“Jack the Ripper,” also known as “the Whitechapel Murderer” and “Leather Apron,” was an unidentified serial killer in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London in the autumn of 1888 who is “credited” with murdering prostitutes, slitting their throats, and committing abdominal mutilations on the corpses, including the removal of internal organs. Although the five victims who were murdered between August 31, 1988, and November 9, 1888, known as the “canonical five,” are broadly considered the most likely to be linked to the Ripper, other brutal killings, particularly a series of eleven murders committed in Whitechapel and Spitalfields between 1888 and 1891, are also believed to have been committed by him.
Extensive newspaper coverage of the crimes generated widespread and enduring international notoriety and, although the murders were never solved, the legends surrounding these crimes became the subject of historical research, folklore and pseudohistory which continue to capture the public imagination to the present day.
Whitechapel, the seamy underbelly of Victorian society, was marked by almost unimaginable poverty, human desperation and crime. The influx of poor Jewish immigrants to the area from Europe, who were “foreign” in their ways and who increased competition for the all-but nonexistent jobs, did not endear them to the local population, which already was notoriously antisemitic, and it is perhaps not surprising that the broad belief was that the Ripper was a Jew. One Jew, John Pizer, who had a reputation for violence against prostitutes and was nicknamed “Leather Apron” from his trade as a bootmaker, was arrested for the murders, but he was released after his alibis were corroborated.
When Constable Alfred Long of the Metropolitan Police Force searched the area near two Ripper murders that took place in the early morning hours of September 30, 1888, he discovered a dirty, bloodstained piece of an apron in the stairwell of a tenement at Goulston Street, which was later confirmed as belonging to one of the victims. Above it was a graffito written in white chalk: “The Juwes [sic] are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren attached a copy of the message to a report to the Home Office (see exhibit) but, fearing massive attacks against Jews and acting with great altruism, Arnold ordered that the writing be erased immediately:
… knowing in consequence of suspicion having fallen upon a Jew named “John Pizer” alias “Leather Apron” having committed a murder in Hanbury Street a short time previously, a strong feeling existed against the Jews generally, and as the Building upon which the writing was found was situated in the midst of a locality inhabited principally by that Sect, I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot and therefore considered it desirable that it should be removed …
Many officers vehemently took issue with Superintendent Thomas Arnold of Whitechapel and Warren’s decision, arguing that the writing was an important part of a crime scene and should have at least been photographed before being erased. Others noted that the handwriting did not match the writing on a correspondence sent to the police by an unknown person claiming to be the Ripper and concluded that the chalk text was a deliberate subterfuge designed to incriminate the Jews and throw the police off the track of the real murderer.
There are many theories regarding who Jack the Ripper might have been. Among the most common suspects is Montague John Druitt, the privileged son of a local surgeon – theorists suggest that he learned the surgical skills evidenced by the Ripper from his father – who killed himself in December 1888 immediately after the Ripper took his final victim. Another prime suspect is George Chapman, who was apprenticed to a surgeon and later studied at a hospital in Warsaw; he poisoned his three common-law wives, and the Ripper murders all took place between the time he left the United States for London and the time he returned there.
Innumerable bizarre theories are still floating around regarding the identity of Jack the Ripper, including one that identifies Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland), who various crackpots claim wrote his diary in purple ink except on days of the Whitechapel murders, when he wrote in black; another that points to British prime minister William Gladstone; and one that names Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father) as the killer. But according to the most contemporary theory, which has seen broad – but by no means universal – acceptance, is that the murders were committed by Aaron Mordke Kosminski (1865-1919), a Jewish barber and hairdresser who emigrated from Poland to England in the 1880s.
