Jack the Ripper

by The Whitechapel Society

  The Spiritualist medium, Robert James Lees.

  Further ‘evidence’ against Gull comes from a rather tortuous source. Articles began to appear in various American newspapers, including the Chicago Sunday Times Herald in April 1895, claiming that the Ripper was an eminent London doctor. The information came from tittle-tattle from Dr Benjamin Howard, an American who had been working in London, and he had told the story to a prominent San Francisco citizen, William Greer Harrison. Although the doctor was unnamed, there were sufficient links with Guys Hospital – and the vivisectionist lobby, of which Gull was a member – for the well-informed to draw obvious conclusions. Even though Howard wrote a strenuous denial, via the People in January1896, to the effect that he had never discussed Jack the Ripper with anyone and knew no more than the sketchy newspaper reports back in 1888, the public were hooked.

  The same series of articles concerned the spiritualist medium Robert James Lees, who claimed to have offered his services to both the City and Metropolitan Police in early October, 1888. Lees’ story was that whilst riding on a bus, he had the strongest sensation that he was sitting near the Ripper. He followed his suspect to an elegant house in the West End (later said to be Brook Street), and this led to police questioning the inhabitants. Lees’ fellow traveller turned out to be William Gull, who had recently suffered from serious bouts of memory loss. Over a period of time, the physician’s wife had come to recognise her husband’s increasingly violent mood swings and had become so afraid of him that she had locked herself, and her children, in a room in the house. At one point, she discovered blood on her husband’s shirt for which he could not account. A court of inquiry was held by Gull’s fellow doctors (or Masons, or both, depending on which subsequent version of the tale you read) and, convinced of his guilt, they sentenced him to an asylum under the pseudonym ‘Thomas Mason 124’. The word was put out that Gull had died, but the coffin contained either another body entirely or a pile of rocks, depending on how far down the conspiratorial path you want to go.

  Nothing is more delicious to a researcher, especially of conspiracy theories, than to stumble upon a collection of papers which blow the lid off an accepted body of evidence. When Frank Spiering wrote Prince Jack in 1978, some of the material for the book came from the Academy of Medicine Library, in New York. This was a straight, 1896, reprint of the memoirs that had appeared two years earlier, written by Dr Acland, Gull’s son-in-law. What intrigued Spiering was the sheaf of 120 handwritten pages – apparently in Gull’s handwriting – which contained the extraordinary information that Gull had told the Prince of Wales that his son, Eddie, was dying from tertiary syphilis. Even more bizarre was the claim that Gull had hypnotised Eddie, and the heir to the throne had confessed to the Whitechapel Murders. He had become aroused watching butchers at work in Aldgate High Street, and had taken a knife to commit the crimes from the horse slaughterers in Buck’s Row (technically, the firm of Harrison in Winthrop Street). The Prince complained of headaches and was very talkative, showing signs of slight delirium. He also had a leather apron in his possession, a positive link to the notion of the butcher and one of the most famous red herrings in the entire Ripper case. In this version of the tale, of course, the Ripper is not Gull, but Eddie, and once again the Queen’s physician assumes the role of accessory after the fact.

  Scratching around for circumstantial evidence, various commentators have hit upon ‘the grape theory’, which has resurfaced in more than one movie about Jack. In one of these, Gull uses poisoned grapes to lull his victims into a stupor before killing and mutilating them in his coach. According to Stephen Knight, Gull was a great believer in grapes as refreshment when tired, but the idea that he constantly carried a bunch with him seems a little unlikely. Poison of course is pre-eminently the doctor’s murder weapon, in fact as well as fiction, so this makes sense. In fact, it makes no sense at all. The publicity-seeking grocer, Matthew Packer, whose shop was close to Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street, claimed to have sold a bunch of grapes to a man accompanying Liz Stride, shortly before she was murdered. Witnesses at the scene later – Louis Diemschutz, Isaac Kozebrodski, Fanny Mortimer and Eva Harstein – all claimed to have seen a grape stem in or near the dead woman’s hand. The police and doctors, who were called to Dutfield’s Yard (men trained to be observant), saw nothing of the kind, only the cachous (sweets) in Liz Stride’s left hand. At the inquest, Drs Bagster-Phillips and Blackwell swore that there were no grapes at the crime scene and none in the stomach of the deceased. Even if both these doctors were wrong, of course, it does not remotely point a finger at Gull, or anyone else in the medical profession. We might as well point the finger at the story-changing Matthew Packer.

