These desperate measures availed him little. On 9 August Justice Marsham of Woolwich Police Court committed him to Newgate for trial at the Central Criminal Court. And there, in September, he was convicted under the name of Claude Cayton for stealing the tankard, valued at ten shillings, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment with hard labour.

During his various court appearances Ostrog displayed signs of insanity. PC Mulvey didn't believe them genuine. 'He was quite sane then [when apprehended],' he told the Central Criminal Court, 'but now he is putting it on.' Dr Herbert Hillier agreed: 'I was called to see the prisoner at the police station. He showed no signs of insanity then. I saw him again a week afterwards and he was behaving the same as he is now. He is merely shamming.' Nevertheless, on 26 September, Ostrog was certified insane. And four days later he was transferred from Wandsworth Prison to the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in Tooting. In the admission register he is recorded as a Jewish surgeon. Having served his sentence, he was discharged 'recovered' on 10 March 1888.12 It is not quite the last we hear of him. For on 26 October 1888, in the midst of the Ripper affair, his description was published in the Police Gazette once more for failing to report. This notice described Ostrog as a Polish Jew and said that he was about fifty-five years of age and 'generally dressed in a semi-clerical suit'. It concluded with the words: 'Special attention is called to this dangerous man.'

The Gazette's notice proves that the police were seeking Ostrog at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Were the two events connected? Almost certainly.

It is true that the notice does not mention the murders. But since the police never appear to have possessed any tangible evidence to link Ostrog with the crimes, and since they were probably anxious that their inquiries maintain a low profile, this is scarcely surprising. It is also true that convicts under police supervision were routinely described in the Gazette for failure to report. But why, if Ostrog had failed to report, did the police delay more than seven months after his release to advertise their interest in him? And why did they direct 'special attention' to a man convicted of nothing more serious than the theft of a metal tankard?

It is highly probable that it was the Ripper scare that gave urgency to the need to locate Ostrog. For Macnaghten has it that attempts to establish Ostrog's whereabouts were linked to the Ripper case, and the timing of the Gazette's notice is surely significant three weeks after the double event, when the police were under the fiercest pressure to detect the culprit, and hard on the heels of systematic inquiries about patients discharged from lunatic asylums.

Ostrog, then, was the only one of Macnaghten's three names who actually fell under suspicion before the murders had run their course. Why was he suspected?

The answer to that question is relatively obvious once the state of police knowledge in the aftermath of the double murder is borne in mind. By then two police surgeons Phillips and Gordon Brown had testified to a considerable degree of surgical skill and anatomical knowledge on the part of the murderer. And the indiscriminate nature of the injuries inflicted upon Kate Eddowes had strengthened the hand of those who contended that the culprit would prove a lunatic. Sir James Risdon Bennett, President of the Royal College of Physicians, and Doctors L. Forbes Winslow, Edgar Sheppard, Frederick William Blackwell and Gordon Brown had all pointed the finger at a lunatic killer within days of the double murder.

Faced with such an impressive array of expert opinion, the police inevitably continued to accord much priority to suspects in possession of anatomical knowledge and to lunatics. There were detailed inquiries at hospitals and amongst butchers and slaughtermen at this time. Even more significant, at least for any consideration of Ostrog, there were visits to asylums.

