Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (27 page)

It was strong stuff and upset several people when the memoirs were serialized in
Blackwood’s Magazine
prior to publication, particularly the editor of the
Jewish Chronicle
who said that
Anderson had no proof that the killer was a Jew. Anderson replied to the objection and was unrepentant, arguing that ‘When I
stated that the murderer was a Jew, I was stating a simple matter of fact. It is not a matter of theory. In stating what I do about the Whitechapel Murderer, I am not speaking as an expert in
crime, but as a man who investigated the facts.’

So Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner CID of the Metropolitan police in 1888 and a man who knew the full facts of the Ripper investigation, publicly insisted that the Ripper was a
‘low-class’ (i.e. a poor, lower working-class) Jew, driven insane by ‘unmentionable’ and ‘solitary’ vices and who had been identified by a witness who had
clearly seen him but who had refused to testify or give any further assistance to the authorities.

Anderson’s confident claims were not echoed by all the other officials involved with the case. It was later suggested that Anderson’s opinions were the cloudy recollections of an
elderly man and others have even said they believed that he was lying outright. Anderson was self-serving and boastful at times, but it is unlikely he would come out with blatant lies, considering
his position. He had strong religious principles which would also militate against him lying: since 1860 he had been a devout fundamental Christian and believed in the imminent coming of Christ. He
was the author of innumerable books on religion and interpretation of scripture. His convictions regarding the Ripper did not seem to waver, even in light of strong criticism.

Robert Anderson’s definitive judgement on the outcome of the Ripper case seemed to stand alone until the discovery of a copy of his 1910 memoirs which had once been in the possession of
Chief Inspector Donald Swanson. Swanson was the detective who was pretty much in charge of the
Ripper investigation while Anderson was on sick leave, and consequently it
would be hard to find a better informed source: every shred of evidence, notes of every police interview, every statement given, arrest made and any and all theories were presented to him at the
time. He was a career policeman, like Abberline, who rose through the ranks from being a beat constable, unlike Macnaghten, Anderson and Warren who were recruited at a high level from the world of
the military or the colonies. Well versed in procedure, Swanson would have been closely familiar with every twist and turn in the case, and his opinion on any Ripper-related matter, had he chosen
to write his memoirs (which he did not, unfortunately), would have been of enormous interest. So when this copy of Anderson’s memoirs turned up in the 1980s, riddled with Swanson’s own
annotations written between 1910 and his death in 1924, including a part where he
actually named
Anderson’s Ripper suspect, the revelations were of maximum importance to historians
and researchers.

The book had passed to Swanson’s spinster daughter, Alice, following his death, and when Alice herself died in 1981, it came into the possession of her nephew, Jim Swanson. Despite the
book being in the family for generations, the notations (or ‘marginalia’ as they have since become known) had escaped attention until Jim Swanson acquired the book and his brother,
Donald, noticed the pencilled notes. A story about the marginalia was sold to the
News of the World
in 1981 for £750, but the newspaper never published it: there was no reason given.
This meant that the marginalia languished in relative obscurity, of interest only to experts in the case, until the book was presented to Scotland Yard’s Black Museum in July 2006. When the
press heard about it, it was treated as a
brand-new discovery: the
Daily Telegraph
, for example, used a large photograph of Donald Swanson in old age, with the
headline: ‘Has this man revealed the real Jack the Ripper?’

The significant annotations related to the passage where Anderson claims that the suspect was a male Polish Jew, living in Whitechapel, who had people (probably meaning family or fellow members
of his community) protecting him. The passage ended: ‘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; but he refused to give evidence against him.’ From here, Swanson had written in pencil underneath and in the margin:

The rest of the relevant notes continued in the endpaper of the book and read:

The content of the marginalia was probably the most important discovery since Dan Farson was introduced to Macnaghten’s memorandum in 1959, which
led to Montague Druitt becoming the prime suspect for many years. Here at last was what seemed to be a direct reference to the identity of the Whitechapel murderer, the so-called ‘Jack the
Ripper’, put forward by men who were actually in a position to know the real background story. It is easy to see why Alan McCormack of the Black Museum would claim in our conversations that
Scotland Yard knew who the killer was and always had done. The book with its notes was, in effect, the ‘documentation’ that McCormack had told me about.

As with any important document, there is always the issue of provenance. For the ‘Swanson Marginalia’ it appeared excellent, as the book had remained with Swanson’s immediate
family and descendants. Also, the presence of the notes was not unusual, as Donald Swanson appeared to be a compulsive annotator of books, as could be seen by looking at other volumes in the
family’s possession. What really needed to be confirmed, just to be on the safe side, was whether the notes in Anderson’s book were actually written by Swanson.

Tests were arranged and in 1988, Dr Richard Totty, Assistant Director of the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory, was given a photocopy of the relevant pages along with copies of other known
examples of Swanson’s writing. Dr Totty’s results were a surprise, as he felt that the marginalia had not been written in the same hand as the sample writing. It turned out that this
was because the sample handwriting was not Swanson’s, but was written by a secretary on his behalf and merely bore Swanson’s signature. Replacement samples were provided which were in
Swanson’s actual hand, and Totty confirmed that they matched.

