Jack the Ripper (6 page)

Shaken by Dr Grapel’s telegram, Dr Stoker refused to sign a death certificate and arranged for tests to be carried out on Maud’s organs. The results showed that both arsenic and antimony, were present in the victim’s remains.
28
On 25 October, Dr Stoker contacted the police, and Detective Inspector George Godley and Inspector William Kemp went to The Crown. Chapman was arrested and that night was charged with the murder of Maud Marsh.
29
It was while the police searched the pub that they found paperwork which clearly showed that George Chapman and Severin Klosowski, despite his protestations,
30
were one and the same man.
31

The bodies of Mrs Spink and Bessie Taylor were exhumed and both contained considerable amounts of antimony. On 31 December Chapman was charged in the name of Severin Klosowski with the murders of Mary Spink and Bessie Taylor.

On 11 February 1903, Chapman was committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court; the trial commenced on 16 March. Sir Edward Carson KC, the Solicitor General, was the prosecuting counsel; Mr Elliott defended Chapman and the judge was Mr Justice Grantham. Chapman pleaded ‘Not guilty’ to all three counts of murder. However, the jury were then instructed to try for the case of the murder of Maud Marsh. Forty-three witnesses gave evidence for the prosecution, including members of all his victims’ families, the family of Lucy Baderski, Annie Chapman, Drs Grapel and Stoker, and of course Detective Inspector Godley and Inspector Kemp.
32

One interesting witness was William Davidson, a chemist from Hastings who testified that on 3 April 1897, George Chapman purchased one ounce of tartar-emetic.
33
Sir Edward Carson had explained to the jury, earlier, that the main ingredient of tartar-emetic was the irritant poison antimony. Tartar-emetic is a white powder which is easily soluble in water and causes vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, weight loss and often a burning sensation in the throat. One ounce of tartar-emetic would have contained at least 146 grains of antimony. The ingestion of two grains can be fatal, while ten to twelve grains would undoubtedly produce death.
34
Mrs Spink’s body contained nearly four grains of antimony, Bessie Taylor’s contained over twenty-nine and Maud Marsh’s body contained just over twenty grains.
35
The fact that Mrs Spink’s body had been in the ground for nearly five years would account for why so little antimony was found, but, in the words of prosecuting counsel, the other two bodies were ‘soaked’ in the poison.

George Chapman in the dock. (
Thomson’s Weekly News
, 21 June, 1930)

Another significant witness was Jessie Toon, who had been employed by Chapman to nurse Maud Marsh for the last twelve days of her life. She testified that Chapman had administered a liquid to Maud on a number of occasions, which he had prepared, always washing the container himself. Towards the end of Maud’s life, Chapman supplied all Maud’s drinking water in a jug and prepared all her food. Chapman told the nurse that it was a mixture of beef tea, egg and milk and he administered it to Maud through a syringe and rubber tube. Not surprisingly, Maud would vomit these preparations back and be in considerable pain. Again, Chapman washed all the feeding apparatus himself. She confirmed that Chapman was becoming very nervous about Mrs Marsh’s presence, advising Toon to be careful what she said to Maud’s mother and to report to him anything that Mrs Marsh said. Toon also described how, on the day of Maud’s death, Chapman gave the victim some brandy and water. On taking a sip Maud cried out, so Toon tasted it herself; she said it tasted as though there was a ‘foreign substance’ in it. She described how this liquid had burnt her lips and she had had to wash her mouth out. Mrs Marsh also testified that after drinking some brandy and soda, which had been given by Chapman, as she sat at her daughter’s bedside, she too was seized with violent stomach pains. Jessie Toon said that Chapman appeared to find this funny and told her, laughing, that ‘The old mother is bad now.’
36

In Mr Justice Grantham’s summing up, he launched a scathing attack on Dr Rogers’ competence, berated the three doctors called to give second opinions in the case of Bessie Taylor and expressed exasperation at the conduct of Dr Stoker. He paid tribute to Mr and Mrs Marsh, Maud’s parents, and said that if it had not been for their actions, the cause of the death of their daughter would not have been established and there could well have been more victims. Dr Grapel faired only a little better in this onslaught, when the judge said, ‘…this is the first time in all these long years that any intelligence has been brought in.’ However, he quite rightly attacked him for not communicating his (correct) diagnosis at once, or returning to the sickbed when there was not a moment to lose, and suggested that his visit had prompted Chapman to administer one more large and fatal dose. The judge was in his stride now and continued his attack on the doctors at Guys Hospital who failed to discover the cause of Maud’s illness, and failed to draw any conclusions when her condition improved whilst in the hospital, but deteriorated when she returned to The Crown.
37
After reviewing the four days of evidence presented before the court, the judge asked the jury to retire and consider their verdict in the case of the murder of Maud Marsh. The jury retired at 5 p.m. and in ten minutes had returned with a verdict of ‘guilty’.
38

After his conviction, Chapman was removed to Wandsworth Prison where he was hung, still proclaiming his innocence, on the morning of 7 April 1903. He was thirty-eight years old.

After Chapman’s conviction, the police reviewed the Jack the Ripper Murders of 1888. Certainly Abberline, from his retirement in Bournemouth, felt strongly that Chapman and the Ripper could be one and the same man and expressed his thoughts in an interview with the
Pall Mall Gazette
. So other than being a convicted killer, what evidence do we have?