Soon after the Chapman murder Dr Winslow had been interviewed at Scotland Yard and had urged the Metropolitan Police to call for returns of lunatics recently escaped or discharged from asylums. Perhaps, when the Eddowes killing brought the City Police into the hunt, he tendered them the same advice. On 2 October, just two days after the murder, he sent the following telegram to Sir James Fraser, Commissioner of the City force: 'My services are placed at your disposal.'13 We do not know the outcome of Winslow's attempted intervention. But there is no doubt that the City Police did make such inquiries. For Inspector McWilliam, in his report of 27 October, told the Home Office that he had 'sent officers to all the lunatic asylums in London to make enquiry respecting persons recently admitted or discharged: many persons being of opinion that these crimes are of too revolting a character to have been committed by a sane person.'14 Walter Dew, writing in 1938, retained vivid memories of an even wider search by the Metropolitan Police. 'One of the strongest inferences to be deduced from the crimes,' he said, 'was that the man we were hunting was probably a s.e.xual maniac. This angle of investigation was pursued relentlessly. Inquiries were made at asylums all over the country, including the Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Broadmoor, with the object of discovering whether a homicidal lunatic had been released as cured about the time the Ripper crimes commenced.'15 Unfortunately, Dew's memory cannot be precisely dated and Chief Inspector Swanson's summary reports on the murders curiously make no reference to inquiries at lunatic asylums. The CID were, nevertheless, fully aware of City Police efforts in the area. On 9 October Warren wrote to Fraser proposing daily conferences between Metropolitan and City detectives to avoid 'our working doubly over the same ground.' These were evidently established. At the beginning of November Swanson noted that the inquiries 'of the City Police are merged into those of the Metropolitan Police, each force cordially communicating to the other daily the nature and subject of their enquiries.'16 Against the background of these investigations it should be clear why Ostrog fell under suspicion. His pretensions to medical knowledge, his discharge from an asylum less than six months before the murders began, and his long criminal record marked him out as an obvious possibility for detectives to check out. Doubtless there were other similar names on their list. But after his discharge from the Surrey asylum, Ostrog could not be traced and the police could not, therefore, eliminate him from their inquiries. It was for this reason, and because the Ripper crimes were never conclusively brought home to anyone else, that his name survived on police files as a possible suspect.

Some writers a.s.sume that the police must have possessed tangible evidence against Ostrog. This is a naive view. Consider Macnaghten's comments. From them we can reasonably infer that the CID did not have any hard evidence linking Ostrog with the murders. Had they such information Macnaghten, in a confidential report, would surely have said so. Instead he was reduced to the citation of alleged aspects of Ostrog's personality and criminal past he was said to be habitually cruel to women, he sometimes carried surgical knives and instruments about with him, etc. in order to justify his inclusion as a suspect. Still more telling, Macnaghten explicitly admitted that Ostrog's whereabouts at the time of the murders 'could never be ascertained'. This means, in short, that the police held no satisfactory evidence to connect Ostrog with Whitechapel, let alone the murders, in the autumn of 1888.

We are now presented with a final, crucial question? Is Ostrog, in the light of what we now know, likely to have been Jack the Ripper? Without a doubt the answer has got to be: No.

First, since Ostrog was an incorrigible liar and confidence trickster even the qualities that brought him under suspicion his medical knowledge and insanity cannot be taken for granted. His claims to have been a former surgeon need have had no greater substance than that to have been an exiled son of the King of Poland. It is interesting, too, that his mental illness manifested itself suddenly in 1887. At this time Ostrog was in custody for the theft of George Bigge's tankard and the police were convinced that his odd behaviour was part of a ploy for lenient treatment in court. Since Ostrog pa.s.sed himself off regularly as a medical man (his aliases included Dr Bonge and Dr Grant) it is quite likely that he did possess some degree of medical knowledge. However, before we can seriously accuse him of the Whitechapel murders it is important that further research clarifies such points. About one aspect of the Russian's character there is no doubt. Well-educated and genteel, he displayed a remarkable capacity for deception. Such a quality could unquestionably have served the Ripper well in rea.s.suring potential victims and, if necessary, hoodwinking police constables who stopped him while he was making his escape. Nevertheless, possible medical expertise, a short detention in a lunatic asylum and a talent for confidence trickery are far from adequate grounds for supposing that Ostrog was the murderer.

Macnaghten undoubtedly did consider Ostrog a serious suspect in the Ripper case as late as 1894. But our evidence demonstrates that almost everything he wrote about him was misleading if not completely wrong.

