Ostrog’s behaviour for about two weeks, told Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions that in his opinion Ostrog was a ‘shammer’, not a lunatic.

As the man who led the Scotland Yard team in the East End
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, Fred Abberline should have possessed a more intimate knowledge of the Ripper investigation than either Anderson or Macnaghten. Unfortunately, he never published his memoirs and his mature views on the case have largely been lost to us. We do know, however, that he did not endorse any of the suspects named by Anderson and Macnaghten and that, at least in 1903, he was espousing a rival theory of his own. Abberline’s suspect was Severin Klosowski, better known as George Chapman, the triple poisoner hanged at Wandsworth on 7 April 1903.

Chapman matches the little we know or can reasonably deduce about the Ripper rather better than the other principal suspects. One always gets the feeling with him, too, that there was much more to him than met the eye. H. L. Adam, who was present at Chapman’s arrest in 1902 and who sat on the bench during one of his appearances at Southwark Police Court, caught a glimpse of that secret Chapman: ‘I got the impression that he was a particularly callous murderer. When most people in court were horrified he appeared to be amused. On one occasion, while a sarcastic smile was spreading over his face, he caught sight of me watching him. Immediately he straightened his face and assumed a serious expression.’
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That Chapman committed crimes of which we have no present knowledge I can well believe. That he was Jack the Ripper is another matter.

The main difficulty with the Chapman theory is that because he did not become a suspect until 1903 no accurate information as to his whereabouts at the times of the Ripper murders could ever be procured.

Abberline, hunting for evidence to back up the theory, questioned Lucy Baderski. But Lucy did not meet Chapman until 1889 and could have contributed little of value relating to his movements during the previous autumn. Similar problems beset those seeking to exonerate Chapman. We are indebted to Nick Connell for his recent discovery of Norman Hastings’s articles on the Ripper and Chapman cases. Hastings, apparently, also made inquiries in 1903. ‘The woman with whom he [Chapman] lodged in the West India Dock Road was positive that he could not have committed the first of the Ripper crimes,’ he wrote. ‘That took place on the night of the August Bank holiday in 1888, and she fixed the date easily because that night she gave a small party to a number of Poles, whom Chapman, who was new to the country and lonely, was anxious to meet.’
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This witness
was clearly Ethel Radin, and what she had to say is interesting in that it appears to give Chapman an alibi for the Tabram murder. Unfortunately even this apparent firm ground may be quicksand. Fifteen-year-old memories are treacherous and Ethel’s reference to Chapman’s being ‘new to the country’ raises the possibility that she was remembering the August Bank Holiday of 1887 rather than that of 1888. Post Office directories lend some support to this view. Abraham Radin’s premises were at 70 West India Dock Road and we know he was there from 1887 to 1888. In the latter year, however, the Radins moved out and the shop was taken over by Hyman Schein. It is Schein, not Radin, who is listed as the occupant in the
Post Office London Directory
of 1889, and bearing in mind that the data in these directories was normally at least six months out of date when they were printed, there is every chance that the Radins had already vacated the premises by the time Martha died.

Protagonists of the Chapman theory have always sought to buttress it by linking him with alleged murders in New York or the vicinity of Jersey City. Yet Chapman’s American activities are even more obscure than his early years in London. The murders themselves are still deeply mysterious. The most celebrated American Ripper-type slaying was that of Carrie Brown, committed in a New York lodging house on the night of 23–24 April 1891. This, undoubtedly, was one of the crimes early theorists had in mind. Allusions to atrocities in New Jersey are more difficult to explain. Melvin Harris believes that they were garbled memories of a tale broadcast in the
National Police Gazette
(New York) on 16 February 1889. This report recounted a knife attack on Annie Eisenhart, the head nurse at the Cooper Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, and was headlined: ‘ANOTHER VICTIM OF JACK THE RIPPER’. He may be right. But R. Michael Gordon, the author of a recent book on Chapman, also draws attention to the murder of an old woman in Milburn, New Jersey, during the night of 30–31 January 1892. Elizabeth Senior, the victim in the case, suffered multiple stab wounds to the breast and had her throat cut. Gain was, perhaps, the motive, for Elizabeth’s killer also ransacked her house.
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