Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (25 page)

Klosowski wasted no time in showering non-stop attention on Maud, and within a few months she had agreed to marry him, but only on the condition that they would not share a bed until after the wedding. On 13 October 1901, the couple donned their best clothes and set off to be married at a Roman Catholic church, or so Klosowski alleged; for when Maud’s mother later asked to see the marriage certificate, Maud told her that she could not find it at that moment, as Klosowski had put it away somewhere with his other paperwork. This explanation seemed to satisfy Mrs Marsh, for she never asked for sight of it again.

His sex life might have been back on form, but Klosowski was still desperately short of money, and the pub was still not producing a decent income for him. Klosowski’s next plan was to set fire to his pub in the hope of collecting the insurance money, but when the insurance investigators called and started looking into what had happened, they discovered that all of the furniture and valuables had been removed from the premises before the fire occurred.The insurance company couldn’t prove that Klosowski had deliberately tried to defraud them, but they nevertheless refused to pay him.

In desperation, Klosowski and Maud moved out of the pub without telling a soul, and he obtained the lease on another pub, as far away as possible. Shortly after moving, Klosowski began beating Maud, just like he had done with the others, but in April, Maud became pregnant. Klosowski was not very happy when he heard this, as he would not only lose a barmaid, but it could also dampen his womanising and sexual exploits. A few weeks into the pregnancy, Klosowski persuaded Maud to allow him to carry out an abortion on her, by syringing her womb with a dilute solution of Phenol. (Phenol is also known as carbolic acid, its vapours are corrosive to the eyes, the skin, and the respiratory tract. In other words, it can be a very dangerous chemical to use.)

Strangely enough, Maud did recover from the abortion, and within days, Klosowski had her working behind the bar in the pub again. In fact, one evening, while making his wife work behind the bar, he took another barmaid, Florence Rayner, upstairs to his flat where they made love, and he revealed his plans to leave London and go to America. He asked Florence to go with him, to which she refused, telling him that he already had a wife downstairs and that she had heard her screams when he beat her. According to Florence, Klosowski laughed when she said this and clicked his fingers, saying that is all it would take for his wife to be no more.

Florence was lucky; she walked out of Klosowski’s bedroom that night and never returned to her job at the pub again. Maud however, was not so fortunate; following Florence’s departure, Maud’s condition deteriorated rapidly. The symptoms she started suffering mirrored those of her predecessors, and worried her mother so much that she started paying daily visits to oversee her daughter’s welfare.

It was while Mrs Marsh was at her daughter’s bedside that she noticed how Klosowski insisted on administering Maud’s medicine himself. Mrs Marsh insisted on her daughter staying in a hospital despite Klosowski’s protestations. When she was discharged from the hospital a few weeks later, she showed a great improvement, and for a while everything seemed to be back on track as far as her mother was concerned.

Klosowski, however, wasn’t finished yet, and quickly set Maud back to work in the pub again, preparing meals for her to eat while she was working at the bar. Needless to say, these meals were not prepared for Maud out of the goodness of his heart, and within no time at all she fell extremely ill yet again. Klosowski maintained his façade by going to see a local doctor and asking for some medicine. He made the great mistake of confiding in the doctor that he and Maud were not legally married, which would later come back to haunt him.

Klosowski insisted that everything that Maud ate and drank must only be administered by him, obviously so that he could slip large amounts of poison into her food and drink. Maud’s parents found this behaviour extremely worrying and suspicious to say the least, and called in their own doctor as a result. The doctor that Mr and Mrs Marsh called in happened to be the very same doctor that Klosowski had confided in. This must have rung alarm bells for the doctor, for he immediately informed the Marsh family that their daughter was not married, and in his opinion, unfortunately approaching her death.

Mr Marsh never told Klosowski what the doctor had confided in him, and said that he believed his daughter would get well again. Klosowski shrugged his shoulders in a very callous way when he heard this, and responded by saying, ‘She will never get up no more’.

Klosowski, however, was more worried than he liked to show, and as soon as Mr and Mrs Marsh had left his home, he administered his wife with an enormous dose of the poison which killed her within hours. By the following morning, 22 October 1902, she was announced by the doctor as dead; but the doctor refused to issue a death certificate until a post-mortem had taken place. At the post-mortem traces of arsenic and 7.24 grains of antimony were found in Maud’s stomach, bowels, liver, kidneys and brain. It was found to be the antimony which had actually killed her; the arsenic was only there as an impurity in the antimony.

Once again, Klosowski opened the pub only thirty minutes after Maud’s death, and carried on as if the death had not occurred at all, thus showing his cold-blooded enjoyment of watching someone die a slow and horrible death.

Klosowski had got away with two murders prior to Maud’s death, but this time it wasn’t just the victim he had to deal with, it was her family. Mr and Mrs Marsh’s suspicions resulted in a full investigation of Klosowski’s past life, and on 25 October 1902, Klosowski was arrested by Inspector George Godley of Southwark Police, who charged him under the name of George Chapman. It was only discovered later, when the investigation got under way, that Severin Klosowski and George Chapman were one and the same person.

When the bodies of Klosowski’s two previous wives were exhumed in November and December 1902, they were both remarkably well preserved. Bessie’s body had a mouldy growth upon it but was otherwise fresh, while Mary (having been buried five years) was very well preserved. It was, of course, the large amounts of metallic antimony found in the bodies of both women that caused this preservation and also helped to convict Klosowski.

