by Paul Roland
‘The Whitechapel Murders
A report having been current that a man has been found who is quite convinced that “Jack the Ripper” occupied rooms in his house, and that he had communicated his suspicions in the first instance to Dr Forbes Winslow, together with detailed particulars, a reporter had an interview with the doctor yesterday afternoon on the subject.
“Here are Jack the Ripper’s boots,” said the doctor, at the same time taking a large pair of boots out from under his table. “The tops of these boots are made of ordinary cloth material, while the soles are made of indiarubber. The tops have great bloodstains on them.”
The reporter put the boots on and found they were completely noiseless. Besides these noiseless coverings the doctor says he has the Ripper’s ordinary walking boots, which are very dirty, and the man’s coat which is also bloodstained.
Proceeding, the doctor said that on the morning of Aug. 30 a woman with whom he was in communication was spoken to by a man in Worship Street, Finsbury. He asked her to come down a certain court with him, offering her £1. This she refused and he then doubled the amount, which she also declined. He next asked her where the court led to and shortly afterwards left. She told some neighbours and the party followed the man for some distance. Apparently, he did not know that he was being followed, but when he and the party had reached the open street he turned round, raised his hat, and with an air of bravado said: “I know what you have been doing; Good morning.” The woman then watched the man [go] into a certain house, the situation of which the doctor would not describe. She previously noticed the man because of his strange manner, and on the morning on which the woman Mackenzie was murdered (July 17th) she saw him washing his hands in the yard of the house referred to. He was in his shirt-sleeves at the time, and had a very peculiar look upon his face. This was about four o’clock in the morning.
The doctor said he was now waiting for a certain telegram, which was the only obstacle to his effecting the man’s arrest. The supposed assassin lived with a friend of Dr Forbes Winslow, and this gentleman himself told the doctor that he had noticed the man’s strange behaviour. He would at times sit down and write 50 or 60 sheets of manuscript about low women, for whom he professed to have great hatred. Shortly before the body was found in Pinchin Street last week the man disappeared, leaving behind him the articles already mentioned, together with a packet of manuscript, which the doctor said was in exactly the same handwriting as the Jack the Ripper letters which were sent to the police. He stated previously that he was going abroad, but a very few days before the body was discovered (Sept. 10) he was seen in the neighbourhood of Pinchin Street. The doctor is certain that this man is the Whitechapel murderer, and says that two days at the utmost will see him in custody.
He could give a reason for the head and legs of the last murdered woman being missing. The man, he thinks, cut the body up, and then commenced to burn it. He had consumed the head and legs when his fit of the terrible mania passed, and he was horrified to find what he had done. “I know for a fact”, said the doctor, “that this man is suffering from a violent form of religious mania, which attacks him and passes off at intervals. I am certain that there is another man in it besides the one I am after, but my reasons for that I cannot state.”
Chief Inspector Swanson wasted no time in interviewing Dr Winslow and discovered the identity of the man with the religious mania. He was named as Mr Bell Smith, a Canadian who had been lodging with Mr and Mrs Callaghan of Victoria Park, who were friends of Dr Winslow.
The Callaghans had become suspicious of their lodger after he had stayed out until 4am on 7 August, the night of Martha Tabram’s murder. Later that day they discovered bloodstains on his bedclothes and noted that he had soaked his shirts in his room, presumably in an attempt to eradicate incriminating stains. The Callaghans regarded their eccentric guest as ‘a lunatic with delusions regarding women of the streets’, especially those in the East End. The Callaghans confirmed that their lodger’s handwriting was an exact match for the Ripper letters which had been widely circulated and published in the press. During his interview with Dr Winslow, Swanson obtained a description of Bell Smith from a letter written by Mr Callaghan to the doctor.
‘He is about 5ft 10in in height . . . hair dark, complexion the same, moustache and beard closely cut giving the idea of being unshaven . . . he appeared well conducted, was well dressed and resembled a foreigner, speaking several languages. [He] entertains strong religious delusions about women, and stated that he had done some wonderful operations. His manner and habits were peculiar. Without doubt this man is the perpetrator of these crimes.’
Incredibly, no further information is known about this promising line of inquiry and the trail ends with Swanson’s summation of the information received from Callaghan and a note regarding the fact that Inspector Abberline has no record of Dr Winslow’s accusation.
The police files
During the investigation police officials were discouraged from giving interviews to the press, but after the Ripper files were closed in 1892 various officers published their memoirs and talked openly to journalists of their suspicions regarding the known suspects.
Metropolitan Police Inspector Frederick Abberline
In 1903 Abberline admitted that ‘Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago’. But the same year he reputedly told the Pall Mall Gazette that he personally had suspected convicted murderer Severin Klosowski (alias George Chapman) of being the Ripper: ‘I cannot help feeling that this was the man we struggled so hard to capture fifteen years ago.’ In a letter to Sir Melville Macnaghten written around the same time, he remarked, ‘I have been so struck with the remarkable coincidences in the two series of murders, that I have not been able to think of anything else for several days past.’ He noted the salient fact that his suspect ‘arrived in London shortly before the murders began, and then they stopped after he went to America. He had studied medicine and surgery in Russia, and the series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon.’ He felt it pertinent to add that Klosowski was known to have attacked his own wife with a long-bladed knife after they had emigrated to the USA.
