Jack the Ripper: The Secret Police Files (20 page)

In September 1888 Le Grand and his partner in the agency John Batchelor were employed by the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee to investigate the Whitechapel murders. During this time Westcott suggests that Le Grand and his partner were actively involved in the training of volunteers from the Whitechapel Vigilance Group and even went out on patrol with them at night. However, I can find no evidence to corroborate this.

During their investigations and their involvement with the Vigilance Group, Le Grand and Batchelor were instrumental in finding a witness in the Stride case namely Mathew Packer who supposedly saw Stride with a male person shortly before her death and was able to give a description of that man. It has been suggested that this could have in fact been her killer. However, Packer was later interviewed by the police and gave conflicting evidence to them. To this day Packer’s evidence has been looked upon as being totally unreliable and may have been part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Le Grand.

In June 1889 he and Amelia Marie Demay and others were charged with conspiracy to extort money from a prominent doctor. He received a two-year prison sentence for these offences and Amelia eighteen-months hard labour.

He was released from prison in 1891 but after a short time he was again arrested, this time under the name of Charles Grant for blackmailing several elderly wealthy ladies by sending letters threatening that they would be murdered unless they paid large sums of money. Needless to say none met the demands and contacted the police on receipt of the letters.

None of the death threats involved the suggestion that the victims would have their throats cut and then disembowelled and organs removed. The threats related to blowing them up using dynamite. Le Grand was not averse to using force as has been previously stated. When he was arrested at a railway station he had in his possession a revolver, a cosh and a set of knuckledusters. He also attempted to push one of the arresting officers under a train as it entered the station. Following his arrest his house was searched and police found a home-made explosive device rigged to a cigar tin, gunpowder, and two bottles of acid.

Following a lengthy trial Le Grand was sentenced to twenty years hard labour for blackmail and a further seven years for attempted fraud.

At the conclusion of the article Westcott sets out a number of facts he seeks to rely on to suggest Le Grand could have been Jack the Ripper. I will comment on the important ones individually, Westcott’s facts are written in italics.

He states: “
Le Grand was cruel, vicious, violent, accurately described himself as “void of all human feeling”; he lived for years off prostitutes and took joy in beating them in the open street.”

It has to be accepted that the Ripper was cruel, vicious and violent towards his prostitute victims. The assaults documented by Westcott all took place in and around central London, and the prostitutes involved were of a much higher class than the prostitutes of Whitechapel. All the Whitechapel murders took place in the dead of night away from the public eye. Le Grand’s violence towards prostitutes was to either force them to work for him or to frighten them away from his area and most of this occurred in daylight hours sometimes in full view of the public. There is no evidence to suggest any of the Ripper victims were under the control of a pimp or worked in a brothel, or ever came in contact with Le Grand.

“Le Grand alone would have known the whereabouts on any night of the WVC patrolmen, as he was in charge of placing them. Through his police contacts he would also know the beats of policemen in any area of London.”

There is no evidence to suggest the Ripper knew or used this information to his advantage in the commission of the murders.

“Le Grand, because of his status as a Private Investigator and his position with the WVC, could have, and did walk the streets of the East End with impunity. If stopped by a constable, he would not be detained.”

During the height of these murders many people would have been stopped and spoken to by the police and allowed to go lawfully on their way. Although Le Grand was working at the time as a private detective he was known to the police as a prolific criminal and had he been stopped and checked it would have perhaps been recorded. Conversely, if you were a killer on the prowl for a victim the last thing you want to happen is to get stopped and checked by the police, you would want to avoid all possible contact with not only the police but anyone who might subsequently identify you...

“The WVC met at the Crown Tavern at 74 Mile End Road, a short distance from Berner Street, the scene of the Stride murder. They let out for patrol after midnight. This means that we can accurately place Le Grand in the very neighbourhood in which Stride was murdered at the very hour of her murder.”

Berner Street was a totally different murder location to all the other victims, there were many men and women still coming and going at the time of the murder. The International Working Men’s Club was also packed with men. It is not known where Le Grand was at the time of the murder.

Westcott asks the question, “
Why spend his evenings training recruits and his nights walking the dark, wet streets of the East End when he could have been at his gambling den or his brothel, surrounded by beautiful (comparatively speaking) women?“

Le Grand was hired as a private detective to investigate the murders. There is no evidence to show he ever went out on patrol, or was ever in the location of Berner Street at the time of the murder there. It should also be noted that Le Grand’s place of residence at the time was 3, York Place, Baker Street which is located in North West London some five miles from Whitechapel.

“Le Grand, alone among the suspects, possessed a collection of knives and was alleged to have been skilled in the use of them”
he suggests,
“Le Grand was skilled in the use of a knife.”

He was not the only suspect to have possessed a knife Carl Feigenbaum who I will later refer to possessed a long-bladed knife and used that knife to murder a woman in New York in Ripper-like fashion. The knives Westcott refers to were mentioned by a manservant who stated amongst his duties he was responsible for cleaning Le Grand’s knives. Of all the various assortment of weapons Le Grand has had in his possession or under his control he has never been seen with a knife or to have used a knife in any act of violence.

Westcott refers to the “
Dear Boss Letter”
and quotes “
Grand work the last job was…”
He suggests that Le Grand committed the murder and then sent the letter giving a hidden clue. However, as far as the letters are concerned most experienced researchers including myself believe all the letters were hoaxes. However, it is not to say that Le Grand did not write one or more of them. However, that would not make him the killer.

