Did the Seaside Home ID happen?

[Jonathan H]

The trouble is only Anderson came out and told this tale.

Swanson kept it to himself.

Macnaghten denied the identification was true at all.

Echoed by Smith and Reid, and earlier Abberline.

[PaulB]

The trouble is only Anderson came out and told this tale.

Swanson kept it to himself.

Macnaghten denied the identification was true at all.

Echoed by Smith and Reid, and earlier Abberline.

Where did Macnaghten deny that the identification was true?

[Jonathan H]

Macnaghten backed way from it via Sims in 1907, in 1910 had Sims call Anderson a liar about it, and in his 1914 memoirs he denied it completely--and drops the Polish suspect as nothing worth writing about at all.

So he doesn't.

[Jonathan H]

Macnaghten's memoirs are, to some extent, written with the intent of debunking Anderson's of four years previous (in which Mac had been shockingly dismissed as a coward, albeit un-named), specifically on the Ripper.

"Laying the Ghost ..." is the anti-Anderson account on all the essentials: the Ripper was a Gentile, he had not been detained in a madhouse, he was unknown for years--so we, as in Anderson, were chasing a phantom for years--and there was only one witness and he saw nothing satisfactory (He also uses his account of the Beck case to imply that Anderson is a desperate fool for relying on a single witness).

And of course Macnaghten implies that he laid to rest this ghost, not anybody else at the Yard.

These two guys detested each other, and Macnaghten went Anderson one better by airbrushing his ex-boss out of existence altogether.

[Harry D]

The trouble is only Anderson came out and told this tale.

Or that Anderson was the only one whose ego got the better of him.

[Chris]

I was merely pointing out the lack of certainty, upon which statements of fact are being made.

Yes, it's fair enough to point that out, but I think some people get a bit carried away on the distinction between just "Kosminski" and "Aaron Kozminski".

(Note that I didn't deploy my strongest evidence, which is that the likelihood of a chance match between the DNA on the shawl and Aaron Kozminski's is smaller than the reciprocal of the number of atoms in this and all the other parallel universes put together. Full details to come in the paperback edition.)

[PaulB]

Macnaghten's memoirs are, to some extent, written with the intent of debunking Anderson's of four years previous (in which Mac had been shockingly dismissed as a coward, albeit un-named), specifically on the Ripper.

"Laying the Ghost ..." is the anti-Anderson account on all the essentials: the Ripper was a Gentile, he had not been detained in a madhouse, he was unknown for years--so we, as in Anderson, were chasing a phantom for years--and there was only one witness and he saw nothing satisfactory (He also uses his account of the Beck case to imply that Anderson is a desperate fool for relying on a single witness).

And of course Macnaghten implies that he laid to rest this ghost, not anybody else at the Yard.

These two guys detested each other, and Macnaghten went Anderson one better by airbrushing his ex-boss out of existence altogether.

Ah, so Macnaghten didn't in fact deny that the identification had taken place.

[Batman]

If both Anderson and Swanson are getting some of their facts incorrect, then it may be the wrong assumption to say Swanson was once directly involved somehow. Swanson comes with the sort of qualifications as to be the man whom everything JtR related went through... but in Met jurisdiction. What about City jurisdiction? Was he kept informed on everything they did also in connection to the case? Eddowes was murdered in City jurisdiction and Lawende is the City witness, not the Mets.

There seems to be a strong desire to retain Lawende as the witness and not Schwartz but if not Schwartz then I ask, why not drop Swanson also and look at this from a City perspective. Same goes for Anderson and Macnaughton, the other AC of the Met police. This is all Met sources discussing a City police witness. So are they not discussing a city police case?

Could the City have used Lawende to ID someone and we are hearing the story being passed to the Met police who aren't fully informed?

[Errata]

It's possible to determine where conflation or error is most likely in the Swanson marginalia. I don't know if it would help the argument or not, and I don't know if people would trust a sociological process, but if Swanson gt something wrong, we can figure out what it most likely is.

We make the assumption that a person who writes an error, or who speaks an error believes that error to be the truth. It's not at all true. A person can associate one event with another in error a single time, and then wonder why on earth they wrote that if they ever bothered to reread what they write. And in this case it seems unlikely Swanson would have reread his notes. Had they been important to him they wouldn't have been scribbled in a book, and the only other way to reread them would be because he wanted to read Anderson's book again, which given Anderson's book seems pretty unlikely.

[pinkmoon]

I think all this tells us is that the police didnt really have anything on Kosminski but because they had nothing else to look at they paid him some attention if he hadn't picked up that knife two years after the last murder they probley wouldn't have looked at him in the first place.

[John G]

I think the police were totally desperate. I mean, why else would they consider Kosminski such a good suspect, and Lawende an ideal witness?

[pinkmoon]

I think the police were totally desperate. I mean, why else would they consider Kosminki such a good suspect, and Lawende an ideal witness?

When you have no real suspect then anything no matter how remote must look good.

[John G]

When you have no real suspect then anything no matter how remote must look good.

