Complete History of Jack the Ripper (73 page)

Anderson claimed that his witness ‘unhesitatingly’ identified Kosminski ‘the instant he was confronted with him’. But when we look at the circumstances of Lawende’s original sighting of 1888 it is impossible to understand how this could have been so. He saw the Ripper, if indeed it was the Ripper, at 1.35 on the night of the double murder, 29–30 September 1888. The distance between them was not great, perhaps fifteen or sixteen feet, but the observation was a fleeting one, Lawende neither spoke to nor took especial interest in the man, and it was dark. More important, at a time when the incident was still fresh in his mind Lawende insisted repeatedly that he would not be able to recognize the man again. The contemporary records leave us in absolutely no doubt of it. ‘I doubt whether I should know him again,’ Lawende told the Eddowes inquest on 11 October 1888, less than two weeks after the sighting. He told the police the same thing. We know because Inspector McWilliam and Chief Inspector Swanson in their reports of 27 October and 6 November 1888 both explicitly said so. And Major Smith, writing in his memoirs of 1910, remembered it the same way. ‘I could not “lead” him [Lawende] in any way. “You will easily recognize him, then,” I said. “Oh no!” he replied; “I only had a short look at him”.’
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It should now be clear why Lawende’s identification of Kosminski cannot possibly be considered a conclusive or even persuasive piece of evidence. Anderson’s book is seriously misleading on this point. He is expecting us to believe that Lawende, who saw the murderer but once, fleetingly and in a dimly lit street, and who admitted within two weeks that he would not be able to recognize him again, made a cast-iron identification of the culprit more than two years later! The notion, of course, is quite unacceptable and inevitably one
wonders what pressures were brought to bear upon Lawende and why, despite them, he ultimately refused to give evidence against the suspect. Anderson and Swanson have it that he backed out when he learned that the suspect was a fellow Jew. Perhaps. But why, if the identification was sound, could not Lawende have been served with a subpoena compelling him to testify? One cannot help but speculate that Lawende was less sure of his identification than the police wanted him to be and that, when he discovered that they had no other evidence against Kosminski, his misgivings overwhelmed him. If so he was right to withdraw. His identification would not have stood up in court for a moment.

Nowhere does Anderson so much as hint that the witness who identified his suspect was used on any other occasion. Yet we have evidence that he was – twice.

In February 1891, after Kosminski had been lodged in Colney Hatch, Tom Sadler, the suspect in the Coles case, was put in a line-up to see if Lawende could identify him. He couldn’t. But then, in the spring of 1895 the CID came up with another Ripper suspect in the person of William Grant Grainger. The
Pall Mall Gazette
, reporting their inquiries, says: ‘there is one person whom the police believe to have actually seen the Whitechapel murderer with a woman a few minutes before that woman’s dissected body was found in the street. That person is stated to have identified Grainger as the man he then saw. But obviously identification after so cursory a glance, and after the lapse of so long an interval, could not be reliable.’
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It would be fascinating to know who this witness was. For if the police considered Lawende an honest witness and were in touch with him as late as 1890–1 it is by no means unlikely that they were able to use him again in 1895. Indeed, careful scrutiny of the
Gazette
report indicates that the 1895 witness probably
was
Lawende. Mrs Long and Mary Cox can be ruled out because the witness was a man. Hutchinson is eliminated by the reference to the victim being found in the street. The best candidates, then, are PC Smith, Israel Schwartz and Joseph Lawende. But if the victim was ‘dissected’, as the
Gazette
says, we can discount the first two. They saw Liz Stride and her body, as is well-known, was not mutilated. All this leaves Kate Eddowes the victim and Lawende, once again, the witness.

It would be wrong to make too much of unsubstantiated news reports. Time and the loss of police records have buried the truth, probably forever. Nevertheless, the fact that Lawende was confronted
with suspects after he had identified Kosminski demonstrates that the first identification was anything but conclusive. And at the very least it is food for thought that he may have identified different men at different times. If it can be proved that Lawende did identify Grainger in 1895 his previous identification of Kosminski will be completely discredited.

