by Trow, M. J.
By the end of 1893 Klosowksi had taken up with Annie Chapman (no relation to the Ripper victim of the same name) and he used her surname as his own from now on. This may have been to make himself more acceptable in an alien land or it may have made his philandering easier. Annie had left him by December 1894 and he took up with a fellow lodger in Tottenham, Isabella Spink, whose husband had just deserted her. On the rebound, Isabella moved to Hastings with ‘Chapman’ in March 1896 where he opened a successful barber shop in George Street. By September of the following year they were back, with Chapman now running the Prince of Wales pub off Old Street. Isabella Spink died of phthisis (tuberculosis) on Christmas Day 1897.
Within months, Chapman had taken on a new barmaid and lover, Bessie Taylor, and after a brief stay in Bishop’s Stortford, returned to London to run the Monument pub in Union Street. It was here that Bessie died, of intestinal obstruction on 13 February 1901. By October, Chapman had met and married Maud Marsh and the following summer saw them at the Crown pub in the Borough High Street. By the summer of 1902 Chapman had grown tired of Maud as he had of so many other women and killed her, using the same tartar emetic poison he had used on Isabella and Bessie.
Coincidences do not extend this far and police suspicion of Chapman led to his arrest by Inspector George Godley in December 1902. For four days in the following March, Chapman stood his trial. He was found guilty and executed on 7 April, gibbering on the scaffold and having to be supported by warders.
It is inconceivable that Severin Klosowski aka George Chapman was Jack the Ripper. The myth has come about because Inspector Frederick Abberline, one of the foremost detectives on the Ripper case, wrote an article for the Pall Mall Gazette in which he admitted that Chapman’s behaviour and antecedents fitted well with ‘the man we struggled so hard to capture fifteen years ago’.10 That statement shows the huge gulf that existed between reality and the minds of the men charged with hunting Jack. Klosowski was a poisoner, using his medical knowledge to good effect in that the deaths of two of his victims were put down initially to natural causes. Yes, he was once a junior surgeon. Yes, he lived briefly in Cable Street, but there, the links and coincidences end.
Klosowski was merely one of a whole range of men behaving madly at the time. Most of those discussed in this chapter came to light because of the Ripper murders and are inevitably located in the East End. As Cream and Klosowski show however, dangerous insanity was not confined to the adjacent parishes of Spitalfields and Whitechapel.
Nor were serial killers confined to the London of the 1870s and 1880s.
Chapter 12
Other Times, Other Crimes
The trunk of a body was discovered by Regent’s Canal, Edgware Road, London on 28 December … A few days later the head was recovered and ‘matched’ with the body and eventually the remaining parts were found. The head was made available for public inspection and in March … Hannah Brown’s brother came forward to identify her. It took a while to trace Hannah’s betrothed, James Greenacre, who by this time was living with Sarah Gale in the Kennington Road. Despite denying any connection with the murder, remnants of a cotton dress matching the original wrappings of the body were discovered in their lodgings, together with many personal items belonging to Hannah. Greenacre was subsequently sentenced to death and Sarah Gale was transported for life.1
This is not another example of the torso murders, although the MO was depressingly similar. It happened back in 1836 when the Met was only seven years old and there was not even a Detective Branch at Scotland Yard. Three days after Christmas, Constable Pegler of S Division was on his beat along the Edgware Road when he met an hysterical man who had spotted a parcel tucked behind an up-ended pavement flagstone. In the parcel was a naked female body without head or legs. Pegler took the remains to the nearest workhouse in a wheelbarrow and discovered mahogany shavings and a piece of patched nankeen cotton in the sacking parcel. Technically, the body was found in T (Kensington) Division and Inspector Feltham led the inquiry. Doctors speculated that the victim was between 40 and 50 and had ‘an unusual interior malformation’.2 Ten days later the head was found floating in Regent’s Canal. It was preserved in spirit of alcohol and put on display in the workhouse, although by now it must have been almost unrecognizable, battered and bloated. The canal was dragged in search of the legs, but these would be found seven miles away in the Camberwell marshes. They were wrapped in hessian and an extraordinary piece of police work led to the producer of the material in Covent Garden. Here however the trail went cold.
