The Cases That Haunt Us (12 page)

But Aaron Kosminski looked good for the murders. A Polish Jewish immigrant hairdresser with a history of mental illness and a reported dislike of women, he fit the eyewitness descriptions, the disorganized personality, and the police descriptions. The escalation of mutilation and depravity in the murders was dramatic, and the Mary Jane Kelly kill certainly strikes me as the work of a guy pretty much at the end of his mental rope. That is not to say that he’d turn himself in, as Edmund Kemper did, or kill himself. Rather, it suggests that he might not be able to continue functioning on his own much longer. And a guy who is so paranoid he eats garbage off the streets rather than accept food from anyone would tend to fit the bill.

His is also the only name that comes up in all three of the key documents (though Anderson does not mention him by name). According to Swanson, when Kosminski was placed under surveillance, the killing stopped. Though some have questioned the recollection of all three former cops, there is no compelling reason to think they were wrong in the essence of what they were saying. Martin Fido has extensively researched the lives and writings of all three men, and he states that everything else Robert Anderson wrote, on subjects far diverse from the Ripper murders, is accurate and creditable. So there is no reason to doubt him here.

My subject, it will be noted, was an immigrant Jew, the very type many of the citizens of Whitechapel suspected, feared, and despised. Is his Jewishness a significant factor in either the profile or the commission of the crimes? No. Jack the Ripper had to be a poor East End local. A significant number of poor East End locals at that time were immigrant Jews. There are sick and murderous individuals in every definable race and ethnic grouping. That’s it.

Although Kosminski seemed to fit my profile and evaluation, I cautioned on the show that a hundred years after the fact, I could not prove that he was the actual killer. What I said was that Jack the Ripper would either be Aaron Kosminski or someone like the man I was describing. And I stand by that.

But, as I learned in the years after the airing of the show, there are a couple of problems with Kosminski, information I had not been given at the time. For one thing, Swanson turned out to be wrong on one critical fact: Kosminski did not die shortly after the murders, but actually lived in asylums until 1919! During that time he was often dissociative but not violent and never gave any indication of being the Ripper. I would expect a paranoid individual of this nature to talk frequently of this. Kosminski seems too docile and passive to have been a predatory animal nightly on the hunt for victims of opportunity.

Reenter Martin Fido. He had also believed that the man the police referred to as Kosminski was the answer to the Ripper mystery, but the problems struck him as just as real as they did me. Knowing that the Polish Jew description from Anderson was more reliable than the name, Fido exhaustively checked the records of all the prisons and insane asylums in the area. And of all the names he went through, he came up with one fascinating candidate.

David Cohen was a Polish Jew, twenty-three years of age at the time (exactly the same age as Kosminski), whose incarceration at Colney Hatch fits precisely with the end of the murders. He had originally been brought by police to Whitechapel Infirmary on December 12, 1888, when they “found him wandering at large and unable to take care of himself.”

Unlike Kosminski, Cohen was violently antisocial and was kept in restraints. When he was given any clothing, he would rip it off his body. He spoke little, and when he did, it was a foreign language that attendants took to be German. Though we know he was in Whitechapel at the time of the crimes, we don’t know where he lived or if he actually had a job.

He became ill on December 28, and while he gradually regained some of his strength during the spring and summer of 1889, he suffered a relapse and died on October 20. The cause of death was put down to “exhaustion of mania.” This diagnosis, rather crude by modern standards, still fits in perfectly with the profile. The killer and mutilator of Mary Jane Kelly was at the end of his emotional rope.

His address had been given as 86 Leman Street, an unlikely possibility since this was the address of the Protestant Boys’ Club. However, Fido quickly discovered that number 84 was the Temporary Shelter for Poor Homeless Jews, which seemed completely logical. But this home only accepted newly landed immigrants for two weeks. Immigrant Jews taken in by their fellow immigrants in this way were often listed for employment in one of the traditional Jewish trades, either tailor or shoemaker. Cohen is listed as a tailor, but it is certainly possible that he had been a shoemaker. The connection of shoemakers with Leather Apron would have been enough to change the designation for his own protection.

It’s easy to see how 84 Leman Street could be mistranscribed as 86, but how do you confuse Kosminski and Cohen? Well, one possible way was explained to Fido.
Cohen
was a John Doe–type surname often given to Jewish immigrants whose actual surnames were difficult for Englishmen to pronounce or spell. It is therefore possible that the City Police were following Kosminski while Scotland Yard was following Cohen. The Yard knew their man had died, but weren’t certain of his real name.

The situation is further complicated by another fellow, generally referred to as Nathan Kaminsky, an immigrant Jewish bootmaker, the same age and general description as both Kosminski and Cohen. He was treated for syphilis in a workhouse infirmary shortly before the murders and then suddenly and inexplicably vanishes from the records. He lived right in the heart of the Ripper’s comfort zone. There are no death records for him.

So I think there is every chance that these three immigrant Polish Jews with documented emotional problems were combined and confused by the various police officials and agencies. I don’t set much store in elaborate conspiracies and cover-ups, but I’ve seen enough bureaucratic gaffes and fumbles in my time to believe quite heartily in them. And yet, what is the element of truth or consistency that runs throughout the three accounts and also squares with the profile of the Whitechapel Murderer?

As we have seen, it’s impossible to be certain of the true identity after all these years, but the behavioral evidence as to the
type
of individual he was is plentiful and compelling. Therefore, I’m now prepared to say that Jack the Ripper was either the man known to the police as David Cohen … or someone very much like him.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks;

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one.