We have covered all of Ostrog's criminal convictions up to 1888. He cozened people out of money and goods by telling hard luck stories. He stole valuables when their owners weren't looking. And he didn't return his library books. Not a record to be proud of, certainly, but far from being one 'of the worst possible type', as Macnaghten would have us believe. Macnaghten tells us, too, that Ostrog was 'unquestionably a homicidal maniac' and was 'said to have been habitually cruel to women'. But his criminal record does not substantiate either of these claims. In 1873, resisting arrest and the probability of a long prison sentence, Ostrog menaced Superintendent Oswald with a revolver, but neither his general behaviour nor the manner of his crimes suggest anything like a propensity to violence. There is no record of any attempt by him to attack or molest a woman. Macnaghten's a.s.sertion that Ostrog sometimes carried surgical knives and other instruments about with him may well be equally misleading. For in the context of a report about the Ripper murders the natural inference is that these items were being carried about with intent to murder and mutilate. In fact, as a glance at Ostrog's career will attest, he repeatedly posed as a surgeon or doctor, and a doctor's bag, complete with instruments, would have been a basic prop to any such disguise.

The most serious objection to Ostrog as a Ripper candidate and to my mind it is near conclusive is that his known appearance just cannot be reconciled with the descriptions supplied by witnesses who saw the murderer with one or other of his victims.

These witnesses, as we have seen, indicate that the Ripper was a man in his twenties or thirties. Now, Ostrog's age in 1888 is uncertain. The Russian was as dishonest about his age as he was about almost everything else and contemporary doc.u.ments credit him with at least eleven different birth dates ranging from 1829 to 1848. However, our last record the Police Gazette of 26 October 1888 reports his age as fifty-five and a surviving photograph, probably taken in 1883, depicts a man who could have been even older. It shows a man with a receding hairline, a lined face and sunken cheeks, a man who might conceivably be in his fifties, even in his sixties, but a man who could never have been consistently mistaken for one of twenty-eight to thirty-five.

We may not know Ostrog's precise age in 1888 but we do know that he was a tall man. Police sources record his height as five feet eleven inches. This was well above the average for men at a time when people were generally smaller than they are today. John Beddoe, in his survey of 1870, estimated the average height of adult Englishmen at between five feet six inches and five feet seven inches, an estimate that is perhaps too generous in that his research was heavily reliant upon data derived from military recruits. And in 1888 Mr A. E. Knowles, an ex-Pinkerton detective, suggested that the CID be reinforced by a team of civilian detectives, no taller than five feet seven because 'a person over that stature attracts attention.'17 At five feet eleven Ostrog would have been only too conspicuous. Yet our witnesses are broadly consistent in describing the Ripper as a man of average or below average height. Especially revealing, perhaps, is the testimony of those who explicitly compared his height to that of a victim. Both Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes are known to have been only about five feet tall. Ostrog would have towered almost a foot above either of them. Yet Mrs Long, who saw Annie with a man in Hanbury Street only minutes before the time she must have been murdered, thought that the man stood only 'a little taller' than Annie. And Joseph Hyam Levy, Lawende's companion on the night of the double murder, thought that the man they saw talking with a woman (probably Kate) near Mitre Square was only 'about 3 inches taller than the woman.'18 Although Ostrog is the least plausible of Macnaghten's three names there is no shirking the fact that a credible case cannot be made against a single one of them.

Ever since Dan Farson turned up the Chief Constable's report more than thirty years ago it has dominated serious discussion of the ident.i.ty of Jack the Ripper. With very few exceptions students have a.s.sumed that Macnaghten reflected the official view of the CID and that his choices were considered ones, the result of a careful weeding-out process. It is now clear that these a.s.sumptions were unsound.

There was no consensus within the CID about the Ripper's ident.i.ty. Indeed, recorded opinions of officers who worked on the case reveal widespread disagreement on the point. Macnaghten's comments, moreover, seem to have owed as much to his personal theorizing as to the views of his colleagues. Only one of his three names is known to have been seriously suspected by anyone else. There is no doubt, too, that Macnaghten was ill-informed, both about the crimes and about the men he accused. We know far more about Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog now than he did then, and what we know strongly suggests that all three were innocent. Macnaghten was right to refute the Sun's preposterous claims about Thomas Cutbush. But in advancing alternatives he grasped at straws.

