Macnaghten’s Ripper suspect Aaron Kosminski was a Polish Jew who apparently had lived in Whitechapel since 1882. This was a man who was ‘supposed’ to have an extreme hatred of women, especially prostitutes. It has also been suggested that he had strong homicidal tendencies and a history of brutal crimes. If this were correct, it would have given him a motive. However, there is no documentary evidence to support any of these suggestions.
Kosminski would have been around 25 at the time of the murders. No witness describes seeing anyone of about this age in the murder locations or in the company of the victims before their deaths. It seems that Kosminski could speak only Yiddish, so this would have given him great difficulty in propositioning prostitutes, and, even if he did speak a little English, no witness who heard suspects talk mentioned any of them having a foreign accent.
Macnaghten mentions Kosminski by surname only, so it is not certain to whom he was referring. It is likely that there was more than one young man named Kosminski in an area that had become home to many Jews from eastern Europe. There is also doubt as to why, several years after the murders, Kosminski was put forward as a suspect, for he had no criminal convictions.
So what do we know of Aaron Kosminski? A family with that surname was known to reside near Goulston Street, where the graffito and bloodstained piece of apron were found, but it is not known whether it was Aaron’s or another.
Kosminski supposedly had a history of carrying and using a knife and, being a barber, he used cut-throat razors in his work. However, we know that a knife, not a razor, was the murder weapon in all the Whitechapel murders. I believe that the suspicion about the knife and the fact of his habitual use of a cut-throat razor alone were enough to have made him a suspect, but the first was supposition and the second was true of any man in the same occupation, yet it would not necessarily have made him a killer. In fact, Kosminski was never a suspect at the time of the murders. It is known that there was an incident when he threatened his sister with a knife. This was before he was sent to the asylum and may well have been the deciding factor in the decision to send him there. However, the incident occurred two years after the murders ceased. There is no evidence to say he was living in Whitechapel at the time of the murders.
Macnaghten also suggested that the police had received information that Kosminski was the killer. If there was indeed any information, what it was, who supplied it and who received it is not known. This question has been the subject of many theories and much speculation over the years. As a result of this information, it is suggested, the police staged some form of identification procedure at a location which some say was a seaside home in Brighton and others say was a workhouse in London. It is known that Kosminski was in a workhouse at some point. The police took a witness to the location.The name of this witness is not known but it may have been one of the two who saw a man with Catherine Eddowes before her murder. Or could it have been a new witness who had given new information? Whoever this witness was, he appears to have been another Jew, who supposedly made a positive identification and then told the police he would not testify against a fellow Jew knowing that the outcome would likely be hanging.
In any event, if this ever took place, the evidence is questionable. The identification procedure the police adopted is today known as a ‘direct confrontation’. I suggest that, even in that day and age, this evidence would have not been sufficient to charge Kosminski, let alone secure a conviction.
The identification was made almost two years after Eddowes’s murder, a time gap that raises considerable doubt about the witness’s accuracy. I also have to ask: what was the witness being asked to make an identification on? And why was only one witness used when several witnesses had given the police descriptions of men they had seen with some of the victims before their murders?
In any event, the witness may not have had a clear view of the suspect as the sighting took place at night, when it was almost totally dark, and to have had such a view he would have had to have been fairly close to the man. All in all, there are major doubts surrounding this identification.
None of the descriptions of the suspect given by witnesses appears to fit Kosminski in terms of age. Neither do they in terms of dress. To take a key example, several witnesses referred to the suspect wearing hats of various kinds, yet there is no evidence to show Kosminski ever wore a hat of any description.
If this identification did take place, it leaves some burning questions:
• Why did the police not officially document the identification at the time? This would have been a major breakthrough, but no police records are available to confirm that it took place.
• After the identification, why did the police not arrest Kosminski or at least interview him? There is nothing in police records to show that either was done or to explain why neither was done. I would have expected the police to put this significant identification to Kosminski. They could have told him he had been positively identified – there was no need to tell him that the witness was not going to give evidence – just to see his reaction. This information alone may well have been enough to make him confess, should he have been Jack the Ripper.
• Why did the police take Kosminski to the supposed location for the identification procedure, if they ever did? This would surely have been against normal police procedures, even in those days. As a suspect, he should have been formally arrested.
Kosminski was supposedly committed to an infirmary for the insane in late 1890, although Macnaghten states that it was in March 1889. According to the records at the asylum, Kosminski was not considered a danger and was never placed in a straitjacket. Also, he only ever spoke Yiddish while there. He died of gangrene in 1919, still an asylum inmate.
Was Kosminski the killer? In the absence of anything direct to link him to the murders, there must be serious doubt. We know he lived in Whitechapel, but we know nothing of his whereabouts and movements at the time of the murders. Before being committed to the asylum he had been living on the streets, refusing handouts of food and instead eating from the gutter and drinking from public taps. Had he been living in the way suggested at the time of the killings and had he been the killer, I am sure that the police would have received information on or about him from the local community and would have built up a strong picture and background on him through the course of their investigation. In the absence of this information, we can assume that there was no reason to suspect him at the time.
As to the actions of the police at the time, they appear to have broken many rules. I suspect that they had much more of a free hand than officers have today. Nevertheless, if, as has been suggested, they were satisfied that Kosminski was Jack the Ripper but could not bring him to justice owing to his insanity, this surely would have been documented. After all, the murders were high-profile crimes and the issue of Kosminski would have been reported somewhere and Queen Victoria herself made aware. In addition, the police would have wanted to publicise the fact that the killer had been found and incarcerated, just to put the public at ease. Furthermore, the acclaim that the police would have received for identifying Jack the Ripper would have made the suppression of their findings very difficult.
Today, when the police charge a person with murder and there is a suggestion that he may be insane, provided he has initially been certified by a doctor as being fit to be interviewed and the evidence is sufficient to charge him, he is put before a court. However, the person may later be deemed unable to stand trial if further medical examination results in his being classed as ‘Unfit to plead’ owing to mental illness. In this case, an order is made under the Mental Health Act for an unspecified period of detention in a secure institution. This would have been an option open to the police in the case of Kosminski. As I have said, to do so would have put the public at ease and provided an opportunity to regain the people’s confidence in the police. This, by all accounts, was still lacking two years later.
Kosminski has been of great interest to researchers over the years, mainly because hardly anything concrete is known of him, and no one has been able to eliminate him totally as a suspect. On the other hand, no evidence has been put forward to make him any more of a prime suspect than the others. Precisely because of this, researchers have continued to speculate and theorise and been able to keep alive the possibility that he was Jack the Ripper.
My own view is that the police looked at Kosminski in later years as a result of his threatening his sister with a knife, probably aware of the fact that he may well have lived in Whitechapel at the time of the murders. Whatever they did in connection with this suspect they did with good intent, but all to no avail. The reality is that all the facts surrounding Kosminski have been distorted over the years, and, after considering this, I can still find no motive and no evidence to suggest he was Jack the Ripper.