Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (24 page)

Throughout his period of working on the Ripper case Inspector Abberline had a chance of going through the details of every one of the dozens of suspects. Most were no more than just a name, bandied about by locals: someone of strange appearance or, as previously pointed out, maybe mentally unbalanced; but there were also those, such as the names we have just been through, who, rightly or wrongly, at least attracted a modicum of serious suspicion. There was one man, however, whom Abberline classed as his number one suspect, and that man was Severin Klosowski.

If a modern profiler were to try to paint us a picture of the man known as Jack the Ripper, Klosowski would fit that picture almost perfectly. Severin Klosowski, also commonly known as George Chapman, was a man who had all the makings of a serial killer. He poisoned three of his wives, demonstrating beyond doubt that he was capable of senseless, cold-blooded murder while remaining completely emotionless. Even the investigators present at his trial would later describe him as a real villain who was capable of almost anything.

Severin Klosowski was born on 14 December 1865 in a small village in Russian-occupied Poland. In 1880, after leaving school, he trained in what was known as a feldscher, which was an occupation combining the roles of barber and minor surgeon, which consequently qualified him to perform small operations by himself and to assist in major operations carried out by fully qualified surgeons.

By the time Klosowski was 19, he left his small town and travelled to Warsaw, where he enrolled in a course on practical surgery at the Hospital of the Infant Jesus. To help pay for his studies, he took a job as an assistant to a barber-surgeon, but it was around this time that he met and married his first wife, who almost immediately became pregnant. He promptly finished his studies and started to look for a full-time job in order to provide for his new family. It is unclear where he lived or if he did manage to find a job in Warsaw, but the next we hear of him is when he turned up alone in London, sometime in the spring of 1888, having left Poland.

Shortly after arriving in London, Klosowski introduced himself to a Polish barber, as a hairdresser and qualified doctor, using the alias Ludwig Zagowski. The Pole gave him a job as his assistant, and even let him stay above the premises for a while, as his son was ill and Klosowski pretended to care for him. This arrangement didn’t last long, however, when the Pole found out that his son was actually getting worse under Klosowski’s supposed care.

Klosowski was undaunted by this rejection, and soon found himself another job with a barber whose shop was in the basement underneath a public house on Whitechapel High Street.

During the early hours of the morning on 7 August 1888, Albert George Crow, a resident of George Yard Buildings, Whitechapel, was returning home after a night’s work as a cab driver, when he noticed the body of a woman, later identified as 35-year-old prostitute Martha Tabram, lying on a landing above the first flight of stairs in his building; she had been stabbed thirty-nine times. Martha Tabram was a victim of the Whitechapel murders, and sometimes referred to as the first victim of Jack the Ripper.

The murder occurred within yards of Klosowski’s place of work, and when he was questioned by the police, they found out that at the time of this murder Klosowski had rented rooms in George Yard Buildings; the very building in which Tabram was found murdered.

The police questioned a number of local people regarding the Tabram murder, including Klosowski on a number of occasions. Despite regular questioning, nothing ever came of the investigation surrounding the murder. Klosowski was allowed to walk free, and the identity of the murderer remained unknown.

Klosowski not only walked away from this without a stain on his character, but he also reverted to his real name, and in June 1889 he opened his own barber’s shop. It was during this period that he met Lucy Baderski, and married her just five weeks later. What he had unfortunately forgotten to tell his new wife was that he was still legally married to his first wife, who was still living in Poland.

Somehow or other, Klosowski’s first wife heard the news of his new marriage, and rushed to London as quickly as she could in an attempt to reclaim her marriage and get rid of this other woman. As usual, Klosowski took the whole thing in his stride, and somehow managed to bring the two women together, telling them they should be friends. His plan worked, and for a while both women cohabited with Klosowski. This happy threesome ended, however, when Baderski bore Klosowski a son in September 1890. This was too much for his first wife to bear, and after a blazing argument, she walked out and returned to Poland.