Inspector Abberline, the man at the heart of the Whitechapel investigation, would have none of Macnaghten's names. 'You can state most emphatically,' he said in 1903, 'that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago.'

By then, however, the inspector was beginning to develop theories of his own.

22.

'You've got Jack the Ripper at last!': George Chapman.

WITHOUT A DOUBT Chief Inspector Frederick George Abberline has become the most celebrated of all the detectives that hunted Jack the Ripper.

This may be an historical injustice but Abberline was by no means just another officer on the case. He was marked out by outstanding ability. When he retired from the Metropolitan Police in 1892 he had received no less than eighty-four commendations and awards, close, he thought, to a record, and for another twelve years he earned fresh laurels as a private inquiry agent, accepting in 1898 the European agency of the world-famous Pinkerton organization.

It is probable that he possessed, moreover, a more intimate knowledge of the Whitechapel murders than any other officer in the Metropolitan Police. Donald Swanson, it is true, ama.s.sed a vast knowledge by processing the reports sent in to headquarters. But it was Abberline who co-ordinated the divisional investigations on the ground, searching murder sites for clues, interrogating witnesses and suspects, following up the mult.i.tudinous leads proffered by the public, turning out daily, and sometimes nightly too, to supervise his staff or to patrol the streets of Whitechapel. His was a knowledge that could not be acquired from behind a desk. It was, if not unique, extraordinarily comprehensive, backed by fourteen years' experience in Whitechapel, nearly ten of them as local head of CID.

Recent writers, anxious to promote theories suggested in the writings of Macnaghten or Anderson, have sometimes found it necessary to disparage Abberline's knowledge or contribution to the case. His pivotal importance in the Ripper inquiry, however, is well ill.u.s.trated by the Yard's response to Matthews' query about the witness Israel Schwartz.

Perusing a report on the Berner Street murder, Matthews wondered whether the man Schwartz claimed to have seen attacking Liz Stride used the word 'Lipski!' as 'a mere e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, meaning in mockery "I am going to 'Lipski' the woman"' or whether he was calling to 'a man [an accomplice] across the road by his proper name.' This query was transmitted to Warren on 29 October 1888 and the Commissioner duly pa.s.sed it on to Anderson.

But neither Anderson nor Swanson were capable of making such judgements. Swanson's knowledge of the murders was encyclopaedic but mainly confined to what he had read in incoming reports, a serious limitation reflected, for example, in such comments as 'if Schwartz is to be believed, and the police report of his statement casts no doubt upon it . . .' Inevitably the Home Secretary's query was referred to Abberline, the officer who had interrogated Schwartz and who had followed up the leads he presented. In his reply Abberline expressed the view that the man Schwartz saw attacking a woman in Berner Street had shouted 'Lipski!' at Schwartz himself. For Schwartz had a strong Jewish appearance and in the East End the name Lipski had become an epithet applied to Jews after the conviction of Israel Lipski, a Polish Jew, for murder in 1887. Abberline's interpretation of Schwartz's evidence was adopted by the Yard. On 5 November it was incorporated virtually unchanged into a draft reply to the Home Office, prepared by Anderson, and the next day was sent to the Under Secretary of State there by Warren.1 There was thus no more authoritative voice on the Whitechapel murders than that of Abberline.

For this reason the recent discovery by Martin Howells and Keith Skinner of two interviews the detective gave to the Pall Mall Gazette in 19032 is more important than those two authors realized.

Howells and Skinner were primarily interested in Druitt. And certainly Abberline's dismissals of Druitt and others were well worth finding. But the central thrust and principle value of the Gazette interviews lies in Abberline's indictment of an altogether different suspect George Chapman, the Polish multiple murderer hanged in 1903.

