The Seaside Home: Could Schwartz or Lawende Have Put the Ripper's Neck in a Noose?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Because Anderson was egotistical and full of b-----t

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Would an egotistical man have wanted to have his reputation tarnished by having people coming out of the woodwork and calling him a liar?

[Sunny Delight]

Swanson may have believed Anderson's fantasy, but that belief is being taken by some as corroboration of Anderson's tale, which it is not.

Swanson provided no inside information that would confirm that he had any personal familiarity with the case he was describing.

He did not name the witness, the suspect's brother's name, the street he lived in, nor provide the name of a single person involved in the transportation, identification, or surveillance of Kosminski.

When he does name something - the workhouse - it is wrong.

Most seriously, he claims that the identification of Kosminski coincided with the cessation of the murders, whereas we know that more than a year after the last murder, Kosminski was walking a dog in the City of London.

All manner of excuses are made for Swanson - that he could not be expected to provide such details and that a literal reading of his claim makes it true.

The problem is that Kosminski was free to commit murder for 27 months following the murder of Kelly, but did not do so.

If Anderson and Swanson were aware of that fact, then they must have known that they were accusing an innocent man.

If they did not know, then they are completely unreliable witnesses to what really happened.

You just keep repeating the same things over and over. My opinion is that the ID was nowhere near as definite as Anderson claimed. From what we can discern it would have been decidedly unsatisfactory. However the ID did take place. To argue that it didn't based on the points you have raised is ridiculous.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

What conceivable purpose could Swanson have had in writing his marginalia other than to back up Anderson's account?

And how does he do so?

Like Anderson, he mentions an identification and incarceration, but no dates.

He mentions a workhouse, but it is the wrong one.

He mentions a witness, but does not name him.

He mentions an identification, but does not name anyone present at it other than Kosminski.

He mentions CID surveillance, but does not name anyone in CID.

He mentions the house being watched, but does not mention the name of the street.

He never explains why a trip to the coast was necessary or justified - only that it was difficult.

He never explains how or why a suspect could be taken from London to the coast, allowed to return to his home, and only then taken away with his hands tied behind his back, nor whether he had ever been arrested!

He says the suspect dies about three decades earlier than he did.

He says the identification took place in the Seaside Home, and that the identification coincided with the cessation of the murders.

That is impossible.

If the identification took place in the Seaside Home, then it could not have coincided with the cessation of the murders.

The marginalia are not credible and all the excuses for Swanson's errors, vagueness, and lack of detail on all the important matters cannot make them credible.

[Trevor Marriott]

Why am I?

I simply read what Anderson and Swanson wrote. I see no reason or benefit for them to have lied and the evidence points very strongly to the Marginalia being genuine. Kosminski was a real person. McNaghten mentions him as a suspect.

You, on the other hand, have to assume that Anderson lied for some reason and then that, in a book that was never going to be made public, Swanson then dishonestly (and pointlessly) confirms Anderson’s lie (despite having no way of knowing how many people might emerge to call them both liars). And that MacNaghten simply plucked Kosminski’s name out of thin air.

Its just not credible Trevor.

There was no record to survive because it could not have happened as described in the marginalia, and if Kosminski was identified as being the killer why does MM tend to exonerate him. Swanson, Anderson and MM are clearly not all singing from the same song sheet so how can you rely on with any certainty anything any of the three of them say?

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[Trevor Marriott]

Why would he have lied?

Because Anderson was egotistical and full of b-----t

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[Herlock Sholmes]

Why would he have lied?

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

I think it is obvious that Anderson knew his story was not credible.

He claimed that he tried to obtain a murder conviction of a man who was already permanently incarcerated in a lunatic asylum - a conviction which, as Swanson later elaborated, would have resulted in the lunatic being hanged.

Whether he himself realised his error or someone else had to point it out to him, he then changed his story so that no mention of the incarceration was made.

Anderson must have known that his accusations against the Jews would cause an outcry.

When challenged by Inspector Reid, who pointed out that the idea that the murderer had been Jewish had not been in the minds of the police at the time that the murders were being investigated, Anderson made no response.

Anderson was certainly not a man who was sure of his facts.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Well, you are clearly biased in favour of the fact that the Id did take place as described, despite all the rules of evidence the police should have adopted with regard to ID procedures being ignored.

I have a question for you who do you was involved in the transportation of Kosminski for his day out at the seaside, and who from the police oversaw the ID procedure as described?