In another interview he dismissed the rumour that Kosminski had been identified as the perpetrator, saying, ‘It has been stated in several quarters that “Jack the Ripper” was a man who died in a lunatic asylum a few years ago, but there is nothing at all of a tangible nature to support such a theory.’ He was equally dismissive of the case against Druitt. ‘Soon after the last murder in Whitechapel the body of a young doctor was found in the Thames, but there is absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was found at the time to incriminate him.’
Sir Robert Anderson
In his autobiography, The Lighter Side of My Official Life, Anderson, who was Assistant Commissioner of the CID at the time of the murders, confidently asserted that ‘in saying that he was a Polish Jew I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact’, adding, ‘One did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to discover that the criminal was a sexual maniac of a virulent type; that he was living in the immediate vicinity of the scenes of the murders, and that if he was not living absolutely alone, his people knew of his guilt and refused to give him up to justice . . . I will only add that when the individual whom we suspected was caged in an asylum, the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer at once identified him, but when he learned that the suspect was a fellow Jew, he declined to swear to him.’
It is understood that the suspect to whom he is referring is Kosminski and that the reluctant witness was either Schwartz or Lawende.
Donald Swanson, Chief Inspector, CID, Scotland Yard
Swanson later confirmed that the suspect Anderson referred to ‘was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards’, adding, ‘Kosminski was the suspect.’ But he does not say if he believes that Kosminski was the Ripper, only that he was a suspect.
Chief Inspector John Geor
ge Littlechild
In 1913 Littlechild wrote privately to journalist George Sims revealing that a substantial dossier had been compiled on a dubious character by the name of Dr Francis Tumblety who remained ‘a very likely suspect’, but the file has mysteriously vanished from the archives at Scotland Yard.
He concluded the letter by saying that Sir Robert Anderson only ‘thought he knew’ who the killer was, which suggests that no one actively engaged on the case knew with any certainty.
Chief Inspector Littlechild
Assistant Chief Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten
Although Macnaghten did not arrive at the Metropolitan Police until June 1889 he familiarized himself with the details of the case and identified Druitt, Ostrog and Kosminski as likely suspects. In the Aberconway version of his famous memorandum he went further, expressing his preference for Druitt. In his memoirs Days of My Years, he speculated that ‘the Whitechapel murderer in all probability put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November 1888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in the possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer.’
Inspector of Prisons Major Arthur Griffiths
In his official capacity Griffiths was in the habit of visiting Scotland Yard and sitting in on discussions between Macnaghten, Anderson and Littlechild, which led him to claim that he was privy to inside information on the Ripper investigation. In Mysteries of Police and Crime he confided, ‘The general public may think that the identity of Jack the Ripper was never revealed. So far as actual knowledge goes, this is undoubtedly true. But the police, after the last murder, had brought their investigations to the point of strongly suspecting several persons, all of them known to be homicidal lunatics, and against three of these they held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion . . . Concerning two of them the case was weak, although it was based on certain colourable facts. One was a Polish Jew, a known lunatic, who was at large in the district of Whitechapel at the time of the murders, and who, having afterwards developed homicidal tendencies, was confined to an asylum.’ This is a clear reference to Kosminski.
Assistant Commissioner James Monro
Monro was not given to speculation. He prided himself on acting on the facts alone, but was so certain that he knew the identity of the Whitechapel murderer that he told his grandson, ‘The Ripper was never caught. But he should have been.’ It is believed that he had a private file that he left to his eldest son Charles, who in turn shared the contents with his younger brother, Douglas, who described the dossier as ‘a very hot potato’. Douglas advised his brother to burn it and to forget what he had read. Unfortunately, Charles did so, so we have no way of corroborating the story.
Inspector Edmund Reid
Reid, who took charge of the initial investigation after the murder of Martha Tabram, maintained that there were nine victims, the last being Francis Coles. In 1912 he gave his verdict on the case to Lloyd’s Weekly News, in which he said, ‘It still amuses me to read the writings of such men as Dr Anderson, Dr Forbes Winslow, Major Arthur Griffiths, and many others, all holding different theories, but all of them wrong . . . the perpetrator of the crimes was a man who was in the habit of using a certain public-house.’ Reid did not have a specific individual in mind, but he had formed an opinion of the type of man who when drunk would lead his drinking companion into a dark corner then ‘attack her with the knife and cut her up. Having satisfied his maniacal blood-lust he would go away home, and the next day know nothing about it’. It is thought that he based this belief on a sighting by a witness who had reported seeing a suspicious man with a knife in a public house, but there were so many reports of a similar nature that identification would have proven impractical.
