Aaron Kosminski
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of
interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the
articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ]
Aaron Kosminski (born
Aron Mordke Kozminski; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was an insane
Polish Jew who was a suspect in the
Jack the Ripper murders. He emigrated to England from Poland in the 1880s and worked as a hairdresser in
Whitechapel in the
East End of London, where the murders were committed in 1888. From 1891, he was institutionalized in an asylum.
Police officials at the time of the murders named one of their
suspects "Kosminski" (without a forename), and described him as a Polish
Jew in an insane asylum. Almost a century after the final murder, the
suspect "Kosminski" was identified with Aaron Kosminski, but there was
little if any evidence to connect him with the murders, and the reasons
for his inclusion as a suspect are unclear. Possibly, Kosminski was
confused with another Polish Jew of the same age named Aaron or David
Cohen (real name possibly Nathan Kaminsky), who was a violent patient at
the same asylum.
Life
Aaron Kosminski was born in the Polish town of
Kłodawa, which was then in the
Russian Empire. His parents were Abram Jozef Kozminski, a tailor, and his wife Golda née Lubnowska.
[1]
In 1881, he emigrated to England with his family, and moved to
Whitechapel, an impoverished slum in London's East End that had become
home to many
Jewish refugees who were fleeing
pogroms and economic hardship in eastern Europe and
Tsarist Russia.
[2]
His sister and two brothers also left Russia and lived in Whitechapel,
and his widowed mother later emigrated and joined them there.
[3]
On two occasions in July 1890 and February 1891, Kosminski was placed in
Mile End Old Town
workhouse because of his insane behaviour. On the second occasion, he was discharged to
Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, where he remained for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to
Leavesden Asylum.
[4][5]
Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885.
His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear
of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food
dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe.
[6] The cause of his insanity was recorded as "self-abuse", which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation.
[5] His poor diet seems to have kept him in an emaciated state for years; his low weight was recorded in the asylum case notes.
[5] By February 1919, he weighed just 96 pounds (44 kg). He died the following month.
[5]
Jack the Ripper suspect
Between 1888 and 1891, the deaths of eleven women in or around the
Whitechapel district of the
East End of London were linked together in a single police investigation known as the "
Whitechapel murders".
Seven of the victims suffered a slash to the throat, and in four cases
the bodies were mutilated after death. Five of the cases, between August
and November 1888, show such marked similarities that they are
generally agreed to be the work of a single serial killer, known as "
Jack the Ripper".
Despite an extensive police investigation, the Ripper was never
identified and the crimes remained unsolved. Years after the end of the
murders, documents were discovered that revealed the suspicions of
police officials against a man called "Kosminski".
An 1894 memorandum written by Sir
Melville Macnaghten, the Assistant
Chief Constable of the London
Metropolitan Police Service,
names one of the suspects as a Polish Jew called "Kosminski" (without a
forename). Macnaghten's memo was discovered in the private papers of
his daughter,
Lady Aberconway, by television journalist
Dan Farson in 1959,
[7] and an abridged version from the archives of the Metropolitan Police Service was released to the public in the 1970s.
[5]
Macnaghten stated that there were strong reasons for suspecting
"Kosminski" because he "had a great hatred of women ... with strong
homicidal tendencies".
[8]
In 1910,
Assistant Commissioner Sir
Robert Anderson claimed in his memoirs
The Lighter Side of My Official Life that the Ripper was a "low-class Polish Jew".
[9] Chief Inspector
Donald Swanson,
who led the Ripper investigation, named the man as "Kosminski" in notes
handwritten in the margin of his presentation copy of Anderson's
memoirs.
[10]
He added that "Kosminski" had been watched at his brother's home in
Whitechapel by the police, that he was taken with his hands tied behind
his back to the workhouse and then to Colney Hatch Asylum, and that he
died shortly after.
[11] The copy of Anderson's memoirs containing the handwritten notes by Swanson was donated by his descendents to
Scotland Yard's
Crime Museum in 2006.
[12][13]
In 1987, Ripper author
Martin Fido searched asylum records for any inmates called Kosminski, and found only one: Aaron Kosminski.
[14]
At the time of the murders, Aaron apparently lived either on Providence
Street or Greenfield Street, both addresses of which are close to the
sites of the murders.
[15] The addresses given in the asylum records are in Mile End Old Town, just on the edge of Whitechapel.
