There was also ‘the nurse’. Appalled at finding out that her husband had gone with a prostitute, she set out to avenge herself upon the women who threatened her marriage. And speaking of medical types and Russians...
Dr Alexander Pedachenko (1857?-1908?)
Fingered by William Le Queux in Things I Know About Kings, Celebrities and Crooks (1923) and expanded upon by Donald McCormick in The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959)
Bear with us, this is a good one. Pedachenko lived in Walworth with his sister. Along with a friend Levitski (who wrote the Ripper letters) and a seamstress Miss Winberg (who engaged the victims in conversation), Pedachenko killed prostitutes under orders from Ochrana (the then Russian secret police). Their aim was to discredit the Met, whom they hated for tolerating emigrant dissidents and anarchists in the East End.When their plan succeeded (with the resignation of Sir Charles Warren), Pedachenko was smuggled back to Moscow and exiled to Yakutsk (or sent to an asylum after trying to murder a woman in Russia). Le Queux claimed the information came from a manuscript entitled Great Russian Criminals, written by Rasputin. Pedachenko, supposedly, was an alias for Vassily Konovalov and, as well as being a surgeon, he was an occasional transvestite. He was wearing women’s clothing when he was arrested in Russia. An unsourced letter, attributed to Sir Basil Thomson (assistant commissioner of the Met 1913–1919), states that Konovalov also used the alias ‘Mikhail Ostrog’. It seems unlikely that Konovalov was the Michael Ostrog the Met sought at the time of the Ripper murders.
Donald McCormick furthered the madness by quoting from Dr Thomas Dutton’s unpublished notebooks (themselves not seen since 1935) that Pedachenko was the double of Severin Klosowski (see below). Both barber’s assistants, they knew each other and would exchange identities for their nightly excursions. Hope that’s clear, then.
Another Russian candidate was Nicolay Vasiliev (also called Nicolas Vassili, Vassily, Vasilyeff and Nicolai Wassili). He was mentioned in the British and international press, as well as in two American books on the Whitechapel murders, published between October and December 1888. Having become a leader of the Skoptsy (a Russian religious cult that preached castration),Vasiliev fled to Paris in 1872, at the age of 25, to evade persecution by the Russian government. He spent his time trying to convert prostitutes, including one known as ‘Madeleine’ with whom he fell in love. When she left him he tracked her down and killed her before butchering another seven prostitutes. Caught when his next victim called for help, Vasiliev was tried and sent to an asylum (in either Russia or France) for the next sixteen years. He was released on 1 January 1888 and announced his intention to move to London. Here he lived with friends in Whitechapel until Polly Nichols was killed. Since then, papers reported that ‘his friends have not seen him’. The problem with Vasiliev is that no-one may have ever seen him. An article in the London Star for 17 November 1888, entitled ‘A Fictional French “Ripper”’ relayed doubts about his story. It quoted an interview with M Macé, a former head of the Sureté, who stated that no such murders occurred in Paris in 1872. This seemingly conclusive rubbishing did little to stop other papers continuing to print and embellish Vasiliev’s tale. In an essay on the articles for www.casebook.co.uk, Stepan Poberowski notes that several of these articles resemble stories planted in other newspapers by the Ochrana. These articles, he suggests, were part of a provocation campaign to force the Met to interrogate Russian immigrants. Any information gathered would be fed back to the Ochrana via their spies at Scotland Yard. If Vasiliev was a fictional tool of provocation, his usefulness ended when the murders stopped. By January 1889 newspapers no longer mentioned him, and there is no indication that he was ever actively sought as a genuine suspect.
Montague John Druitt (1857–1888)
Fingered by Tom Cullen in Autumn of Terror (1965), Daniel Farson in Jack the Ripper (1972), Martin Howells and Keith Skinner in The Ripper Legacy (1987), John Wilding in Jack the Ripper Revealed (1993)
One of three suspects proposed by Sir Melville Macnaghten, who became assistant Chief Constable of the CID six months after Mary Kelly’s murder. The document, known as ‘the Macnaghten Memoranda’ was discovered by Daniel Farson in 1959 and was written ostensibly to discredit The Sun’s Thomas Cutbush theory (see also: Kosminski, Ostrog).
