Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  The police claim that Chapman had a black bag was true. Harriet Greenaway, one of his neighbours in Hastings, saw it and told Southwark Police Court about it in 1903: ‘Once Mrs Chapman [Mary Spink] showed me a black bag, secretly. Prisoner [Chapman] used to keep the bag.’ Why Mary should have been so furtive about the bag is not clear. But since there is no reason to believe that the Ripper possessed such an article it does not matter. Similarly, Neil’s claim that Chapman was ambidextrous is of doubtful relevance to our inquiry. For although two different weapons were used against Martha Tabram there is no persuasive evidence that the Ripper was an ambidexter. Perhaps the most patently bogus argument against Chapman, though, was one raised by H. L. Adam. He noted the Americanisms in the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and postcard and pointed out that Chapman was accustomed to use Americanisms and pass himself off as an American. Chapman certainly did sometimes pose as an American. Petitioning the Home Secretary for clemency after his trial in 1903, for example, he insisted that he was an American ‘born in 1865 in the County of Michigan USA.’ It is probable, too, that during his residence in Jersey City his speech acquired a smattering of Americanisms. Unfortunately for Adam’s argument, however, the ‘Dear Boss’ letter was penned in September 1888, more than two years before Chapman left for the States. In any case, as we have already learned, this letter was almost certainly a hoax.15

  Even with the red herrings ruthlessly binned, an impressive array of circumstantial factors can still be alleged against Chapman.

  A trained if relatively inexperienced surgeon, he possessed the medical expertise necessary to have perpetrated the Whitechapel murders.

  Abberline said that Chapman lodged in George Yard. The White Hart, in the basement of which Chapman had a shop, was on the corner of George Yard and Whitechapel High Street. But Chapman did not move there until 1890. At the time of the murders he was ensconced at 126 Cable Street. This was within walking distance of all the murder sites. And Goulston Street, where the bloody remnant of Kate Eddowes’ apron was discovered, could easily have been traversed by a murderer escaping to Cable Street from Mitre Square.

  Chapman’s personal circumstances mirrored those we have already deduced for the Ripper. He was in regular work. So, too, if the dates of the murders be any guide, was the Ripper. He was single. In other words, again probably like the Ripper, he was free of family entanglements. And Lucy Baderski, who met Chapman in 1889, tells us that he was in the habit of staying out late into the early hours of the morning. We have no certain knowledge of it but, ardent womanizer as he was, Chapman may well have been a regular patron of prostitutes.

  There are remarkable affinities between the descriptions witnesses gave of the Whitechapel murderer and the known appearance of Chapman. As we have noted, the murderer seems to have been a white male in his twenties or thirties, of medium height, respectably dressed and possibly of foreign origin. Chapman fits this profile. At the time of the murders he was twenty-three. He was of medium height. And even in his working clothes, as a hairdresser, he would have been expected to dress respectably. Furthermore, three of the witnesses who may have seen the Ripper (Marshall, Schwartz and Lawende) describe a man who wore a round cap with a peak, like that of a sailor, and there is no doubt that Chapman’s wardrobe once held just such a cap. In a photograph of Chapman and Bessie Taylor, taken about 1898–1900, he is clearly to be seen wearing it. If Chapman really was the Ripper he may even help to explain the inconsistency among the witnesses as to whether the murderer was a foreigner or not. Chapman was, of course, a foreigner, but one who might easily have passed for an Englishman. This was a point noted by the newspapers in 1903. ‘Although born and bred near Warsaw,’ commented one, ‘Klosowski is not in appearance a typical Russian Pole. He is an undersized man, with small, sharp features, and in repose his face does not suggest a foreigner.’16

  The resemblance between George Hutchinson’s suspect and Chapman is particularly striking. Hutchinson described a foreigner of medium height, dark, very well dressed and sporting a dark moustache curled up at the ends. Any one of these details might accurately be applied to Chapman. Levisohn, it will be remembered, credited Chapman with a penchant for flashy dressing even in the early years of their acquaintanceship, testimony which suggests that the barber’s assistant was not the impoverished immigrant that many of his compatriots were.