[16]
The description of Aaron's symptoms in the case notes indicates that he
was a paranoid schizophrenic, and known paranoid schizophrenics include
serial killers such as
Peter Sutcliffe.
[5] Macnaghten's notes say that "Kosminski" indulged in "solitary vices",
[8] and in his memoirs Anderson wrote of his suspect's "unmentionable vices",
[17] both of which may match the claim in the case notes that Aaron committed "self-abuse".
[18]
Swanson's notes match the known details of Aaron's life in that he
reported that the suspect went to the workhouse and then to Colney
Hatch,
[19] but the last detail about his early death does not match Aaron, who lived until 1919.
[20]
Anderson claimed that the Ripper had been identified by the "only
person who had ever had a good view of the murderer", but that no
prosecution was possible because both the witness and the culprit were
Jews, and Jews were not willing to offer testimony against fellow Jews.
[9] Swanson's notes state that "Kosminski" was identified at "the Seaside Home", which was the Police Convalescent Home in
Brighton.
Some authors express skepticism that this identification ever happened,
while others use it as evidence for their theories. For example,
Donald Rumbelow thought the story unlikely,
[21] but fellow Ripper authors
Martin Fido and Paul Begg thought there was another witness, perhaps
Israel Schwartz,
[22] Joseph Lawende, or a policeman.
[23]
In his memorandum, however, Macnaghten stated that "no-one ever saw the
Whitechapel murderer", which directly contradicts Anderson's and
Swanson's recollection.
[24] Sir Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the
City of London Police
at the time of the murders, dismissed Anderson's claim scathingly in
his own memoirs written later in the same year, calling it a "reckless
accusation" against Jews.
[25] Edmund Reid, the inspector in charge of the investigation initially, also challenged Anderson's opinion.
[26] There is no record of Aaron Kosminski in any surviving official police documents except Macnaghten's memo.
[27]
In Kosminski's defence, he was described as harmless in the asylum.
He brandished a chair at an asylum attendant in January 1892 and
threatened his sister with a knife, but these two incidents are the only
known indications of violent behaviour displayed by him during his
illness.
[28]
The "canonical five" killings that are most frequently blamed on the
Ripper ended in 1888 but Kosminski's movements were not restricted until
1891.
[29]
David Cohen
Newspaper broadsheet referring to the Whitechapel murderer as "Leather Apron", September 1888
Another Polish Jew proposed as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders was
Aaron Davis Cohen or David Cohen, whose incarceration at
Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum roughly coincided with the end of the murders. He was committed on 12 December 1888, about one month after the murder of
Mary Jane Kelly
on 9 November. He was described as violently antisocial, exhibited
destructive tendencies while at the asylum, and had to be restrained. He
was the same age as Kosminski, and died at the asylum in October 1889.
[30] Author
Martin Fido suggested in his book
The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper
(1987) that the name "David Cohen" was used by the asylum as a simple
name for an inmate whose true name (Kosminski or Kaminsky) was too
difficult to spell or easily misunderstood.
[31]
Fido identified Cohen with "Leather Apron", a Polish Jewish bootmaker
blamed for the murders in local gossip, and speculated that Cohen's true
identity was Nathan Kaminsky, a bootmaker living in Whitechapel who had
been treated at one time for syphilis. Fido was unable to trace
Kaminsky after May 1888, and records of Cohen begin that December.
[32]
Fido suggested that police officials confused the name Kaminsky with
Kosminski, resulting in the wrong man coming under suspicion.
[20] As with Kosminski, the asylum case notes say he spoke only Yiddish.
[33]
The implication is that Kaminsky's syphilis was not cured in May 1888
but in remission, and he began to kill prostitutes as an act of revenge
because it had affected his brain. However, Cohen's death certificate
makes no mention of syphilis but gives the cause of death as "exhaustion
of mania" with phthisis, a then prevalent form of pulmonary
tuberculosis, as the secondary cause. Kaminsky might have died as an
"unknown" as hundreds of people did each year in the late 19th century.
That would account for Fido's inability to find a record of his death in
England and Wales during the probable period of his life.
[34]
Nigel Cawthorne
dismissed Cohen as a likely suspect because in the asylum his assaults
were undirected, and his behaviour was wild and uncontrolled, whereas
the Ripper seemed to attack specifically and quietly.
