Complete History of Jack the Ripper (77 page)

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 sexual 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 assume 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 passed 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 reassuring 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 assertion 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 documents 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 identity of Jack the Ripper. With very few exceptions students have assumed 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 assumptions were unsound.

There was no consensus within the CID about the Ripper’s identity. 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.

W
ITHOUT 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, amassed 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 multitudinous 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 illustrated 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 ejaculation, 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 passed 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 1903
²
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.