Complete History of Jack the Ripper (75 page)
Read Complete History of Jack the Ripper Online
Authors: Philip Sudgen
None of this entitles us to dismiss Sir Robert as an arrant liar. A competent police chief, he was valued and respected by many of his colleagues, and he did not invent Kosminski. Why, then, did he write so misleadingly about him? We can but speculate. That irritating sense of self-importance detected by Churchill suggests part, but only part, of the answer. I incline to the belief that Anderson’s errors of interpretation stemmed not from a wilful intent to deceive but from wishful thinking, that what he was doing was interpreting his memories of Kosminski in exactly the same way that Warren and Abberline had interpreted their clues on Jacob Isenschmid in 1888. They had found themselves propelling the mad pork butcher in the direction of the gallows because of the public clamour for a conviction. The pressures upon Anderson, though different, were productive of similar results.
By 1910 the Ripper murders had slipped into history. In writing their reminiscences, however, public servants naturally have no wish to depict themselves as fools or failures. And a man of Anderson’s
self-conceit would have found it especially difficult to concede a blow to his personal and professional pride as ignominious as the CID’s inability to detect the Whitechapel killer.
It is not unreasonable to suppose that Anderson was also deeply galled by public criticism over the Ripper affair. Certainly he fumed – and not without reason – at the jibes of amateur sleuths like Dr Winslow, who freely dispensed blame and advice and pretended that they knew more than the police. About one such, Edward K. Larkins, Anderson wrote in 1893: ‘Mr Larkins is a troublesome busybody whose vagaries on the subject of the Whitechapel murders have cost this department, the Public Prosecutor and the Foreign Office a great deal of trouble . . . it is a mere waste of time attempting to deal with him on this subject.’ And the same brand of derisive exasperation surfaced in his 1910 reminiscences. ‘When the stolid English go in for a scare,’ he observed tartly, ‘they take leave of all moderation and common sense. If nonsense were solid, the nonsense that was talked and written about those murders would sink a
Dreadnought
.’
24
Troubled by deafness and an increasing sense of isolation, his days occupied in quiet contemplation of the scriptures, his nights plagued by the attacks of ‘blue devils’, Sir Robert lived out his retirement at his home at 39 Linden Gardens, Hyde Park. He must sometimes have reflected there upon those hectic days at the Yard. And when he did it would doubtless have given him comfort to think, that whatever the world might say, he had laid the Ripper by the heels. Over the years, with the selective and faulty memory characteristic of advancing age, he came to believe it.
In supporting him, Swanson exhibited that same capacity for self-deception. ‘After this [Kosminski’s] identification which suspect knew,’ he wrote, ‘no other murder of this kind took place in London.’ He had conveniently forgotten, of course, about the Ripper-type slaying of poor Frances Coles in February 1891, only six days after Kosminski had been ‘caged’ in his asylum. And if it be objected that Swanson was subscribing to the conventional view that Mary Kelly had been the Ripper’s last victim, surely he should have made it clear that the crimes had ended, not
with
Kosminski’s identification, but two years
before
it.
None of this mattered. Anderson and Swanson had come to inhabit a world of wish-dreams. And together they transformed a harmless imbecile, sheltering within the walls of Leavesden, into the most infamous murderer of modern times.
The Mad Russian: Michael Ostrog
T
HE THIRD MAN
, named by Macnaghten as Michael Ostrog, was a thief and confidence trickster accustomed to living under numerous aliases.
In his draft report Macnaghten wrote:
No
: 3. Michael Ostrog, a mad Russian doctor & a convict & unquestionably a homicidal maniac. This man was said to have been habitually cruel to women, & for a long time was known to have carried about with him surgical knives & other instruments; his antecedents were of the very worst & his whereabouts at the time of the Whitechapel murders could never be satisfactorily accounted for. He is still alive.
