Complete History of Jack the Ripper (74 page)

From contemporary and other evidence, every one of these contentions can be categorically refuted.

In his book Anderson explains that when he returned to London after the double murder he initiated a policy of warning prostitutes that the police would not protect them. He continues: ‘However the fact may be explained, it is a fact that no other street murder occurred in the “Jack-the-Ripper” series. The last and most horrible of that maniac’s crimes was committed in a house in Miller’s Court on the 9th of November.’
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The inference of these words is plain. Anderson is trying to suggest that his policy put an end to street murders by scaring Whitechapel whores off the streets.

The truth is that many of these women were compelled to solicit in the streets in order to raise money for their beds in common lodging houses. Admittedly, the terror unleashed by the double murder did temporarily diminish the number seen out at night as some sought refuge in casual wards and others fled to safer parts of the metropolis. But resilience the Whitechapel sisterhood had in abundance. And by the end of October they were back on the pavements of the East End. Mary Kelly herself picked up at least two clients in this way on the night she was killed. And as far as her murderer was concerned the fact that she turned out to possess a room of her own to which she could take him was probably an unlooked for bonus. It is impossible to find contemporary evidence that Anderson’s heartless and politically impracticable proposal was ever implemented by the police let alone that it drove the prostitutes from the streets. The official response to the double murder was to afford them increased protection by drafting extra men into the murder district and maintaining them there throughout the crisis.
This subject is not directly linked with Kosminski. But the fact that Anderson was capable of interpreting events so perversely in order to claim credit for himself surely cautions us against accepting his other statements.

The house-to-house inquiry was completed on or about 18 October 1888. It did not persuade the police that the murders had been committed by a Jew. Indirect evidence to this effect is contained in reports Warren and Swanson prepared for the Home Office as late as 6 November. Both officers interpreted the chalked message left in Goulston Street – ‘the Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’ – as a deliberate subterfuge on the part of the murderer to throw the blame for his crimes upon the Jews. And the fact that they subscribed to this view implies, of course, that neither of them believed that the murderer himself was a Jew. Perhaps the clearest evidence that the house-to-house search did not incriminate the Jews, though, is furnished by a CID minute directed to Warren on 23 October, at least five days
after
the search. It mentioned the co-operation of the people of the East End, especially in permitting their homes to be searched, and acknowledged that, despite five successive murders, the CID were without ‘the slightest clue of any kind’. The author of this frank admission of failure? None other than Anderson himself!
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No, for credible evidence that the Ripper may have been a Jew the police had to wait for George Hutchinson.

Anderson’s statement that the witness who identified Kosminski was the ‘only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer’ is absurd. The witness, as I have demonstrated, was probably Lawende. But there were at least four other witnesses who were as likely to have seen the killer as he. And the evidence of three of them – Smith, Schwartz and Hutchinson – was arguably preferable. Although it is generally supposed that Lawende saw the Ripper talking with Kate Eddowes his evidence is open to the objection that since he did not see the woman’s face he could not positively identify her as the Mitre Square victim. This type of criticism cannot fairly be levelled at the other three. Smith and Schwartz both identified Liz Stride’s body as that of a woman they had seen in the company of a man in Berner Street shortly before the murder there, and Hutchinson, who described a man with Mary Kelly on the night of the Miller’s Court murder, had known Mary for years. These witnesses enjoyed other advantages over Lawende. As a patrolling policeman, Smith was possibly a more careful observer. The great
advantage of Schwartz’s evidence was that the man he described had actually been seen attacking Stride. And Hutchinson took such an unusual and persistent interest in Mary Kelly’s client as to enable him to describe the suspect in exceptional detail. Lawende, then, was merely one of five important witnesses and probably not the best at that. Nevertheless, he was the one who identified Kosminski and as such acquired special significance in the mind of Sir Robert Anderson, anxious as he was in his twilight years to believe that in this Polish Jew he had tracked down the murderer.

Incidentally, it is worth noting that back in 1888 neither Swanson, who synthesized the reports coming in from Abberline and the divisions, nor Anderson, who primarily drew upon Swanson, were in the best position to assess the relative values of the witnesses. It is to be doubted whether they saw, let alone interviewed, a single one of them. Abberline, who did interrogate them, who looked them in the eye, seems to have been particularly impressed by Hutchinson.

I have already shown that Lawende’s identification of Kosminski cannot possibly have been conclusive. It is equally apparent that it was not
generally
regarded as such among those best qualified to judge.

Melville Macnaghten succeeded to the post of Chief Constable of the CID, the second highest office in the department, in 1890. If he was not himself a party to the Kosminski inquiry he must have been familiar with its findings. Yet, drafting his report of 1894, he explicitly exonerated Kosminski and opted for Druitt. Twenty years later, notwithstanding everything Anderson had written, Macnaghten’s belief in Druitt’s guilt remained unshaken and he reiterated it in his book
Days of My Years
.