A few months later Klosowski’s son fell ill and sadly died of pneumonia. Needless to say this put a terrible strain on their relationship, with Baderski threatening to walk out on Klosowski. In order to save their marriage, the couple decided to immigrate to New Jersey just one month later in order to try to establish a new life.

Within a couple of months of arriving in the United States, Klosowski had set up his own barber shop, but his relationship with his wife was far from on course, and fights between them began to lead to serious violence on his behalf. During the later trial against Klosowski, Baderski claimed that he threatened her on numerous occasions, at one point with a knife and saying that, if he had any more trouble, he would make her disappear and simply tell everyone that she had returned to London.

During this period, four murders occurred in the area he was living in. These were not just ordinary murders, but resembled very closely the Jack the Ripper murders of a few years earlier in London. One murder in particular was that of an elderly prostitute named Carrie Brown, or ‘Old Shakespeare’ as she was known, for her fondness of quoting the Great Bard himself when she was drunk. She was murdered in a common lodging house in Jersey City, on 24 April 1891. At the inquest into her death, it was established that she had been strangled first and then, ‘savagely mutilated’ in exactly the same manner as the Ripper victims. A suspect was arrested for the murder at the time, but he was later acquitted and the true culprit was apparently never found.

The American police didn’t have any reason at the time to look into Klosowski as a potential suspect. It wasn’t until some years later, when he was being investigated regarding the murders of his wives/partners, that the police realised he was a possible suspect.

It must be noted that Inspector Abberline did not have all these facts to hand when he first suspected Klosowski, as much of his suspicious activity happened some years after the initial Ripper investigations. What Abberline did know of Klosowski was that he had surgical expertise, a blatant disrespect for women in general, and had demonstrated violence with a knife, especially towards his wife. After extensive checking, Abberline also found out that Klosowski’s movements coincided perfectly with the times of the Ripper murders.

Klosowski eventually returned to London, where he once again found himself a position as an assistant in a barber’s shop. He also found the company of a young lady named Annie Chapman, which was also, strangely enough, the name of one of the Ripper victims. Klosowski asked Chapman if she would consider working for him as his housekeeper, for which he would pay her and provide her with a room at his house. Chapman agreed and moved in with him in November 1893. Their relationship soon blossomed into more than employer/employee, and within a very short time they began calling themselves husband and wife, even though they had never legally married.

Klosowski, however, was still the womaniser he had always been, and when he brought home another woman, telling Chapman that she was to share their bed, Chapman grew impatient and angry, and consequently left him. She returned a few weeks later, however, when she discovered that she was pregnant with his child. She gave Klosowski two options: either he married her and throw the other woman out or he should support her and the baby when it was born.

Klosowski simply refused either, denying that the baby was his and telling her that he was moving out of London soon anyway. There was nothing Chapman could do as they were not legally married, so she left him for good in February 1894. From this point on, he used the name George Chapman, which seemed a very strange thing to do, especially as he had professed to having no feelings for Annie Chapman whatsoever; or could it have been some strange fascination with the name of an earlier Ripper victim?

Following his split with Annie Chapman, Klosowski also walked out on the other woman and began posing as a well-off American. He posed quite an elegant figure in his smart suits, and found no difficulty in attracting yet more women. His next conquest came in the form of a young divorcee named Mary Spink, whose husband had left her and taken their son, allegedly because of her heavy drinking. Klosowski and Mary Spink joined hands in a fake marriage and he managed to talk her into signing over a £6,000 legacy to him, which she had inherited from her grandfather. He used part of the money to lease a barber’s shop in a poor area of Hastings, but soon moved to a more salubrious area, where he also purchased a piano, which Mary would play while he serviced the customers. This provided a very good income for a while, and Klosowski found himself living the type of life he had long been searching for. He even bought himself a sailing boat, which he christened the
Mosquito
.

The business was successful but their life together started going down the same path as most of his other relationships. Neighbours reported hearing them arguing and hearing Mary crying and screaming with pain in the middle of the night. They also said they saw abrasions and bruises on her face, and on one occasion noticed marks around her throat.