Absolutely. I think that at the very highest level the police simply didn't want to admit that they'd failed. Abberliine was no different with his equally misguided belief that Chapman was JtR. What I do find a little odd is that they also failed to find the Torso Killer, and they must have felt totally humiliated by the Scotland Yard torso discovery. However, there seems to be little evidence that they were anything like as concerned about their failure to bring this killer to justice, or to even identify any suspects.

[Jonathan H]

I think that Macnaghten believed, rightly or wrongly, that Joseph Lawende had seen Druitt, and he subsequently went to great lengths to bury that fact.

The notion that all the police failed to identify the Ripper is very contestable. Both Macnaghten and Anderson apparently believed the fiend to be a madman who was deceased--but only one of those men actually were in their grave.

Why can't some in RipperLand ever contemplate that Macnaghten knew what he was talking about?

To PaulB

Of course, because Mac knew about the positive identification of a prime Ripper suspect by a Jewish witness that, frustratingly, came to nothing, e.g. Lawende and Grant in 1895. Very shortly after that Anderson is bragging to Major Griffiths that he has a very good theory that the correct man is locked up in an asylum. I don't think this is a coincidence.

I argue that the evolution of the "Seaside Home" legend went something like this.

Macnaghten knew about the failed identification of Sadler by Lawende and the positive identification by Lawende of Grant (why wouldn't he? He was there for both).

These two events lie behind Anderson's unprecedented footnote in the 1910 magazine version, an honest mix up by a failing memory.

Between Feb 18th and March 1st 1891, Macnaghten had seen photos of Montague Druitt and knew instantly that they matched what Lawende had testified to--or at least he believed they did.

In 1898 Mac wanted to elevate the minor suspect, the local Pole, and did so by disseminating to the public that he might have been seen at the Eddowes murder scene by a beat cop. He reversed the ethnicity of witness and suspect, and thus in one stroke eliminated both Lawende and Druitt.

In 1907, via Sims, Macnaghten began to pull back from this semi-fictionalized event. Sims now claimed that the cop had later been to some kind of confrontation with the suspect and failed to identify him. Critically Sims has the Bobbie seeing the murderer exiting the crime scene and then stumbling upon the vicitm's remains--a variation of PC Thompson and Frances Coles.

I think that Anderson read or learned of this 1907 account and it was at this moment that his crumbling syanpses reassembled a multitude of data between 1888 and 1895, out of which sprang his uncooperative Jewish witness and the Seaside Home. Anderson did recall three aspects quite correctly: the witness was not a Gentile and he was not a cop, and the susepct's name was "Kosminski"--no other names, just as in Mac's Report(s). The rest of what he recalled was a train wreck, transcribed by Swanson, one that, typically, absolved Anderson of blame. A Jewish witness had never confronted Aaron Kosminski; there were other 'Jack' murders after Kelly; and the Polish man was not deceased in, it implies, early 1889 (in fact was still alive as Swasnon made his annotations).

In 1914 Macnaghten, still committed to his beat cop subterfuge, nonetheless conceded that the witness at the Eddowes' murder--actually Lawende--had seen the murderer, and had seen him before the crime took place. That's a match.

[Errata]

I think that Anderson read or learned of this 1907 account and it was at this moment that his crumbling syanpses reassembled a multitude of data between 1888 and 1895, out of which sprang his uncooperative Jewish witness and the Seaside Home. Anderson did recall three aspects quite correctly: the witness was not a Gentile and he was not a cop, and the susepct's name was "Kosminski"--no other names, just as in Mac's Report(s). The rest of what he recalled was a train wreck, transcribed by Swanson, one that, typically, absolved Anderson of blame. A Jewish witness had never confronted Aaron Kosminski; there were other 'Jack' murders after Kelly; and the Polish man was not deceased in, it implies, early 1889 (in fact was still alive as Swasnon made his annotations).

In 1914 Macnaghten, still committed to his beat cop subterfuge, nonetheless conceded that the witness at the Eddowes' murder--actually Lawende--had seen the murderer, and had seen him before the crime took place. That's a match.

I'm sort of curious why you would ascribe error to malice or incompetence? They way we ask our memory to work is not at all how it works. And it is a fundamental truth in the memory business that after just a day, any account anyone gives from memory is flawed in some way. And the more time passes, the more likely you are to have a catastrophic fault in recall. And ironically a series of events that affects you not in the slightest (say, a bunch of factoids about the sinking of the Titanic) are more likely to be remembered accurately than any event that inspired an emotional reaction. So if you were to be asked about a personal event such as the birth of your first child or losing a job, you have a 50% shot of relating a piece of information that is absolutely incorrect in every way. And presumably your neurons are fine.

It's useful to try and figure out if something was said that was untrue. I can guarantee you something was. But there is little point in trying to assign a reason for the error if you don't understand how memory works. You cannot blame a man for doing something badly that every human does badly. It's like calling a man an idiot for not being able to fly.

The fundamental error in believing the accounts of those who were there at the time is not that they might have been biased or morally suspect. The error is that believing any remembered account is uncompromised and true. It never is. Not with Anderson, not with your grandmother, not with Mother Theresa. And the more emotional or referential context there is in the memory, the more likely it has been altered in our own minds.