In supporting him, Swanson exhibited that same capacity for self-deception. ‘After this [Kosminski’s] identification which suspect knew,’ he wrote, ‘no other murder of this kind took place in London.’ He had conveniently forgotten, of course, about the Ripper-type slaying of poor Frances Coles in February 1891, only six days after Kosminski had been ‘caged’ in his asylum. And if it be objected that Swanson was subscribing to the conventional view that Mary Kelly had been the Ripper’s last victim, surely he should have made it clear that the crimes had ended, not with Kosminski’s identification, but two years before it.
None of this mattered. Anderson and Swanson had come to inhabit a world of wish-dreams. And together they transformed a harmless imbecile, sheltering within the walls of Leavesden, into the most infamous murderer of modern times.
21
The Mad Russian: Michael Ostrog
THE THIRD MAN, named by Macnaghten as Michael Ostrog, was a thief and confidence trickster accustomed to living under numerous aliases.
In his draft report Macnaghten wrote:
No: 3. Michael Ostrog, a mad Russian doctor & a convict & unquestionably a homicidal maniac. This man was said to have been habitually cruel to women, & for a long time was known to have carried about with him surgical knives & other instruments; his antecedents were of the very worst & his whereabouts at the time of the Whitechapel murders could never be satisfactorily accounted for. He is still alive.
The official version, preserved in the Scotland Yard files, is just two sentences long:
(3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was subsequently detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man’s antecedents were of the worst possible type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.1
Until recently nothing else was known about Ostrog, which is a mystery in itself because at the time of the Ripper murders the Metropolitan Police publicized their interest in him in The Police Gazette, an obvious source for any student of the Whitechapel crimes. Six years ago, when I came to investigate the double murder, the Gazette’s notice of Ostrog was one of the first items I discovered and it led me to explore his long and colourful career in other contemporary records. In 1991, in the midst of this research, Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, having discovered Ostrog independently, published a brief sketch of him in their book, The Jack the Ripper A to Z, and concluded that he was ‘a plausible historical suspect’. Although accurate as far as it went their account left much unsaid. In particular, it failed to explain why Ostrog became a suspect in the first place and to notice the obvious weaknesses in the case against him. Weaknesses which, far from leaving him a ‘plausible’ suspect, come close to ruling him out of the reckoning altogether.
Ostrog’s story has not been told in detail before. So first, just what do historical documents tell us about this elusive Russian?
We first hear of him in Oxford in 1863.
At the beginning of the year there was a spate of mysterious robberies at the university. Watches, purses, coats, indeed all manner of portable items, disappeared from the chapel, from college rooms and even from the dining hall. The police were called in and the thief turned out to be Ostrog, then representing himself to be Max Kaife Gosslar, a 27-year-old German student.
On 11 February he stole an opera glass and case at Oriel College from Charles Leir. Arrested at Cambridge six days later, he was returned to Oxford and tried for this offence at the county assize on 3 March. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten months’ hard labour in the House of Correction. A second indictment stood against Ostrog. This was for stealing a dressing case, two coats, a cape, a pair of trousers, a pair of silver cufflinks and a handkerchief from the Reverend George Price at New College, also on 11 February. But because he had admitted the first offence the second indictment was not proceeded with. Ostrog is described as a labourer in these indictments but this was conventional where the accused’s occupation was at all uncertain.2
Shortly after his release Ostrog appeared at Bishop’s Stortford. There he posed as Count Sobieski, the son of a fallen Polish nobleman, who had escaped from Warsaw after being sentenced, like his father, to end his days in Siberia. His melancholy story and well-bred and amiable manners won numerous friends.