  Clutching at straws, other Ripperologists have pointed out that William Gull was a supporter of vivisection – the carrying out of experiments on animals for scientific purposes. This has been alleged as an example of his cruelty, but takes things entirely out of context. England has always had an animal-centric culture (the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was established forty years before the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, for example), but conversely, bad treatment of animals, especially horses, was commonplace and in all his writings, Gull put people first rather than animals second. Even if he was particularly callous in this regard (and there was no evidence for this), the leap of logic that he must be the Whitechapel murderer is extraordinary.

  Then we have the fact that Gull delivered the Goulstonian Lectures at Guys Hospital, with all the delicious associations with Goulston Street and the irrelevant ‘Juwes’ graffito. Dr Goulston was actually a seventeenth-century physician and that, rather than the street, is the only link.

  The case against Gull rests entirely on the royal connection, and I do not have the space in this chapter to demolish that nonsense; except to say that all the theories emanating from Sickert and Knight have been discredited by painstaking research. Psychological profilers, over the last thirty years, have established the likelihood that the Ripper was an asocial loner whose sexual activity may have involved prostitutes. He probably came from the same social class as his victims and would have passed unnoticed in the streets of Whitechapel, which he clearly knew very well. Geo-profilers would add that Jack killed in his ‘circle of comfort’, which again points us to the Abyss. None of this fits William Gull, at all. He was a doctor, but not a surgeon. He worked in Guys Hospital, which is half an hour’s walk from Whitechapel and south of the river, well out of any geo-profiler circle of comfort. There is nothing to connect Gull with the Abyss, except the highly tenuous links via Walter Sickert and his supposed studio in Cleveland Street (which did not exist either!), as told to Ripperologist Jean Overton Fuller, by Sickert’s friend Florence Pash.

  The whole tale of the mad Mason, whisking Annie Crook off to a private asylum and operating on her to remove her memory, is high melodrama but has absolutely no basis in fact. Neither was Gull an expert on syphilis, and if he did recommend the use of mercury as a potential cure for the disease, he went along with 90 per cent of the medical profession at the time. How the twenty-four-year-old Eddie was supposed to be suffering from tertiary syphilis, when that stage usually takes fifteen years to develop, has never been explained. Gull was never a Freemason, so the ‘highest in the land theory’ collapses on that score alone, making a similar nonsense of the pseudonym Thomas Mason – the name given for Gull’s supposed incarceration in an asylum, following the Ripper Murders.

  The only ‘evidence’ against Gull – and it is flimsy in the extreme – rests on the claims of Robert Lees and the supposed police visit to Gull’s house, in Brook Street. Everything else – the memory lapses, the mood swings, the bloody shirt, the unofficial doctors’ ‘jury’ and the fake funeral – is just smoke and mirrors. There is no mention, in any police record, of Lees offering his services to them, nor were there any enquiries in Brook Street or the involvement of a doctor named Gull. The so-called corroborative evidence, provid
ed by Stephen Knight, of a letter sent by a crank in July 1889, is a simple misreading: ‘With all your “Lees”, with all your blue bottles…’, should actually read ‘tecs’ (i.e. detectives). Without that all-important police corroboration, all we have is the speculative nonsense that has been launched against an innocent man for forty years.