Sixty years ago Hargrave L. Adam carefully doc.u.mented the Chapman case for the Notable British Trials series. At that time, however, the official records were closed to public access. When I began to investigate the story for myself I soon learned that since then many important doc.u.ments have disappeared. Nevertheless, a wealth of Chapman material still does exist in the records of Southwark Coroner's Court, the Central Criminal Court, the Home Office and elsewhere. Studiously ignored by all previous writers on both Jack the Ripper and Chapman, they have been searched for the present work and enable us to bring the figure of the sinister Pole into sharper focus.3 Chapman's real name was Severin Klosowski. The son of a carpenter, he was born in the village of Nagornak, Poland, in 1865. In 1880 his parents apprenticed him to Moshko Rappaport, Senior Surgeon in Zvolen, and he faithfully served his apprenticeship until 1885, when he went to Warsaw armed with a certificate signed by Rappaport to the effect that he was 'diligent, of exemplary conduct, and studied with zeal the science of surgery'. An eyewitness testified that during his apprenticeship Klosowski had rendered 'very skilful a.s.sistance to patients i.e., in cupping by means of gla.s.ses, leeches, and other a.s.sistance comprised in the science of surgery', which suggests, perhaps, that his training didn't amount to much. Nevertheless, for two more years he worked in Poland as an a.s.sistant-surgeon or feldscher and during the last quarter of 1885 attended a practical course in surgery at the Praga Hospital, Warsaw.

We know from a receipt for hospital fees paid by Chapman at Warsaw that he was still in Poland in February 1887. But soon after that he emigrated to London.

Chapman's movements in the East End are central to any consideration of the claim that he was Jack the Ripper. In 1887 or early the following year he took a position as a.s.sistant hairdresser in the shop of Abraham Radin at 70 West India Dock Road. He stayed in this job about five months. During that time Mrs Radin's eldest son fell ill and Chapman helped to nurse him.4 We next find him running a hairdresser's shop of his own at 126 Cable Street, St George's-in-the-East. He is listed at this address in the Post Office London Directory of 1889 so was probably living there in the autumn of 1888 when the Ripper murders occurred.

In October 1889 Chapman married a Polish woman named Lucy Baderski. The ceremony was performed in accordance with the rites of the German Roman Catholics. At this time he was still in Cable Street. But in 1890 Wolff Levisohn, a traveller in hairdresser's appliances, met him in a barber's shop in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the White Hart public house, 89 Whitechapel High Street.

Levisohn gave evidence against Chapman at Southwark Police Court in January 1903. According to his testimony, Chapman was calling himself Ludwig Zagowski in 1890 and speaking a mixture of Polish and Yiddish. At first he worked as an a.s.sistant at the shop under the White Hart. He may have been lodging with his employer but Levisohn did not think so. 'I believe prisoner [Chapman] was living in Greenfield Street near Commercial Road,' he said, '[but] I never visited him there.' However, by September 1890, when Lucy bore Chapman a son, he had become the proprietor of the shop and had taken her to live there.

What did Chapman look like in the autumn of 1888? Of medium height, he had blue eyes and dark hair and was nearly twenty-three years old. In his later years he sported a formidable moustache turned up at the ends. Whether this was so in 1888 it is impossible now to say. But by 1890 he had already begun to cultivate a taste for fastidious dressing, complete with black coat, patent boots and high hat. Thus, when Levisohn saw him in the dock at Southwark, he is credited with the outburst: 'There he sits! That is his description. He has not altered from the day he came to England; he has not even a grey hair. Always the same same la-di-da, 'igh 'at and umbrella.'5 The baby son, Wladyslaw or Wohystaw Klosowski, died of 'pneumonia asthenia' on 3 March 1891. Chapman and Lucy were then living at 2 Tewkesbury Buildings, Whitechapel. They were still there a month later when the national census of 1891 was taken. But soon after that they emigrated to New York. Their names have not yet been traced on surviving pa.s.senger lists6 but it seems likely that it was the loss of their son that triggered their decision and that they made the pa.s.sage in April 1891.

Chapman eventually established himself in a barber's shop in Jersey City. There the couple quarrelled. The rift is said to have been caused by Chapman's attentions to other women but no details are preserved. Whatever it was, Chapman attacked Lucy with a knife and Lucy, pregnant and terrified, returned to London without him in February 1892. She found refuge with her sister at 26 Scarborough Street, Whitechapel, and her second child, Cecilia, was born there on 15 May. Then, about a fortnight after that, Chapman reappeared in the East End.