To one tradesman he displayed all the money he had – one shilling and eight pence – and explained that he was in need of a hotel room, ‘not grand’ because his means were so precarious, but clean. The tradesman left his business to introduce the ‘Polish count’ personally to the landlord of the Coach and Horses, an adjoining hostelry. At the Coach and Horses Ostrog dined on the choicest fare the house could provide and was allocated the best spare bed. Better yet, the next morning the landlord told him that there was ‘nothing to pay’ and gave him a hearty shake of the hand, leaving in his palm a piece of gold to help him on the road. Another dupe, a professional gentleman, invited Ostrog to stay at his home. For four days he lived there as the ‘star of the house’. And when he left the gentleman loaned him two or three sovereigns and went with him to the railway station to procure for him a first-class ticket for Cambridge.
At Cambridge he obtained money under false pretences from several of the undergraduates. One was Herbert Draper of Magdalene College. Ostrog came to his rooms and introduced himself as Max Sobieski, a Russian Pole of good family. Having escaped from the Russian authorities, he had, he said, just arrived in England from Amsterdam and had tramped penniless from Ipswich to Cambridge. He accounted for his knowledge of the language by explaining that he had been taught by an English governess when young. And so plausibly did he spin his heartrending yarn that Draper gave him a sovereign.
When Ostrog returned to Bishop’s Stortford his friends found him a good deal wealthier than when he had left. Nevertheless, attending church one Sunday, he prevailed upon one of them to lend him a piece of silver so that he might contribute to the church restoration fund as a ‘charitable Christian’.
Doubtless in hopes of further pickings, Ostrog then went back to Cambridge. It was a mistake. For while he had been absent at Bishop’s Stortford Draper had begun to suspect him and had confided with Police Superintendent Turrall. When Ostrog’s train pulled into the station at Cambridge the Russian found to his dismay that the superintendent was there waiting for him. On 2 February 1864 Ostrog was prosecuted as a rogue and a vagabond at Cambridge Police Court and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. Confronted by Draper in court, he protested: ‘Did I not ask you only to lend the sovereign?’ ‘Whether you did or not,’ replied Draper, ‘I never expected to see it again.’3
The following summer an unrepentant Ostrog visited Tunbridge Wells. In the guise of Count Sobieski, a son of the late King of Poland, he claimed that he had been exiled by the Russian government because of his political beliefs. Young, tall and well-dressed, he would wander gloomily about, asking the band on the Parade to play the Polish national anthem or, whenever anyone would listen, reciting the wrongs and sufferings he had endured in the cause of his native land. Again, many were taken in. Gifts of money and property were bestowed upon him. It is even said that ladies became enamoured of the ‘distinguished young exile’.
He was not so lucky in Tormoham, Devonshire, where he stole a silver-plated tankard from William Angleis on 16 December and obtained a sovereign, £2 in silver and a five-franc-piece from John Windeyer by false pretences three days later. Indicted under the names of Mutters Ostrogoc and John Sobieski at the Devonshire Quarter Sessions of January 1865, he pleaded guilty to both indictments and was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment with hard labour for each offence.4
In the autumn of 1865 he appeared in Gloucestershire. A bundle of depositions relating to his activities there have survived in the county records and these enable us to reconstruct his progress in full.5
Calling himself Knuth Ostin, he turned up at the house of the Reverend Edward Brice of Newnham on 2 October. Let Brice take up the story:
> He said he called upon me as the clergyman of the parish as he was not known to anyone, that he had walked all the way from Chepstow that morning, that he was quite overcome with fatigue in consequence and that he had no means to procure refreshment or shelter. He said that he was a Swede and that he had been educated in the University of Heidelberg and that he had come away suddenly to escape the consequences of a duel. He said he came through Paris and arrived by a sailing vessel at Bristol. I sent for Mr. Lubbren who is a German and himself and Mr. Lubbren conversed in German and we found that he was a gentleman and highly educated and were induced to believe that his representations were correct.
Ostrog appeared destitute. Yet he persuaded Brice that he shortly expected to receive money from his mother, from a Miss Bourke at Bishop’s Stortford and from various other people. The gullible clergyman believed every word of it and referred him to the Victoria Hotel in Newnham. More, he went there himself and bade George Hawkins, the landlord, make Ostrog comfortable until such time as the money should arrive.