  There are some difficulties in matching Chapman with the Ripper evidence. One is age. Hutchinson thought that the man he saw was about thirty-four or thirty-five. Chapman was then twenty-three. Certainly Hutchinson may have been mistaken. The estimation of age in strangers can be exceedingly difficult at the best of times, as those of my readers who care to experiment for themselves will readily discover, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that in a dimly-lit street a man with a heavy moustache could have passed for one older than his years. But no other witness made the Ripper as young as Chapman. PC Smith’s estimate of age was twenty-eight, Schwartz’s and Lawende’s both thirty. The fact that almost all of our Chapman material comes from 1902–3 does not help either. It is true that Levisohn, Stanislaus Baderski (Lucy’s brother) and Mrs Rauch (her sister) all testified that Chapman’s general appearance changed little during the period of his residence in England, but the fourteen-year gap between the murders and the Chapman evidence inevitably introduces uncertainties into the case against him. Did Chapman own his peaked cap in 1888, for example, or was it a relic of his nautical expeditions out of Hastings during 1896–7?

  Notwithstanding such caveats, it has to be conceded that, as a whole, Chapman matches up with the Ripper evidence on appearance very well.

  Some students of the Whitechapel crimes have dismissed Chapman as a serious suspect because of an alleged dissimilarity in character between him and the Ripper. In fact, as Abberline pointed out, there were also many affinities of character between the two.

  Chapman, like the Ripper, had a powerful sex drive, and he was regularly violent to women. A moral oaf, indifferent to the sufferings of others, the Pole physically beat at least two of his ‘wives’, threatened one with a knife, another with a revolver, and ultimately condemned three to agonizing deaths by poison. Alone among the major Ripper suspects he was a known homicide. There must have been few men, even in late Victorian London, capable of multiple murder. The Ripper was one. Chapman was another.

  In normal circumstances the Whitechapel killer’s appearance and behaviour must have been disarming and reassuring. This, according to the Solicitor-General, Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson, who led for the prosecution at Chapman’s trial, could scarcely be said of Chapman. ‘I have never seen such a villain,’ he recalled afterwards. ‘He looked like some evil wild beast. I almost expected him to leap over the dock and attack me.’17 Carson’s reminiscence is much quoted but that does not make it accurate. Had Chapman typically presented such an appearance he would never have ensnared a succession of doting mistresses and the truth, as contemporary records amply demonstrate, is that he was possessed of a remarkable capacity for ingratiating himself with those around him.

  His employers found him quiet, steady and industrious. The families of his victims were completely deceived. Having visited her son-in-law at the Monument, Bessie Taylor’s mother, for example, averred that she had ‘never seen a better husband’. Chapman’s ability to allay suspicion is well illustrated in the case of Robert Marsh, father of Maud Marsh, the last victim.

  On the day before Maud died, the worried father visited the Chapmans at the Crown.

  ‘I think my daughter will pull through now, George,’ he ventured hopefully.

  Chapman prepared him for the worst: ‘She will never get up no more.’

  Marsh had heard rumours about Bessie Taylor, the previous wife, and understandably they troubled him. He probed Chapman on the matter. ‘Have you seen anyone else like it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chapman.

  ‘Was your other wife like it?’

  Chapman realized that any attempt to
conceal the fact would simply undermine his credibility. Without batting an eyelid he replied: ‘Just about in the same way.’

  All in all Marsh was impressed by his son-in-law. At the trial he testified that Chapman ‘always answered my inquiries about my daughter perfectly frankly. He used to come down sometimes to see me with Maud, and, as far as I could see, she was very happy with him. I thought he treated her very well.’18

  There were moments during the fatal illnesses of his wives when Chapman’s mask slipped and witnesses like Martha Doubleday and Elizabeth Waymark glimpsed the callous indifference beneath. But their testimony was greatly overborne by those who could only see in him the solicitous husband. He ministered to his victims’ needs, monitored their pulse and heart rates, prepared and administered their medicines and shed tears for their passing. Even Dr Stoker, who treated Bessie Taylor and Maud Marsh for the same symptoms, entertained no suspicion of foul play until after Grapel had alerted him to the possibility of poison.

