Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  Here was a man who had passed under at least four names (Severin Klosowski, Ludwig Zagowski, George Chapman and ‘Smith’), two nationalities (for after 1892 he commonly posed as an American) and two faiths (Roman Catholic and Jewish), a man who had slain not one, but three ‘wives’, and a man who had not scrupled to add arson and perjury to his crimes. Police inquiries demonstrated, for example, that in 1901, when Chapman’s lease of the Monument was nearing expiry, he had deliberately attempted to burn the property down in order to lodge a claim against the insurance company. And, worse, that at the Newington Sessions of June 1902 he had falsely prosecuted Alfred Clark and Matilda Gilmor for conspiracy to defraud him of £700. On that occasion Chapman alleged that he had paid Clark and Gilmor the money on the security of share certificates which later turned out to be worthless. Clark was convicted and sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. But when Godley arrested Chapman in October he found banknotes at the Crown with serial numbers that matched some of those Chapman, only four months earlier, had sworn he had paid to Clark and Gilmor. What the Pole hoped to gain by fabricating his dastardly charge is not clear but upon Godley’s discovery the Home Office ordered Clark’s immediate release from Portland Prison.

  Not surprisingly, by this time the police seem to have formed the opinion that Chapman was capable of almost any villainy. Were there other skeletons rattling about in his cupboard? Only Chapman himself knew and, even after sentence of death, he said nothing. Sometimes, from his cell at Wandsworth, he proclaimed his innocence. For the rest of the time he languished restless, moody and silent. After the failure of his appeal to the Home Secretary he had to be carefully watched because it was thought that he contemplated suicide.

  What Chapman knew died with him. But there were those who wondered even then whether this man of mystery harboured a still more terrible secret than any that had yet been uncovered.

  Chapman’s name does not appear on Macnaghten’s list of major Ripper suspects for the reason that in 1894, when the Chief Constable drafted his report, the police knew nothing about him. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that in 1903 he did become a leading suspect.

  Inspector Godley, the man who headed the Chapman inquiry, knew a great deal about the Whitechapel murders. Indeed, when he retired in 1908, the Police Review claimed that his knowledge of the crimes was perhaps ‘as complete as that of any officer concerned’. That, probably, was an exaggeration. But Godley had been actively involved in the Ripper hunt. We have already encountered him, a detective sergeant from J Division, working on the Nichols murder. Later his name frequently appears in the Ripper evidence. In September 1888 he was credited with making inquiries about one suspect living not far from Buck’s Row. And he is known to have arrested others in the following October and December.10

  As he prepared his case against George Chapman in 1903 Godley was struck by the similarities between Chapman and the Ripper and considered the possibility that they were one and the same man. Unfortunately, the Metropolitan Police file on Chapman, which might have been expected to shed light upon his inquiries, no longer survives. But they were noticed briefly in the Daily Chronicle on 23 March 1903:

  The police officers who have been engaged in tracing Klosowski’s movements in connection with the three murders with which he was charged, are forming some rather startling theories as to the antecedent history of the criminal. These theories are connected with the Whitechapel murders which startled the world some fifteen years ago, and were attributed to ‘Jack the Ripper’. The police have found that at the time of the first two murders Klosowski was undoubtedly occupying a lodging in George Yard, Whitechapel Road, where the first murder was committed. Moreover, he always carried a black bag and wore a ‘P. and O.’ cap. The man who was ‘wanted’ in connection with the Whitechapel murders always wore a ‘P. and O.’ cap, and carried a black bag, according to the tale of some of the women who escaped him. In pursuing their investigations into the movements of Klosowski, the London detectives have found that he went to New Jersey City soon after the Whitechapel atrocities ceased, and that he opened a barber’s shop there.

  It will be remembered that soon after the murders ceased in London crimes of a similar character were committed in America. Klosowski’s real wife, Lucy Klosowski, who was present in the Central Criminal Court last week, has made a startling statement as to what occurred in the New Jersey shop. She states that on one occasion, when she had had a quarrel with her husband, he held her down on the bed, and pressed his face against her mouth to keep her from screaming. At that moment a customer entered the shop immediately in front of the room, and Klosowski got up to attend him. The woman chanced to see a handle protruding from underneath the pillow. She found, to her horror, that it was a sharp and formidable knife, which she promptly hid. Later, Klosowski deliberately told her that he meant to have cut her head off, and pointed to a place in the room where he meant to have buried her. She said, ‘But the neighbours would have asked where I had gone to.’ ‘Oh,’ retorted Klosowski, calmly, ‘I should simply have told them that you had gone back to New York.’

  In the light of these and other definite statements, the police have considerable doubt whether the full extent of the criminality of Klosowski has been nearly revealed by the recent investigations, remarkable as they were in their extent.