A barrister, schoolmaster, gentleman and cricket ace, Druitt’s body was fished from the Thames at Chiswick on 31 December 1888. It had been in the water for approximately a month and there were four large stones in the coat pockets. A note to his brother,William, read to the effect: ‘Since Friday I felt that I was going to be like mother [i.e. incarcerated in an asylum] and it would be best for all concerned if I were to die.’
Melancholia was a common trait in the family. Several of Druitt’s immediate family had attempted or committed suicide. On or around 30 November, Druitt, for reasons unknown, was fired from his teaching post. William later learned that Druitt had been dismissed after getting into serious trouble at the school. The cause of this trouble is unclear but it seems to have been the final straw. By the time William was told of his absence from chambers, Druitt had already been missing, probably dead, for over a week.
There is no real evidence to suggest that Druitt was the Ripper. Sir Melville Macnaghten appears to be the first to really push for him as a suspect. But the only proof behind his conviction of Druitt’s guilt is unspecified ‘private information (from which) I have little doubt but that his own family believed him to have been the murderer’. What information, and from what source, was lost when Macnaghten later destroyed all his personal papers relating to the matter. Further difficulties arise. Druitt was a tall, slim Anglo-Saxon, which goes against the bulk of eyewitness descriptions. Nor is there a clear way to place Druitt in the East End. Several of his cricket engagements (one in Dorset) clash with the times of the murders.
In 1961, Daniel Farson went to Australia in search of a document that supposedly proved Druitt’s guilt. ‘The East End Murderer – I Knew Him’ was allegedly written by his cousin Lionel, a doctor who had emigrated in 1886. Such tantalising evidence, as is often the case, proved to be a hoax. There remains nothing solid to place Druitt as Jack. Abberline was certainly unimpressed by the theory. When asked about Druitt in 1903, he said, ‘You can state most emphatically that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago. It is simple nonsense to talk of the police having proof that the man is dead.’
What ties Druitt to the Ripper is his timely suicide. Unexplained matters such as the increasingly violent mutilations and the sudden cessation of the murders are neatly cleared up in Macnaghten’s theory that ‘the murderer’s brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller’s Court’ as a result of which he either committed suicide or was committed by relatives (see Kosminski). A major issue with this solution is that serial killers rarely tend to commit suicide, but keep killing until, by luck or design, they are caught. Another suicide, Edward Buchan, was chosen by Roger Barber for ‘Did Jack the Ripper Commit Suicide?’ (Criminologist, Autumn 1990). Buchan ran a marine store (or was a cobbler) in Poplar and obligingly killed himself on 19 November 1888.
Aaron Kosminski (1864/65–1919)
Along with his championing of Druitt, Macnaghten was also the first to suggest Kosminski as a suspect. A Polish Jewish hairdresser, he was certified insane and committed to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891. He’d been suffering from periods of insanity for three years and roamed the streets, eating food out of the gutter. He heard voices and had once threatened his sister with a knife. However, usually Kosminski’s insanity sent him into a torpor, during which time he refused to bathe or to work. Plus, he remained insane and at liberty until 1891 while the murders ceased in 1888. Far from being Macnaghten’s ‘homicidal lunatic with a deep hatred of women’, Kosminski’s medical records assert that he was neither suicidal nor dangerous to others. Apart from the knife incident, Kosminski’s only other act of violence was in 1892, when he thre
w a chair at an asylum attendant.This did nothing to alter the authorities’ opinions that he was harmless. In addition, his build, small and slight, doesn’t fit the majority of most Ripper descriptions.
