Read Complete History of Jack the Ripper Online
Authors: Philip Sudgen
Soon after this escapade Ostrog turned up in Kent using the names Bertrand Ashley and Ashley Nabokoff. On 19 March 1866 he called at the house of Esther Carpenter in Maidstone under pretence of wishing to speak to a clergyman who lived there and stole a gold watch and other articles. The next day he took lodgings at the Globe Inn, Chatham. There he posed as a Polish exile once more and succeeded in ingratiating himself with the local gentry. One of these was Thomas Ayrton White of the military service at Chatham. When Ostrog visited him on 13 April White unwittingly showed him a gold cross attached to a watch-chain and then left the room. He was only out about five minutes. But the next morning he discovered that the cross had gone. At the end of April Ostrog left the Globe, taking a couple of books belonging to James Burch, the landlord, and took new lodgings at the Bull Inn, Rochester.
As in Tunbridge Wells he made attachments with women. Esther Brenchley of Rochester would testify that he was in the habit of calling at her house for a glass of ale. On 14 April he gave her a gold cross suspiciously like the one Thomas White had lost. He wanted, he said, to give her something ‘in remembrance of him’. He was accompanied by a woman, too, when he took lodgings at the Bull. Because he left this establishment without settling his account George Wilson, the landlord, opened his portmanteau and there found the books stolen from the Globe.
Ostrog was brought to trial at the Kent Summer Assize in Maidstone in July 1866. A mixed jury of foreigners and Englishmen acquitted him of stealing the cross but convicted him of the theft of James Burch’s books and the robbery of Esther Carpenter. These offences were no worse than those he had committed elsewhere. But the judge knew of his previous convictions and was determined to teach him a sharp lesson. He sentenced him to seven years’ penal servitude for each offence, the sentences to run concurrently. Ostrog, reported the local paper, ‘appeared astonished at the severity of the sentence but walked away with a firm step.’
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Unfortunately, Ostrog’s penal servitude record has not survived. All we know is that in 1872 he was transferred to Chatham Prison and that he was released from there on licence on 23 May 1873.
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He was soon up to his old tricks.
On 3 July 1873 he visited Woolwich barracks. There he gained access to the quarters of Captain F. W. Milner and stole a silver soap dish, a shaving pot, a glass toothbrush dish with a silver top and eleven studs worth, in all, about £5. But his greatest depredations were at Eton College. Four days after the Woolwich theft Ostrog took lodgings at the South Western Railway Hotel in Windsor. His gentlemanly appearance and plausible manner soon won him acceptance into polite society and his tales of misfortune elicited widespread sympathy. This time he passed himself off as a surgeon of the Russian navy or Imperial Guard who had been forced to flee his country after killing a man in a duel in St Petersburg. It was from Windsor that he made his visits to Eton.
He pilfered several items from the boys’ apartments there. On 15 July he stole a silver cup valued at £4 10s. out of the room of Alfred Cooke. And on 28 September two silver cups and a coat, together worth £30, from that of John Ellison. Oscar Browning, one of the assistant masters, fell for his stories to the extent of giving him money
and lending him books. Ostrog decamped with nearly a dozen books from his library. The titles are instructive. They included Smith’s
Dictionary of Biography and Mythology
, Smith’s
Dictionary of Geography
, a Spanish dictionary, a work by Darwin and a book of Latin quotations and indicate that Ostrog’s pretensions to a good upbringing and superior education were not entirely unjustified.
In September he was in London, duping Dr Watkins O’Connor of Osnaburgh Terrace, Portland Road, with the same stories. He even inveigled O’Connor into pawning the cup he had stolen from Alfred Cooke. It was, he assured the doctor, a prize he had won at ‘a boat race on the Neva’ and he had erased the names from it to avoid discovery by the Russian detectives.
