Complete History of Jack the Ripper (78 page)

Sixty years ago Hargrave L. Adam carefully documented the Chapman case for the Notable British Trials series. At that time, however, the official records were closed to public access. When I began to investigate the story for myself I soon learned that since then many important documents have disappeared. Nevertheless, a wealth of Chapman material still does exist – in the records of Southwark Coroner’s Court, the Central Criminal Court, the Home Office and elsewhere. Studiously ignored by all previous writers on both Jack the Ripper and Chapman, they have been searched for the present work and enable us to bring the figure of the sinister Pole into sharper focus.
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Chapman’s real name was Severin Klosowski. The son of a carpenter, he was born in the village of Nagornak, Poland, in 1865. In 1880 his parents apprenticed him to Moshko Rappaport, Senior Surgeon in Zvolen, and he faithfully served his apprenticeship until 1885, when he went to Warsaw armed with a certificate signed by Rappaport to the effect that he was ‘diligent, of exemplary conduct, and studied with zeal the science of surgery’. An eyewitness testified that during his apprenticeship Klosowski had rendered ‘very skilful assistance to patients – i.e., in cupping by means of glasses, leeches, and other assistance comprised in the science of surgery’, which suggests, perhaps, that his training didn’t amount to much. Nevertheless, for two more years he worked in Poland as an assistant-surgeon or
feldscher
and during the last quarter of 1885 attended a practical course in surgery at the Praga Hospital, Warsaw.

We know from a receipt for hospital fees paid by Chapman at Warsaw that he was still in Poland in February 1887. But soon after that he emigrated to London.

Chapman’s movements in the East End are central to any consideration of the claim that he was Jack the Ripper. In 1887 or early the following year he took a position as assistant hairdresser in the shop of Abraham Radin at 70 West India Dock Road. He stayed in this job about five months. During that time Mrs Radin’s eldest son fell ill and Chapman helped to nurse him.
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We next find him running a hairdresser’s shop of his own at 126 Cable Street, St George’s-in-the-East. He is listed at this address in the
Post Office London Directory
of 1889 so was probably living there in the autumn of 1888 when the Ripper murders occurred.

In October 1889 Chapman married a Polish woman named Lucy Baderski. The ceremony was performed in accordance with the rites of the German Roman Catholics. At this time he was still in Cable Street. But in 1890 Wolff Levisohn, a traveller in hairdresser’s appliances, met him in a barber’s shop in the basement of the White Hart public house, 89 Whitechapel High Street.

Levisohn gave evidence against Chapman at Southwark Police Court in January 1903. According to his testimony, Chapman was calling himself Ludwig Zagowski in 1890 and speaking a mixture of Polish and Yiddish. At first he worked as an assistant at the shop under the White Hart. He may have been lodging with his employer but Levisohn did not think so. ‘I believe prisoner [Chapman] was living in Greenfield Street near Commercial Road,’ he said, ‘[but] I never visited him there.’ However, by September 1890, when Lucy bore Chapman a son, he had become the proprietor of the shop and had taken her to live there.

What did Chapman look like in the autumn of 1888? Of medium height, he had blue eyes and dark hair and was nearly twenty-three years old. In his later years he sported a formidable moustache turned up at the ends. Whether this was so in 1888 it is impossible now to say. But by 1890 he had already begun to cultivate a taste for fastidious dressing, complete with black coat, patent boots and high hat. Thus, when Levisohn saw him in the dock at Southwark, he is credited with the outburst: ‘There he sits! That is his description. He has not altered from the day he came to England; he has not even a grey hair. Always the same – same la-di-da, ’igh ’at and umbrella.’
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The baby son, Wladyslaw or Wohystaw Klosowski, died of ‘pneumonia asthenia’ on 3 March 1891. Chapman and Lucy were then living at 2 Tewkesbury Buildings, Whitechapel. They were still there a month later when the national census of 1891 was taken. But soon after that they emigrated to New York. Their names have not yet been traced on surviving passenger lists
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but it seems likely that it was the loss of their son that triggered their decision and that they made the passage in April 1891.

