Complete History of Jack the Ripper (72 page)

Leavesden was an asylum for adult imbeciles established in 1870. And on 19 April 1894 W. Thacker, Clerk to the Board of Guardians, Mile End Old Town, signed an order for Kosminski’s admission there as a ‘chronic harmless lunatic, idiot or imbecile’. The order named his mother, Mrs Kosminski of 63 New Street, New Road, Whitechapel, as his nearest known relative.

Leavesden was Kosminski’s home for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. No case notes before 1910 appear to have survived. But from that date eight entries afford us glimpses of his behaviour. Two (1 April and 16 July 1914) noted that he was excitable and ‘troublesome’ at times, one (17 February 1915) that he was occasionally ‘very excitable’ and another (2 February 1916) that he could be ‘very obstinate’. None referred to him as a violent patient or as one that represented any risk to staff or other patients. Clean, but untidy and slovenly in his habits, he did no work and seemed unable to respond rationally to the simplest questions. This last point is mentioned in all but two of the eight case notes. ‘Patient is morose in manner. No sensible reply can be got by questions. He mutters incoherently.’ So ran a typical entry in January 1913. ‘Patient merely mutters when asked questions,’ another reported in February 1915. From four entries between 1 April 1914 and 2 February 1916 we learn that Kosminski was hearing voices and seeing things that were not there. By the latter date he had become a sad shell of a man, dull and vacant, and locked in a secret world of his own: ‘Patient does not know his age or how long he has been here. He has hallucinations of sight & hearing & is at times very obstinate. Untidy but clean, does no work.’

Of Kosminski’s general health we know a little more. Dr Henry Case, Medical Superintendent at Leavesden, informed Thacker upon Kosminski’s arrival at his asylum in 1894 that his bodily condition was ‘impaired’. Detailed medical records after 1910 note that it ranged from weak to good and record such mundane facts as Kosminski sustaining a cut over the left eye from an encounter with a wash-house tap in November 1915 and being twice put to bed with swollen feet in January and February 1919. It was in 1918, however, that his general health seems to have entered into terminal decline. On 26 May he was put to bed suffering from diarrhoea and ‘passing loose motions with blood & mucus’. Eight days later, his diarrhoea having ceased, he was ordered up by Dr Reese. In May 1918, too, his weight fell below seven stone. In May 1915 it had exceeded seven stone eight pounds. By February 1919, the last time he was weighed, it stood at six stone twelve pounds. It is from such arid medical data that we must of necessity reconstruct the last days of the man Sir Robert Anderson insisted was Jack the Ripper. From late February 1919 Kosminski was more or less permanently bedridden with erysipelas. On 13 March it was reported that his right hip had ‘broken down’. On 22 March he was very noisy but took little nourishment. The next day he again took little nourishment and appeared ‘very low’. Then, at five minutes past five on the morning of 24 March 1919, he died at the asylum in the presence of S. Bennett, the night attendant. There was a sore on his left hip and leg. Some of Kosminski’s symptoms suggest that he may have been suffering from cancer but the male patients’ medical journal and Kosminski’s death certificate both record the cause of death as gangrene of the left leg.
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To judge by Anderson’s comment that there was ‘no doubt whatever as to the identity of the criminal’ one would think the case against Aaron Kosminski cut and dried. In one respect, certainly, Kosminski was unique among major Whitechapel murder suspects – he was the only one against whom any direct evidence linking him with the crimes was ever adduced. That evidence, of course, was the positive identification of a witness mentioned both by Anderson and Swanson and the credibility of the case against the Polish Jew rests almost entirely upon it.

So who was the witness? Neither Anderson nor Swanson tell us his name but there are sufficient clues in the police evidence for us to determine his identity with reasonable certainty.

First, we have Macnaghten’s comment in the draft version of his 1894 report that ‘this man [Kosminski] in appearance strongly resembled the individual seen by the City PC near Mitre Square’. Now, as we have seen, Macnaghten’s draft and official report are factually weak. This particular statement is quite erroneous for despite Major Smith’s orders that couples be kept under close observation no City policeman saw the Ripper with his victim near Mitre Square and this led to speculation in the force that they might have met there by prior appointment.
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The Mitre Square witness, in fact, was Joseph Lawende, the commercial traveller who saw a man with a woman who may have been Kate Eddowes at the entrance of Church Passage, leading into Mitre Square, ten minutes before Kate’s body was discovered in the square itself. Macnaghten’s ‘City PC’ was undoubtedly a hazy memory of PC William Smith. Smith, however, was a Metropolitan, not a City, constable, and he reported seeing a man with Liz Stride in Berner Street, not one with Kate Eddowes near Mitre Square. In short Macnaghten confused two separate sightings made on the night of the double murder: those of PC Smith in Berner Street at about 12.35 and Joseph Lawende near Mitre Square an hour later.

