Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Aaron Kosminski

Aaron Kosminski

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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

Ghastly murder in the East End. Dreadful mutilation of a woman. Capture: Leather Apron
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
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

  1. House, Robert (March 2006), "The Kozminski File", Ripperologist, No. 65
  2. 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
  3. Begg, pp. 269–273
  4. Colney Hatch Register of Admissions, quoted in Begg, pp. 269–270
  5. 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
  6. Asylum case notes quoted by Begg, p. 270; Fido, p. 216 and Rumbelow, p. 180
  7. Woods and Baddeley, p. 125
  8. Macnaghten's notes quoted by Evans and Skinner, pp. 584–587; Fido, p. 147 and Rumbelow, p. 142
  9. Quoted in Begg, p. 266; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 236 and Evans and Skinner, pp. 626–633
  10. Begg, p. 269; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 243; Evans and Skinner, p. 635; Rumbelow, p. 179
  11. Begg, p. 269; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 253; Evans and Skinner, p. 635; Rumbelow, p. 179
  12. BBC News (13 July 2006) "Ripper case notes given to museum", retrieved 20 January 2010
  13. Tendler, Stewart (14 July 2006) "Official: Jack the Ripper identified" The Times, retrieved 20 January 2010
  14. Begg, p. 269; Fido, p. 215
  15. Marriott, p. 238
  16. Begg, pp. 269–270
  17. Fido, p. 170
  18. e.g. Fido, p. 229
  19. Begg, p. 273
  20. Whitehead and Rivett, p. 109
  21. Evans and Rumbelow, pp. 249–253; Rumbelow, p. 182
  22. Begg, p. 276
  23. Fido, pp. 77, 152, 207
  24. Evans and Rumbelow, p. 255
  25. Wilson and Odell, p. 78
  26. Interview with Reid in the Morning Advertiser, 23 April 1910, quoted in Cook, p. 178
  27. Evans and Skinner, pp. 262, 604
  28. Fido, p. 228; Rumbelow, p. 182; Whitehead and Rivett, p. 108
  29. Whitehead and Rivett, p. 108
  30. Fido, pp. 219–220
  31. Fido, pp. 219, 231
  32. Fido, pp. 216–219
  33. Fido, p. 220
  34. Kendell p80
  35. Cawthorne, Nigel (2000) "Foreword", in Knight, p. 2
  36. Douglas, John; Olshaker, Mark (2001). The Cases That Haunt Us. New York: Simon and Schuster. pp. 79–80. ISBN 978-0-7432-1239-7.
  37. Marriott, p. 251
  38. 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
  39. Rumbelow, p. 49
  40. 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
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