Ostrog lodged at the Victoria for two weeks. He told Hawkins that Brice would pay the bills and Hawkins never questioned it. The landlord even loaned his guest £2 5s. 0d. of his own money on the understanding that Ostrog would use it to bring his luggage over from Torquay and make some small donations to the poor. Of the value of his luggage Ostrog spoke glowingly. Hawkins heard him speak of a portmanteau containing gold watches and other valuables. And Charlotte Averill, the barmaid, must have been simply overwhelmed when Ostrog casually informed her that his portmanteau was ‘as long as the sofa in the bar’, that the bar itself would not hold all his luggage!
The luggage never materialized. Worse, when the matter of Ostrog’s bill was taken up with Reverend Brice the indignant clergyman refused to pay. Sergeant James Scott of the Newnham police arrested Ostrog on 23 October and he was lodged in Gloucester Gaol the next day. The gaol register gives his age as twenty-nine and his height as five feet ten and three-quarter inches. His complexion was dark and his hair and eyes brown. In January 1866 Ostrog was tried at the Gloucestershire Quarter Sessions for obtaining food, lodgings and money worth £7 14s. 0d. under false pretences from George Hawkins. He had a narrow escape. The evidence was judged insufficient and he was acquitted.
Soon after this escapade Ostrog turned up in Kent using the names Bertrand Ashley and Ashley Nabokoff. On 19 March 1866 he called at the house of Esther Carpenter in Maidstone under pretence of wishing to speak to a clergyman who lived there and stole a gold watch and other articles. The next day he took lodgings at the Globe Inn, Chatham. There he posed as a Polish exile once more and succeeded in ingratiating himself with the local gentry. One of these was Thomas Ayrton White of the military service at Chatham. When Ostrog visited him on 13 April White unwittingly showed him a gold cross attached to a watch-chain and then left the room. He was only out about five minutes. But the next morning he discovered that the cross had gone. At the end of April Ostrog left the Globe, taking a couple of books belonging to James Burch, the landlord, and took new lodgings at the Bull Inn, Rochester.
As in Tunbridge Wells he made attachments with women. Esther Brenchley of Rochester would testify that he was in the habit of calling at her house for a glass of ale. On 14 April he gave her a gold cross suspiciously like the one Thomas White had lost. He wanted, he said, to give her something ‘in remembrance of him’. He was accompanied by a woman, too, when he took lodgings at the Bull. Because he left this establishment without settling his account George Wilson, the landlord, opened his portmanteau and there found the books stolen from the Globe.
Ostrog was brought to trial at the Kent Summer Assize in Maidstone in July 1866. A mixed jury of foreigners and Englishmen acquitted him of stealing the cross but convicted him of the theft of James Burch’s books and the robbery of Esther Carpenter. These offences were no worse than those he had committed elsewhere. But the judge knew of his previous convictions and was determined to teach him a sharp lesson. He sentenced him to seven years’ penal servitude for each offence, the sentences to run concurrently. Ostrog, reported the local paper, ‘appeared astonished at the severity of the sentence but walked away with a firm step.’6
Unfortunately, Ostrog’s penal servitude record has not survived. All we know is that in 1872 he was transferred to Chatham Prison and that he was released from there on licence on 23 May 1873.7 He was soon up to his old tricks.
On 3 July 1873 he visited Woolwich barracks. There he gained access to the quarters of Captain F. W. Milner and stole a silver soap dish, a shaving pot, a glass toothbrush dish with a silver top and eleven studs worth, in all, about £5. But his greatest depredations were at Eton College. Four days after the Woolwich theft Ostrog took lodgings at the South Western Railway Hotel in Windsor. His gentlemanly appearance and plausible manner soon won him acceptance into polite society and his tales of misfortune elicited widespread sympathy. This time he passed himself off as a surgeon of the Russian navy or Imperial Guard who had been forced to flee his country after killing a man in a duel in St Petersburg. It was from Windsor that he made his visits to Eton.