A reunion with Lucy was short-lived. In 1893 Chapman found a new consort. Her name was Annie Chapman (not to be confused with the Ripper victim of the same name) and they met in Haddin's hairdresser shop at 5 West Green Road, South Tottenham, where Chapman himself then worked as an a.s.sistant. For about a year they lived together. But towards the end of 1894 Chapman brought another woman home with him and insisted that she share their lodging. This menage a trois fell apart when Annie walked out some weeks later. By that time, however, she was pregnant, and in January or February 1895 she was obliged to seek Chapman out to tell him and solicit his support. 'When I told him I was going to have a baby,' Annie recalled eight years later, 'he did not take much notice.' Even so Annie fared much better than any of Chapman's other 'wives'. And from her the barber's a.s.sistant borrowed the name by which he would become notorious. He never admitted to being Severin Klosowski again.

Later in 1895 Chapman obtained a situation as a.s.sistant in William Wenzel's barber shop at 7 Church Lane, Leytonstone. While at Leytonstone he lodged at the house of John Ward in Forest Road and it was probably there that he first made the acquaintance of Mrs Mary Isabella Spink, a married woman living apart from her husband, for Mrs Spink was a lodger in the same house. The lodgers were soon conducting an indiscreet affair and Ward had occasion to upbraid Chapman about it.

'My wife has seen you kissing Mrs Spink,' he began. 'We cannot allow that sort of thing to go on in the house.'

'It's all right, Mr Ward,' replied Chapman, 'we are going to get married about Sunday week.'

When the day came, Sunday 27 October 1895, Chapman and Spink left the house early in the morning. Chapman, who posed as a Jew (he was, in fact, a Roman Catholic), told the Wards that they were going to Whitechapel to get married. They returned that night and Chapman, ushering Mrs Spink into the presence of the Wards, said: 'Allow me to present you to my wife.' Mrs Ward asked to see the certificate but Chapman waved her away. 'Oh,' he said, 'our laws are different to your laws.'

Wherever Chapman went that day he did not marry Mrs Spink because the marriage registers at St Catherine's House contain no record of such a ceremony. Nevertheless, it was a subterfuge Chapman would employ successfully time and again.

Mary Spink seems to have been almost mesmerized by Chapman. She cohabited with him, entered into a bogus marriage with him and, amazingly, made the proceeds of a 500 legacy over to him. With part of the money he took the lease of a barber's shop in George Street, Hastings, in 1896.

The Chapmans prospered in Hastings. Mary lathered the customers and, while George shaved them, entertained the clientele by playing a piano installed in the front of the shop. The popularity of these 'musical shaves' was such that Chapman was able to buy a sailing boat. He named her the 'Mosquito' and, although his nautical adventures were confined to short cruises along the coast, boasted to his customers that he would sail her to Boulogne. Behind the facade, however, all was not well in the Chapman household.

Mrs Annie Helsdown, who lodged in the same house as the Chapmans in Hill Street, occasionally heard Mary cry out. Sometimes Mary's face bore the marks of blows and on at least one occasion she showed Annie marks around her throat.7 More ominous still, Chapman began to pay court to Alice Penfold, a domestic servant, telling her that he was a single man and the manager of a pianoforte shop. On 3 April 1897 he walked into the shop of William Davidson, a chemist in the High Street, and purchased one ounce of tartar-emetic.

Tartar-emetic, a white powder soluble in water, contains antimony. With his knowledge of medicine Chapman had plumped upon what, from a murderer's point of view, was in many respects an ideal poison. For antimony is colourless, odourless, practically tasteless and, in the form of tartar-emetic, easily soluble in water. Furthermore, in Chapman's time its properties were little known, even to many physicians, so that it might be administered by the poisoner in relative safety in cases where the use of a.r.s.enic or strychnine would have been foolhardy. Given in a large dose antimony is likely to cause vomiting and be expelled. For this reason Chapman opted to torture Mary Spink to death with comparatively small doses repeated over time. Unfortunately for him there was one effect of the poison of which even he seems to have been unaware. Administered during the lifetime of a victim it preserves the body from decomposition long after death. Chapman had made a fatal mistake.