The official version, preserved in the Scotland Yard files, is just two sentences long:
(3) Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor, and a convict, who was subsequently detained in a lunatic asylum as a homicidal maniac. This man’s antecedents were of the worst possible type, and his whereabouts at the time of the murders could never be ascertained.
1
Until recently nothing else was known about Ostrog, which is a mystery in itself because at the time of the Ripper murders the
Metropolitan Police publicized their interest in him in
The Police Gazette
, an obvious source for any student of the Whitechapel crimes. Six years ago, when I came to investigate the double murder, the
Gazette
’s notice of Ostrog was one of the first items I discovered and it led me to explore his long and colourful career in other contemporary records. In 1991, in the midst of this research, Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, having discovered Ostrog independently, published a brief sketch of him in their book,
The Jack the Ripper A to Z
, and concluded that he was ‘a plausible historical suspect’. Although accurate as far as it went their account left much unsaid. In particular, it failed to explain why Ostrog became a suspect in the first place and to notice the obvious weaknesses in the case against him. Weaknesses which, far from leaving him a ‘plausible’ suspect, come close to ruling him out of the reckoning altogether.
Ostrog’s story has not been told in detail before. So first, just what do historical documents tell us about this elusive Russian?
We first hear of him in Oxford in 1863.
At the beginning of the year there was a spate of mysterious robberies at the university. Watches, purses, coats, indeed all manner of portable items, disappeared from the chapel, from college rooms and even from the dining hall. The police were called in and the thief turned out to be Ostrog, then representing himself to be Max Kaife Gosslar, a 27-year-old German student.
On 11 February he stole an opera glass and case at Oriel College from Charles Leir. Arrested at Cambridge six days later, he was returned to Oxford and tried for this offence at the county assize on 3 March. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten months’ hard labour in the House of Correction. A second indictment stood against Ostrog. This was for stealing a dressing case, two coats, a cape, a pair of trousers, a pair of silver cufflinks and a handkerchief from the Reverend George Price at New College, also on 11 February. But because he had admitted the first offence the second indictment was not proceeded with. Ostrog is described as a labourer in these indictments but this was conventional where the accused’s occupation was at all uncertain.
2
Shortly after his release Ostrog appeared at Bishop’s Stortford. There he posed as Count Sobieski, the son of a fallen Polish nobleman, who had escaped from Warsaw after being sentenced, like his father, to end his days in Siberia. His melancholy story and well-bred and amiable manners won numerous friends.
To one tradesman he displayed all the money he had – one shilling and eight pence – and explained that he was in need of a hotel room, ‘not grand’ because his means were so precarious, but clean. The tradesman left his business to introduce the ‘Polish count’ personally to the landlord of the Coach and Horses, an adjoining hostelry. At the Coach and Horses Ostrog dined on the choicest fare the house could provide and was allocated the best spare bed. Better yet, the next morning the landlord told him that there was ‘nothing to pay’ and gave him a hearty shake of the hand, leaving in his palm a piece of gold to help him on the road. Another dupe, a professional gentleman, invited Ostrog to stay at his home. For four days he lived there as the ‘star of the house’. And when he left the gentleman loaned him two or three sovereigns and went with him to the railway station to procure for him a first-class ticket for Cambridge.
At Cambridge he obtained money under false pretences from several of the undergraduates. One was Herbert Draper of Magdalene College. Ostrog came to his rooms and introduced himself as Max Sobieski, a Russian Pole of good family. Having escaped from the Russian authorities, he had, he said, just arrived in England from Amsterdam and had tramped penniless from Ipswich to Cambridge. He accounted for his knowledge of the language by explaining that he had been taught by an English governess when young. And so plausibly did he spin his heartrending yarn that Draper gave him a sovereign.
When Ostrog returned to Bishop’s Stortford his friends found him a good deal wealthier than when he had left. Nevertheless, attending church one Sunday, he prevailed upon one of them to lend him a piece of silver so that he might contribute to the church restoration fund as a ‘charitable Christian’.