  Most remarkable of all Chapman retained the affection and trust of his victims. We have seen this in the case of Mary Spink and it is equally evident in that of Maud Marsh. At the trial Maud’s mother was asked if Maud had uttered one word to suggest that she had ever doubted her husband. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘she appeared perfectly happy and contented to the last.’19

  ‘The tiger’s heart was masked by the most insinuating and snaky refinement.’ Such was de Quincey’s description of John Williams, the supposed Ratcliff Highway murderer.20 Recent research has tended to exonerate Williams of those crimes but the quality noticed by de Quincey might realistically be surmised of the Ripper and it was undoubtedly true of Chapman.

  There was one other respect in which Chapman’s personality may have replicated that of Jack the Ripper. If, as Mrs Long and George Hutchinson indicated, the Ripper was a foreigner, the chalk message – ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’ – was a gesture of overweening arrogance. And self-incriminating braggadocio was not uncharacteristic of Chapman. On one occasion Louisa Morris, Maud Marsh’s sister, told him that it seemed strange that the doctor could not find out what was ailing Maud. ‘I could give her a bit like that,’ said Chapman snapping his fingers, ‘and fifty doctors could not find out.’21

  Why Abberline found Chapman such a compelling suspect should now be apparent. Here was a much more likely suspect than Macnaghten’s depressed Blackheath barrister or Anderson’s inoffensive scavenger of the streets. Here was a man who had the medical qualifications, the opportunity, the appearance, the cunning and the cruelty to have been Jack the Ripper.

  At this point it would give me immense satisfaction to announce that we had unmasked the killer. Unfortunately I can’t. Because although Chapman is undoubtedly the best suspect on offer the case against him still contains serious flaws.

  The absence of any direct evidence linking Chapman with the killings is the major weakness. Lucy Baderski’s statement that he was often out at night at the time of the murders will not bear scrutiny. Chapman met Lucy in a Polish club in St John’s Square, Clerkenwell, and they were married on 29 October 1889. Now, according to the later testimony of Stanislaus Baderski, Lucy’s brother, their courtship was a rapid affair: ‘She met the accused at the Polish club, and they kept company together for four or five weeks, after which they got married.’22 Stanislaus was vague on chronology and dates. In his Central Criminal Court testimony, for example, he erroneously dated the marriage August Bank Holiday 1889. Nevertheless, the import of his statement is clear. Lucy cannot have met Chapman before the summer of 1889 and thus knew nothing about his movements during the previous autumn. The only Ripper-type murders upon which she might conceivably have been questioned were those of Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles in July 1889 and February 1891.

  There are other difficulties in identifying Chapman with the Ripper. Would an immigrant, unfamiliar with the locality as well as the English language, have been capable of the crimes? We do not know the extent of the Ripper’s command of English but some of our best witnesses – Long, Cadosch, Lawende and Hutchinson – attest to some ability to converse with English-speaking victims.

  This is a difficult question to answer. Much depends upon how long Chapman had been resident in Britain. Arthur Neil, in the autobiography already referred to, tells us that he first came to this country in June 1887 but I have been unable to discover any corroboration of this statement. Papers in Russian and Polish, found in Chapman’s possession when he was arrested in 1902, closely document his early life in Poland. Their abrupt termination, in February 1887, suggests to me that he emigrated soon after that date. At the height of the Ripper scare, then, he may have been resident the best part of eighteen months in the East End, long enough one would think to acquire some local knowledge and sufficient conversational English to pick up a Whitechapel whore. Wolff Levisohn’s testimony on this point is inconclusive. He said that Chapman could only speak Polish and a little Yiddish when he met him in 1890. It should be remembered, however, that since Levisohn was himself a Russian Pole it would have been unnatural and unnecessary for Chapman to have attempted to communicate with him in English.

  A much more serious objection to Chapman as a Whitechapel murder suspect is the dissimilarity in character between the Ripper-type slayer and the poisoner. For if Chapman was the Ripper we would have to accept that he abandoned the knife for fear of detection and adopted poison as a safer method of killing. Is this a credible scenario?