  Lucy Klosowski was Lucy Baderski and the incident referred to in this report was the assault which caused her to return to England without Chapman in 1892. I have discovered no other detailed account of it. After Chapman’s arrest in 1902 Detective Sergeant Arthur Neil, working with Godley, traced Lucy and she picked her husband out at an identity parade. As Neil remembered it in his autobiography, Forty Years of Man-Hunting, published in 1932, Lucy identified Chapman without hesitation. ‘I don’t know this woman,’ he protested. ‘Ah, Severino, don’t say that!’ she exclaimed. ‘You remember the time you nearly killed me in Jersey City!’11 Presumably, at about that time, Lucy made a statement to the police about the incident but if she did it has gone missing with the rest of the Metropolitan Police file on Chapman.

  Intrigued by the theory expounded in the Chronicle, a reporter for the Pall Mall Gazette called on Abberline for expert comment. He found the great detective developing an identical hypothesis of his own. His views on Chapman are given here in full for the first time since 1903:

  Should Klosowski, the wretched man now lying under sentence of death for wife-poisoning, go to the scaffold without a ‘last dying speech and confession’, a great mystery may for ever remain unsolved, but the conviction that Chapman and Jack the Ripper were one and the same person will not in the least be weakened in the mind of the man who is, perhaps, better qualified than anyone else in this country to express an opinion in the matter. We allude to Mr. F. G. Abberline, formerly Chief Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard, the official who had full charge of the criminal investigations at the time of the terrible murders in Whitechapel.

  When a representative of the Pall Mall Gazette called on Mr. Abberline yesterday and asked for his views on the startling theory set up by one of the morning papers, the retired detective said: ‘What an extraordinary thing it is that you should just have called upon me now. I had just commenced, not knowing anything about the report in the newspaper, to write to the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mr. Macnaghten, to say how strongly I was impressed with the opinion that Chapman was also the author of the Whitechapel murders. Your appearance saves me the trouble. I intended to write on Friday, but a fall in the garden, injuring my hand and shoulder, prevented my doing so until today.’

  Mr. Abberline had already covered a page and a half of foolscap, and was surrounded with a sheaf of documents and newspaper cuttings dealing with the ghastly outrages of 1888.

  ‘I have been so struck with the remarkable coincidences in the two series of murders’, he continued, ‘that I have not been able to think of anything else for several days past – not, in fact, since the Attorney-General made his opening stateme
nt at the recent trial, and traced the antecedents of Chapman before he came to this country in 1888. Since then the idea has taken full possession of me, and everything fits in and dovetails so well that I cannot help feeling that this is the man we struggled so hard to capture fifteen years ago . . .

  ‘As I say,’ went on the criminal expert, ‘there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when Chapman went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came over here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by Chapman’s wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored, but something else with regard to America is still more remarkable.

  ‘While the coroner was investigating one of the Whitechapel murders he told the jury a very queer story. You will remember that Dr. Phillips, the divisional surgeon, who made the post-mortem examination, not only spoke of the skilfulness with which the knife had been used, but stated that there was overwhelming evidence to show that the criminal had so mutilated the body that he could possess himself of one of the organs. The coroner, in commenting on this, said that he had been told by the sub-curator of the pathological museum connected with one of the great medical schools that some few months before an American had called upon him and asked him to procure a number of specimens. He stated his willingness to give £20 for each. Although the strange visitor was told that his wish was impossible of fulfilment, he still urged his request. It was known that the request was repeated at another institution of a similar character in London. The coroner at the time said: ‘Is it not possible that a knowledge of this demand may have inspired some abandoned wretch to possess himself of the specimens? It seems beyond belief that such inhuman wickedness could enter into the mind of any man; but, unfortunately, our criminal annals prove that every crime is possible!’

  ‘It is a remarkable thing,’ Mr. Abberline pointed out, ‘that after the Whitechapel horrors America should have been the place where a similar kind of murder began, as though the miscreant had not fully supplied the demand of the American agent.

  ‘There are many other things extremely remarkable. The fact that Klosowski when he came to reside in this country occupied a lodging in George Yard, Whitechapel Road, where the first murder was committed, is very curious, and the height of the man and the peaked cap he is said to have worn quite tallies with the descriptions I got of him. All agree, too, that he was a foreign-looking man, but that, of course, helped us little in a district so full of foreigners as Whitechapel. One discrepancy only have I noted, and this is that the people who alleged that they saw Jack the Ripper at one time or another, state that he was a man about thirty-five or forty years of age. They, however, state that they only saw his back, and it is easy to misjudge age from a back view.’

  Altogether Mr. Abberline considers that the matter is quite beyond abstract speculation and coincidence, and believes the present situation affords an opportunity of unravelling a web of crime such as no man living can appreciate in its extent and hideousness.