Chapman eventually established himself in a barber’s shop in Jersey City. There the couple quarrelled. The rift is said to have been caused by Chapman’s attentions to other women but no details are preserved. Whatever it was, Chapman attacked Lucy with a knife and Lucy, pregnant and terrified, returned to London without him in February 1892. She found refuge with her sister at 26 Scarborough Street,
Whitechapel, and her second child, Cecilia, was born there on 15 May. Then, about a fortnight after that, Chapman reappeared in the East End.

A reunion with Lucy was short-lived. In 1893 Chapman found a new consort. Her name was Annie Chapman (not to be confused with the Ripper victim of the same name) and they met in Haddin’s hairdresser shop at 5 West Green Road, South Tottenham, where Chapman himself then worked as an assistant. For about a year they lived together. But towards the end of 1894 Chapman brought another woman home with him and insisted that she share their lodging. This
ménage à trois
fell apart when Annie walked out some weeks later. By that time, however, she was pregnant, and in January or February 1895 she was obliged to seek Chapman out to tell him and solicit his support. ‘When I told him I was going to have a baby,’ Annie recalled eight years later, ‘he did not take much notice.’ Even so Annie fared much better than any of Chapman’s other ‘wives’. And from her the barber’s assistant borrowed the name by which he would become notorious. He never admitted to being Severin Klosowski again.

Later in 1895 Chapman obtained a situation as assistant in William Wenzel’s barber shop at 7 Church Lane, Leytonstone. While at Leytonstone he lodged at the house of John Ward in Forest Road and it was probably there that he first made the acquaintance of Mrs Mary Isabella Spink, a married woman living apart from her husband, for Mrs Spink was a lodger in the same house. The lodgers were soon conducting an indiscreet affair and Ward had occasion to upbraid Chapman about it.

‘My wife has seen you kissing Mrs Spink,’ he began. ‘We cannot allow that sort of thing to go on in the house.’

‘It’s all right, Mr Ward,’ replied Chapman, ‘we are going to get married about Sunday week.’

When the day came, Sunday 27 October 1895, Chapman and Spink left the house early in the morning. Chapman, who posed as a Jew (he was, in fact, a Roman Catholic), told the Wards that they were going to Whitechapel to get married. They returned that night and Chapman, ushering Mrs Spink into the presence of the Wards, said: ‘Allow me to present you to my wife.’ Mrs Ward asked to see the certificate but Chapman waved her away. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘our laws are different to your laws.’

Wherever Chapman went that day he did not marry Mrs Spink
because the marriage registers at St Catherine’s House contain no record of such a ceremony. Nevertheless, it was a subterfuge Chapman would employ successfully time and again.

Mary Spink seems to have been almost mesmerized by Chapman. She cohabited with him, entered into a bogus marriage with him and, amazingly, made the proceeds of a £500 legacy over to him. With part of the money he took the lease of a barber’s shop in George Street, Hastings, in 1896.

The Chapmans prospered in Hastings. Mary lathered the customers and, while George shaved them, entertained the clientele by playing a piano installed in the front of the shop. The popularity of these ‘musical shaves’ was such that Chapman was able to buy a sailing boat. He named her the ‘Mosquito’ and, although his nautical adventures were confined to short cruises along the coast, boasted to his customers that he would sail her to Boulogne. Behind the facade, however, all was not well in the Chapman household.

Mrs Annie Helsdown, who lodged in the same house as the Chapmans in Hill Street, occasionally heard Mary cry out. Sometimes Mary’s face bore the marks of blows and on at least one occasion she showed Annie marks around her throat.
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More ominous still, Chapman began to pay court to Alice Penfold, a domestic servant, telling her that he was a single man and the manager of a pianoforte shop. On 3 April 1897 he walked into the shop of William Davidson, a chemist in the High Street, and purchased one ounce of tartar-emetic.

Tartar-emetic, a white powder soluble in water, contains antimony. With his knowledge of medicine Chapman had plumped upon what, from a murderer’s point of view, was in many respects an ideal poison. For antimony is colourless, odourless, practically tasteless and, in the form of tartar-emetic, easily soluble in water. Furthermore, in Chapman’s time its properties were little known, even to many physicians, so that it might be administered by the poisoner in relative safety in cases where the use of arsenic or strychnine would have been foolhardy. Given in a large dose antimony is likely to cause vomiting and be expelled. For this reason Chapman opted to torture Mary Spink to death with comparatively small doses repeated over time. Unfortunately for him there was one effect of the poison of which even he seems to have been unaware. Administered during the lifetime of a victim it preserves the body from decomposition long after death. Chapman had made a fatal mistake.