I haven’t a clue Trevor. I wasn’t there and no record has survived. It could have been as few as two officers and the staff at The Seaside Home could easily have been told that the ID was from some other crime so they would have had no reason to remember it or mention it in the future.

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Why am I?

I simply read what Anderson and Swanson wrote. I see no reason or benefit for them to have lied and the evidence points very strongly to the Marginalia being genuine. Kosminski was a real person. McNaghten mentions him as a suspect.

You, on the other hand, have to assume that Anderson lied for some reason and then that, in a book that was never going to be made public, Swanson then dishonestly (and pointlessly) confirms Anderson’s lie (despite having no way of knowing how many people might emerge to call them both liars). And that MacNaghten simply plucked Kosminski’s name out of thin air.

Its just not credible Trevor.

[Trevor Marriott]

You and I have gone over this so many times that I’ve lost count Trevor. You keep repeating that people are ‘accepting without question…’ when this very clearly isn’t the case. No one is doing this although it might be suggested that you are in the habit of ‘dismissing without question.” People are looking at the evidence without preconception and discussing what might very well have occurred. You can no more prove that this ID never took place any more than others can prove that it did and you seem unwilling to apply context in that firstly, so many documents haven’t survived, and secondly that it’s perfectly understandable that someone remembering back over 20 years previously might get one or two details wrong (and for all that we know they might simply have been given incorrect information.)

You still want to dismiss on the grounds that no physical evidence of this ID remains to us (apart from the evidence of Anderson and Swanson course - and whatever random police officers that you choose to quote there’s just no getting past the fact that these two were the top two men on the ripper case and were more likely to have access to every thread of information than all of the other officers that you’ve mentioned)

And talking of evidence….the evidence tells us the marginalia is genuine. We have Dr. Davies report which is quite clear on this point. You choose not to accept but again that smacks of you doing so because it doesn’t conform to your own preconception.

I think that you, and not only you, should try and be a little more open-minded in your approaches and you shouldn’t let your personal opinions cloud your judgment on an issue where so much is unknown. It’s simply a fact that you cannot disprove that the ID took place. This doesn’t prove that it did take place of course. We don’t know but we have the two senior officers on the case who tell us that it did. For me, they tend to outweigh the others in your list.

Well, you are clearly biased in favour of the fact that the Id did take place as described, despite all the rules of evidence the police should have adopted with regard to ID procedures being ignored.

I have a question for you who do you was involved in the transportation of Kosminski for his day out at the seaside, and who from the police oversaw the ID procedure as described?

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[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Please see my replies below.

I personally think that the information you refer to was never there in the first place.


I agree - and if there was anything there about Kosminski, it must have been purely circumstantial, as indicated by Macnaghten.


This is the same Sir Robert Anderson who in his book published in 1910 and up until that time had stated on many occasions he knew the identity of the Ripper but didn’t name him


Thanks for providing all the quotes, but is it not the case that until 1910, Anderson made no claim to know the identity of the murderer?
According to Major Griffiths, by 1895 Anderson had no more than a theory and, by way of confirmation, during his interview in 1892 Anderson could do no better than speculate, 'It is impossible to believe [the murders] were acts of a sane man'.

Even in 1908, as you pointed out, he was talking about the murderer not even having been detected.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I personally think that the information you refer to was never there in the first place. There are two sides to this murder investigation, on one side we have some senior officers who were not directly involved in the day-to-day investigation and I will single out Anderson and Swanson who in later years penned in memoirs or newspaper reports misleading details surrounding likely suspects which researchers today are ready to accept without question despite the flaws in their statements/memoirs being highlighted many times.

I think time for some researchers to wake up to reality and accept that all that they have read, and readily accept without question may not be as accurate as they want to believe

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You and I have gone over this so many times that I’ve lost count Trevor. You keep repeating that people are ‘accepting without question…’ when this very clearly isn’t the case. No one is doing this although it might be suggested that you are in the habit of ‘dismissing without question.” People are looking at the evidence without preconception and discussing what might very well have occurred. You can no more prove that this ID never took place any more than others can prove that it did and you seem unwilling to apply context in that firstly, so many documents haven’t survived, and secondly that it’s perfectly understandable that someone remembering back over 20 years previously might get one or two details wrong (and for all that we know they might simply have been given incorrect information.)

You still want to dismiss on the grounds that no physical evidence of this ID remains to us (apart from the evidence of Anderson and Swanson course - and whatever random police officers that you choose to quote there’s just no getting past the fact that these two were the top two men on the ripper case and were more likely to have access to every thread of information than all of the other officers that you’ve mentioned)

And talking of evidence….the evidence tells us the marginalia is genuine. We have Dr. Davies report which is quite clear on this point. You choose not to accept but again that smacks of you doing so because it doesn’t conform to your own preconception.