Ostrog was eventually arrested in October at the Fox and Goose Inn, Burton-on-Trent, by Police Superintendent Thomas Oswald. The incident is unique in Ostrog’s record because it is the only one in which he is known to have resorted to violence. Oswald said later that he found his quarry in the dining room:
Fearing the prisoner [Ostrog] would give some trouble witness [Oswald] threw the knives and forks to another part of the room, and showed him the
Police Gazette
, and charged him with stealing a silver cup at Eton. Prisoner replied that he had never been to Eton in his life, that he was a Swedish doctor and had visited Burton to see the breweries. He was taken into custody and had to be forced into a cab. On alighting at the police station he pulled a revolver out of his pocket, but witness seized it and turned it against him. The weapon had eight chambers and was loaded. He took the prisoner to Windsor and handed him over to the police there.
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Ostrog was tried at the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions held at Aylesbury in January 1874. Convicted of stealing Browning’s books and of receiving, but not stealing, Cooke’s silver cup, he received a sentence of ten years’ penal servitude and seven years’ police supervision. Given the relative pettiness of his crimes it was a hard sentence. But by then Ostrog seems to have given way to resignation and despair. ‘I am sick of my life,’ he protested at one point. ‘Why do you go into the different charges? Why not give me my sentence and let me go? That is all I crave.’ At another, addressing the Duke of Buckingham, who presided at the trial, he declared that
he ‘had taken poison and endeavoured to starve himself to death to no purpose, so that he did not care what became of himself.’
Ostrog was very much an oddity. The
Buckinghamshire Advertiser
, recording his conviction in 1874, put it well:
Ostrog is no ordinary offender, but a man in the prime of life, with a clever head, a good education and polished manners, who would be certain to succeed in almost any honest line of life to which he might devote himself, but who, nevertheless, is an inveterate criminal. With natural and acquired abilities such as few men possess, and having before his eyes a warning in the shape of seven years’ penal servitude to which he had been sentenced at Maidstone for felony, he nevertheless risked his liberty and forfeited a position which he had obtained in respectable society, by pilfering a few books and a silver cup, worth to him about £5. The case is altogether a psychological puzzle. It is impossible to gauge the mental condition of a man of such intellectual and personal advantages, who would run the risk of ten years’ penal servitude for such a miserable stake.
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Ostrog spent the next decade in various government prisons but no detailed record now seems to exist. From Aylesbury Gaol, where he had been held during the trial period, he was sent to Pentonville. Received there on 28 January, he was discharged to Millbank just three days later. Ostrog was held at Millbank from 2 February to 11 September 1874. On the last date he was transferred to Portland Prison and he was still there in 1876 when our records fail. Prison registers describe him as a surgeon and forty years of age at the time of his conviction. His religion is given as Roman Catholic. Although his behaviour is often noted as good it is clear that he could sometimes be troublesome. While at Millbank his name was twice entered in the misconduct book and the Governor of Portland Prison, too, occasionally refers to him being punished in his journals.
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On 28 August 1883 Ostrog was released on licence. Within two months he was wanted by the Metropolitan Police for failing to report to them regularly. They circulated his description in the
Police Gazette
and from it we learn that he was five feet eleven inches tall, had dark-brown hair, grey eyes and a dark complexion, and bore flogging marks on his back. He was considered to be fifty years of age.
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We glimpse no more of Ostrog for four years. Then, on 19 July
1887, we find him at his old trade. At about four in the afternoon George Bigge, a cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, was lying on his bed resting a sprained ankle. The door opened and Ostrog, wearing india-rubber sports shoes, stealthily entered the room. Not noticing Bigge, whose bed was behind the door, he took a metal tankard from the mantelpiece, put it in his bag and went out. Crippled as he was, Bigge followed him and knocked him down. Ostrog abandoned his bag and hat and made off across Woolwich Common. Bigge could pursue him no further. But several other cadets did. And PC Frank Mulvey, on duty on the common at the time, saw the chase and joined in. After running about a mile the constable met some of the cadets, with Ostrog under guard, coming back. ‘I know I have made a mistake,’ Ostrog told Mulvey. ‘I am a gentleman. Don’t press the charge on account of my family, not on account of myself.’
Ostrog, indeed, appears to have been terrified of another long prison sentence. While being taken to the police station he either took poison or pretended to have done so and had to be taken to the Miller Hospital in Greenwich until well enough to go before a magistrate. Then, when being conducted to gaol on remand, he tried to throw himself under a train and nearly dragged a boy to whom he had been handcuffed with him.
