Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (31 page)

Aaron Kosminski was placed in a room at the Seaside Home. Israel Schwartz was led into the room by a police officer and confronted with Kosminski. He was then immediately led out of the room and
asked if this was the man he saw attacking Elizabeth Stride on the night of her murder. Alan McCormack was adamant that there was what he described as ‘an unhesitating ID’. After a gap
of ten minutes or so Schwartz was taken into the room again, and again there was a clear affirmation that this was the right man. But then the police asked Schwartz if he would be willing to
testify to the fact, and he refused on the grounds that he could not bear to have it on his conscience that he had sent a fellow Jew to the gallows.

Even though Aaron Kosminski had been clearly identified, the manner in which this identification was made was problematical, because to present it as evidence in court it would have to have been
a full line-up of men from whom Kosminski was chosen. As a result, the police had the moral proof, but the
legal
proof was not good enough, a matter bemoaned by Robert Anderson who later
said in his memoirs that if the British police ‘had powers such as the French police possess, the murderer would have been brought to justice’, meaning that such an identification would
have been sufficient to officially arrest and charge Kosminski under the French legal system. Here, there were strict legal rules: there had to be a line-up.

The police had probably never anticipated Schwartz’s refusal to testify against Kosminski or they would have staged a proper, legally watertight, identification. Alan McCormack stressed to
me that there was no other evidence, and that there was never a conspiracy to keep the facts of the case hidden: the police simply could not proceed without Schwartz. I
believe the fact there was a confrontation and not a line-up is the reason why Jack the Ripper has remained such a hot topic down the years: if Kosminski had been prosecuted and convicted, the
Ripper case would be of interest only to experts studying serial killers, and would occasionally make a chapter in a compilation of historical crimes. It would not have spawned the books, films and
whole Ripper industry that we have today.

Schwartz’s position was invidious. As a Jew himself, he knew the prejudice against his race that was rampant at the time: if the Ripper was Jewish, it would feed into this growing
anti-Semitism. And as far as his own community was concerned, he would possibly have been regarded as a traitor to have stirred up more bad feeling towards them all. He no doubt felt that, as the
police were on to the right man, there would be no more deaths at the hands of this man, so his conscience would be clear on that account. He would not, as Swanson pointed out, have
Kosminski’s death on his mind for the rest of his life. He had helped the police nail their man: as far as he was concerned it was up to them to keep the East End community safe from him.

All criminal prosecutions rely on identifying the culprit. In some cases, it may be possible to establish identification through fingerprints, DNA or other forensic evidence, none of which was
available to the police in 1888. Scotland Yard introduced its first Fingerprint Bureau in 1901. They literally had one eyewitness, who would not testify, and there was no other evidence.

Without a clear identification, everything else they had
against Kosminski was circumstantial, and there was little hope of getting more. His family may well have been
able to help: it is hard to believe they did not at least suspect him. But if Schwartz would not testify against a fellow Jew, the siblings would certainly not testify against their own brother.
Without enough evidence to arrest him and take him before a court, Aaron Kosminski was sent back to the home of his brother Woolf, after which he was watched day and night by the police until he
was incarcerated in the asylum.

But how could a seemingly harmless mental patient like Kosminski be a brutal killer who mutilated prostitutes? There are two examples of potential violence, the first being the
threat against his sister with a knife, the other being an attempt to hit an asylum employee with a chair. Aggressive acts in themselves, but apparent ‘one-offs’ which do not
necessarily give such a violent portrait as the behaviour of somebody like David Cohen, Martin Fido’s preferred suspect, who was also incarcerated in the Colney Hatch Asylum and proved to be
a very difficult and violent patient to contain.

It is probable that Kosminski was schizophrenic. Various different factors contribute to the development of schizophrenia, such as living environment, use of drugs and prenatal stresses, as
well as, scientists today believe, a genetic pre-disposition. Kosminski was born when his mother was forty-five years old and life may have been hard, particularly after the death of Abram
Kosminski when Aaron was at the impressionable age of nine years old. Soon after, Aaron was working in the family business, and some of his close family had already begun to leave Poland for the
safety of London. There must have been a constant feeling of threat and
insecurity among the Jewish population in Poland, and even as a child he would have picked up on the
fears.

Immigration from areas of social adversity has been recognized as a significant factor in the triggering of schizophrenia. Any immigration into a new country and culture raises the incidence of
schizophrenia by four to six times, and it is even higher when immigrants are living, in their host country, in poor social conditions and as a minority group.

The symptoms mentioned in the report by Dr Houchin are typical of schizophrenia. He said that Aaron ‘declares that he is guided and his movements altogether controlled by an instinct that
informs his mind’ and that he knew ‘the movements of all mankind’. These are the sort of delusions often experienced by sufferers from schizophrenia. In the early twentieth
century, psychiatrist Kurt Schneider listed the forms of psychotic symptoms that he thought distinguished schizophrenia from other such disorders. They became known as ‘Schneider’s
first rank symptoms’ and have been described as delusions of being controlled by an external force, the belief that thoughts are being inserted into or withdrawn from the sufferer’s
conscious mind and the belief that their thoughts are being broadcast to other people. Other symptoms, known as ‘negative symptoms’, reveal similarities with Kosminski’s
deterioration while at Colney Hatch and Leavesden; these include blunted emotions, speech problems, asocial behaviour and lack of motivation.

The violence of schizophrenics is something that has been the focus of media attention in modern times, even though schizophrenics are statistically no more violent than the general population.
When they are violent, it usually takes place during ‘episodes’, outside of which the individual may appear to be
normal, and it attracts attention because it
appears, to those who don’t share the fractured delusions of the perpetrator, to be random, and therefore more alarming. Murder victims are overwhelmingly more likely to have been killed by a
close family member or someone who knows them well, but it is the chance meeting with a deranged maniac that makes the headlines and fuels horror movies.