When the copy of Anderson’s book was donated to the Black Museum in July 2006, another set of tests was initiated, again to satisfy curator Alan McCormack that what
they had was bona fide. Using one of Donald Swanson’s notebooks from the family collection for comparison, the analysis was performed by Dr Christopher Davies who at that time was one of the
senior document examiners in the London Laboratory of the Forensic Science Service. In his report, he said:

He concluded that ‘there is strong evidence to support the proposition that Swanson wrote the questioned annotations in the book
The Lighter Side of My Official
Life
.’ But for some, ‘strong evidence’ is not conclusive evidence and the slight
trace of hesitancy by Dr Davies means that, for some Ripper
investigators, the authenticity of these annotations is still in question. They fight their corner in internet forums, with exasperatingly long arguments which are sometimes shut down by
administrators once they become libellous. Several people have been accused of interfering with the document in order to put Kosminski in the frame. The whole debate shows how passions are inflamed
by the Ripper mystery, and the lengths some enthusiasts will go to prove a point.

Eventually, thanks to all this acrimony, a new set of tests was conducted by Dr Davies in 2012, this time with newly found material from the Swanson family collection which had samples of Donald
Swanson’s handwriting at different stages of his life. By this time, the copy of Anderson’s book had been removed from the Black Museum at the suggestion of the family because they felt
there was no point it being displayed in a place where nobody could see it (just as happened with the shawl, which was removed in 1997). Dr Davies’ new report claimed that ‘there is
very strong support for the view that the notes towards the bottom of page 138 in Donald Swanson’s copy of
The Lighter Side of My Official Life
and the notes on the last leaf in this
book were written by Donald Swanson.’ And as for the key phrase ‘Kosminski was the suspect’, Dr Davies answered critics who felt that it had been added on purpose by Jim Swanson
at a later date:

The Swanson marginalia is one of the few artefacts from the Ripper story that has been subjected to physical scientific scrutiny, along with several
Ripper letters, the Maybrick Diary and now, of course, the shawl. It is, I firmly believe, the genuine article, and I think my view is now vindicated. All attempts to rubbish the marginalia have
been refuted by qualified analysis, and therefore I believe we can say that what is contained within it must be considered the important words of an important man involved in the Ripper case.

Around the time that the Anderson book and the Swanson marginalia were in limbo and before much information about them had been published, in 1986–7, freelance writer and broadcaster
Martin Fido was preparing his own study of the Ripper case and, drawing from Anderson’s claims, undertook an extensive trawl through asylum records looking for the suspect. Aware that a
‘Kosminski’ had been put forward by Melville Macnaghten, he found an Aaron Kosminski in the records of Colney Hatch Asylum, where he had been incarcerated in February 1891, a date that
was at odds with Macnaghten’s assertion that he had been ‘removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889’. Fido also felt that Aaron Kosminski was little more than a harmless
imbecile and certainly not the homicidal maniac that the Ripper was meant to be. He also did not die shortly after being sent to Colney Hatch as was claimed in Swanson’s marginalia.

Fido duly picked out another Jewish inmate, David Cohen, who died in October 1889; this man was from Whitechapel and was extremely violent and thus, in Fido’s opinion, fitted the bill
better than Kosminski. But Cohen’s candidacy was not without its problems either: most obviously, the name was wrong. Fido got round this by suggesting that ‘David Cohen’
was perhaps a ‘John Doe’ name, in other words a blanket title given to those eastern Europeans with names that were difficult to pronounce. Also, according to
Swanson, the identification took place at the ‘Seaside Home’, which is popularly believed to refer to the Police Convalescent Seaside Home in Hove on the Sussex coast, near Brighton. As
this establishment opened in 1890, Cohen could not have been identified there as he had died the year before.

Another boost to the case for Kosminski, apart from his presence at Colney Hatch as stated by Swanson, was the reason for his internment – ‘self abuse’ – a very specific
diagnosis which obviously made a direct link with the ‘solitary’ and ‘unmentionable vices’ put down by Anderson and Macnaghten.

It was all enough to confirm to me that Kosminski was the most likely suspect, and so I began to renew my research into his life which I had started in 2007. The most pressing
need was to get a sample of his DNA, to compare it with the shawl.

This was now my biggest task.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WHO WAS AARON KOSMINSKI?

F
rom the moment Alan McCormack uttered those words: ‘We know who the Ripper is. We’ve always known,’ I have felt strongly that
Aaron Kosminski is the right suspect. I’ve looked at all the others, and although there are some discrepancies among the assertions of the police involved in the case, I think the compelling
evidence leads to him. So who is he? What do we know about him?

The answer is that we don’t have a very full picture of this man who is the most famous murderer in the world. Records from the 1880s are shadowy at best, and with a foreign immigrant,
even more so. But we do have an outline of his life.

Soon after I bought the shawl I started the search for him, which led me in 2008 to the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), which are housed in the Farringdon area of London, and are the main
archive for the Greater London area. The archives contain 105 kilometres of documents, maps, books, film, pictures and photographs of London, some of it dating back to 1067.