The exact date of Chapman’s arrival in London is not known. It has to be after March 1887 (his last payment to the Treasury of the Warsaw Society of Assistant Surgeons). At Chapman’s trial, Mrs Radin (wife of Abraham Radin) says that Klosowski (Chapman) worked for her husband for five months and during that time ‘her baby was ill and he helped her in the treatment of it.’
39
That baby was Solomon Radin, born 26 May 1887.
40
To describe a child as a ‘baby’, it is reasonable to assume that it is under one year old, giving a latest date of arrival as May 1888. We can now say, with confidence, that Chapman was in the East End of London at the time of the Whitechapel Murders.

Chapman’s frequent change of job, and address, make it difficult to decide where he was living in the Autumn of 1888. From the evidence given during his trial and his marriage certificate of 1889, it seems his most likely address was No.126 Cable Street, St George’s-in-the-East. This is well within striking distance of all the Ripper murder sites.

The date when Chapman and Lucy Baderski departed for America is hard to pin down. Their baby son had died in March 1891, and they appear on the census of the 5 April. At Chapman’s trial, Lucy Baderski’s sister testified that Lucy returned from America alone in February 1891, and another child was born on 12 May.
41
This is, of course, at odds with the April 1891 census, which clearly showed that Chapman was present in the UK, and the birth certificate of that second child clearly shows that she was born on 15 May 1892.
42
Therefore, given that this evidence was given some ten years later, I believe that Lucy’s sister was mistaken about the year and that Lucy’s return was indeed in February 1892. However, she did say that Chapman returned from America when the baby was two weeks old, therefore putting his return at the end of May 1892, which is consistent with him registering the baby’s birth himself on 20 June. On cross-examination, she said that the couple had departed for America at ‘Whitsuntide’.
43
Therefore, I believe that Chapman was in America from late May/early June 1891 to late May 1892. A New York prostitute, Carrie Brown, was found murdered and mutilated in a Ripper-style killing, outside the run-down East River Hotel on 24 April 1891.An Algerian was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, this was widely believed to be an unsound conviction and he was released after eleven years. Many have said that this murder could have been the work of George Chapman, but the dates I have outlined above make this unlikely, though not out of the question. However, it would have meant that Chapman only had between 5 (date of the census) and 24 April to depart the UK, sail to New York, select a victim and carry out the murder – so I am inclined to rule out Carrie Brown as being a victim of George Chapman.

The Hanging of George Chapman. (
Illustrated Police News
,18 April, 1903)

However, as well as Chapman being in the locale at the time of the murders of the ‘Canonical 5’, the murder of Martha Tabram (7 August 1888) could well have occurred after Chapman’s arrival in London; and certainly the murders of Annie Farmer (20 November 1888), Rose Mylett (20 December 1888), Elizabeth Jackson (June 1889), Alice Mackenzie (17 July 1889), the Pinchin Street torso (September 1889) and Frances Coles (13 February 1891) occurred when Chapman was in the East End. No further victims have been suggested to have occurred after February 1891, which fits nicely with Chapman’s departure for New York around May/June 1891.

Chapman’s known murderous activities started around May 1897. If Francis Coles was a Chapman victim, then there was an interval of just over six years. This is not without precedent; Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, had an interval of five years and ten months between his first two attacks.

The description given by George Hutchinson of the man seen with Mary Jane Kelly was: 5ft 6in tall, aged around thirty-four, with a dark complexion and a moustache curled at the end. Other than the age, this fits Chapman well. At the time of the Kelly murder, Chapman would have been twenty-three. However, the photograph of Chapman with Bessie Taylor and another with Maud Marsh, when Chapman would have been in his mid-thirties, show a much older looking man. At his trial, Lucy Baderski’s brother and sister both said that Chapman’s appearance had changed very little since the first time they had met him.

It was thought that Jack the Ripper had medical knowledge, particularly with reference to the case of Catherine Eddowes. Chapman undoubtedly had the medical knowledge to remove this poor woman’s kidney and uterus.

All of this is, of course, circumstantial evidence. Is there an argument against Chapman being Jack the Ripper? If Chapman were the Whitechapel murderer, he would have changed from murdering prostitutes, who were probably strangers to him, to murdering women from an entirely ‘respectable’ class who were known – indeed were close – to him. He would have changed from cutting throats and savagely quick and highly violent deaths – each one more vicious than the last – to the slow, drip-drip, long, drawn-out deaths that antimony produces. However, Abberline addressed that very point in the
Pall Mall Gazette
interview, when he said, ‘…incentive changes, but fiendishness is not eradicated. The victims too, you will notice, continue to be women; but they were of different classes, and obviously call for different methods of despatch.’ John Douglas, of the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI, says on his website that serial murders generally surface in their mid to late twenties (Chapman would have been nearly twenty-four during the Autumn of Terror). He would argue that Chapman did not start killing when he was in his mid-thirties; it is likely he would have started about ten years earlier. In Douglas’s opinion, experience will bring sophistication to a multiple killer’s methods, and this is certainly a description that can be applied to Chapman. He was clearly an intelligent man and was on a learning curve.

On balance then, was this man Jack the Ripper? Unlike most other suggested subjects, he is a known killer, living in the right place at the right time. So, yes ladies and gentlemen, I offer you Severin Klosowski, aka George Chapman, as Jack the Ripper.