by Robert House
If we are to believe Sadler’s police statement, he did not see Coles again after this. He claimed that after he left White’s Row, he walked in the direction of the London Hospital, where he was stopped and questioned by a policeman who thought Sadler looked like he was “in a pretty pickle.” The policeman asked where Sadler was going, and Sadler explained that he had “had two doings that night” and had been cut with a knife or a broken bottle. The policeman apparently misunderstood this and said, “Oh, have you a knife about you?” Sadler replied that he said he did not have a knife and hadn’t carried a knife in years, but the policeman searched him anyway. Sadler then walked across the street to the London Hospital, where he was treated for a wound in his head and was allowed to lie down on a couch. The next day, Sadler was paid at the shipping office and went to a lodging house in Upper East Smithfield, where he stayed all day, feeling miserable.
After Coles was kicked out of Spitalfields Chambers, she was seen at 1:30 a.m. dining on mutton at Shuttleworth’s eating house on Wentworth Street. She sat alone in the corner and was repeatedly asked to leave by Joseph Haswell, an employee who was trying to close up shop. “Mind your own business!” Coles said. Haswell then physically assisted her to the door. A short time later, Coles was on Commercial Street, soliciting a man in a cheesecutter hat, despite the fact that a friend had warned her that the man was violent. But Coles was desperate4
A half-mile to the south, a laborer named Thomas Fowles was standing with his fiancée, Kate McCarthy, in front of her home on Royal Mint Street, wearing what he referred to as a “black pilot monkey jacket.” At 2 a.m., the couple noticed some railway workers walk by, toward the south end of Swallow Gardens, followed by a man Fowles knew only as Jumbo, who was carrying a whip and was apparently very drunk. “Jumbo,” whose real name was Carmen Friday, would later misidentify Kate McCarthy as Frances Coles and would also state that she was with a man who looked like a ship’s fireman5
Given that most of what we know about Sadler’s whereabouts that night came from Sadler himself, we must regard his statements with some suspicion. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Sadler was lying. For one thing, it is clear that Sadler did see Coles again after they left Spitalfields Chambers. Sadler admitted as much in his police statement, when he said, “I forgot to mention that Frances and I had some food at Mrs. Shuttleworth’s in Wentworth Street.” This means that Coles and Sadler met up at Shuttleworth’s sometime before 1:30 a.m. Another problem with Sadler’s story is that it seems he went to the London docks after he left Coles at White’s Row, not before, as he claimed. In any case, Sadler clearly did not proceed “towards London Hospital,” as he claimed, because at approximately 2 a.m., Sergeant Wesley Edwards encountered Sadler in a drunk and bloody state on the pavement near the Royal Mint. Fifteen minutes later, Coles would be found murdered only a few hundred yards away. The fact that Coles and Sadler both ended up in the vicinity of Royal Mint Street around 2 a.m. strengthens the case against Sadler. One possibility is that Coles and Sadler separated after meeting at Shuttleworth’s, with the intention of meeting up again later. Coles may have tried to find a client around Commercial Street, while Sadler went to the docks to try to get on the Fez. After they both failed, they may have met again (as planned) near the Royal Mint.
The police were extremely interested in Sadler as a suspect, not only for the murder of Frances Coles, but for the previous Ripper murders as well. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson interviewed Sadler’s wife, who described her husband as a tempestuous and violent alcoholic, who “not only assaulted her and otherwise treated her cruelly, but he had repeatedly threatened to take her life.”6 On one occasion, Sadler wanted to take his wife to look at one of the Ripper murder sites, saying, “It was miraculous that any person could do such a thing and get off,” but his wife did not care to visit the place. Yet the jury at Coles’s inquest eventually found Sadler not guilty, in part because the jurors thought he was too drunk to have performed the murder. In addition, the testimony of Carmen Friday, a central witness in the case against Sadler, turned out to be a case of mistaken identification. Ultimately, the police failed to find any definite evidence that proved Sadler was guilty, and the charges were dropped.