It may seem difficult to believe that a senior police officer could have botched his facts as badly as this. But Macnaghten’s report shows every indication of having been largely compiled from memory. In the last chapter we noted several errors in his account of Druitt and that of Kosminski is similarly flawed by its assertion that this suspect had been committed to an asylum about March 1889. The correct date was February 1891. There are also errors in Macnaghten’s remarks on the Tabram, Chapman and Stride murders. The last is particularly revealing in that, like the reference to the City PC, it seems to have arisen from a transposition of the events surrounding the Berner Street and Mitre Square killings. Macnaghten’s draft avers that Stride’s killer was disturbed when ‘three Jews drove up to an Anarchist Club in Berners Street’. Now the Berner Street killer might very well have been disturbed but if he was it was by just
one
Jew – Louis Diemschutz, the steward of the International Working Men’s Club, who drove his barrow into Dutfield’s Yard, next to the club, within minutes of the time Long Liz must have been killed. Macnaghten’s reference to
three
Jews, then, was probably inspired by the story of Joseph Lawende, Joseph Hyam Levy and Harry Harris, the three Jews who, upon leaving the
Imperial Club in Duke Street later that same night, chanced upon the couple subsequently believed to have been the Ripper and Kate Eddowes. Haste and a disposition to trust too much in the memory are the causes of the Chief Constable’s lapses. ‘I never kept a diary, nor even possessed a notebook,’ he confessed in his autobiography in 1914, ‘so that, in what I write, I must trust to my memory, and to my memory alone.’
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If there is any truth at all in Macnaghten’s statement the witness who identified Kosminski was
either
PC Smith
or
Joseph Lawende. Other clues, though, clearly rule Smith out. Both Anderson and Swanson were emphatic that the witness was a Jew. And Swanson’s revelation that it was the City CID who watched Kosminski’s house points unmistakably at Lawende. Whether Sion Square or Greenfield Street was meant is immaterial. Both were well within the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police. So why was the surveillance being undertaken by the City force? There seems only one plausible explanation. The witness who had identified Kosminski was Lawende so the police were seeking to charge the suspect with the murder of Kate Eddowes in Mitre Square. Since the investigation of this crime, the only one in the series which occurred in the City, was the responsibility of the City detectives they had, of necessity, to be involved in the inquiry.

If the witness was a Jew the only alternative to Lawende is Israel Schwartz. But Schwartz does not fit the bill anything like as well. If Schwartz was the witness then Macnaghten was completely wrong and the City Police would have had no business trespassing into Metropolitan Police territory in order to watch a man suspected of a crime (the Berner Street murder) committed within the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan force. Furthermore, if the man Schwartz claimed to have seen attacking Stride in Berner Street really did call out ‘Lipski!’ he is unlikely to have been, as Kosminski unquestionably was, a Jew.

The witness mentioned by Anderson and Swanson was almost certainly Lawende and it is upon his identification of Kosminski that the case against the Polish Jew largely hinges. This single piece of positive evidence seems to mark Kosminski out as a more likely suspect than Druitt but in other ways, too, he sounds a more plausible Whitechapel murderer than the ill-starred barrister.