These desperate measures availed him little. On 9 August Justice Marsham of Woolwich Police Court committed him to Newgate for trial at the Central Criminal Court. And there, in September, he was convicted under the name of Claude Cayton for stealing the tankard, valued at ten shillings, and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour.
During his various court appearances Ostrog displayed signs of insanity. PC Mulvey didn’t believe them genuine. ‘He was quite sane then [when apprehended],’ he told the Central Criminal Court, ‘but now he is putting it on.’ Dr Herbert Hillier agreed: ‘I was called to see the prisoner at the police station. He showed no signs of insanity then. I saw him again a week afterwards and he was behaving the same as he is now. He is merely shamming.’ Nevertheless, on 26 September, Ostrog was certified insane. And four days later he was transferred from Wandsworth Prison to the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in Tooting. In the admission register he is recorded as a Jewish surgeon. Having served his sentence, he was discharged ‘recovered’ on 10 March 1888.
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It is not quite the last we hear of him. For on 26 October 1888, in the midst of the Ripper affair, his description was published in the
Police Gazette
once more for failing to report. This notice described Ostrog as a Polish Jew and said that he was about fifty-five years of age and ‘generally dressed in a semi-clerical suit’. It concluded with the words: ‘Special attention is called to this dangerous man.’
The
Gazette
’s notice proves that the police were seeking Ostrog at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Were the two events connected? Almost certainly.
It is true that the notice does not mention the murders. But since the police never appear to have possessed any tangible evidence to link Ostrog with the crimes, and since they were probably anxious that their inquiries maintain a low profile, this is scarcely surprising. It is also true that convicts under police supervision were routinely described in the
Gazette
for failure to report. But why, if Ostrog had failed to report, did the police delay more than seven months after his release to advertise their interest in him? And why did they direct ‘special attention’ to a man convicted of nothing more serious than the theft of a metal tankard?
It is highly probable that it
was
the Ripper scare that gave urgency to the need to locate Ostrog. For Macnaghten has it that attempts to establish Ostrog’s whereabouts were linked to the Ripper case, and the timing of the
Gazette
’s notice is surely significant – three weeks after the double event, when the police were under the fiercest pressure to detect the culprit, and hard on the heels of systematic inquiries about patients discharged from lunatic asylums.
Ostrog, then, was the only one of Macnaghten’s three names who actually fell under suspicion before the murders had run their course. Why was he suspected?
The answer to that question is relatively obvious once the state of police knowledge in the aftermath of the double murder is borne in mind. By then two police surgeons – Phillips and Gordon Brown – had testified to a considerable degree of surgical skill and anatomical knowledge on the part of the murderer. And the indiscriminate nature of the injuries inflicted upon Kate Eddowes had strengthened the hand of those who contended that the culprit would prove a lunatic. Sir James Risdon Bennett, President of the Royal College of Physicians, and Doctors L. Forbes Winslow, Edgar Sheppard, Frederick William Blackwell and Gordon Brown had all pointed the finger at a lunatic killer within days of the double murder.
Faced with such an impressive array of expert opinion, the police inevitably continued to accord much priority to suspects in possession of anatomical knowledge and to lunatics. There were detailed inquiries at hospitals and amongst butchers and slaughtermen at this time. Even more significant, at least for any consideration of Ostrog, there were visits to asylums.
Soon after the Chapman murder Dr Winslow had been interviewed at Scotland Yard and had urged the Metropolitan Police to call for returns of lunatics recently escaped or discharged from asylums. Perhaps, when the Eddowes killing brought the City Police into the hunt, he tendered them the same advice. On 2 October, just two days after the murder, he sent the following telegram to Sir James Fraser, Commissioner of the City force: ‘My services are placed at your disposal.’
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We do not know the outcome of Winslow’s attempted intervention. But there is no doubt that the City Police did make such inquiries. For Inspector McWilliam, in his report of 27 October, told the Home Office that he had ‘sent officers to all the lunatic asylums in London to make enquiry respecting persons recently admitted or discharged: many persons being of opinion that these crimes are of too revolting a character to have been committed by a sane person.’
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