In 1897 Chapman returned to London and took the lease of
the Prince of Wales public house in Bartholomew Square, off the City Road. There a transformation in Mary’s health took place. Formerly rather stout, fresh-complexioned and strong, she was now tormented by violent stomach pains, spewed green vomit, suffered from diarrhoea and grew emaciated and exhausted. A physician, Dr J. F. Rodgers, was called in to attend her but it was Chapman who prepared and administered the medicines prescribed. By Christmas Mary was close to death.

Neither Elizabeth Waymark nor Martha Doubleday, who nursed Mary, were impressed by Chapman’s concern. Elizabeth remembered that on Christmas Day, the last day, she sent downstairs several times for Chapman: ‘At first he did not come up, and when he did she [Mary] said to him, “Do kiss me”. She put her arms out for him to bend over to kiss her but he did not do so. The last time I sent for him just before she died he did not come up in time. I prepared the body for burial. It was a mere skeleton.’

When Martha Doubleday realized that Mary’s life was slipping away she, too, alerted Chapman. ‘Chapman,’ she cried, ‘come up quickly! Your wife is dying!’ By the time Chapman got there Mary was dead. He stood at her bedside, looked down at her body and said ‘Polly, Polly, speak!’ Then he went into the next room and cried. After that he went downstairs and opened the pub. ‘You are never going to open the house today?’ Martha protested. ‘Yes, I am,’ said Chapman.

Dr Rodgers certified the cause of death as phthisis.

A few months after Mary’s death Chapman advertised for a barmaid and engaged former restaurant manageress Bessie Taylor. Then history repeated itself. As in the case of Mary Spink there was a bogus marriage. There was the same abuse by Chapman. According to Elizabeth Painter, Bessie’s longtime friend, Chapman shouted and threw things at Bessie and on one occasion threatened her with a revolver.
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After three years Bessie succumbed to the same wasting illness.

During that final illness Mrs Painter visited Bessie almost every evening at the Monument public house in Union Street, Southwark, which Chapman had leased from the Bridge House Estates Committee. Although overtly attentive to Bessie’s needs Chapman was wont to indulge in callous jests at Mrs Painter’s expense. Sometimes, when she came into the house and asked how Bessie was, he would tell her: ‘Your friend is dead.’ Then, when Mrs Painter went upstairs,
she would find Bessie alive. On 7 February 1901 Bessie seemed better and Mrs Painter didn’t call again until the 14th. On that occasion, however, she found Chapman in the bar parlour. He said that Bessie was ‘much about the same’. But when Mrs Painter went up she found that Bessie had died the previous day.

Dr James Stoker certified the cause of death as intestinal obstruction, vomiting and exhaustion.

In August 1901 Chapman hired eighteen-year-old Maud Marsh as his new barmaid at the Monument. Soon he persuaded her to collude with him in the now well-rehearsed ritual of the bogus marriage, a stratagem that seems to have completely deceived Maud’s parents, and before Christmas they were ensconced as man and wife at the Crown, 213 Borough High Street. Maud was to be his last victim.

By the summer of 1902 Chapman had tired of his young ‘bride’. In June he engaged one Florence Rayner as a barmaid. As she frankly admitted later, Florence did not find her employer’s repeated amorous advances unwelcome but she baulked when he asked her to go to America with him. ‘No, you have your wife downstairs,’ she reminded him, ‘and you don’t want me.’ Chapman snapped his fingers. ‘Oh, I’d give her that,’ he said, ‘and she would be no more Mrs Chapman.’

There is also evidence of Chapman’s violence towards Maud. On one occasion, out on a tramride down Streatham Hill with her married sister, Mrs Louisa Morris, Maud burst into tears when it became apparent that she would get home late. In comforting her sister, Louisa learned that she lived in fear of Chapman. ‘You don’t know what he is,’ said Maud and she told of how he had sometimes beaten her.

‘Well,’ asked Louisa, ‘has he hit you then?’

‘Yes, more than once,’ replied Maud.

‘How did he hit you?’