In July 2006, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson’s great-grandson donated the book containing the ‘Swanson marginalia’ to Scotland Yard’s ‘Black Museum’. Originally discovered by his grandson when the book passed to him around 1980, the notes were first published in the Daily Telegraph in 1987. Swanson’s handwritten note is in the margin and end-page of his copy of Commissioner Robert Anderson’s controversial memoirs, published in 1910. In these, Anderson sketchily described the suspect whom he believed to be the Ripper.Anderson’s description of the man extends little beyond mentioning he was a low-class Polish Jew from Whitechapel whose relatives shielded him from the police. He also states that ‘the only person who ever saw the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him’. Swanson’s notes continue, mentioning that the witness, also a Jew, refused to give evidence against the suspect as he did not want to be ‘the means of the murderer being hanged’. Swanson also states that the ‘…suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home where he had been sent to us with difficulty in order to subject him to identification and he knew he was identified.’The ‘Seaside Home’ was one of the Convalescent Police Seaside Homes. The first of these was opened in West Brighton in March 1890. If this is the correct location a period of eighteen months had passed since the original sighting of Kosminski, sixteen months alone would have passed since the last murder. The ‘marginalia’ further details that Kosminski was taken ‘to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards’ when, in fact, he lived on until 1919. Despite these anomalies, Swanson’s notations are clearly for personal consumption only.Thus, having no agenda to mislead anyone, they simply relate the truth as Swanson saw it from 1910. The margina-lia’s provenance is unquestionably from Swanson’s own hand. Despite Macnaghten’s, Anderson’s and Swanson’s enthusiasm for Kosminski-as-the-Ripper, there exists as much evidence against him as any of our other suspects.
There were other mentally-ill suspects. Aaron Davis Cohen (aka David Cohen and possibly aka Nathan Kaminsky) was an extremely violent lunatic whose capture and incarceration came closely after the cessation of the murders and who might possibly have been confused by Macnaghten with Kosminski. There was the religious maniac, G Wentworth Bell Smith who terrified his landlord with his nightly excursions and his fulminations on drowning prostitutes. Contemporary Ripper theorist Dr L Forbes Winslow was convinced of his guilt and continually raised this with police. There was also borderline psychotic butcher, Jacob Levy, who may have been recognised talking to Catharine Eddowes by fellow butcher Joseph Levy near the Church Passage entrance to Mitre Square. And perhaps that explains Joseph’s apparent reluctance to come forward at the inquest.
Thomas Cutbush (suspected by The Sun in 1894) was arrested after escaping from an asylum and stabbing two women in the bottom. Neither his knife, nor his method match the Ripper’s, but he had contracted syphilis from a prostitute early in 1888 and suffered from religious mania and nightly wanderings. Although police were reasonably convinced. Macnaghten wrote his memorandum partly to rubbish the Cutbush theory. But then, he would, suggests AP Wolf (in Jack The Myth [1993]) because he was covering up for Cutbush’s uncle, a senior police officer.The uncle would later shoot himself...
Michael Ostrog (1833?-?)
While the police were certainly actively seeking Michael Ostrog during the murders, it seems more likely that they sought to eliminate him from enquiries rather than seriously considered him the Ripper. Ostrog was a Russian conman who adopted a host of identities, all with hard-luck stories of exile and poverty attached. With these he continually duped society figures into providing him with cash and lodgings. He often stole their possessions. His crimes in Britain began in Oxford in 1863 and he continued, with breaks at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, until at least 1888 (movements have been traced to 1904 by researcher Derryl Goffee). Ostrog’s confidence tricks appear to be the trigger for police interest. At a time when much expert opinion suggested the killer was a lunatic who possessed anatomical knowledge, Ostrog’s lies put him in both categories. He frequently told his marks that he was a former surgeon, and often feigned insanity to avoid being sent to prison. Beyond one incident when he threatened an arresting officer with a loaded revolver, a propensity to violence appears non-existent. His height of 5 feet 11 inches, notably tall for the period, seems to put him out of the range of the Ripper sightings. His ability to charm several society women would suggest that he was a ladykiller of another kind entirely.