In 1897 Chapman returned to London and took the lease of the Prince of Wales public house in Bartholomew Square, off the City Road. There a transformation in Mary's health took place. Formerly rather stout, fresh-complexioned and strong, she was now tormented by violent stomach pains, spewed green vomit, suffered from diarrhoea and grew emaciated and exhausted. A physician, Dr J. F. Rodgers, was called in to attend her but it was Chapman who prepared and administered the medicines prescribed. By Christmas Mary was close to death.

Neither Elizabeth Waymark nor Martha Doubleday, who nursed Mary, were impressed by Chapman's concern. Elizabeth remembered that on Christmas Day, the last day, she sent downstairs several times for Chapman: 'At first he did not come up, and when he did she [Mary] said to him, "Do kiss me". She put her arms out for him to bend over to kiss her but he did not do so. The last time I sent for him just before she died he did not come up in time. I prepared the body for burial. It was a mere skeleton.'

When Martha Doubleday realized that Mary's life was slipping away she, too, alerted Chapman. 'Chapman,' she cried, 'come up quickly! Your wife is dying!' By the time Chapman got there Mary was dead. He stood at her bedside, looked down at her body and said 'Polly, Polly, speak!' Then he went into the next room and cried. After that he went downstairs and opened the pub. 'You are never going to open the house today?' Martha protested. 'Yes, I am,' said Chapman.

Dr Rodgers certified the cause of death as phthisis.

A few months after Mary's death Chapman advertised for a barmaid and engaged former restaurant manageress Bessie Taylor. Then history repeated itself. As in the case of Mary Spink there was a bogus marriage. There was the same abuse by Chapman. According to Elizabeth Painter, Bessie's longtime friend, Chapman shouted and threw things at Bessie and on one occasion threatened her with a revolver.8 After three years Bessie succ.u.mbed to the same wasting illness.

During that final illness Mrs Painter visited Bessie almost every evening at the Monument public house in Union Street, Southwark, which Chapman had leased from the Bridge House Estates Committee. Although overtly attentive to Bessie's needs Chapman was wont to indulge in callous jests at Mrs Painter's expense. Sometimes, when she came into the house and asked how Bessie was, he would tell her: 'Your friend is dead.' Then, when Mrs Painter went upstairs, she would find Bessie alive. On 7 February 1901 Bessie seemed better and Mrs Painter didn't call again until the 14th. On that occasion, however, she found Chapman in the bar parlour. He said that Bessie was 'much about the same'. But when Mrs Painter went up she found that Bessie had died the previous day.

Dr James Stoker certified the cause of death as intestinal obstruction, vomiting and exhaustion.

In August 1901 Chapman hired eighteen-year-old Maud Marsh as his new barmaid at the Monument. Soon he persuaded her to collude with him in the now well-rehea.r.s.ed ritual of the bogus marriage, a stratagem that seems to have completely deceived Maud's parents, and before Christmas they were ensconced as man and wife at the Crown, 213 Borough High Street. Maud was to be his last victim.

By the summer of 1902 Chapman had tired of his young 'bride'. In June he engaged one Florence Rayner as a barmaid. As she frankly admitted later, Florence did not find her employer's repeated amorous advances unwelcome but she baulked when he asked her to go to America with him. 'No, you have your wife downstairs,' she reminded him, 'and you don't want me.' Chapman snapped his fingers. 'Oh, I'd give her that,' he said, 'and she would be no more Mrs Chapman.'

There is also evidence of Chapman's violence towards Maud. On one occasion, out on a tramride down Streatham Hill with her married sister, Mrs Louisa Morris, Maud burst into tears when it became apparent that she would get home late. In comforting her sister, Louisa learned that she lived in fear of Chapman. 'You don't know what he is,' said Maud and she told of how he had sometimes beaten her.

'Well,' asked Louisa, 'has he hit you then?'

'Yes, more than once,' replied Maud.