Doubtless in hopes of further pickings, Ostrog then went back to Cambridge. It was a mistake. For while he had been absent at Bishop’s Stortford Draper had begun to suspect him and had confided with Police Superintendent Turrall. When Ostrog’s train pulled into the station at Cambridge the Russian found to his dismay that the superintendent was there waiting for him. On 2 February 1864 Ostrog was prosecuted as a rogue and a vagabond at Cambridge Police Court and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. Confronted by Draper in court, he protested: ‘Did I not ask you only to
lend
the sovereign?’ ‘Whether you did or not,’ replied Draper, ‘I never expected to see it again.’
3
The following summer an unrepentant Ostrog visited Tunbridge Wells. In the guise of Count Sobieski, a son of the late King of Poland, he claimed that he had been exiled by the Russian government because of his political beliefs. Young, tall and well-dressed, he would wander gloomily about, asking the band on the Parade to play the Polish national anthem or, whenever anyone would listen, reciting the wrongs and sufferings he had endured in the cause of his native land. Again, many were taken in. Gifts of money and property were bestowed upon him. It is even said that ladies became enamoured of the ‘distinguished young exile’.
He was not so lucky in Tormoham, Devonshire, where he stole a silver-plated tankard from William Angleis on 16 December and obtained a sovereign, £2 in silver and a five-franc-piece from John Windeyer by false pretences three days later. Indicted under the names of Mutters Ostrogoc and John Sobieski at the Devonshire Quarter Sessions of January 1865, he pleaded guilty to both indictments and was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment with hard labour for each offence.
4
In the autumn of 1865 he appeared in Gloucestershire. A bundle of depositions relating to his activities there have survived in the county records and these enable us to reconstruct his progress in full.
5
Calling himself Knuth Ostin, he turned up at the house of the Reverend Edward Brice of Newnham on 2 October. Let Brice take up the story:
He said he called upon me as the clergyman of the parish as he was not known to anyone, that he had walked all the way from Chepstow that morning, that he was quite overcome with fatigue in consequence and that he had no means to procure refreshment or shelter. He said that he was a Swede and that he had been educated in the University of Heidelberg and that he had come away suddenly to escape the consequences of a duel. He said he came through Paris and arrived by a sailing vessel at Bristol. I sent for Mr. Lubbren who is a German and himself and Mr. Lubbren conversed in German and we found that he was a gentleman and highly educated and were induced to believe that his representations were correct.
Ostrog appeared destitute. Yet he persuaded Brice that he shortly expected to receive money from his mother, from a Miss Bourke at Bishop’s Stortford and from various other people. The gullible
clergyman believed every word of it and referred him to the Victoria Hotel in Newnham. More, he went there himself and bade George Hawkins, the landlord, make Ostrog comfortable until such time as the money should arrive.
Ostrog lodged at the Victoria for two weeks. He told Hawkins that Brice would pay the bills and Hawkins never questioned it. The landlord even loaned his guest £2 5s. 0d. of his own money on the understanding that Ostrog would use it to bring his luggage over from Torquay and make some small donations to the poor. Of the value of his luggage Ostrog spoke glowingly. Hawkins heard him speak of a portmanteau containing gold watches and other valuables. And Charlotte Averill, the barmaid, must have been simply overwhelmed when Ostrog casually informed her that his portmanteau was ‘as long as the sofa in the bar’, that the bar itself would not hold all his luggage!
The luggage never materialized. Worse, when the matter of Ostrog’s bill was taken up with Reverend Brice the indignant clergyman refused to pay. Sergeant James Scott of the Newnham police arrested Ostrog on 23 October and he was lodged in Gloucester Gaol the next day. The gaol register gives his age as twenty-nine and his height as five feet ten and three-quarter inches. His complexion was dark and his hair and eyes brown. In January 1866 Ostrog was tried at the Gloucestershire Quarter Sessions for obtaining food, lodgings and money worth £7 14s. 0d. under false pretences from George Hawkins. He had a narrow escape. The evidence was judged insufficient and he was acquitted.