As discussed in more detail below, Kosminski was named as the killer by two top Scotland Yard officers involved in the investigation of the Ripper murders; he was followed as a suspect and watched “by day and night” by London CID offers, who described him as “very likely” the murderer; his age and type matched eyewitness reports of the murderer; and he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which many experts, then and now, believe to be a common characteristic of such mass murderers. He lived in the heart of the district where the murders occurred, which was consistent with the belief by the police that the Ripper had to be a local Whitechapel resident, given his apparent ability to disappear immediately after the killings and a thorough knowledge of the Whitechapel area, including its back alleys and hiding places. Most significantly, a 2014 DNA test tied Kosminski directly to one of the Ripper’s victims.
Kosminski, raised by his parents Abram Józef Kosminski, a tailor, and Golda née Lubnowska, worked in a hospital as a hairdresser or orderly before emigrating from Poland to Germany in 1880 or 1881 with his sisters’ families following the April 1881 pogroms after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. They moved to Britain, settling in London sometime in 1881 or 1882, and his mother, who was listed as a widow, had joined them by 1894.
Kosminski worked sporadically as a barber in Whitechapel, an impoverished slum in London’s East End that had become home to many Jewish refugees fleeing economic hardship in Eastern Europe and the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. According to an 1891 report, he “had not attempted any kind of work for years,” and it appears that he was supported by his sisters. Due to his steadily worsening mental condition, he was assigned to a series of short workhouses before being certified insane and being transferred to the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum on February 7, 1891. According to Jacob Cohen, a witness to the certification of his entry who provided basic intake information, Kosminski had threatened “his” sister with a knife (the ambiguous language leaves unclear whether the intended victim was Kosminski’s sister or Cohen’s sister).
Kosminski remained at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum for three years before being admitted to the Leavesden Asylum on April 19, 1894, where he remained for 25 years until his death. Case notes indicate that he had been ill since at least 1885 and that his insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a refusal to wash or bathe, and a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food that had been dropped as litter. His poor diet left him in an emaciated state for many years, and his asylum case notes show that he weighed only 96 pounds in February 1919, a month before he died at age 53 of gangrene of the left leg. He was buried on March 27 at the East Ham Jewish cemetery.
In an 1894 memorandum, Sir Melville Macnaghten, the assistant chief constable of the London Metropolitan Police, names one of the suspects as a Polish Jew of low class called “Kosminski” with no first name. (This omission of a first name remains a source of great frustration among “Ripperologists” – as Jack the Ripper scholars are known – and many scholars find it extremely strange that no reference to Kosminski includes even a first initial.) In this Macnaghten Memorandum, which was discovered in the private papers of his daughter by a television journalist in 1959, he writes that there were strong reasons for suspecting “Kosminski” because he “had a great hatred of women … with strong homicidal tendencies.”
Assistant Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson suggested in 1901 that the police had identified the Ripper, but he never actually named the killer. In Punishing Crime, he wrote that “Jack the Ripper was safely caged in an asylum,” and he repeated this claim in his book, Criminals And Crime (1907). In 1910, he claimed in his memoirs, The Lighter Side of My Official Life, that “’I will merely add that the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer, unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him. In saying that he was a Polish Jew, I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact.”
In notes he wrote in the margin of his presentation copy of Anderson’s memoirs, Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson, who led the Jack the Ripper investigation and reported to Anderson, named this Polish Jew as “Kosminski” – again, with no first name. He added that Kosminski had been watched at his brother’s home in Whitechapel by the police and that he had been taken with his hands tied behind his back to the workhouse and then to Colney Hatch Asylum. However, Swanson erred in one important respect: he wrote that Kosminski died soon after when, in fact, he died in 1919.
Ironically, the only person who may have actually witnessed an assault by the Ripper was a Jew. Israel Schwartz officially testified that shortly after midnight on September 30, 1888, he saw a man stop and speak to a woman, whom he later identified as one of the two Ripper victims that evening. He described the man as being about thirty years old and about five feet five inches and broad-shouldered with a full face, fair complexion, dark hair, and small brown mustache. In his autobiography, Commissioner Robert Anderson claimed that the Ripper had been positively identified by “the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer,” and in marginalia found in his personal copy of Anderson’s book, Swanson wrote that the witness in question was Jewish. Some Ripperologists have concluded that Schwartz was most likely the man to whom they were referring.