Klosowski was charged with the murders of Maud Marsh, Mary Spink and Bessie Taylor, but he was convicted only of Maud’s death. On 20 March 1903, the jury deliberated for just eleven minutes before coming to a verdict of guilty. Up to this point, Klosowski had assumed an almost careless attitude to the trial, but as sentence was being passed upon him he suddenly broke down completely and wept. Klosowski lodged an appeal, and while waiting for it to be heard, his lawyer visited him in the condemned cell. He said Klosowski was busy writing out a lengthy statement of some kind that he said would explain all, but because it wasn’t finished he would not let his lawyer see it.

The document never re-surfaced again; it was not among his personal effects, which came to light after his execution, and even his lawyer was at a loss as to what had happened to it. There has been speculation that Klosowski had decided to reveal himself in this document as one of the most infamous serial killers of all time. That he was indeed Jack the Ripper.

Whether the missing document would have proven once and for all the identity of the Ripper is pure conjecture, as it has never been found. Klosowski’s appeal was eventually turned down by the Home Secretary, and he was hanged at Wandsworth prison on 7 April 1903.

Inspector George Godley had worked under Inspector Abberline on the Ripper murders, and the two men had remained good friends ever since. When Abberline heard the news that Godley had arrested Klosowski and charged him with murder, he immediately went to see him and congratulated him with the words: ‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last.’

Klosowski had always been Abberline’s number one suspect as Jack the Ripper, and Abberline felt thwarted that he had never been able to bring him to justice.

Abberline was interviewed by the
Pall Mall Gazette
, which published the following interview on 24 March 1903:

Should Klosowski, the wretched man now lying under sentence of death for wife-poisoning, go to the scaffold without a ‘last dying speech and confession,’ a great mystery may for ever remain unsolved, but the conviction that ‘Chapman’ and ‘Jack the Ripper’ were one and the same person will not in the least be weakened in the mind of the man who is, perhaps, better qualified than anyone else in this country to express an opinion in this matter. We allude to Mr. F. G. Abberline, formerly Chief Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard, the official who had full charge of the criminal investigations at the time of the terrible murders in Whitechapel.

When a representative of the Pall Mall Gazette called on Mr. Abberline yesterday and asked for his views on the startling theory set up by one of the morning papers, the retired detective said: ‘What an extra-ordinary thing it is that you should just have called upon me now. I had just commenced, not knowing anything about the report in the newspaper, to write to the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mr. Macnaghten, to say how strongly I was impressed with the opinion that “Chapman” was also the author of the Whitechapel murders. Your appearance saves me the trouble. I intended to write on Friday, but a fall in the garden, injuring my hand and shoulder, prevented my doing so until today.’

Mr. Abberline had already covered a page and a half of foolscap, and was surrounded with a sheaf of documents and newspaper cuttings dealing with the ghastly outrages of 1888.

‘I have been so struck with the remarkable coincidences in the two series of murders,’ he continued, ‘that I have not been able to think of anything else for several days past–not, in fact, since the Attorney-General made his opening statement at the recent trial, and traced the antecedents of Chapman before he came to this country in 1888. Since then the idea has taken full possession of me, and everything fits in and dovetails so well that I cannot help feeling that this is the man we struggled so hard to capture fifteen years ago.’

‘My interest in the Ripper cases was especially deep. I had for fourteen years previously been an inspector of police in Whitechapel, but when the murders began I was at the Central Office at Scotland Yard. On the application of Superintendent Arnold I went back to the East End just before Annie Chapman was found mutilated, and as chief of the detective corps I gave myself up to the study of the cases. Many a time, even after we had carried our inquiries as far as we could–and we made out no fewer than 1,600 sets of papers respecting our investigations–instead of going home when I was off duty, I used to patrol the district until four or five o’clock in the morning, and, while keeping my eyes wide open for clues of any kind, have many and many a time given those wretched, homeless women, who were Jack the Ripper’s special prey, fourpence or sixpence for a shelter to get them away from the streets and out of harm’s way.’

‘As I say,’ went on the criminal expert, ‘there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when “Chapman” went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by “Chapman’s” wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored, but something else with regard to America is still more remarkable.’

‘While the coroner was investigating one of the Whitechapel murders he told the jury a very queer story. You will remember that Dr. Phillips, the divisional surgeon, who made the post-mortem examination, not only spoke of the skilfulness with which the knife had been used, but stated that there was overwhelming evidence to show that the criminal had so mutilated the body that he could possess himself of one of the organs. The coroner, in commenting on this, said that he had been told by the sub-curator of the pathological museum connected with one of the great medical schools that some few months before an American had called upon him and asked him to procure a number of specimens. He stated his willingness to give £20 for each. Although the strange visitor was told that his wish was impossible of fulfilment, he still urged his request. It was known that the request was repeated at another institution of a similar character in London. The coroner at the time said: “Is it not possible that a knowledge of this demand may have inspired some abandoned wretch to possess himself of the specimens? It seems beyond belief that such inhuman wickedness could enter into the mind of any man; but, unfortunately, our criminal annals prove that every crime is possible”!’

‘It is a remarkable thing,’ Mr. Abberline pointed out, ‘that after the Whitechapel horrors America should have been the place where a similar kind of murder began, as though the miscreant had not fully supplied the demand of the American agent.’

‘There are many other things extremely remarkable. The fact that Klosowski when he came to reside in this country occupied a lodging in George Yard, Whitechapel Road, where the first murder was committed, is very curious, and the height of the man and the peaked cap he is said to have worn quite tallies with the descriptions I got of him. All agree, too, that he was a foreign-looking man, but that, of course, helped us little in a district so full of foreigners as Whitechapel. One discrepancy only have I noted, and this is that the people who alleged that they saw Jack the Ripper at one time or another, state that he was a man about thirty-five or forty years of age. They, however, state that they only saw his back, and it is easy to misjudge age from a back view.’