At Klosowski’s later trial, Mr William Davidson, a chemist, gave evidence that on 3 April 1897 Klosowski had purchased a 1oz dose of tartar emetic from his shop. Tartar emetic is a poison in the form of a white powder, easily soluble in water, containing antimony, which is colourless, odourless and almost tasteless. Its effects were little known in the late nineteenth century. Given in large doses, antimony is likely to be regurgitated and expelled almost immediately from the body, but in smaller, regularly timed doses, it would cause a slow and very painful death. Another aspect of the drug, which was also unknown at the time, is that it preserves the body of the deceased for many years after their death.

Mary was still alive when Klosowski decided to give up the barber’s shop and move back to London, where he took on the lease of the Prince of Wales pub off City Road in Bartholomew Square. It was here that Mary started complaining of severe stomach pains and nausea. A doctor was called in, but failed to diagnose her condition. Mary died on Christmas Day of that year. Her cause of death was registered as consumption.

A witness who was there at the time of Mary’s death said Klosowski seemed very sad and called to the dead body of his wife, asking her to speak to him. He then wept for a few minutes before drying his eyes and going downstairs to open the pub as usual. Klosowski didn’t seem to care one iota what anyone else thought about his apparent lack of emotion following his wife’s death. He was so wrapped up in his own thoughts and intentions that on 20 May 1899, he calmly decided to send Mary’s orphaned son, Willie, to the Shoreditch Workhouse, and would never see him again.

It is difficult to work out if it was sex or making money – or maybe an amalgamation of both which came first in Klosowski’s life. Within weeks of his wife’s death, he had hired Bessie Taylor, whom he had met in a restaurant where she had worked. Bessie was given a room above the pub, but their work relationship soon blossomed into yet another romance, which in turn led to another bogus marriage.

Within a very short time, the old pattern of Klosowski’s relationships began to emerge again, and he began abusing and beating her, just as he had done his previous partners. On one occasion he was seen by a witness to have threatened Bessie with a revolver. Notwithstanding this, Bessie began suffering the same symptoms that had killed her predecessor; tongues began to wag and Klosowski decided to move out of the area, possibly to avoid any sort of police investigation. The couple moved to Bishop’s Stortford for a while, where he claimed the country air would help his wife’s condition, and after a few months there they returned to London, where Klosowski leased the Monument Tavern in the borough.

The country air certainly had not helped Bessie’s condition, and during the short time she spent at their new pub she grew steadily worse. When a close friend of hers, Mrs Painter, went to visit, she found Klosowski far from sympathetic when she asked about her friend’s health; in fact, Klosowski would joke about it and tell her that Bessie was dead, which at that time she was not. On 15 February, however, when this same friend came to call again, Klosowski told her that his wife was much the same as usual. Mrs Painter later found out that Bessie had died the previous day Valentine’s Day, 1901. The cause of death this time was given as ‘exhaustion from vomiting and diarrhoea’.

Six months later Klosowski was up to his old tricks yet again. The pub was not earning him enough money to keep him in the lifestyle he had become accustomed to, and the lease was also soon to expire. Sex, however, seemed to play a dominant role in his life. When he saw an advert in a local newspaper, written by 18-year-old Maud Marsh, who was seeking a job as a barmaid, Klosowski responded to it immediately.

When Maud Marsh turned up at the pub for an interview, however, Klosowski found himself not only confronted with Maud, but her mother as well, due, she explained, to her daughter’s young age. Klosowski explained to Maud that she would be required to live on the premises, above the pub, so she would be available for work at all times. Mrs Marsh was somewhat sceptical of this arrangement, but was reassured by Klosowski, who told her that Maud would be living with a family that rented rooms in the lodgings above the pub. Mrs Marsh was happy and her daughter accepted the job. All Klosowski had to do next was speak to the family above the pub, and get them to prepare Maud’s room for her. He did speak to the family, but not to tell them to get a room ready, but to evict them. When Maud did arrive to take up her position in the pub, she found herself and Klosowski to be the only two residents in the building.