He pilfered several items from the boys’ apartments there. On 15 July he stole a silver cup valued at £4 10s. out of the room of Alfred Cooke. And on 28 September two silver cups and a coat, together worth £30, from that of John Ellison. Oscar Browning, one of the assistant masters, fell for his stories to the extent of giving him money and lending him books. Ostrog decamped with nearly a dozen books from his library. The titles are instructive. They included Smith’s Dictionary of Biography and Mythology, Smith’s Dictionary of Geography, a Spanish dictionary, a work by Darwin and a book of Latin quotations and indicate that Ostrog’s pretensions to a good upbringing and superior education were not entirely unjustified.
In September he was in London, duping Dr Watkins O’Connor of Osnaburgh Terrace, Portland Road, with the same stories. He even inveigled O’Connor into pawning the cup he had stolen from Alfred Cooke. It was, he assured the doctor, a prize he had won at ‘a boat race on the Neva’ and he had erased the names from it to avoid discovery by the Russian detectives.
Ostrog was eventually arrested in October at the Fox and Goose Inn, Burton-on-Trent, by Police Superintendent Thomas Oswald. The incident is unique in Ostrog’s record because it is the only one in which he is known to have resorted to violence. Oswald said later that he found his quarry in the dining room:
Fearing the prisoner [Ostrog] would give some trouble witness [Oswald] threw the knives and forks to another part of the room, and showed him the Police Gazette, and charged him with stealing a silver cup at Eton. Prisoner replied that he had never been to Eton in his life, that he was a Swedish doctor and had visited Burton to see the breweries. He was taken into custody and had to be forced into a cab. On alighting at the police station he pulled a revolver out of his pocket, but witness seized it and turned it against him. The weapon had eight chambers and was loaded. He took the prisoner to Windsor and handed him over to the police there.8
Ostrog was tried at the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions held at Aylesbury in January 1874. Convicted of stealing Browning’s books and of receiving, but not stealing, Cooke’s silver cup, he received a sentence of ten years’ penal servitude and seven years’ police supervision. Given the relative pettiness of his crimes it was a hard sentence. But by then Ostrog seems to have given way to resignation and despair. ‘I am sick of my life,’ he protested at one point. ‘Why do you go into the different charges? Why not give me my sentence and let me go? That is all I crave.’ At another, addressing the Duke of Buckingham, who presided at the trial, he declared that he ‘had taken poison and endeavoured to starve himself to death to no purpose, so that he did not care what became of himself.’
Ostrog was very much an oddity. The Buckinghamshire Advertiser, recording his conviction in 1874, put it well:
Ostrog is no ordinary offender, but a man in the prime of life, with a clever head, a good education and polished manners,
who would be certain to succeed in almost any honest line of life to which he might devote himself, but who, nevertheless, is an inveterate criminal. With natural and acquired abilities such as few men possess, and having before his eyes a warning in the shape of seven years’ penal servitude to which he had been sentenced at Maidstone for felony, he nevertheless risked his liberty and forfeited a position which he had obtained in respectable society, by pilfering a few books and a silver cup, worth to him about £5. The case is altogether a psychological puzzle. It is impossible to gauge the mental condition of a man of such intellectual and personal advantages, who would run the risk of ten years’ penal servitude for such a miserable stake.9
Ostrog spent the next decade in various government prisons but no detailed record now seems to exist. From Aylesbury Gaol, where he had been held during the trial period, he was sent to Pentonville. Received there on 28 January, he was discharged to Millbank just three days later. Ostrog was held at Millbank from 2 February to 11 September 1874. On the last date he was transferred to Portland Prison and he was still there in 1876 when our records fail. Prison registers describe him as a surgeon and forty years of age at the time of his conviction. His religion is given as Roman Catholic. Although his behaviour is often noted as good it is clear that he could sometimes be troublesome. While at Millbank his name was twice entered in the misconduct book and the Governor of Portland Prison, too, occasionally refers to him being punished in his journals.10
Complete History of Jack the Ripper Page 56