Westcott goes to great length throughout the article to emphasize that he was the prime police suspect but is unable to put forward any motive Le Grand may have had for committing the murders. Furthermore there is no mention of Le Grand in any official police record or file relative to the murders, nor has his name been mentioned by any police officer in their memoirs, as have other suspects. I contacted Tom Westcott and he does now agree that there is no corroboration to his suggestion that he was a prime police suspect.

In concluding, Tom Westcott must be commended for his thorough research into Le Grand although it should be noted that he is not the first to take more than a passing interest in Le Grand. Other Ripper researchers Gerry Nixon and Paul Begg have in past years also investigated Le Grand, neither have been able to prove his involvement.

Le Grand is an interesting character, but was he Jack the Ripper? On what has been put forward to date the answer is no. However, like with all the other previously named and discussed suspects, one day that final piece of damning evidence may surface and then the Ripper jigsaw will finally be complete. Until that day we can only wait, and wonder.

AARON KOSMINSKI

Aaron Kosminski has been regarded by many researchers as a prime suspect but is there any evidence to support this? Aaron Kosminski has been regarded as the Kosminski likely suspect named by Sir Melville Macnaghten in his 1894 memorandum in which he refers to Kosminski by surname only and describes this suspect as follows:

“Kosminski -- a Polish Jew -- & resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, especially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies: he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many circumstances connected with this man, which made him a strong ‘suspect’.”

However, it should be noted that in another later document known as, “
The Aberconway Version”
also written by Macnaghten he exonerates the Kosminski he previously mentioned. This document will be discussed in a later chapter.

It was not until 1987 that Martin Fido a Ripper researcher and historian discovered Aaron Kosminski after searching asylum records. However, Fido soon discovered that the antecedents of Aaron Kosminski did not match those of Macnaghten’s Kosminski suspect.

For a start Aaron Kosminski was not incarcerated in an asylum on a permanent basis until 1891 where he remained until his death in 1919. There was no evidence to suggest he had a hatred of prostitutes, or that he ever associated with prostitutes. He never ever showed any homicidal tendencies. In 1889 Aaron Kosminski did have one short spell in the workhouse due to his insane behaviour. However, he had no criminal convictions.

Aaron Kosminski was a Polish Jew and lived with his family in Whitechapel and was in his early years a barber by profession. At the time of the murders he was aged twenty-five. A number of witness statements were taken from persons who are alleged to have seen different males with the victims prior to their death. But none of these witnesses ever describe seeing anyone as young as twenty-five. Aaron was never known to have worn a hat as described by some witnesses in their statements.

Prior to his final long-term incarceration Aaron Kosminski was known to continually masturbate in public and eat out of the gutter. It is believed that what led up to his final incarceration in 1891 was an incident whereby he is alleged to have threatened his sister with a knife.

Many researchers also rely on two other sources in support of Aaron Kosminski being a viable Ripper suspect and corroborate Macnaghten’s entry in his memorandum. One of these being a book published in 1910 by Sir Robert Anderson titled, “
The lighter side of my official life”
in which he refers to an identification procedure which is alleged to have taken place whereby the “suspect” who was the subject of this procedure was said to have been a Polish Jew.

Anderson in his book states that the witness a Jewish male made a positive identification of the suspect as being Jack the Ripper but this witness was not prepared to give evidence as the suspect identified was also a Jew and that his evidence would lead to the execution of another Jew. Anderson does not expand on this explanation. Anderson makes no mention of where the identification took place, who the witness was and even more importantly who the suspect was.

However, it is written in the Torah which is the name given to the first five books of the Jewish bible, that a Jew cannot be put to death without the testimony of two eyewitnesses both of them religiously observant Jews. In this case the Jewish witness should have known that a fellow Jew would not be executed on the testimony of only one person. This is why the witness may have refused to testify.

I have to ask who this witness could have been. Throughout the whole investigation there were only ever two witnesses who one can say gave any reasonable descriptions of persons seen with any of the victims. The first was Israel Schwartz who allegedly saw a man with Liz Stride and the other being Joseph Lawende who saw a man with a woman believed to have been Eddowes at the entrance to Church Passage a short time before her body was discovered. No one ever saw the murders being committed.

In any event these descriptions cannot safely be relied upon due to the time of the night, the lighting conditions and the distance between witness and possible suspect and of course the lengthy time gap between 1888 and 1890/91 when it is believed this identification procedure is alleged to have taken place.

In relation to identification parades in today’s criminal justice system it is generally accepted that a witness has to make a positive identification. An identification made whereby a witness states, “I think it could be him” would not be classed as a positive identification.

If this identification procedure ever did take place then the witness could have only been Israel Schwartz. The Stride murder came under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police and it was they who had organized this identification procedure, who it would seem, knew nothing of the suspect nor of the identification taking place.

I do find it strange that the officers of the City Police were not actively involved in this process, after all Joseph Lawende had given them a suspect description in relation to the Eddowes murder, and if one witness was going to try to identify a suspect why not let the second witness attempt to do the same?

It is normal practice to bring all the witnesses together where practicable for just one procedure. If Schwartz had been the witness and did make a positive identification then at best the police would have only finished up with weak circumstantial evidence in relation to only one murder in the series, that of Stride, a murder, which in fact may not have even been committed by the same killer who had been responsible for killing the other victims.

Anderson in his book makes no mention of the suspect’s name or the name of the witness, or where this identification is supposed to have taken place. In his book he wrote that he would have named his suspect but for fear of libel action and that no public benefit would occur. However, the publishers of Anderson’s book had categorically stated that they would be willing to pay for any costs should a libel case ever be brought. So what reason could Anderson give for not naming the suspect, or the witness, or where it took place?