The episodic nature of psychosis is why many extreme serial killers are able to get away with their crimes for long periods, and why even those closest to them are not always aware of what they
are capable of doing when their delusional state takes over. Many notorious killers have been diagnosed with schizophrenia or have shown behaviour that strongly suggests they have it. They include
David Berkowitz, the so-called ‘Son of Sam’, who apparently suffered from auditory hallucinations; Ed Gein, the inspiration for Robert Bloch’s Norman Bates in
Psycho
;
Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ who murdered in response to voices from God telling him to do so; and Mark Chapman, who murdered John Lennon in 1980. Richard Trenton Chase, the
‘Vampire of Sacramento’, killed six people in the space of one month in Sacramento, California, sometimes indulging in necrophilia and cannibalism. He had been diagnosed as suffering
with paranoid schizophrenia and sent to an institution in 1975, but responded so well to treatment that he was not considered a danger to the public and released in 1977 into the care of his
mother. That year, he committed his first murder. There is an echo of Kosminski’s experience, because he, too, despite showing signs of mental illness and later being declared insane, was at
one point returned into the care of his family.

The eruption of schizophrenic episodes and the periods of
calm between them possibly explains why somebody like Aaron Kosminski could appear harmless much of the time
(such as during his court appearance for walking the unmuzzled dog) and yet be capable of terrible violence. The choice of victims all from a certain class of women suggests that he felt compelled
by his delusions to wreak out his fury on them. Prostitutes were all around him on the streets of the East End, and their presence fed these delusions. Later, when he was confined in an asylum, his
delusions were not aggravated by them, which may partly explain his lack of violence once incarcerated. But he was not calm: his notes show that he was ‘at times excited and violent’,
that he had ‘episodes of great excitement’. Of course, in the harsh custody of the asylum attendants, his violence was contained, as it was not when he roamed the streets of the East
End. The description of his behaviour in the scant asylum notes we have is consistent with what would today be diagnosed as schizophrenia.

Most serial murderers can consistently exhibit normal behaviour in certain situations, even in the presence of close family members, and their urge to kill can often lie dormant for many years.
Two examples can be found: Dennis Rader, the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) killer, who had a number of periods when his killing spree paused for some time, on two occasions following the birth of his
children; and Ted Bundy, a notoriously charming and cool character, who had a three-year hiatus from killing between 1975 and 1978.

The onset of schizophrenia typically happens between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, and for young men is in their very early twenties, and follows a (typically) three-year stage where
thoughts become more and more disordered. Aaron Kosminski celebrated his twenty-third birthday in September
1888, at the height of his killing spree, and when he was
admitted to the asylum it was recorded that he had been mentally ill for six years: in other words, since he was twenty.

Although it is invidious to try to diagnose from the patchy information we have, this would appear to be a textbook case. In today’s pharmacological world, anti-psychotic drugs can
suppress the florid symptoms of schizophrenia, but these were not available then, and if his family ever hoped for help managing him, they would have been disappointed: permanent incarceration was
all that was available then.

Schizophrenia if untreated can lead to accelerated physical aging, decline in social skills, poor self care, no motivation, and withdrawal from social contact. It also leads to declining mental
abilities: memory, attention, intelligence. All of this bears out what we know of Aaron’s time in the asylums, when he seems to have withdrawn, both physically and mentally.

My own theory, so far unproven, is that his psychosis may have been triggered by untreated diphtheria. Woolf’s daughter Rachel died from diphtheria at the age of three, the year before the
killings started. Aaron was probably living with Woolf’s family at the time, and if not was certainly in close contact with them. There is, today, a substantial body of evidence associating
schizophrenia with bacterial infections, such as diphtheria. The physical decline Aaron showed during his time in the asylums also correlates with untreated diphtheria. If we ever get the
opportunity to exhume his body, we will, Jari believes, be able to test my theory.

When he died, Aaron Kosminski’s family put a loving headstone on his grave. If they were aware of his earlier killing spree, they must have offered up thanks for his long
incarceration and eventual death, safely away from suspicion and from any provocation to carry on murdering.

Looking hard at his life, I felt satisfied that he was the most likely candidate as the Ripper. We were confident we could isolate the killer’s DNA from the epithelial cells. Now we just
needed the last piece of the puzzle: I needed to find the DNA of Aaron Kosminski, to know that those cells were his.

CHAPTER TWELVE

CATCHING THE RIPPER

W
hen I received news about the isolation of the twelve epithelial cells from the possible semen stains in December 2012, it felt like I’d won
the lottery. At the very beginning, I had hoped to find some missing evidence that would solve the case, but when I bought the shawl, the most I thought could be achieved would be to prove that the
shawl was genuine, that it had been at the scene of Catherine Eddowes’ murder. I never dared to hope that, as well as her DNA, we would also have
his.
Yet here we were, in sight of
the Holy Grail: the final, scientific identification of Jack the Ripper.

We now had samples to extract DNA material from and, luckily, it happened on the first attempt that David Miller made. I was relieved because the work on one vial had taken two months, so if
that had failed, there was the potential for this to drag on for possibly another four months if he had needed to work on the other two vials. But my greatest feeling was one of huge excitement at
what we had. The question was what to do with it? The answer was inevitable: if we had the DNA from the stains on the shawl which I believed were
produced by the killer, we
needed the DNA of the suspect, Aaron Kosminski, to prove I was right in choosing him.

It was a daunting prospect: it had been hard enough trying to work on the family tree of Catherine Eddowes in order to locate a living descendant and it was a lucky break that had taken me to
Karen Miller, and my great good fortune that she had turned out to be such a generous, helpful person.