Frederick George Abberline attained the rank of Chief Detective Inspector on 22 December 1890. His special knowledge of the East End, and of the Ripper investigation in particular, qualified him above all others to lead the Kosminski inquiry and although we have no documentary proof that he did it must be regarded as a strong probability. In any event, had conclusive evidence of Kosminski’s guilt been procured it is inconceivable that Abberline would not have known about it. The two interviews he gave to the
Pall Mall Gazette
in March 1903 thus contain a formidable rebuttal of Anderson’s assertions. ‘You must understand,’ the detective told the
Gazette
on 23 March, ‘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.’ A week later he was even more categoric. ‘You can state most emphatically,’ he said, ‘that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago.’ Warming to his theme, he refuted the Druitt theory, dismissed as ‘another idle story’ a rumour that the poisoner Thomas Neill Cream had been the Ripper and, in the following remarks,
may
have referred to Kosminski: ‘I know that it has been stated in several quarters that “Jack the Ripper” was a man who died in a lunatic asylum a few years ago, but there is nothing at all of a tangible nature to support such a theory.’ Abberline showed the reporter recent documentary evidence which proved that the case had never been solved and concluded in language as trenchant as any Anderson would later employ: ‘No; the identity of the diabolical individual has yet to be established, notwithstanding the people who have produced these rumours and who pretend to know the state of the official mind.’
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Although Macnaghten and Abberline clearly did not share Anderson’s view of Kosminski neither are known to have ever been personally critical of their ex-chief. When Anderson’s memoirs were serialized in
Blackwood’s
, however, they provoked an immediate and scathing riposte from Sir Henry Smith. Anderson’s claim that the East End Jews protected the murderer as one of their own was denounced by Smith as a ‘reckless accusation’. ‘Surely,’ he wrote, ‘Sir Robert cannot believe that while the Jews . . . were entering into this conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice, there was no one among them with sufficient knowledge of the criminal law to warn them of the risks they were running.’ The latter were then considerable for in murder cases accessories after the fact were liable to penal servitude for life. Smith concluded his diatribe by recommending Anderson to read
Bleak House
and the Bible. Why? ‘In the former book,’ he explained, ‘Mademoiselle Hortense, to divert suspicion from herself, writes “Lady Deadlock, Murderess” – with what result Inspector Bucket tells us. In the latter, Daniel interprets the writing on the wall which brought things to a crisis at Belshazzar’s Feast.’
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What Smith was saying, of course, was that if Anderson had correctly interpreted the Goulston Street writing as an attempt to throw the police off the scent of the real culprit he would have known that Jack the Ripper could not have been a Jew. There is more than a hint of personal and professional rivalry in Smith’s account but his views cannot be dismissed lightly. We know from Swanson that the City CID actively participated in the Kosminski inquiry and by then
Smith had already succeeded Sir James Fraser as Commissioner of the City Police.

Macnaghten, Abberline and Smith. These men must have known the truth about Kosminski. Had the Ripper case been solved they would presumably have been only too glad to say so. So by disassociating themselves from Anderson on this point they demonstrated that his claim to have definitively identified the murderer was simply addle-headed nonsense. They were not alone. Thomas Arnold, interviewed upon his retirement as Superintendent of H Division in 1893, spoke of the Whitechapel murders as unsolved. Edmund Reid, who served in H Division as Head of CID between 1887 and 1896, clearly thought that Frances Coles, killed
after
Kosminski’s committal to Colney Hatch, was the last victim of Jack the Ripper. In 1903 he dismissed Macnaghten’s draft account of the three suspects, as served up by Griffiths, as ‘full of inaccuracies’. And, after mooting a different theory of his own, John Littlechild, Head of the Special (Irish) Branch at the time of the murders, pointedly told George R. Sims in a personal letter of 1913 that Anderson ‘only “
thought he knew
”.’
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Chief Inspector Swanson, a strong authority on the case, did endorse Anderson. Swanson enjoyed a particularly close friendship with Sir Robert, transmitting greetings to his ‘dear former master’ every Christmas until Anderson’s death in 1918. Loyalty and a deep sense of personal obligation may have coloured his judgement. It is also possible that the Kosminski theory originated with Swanson rather than Anderson. If so Swanson’s known comments suggest that he would have argued it with greater caution.
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No matter, Anderson’s claim that the case was solved by the unmasking of Kosminski cannot possibly be reconciled with the fact that inquiries continued until at least as late as 1895, with Macnaghten’s assertion, in his official report of 1894, that ‘many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on any one’, or with the undoubted fact that on the identity of the Whitechapel killer senior police officers continued to contradict each other in print well into the next century.

Anderson’s contention that the identity of Jack the penman was
positively
established as that of a London journalist is equally untenable. I have dealt with this matter elsewhere
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and need not reiterate the arguments but documentary evidence from the Scotland Yard files is there adduced which proves that as late as 1896, eight
years after the murders, the police still did not know who had written the original letter and post card.

Anderson’s memoirs do not seem to have enjoyed a high contemporary reputation. Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, read them while they were being serialized in
Blackwood’s
to determine whether Anderson should forfeit his police pension because of his disclosures of confidential information. He decided that to deprive Sir Robert of his pension would be to attach ‘far too much importance to the articles and to their author’ but noted that the articles did Anderson little credit. In particular he hit the nail right on the head when he told the Commons in April 1910 that the memoirs seemed ‘to be written in a spirit of gross boastfulness . . . in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo.” The writer has been so anxious to show how important he was, how invariably he was right, and how much more he could tell if only his mouth was not what he was pleased to call closed.’
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There is no doubt that the section on the Ripper crimes was very misleading indeed and Anderson may have made at least one other blunder when he implied that James Monro had sanctioned the ‘Parnellism and Crime’ articles he had written for the
Times
in 1887. Monro denied it: ‘No such authority was asked by Mr Anderson, and none was given to him by me . . . A long time afterwards Mr Anderson informed me that he had written one or more of the articles, and I felt much annoyed.’
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