Other suspected ‘foreign-looking’ (or sounding) men include a lethal tag-team triumvirate of Portuguese sailors proposed by contemporary theorist and police-irritant, EK Larkins. You didn’t have to be Portuguese, however. Sausage maker and self-described surgeon Alios Szmeredy committed suicide in Vienna while under arrest for murder. Rumours in Austria that he had been the Ripper resulted in Carl Muusmann’s Hvem Var Jack the Ripper? (1908), arguably the first book-length attempt to identify Jack. Itinerant Swede Nikolaus Benelius was arrested after unlawfully entering an East End house and grinning at the female occupant.‘Fogelma’ was described as being a Norwegian sailor prone to madness in Empire News (23 October 1923). Committed to the Morris Plains Lunatic Asylum, New Jersey in 1899 (although no records of his incarceration exist), he would mutter about events that ‘connected him clearly with the atrocious crimes of 1888’. A pity he doesn’t seem to have actually existed.
The Argentinean businessman, Alonzo Maduro, had his identity divulged in 1952 by a Mr Salway who had met him in Whitechapel just before Emma Smith’s death. Maduro had told him that all prostitutes should be killed. After Mary Kelly’s death, Salway claimed he had found knives in Maduro’s possession.
Severin Klosowski/George Chapman (1865–1903)
Fingered in R Michael Gordon’s Alias Jack the Ripper (2001). Abberline’s suspect. Considered strongly by Philip Sugden in The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (1994)
One thing is certain about Klosowski – he did murder women. Between 1895 and 1901 he poisoned three successive wives with antimony (which, he believed, left no trace). For these crimes, he was tried and hanged in 1903. The more the trial revealed about Klosowski’s background, the more convinced Inspector Abberline was that he was Jack the Ripper. Klosowski was a qualified junior surgeon who had been a barber’s assistant in Whitechapel during the murders, emigrating to America in mid-1890. During his stay in New Jersey, a prostitute was strangled and mutilated in Manhattan. This immediately sparked rumours that the Ripper had emigrated, but there is no proof that Klosowski was even in Manhattan. He returned to London in 1891–2 where he resumed his career as a barber.
The similarities between his appearance and eyewitness descriptions are notable, particularly that of George Hutchinson. Klosowski also fits many criteria supplied in the FBI’s profile. He was charming and violent towards women, and sadistic enough to slowly poison his three victims. His callousness towards his wives’ suffering was noted by more than one witness. He threatened his first wife, Lucy Baderski, with a knife more than once. At the best estimate, he had first emigrated to the East End around eighteen months before the beginning of the crimes; long enough to acquaint himself with the area and pick up some conversational English. Moreover, he favoured a sailor’s cap and carried a little bag...
It’s said, when Klosowski was convicted, Abberline turned to Inspector Godley, the arresting officer, and said: ‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!’ However, Klosowski was only 23 when the crimes were committed, much younger than any witness description estimated. More problematic is the switch from one modus operandi to another. Serial killers have been known to experiment with other methods. The Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, briefly switched from killing his victims with a hammer to strangling them wi
th a piece of flex to divert police attention from the fact that he was still killing but soon reverted. To accept that Klosowski was Jack the Ripper we have to believe that he was capable of switching from viciously mutilating prostitutes to poisoning his wives. A change in behaviour that great is a serious leap.
Another poisoner got in on the act: Dr Thomas Neil Cream was hanged for the poisoning of four prostitutes in Lambeth in 1892. As the trapdoor opened, he is alleged to have said, ‘I am Jack the...’ (Relax, he was actually in jail in America at the time of the killings.) Other wife murderers include William Henry Bury. He stabbed his wife to death in Glasgow in 1889 but had lived at Bow during the previous year. Graffiti outside his lodgings claimed that ‘Jack the Ripper is at the back of this door’. Frederick Bailey Deeming killed two wives, one in Liverpool (as well as his children) in 1891, a second in Australia in 1892. He was said to have confessed to the last two Ripper crimes. His solicitor denied it.
James Kelly killed his wife in 1883. Doctors doubted he was insane but he was locked up in Broadmoor anyway. He escaped in January 1888 but turned himself in in 1927, remaining in Broadmoor until his death. James Tully’s theory (The Secret of Prisoner 1167 [1997]) is that Kelly killed his wife when she discovered his affair with Mary Kelly. He escaped Broadmoor to find that Mary had aborted the child she was bearing him. He killed each woman after asking about her whereabouts and finally Mary herself. Supposedly, the authorities were so embarrassed by his escape they covered the whole thing up.
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