Besides all this, the facts we have established on Kosminski raise serious difficulties for those who would identify him with the Ripper.

Take the question of his appearance. The little we know about this is soon said. His weight, recorded in May 1915, was only seven stone eight pounds and ten ounces, which suggests that he was small and slight of stature (he was said to have been in good bodily health as late as 1916). In 1888 he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. He was a Polish Jew. And he was a hairdresser. Now it is true that these details are consistent with
some
of the observations reported by witnesses who may have seen the killer but, on the whole, what we know about Kosminski does not match their descriptions particularly well.

Our best witnesses concur that the murderer was of average or below average height. This fits our data on Kosminski. Build, however, is a problem. Only two important witnesses mention build. Lawende said that the man he saw was of medium build, which could fit Kosminski, but Schwartz described a stout, broad-shouldered man, which doesn’t sound like him at all. Age is very difficult to estimate. Nevertheless the witnesses consistently described men who looked older than Kosminski is known to have been. And although two of the key witnesses did, indeed, accuse a foreigner neither can be said to have described Kosminski. He could fit Mrs Long’s description of a ‘shabby genteel’ foreigner but not her estimate of age – over forty. George Hutchinson’s man looked Jewish. But in this case Kosminski is seemingly ruled out both by the man’s age (thirty-four or five) and by his obviously prosperous appearance. It might justifiably be argued that Mrs Long be discounted on age because she did not see her suspect’s face. Hutchinson’s middle-aged ‘toff’, however, would seem a world away from Anderson’s young ‘low-class’ Polish barber. The other important witnesses (Smith, Schwartz and Lawende) did not indicate at the time that they had seen foreigners.

Although Kosminski’s earnings as a hairdresser would not have enabled him to tog himself out like Hutchinson’s man they might,
as we have said, have financed the shabby genteel or respectable appearance reported by Long, Smith and Schwartz. There is, though, a real problem here in the case against Kosminski: we cannot be certain that he was working at hairdressing or anything else in 1888.

Among the symptoms of Kosminski’s mental illness was a refusal to work and wash. We do not know when these particular symptoms first manifested themselves. In February 1891 Maurice Whitfield stated that Kosminski’s first attack of insanity had occurred in 1890 and that the present attack had lasted six months. These details were entered in the male patients’ casebook at Colney Hatch. But at some time during Kosminski’s stay at the asylum the entry recording the duration of the present attack at time of admission was altered in the casebook from six months to six years and six years is also the period specified in the male admissions register. In other words Kosminski may have been exhibiting symptoms of mental illness since 1885. Jacob Cohen’s statement in February 1891 certainly indicates that refusal to work had been a long-standing characteristic of his behaviour: ‘He has not attempted any kind of work for years.’ It is entirely on the cards, then, that in 1888 Kosminski was already dirty, dishevelled and out of work. In this condition his appearance would be irreconcilable with the descriptions given by Long, Smith or Schwartz, to say nothing of Hutchinson, and his circumstances would not square with our deduction, suggested by the dates and times of the murders, that the killer was in regular work.
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Kosminski’s known acts of violence no more qualify him for the role of Jack the Ripper than his physical appearance. Certainly they fall far short of proving Macnaghten’s claim that he was a homicidal lunatic with a deep hatred of women. His altercation with his (or Cohen’s) sister, in which he is said to have menaced her with a knife, can hardly be considered significant by itself in the light of the great amount of domestic violence evidenced weekly in the Victorian police courts. And the workhouse and asylum records are very revealing. In 1891, when Kosminski was committed to Colney Hatch, Maurice Whitfield, the Relieving Officer at Mile End, explicitly stated that he was not considered dangerous to other people. Three years later, upon Kosminski’s discharge from Colney Hatch to Leavesden, William Seward, Medical Superintendent at Colney Hatch, did the same. As late as 1910 the records of Leavesden Asylum were reiterating this belief. Clearly the authorities in these institutions never knew
that their patient had been suspected of the Whitechapel murders and, notwithstanding the incident of the chair, nothing in his behaviour while under their care gave them reason to believe that he had homicidal tendencies. Typically he languished indolent and apathetic.