T
his is the way the most famous and notorious American murder case of the nineteenth century has chiefly been remembered. But if the unnamed authors of this rather cruel ditty were being responsible and accurate, they would have recast their verse into something less tuneful yet somewhat more in line with the established facts of this officially unsolved case:

An unknown subject took a hatchet

And gave Lizzie Borden’s stepmother nineteen whacks;

Ninety minutes after that deed was done

He or she gave Borden’s father ten plus one.

The one being sufficient to cause death; the other ten constituting out-and-out overkill. But as we’ll discover, this was a behaviorally different type of overkill than what we saw in the Whitechapel murders.

What was it about this brutal daytime murder in a small but prosperous New England town at the height of the Industrial Revolution that struck such a nerve, not only in New England but, within days, across the nation and around the globe, just as Jack the Ripper had four years previously? For one thing, proper, well-to-do women just didn’t get accused of cold-bloodedly hacking people to death. If the Whitechapel murders were about the potential for random brutality and the loss of public innocence regarding the presence of evil in a confident and complacent world, this case was about the potential for violence lurking within seemingly normal families, and the even more profound and searing loss of innocence that implied.

It’s difficult to avoid the interesting, almost uncanny parallels to another instance of officially unsolved, allegedly domestic murder that would take place 102 years later and an entire continent away: the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman outside her condominium in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles in 1994. Both cases involved an upstanding, well-off, community-pillar defendant, represented by the finest legal team money could buy, who vigorously proclaimed innocence of the savage mutilation murders of one male and one female victim by bladed weapons that were not found at the scene. Nor had virtually any blood been found on either defendant. Both offered substantial rewards for information leading to the killer—rewards that were never claimed. And in both cases, the world was riveted to every word uttered in trial, during which each defendant chose not to take the stand to give her or his own account of what had happened. In fact, the only words both defendants uttered in open court were single sentences proclaiming their innocence.

When people all over the world asked if a wealthy, famous, handsome, and charming ex–football star could possibly be capable of savaging his former wife and an innocent bystander in a fit of murderous rage, they were harkening back to a similar question from the century past:

Could a demure, well-mannered, and well-to-do former Sunday-school teacher, active in her church and charities and a prominent member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, actually be a monster?

It was a question that, with individual variations, would be posed many times in the years between the two cases. It is, in many ways, the essence of criminological behavioral science.

THE
BORDENS
OF
FALL
RIVER

Let’s begin with the undisputed facts.

At around 11:15 on the warm and humid morning of Thursday, August 4, 1892, Rufus B. Hilliard, the city marshal of Fall River, Massachusetts, received an urgent telephone call at the central police station. It was from John Cunningham, a local newsdealer. Cunningham happened to be at Hall’s Livery Stable when he saw Mrs. Adelaide Churchill frantically approach her carriage driver, Tom, telling him to go find a doctor. Her next-door neighbor Andrew Borden, one of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens in town, had been brutally attacked in the sitting room of his house on Second Street. Noticing Cunningham, she suggested that someone call the police.

Which is what Cunningham did. But not before he first called the
FallRiver Globe
and gave them the exclusive story.

The Borden family consisted of four members: Andrew Jackson Borden, one of the town’s most prominent businessmen, seventy years of age; his second wife, Abby Durfee Grady Borden, sixty-four; and Andrew’s two adult, unmarried daughters by his late first wife, Sarah Anthony Morse Borden, forty-one-year-old Emma Lenora and Lizzie Andrew, thirty-two. There was also a live-in maid, a twenty-six-year-old Irish immigrant named Bridget Sullivan, who had been with the family for more than two years.

In 1890, Fall River had a population of eighty thousand and manufactured more cotton textiles than any other city in the world. And if one name could be associated with the economic origins and continued prosperity of the town, that name would be Borden. Though he was related to the family that had established Fall River and was by then enjoying its third generation of wealth, Andrew was only a second cousin of the wealthy Borden branch and had grown up without any of their power or advantages. His grandfather had been a brother of one of the original Bordens who made good, and Andrew’s father had never made anything of himself. Everything Andrew had—and he had a lot—he’d earned completely on his own, beginning as a casket maker, then opening his own undertaking business and investing the profits in real estate, banks, and mills. Now tall, thin, white-haired, and bearded, and almost invariably dressed in a heavy black suit regardless of the weather, Andrew Borden was president of the Union Savings Bank; a director of the Merchants Manufacturing Company, the B.M.C. Durfee Safe Deposit and Trust Company, the Globe Yarn Mills, the Troy Cotton and Woolen Manufactory; and the owner of several farms. By 1892 his personal wealth was estimated as high as a half million dollars, a tremendous sum in those days.

Probably as a result of his own struggle, Andrew was known as a fair but tough and hard-nosed bargainer in business, and in his personal life, he was parsimonious in the extreme, eschewing luxuries that were at this point commonly enjoyed by people with far less than he, such as electricity or indoor plumbing. The simple two-story frame house at 92 Second Street was furnished with a water closet in the basement and slop pails in the bedrooms, which had to be emptied every morning. Andrew, who according to all available research had never been accused of a sense of humor, saw no reason for such amenities, much to the dismay of his daughters, who seemed to feel that their father’s penurious lifestyle was prohibiting their chances for social success.

On the morning in question, Emma was away from home, visiting friends in Fairhaven, some fifteen miles away. But the household also had an overnight guest, John Vinnicum Morse, fifty-nine years of age, brother of Andrew’s late wife. He had lived in Iowa for twenty years, but three years before had returned to the Northeast and resided in South Dartmouth. He arrived on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 3, then he left for one of Andrew’s farms in Swansea. Normally, the eggs from the farm were delivered to Andrew by the farmer on Thursdays. But Wednesday night, Morse brought back with him the weekly egg delivery. Then, Morse apparently discussed business details with his former brother-in-law. Though there is some suggestion the two men were talking about Andrew’s intention to write a will, there is no documentation on this point.