  Critics of the theory immediately alleged a dissimilarity in character between Chapman and the Ripper. A week after his original interview Abberline responded:

  ‘As to the question of the dissimilarity of character in the crimes which one hears so much about,’ continued the expert, ‘I cannot see why one man should not have done both, provided he had the professional knowledge, and this is admitted in Chapman’s case. A man who could watch his wives being slowly tortured to death by poison, as he did, was capable of anything; and the fact that he should have attempted, in such a cold-blooded manner, to murder his first wife with a knife in New Jersey, makes one more inclined to believe in the theory that he was mixed up in the two series of crimes. What, indeed, is more likely than that a man to some extent skilled in medicine and surgery should discontinue the use of the knife when his commission – and I still believe Chapman had a commission from America – came to an end, and then for the remainder of his ghastly deeds put into practice his knowledge of poisons? Indeed, if the theory be accepted that a man who takes life on a wholesale scale never ceases his accursed habit until he is either arrested or dies, there is much to be said for Chapman’s consistency. You see, incentive changes; but the fiendishness is not eradicated. The victims, too, you will notice, continue to be women; but they are of different classes, and obviously call for different methods of despatch.’12

  H. L. Adam, writing in 1930, tells us how Abberline followed up his theory:

  Chief Inspector Abberline, who had charge of the investigations into the East End murders, thought that Chapman and Jack the Ripper were one and the same person. He closely questioned the Polish woman, Lucy Baderski, about Chapman’s nightly habits at the time of the murders. She said that he was often out until three or four o’clock in the morning, but she could throw little light upon these absences. Both Inspector Abberline and Inspector Godley spent years in investigating the Ripper murders. Abberline never wavered in his firm conviction that Chapman and Jack the Ripper were one and the same person. When Godley arrested Chapman Abberline said to his confrère, ‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!’13

  The source of this information was almost certainly Godley himself for in his preface Adam expressed his gratitude to Godley for ‘much information’ received. In one particular, though, Godley’s memory undoubtedly played him false. Abberline could not have made the remark ‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!’ when Godley arrested Chapman in October 1902. At that time almost nothing was known about Chapman. Besides, Abberline himself implied in his Pall Mall Gazette interview that he did not suspect Chapman of the Ripper crimes until the Solicitor-General’s opening address at the Central Criminal Court on 16 March 1903. I do not doubt that Abberline made such a comment at some time during the Chapman affair. But it is more likely to have been made on or soon after 19 March, when he congratulated Godley on having secured a conviction.

  In 1932 the voice of ex-Superintendent Arthur Neil joined the chorus. Coming from a detective who had worked on the Chapman inquiry, the case he makes against Chapman, published in Forty Years of Man-Hunting, is valuable:

  The Polish Jew, Kloskovski [Chapman] . . . got a job at a barber’s shop in High Street, Whitechapel. He was right on the scene of these atrocities [the Ripper murders] during the whole period . . .

  The first ‘Ripper’ crime occurred in August 1888. Chapman worked in Whitechapel at this time, and was there during the whole period of these wholesale killings. ‘The Ripper,’ by the account of four medical men, was testified as to having surgical knowledge. Severino Kloskovski, alias George Chapman, had this qualification. Also it was thought, by the expert manner of the mutilations examined on the various bodies of his victims, that the ‘Ripper’ was ambidextrous, that is left- and right-handed. Chapman was seen to use his hands in this way during the time he lived in the Borough. The only living description ever given by an eyewitness of the ‘Ripper,’ tallied exactly with Chapman, even to the height, deep-sunk black eyes, sallow complexion and thick, black moustache.

  Towards the end of 1888, Severino Kloskovski left Britain for the United States. The ‘Ripper’ murders had by this time ceased, so far as London was concerned. But a series of equally terrible crimes, causing a precisely similar reign of terror, began in America. These crimes ceased when, in 1892, Kloskovski returned to this country.

  We were never able to secur
e definite proof that Chapman was the ‘Ripper’. But the strong theory remains just the same. No one who had not been trained as a surgeon and medical man, could have committed the ‘Ripper’ crimes. As we discovered, Chapman had been a surgeon in Poland, and would, therefore, be the only possible fiend capable of putting such trained knowledge into use against humanity, instead of for it. ‘Jack the Ripper’ was a cold-blooded, inhuman monster, who killed for the sake of killing.

  The same could be said of Severino Kloskovski, alias George Chapman, the Borough poisoner.

  Why he took to poisoning his women victims on his second visit to this country can only be ascribed to his diabolical cunning, or some insane idea or urge to satisfy his inordinate vanity.

  In any case, it is the most fitting and sensible solution to the possible identity of the murderer in one of the world’s greatest crime mysteries.

  Neil conceded that police inquiries failed to procure proof that Chapman and the Ripper were one. Nevertheless, ‘as every detective, and come to that, any active crime reporter, very quickly learns,’ he added, ‘there are things you cannot prove in a court of law but of which you may feel quite certain in your own mind.’14

  A coterie of top detectives – Abberline, Godley and Neil – thus developed the strong conviction that Severin Klosowski, the man hanged at Wandsworth as George Chapman, was also Jack the Ripper. Were they right?

  In certain respects there is no doubt that Chapman is the most promising suspect we have encountered. But before we consider his case in detail we had best clear out of the way some of the red herrings introduced into the discussion by his accusers.