Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Part One: Coming to London

  1: “Fear God and the King”

  2: 1881: The Storm Breaks

  3: The Victorian East End

  4: Jewish Tailors in the East End

  Part Two: 1888

  5: The Murders Begin

  6: Martha Tabram

  7: Polly Nichols

  8: The Police

  9: Annie Chapman

  10: Elizabeth Stride

  11: Kate Eddowes

  12: Lonesome October

  13: The Batty Street “Lodger”

  14: Mary Kelly

  15: The Curtain Falls

  16: An Encore? The Murder of Frances Coles

  Part Three: Aaron Kozminski

  17: Downward Spiral

  18: Anderson’s Suspect

  19: Macnaghten and Swanson

  20: A Few Possible Leads

  21: The Identification, the Witness, and the Informant

  Part Four: A Modern Perspective

  22: Not Guilty?

  23: A Modern Take on Serial Killers

  Modern Advances in Criminology

  The FBI’s Profile of Jack the Ripper

  A Motivational Model

  24: Geographic Profiling

  25: Schizophrenia and Violence

  26: Murder Will Out

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. “Fear God and the King”

  2. 1881: The Storm Breaks

  3. The Victorian East End

  4. Jewish Tailors in the East End

  5. The Murders Begin

  6. Martha Tabram

  7. Polly Nichols

  8. The Police

  9. Annie Chapman

  10. Elizabeth Stride

  11. Kate Eddowes

  12. Lonesome October

  13. The Batty Street “Lodger”

  14. Mary Kelly

  15. The Curtain Falls

  16. An Encore? The Murder of Frances Coles

  17. Downward Spiral

  18. Anderson’s Suspect

  19. Macnaghten and Swanson

  20. A Few Possible Leads

  21. The Identification, the Witness, and the Informant

  22. Not Guilty?

  23. A Modern Take on Serial Killers

  24. Geographic Profiling

  25. Schizophrenia and Violence

  26. Murder Will Out

  Photo Credits

  Index

  Copyright © 2011 by Robert House. All rights reserved

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Photo credits begin on page 341 and constitute an extension of the copyright page.

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  ISBN 978-0-470-93899-7 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-00321-3 (ebk);

  ISBN 978-1-118-00322-0 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-00323-7 (ebk.)

  Foreword

  by Roy Hazelwood

  Jack the Ripper. The name itself speaks of serial murder, mutilation, and fear. Even though his identity remains shrouded in mystery, he is, without question, the most infamous serial killer in the history of the world. It has always been interesting to me that Jack’s fame persists in spite of the fact that by today’s violent crime standards, he would not rate more than a passing interest by the media. After all, there were only five or six or seven victims.

  I first became intimately familiar with the case in 1988 when John Douglas and I were invited to prepare a profile of the unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. We were asked to present our findings on a television special, before a live audience, marking the one hundredth anniversary of the Ripper’s crimes. This program was on a major network and was hosted by the noted actor Peter Ustinov. We were provided with police and autopsy reports, background information on each of five Ripper victims, maps depicting the crime locations, and articles and book chapters written about the killings.

  We prepared the profile and traveled to Hollywood to rehearse for the show. We met with the other guests who were to appear on the program: a noted forensic pathologist, the curator of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, and a female jurist from London. John and I shocked our new colleagues when we quickly told them that it was our opinion that Jack the Ripper was a paranoid schizophrenic and that his criminal successes could be attributed more to luck than to skill and intelligence.

  We were surprised to learn that the program’s producers had identified five suspects from the 1888 case. Included in the group was a schoolteacher who had committed suicide, a surgeon for the royal family, a prince, and a mentally disturbed person named Aaron Kozminski. John and I studied what was known about the suspects, compared our profile to the group of suspects, and determined that Kozminski most closely matched our profile. We then informed our colleagues that if Kozminski wasn’t the Ripper, then it was someone just like him.

  Over the intervening years, I have been made aware of a number of other men who were forcefully put forth as the Ripper. I have not, however, been convinced that any of those men were as likely to be responsible for the murders as Kozminski was.

  Over those same years, I have often longed for more information on Kozminski, and periodically I have attempted to delve into his background. Because of a lack of time and patience, however, I was largely unsuccessful. But finally, thanks to Robert House, I am able to satisfy my curiosity. Does Mr. House resolve the identity of Jack the Ripper? Probably not, but no one else has either, and besides, that isn’t his purpose. He simply wants to provide his readers with the most complete history of a most likely
suspect, and he has done a masterful job.