Others suggest that Anderson’s eyewitness was a different Jew, Joseph Lawende, who had immigrated from Poland and was married in a London synagogue, an account that is dubious at best. Swanson indicated that the positive identification took place at a police convalescent center in Brighton, which could not have been before March 1890, when the home was first opened; this is at least two years after Lawende allegedly sighted the Ripper in 1888 and stated at the time that he would not be able to identify the murderer again. Moreover, Kosminski was small and of slender build, which contradicted Lawende’s description of the killer as medium build. Adding to the confusion is the fact that Macnaghten stated in his memorandum that “no-one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer.”
Anderson further claimed that although the Ripper had been identified, no prosecution was possible because both the witness (Schwartz or Lawende) and the culprit (Kosminski) were Jews and that Jews were unwilling to testify against their fellow coreligionists. However, in his memoirs, Sir Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police at the time, contemptuously dismissed Anderson’s claim that Jews would not testify against one another and he characterized the allegation as a “reckless accusation” against Jews. Edmund Reid, the initial inspector in charge of the investigation, also challenged Anderson’s opinion.
Smith and Reid may not have been aware of the intricacies of the Jewish law of mesira (literally, to “turn over”), which prohibits a Jew from reporting another Jew to the civil authorities – although, of course, there are important exceptions, interpretations, and caveats (as they say in the vernacular, consult your local Rav). While Anglicized Jews in Great Britain generally ignored the law of mesira, the new and more religiously observant Jewish immigrants viewed the police as fearsome agents of an oppressive government and were reticent to involve other Jews in Gentile legal proceedings.
Kosminski was described as harmless in the asylum, with the only incident of violent behavior in all his years there involving his wielding a chair at an asylum attendant in January 1892. While there, he preferred to speak Yiddish, his native language, and some argue that he would have been unable to persuade English-speaking victims into dark alleyways, which was the Ripper’s modus operandi. On the other hand, the “canonical five” killings ended in 1888 and Kosminski’s movements were not constrained until three years later.
In 1987, author Martin Fido wondered if Anderson’s “Polish Jew” could be the Kosminski who had been mentioned by Macnaghten. He searched asylum records for any inmates named Kosminski, and found only one: Aaron Kosminski, who at the time of the murders lived either on Providence Street or on Greenfield Street, both of which addresses were close to the sites of the murders. The description of Kosminski’s symptoms in the case notes indicates that he had paranoid schizophrenia, and Swanson’s notes match the known details of Aaron Kosminski’s life (except, as mentioned, that the early recorded death does not match our Aaron Kosminski, who lived until 1919).
In Naming Jack The Ripper, British author Russell Edwards identified Kosminski as the Ripper, writing that while he was on a list of police suspects, there never was evidence sufficient to bring him to trial at the time. Edwards purchased a shawl at auction in 2007 said to have been found with Catherine Eddowes, the Ripper’s fourth victim, that had been removed from the crime scene by acting sergeant Amos Simpson. He commissioned Jari Louhelainen, a biochemist at Liverpool John Moores University and a renowned expert in historic DNA analysis, to conduct an independent forensic DNA investigation. On September 7, 2014, Louhelainen announced that he had extracted mitochondrial DNA (the portion of DNA inherited only from one’s mother) from the shawl that matched the DNA of both Eddowes’ line of descendants and Kosminski’s sister’s line of descendants. Declaring that “I’ve got the only piece of forensic evidence in the whole history of the case,” he concluded that the DNA samples proved that Kosminski was “definitely, categorically and absolutely” the person responsible for the Whitechapel murders committed by Jack the Ripper.