Among those who came forward to identify the deceased was a Mr Gay whose sister, Hannah Brown, had gone missing shortly before Christmas. He recognized the head from a torn earlobe, an old injury caused years before in a fight with a fellow servant. Hannah had been due to marry a Mr Greenacre, whom Gay had not met, on Christmas Day but disappeared on Christmas Eve apparently en route to a friend’s house. James Greenacre was telling friends on the same day that the wedding was off. The reason he gave was that Hannah was horribly in debt and had run away in shame.
At Greenacre’s lodgings in Camberwell, Constable Pegler found not only a live-in lover, Sarah Gale, but a child’s frock of nankeen, patched in the same way as the fragment found with Hannah’s body. The mahogany shavings had come from the carpentry shop next door. Greenacre’s story now was that Hannah had accidentally fallen backwards at a drunken party on Christmas Eve and had hit her head. Since the most obvious wound was to the face, almost removing an eye, this was patently a lie.
What is fascinating about the Greenacre case, apart from its similarity to the later torso murders and the first-class detective work by a man (Pegler) who was not even a detective, is that we have the murderer’s confession as to how he disposed of the parts. Presumably, Greenacre panicked. He had had a row with his fiancée, quite possibly over Sarah Gale and had killed her. Body disposal in a confined or public place is difficult and speed is of the essence. A narrative of ‘The Paddington Tragedy’ was published by Orlando Hodgson of Fleet Street, featuring the lives and trial of James Greenacre and ‘the woman Gale’. In typical ‘Penny Dreadful’ style, the artist showed Greenacre at work, a demonic look on his face, a bloody, curved knife in one hand and Hannah’s decapitated head in the other. On the table behind him, in a cheerful little room with a roaring fire, lies the bleeding torso and on the floor, lying stockinged foot to stockinged foot, her legs. Greenacre confessed that he had taken the wrapped head to Stepney by bus and dropped it into the canal. On Christmas Day he wandered out onto the Camberwell marshes to drop the legs and then, on Boxing Day, the trunk was taken by cart and cab to the Edgware Road. What Greenacre was doing was exactly what the torso killer did half a century later; he was scattering the body parts to confuse the police. But one major difference was that James Greenacre was not a skilled surgeon or a butcher. His sadism existed only for a few seconds in what was almost certainly a spur of the moment attack.
One hundred years and three and a half thousand miles away from the Thames torso murders, somebody else was cutting up bodies and dumping them to be found. The Kingsbury Run was an area of wilderness on the edge of industrial Cleveland in Ohio and in the 1930s it was home to the most vulnerable victims of the Depression. Every bit as hopeless as the inhabitants of Whitechapel in the days of the Ripper, the hobos of the Run lived in shanty towns of scrap iron and timber, hitching rides on freight trains in their desperate search for work. When author James Badal was a child, his history teacher told the class stories of a series of murders carried out in the Run, with an effective dose of gallows doggerel: ‘Floating down the river, chunk by chunk by chunk, Arms and legs and torsos, hunk by hunk by hunk.’
Between September 1935 and August 1938, the Cleveland Torso killer claimed twelve victims, male and female, although it is possible that his spree did not finally end until 1950. The first victim – the lower half of a woman’s torso, severed at the knees – was found on the shores of Lake Erie by Frank LaGassie, who had be
en searching for firewood. Some sort of preservative had been poured over the body which left the skin red and leathery. The forensic experts decided that this was probably chloride of lime. The dead woman had been in the water for about four months; her death had occurred two months before that. She would have been in her late thirties, about 5ft 6ins tall and had had a hysterectomy about a year before she died. Such operations were common during the Depression, so what may have been a promising lead ultimately led nowhere. Over the next few days, the lake yielded other body parts and a photograph printed in the local Plain Dealer newspaper on 14 September shows just how little integrity of a crime scene mattered in 1930s America. An upper arm lies on the foreshore and two or three policemen, two sailors and civilians including five children are all standing nearby. Three years later a police photograph shows detectives sifting the rubble where anonymous victims No. 11 and No. 12 were found, surrounded by a huge crowd of men swarming all over a potential murder site. When the coroner, Dr Samuel Gerber, arrived, he was photographed in his everyday suit, handling the grisly skull with ungloved hands.