  Aaron Kozminski was a Polish Jew who spent the first fifteen years of his life in Russia. Mr. House begins his book by providing us with an overview of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Russia. He then transitions the Kozminski family to the East End, or Whitechapel section, of London (where the murders eventually occurred) and situates them geographically, economically, and socially for us. In doing so, he sets the stage for the murders that follow.

  Mr. House takes us into the corridors of Jack’s murders through a number of different doors. He provides detailed information on each of the Ripper’s victims, interspersing the murder accounts with informative and interesting material about the police investigation, other main suspects, and even the infamous letter allegedly written by Jack.

  As I mentioned earlier, John Douglas and I felt that Jack the Ripper was a paranoid schizophrenic, and Mr. House documents Kozminski’s mental deterioration. What will be new information for many readers (as it was for me) is Mr. House’s description of witness and informant accounts that led to the identification of Kozminski as a viable suspect.

  Mr. House then brings the reader into the modern era of the serial killer phenomenon. He discusses the FBI study conducted by John Douglas and Bob Ressler, both of whom served in the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Mr. House also describes the application of a relatively new law enforcement tool, geographic profiling, to the Ripper case. This process has been effectively used by investigators across the western world and is a most valuable tool in such crimes. The reader will find the procedure and its findings in this case to be illuminating and very interesting.

  As an FBI agent, I was fortunate to have served in the Behavioral Science Unit with Bob and John and to have consulted on serial murder cases across the United States, Canada, and Europe. I have also conducted face-to-face interviews with killers, rapists, sexual sadists, and child molesters and their wives and girlfriends, and I can unequivocally state that no case has ever captured the attention of criminologists or the imagination of the public like Jack the Ripper—not the Atlanta Child Murders, Ted Bundy, the notorious Night Stalker of Los Angeles, or even the infamous Citizen X case involving the murders of more than one hundred children in Russia.

  Jack the Ripper is unsolved and from all indications will remain so. Mr. House, however, has done for all who are fascinated by this case a great favor by writing an extremely well-researched book that sheds light on the individual who is, in my opinion, the most viable of all suspects in this, the most studied serial murder case in all of history. Jack the Ripper still stands apart from all other serial killers, and it is my belief that he will continue to do so far into the future.

  Read, learn, and enjoy!

  Robert R. “Roy” Hazelwood is a retired FBI agent with the Academy Group Inc. (AGI) and author of The Evil That Men Do and Dark Dreams.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Chris Scott, R. J. Palmer, Robert Linford, Phillip Hutchinson, Debra Arif, John Bennett, Rob Clack, Neal and Jennifer Shelden, Neil Bell, Andrew Firth, Scott Nelson, Paul Begg, Stewart Evans, Keith Skinner, Jonathan Menges, Richard Jones, Dick Bonier, Lauren Post, Roy Hazelwood, D. Kim Rossmo, Colin Roberts, Ripperologist magazine, Eduardo Zinna, Chris George, Adam Wood, Martin Fido, the Polish National Archives at Poznan, the London Metropolitan Archives, Don Axcell and the Christian Police Association, Chris Hogger, David Wright, Andy Aliffe, Alan McCormick, Norma Buddle, Jeff Leahy, Howard Brown, Stephen Ryder, Katarzyna Grycza, Iana Ulianova, Anya Razumnaya, Peter Higginbotham, Tomek Wisniewski, Adam Weglowski, Chris Reynolds, Joy Azmitia, Tim Seldes, Stephen Power, and Ellen Wright.

  Special thanks to John Malcolm for his feedback and encouragement and the many hours we spent discussing the case over beers at the Burren, and to Laura Malcolm, who graciously translated countless Polish documents for me. My deepest thanks also to the descendants of Woolf Abrahams, Isaac Abrahams, and Matilda and Morris Lubnowski Cohen, and Nevill Swanson and the descendants of Donald S. Swanson.

  Finally, none of this would have been possible without the research and insights of Chris Phillips, a tireless investigator whose contributions as my partner in this endeavor I could not possibly overstate.

  Note: Polish vital records from the nineteenth century used the dual dating format, showing both the Gregorian and the Julian calendar dates (for example, “It happened in the town of Kodawa on 2nd, 14th May 1851”). For the sake of clarity, I will simplify these and show only the modern Gregorian date.

  Introduction

  This is an obscure and fantastic case, a contemporary case, something that could only happen in our day, when the heart of man has grown troubled, when people quote sayings about blood “refreshing,” when the whole of life is dedicated to comfort . . . there is resolution evident here, for the first step, but resolution of a special kind—a resolve like that of a man falling from a precipice or flinging himself off a tower; this is the work of a man carried along into crime, as it were, by some outside force.