I think that you, and not only you, should try and be a little more open-minded in your approaches and you shouldn’t let your personal opinions cloud your judgment on an issue where so much is unknown. It’s simply a fact that you cannot disprove that the ID took place. This doesn’t prove that it did take place of course. We don’t know but we have the two senior officers on the case who tell us that it did. For me, they tend to outweigh the others in your list.

[Tom_Wescott]

I am quite sure Smith did not know anything about the identification procedure - because it couldn't have happened!

Lawende's suspect was a man with the appearance of a sailor and a fair moustache.

He was not a Polish Jew.

This is possible, but I prefer a simpler approach that doesn't require setting aside huge chunks of evidence and testimony merely because it's inconvenient. This is how too many Ripper writers and commentators work and I see no fun in it. Best to take it all on board and look at the inconveniences as helpful clues and then construct a scenario in which everything fits together. You get closer to the truth that way.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Trevor Marriott]

If, as an example, Trevor told us that he’d interviewed a Mr X in 1982 but the station had been destroyed by fire and that he no longer had his notebook from that time would be be treating him fairly if we accused him off making it up? And what if, thinking back, he gave a provable error in detail? Would he be a liar or would we be fairer to point out the fallibility or memory or that he might have, either at the time or later, been given a piece of misleading information by a colleague?

In the case in hand we all know that we are dealing with a huge amount of information which no longer exists. How can we possibly express confidence that such corroboration didn’t exist at one time?

I personally think that the information you refer to was never there in the first place. There are two sides to this murder investigation, on one side we have some senior officers who were not directly involved in the day-to-day investigation and I will single out Anderson and Swanson who in later years penned in memoirs or newspaper reports misleading details surrounding likely suspects which researchers today are ready to accept without question despite the flaws in their statements/memoirs being highlighted many times.

On the other side, we have those officers who were actively involved in the day-to-day investigation Abberline,Reid, and Dew who all in later years make no specific mention of any likely suspect and certainly make no mention of any ID parade where the killer was identified. I think researchers should take note that the likes Abberline,Reid and Dew would have been the ones directly involved in an such ID procedure or any arrest of any prime suspect.

I am sure this has been posted before but it is relevant to my post

October 23rd 1888
Sir Robert Anderson, Ass. Comm, Met Police said:
“But that five successive murders should have been committed, without our having the slightest clue of any kind is extraordinary, if not unique, in the annals of crime.”

November 4th 1889
Sir Robert Anderson in the Pall Mall Gazette in an interview with American journalist: “Our failure to find Jack the Ripper as they call him.”
This is the same Sir Robert Anderson who in his book published in 1910 and up until that time had stated on many occasions he knew the identity of the Ripper but didn’t name him

November 1890
James Monro following his resignation as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, November 1890 stated:
“The police had nothing positive in the way of clues about the identity of the Ripper.”

February 15th 1891
Significantly, in the Lloyds Weekly News of February 15th 1891, Sir Edward Bradford, by this time, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, felt convinced from the evidence of previous murders in Whitechapel that the murdered woman (Coles) was a victim of the same killer responsible for the Ripper murders two years previously.
If there had already been a previous positive identification (Kosminski), why would Bradford, who would surely have known about it, have thought the Ripper to be still at large?

In Cassell’s Saturday Journal Chief Inspector Abberline is quoted:

“Theories! We were lost almost in theories; there were so many of them.”

June 1892
Sir Robert Anderson in Cassell's Saturday Journal, 1892 stated:
“The mention of this appalling sequence of still undiscovered crimes.”

February 1893
Eastern Post and Daily Chronicle, Superintendent Thomas Arnold said:
“We had some of the finest men from all parts of London, but all their efforts were useless.”

October 1898
Detective Inspector Sewell on his retirement in 1898 in The East London Advertiser
“Although the identity of the man was never discovered, most of us believed he was a sailor, who came to London on pretty frequent intervals. When the crimes ceased in London, they commenced after a short period abroad, and generally, they were in or near a port”

March 1903
Chief Inspector Abberline now retired and living in Bournemouth in speaking to the Pall Mall Gazette:
“We have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic or anything of that kind.”Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago. It is simple nonsense to talk of the police having proof that the man is dead. I am, and always have been, in the closest touch with Scotland Yard, and it would have been next to impossible for me not to have known all about it. Besides, the authorities would have been only too glad to make an end of such a mystery, if only for their own credit."