[35] In contrast, former FBI criminal profiler
John Douglas has asserted in his book
The Cases That Haunt Us
that behavioural clues gathered from the murders all point to a person
"known to the police as David Cohen ... or someone very much like him".
[36]
Using criminal profiling techniques Douglas and Roy Hazlewood concluded
that the Whitechapel murderer would have been someone of Kosminski's or
Cohen's age, marital status and social class who exhibited erratic or
irrational antisocial behaviour and who lived close to the scenes of the
murders.
John Pizer
was another Polish Jew who worked as a bootmaker in Whitechapel. Police
Sergeant William Thicke arrested him on 10 September 1888 on suspicion
of being "Leather Apron". Thicke apparently believed that he had
committed a string of minor assaults on prostitutes, and he did have a
prior conviction for a stabbing offence.
[37] The investigating inspector, however, reported that "there is no evidence whatsoever against him",
[38]
and he was cleared of suspicion when it turned out that he had alibis
for two of the murders. He was staying with relatives at the time of one
of the murders, and he was talking with a police officer while watching
a spectacular fire on the
London Docks at the time of another.
[39] Pizer successfully obtained monetary compensation from at least one newspaper that had named him as the murderer.
[40]
See also
Notes
- House, Robert (March 2006), "The Kozminski File", Ripperologist, No. 65
- Kershen, Anne J.,
"The Immigrant Community of Whitechapel at the Time of the Jack the
Ripper Murders", in Werner, pp. 65–97; Vaughan, Laura, "Mapping the East
End Labyrinth", in Werner, p. 225
- Begg, pp. 269–273
- Colney Hatch Register of Admissions, quoted in Begg, pp. 269–270
- Lekh, S.K.; Langa, A.; Begg, P.; Puri, B.K. (1992), "The case of Aaron Kosminski: was he Jack the Ripper?", Psychiatric Bulletin, vol. 16, pp. 786–788
- Asylum case notes quoted by Begg, p. 270; Fido, p. 216 and Rumbelow, p. 180
- Woods and Baddeley, p. 125
- Macnaghten's notes quoted by Evans and Skinner, pp. 584–587; Fido, p. 147 and Rumbelow, p. 142
- Quoted in Begg, p. 266; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 236 and Evans and Skinner, pp. 626–633
- Begg, p. 269; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 243; Evans and Skinner, p. 635; Rumbelow, p. 179
- Begg, p. 269; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 253; Evans and Skinner, p. 635; Rumbelow, p. 179
- BBC News (13 July 2006) "Ripper case notes given to museum", retrieved 20 January 2010
- Tendler, Stewart (14 July 2006) "Official: Jack the Ripper identified" The Times, retrieved 20 January 2010
- Begg, p. 269; Fido, p. 215
- Marriott, p. 238
- Begg, pp. 269–270
- Fido, p. 170
- e.g. Fido, p. 229
- Begg, p. 273
- Whitehead and Rivett, p. 109
- Evans and Rumbelow, pp. 249–253; Rumbelow, p. 182
- Begg, p. 276
- Fido, pp. 77, 152, 207
- Evans and Rumbelow, p. 255
- Wilson and Odell, p. 78
- Interview with Reid in the Morning Advertiser, 23 April 1910, quoted in Cook, p. 178
- Evans and Skinner, pp. 262, 604
- Fido, p. 228; Rumbelow, p. 182; Whitehead and Rivett, p. 108
- Whitehead and Rivett, p. 108
- Fido, pp. 219–220
- Fido, pp. 219, 231
- Fido, pp. 216–219
- Fido, p. 220
- Kendell p80
- Cawthorne, Nigel (2000) "Foreword", in Knight, p. 2
- Douglas, John; Olshaker, Mark (2001). The Cases That Haunt Us. New York: Simon and Schuster. pp. 79–80. ISBN 978-0-7432-1239-7.
- Marriott, p. 251
- Report by Inspector
Joseph Helson, CID 'J' Division, in the Metropolitan Police archive,
MEPO 3/140 ff. 235–8, quoted in Begg, p. 99 and Evans and Skinner, p. 24
- Rumbelow, p. 49
- O'Connor, T. P. (1929). Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian. London: Ernest Benn. Vol. 2, p. 257, quoted in Begg, p. 166 and Cook, pp. 72–73