'How did he hit you?'

'He held my hair and banged my head.'

'Didn't you pay him back?'

'Yes, I kicked him.'9 On 22 October Maud died as wretchedly as her predecessors. But by then the toils were closing fast around the s.a.d.i.s.tic Pole.

Dr Stoker, who attended Maud, was as bewildered by her symptoms as he had been by those of Bessie Taylor. This time, however, the victim's relatives insisted on a second opinion. Maud's father called in Dr Francis Grapel, the family doctor from Croydon. And Grapel became the first medical man in the whole Chapman saga to suspect foul play. Tragically, he failed to act quickly enough to save Maud's life.

On 21 October, after examining Maud and consulting with Stoker, Grapel concluded that the girl was suffering from some acute irritant poison. It even crossed his mind on his way home that she might be the victim of repeated doses of a.r.s.enic. But he naturally hesitated to raise what would have been a cry of attempted murder and the next day, before he could return to London and confer with Stoker again, he learned that Maud was dead. Nevertheless, prompted by Grapel's diagnosis, Stoker refused a death certificate and submitted Maud's stomach and its contents to Richard Bodmer, the consulting chemist to the Clinical Research a.s.sociation. And Bodmer found both a.r.s.enic and antimony in the stomach. It was, in fact, the antimony that had done the business, the negligible quant.i.ty of a.r.s.enic having been introduced into the woman's body only as an impurity in the antimony. When Dr Thomas Stevenson, a Home Office a.n.a.lyst, conducted the post-mortem examination of Maud's body he discovered that her stomach, bowels, liver, kidneys and brain alone contained 7.24 grains of metallic antimony.

Now it was that justice reached out from the grave to claim Chapman. Any hopes he may have cherished that Maud's death might be written off as a tragic accident were dashed when the bodies of Bessie Taylor and Mary Spink were exhumed in November and December 1902. Antimony acts to preserve the body. Although Bessie's corpse was covered with a mouldy growth it seemed otherwise fresh. And an even greater surprise awaited Stevenson's team when they raised the lid of Mary's coffin. Mary had been five years in the ground but when Elizabeth Waymark gazed upon her face she recognized it instantly. 'She looked as if she had only been buried about nine months,' said Elizabeth. 'The only difference was that her hair had grown a little longer on the forehead. The face was perfect.' Significant quant.i.ties of metallic antimony were traced in the remains of both women.

Tried and convicted of the murder of Maud Marsh, Chapman went to the scaffold in Wandsworth Prison on 7 April 1903.

Sat.u.r.day, 25 October 1902, was the day on which the Coronation Procession of King Edward VII pa.s.sed through the streets of London. It was also the day that Inspector George G.o.dley went to the Crown in Borough High Street and arrested George Chapman. At that time G.o.dley thought he was dealing with nothing more spectacular than a one-off wife murder, tragic certainly, but by no means out of the ordinary. However, as detectives untangled the web of deceit and homicide that was Chapman's past it became clear that they had stumbled across a very dark horse indeed.

Here was a man who had pa.s.sed 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 G.o.dley 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 G.o.dley'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 G.o.dley, 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 G.o.dley 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 G.o.dley 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 a.s.sault 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 G.o.dley, traced Lucy and she picked her husband out at an ident.i.ty 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 a.s.sistant 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 doc.u.ments 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 statement 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 inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.ses, 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 G.o.dley 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 G.o.dley arrested Chapman Abberline said to his confrere, 'You've got Jack the Ripper at last!'13 The source of this information was almost certainly G.o.dley himself for in his preface Adam expressed his grat.i.tude to G.o.dley for 'much information' received. In one particular, though, G.o.dley's memory undoubtedly played him false. Abberline could not have made the remark 'You've got Jack the Ripper at last!' when G.o.dley 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 G.o.dley 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 secure 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 ident.i.ty 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, G.o.dley 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.

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 pa.s.s himself off as an American. Chapman certainly did sometimes pose as an American. Pet.i.tioning 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 circ.u.mstantial factors can still be alleged against Chapman.