So, was Frances Coles killed by Jack the Ripper? As in the previous murder, police opinion was divided, and today, most researchers do not seem to think Coles was a victim of the Ripper. For one thing, although Coles’s throat was cut, her abdomen was not mutilated, nor were her clothes disarranged. In addition, there seems to be a good circumstantial case in favor of Sadler being Coles’s murderer. Yet Sadler was clearly not the Ripper, because his shipping records showed that he was at sea during several of the murders. In any case, by the time Frances Coles was murdered, Aaron Kozminski was already locked away in an asylum. So, although it will never be known for certain whether Coles was a victim of the Ripper, if she was, then Kozminski must be declared innocent of all Ripper crimes.
The intersection of Whitechapel Road and Osborn Street circa 1890, near where Emma Smith was attacked. This corner was almost directly across from St. Mary’s Church. The site of the Tabram murder was just a few minutes’ walk from here.
St. Botolph’s Church, aka “the Prostitutes’ Church,” circa 1892. Kate Eddowes was passed out drunk near here when she was arrested.
Buck’s Row, looking west, in the 1930s. New Cottage can be seen in the center of the photo. An arrow points to the site of the murder.
Polly Nichols’s mortuary photo.
Discovery of the body.
Annie Chapman’s wedding photo, circa 1869.
The backyard at 29 Hanbury Street. Chapman’s body was found lying between the step and the wood fence.
Chapman’s mortuary photo.
Liz Stride’s mortuary photo.
The north end of Berner Street at the intersection with Commercial Road circa the 1890s. The south end of Greenfield Street was almost directly opposite.
The corner of Berner and Fairclough streets, as it looked in April 1909. The entrance to Dutfield’s Yard is under the hanging wagon wheel. The International Working Men’s Educational Club was in the tall building adjacent to the yard.
Mitre Square circa 1925. The darkest corner of the square, where Eddowes was murdered, is to the left behind the car.
In situ drawing of Kate Eddowes by Frederick Foster.
Eddowes’s mortuary photos.
Goulston Street cloth market in the early 1900s. Goulston Street was the site of the chazar mark, where Jewish master tailors went to hire “greeners.” The infamous graffito was written in one of the entranceways of Wentworth Model Dwellings, the large building at the end of the street.
The Goulston Street graffito was scrawled in chalk in this doorway (this photo was taken in 1975), above a cut-off portion of Kate Eddowes’s bloody apron. It read, “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” Ripperologists still debate whether this message was written by the killer.
The same entranceway in 2005.
Mary Kelly’s body, photographed on the day of her murder at 13 Miller’s Court. She was the only victim to be photographed in situ at the murder site.
Photograph of Kelly’s room taken on the day of the murder. The broken window can be seen on the right.
The layout of Miller’s Court. The exact location of the room of Kelly’s upstairs neighbor Elizabeth Prater is still unclear.
Part Three
Aaron Kozminski
17
Downward Spiral
It was just one thing after another, Rodion Romanovitch, my dear fellow! How could I avoid being brought to certain ideas? From a hundred rabbits you can’t make a horse, a hundred suspicions don’t make a proof, as the English proverb says, but that’s only from the rational point of view.
—Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Researching the life of Aaron Kozminski has proved to be a difficult undertaking. There is no known photograph of him, and what documentation has
survived is riddled with apparent contradictions. In a sense, he has slipped through the cracks, historically speaking.
Overall, one gets the impression of a man who seems to have barely existed at all. In a sense, the paucity of information about Kozminski as a suspect in the case seems a bit suspicious. Although he was arguably Scotland Yard’s top Ripper suspect, there is no dossier on him in the extant police files on the case. Despite this, he is referred to as a suspect by at least three high-ranking Scotland Yard officials. Admittedly, the explanation for this is probably an innocent one, because many of the files were lost, destroyed, or “borrowed” over the years, and the documentation that did survive represents only a fraction of what once existed. But where did the files go? Was it merely an accident that files on Kozminski were “lost?” What about the fact that sixteen years of Kozminski’s Leavesden Asylum file documentation seem to have disappeared? One begins to wonder whether this vanishing act was brought about by design—if the police made Kozminski disappear.