  John Douglas of the FBI tells us: ‘Some criminologists and behavioural scientists have written that perpetrators maintain their modus operandi, and that this is what links so-called signature crimes. This conclusion is incorrect. Subjects will change their modus operandi as they gain experience. This is learned behaviour.’23 Point taken. It is also possible, as noted in an earlier chapter, to find examples of serial killers who lay dormant for extended periods or baffled police by changing their methods. But to exchange knife for hammer, gun or rope, weapons of violence all, is one thing. To forsake violence in favour of subterfuge, as is alleged of Chapman, quite another. I can think of only one possible parallel – California’s still uncaught Zodiac killer.

  In four horrific incidents in 1968–9 Zodiac shot or stabbed seven victims, five of them fatally. The attacks then ceased. But the murderer continued to taunt the police and press with letters until as late as 1978. He even boasted in his macabre correspondence of fresh killings. These later victims may have been figments of a perverted imagination. Yet it is also possible that they were real and that they had not been officially attributed to Zodiac because of differences of locale or technique. Indeed, in a letter of November 1969, Zodiac warned of just such an impending change in his modus operandi: ‘I shall no longer announce to anyone when I commit my murders, they shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger, and a few fake accidents, etc. The police shall never catch me, because I have been too clever for them.’ Robert Graysmith, who studied the case, took Zodiac at his word and presented evidence to link him with various unsolved murders of hitchhikers in California, Washington and Oregon between 1969 and 1981. The victims were stabbed, poisoned, strangled, drowned or smothered. ‘The truly horrifying part to me,’ he wrote, ‘was that it seemed that someone was experimenting in different ways of killing people.’24

  Whether Chapman was capable of such versatility in murder it is impossible now to say. ‘You don’t know what he is.’ Maud Marsh’s rejoinder to her sister might well serve as a caution to those eager to pontificate about what the Pole was or was not capable of doing. The fact is that he still remains very much an enigma. We do not even know why he poisoned three women. Apart from Mary Spink, with her £500 legacy, there were no substantial economic advantages in any of his ‘marriages’. Bessie Taylor was the favourite daughter of comparatively affluent parents but Chapman killed her before she could inherit. And Maud Marsh was the daughter of a labourer. Since Chapman did not legally marry any of his victims, moreo
ver, he had no need to resort to murder in order to free himself of one so that he might live with another. George Elliott, defending Chapman at the Central Criminal Court, made an effective point out of this lack of tangible motive, a point to which Carson could but protest Chapman’s record of ‘unbridled, heartless and cruel lust’.

  A restless adventurer, never staying long in one place, Chapman slipped easily into fantasy worlds of his own creation. He posed as an American, displaying the stars and stripes prominently in his public houses, and boasted of his exploits at sea and in hunting big game. An American revolver, fully loaded, was found at the Crown after his arrest, but the most ferocious quarry he is known to have pursued with it were the rats he was accustomed to shoot in his cellar. Perhaps the lies served to mask a deep-rooted sense of inferiority. Whatever, despite his macho image and undoubted success with women, Chapman seems to have made no close male friends at all. Asked in the death cell whether he wanted to see any friends, he replied bitterly, ‘I have none!’

  Poison was an obvious weapon for Chapman given his knowledge of medicine and his desire to murder his ‘wives’. And the fact that he was a poisoner in one set of circumstances does not, as Abberline intimated, preclude the possibility of his perpetrating different types of slayings in another. The Pole has a demonstrable record of physical violence against women and he is the only serious Ripper suspect who has. But perhaps it is stretching credibility too far to believe that the man who committed six horrific, often frenzied, knife murders in just three months in 1888 could have quietly gone into retirement and then re-emerged a decade later in the covert guise of domestic poisoner.

  The case against Chapman would unquestionably look stronger if it could be shown that his movements correlated with other recorded sex murders or assaults. In this context the slayings of Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles and the alleged American attacks of 1890–92 are interesting.