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 1866

  In the summer of 1888, a brutal killer emerged like a plague in the very epicenter of what was at the time one of the worst slums in the world. To the residents of London’s crime-ridden East End, the monster seemed to be lurking in every alley, just beyond the edge of every shadow. By the end of the summer, three local prostitutes had been brutally murdered, and a frenzied panic had taken hold of the heart of the British Empire. To both the baffled police force and a morbidly fascinated public, it was clear that these were no ordinary crimes. This was a new and largely misunderstood type of horror, like something out of a nightmare. It was the modern world’s introduction to the phenomenon of the serial killer.

  Then, in late September, the police received a taunting letter from someone claiming to be the killer; it was signed “Jack the Ripper.” The murders quickly became an international sensation, and detailed accounts of the murders were reported in newspapers across the globe. As a bloody summer gave way to an even bloodier autumn, there were more murders, each more gruesome than the last. The victims were often disemboweled or mutilated beyond recognition. The police were at a dead end, completely defeated, and the Home Office began to worry that the murders might give rise to social upheaval among the lower classes. And then, after butchering five (or six) prostitutes in the span of only a few short months, the phantom suddenly vanished.

  The Jack the Ripper crimes were never solved, and largely because of this the murderer attained an almost mythic notoriety. He was a real-life exemplar of the bogeyman; mothers would scare their children into avoiding mischief with the warning, “You better watch out, or Jack the Ripper will come and get you.” The archetype of the preternatural supervillain, Jack the Ripper eventually earned his place alongside more traditional figures from the Western canon of monster mythology like Dracula and werewolves. In a sense, the crimes served as a harbinger of the twentieth century and of the rapid and unnerving changes being ushered in by both the industrial revolution and modernization in general. As author Paul Begg has noted, the Ripper was “the embodiment of the public’s fears of the East-End slums—poverty, disease, upheaval . . . fear of what lurked in shadows.”1 The Ripper was then, and yet remains, a manifestation of our darkest fears and anxieties, still haunting the remote gaslit corners of the collective subconscious, invariably wearing a cape, a top hat, and a dark overcoat.

  Jack the Ripper is now widely considered to be the most famous serial killer of all time, and the case ranks as one of the world’s most notable unsolved mysteries. The allure of the case has proved irresistible to scholars (commonly referred to as Ripperologists) who, over the course of the last century, investigated every imaginable facet of the story. Yet despite a veritable mountain of documentation in the form of police files, inquest testimony, newspaper reports, and memoirs, there are still huge gaps in our knowledge. Many of the original police files were lost, stolen, or simply di
scarded, while the memories of those who actually investigated the murders gradually faded. What has survived is a complex jigsaw puzzle of fragments, vague statements, and documents that are often contradictory and difficult to interpret. The inevitable result for those who try to solve the case is frustration, and the general consensus now among most Ripperologists is that the killer’s identity will remain a mystery forever.

  Such is the basic gist of the Jack the Ripper story. Contrary to the general public knowledge, however, there was one man who repeatedly stated that the London police in fact knew the identity of Jack the Ripper. The killer was an insane Polish Jew, he claimed, “whose utterly unmentionable vices reduced him to a lower level than that of the brute.” Intriguingly, the man who made this provocative statement was not a mere crank or an armchair theorist, but instead was none other than Sir Robert Anderson, the assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police Force and the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) during the Ripper murders. In his 1910 autobiography, Anderson bluntly stated that the Ripper’s identity was a “definitely ascertained fact,” and that a witness had in fact identified the killer but then refused to testify to his identification in court. Anderson noted that he was “almost tempted” to disclose the name of Jack the Ripper, if “the publishers would accept all responsibility in view of a possible libel action.”2 Yet in the end, he never revealed the name of the suspect in question, and his cryptic statements on the matter were soon forgotten.

  Then in 1959 a document emerged from the fray of research that seemed to back up Anderson’s claim. The document in question was an internal London Metropolitan Police memorandum that had been written in 1894, in which the former assistant chief constable Melville Macnaghten listed three “strong suspects” in the case. One of these was “Kosminski,” a man described as “a Polish Jew, & resident in Whitechapel.” According to Macnaghten, Kosminski “had a great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies,” and was “removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889.”3 Unfortunately, despite the obvious similarities with Anderson’s unnamed suspect, nobody seemed to make a connection between the two, and it was generally assumed that Anderson and Macnaghten were talking about two different people.