What remains of his story is an interesting one, however, and I will try to piece it together as best I can. Oddly enough, the only time Kozminski’s name is known to have been in print during his lifetime was when he was arrested for the relatively innocuous charge of walking a dog without a muzzle.
In the 1880s, the residents of London had been growing increasingly concerned by the ever-present danger of being bitten by one of the countless ownerless dogs roaming the streets. The fear was rabies or hydrophobia, a horrible disease that in humans leads to mania, coma, and almost certain death. In 1885, there were twenty-seven recorded deaths from rabies in London, and by the 1890s, the police were seizing more than twenty thousand stray dogs each year1 The veterinary consensus was that muzzling would prevent dogs from biting one another and thus halt the spread of the disease. Yet the practice of muzzling was controversial, primarily because it was seen as being cruel to animals, so a select committee was set up to research the issue. In one rather comedic exchange, a member of the committee described an experiment in which he tried to drink while wearing a wire muzzle over his face. “I found it impossible,” the man said. “There is a bar in front of the tongue.” The chairman dryly responded, “With all respect, you are not a dog.”2 In the end, muzzling won out, and in July 1889, the Board of Agriculture passed a compulsory muzzling order that covered the entire London Metropolitan area and the City of London, which led to a rapid decline in rabies cases.
In December 1889, a few months after the passage of this new law, a City Police constable named Borer stopped a man who was walking an unmuzzled dog in Cheapside, a street in the City of London, described by Charles Dickens in 1879 as “the busiest thoroughfare in the world, with the sole exception perhaps of London-bridge.”3 The man gave his name as Aaron Kosminski and then gave what turned out to be a wrong address. Little else is known about the incident. It is not known what type of dog Kozminski was walking, although one might imagine it was similar to those Dickens described as “the poor vagrant homeless curs that one sees looking out for a dinner in the gutter.”4 Kozminski was ordered to appear in City Summons Court to answer for the charge. Lloyd’s Weekly News reported the following on December 15, under the heading “Fined for Unmuzzled Dogs”:
Aaron Kosminski was summoned for a similar office—Police-constable Borer said he saw the defendant with an unmuzzled dog, and when asked his name gave that of Aaron Kosminski, which his brother said was wrong as his name was Abrahams—Defendant said that the dog was not his, and his brother said it was found more convenient to go by the name Abrahams, but his name was Kosminski.—Sir Polydore de Keyser imposed a fine of 10s. and costs, which the defendant would not pay as it was the Jewish Sunday, and it was not right to pay money on Sunday. He was given till Monday to pay5
A second notice was printed in the City Press on December 18 under the heading “The Rabies Order”:
AARON KOSMUNSKI also appeared to a summons for having a dog unmuzzled in Cheapside. When spoken to by the police he gave a wrong name and address. Defendant: I goes by the name of Abrahams sometimes, because Kosmunski is hard to spell. (Laughter.) The defendant called his brother, who corroborated that part of the evidence which related to his name. The Alderman said he would have to pay a fine of 10s., and costs. Defendant: I cannot pay; the dog belongs to Jacobs; it is not mine. The Alderman: It was in your charge, and you must pay the fine, and if you have no goods on which to distrain you will have to go to prison for seven days6
After the dog-muzzling incident, Kozminski disappeared from the record again, and nothing is known about his life for the next seven months.
By early 1890, East End life had basically returned to normal, and people were forgetting about the Ripper. The newspapers were then focusing on the “Cleveland Street Scandal,” which revolved around a homosexual brothel in Fitzrovia that was said to be have been patronized by several prominent aristocrats and government figures, including “a gentleman of very high position”—apparently, Lord Arthur Somerset. The Metropolitan Police discovered the brothel in the summer of 1889 as a result of inquiries led by Detective Frederick Abberline, among others. Homosexuality at the time was illegal, and several trials followed. In February 1890, details were still unfolding, and the press was enthralled. The Ripper was the furthest thing from people’s minds.