His known addresses in Sion Square and Greenfield Street were
within walking distance of all the murder sites. Additionally, a killer making his way there from Mitre Square could have traversed Goulston Street, where the bloodstained portion of Kate’s apron was found. Evidence of a violent disposition, lacking altogether in the case of Druitt, is there for all to read in Kosminski’s record. He was said by Jacob Cohen to have threatened his sister with a knife. When he was conveyed to Mile End Old Town Workhouse the authorities are said by Swanson to have felt obliged to restrain him by tying his hands behind his back. And in Colney Hatch he attacked an attendant with a chair. In his personal appearance, too, Kosminski arguably displayed some of the characteristics reported by witnesses of the Whitechapel killer. Mrs Long spoke of a man of ‘shabby genteel’ appearance. Three witnesses (Marshall, Smith and Schwartz) described one who was respectably or decently dressed. One (Marshall) said that the man he saw reminded him of a clerk rather than a manual worker. A hairdresser like Kosminski would scarcely have been an affluent man but he would not have been accustomed to dress like a labourer. ‘Shabby genteel’, ‘decent’ and ‘respectable’. These terms do not seem inappropriate ones to describe the general appearance of a poor immigrant barber. Then, of course, two important witnesses (Mrs Long and George Hutchinson) explicitly reported a man of foreign or Jewish appearance.

So have we found Jack the Ripper?

Well, there is no doubt that at the moment informed opinion regards Kosminski as the leading suspect. In
The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper
, an American TV documentary broadcast in 1988, a panel of experts including Scotland Yard’s Bill Waddell unanimously chose Kosminski as the most likely murderer from a list of five admittedly ill-chosen candidates. And Begg, Fido & Skinner, in their influential
Jack the Ripper A to Z
(1991) contend that nothing Anderson wrote about his suspect has been ‘shown to be false’, that the documentary case against Kosminski is ‘very strong indeed’ and that it is research into Kosminski which will most likely lead to the identification of Jack the Ripper ‘if it has not done so already’. Such comments led at least one reviewer to observe that the answer to the mystery seemed ‘tantalizingly close’. Unfortunately it isn’t. For the facts established in the present work about Kosminski and the Ripper prove that there is no credible evidence against the Jewish hairdresser, that there are important objections to attempts to identify him with the Ripper and that Anderson, the ‘rock’
upon which these accusations have been founded, is repeatedly and demonstrably inaccurate and misleading.

We had better start with that crucial identification of Kosminski by Lawende.

Just how incriminating this identification was depends upon the answers to three questions. When did it take place? Under what circumstances? And how confident was Lawende in the result? We do not have the information to furnish precise answers but the little that we do know, or can deduce, sheds great doubt upon the worth of Lawende’s evidence.

The important clue to the date of the identification is Swanson’s statement that it took place at the ‘Seaside Home’. This is a reference to the Convalescent Police Seaside Home at 51 Clarendon Villas, Hove, officially opened by the Countess of Chichester in March 1890, and its use proves that the identification was made between March 1890 and 4 February 1891, when Kosminski was last committed to the workhouse. If Swanson is to be believed we can narrow it down still further. For his statement that Kosminski was committed to the workhouse, and from thence to Colney Hatch, ‘in a very short time’ after his return strongly suggests that we should place the identification nearer the latter than the former date. The upshot of all this is clear; Lawende did not identify Kosminski until two years or more after his original sighting.

It is difficult to understand why it was considered necessary to take Kosminski to the Seaside Home unless it was to escape the attentions of the London press. The venue, however, does give cause for disquiet concerning the circumstances of the identification. Was Kosminski picked out from a line-up, as he would have been, for example, at Leman or Commercial Street, or were suspect and witness, as Anderson perhaps implies, simply confronted with each other? The last method would have ensured a measure of secrecy but the value of any identification made under such circumstances would have been extremely doubtful. Victorian detectives do not appear to have been consistent in their approach to the identification of suspects. The line-up, as in the case of John Pizer, may have been usual, but circumstance sometimes dictated variations in the routine. In the Lipski case of 1887 Charles Moore was taken to the London Hospital to see if he could identify Lipski, then a patient, as the man to whom he had sold a bottle of nitric acid on the morning of the murder. He picked Lipski out but doubts about the validity of his
identification were not settled during the trial when Moore admitted that before he had been allowed into the ward one police officer had already told him that he would most likely find his customer there and, worse, that although he was permitted to walk from bed to bed and look at the various patients Lipski had been the only one guarded by a policeman! The argument did not cease with Lipski’s conviction. Inspector Final insisted that the constable guarding Lipski was ‘a young man in plain clothes, and not brash like a constable’, and that the identification was ‘not open to exception’. A hospital nurse, on the other hand, contended that when Moore, Final and Detective Sergeant Thick came into the ward they ‘were all together and, it seemed to me, went altogether direct to the foot of Lipski’s bed.’
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