Theories that the body may have been a suicide subsequently sliced by a boat’s propeller were exploded by coroner Arthur J Pearce who concluded that a butcher’s knife was probably used and the job was skilfully done except for the right arm which had been botched. Pearce supposed that disposal of the body on dry land where the murder took place was difficult so that the parts were placed in boxes in the lake where wave action had brought them to the surface. He believed that the lime used was the wrong sort in that it preserved the body rather than destroyed it. The lake’s currents meant that the parts could have been deposited as far away as Canada or even thrown from a light aircraft.3
On 23 September 1935 the decapitated body of a man, later identified as petty criminal Edward Andrassy, was found at the bottom of Jackass Hill in the Kingsbury Run. His genitals had been removed and his head was found nearby. Not far away a second headless corpse was found. It would never be identified and remains on record as Victim No. 2. At the time, the police were unsure whether the ‘lady in the lake’ was the first in a series or not.
The following June, a head wrapped in trousers was found by Louis Checley and Gomez Ivey, two kids out playing and the rest of the body turned up near East 55th Street. Despite the fact that the body carried clear tattoos with the name ‘Jiggs’ and the head, suitably cleaned up, was put on public display for identification, the corpse was never identified and remains as Victim No. 4.
At least Victim No. 3 had a name. She was 43-year-old prostitute Flo Polillo and parts of her were found stuffed in baskets behind the Hart Manufacturing building on the east side of Central Avenue in the freezing January of 1936. These and the later portions found the following month were wrapped in burlap bags, stained with blood and sticky with chicken feathers. Flo had a rap sheet, having been arrested for prostitution in Washington, DC, in 1934 and three years earlier in Cleveland itself. In the era of prohibition, she was also arrested for selling alcohol on St Clair Avenue in the city in October 1935. Her mug shot, the only known photograph of her, shows a plump, half-smiling woman with a double chin and erratic hair. She had been murdered only two days before her body was found.
The press at the time confirmed that the police did not seem to be making any connection between these victims; nor did they see their deaths as part of a series. In this they shared the myopia of the London police of the 1870s and 1880s. Even by the time of the Cleveland killings of course, the term serial killer and even the concept of murder of this type, was unrecognized. Forensic science had its blood groupings and its fingerprints and in 1935, in Britain, Professor Glaister was making excellent progress in corpse identification in the case of Dr Buck Ruxton, who murdered his wife and housekeeper.4 In terms of actual psychoanalysis however, the nearest that the police could come was that they were probably looking for a ‘pervert’. The fact that the Cleveland killer’s victims were male and female pointed to an unusual kind of murderer – at the time Peter Kürten, the monster of Dusseldorf who was executed in 1931, was probably the most notorious example. The removal of heads and genitals however was not necessarily sex related. In the prohibition era, the Mob sent such messages to anyone who crossed them in various eastern cities. Bodies were frequently fished out of New York’s East River in the 1930s, some identifiable, some not.
The most high-profile policeman hunting the Cleveland killer was Eliot Ness. In 1928 he had hand-picked nine special Prohibition agents from the Chicago Police Department who went to war with Al Capone’s bootleg and narcotics racketeers for six years. Named the Untouchables because neither bribery nor intimidation worked against them, Ness’s men made a serious financial dent in Capone’s organization before the gangster himself was sent to prison on tax evasion charges. In Cleveland, Ness’s role was that of public safety director and he scored more successes here against syndicate boss Moe Dalitz. But the torso killer beat him. Cynics said that Ness was the murderer’s thirteenth victim in that he retired from law enforcement soon afterwards and his later business ventures were failures.