Then in June 1890, Commissioner James Monro gave a curious interview in Cassell’s Saturday Journal, in which he stated that he had “decidedly” formed a theory about the Whitechapel murders. Monro declined to elaborate on this but added, “When I do theorize it is from a practical standpoint, and not upon a mere visionary foundation.”
“Are you in possession of any clue at all?” the reporter asked.
“Nothing positive,” Monro replied. “You see, crimes of this kind—when we consider the particular class of victims selected—are the most easy of all crimes to commit. The person entrapped is as anxious to secure secrecy as the murderer himself.”7
On June 12, shortly after giving this interview, Monro tendered his resignation as Police Commissioner, apparently in protest over an issue related to police pensions. Years later, ex-CID chief Robert Anderson would refer to “a most painful incident which, on the eve of his [Monro’s] resigning the Chief Commissionership of Police, broke up a close friendship of several years.”8 Yet Anderson does not explain what the “painful incident” was, and nothing more is known about Monro’s “practical” theory. The timing is curious, however. Just one month after Monro’s resignation, Kozminski was admitted to Mile End Old Town Workhouse, exhibiting signs of insanity.
Workhouses had existed in England ever since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, when the Act for the Relief of the Poor made parishes responsible for taking care of their destitute citizens. In concept, the workhouse was a place where the poor could be put to work in exchange for receiving food and shelter. In an early reference from 1631, for example, the mayor of Abingdon, Berkshire, wrote, “Wee haue erected wthn our borough a workehouse to sett poore people to worke.”9 The earliest workhouses were much like ordinary houses, providing “out-relief” in the form of money, clothing, and food given to poor residents who lived in their own homes. By the eighteenth century, however, the workhouse had begun to evolve to an “in-relief” model, somewhat similar to a modern homeless shelter. In 1834, the Poor Law Amendment Act signaled an end to all out-relief and formed the parishes of England into Poor Law Unions, each of which had its own workhouse run by a Board of Guardians and paid for by local taxes levied on property owners10
The new workhouses were larger in scale and could accommodate various types of paupers, including the mentally ill. They were notoriously plagued by unsanitary conditions, inadequate ventilation, untrained staff, defective equipment, and overcrowding. Such conditions were made repugnant by design. The “threat” of entering a workhouse was seen as a last option for the desperate and was regarded as the ultimate in degradation. As one anonymous writer put it, “As to the workhouse, it was li
terally burying one’s self alive.”11
Mile End Old Town was a large hamlet in the East End division of Stepney, just east of Whitechapel. In its southwest corner, the boundary of the hamlet jutted out like an arm reaching toward the very epicenter of the Ripper murders, and it was in this section that the Kozminski families lived. The Mile End Old Town workhouse on Bancroft Road was designed to house five hundred adults, with accommodations for casual paupers, infants, and the elderly and a separate “imbeciles block” for the mentally ill. In exchange for food and shelter, the casual poor were employed in breaking stones in the yard.
On July 12, 1890, Kozminski was brought to Mile End Old Town Workhouse by one of his brothers—probably Woolf Abrahams. It was a mile-and-a-half walk, because the Kozminskis lived in the farthest western part of Mile End Old Town, and the workhouse was in the farthest eastern part. It is not actually known why Kozminski was brought to the workhouse at this time, but presumably it was because he was exhibiting signs of insanity. On the admission papers, next to “Cause of Seeking Relief,” the workhouse relieving officer Maurice Whitfield wrote, “Qy insane” (“query insane”), which was apparently a fairly standard procedure for pauper lunatics, because several other admissions had the same entry. Next to “Qy insane” Whitfield wrote “destitute.” The admission recorded that Kozminski was born in 1865 and was single; his occupation was given as “hairdresser,” his religion as Hebrew, and his class for diet as “able bodied man.”12 Kozminski’s address was listed as 3 Sion Square, which was Woolf’s address at the time. Next to “How Discharged; and, if by Order, by whose Order” was written “In care of brother.” The entry gave no information about Kozminski’s mental condition.