  Those who put Gull in the frame, from Dr Stowell to today’s filmmakers, should have read the words of the great doctor, recorded for posterity in 1894: ‘Fools and savages explain; wise men investigate.’

  Mei Trow is a member of the Society of Authors, Crime Writers’ Association and Welsh Academy. He has over fifty books to his credit, both fiction and non-fiction, and has written extensively on Jack the Ripper. He has lectured to The Whitechapel Society and has appeared in a number of Jack-related documentaries.

  6

  The Mysteries of Aaron Kosminski

  Philip Marquis

  The elderly man had been absorbed in the book from the very beginning, but when he reached page 137, his pulse began to quicken as he read the words, ‘and the conclusion we came to was that he and his people were certain low class polish Jews…’

  He nodded in agreement and turned the page. Excitement surged within him as he read on. When he came to the passage, ‘I will merely add that the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him, but he refused to give evidence against him’, he could contain himself no longer and, picking up a pencil, he scrawled underneath:

  …because the suspect was also a Jew and also because his evidence would convict the suspect and witness would be the means of murderer being hanged which he did not wish to be left on his mind. DSS

  Splaying out into the left-hand margin of the page, ‘DSS’ continued, ‘and after this identification which suspect knew, no other murder of this kind took place in London.’

  Running out of space now, he turned to the end of the book, changed pencils, and wrote on one of the endpapers:

  After the suspect had been identified, by us, at the seaside home where he had been sent by us with difficulty, in order to subject him to identification and he knew he was identified.

  On suspect’s return to his brother’s house in White-chapel he was watched by police [City CID] by day and night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards – Kosminski was the suspect – DSS

  ‘DSS’ stood for Donald Sutherland Swanson, a retired Detective Chief Inspector of the Metropolitan Police who, in 1888, had been in charge of the day-to-day running of the Ripper investigation. The book in which he was making notes, The Lighter Side of My Official Life, by Swanson’s old boss, Assistant Commissioner (CID) Sir Robert Anderson, was published in 1910, when Swanson was sixty-two and Anderson, sixty-nine. The man Swanson had named was Aaron Mordke Kosminski, a Polish Jew from the province of Kalish. At the time Swanson was annotating the book, he believed Kosminski was dead. However, he was in fact alive and resident in the Leavesden home for imbeciles, although his incarceration there might fairly be described as a living death.

  But, it is Anderson’s number two in the 1890s, Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten, who we have to thank for first bringing Kosminski’s name to our attention. In 1894, he was asked to prepare a report for the Home Office on Thomas Cutbush, a man named as the Ripper in a series of newspaper articles. In his report, Macnaghten exonerated Cutbush and mentioned three men whom he thought were more likely to have been the killer. One of these three was Aaron Kosminski.

  Popular depiction of Aaron Kosminski. (Illustrated London News, 1888).

  There are two extant versions of the Macnaghten Memoranda, as it has become known. One, the final draft, is preserved in the police files. The other, seemingly a preliminary draft, was in the possession of Macnaghten’s daughter, Lady Aberconway. The Aberconway version tells us that Kosminski was a Polish Jew, living in Whitechapel, who had become insane through indulging in ‘solitary vices’. He had strong homicidal tendencies, hated women and was detained in an asylum ‘about March 1889.’ He strongly resembled an individual seen by a City Police officer near Mitre Square.

  In the final draft, Machaghten adds that Kosminski specifically hated prostitutes and claims that there were many ‘circumstances connected with this man which made him a strong suspect.’

  So what we have here, on the surface at least, is a simple, straightforward story in which the top brass at Scotland Yard say that Kosminski was, at the very least, a gilt-edged suspect for these murders and in all likelihood was the perpetrator. Although, the point has to be made that, of his three suspects, Macnaghten apparently favoured Montague Druitt over him.

  Serious research into Kosminski only commenced in the mid-1980s, through Ripper-expert Martin Fido. Martin ended up opting for a different suspect, Aaron Cohen, but what he discovered about Kosminski was invaluable.