Nonetheless, critics challenged Louhelainen’s process and results, including allegations of inaccuracy, problems with the chain of evidence, and questions about the provenance of the shawl, and they scorned him for publishing the information in the general press rather than in a peer-reviewed journal. Professor Alec Jeffreys, the forensic scientist who invented DNA fingerprinting in 1984, initially commented that the find was “an interesting but remarkable claim that needs to be subjected to peer review, with detailed analysis of the provenance of the shawl and the nature of the claimed DNA match with the perpetrator’s descendants and its power of discrimination.” Donald Rumbelow, a former London police officer and crime historian, noted that no shawl was listed by the police among Eddowes’s effects, and mitochondrial DNA expert Peter Gill added that the shawl “is of dubious origin and has been handled by several people who could have shared that mitochondrial DNA profile.”
Moreover, the shawl or other material could have been contaminated before or while DNA was being tested. Hansi Weissensteiner, a DNA expert, also took issue with the mitochondrial DNA analysis, which he said could only reliably show that people, or two DNA samples, are not related: “Based on mitochondrial DNA, one can only exclude a suspect”; in other words, the mitochondrial DNA from the shawl could be from Kosminski, but it could also have come from thousands of others who lived in London at the time.
However, in March 2019, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published a study conducted by scientists at Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Leeds. Using infrared and spectrophotometry technology, they concluded that Louhelainen’s findings were scientifically correct and that the mitochondrial DNA from the shawl matched both that of Eddowes’ and Kosminski’s maternal bloodline. Challenged by critics to publish the genetic sequences of the living relatives of Eddowes and Kosminski, they explained that they are prohibited from doing so pursuant to the Data Protection Act, a British law designed to protect the privacy of individuals.
Finally, another Polish Jew proposed as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders was Aaron Davis Cohen or David Cohen (who was arrested and tried under the former name and incarcerated under the latter name), whose incarceration at the Colony Hatch Lunatic Asylum on December 12, 1888, roughly coincided with the end of the Whitechapel Ripper murders. Records showed that he lived on Lehman Street, where new Jewish immigrants were sheltered, and that he was picked up as a wandering lunatic at age 23. He was a brutally and ruthlessly violent antisocial East End local who manifested destructive tendencies while at the asylum, had to be restrained, and died about a year later. In The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper (1987), Martin Fido theorizes that Cohen, whom he says was Jack the Ripper, was actually Nathan Kaminsky, who the police confused with Aaron Kosminski.
Fido argues that the name “David Cohen” was a generic “John Doe” name used for Jews in the East End with no known identity – sort of like a “hey, buddy” or the “hey, pal” of today – and that the asylum used that name for Kaminsky. Fido stated that he was unable to trace Kaminsky after May 1888; that records of Cohen “coincidentally” began that December; and that police officials had confused the name Kaminsky with Kosminski, resulting in the wrong man becoming a suspect. He suggests that Kaminsky’s/Cohen’s syphilis had not been cured in May 1888 but rather was merely in remission, and that Cohen began to kill prostitutes as an act of revenge because it had affected his brain.
However, Cohen’s death certificate makes no mention of syphilis but gives the cause of death as “exhaustion of mania” with phthisis, a then prevalent form of pulmonary tuberculosis, as a secondary cause. Cohen might have died as an “unknown” as hundreds of people did each year in the late 19th century, which would account for Fido’s inability to find any record of his death in England and Wales. In fact, the only links between Nathan Kaminski and David Cohen are that both were Jewish, both spoke Yiddish, and both were the same age. Moreover, some Ripperologists dismiss Cohen as a likely suspect because his wild and uncontrolled conduct preclude his being the Ripper, who seemed to plan his attacks calmly and cautiously and carried them out quietly and with great control and efficiently.
At the end of the day, although there are arguments that both support and refute the idea that Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper, we may never know for certain. However, he fits virtually everything (except the mistaken account of his year of death) and the weight of evidence – particularly when contrasted with theories involving other suspects – makes him the most likely Ripper.