Chief Superintendent Sir Henry Smith
In 1910 Sir Henry Smith, Chief Superintendent of the City of London Police, published his memoirs From Constable to Commissioner, in which he claimed that he had a serious contender for the Ripper murders in mind at the time of the Eddowes killing which no other officer had known about. ‘He had been a medical student . . . He had been in a lunatic asylum; he spent all his time with women of loose character, whom he bilked by giving them polished farthings instead of sovereigns. I thought he was likely to be in Rupert Street, Haymarket, so I sent up two men and there he was . . . polished farthings and all, he proved an alibi without a shadow of a doubt.’
With that lead having proven a dead end, he was forced to admit that ‘Jack the Ripper beat me and every other police officer in London . . . I have no more idea now where he lived than I had twenty years ago.’
City of London Police Officer Robert Sagar
Sagar was adamant that ‘We had good reason to suspect a man who worked in Butcher’s Row, Aldgate . . . There was no doubt that this man was insane, and after a time his friends thought it advisable to have him removed to a private asylum. After he was removed there were no more Ripper atrocities.’
The Ripper in the USA
Festering in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge on the dockside of lower Manhattan in the spring of 1891 were huddled rows of squalid flophouses to rival those in London’s East End. The patrons too were cut from the same threadbare cloth as their English counterparts. In the squalid compartments of the East River Hotel sailors and dockside labourers could bed down in the company of cut- throats, petty criminals and drug addicts for the princely sum of 25 cents a night. Room service was extra – for a few dollars a prostitute could be persuaded to turn a blind eye to the cockroaches and act as if the rough pawing hands of a stranger were a lover’s caress. But some of the customers liked to play rough and on the morning of 24 April the desk clerk staggered from Room 31, shaken to the core by what he had just seen.
A naked woman lay on the bed, a deep wound extending from the lower abdomen to the breast. She had been strangled then disembowelled and her entrails strewn over the bed. When the police arrived they discovered two deep wounds in her back in the form of a cross. There were rumours that certain organs had been removed. The similarity with the Whitechapel murders was self-evident and quickly seized upon by the newspapers.
‘The points of similarity between this crime and those attributed to “Jack the Ripper” are numerous . . . The murdered woman belonged to the lowest class of fallen women from whom “Jack the Ripper” always selected his victims . . . The same horrible act of disembowelment and mutilation which distinguished the Whitechapel atrocities was performed upon this unfortunate hag . . . There was the same abstraction or attempted abstraction of certain organs. The instrument used – a big bladed knife – is similar to the weapon used by the Whitechapel fiend . . . The district in which the murder was committed corresponds . . . to the Whitechapel district of London, especially in respect to the character of many of its inhabitants.’
Several boasted sources inside the New York police, who confided their fears that the Ripper had fled England and was now loose in the Lower East Side.
Eyewitness account
A preliminary investigation retraced the victim’s last known movements. Somewhere between 10.30 and 11.45pm on 23 April she had asked for a room for herself and her companion, a man about 30 years old, 172cm (5ft 8in) in height with brown hair, a brown moustache and a prominent nose. He was wearing a Derby hat and a cutaway coat. He was sullen and silent for the most part, but when he spoke he betrayed a distinct accent, although the main witness, a prostitute named Mrs Miniter, could not recognize from which country he originated.
There was no doubt concerning the victim’s identity, however. Her name was Carrie Brown, a 60-year-old widow of a wealthy sea captain and mother of three children who had succumbed to prostitution after falling foul of the demon drink. But in her younger days she had been an actress of some repute and was still given to quoting verse which had led to her being given the nickname ‘Old Shakespeare’.
Within three days Inspector Byrnes announced that he had a material witness, an Algerian known local
ly as ‘Frenchy’, and was now looking for his cousin who was known by the same soubriquet in connection with the killing. But shortly afterwards, Byrnes surprised both his colleagues and journalists by denying that he had named the Algerian as a suspect. The turnaround baffled reporters, who delighted in reminding their readers that it was Byrnes who had once boasted that he would not have allowed a serial killer to run rings around his men as the London police had done.
Inspector Byrnes’ mistake
A few days later Byrnes made another contradictory claim. He now identified the prime suspect as Frenchy No. 1, the man he had been holding as a material witness, whose real name was Ameer Ben Ali.
Frustrated journalists quickly became highly critical of the investigation and demanded, ‘Why was it that intelligent reporters did not see the bloody tracks leading across the hall from Room No. 31, the woman’s room, to Room No. 33, Frenchy’s room, or at least the marks of their erasure? And how was it that they had failed to notice that Room No. 33 had the appearance of a slaughterhouse, as Mr Byrnes says it had? In the opinion of the general public Inspector Byrnes must look a good deal further before he finds the real Jack the Ripper. Sympathy is entirely with Frenchy, and there is a general belief in his innocence. Byrnes must soon admit himself as badly baffled and as much at sea as was Scotland Yard during and after the London butcheries.’
Others hinted at the real motive behind the embarrassing volte face: ‘It is charged by the enemies of the Inspector that he is really prosecuting Frenchy to make good his word that a Jack the Ripper could not live here two days in safety.’