  He found that Kosminski had first been admitted to the Mile End Workhouse Infirmary on 12 July 1890, but was discharged three days later, into the care of his brother. However, on 7 February 1891 he was admitted to the Colney Hatch asylum. His age was recorded as twenty-six and his occupation as hairdresser. The form of his illness was described, simply, as ‘mania’, and his age at the time of the first attack – twenty-five – coincides with the six months duration of the illness given in the patients register.

  But the admission book discloses a crucial difference on the latter point. Here, ‘six months’ has been crossed out and ‘six years’ was written in red ink. Immediately below it is another amendment. Against the words ‘supposed cause’, ‘unknown’ had originally been put, but then the words ‘self abuse’ were added, again in red ink.

  Both corrections are of major importance. The length of time Kosminski had been ill in 1891, is crucial in assessing the case against him as Jack the Ripper; while the term ‘self abuse’ dovetails with the ‘solitary vices’ noted in the Macnaghten Memorandum. Both are euphemisms for masturbation – then thought to be a cause of insanity – and appear to pinpoint Aaron Kosminski as Macnaghten, Anderson and Swanson’s Kosminski.

  The Colney Hatch records also disclose the statements of the physician who certified Kosminski insane, and a lay witness. The physician, Dr E.H. Houchin, testified that Kosminski claimed to know the movements of all mankind and was guided by an instinct which controlled him. The instinct told him to refuse food and drink from others and eat out of the gutter.

  The lay witness, a Jacob Cohen, endorsed this, adding that Kosminski had not worked for years and spent his days rambling around the streets, refusing to wash. He had threatened to kill his sister with a knife.

  The illness Dr Houchin was disclosing is known today as paranoid schizophrenia; a condition in which the sufferer believes he or she can hear voices instructing them on how to behave. These aural hallucinations can also progress to becoming visual as well. Such, indeed, was to be Aaron Kosminski’s fate, as noted in the records of the Leavesden home for imbeciles, to which he was transferred in 1894.

  Contrary to popular misconception, paranoid schizophrenics are not necessarily violent. Only a minority are likely to be so. Most are simply the sad victims of mental illness, and that is what the statements of Dr Houchin, and Jacob Cohen, indicate. The written records of his stays both at Colney Hatch and Leavesden tend to confirm this. He was not violent, simply pathetic. The only instance of aggression attributed to him came during his stay at Colney Hatch, when he picked up a chair and threatened an attendant with it; but, given the sometimes brutal nature of nineteenth-century asylums, this might have been a gesture of self-defence.

  Similarly, the only potentially violent act noted by the witnesses against him was his threatening his sister with a knife. A single instance of waving a knife around, during a heated domestic row, is hardly evidence of a violent persona. The asylum itself was plainly unimpressed, because the admission
book notes that Kosminski was not considered dangerous to others.

  These facts are all that we know about Aaron Kosminski. The Macnaghten Memorandum says that ‘he had a great hatred of women with strong homicidal tendencies’ (Aberconway draft), that these hatreds were specifically directed at prostitutes, and that ‘there were many circumstances which made him a strong suspect’ (final draft).

  So, where is the evidence for this hatred of prostitutes, these homicidal tendencies? In this context, the crimes themselves cannot be used as substitutes to explain his motive. Instead, his motivation is supposed to explain why he committed the crimes. But there is nothing about Kosminski, that we know of, to suggest that he had homicidal inclinations towards anybody.

  What are the ‘circumstances’ Macnaghten refers to? Presumably he is talking about the identification, but as we shall see this is fraught with difficulty and did not result in Kosminski’s arrest anyway. The more one looks at Macnaghten’s comments, the more one is reminded of the infamous 1980’s political advert ‘where’s the beef?’ Essentially, the problem is that there are large gaps in our knowledge, because around half the Scotland Yard files are missing today.