Then, again, we have no evidence that Kosminski possessed even an elementary degree of anatomical knowledge. This point would not, perhaps, have troubled Anderson because he was much influenced by Dr Bond, and Bond, in his report of 10 November 1888, asserted unequivocally that the murderer did not possess anatomical knowledge. Unfortunately Bond’s opinion was not shared by any other medical expert who saw the wounds inflicted by the Ripper and whose judgement is on record. The rest seem to have subscribed to
some
degree of expertise, with Phillips and Brown attributing a great deal to the killers of Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes respectively. Anderson’s suspect thus retains credibility only if we are prepared to select the evidence that can be used to incriminate him and discount what remains.

Finally, whereas Druitt’s death might explain the cessation of the crimes so neatly, Kosminski’s incarceration took place more than two years after the Miller’s Court murder. If Kosminski was the killer, therefore, we have to accept that after committing five if not six murders in three months he quietly went to ground and remained inactive for another two years three months. If we add Alice McKenzie to the Ripper’s toll it still leaves us with a period of nineteen months between the last murder and Kosminski’s committal to Colney Hatch to account for. It is by no means impossible that the Ripper remained at large and refrained from murder in order to avoid detection. But does Kosminski, foraging for bread in the gutter, drinking water from taps, dirty, unwilling if not unable to work and listening to his voices, sound like the type of man with the necessary cunning and discipline to have done so? Lawende’s identification, it should be noted, cannot satisfactorily account for Kosminski’s inactivity because, according to Swanson, it occurred only ‘a very short time’ before the committal to Colney Hatch.

If only because of Lawende we have to take Kosminski seriously. Nevertheless, the more we have discovered about this sad and pathetic suspect the less plausible the case against him has appeared. Its central strut – mentioned by Anderson, Swanson and Macnaghten – was the alleged identification but this, for all the reasons we have discussed,
cannot possibly be regarded as satisfactory. What else the police had upon Kosminski it is impossible now to say. But to judge by the vagueness, even falsity, of the other circumstances alleged against him it was not very much. Macnaghten’s claim that Kosminski had strong homicidal tendences is not substantiated at all by the medical record. And Swanson’s that the murders ceased
with
Kosminski’s identification is patently untrue. On the present evidence the case against Kosminski is so extraordinarily flimsy that we have simply no alternative but to exonerate him.

Sir Robert Anderson thought otherwise – and said so in no uncertain terms. ‘There was no doubt whatever as to the identity of the criminal’ – ‘“undiscovered murders” are rare in London, and the “Jack-the-Ripper” crimes are not within that category’ – ‘in saying that he was a Polish Jew I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact.’ This is not the language of compromise. So our dismissal of Anderson’s suspect inevitably raises questions about the worth of his writings as a source of historical information.

In accounts written long after the event lapses of memory are only to be expected. Anderson makes his fair share of such slips. His memoirs state, for example, that the police undertook their house-to-house search during his absence abroad. In truth it was conducted after his return to London. Again, he is inconsistent about the date of his return. Anderson’s book tells us that, having decided to spend the last week of his holiday in Paris, he arrived in the French capital on the night of the double murder, and that, when the next day’s post brought an urgent summons from Matthews to return to London, he complied. A letter he wrote to one of the daily papers in April 1910, however, maintains that he was actually on his way home from Paris the night Stride and Eddowes were slain.
¹⁴
The interesting thing about these memories is that neither was accurate. Contemporary documents prove that Anderson did not return to duty until nearly a week after the double murder.

Reminiscent accounts suffer, too, from the natural tendency of their authors to interpret the past in ways advantageous to themselves. And it is in the interpretation of his memories, rather than in simple errors of fact or chronology, that Anderson most misleads later students of the Ripper case. His book foisted five important myths upon them when it contended that: