felidae 6
11th July 2006, 10:43 PM
I had always thought that David Cohen, aka what ever his real name is, had done the murders mainly because he had gone into the mental hospital and it seemed the murders stopped. I thought it was because the police may have been getting closer to him that he did this to protect himself.
am i way off base? or do I have him mixed up with someone else?
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dannorder
12th July 2006, 12:27 AM
am i way off base? or do I have him mixed up with someone else?
A number of people ended up in asylums, committed suicide, moved elsewhere or so forth shortly after the murders ceased (using a quite generously vague definition of "shortly after" and counting from whichever murder you choose as being the Ripper's last). That alone clearly does not make any single one of them a killer, and the real killer may not even fit into that criteria.
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felidae 6
12th July 2006, 05:31 PM
ohh... i thought when dan cohen went in the murders ended.. apparently i'm missing a lot of something.. can you point me in the right direction to get caught up?
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dannorder
12th July 2006, 07:54 PM
ohh... i thought when dan cohen went in the murders ended..
And when did the murders end? The police investigated a number of murders after Mary Kelly was killed over the space of several years.
Not to mention that there have been lots of serial killer cases where the murders had ended or the police only thought they had and the killer was alive, well, not locked up and still living in the area, just no longer killing for whatever reason.
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robert
12th July 2006, 10:40 PM
Hi Felidae
Fido's book is a good thing to read
Robert
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felidae 6
12th July 2006, 10:52 PM
thank you robert! i'll start there!
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caz the cleaner
26th July 2006, 05:47 PM
In the Jack the Ripper A-Z bY pAUL Begg,David Cohens full name is Aaron Davies Cohen and was born in 1865,i thought it was a big coincidence that his first name was Aaron,so i naturally assumed he and Aaron Kosminski were one and the same,especially when they are born the same year.But cosidering they die years apart they cant be,its very baffling.And what is also strange is that there is a description of David Cohens appearance,who died in 1889 and yet there is no description of Aaron Kosminski who died in 1919,if he was a top Ripper suspect you would have thought there would be a description of him some where.
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JonnyKoala
1st August 2006, 10:19 PM
This is my first post on here after years of lurking, book reading and study of this subject.
I must be honest that after studying each of the major suspects, I've got the feeling (which I'm sure everyone else has had at some time) that "this might actually be the guy". However, there is always counter evidence which almost certainly rules them out when looked into at greater detail.
I'm still leaning towards the feeling that "Jack" was an average Mr Nobody who was just too mundane to stand out from the crowd. If we were told his name today, we probably would never have heard of him. (I can imagine a mild mannered, clever but boring and inadequate bloke with a name like Arthur Tiddlewink, who put an extra valium in his wife's cocoa and then sneaked out of his marital home in the early hours to get his kicks before unassumingly sneaking back and into bed without ever being missed.)
However, out of all the popular suspects listed here and throughout Ripper history, there is one character that sticks out more than most to me and that is David Cohen. He still fits in with the Mr Average philisophy - the fact he is listed as "David Cohen" is like putting a file on the shelf with the label of "miscellaneous". Looking at the facts - he's a flipping good fit:
1. We know he would have been in the right age range to be a serial killer. 2. We know he was suffering from mental illness.
3. We know he was taken off the streets after the murders ended and died shortly after (something that the police alluded to).
4. He was a Polish Jew so would almost certainly been "quietly locked away" and hushed up to avoid anti-semitic rioting/murders.
5. For whatever reasons, many people including Swanson thought that the killer (or prime suspect) was a Polish Jew by the name of Aaron who was locked up shortly after the murders stopped. I'm sure there's a good chance that these people mixed up / assumed it was Kosminski because he was a raving nutter who trawled the gutters and fitted the details.
My gut feeling is that if it was one of the famous suspects then David Cohen fits the bill. When Kosminski was apparently ID'd by a witness who wouldn't testify - are we sure this was Kosminski and not this other Polish Jew called Aaron? Communication can be bad enough in this day and age, but must have been a damn site worse in the 1880's. I for one, think that a foreign raving looney who stood out from the crowd would have been a popular public suspect in those days, but feel that Aaron Kosminski wasn't capable of sexually driven serial killing.
Would be interested in your opinions.
________________________________________
dannorder
2nd August 2006, 12:59 AM
4. He was a Polish Jew so would almost certainly been "quietly locked away" and hushed up to avoid anti-semitic rioting/murders.
I wonder where this idea came from that people keep bringing it up lately? There's no evidence that anyone would have hushed up the capture of Jack the Ripper, Jewish or otherwise, if they really had evidence that they had gotten the right person.
5. For whatever reasons, many people including Swanson thought that the killer (or prime suspect) was a Polish Jew by the name of Aaron who was locked up shortly after the murders stopped.
There is no contemporary reference to the name "Aaron," not in Swanson's notes nor in Macnaghten's memorandum.
________________________________________
How Brown
2nd August 2006, 01:18 AM
Mr.Koala...
Kosminski was not locked away immediately after the last Canonical murder.
Dan:
The argument that it would be impossible to convict Kosminski might play a part in why some feel a "coverup" occurred. Of course,no such thing is known to have happened as you stated.
________________________________________
Magpie
2nd August 2006, 02:46 AM
I wonder where this idea came from that people keep bringing it up lately? There's no evidence that anyone would have hushed up the capture of Jack the Ripper, Jewish or otherwise, if they really had evidence that they had gotten the right person.
I agree with that totally. I sincerely doubt anyone would have taken the responsibility for suppressing the fact that Jack the Ripper had been caught. It makes no sense with the bashing the police and Home Office were taking.
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JonnyKoala
2nd August 2006, 02:49 PM
But what if the police weren't sure they had the right man? Cohen seems to have been admitted after the last canonical murder even if Kosminski wasn't.
Perhaps the murders stopped, the police weren't sure why but knew that Colney Hatch contained some possible suspects, and with the apparent lack of communication Cohen (Kaminski?) was mixed up with Kosminski? And what about the Aaron Davies Cohen mentioned as possibly being David Cohen?
It's all speculation, and rumours but then 130 years later it's all we have to go on with the lack of solid evidence, and we know that the 2 police forces of the day didn't exactly work well together for most of the case.
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JonnyKoala
2nd August 2006, 03:00 PM
Also, serial killers (and serial offenders in general) are quite cunning have a tendency to change their names quite often and this even confuses the police and computer database sytems of our age, let alone the cops of the century before last. I seem to remember no one putting two and two together when Ian Huntley changed his name/address and applied for a job in a school after being logged on computer as a sex offender...
David Cohen / Aaron Davies Cohen / Nathan Kaminski / Aaron Kosminski. If all these names were possibly around at the time, the police wouldn't have had a clue who was who, and 5 years later might just resign themselves to the fact that the guy was probably dead - case closed. Some would no doubt say that Aaron Kosminski was a nutter and therefore it must have been him.
It seems to have been well-recorded that there was a lot of anti-semitic feeling in the East End in those days (why else wash down the graffiti before the locals saw it?), and possibly declaring that Jack had been caught and was a Jew might have caused some big problems in the East End, if they weren't 100% sure. Can you imagine if they did that, caused some riots, and then the murders started again and it was later found out that the police blamed a Jew but it wasn't. Ouch.
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fido
28th August 2006, 09:47 PM
Your thinking seems to me eminently sensible, Jonny K (surprise! surprise!) Cohen is the ONLY Jewish patient from Whitechapel admitted at a time that coincides with the ending of the murders, and the ONLY Jewish patient to die of anything but old age between 1888 and 1892. The Jewish patient from Whitechapel admitted in the spring of 1889 (when Macnaghten said Kosminski was incarcerated) was clearly not the Ripper: he was identified by his wife to whom he was the real threat.
I have to say that if I thought Anderson had really known who Aaron Kosminski was and thought he was the murderer, I should conclude at once that Anderson didn't know his coccyx from his humerus and wasn't worth paying any attention to!
I don't think anyone seriously suggests that the police hushed up the finding of the Ripper because he was Jewish. They hushed up the fact that they were still looking for a Jewish suspect while the murders were going on, and it's my belief they used the wrong identification of Pizer as Leather Apron to suppress the dangers of antiSemitic rioting. But if Anderson's serialized implication is corect, they didn't give out the identity of Anderson's suspect because he was already certified insane before he was identified. It would be quite improper to release the name of a suspect who couldn't have his day in court. Note that they have still not released the name of the suspect who committed suicide and Du Rose avers they were sure was the 'nudes-in-the-Thames' murderer or Jack the Stripper of the 1960s. (Yes, i know it's recently been indicated that Du Rose was probably wrong. But Scotland Yard has still never released the name).
All the best,
Martin F
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Leather_Apron
16th September 2007, 10:04 AM
Well heres Mr Fido right here saying the same thing I suspected!
So perhaps Im not as dumb as some people think.
The whole Pizer thing just dont seem right to me unless Pizer was pretending He was Leather Apron. Then it seems to me the story makes sense.
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Grey Hunter
16th September 2007, 11:05 AM
"...After a stranger has gone over it [Whitechapel] he takes a much more lenient view of our failure to find Jack the Ripper, as they call him, than he did before." - Dr. Robert Anderson, August, 1889.
________________________________________
Grey Hunter
16th September 2007, 11:27 AM
I don't think anyone seriously suggests that the police hushed up the finding of the Ripper because he was Jewish. They hushed up the fact that they were still looking for a Jewish suspect while the murders were going on, and it's my belief they used the wrong identification of Pizer as Leather Apron to suppress the dangers of antiSemitic rioting. But if Anderson's serialized implication is corect, they didn't give out the identity of Anderson's suspect because he was already certified insane before he was identified. It would be quite improper to release the name of a suspect who couldn't have his day in court. Note that they have still not released the name of the suspect who committed suicide and Du Rose avers they were sure was the 'nudes-in-the-Thames' murderer or Jack the Stripper of the 1960s. (Yes, i know it's recently been indicated that Du Rose was probably wrong. But Scotland Yard has still never released the name).
All the best,
Martin F
It's all very well suggesting that the police suppressed information with regard to the public and did not release identities of suspects. However, it's a very different thing to suggest that such information was also suppressed in regard to official internal police reports and memos. A thorough reading of the surviving official records shows no evidence whatsoever of any such suppression and a reading of the below extract from the 7 September 1888 report by Inspector Helson, the J Division Local Inspector, clearly shows that the police knew Pizer as 'Leather Apron' - 'bending' of these official records seems to become a necessity for anyone pushing their own favoured suspect into the frame -
8636
[MEPO 3/140 f 238]
________________________________________
Mishter Lusk
12th January 2008, 02:54 AM
Not to mention that there have been lots of serial killer cases where the murders had ended or the police only thought they had and the killer was alive, well, not locked up and still living in the area, just no longer killing for whatever reason.
Name a few!![Smile](https://forum.casebook.org/core/images/smilies/smile.png)
Mishter Lusk
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dannorder
12th January 2008, 09:02 PM
How many are a few? The Green River Killer (Gary Ridgway) and BTK (Dennis Rader) are certainly the most widely-publicized, but there are others too.
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Mishter Lusk
12th January 2008, 10:31 PM
Thanks for the reply. While I agree that Ridgway did dramtically reduce his number of kills compared to the early eighties I believe he still killed a few in the late eighties and in the nineties. But not that many relatively speaking.
As for Rader well yeah he pretty much did stop.
Interesting to note both these guys had family commitments
But although I'm not a complete expert on serial killers aren't these guys pretty much the exception?
Notwithstanding, I would say these guys have different profiles than JTR as I don't think JTR tortured victims as in the case of BTK, or had any sexual involvement as per Ridgway and BTK.
Would be interesting to know if there was a ripper/mutilation type murderer who stopped. Jeffrey Dahmer pretty much kept going till he got caught.
11th July 2006, 10:43 PM
I had always thought that David Cohen, aka what ever his real name is, had done the murders mainly because he had gone into the mental hospital and it seemed the murders stopped. I thought it was because the police may have been getting closer to him that he did this to protect himself.
am i way off base? or do I have him mixed up with someone else?
________________________________________
dannorder
12th July 2006, 12:27 AM
am i way off base? or do I have him mixed up with someone else?
A number of people ended up in asylums, committed suicide, moved elsewhere or so forth shortly after the murders ceased (using a quite generously vague definition of "shortly after" and counting from whichever murder you choose as being the Ripper's last). That alone clearly does not make any single one of them a killer, and the real killer may not even fit into that criteria.
________________________________________
felidae 6
12th July 2006, 05:31 PM
ohh... i thought when dan cohen went in the murders ended.. apparently i'm missing a lot of something.. can you point me in the right direction to get caught up?
________________________________________
dannorder
12th July 2006, 07:54 PM
ohh... i thought when dan cohen went in the murders ended..
And when did the murders end? The police investigated a number of murders after Mary Kelly was killed over the space of several years.
Not to mention that there have been lots of serial killer cases where the murders had ended or the police only thought they had and the killer was alive, well, not locked up and still living in the area, just no longer killing for whatever reason.
________________________________________
robert
12th July 2006, 10:40 PM
Hi Felidae
Fido's book is a good thing to read
Robert
________________________________________
felidae 6
12th July 2006, 10:52 PM
thank you robert! i'll start there!
________________________________________
caz the cleaner
26th July 2006, 05:47 PM
In the Jack the Ripper A-Z bY pAUL Begg,David Cohens full name is Aaron Davies Cohen and was born in 1865,i thought it was a big coincidence that his first name was Aaron,so i naturally assumed he and Aaron Kosminski were one and the same,especially when they are born the same year.But cosidering they die years apart they cant be,its very baffling.And what is also strange is that there is a description of David Cohens appearance,who died in 1889 and yet there is no description of Aaron Kosminski who died in 1919,if he was a top Ripper suspect you would have thought there would be a description of him some where.
________________________________________
JonnyKoala
1st August 2006, 10:19 PM
This is my first post on here after years of lurking, book reading and study of this subject.
I must be honest that after studying each of the major suspects, I've got the feeling (which I'm sure everyone else has had at some time) that "this might actually be the guy". However, there is always counter evidence which almost certainly rules them out when looked into at greater detail.
I'm still leaning towards the feeling that "Jack" was an average Mr Nobody who was just too mundane to stand out from the crowd. If we were told his name today, we probably would never have heard of him. (I can imagine a mild mannered, clever but boring and inadequate bloke with a name like Arthur Tiddlewink, who put an extra valium in his wife's cocoa and then sneaked out of his marital home in the early hours to get his kicks before unassumingly sneaking back and into bed without ever being missed.)
However, out of all the popular suspects listed here and throughout Ripper history, there is one character that sticks out more than most to me and that is David Cohen. He still fits in with the Mr Average philisophy - the fact he is listed as "David Cohen" is like putting a file on the shelf with the label of "miscellaneous". Looking at the facts - he's a flipping good fit:
1. We know he would have been in the right age range to be a serial killer. 2. We know he was suffering from mental illness.
3. We know he was taken off the streets after the murders ended and died shortly after (something that the police alluded to).
4. He was a Polish Jew so would almost certainly been "quietly locked away" and hushed up to avoid anti-semitic rioting/murders.
5. For whatever reasons, many people including Swanson thought that the killer (or prime suspect) was a Polish Jew by the name of Aaron who was locked up shortly after the murders stopped. I'm sure there's a good chance that these people mixed up / assumed it was Kosminski because he was a raving nutter who trawled the gutters and fitted the details.
My gut feeling is that if it was one of the famous suspects then David Cohen fits the bill. When Kosminski was apparently ID'd by a witness who wouldn't testify - are we sure this was Kosminski and not this other Polish Jew called Aaron? Communication can be bad enough in this day and age, but must have been a damn site worse in the 1880's. I for one, think that a foreign raving looney who stood out from the crowd would have been a popular public suspect in those days, but feel that Aaron Kosminski wasn't capable of sexually driven serial killing.