Huge amounts of money and police time went into catching the Cleveland killer. Some detectives went underground as hobos, riding the freight trains that rolled through the Kingsbury Run, believing the corpses could have been thrown from a cattle truck. On 18 August 1938 Ness launched his own Prohibition-style raid, rounding up the vagrants sleeping rough in the Run and burning their shanty towns to the ground. Many people believed that the killer was smoked out in that the murders apparently ceased. Victim No. 12 had been found along with No. 11 at the corner of East 9th and Lake Shore Drive near the Lake Erie docks two days before Ness’s conflagration. Was it a copycat twelve years later who dumped the body parts of Robert Robertson along Davenport Avenue, only a few yards from the dump site of Victims 11 and 12? Robertson’s prints were on file as a habitual drunk who had often been arrested. In every respect, he was typical of the John and Jane Does who became the Cleveland killer’s victims.
The police of course had their suspects and it was standard procedure to beat confessions out of people in the days before human rights and political correctness. Frank Dolezal was a predatory homosexual who fitted the pattern in police eyes; he hanged himself in police custody in August 1939. Eliot Ness had several interviews with a suspect he called Gaylord Sundheim, who conveniently committed suicide in a mental institution shortly afterwards. Black cab driver Willie Johnson murdered and dismembered 19-year-old prostitute Margaret Wilson in June 1942 and he went to the chair for that on 10 March 1944; all attempts to connect him with the other killings failed. Kentucky butchers, New Castle Railroad men, male nurses and Dr Francis Sweeney all came under the suspicion of one or more of the detectives working the case, but hard evidence, that one final piece of the jigsaw which would link all the Cleveland murders of the Kingsbury Run, was never found.
Coroner Sam Gerber wrote, in the 1930s version of profiling:
He is a person of more than average intelligence, with definite professional knowledge of anatomy but not necessarily a man of surgery. He is large and strong. He probably lives in the section bordering Kingsbury Run where he comes and goes without attracting attention. In all probability he belongs to a higher social stratum than his victims, but can mingle with vagrants without arousing their suspicion. His murders are committed mostly in a laboratory near the Run. He is a pervert who sometimes drugs his victims and may lead a normal life when not absorbed with his sadistic passion.5
Detective Peter Merylo, who worked the case on the ground for years, went further:
the murderer is a sex degenerate suffering from necrophilia, aphrodisia or erotomania who may have worked in the pathology department of some hospital, morgue or some college where he had the opportunity to handle a great number of bodies, or may have been employed in some undertaking establishment and that he had a mania for headless and nude bodies … the murderer procured his [sexual] gratification while watching t
he blood flow after cutting the jugular vein of his victim.6
While Merylo may have been spot on with this analysis he wrote in reply to a letter in October 1938:
In your letter you mention Jack the Ripper in London, but this killer only committed crimes upon one sex, while the [Cleveland] Torso Murderer has changed from one sex to another, apparently without discrimination. Therefore we are of the opinion that we have to deal with a person whose mental processes are so far unknown to scientists.7
Fast forward thirty years. 1960s London was the heart of the swinging scene. Carnaby Street was the centre of the world for anybody under 30. And crimes not unlike those of the torso killer were being carried out along the Thames. They did not involve dismemberment, but the victims were prostitutes and the river bank was their resting place.
Hannah Tailford, Irene Lockwood, Helen Barthelemy, Mary Fleming, Margaret McGowan and Bridie O’Hara were the heiresses of Elizabeth Jackson – West End prostitutes who met the wrong client at the wrong time. The tallest was only 5ft 2ins and they all died within one year – January 1964 to January 1965.
Hannah Tailford aka Terry Lynch was found on the dark mud of the foreshore near Hammersmith Pier on 2 February. She was naked except for her stockings which were round her ankles. Her panties had been stuffed into her mouth. The last time anyone saw her was nine days earlier when she left her home in Thurlby Road, West Norwood. Her clothes were never found; nor was the handbag containing her diary, which may well have listed her clients and possibly, her murderer. Originally from Northumberland, Hannah had a 3-year-old daughter. Her flat was found to contain photographic equipment which she may have used for blackmail purposes. There were rumours of kinky parties in Belgravia involving foreign diplomats. A glimpse of the scale of police operations at the time is evidenced by the fact that DCI Ben Devonald interviewed nearly 700 people on this case; it all led nowhere.