September 1908
Speaking retrospectively to the Daily Chronicle Sir Robert Anderson said:
“I told Sir William Harcourt that I could not accept the responsibility for the non-detection of the author of the Ripper crimes.”

April 23rd 1910
Detective Inspector Reid speaking in Lloyds Weekly and The East London Observer
“ Now we have Sir Robert Anderson saying that Jack the Ripper was a Jew, that I challenge him to prove, and what is more it was never suggested at the time of the murders. I challenge anyone to prove that there was a tittle of evidence against man, woman or child in connection with the murders, as no man was ever seen in the company of the women who were found dead.”

East London Observer 1910
“What should we do if it were proved that beyond all doubt Jack the Ripper was dead? We should have to fall back on the big gooseberry or the sea serpent from stock. Some years ago Major Griffiths in his book “Mysteries of Crime and Police” endeavoured to prove that “Jacks” body was found floating in the Thames seven weeks after the last Whitechapel murder on the last day of the year 1888. Considering that there were considered to have been nine murders. I think it is wonderful that the man’s body should have been found in the Thames before the last of the murders was committed

1910
Major Henry Smith, retired City of London Police Commissioner
“The Ripper ...completely beat me and every Police officer in London." and that "...I have no more idea now where he lived than I had twenty years ago."

February 4th 1912
Detective Inspector Reid speaking again in Lloyds Weekly:
“I challenge anyone to produce a tittle of evidence of any kind against anyone. The earth has been raked over, and the seas have been swept, to find this criminal 'Jack the Ripper’, always without success. It still amuses me to read the writings of such men as Dr Anderson, Dr Forbes Winslow, Major Arthur. Griffiths, and many others, all holding different theories, but all of them wrong. I have answered many of them in print, and would only add here that I was on the scene and ought to know.” 1913

Chief Inspector Henry Moore speaking in The Police Review magazine
"Well, so far as I could make out he was a mad foreign sailor, who paid periodical visits to London on board ship. He committed the crimes and then went back to his ship, and remembered nothing about them"

1914
Sir Melville Macnaghten author of the now questionable Macnaghten Memorandum written in 1894 wrote in his 1914 book titled “Days of my years”:
“No light was vouchsafed to us, and after two or three weeks it seemed as if the Muswell Hill murder was going to climb on the shelf of undiscovered crimes alongside Jack the Ripper and the Cafe Royal case of eighteen months before.”

1938
Walter Dew a Whitechapel Detective actively engaged in the investigation of the murders, and would later be instrumental in the arrest of Dr Crippen. In his book titled “I Caught Crippen,” he refers to the Whitechapel murders in a chapter titled “The Hunt for Jack the Ripper” and states

“Since 1888, many people have written on the subject of the Ripper's uncanny escapes, some of them putting forward their own theories. I was on the spot, actively engaged throughout the whole series of crimes. I ought to know something about it. Yet I have to confess I am as mystified now as I was then:
One big question remains to be asked, but, I am afraid, not to be answered. Who was Jack the Ripper?
I was closely associated with most of the murders. Yet I hesitate to express a definite opinion as to whom, or what the man may have been.
He may have been a doctor. He may have been a medical student. He may have been a foreigner. He may even have been a slaughterman, and so on.
Such speculation is little more than childish, for there is no evidence to support one view any more than another

I think its time for some researchers to wake up to reality and accept that all that they have read, and readily accept without question may not be as accurate as they want to believe

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[Herlock Sholmes]

If, as an example, Trevor told us that he’d interviewed a Mr X in 1982 but the station had been destroyed by fire and that he no longer had his notebook from that time would be be treating him fairly if we accused him off making it up? And what if, thinking back, he gave a provable error in detail? Would he be a liar or would we be fairer to point out the fallibility or memory or that he might have, either at the time or later, been given a piece of misleading information by a colleague?

In the case in hand we all know that we are dealing with a huge amount of information which no longer exists. How can we possibly express confidence that such corroboration didn’t exist at one time?

[Herlock Sholmes]

And equally, a lack of corroborating evidence doesn’t mean that an event couldn’t have occurred; this isn’t logical. Of course it’s only reasonable to state that Swanson was only adding comments in the margins of a book. He wasn’t giving, or even intending to give, a chapter and verse description of events, so we cannot claim that just because such details are absent this is somehow proof of a lack of knowledge.

We also have to ask why Anderson would lie and why would Swanson confirm that lie in his jottings in a book that he had no way of knowing would ever see the light of day.