Would be interested in your opinions.
________________________________________
dannorder
2nd August 2006, 12:59 AM
4. He was a Polish Jew so would almost certainly been "quietly locked away" and hushed up to avoid anti-semitic rioting/murders.
I wonder where this idea came from that people keep bringing it up lately? There's no evidence that anyone would have hushed up the capture of Jack the Ripper, Jewish or otherwise, if they really had evidence that they had gotten the right person.
5. For whatever reasons, many people including Swanson thought that the killer (or prime suspect) was a Polish Jew by the name of Aaron who was locked up shortly after the murders stopped.
There is no contemporary reference to the name "Aaron," not in Swanson's notes nor in Macnaghten's memorandum.
________________________________________
How Brown
2nd August 2006, 01:18 AM
Mr.Koala...
Kosminski was not locked away immediately after the last Canonical murder.
Dan:
The argument that it would be impossible to convict Kosminski might play a part in why some feel a "coverup" occurred. Of course,no such thing is known to have happened as you stated.
________________________________________
Magpie
2nd August 2006, 02:46 AM
I wonder where this idea came from that people keep bringing it up lately? There's no evidence that anyone would have hushed up the capture of Jack the Ripper, Jewish or otherwise, if they really had evidence that they had gotten the right person.
I agree with that totally. I sincerely doubt anyone would have taken the responsibility for suppressing the fact that Jack the Ripper had been caught. It makes no sense with the bashing the police and Home Office were taking.
________________________________________
JonnyKoala
2nd August 2006, 02:49 PM
But what if the police weren't sure they had the right man? Cohen seems to have been admitted after the last canonical murder even if Kosminski wasn't.
Perhaps the murders stopped, the police weren't sure why but knew that Colney Hatch contained some possible suspects, and with the apparent lack of communication Cohen (Kaminski?) was mixed up with Kosminski? And what about the Aaron Davies Cohen mentioned as possibly being David Cohen?
It's all speculation, and rumours but then 130 years later it's all we have to go on with the lack of solid evidence, and we know that the 2 police forces of the day didn't exactly work well together for most of the case.
________________________________________
JonnyKoala
2nd August 2006, 03:00 PM
Also, serial killers (and serial offenders in general) are quite cunning have a tendency to change their names quite often and this even confuses the police and computer database sytems of our age, let alone the cops of the century before last. I seem to remember no one putting two and two together when Ian Huntley changed his name/address and applied for a job in a school after being logged on computer as a sex offender...
David Cohen / Aaron Davies Cohen / Nathan Kaminski / Aaron Kosminski. If all these names were possibly around at the time, the police wouldn't have had a clue who was who, and 5 years later might just resign themselves to the fact that the guy was probably dead - case closed. Some would no doubt say that Aaron Kosminski was a nutter and therefore it must have been him.
It seems to have been well-recorded that there was a lot of anti-semitic feeling in the East End in those days (why else wash down the graffiti before the locals saw it?), and possibly declaring that Jack had been caught and was a Jew might have caused some big problems in the East End, if they weren't 100% sure. Can you imagine if they did that, caused some riots, and then the murders started again and it was later found out that the police blamed a Jew but it wasn't. Ouch.
________________________________________
fido
28th August 2006, 09:47 PM
Your thinking seems to me eminently sensible, Jonny K (surprise! surprise!) Cohen is the ONLY Jewish patient from Whitechapel admitted at a time that coincides with the ending of the murders, and the ONLY Jewish patient to die of anything but old age between 1888 and 1892. The Jewish patient from Whitechapel admitted in the spring of 1889 (when Macnaghten said Kosminski was incarcerated) was clearly not the Ripper: he was identified by his wife to whom he was the real threat.
I have to say that if I thought Anderson had really known who Aaron Kosminski was and thought he was the murderer, I should conclude at once that Anderson didn't know his coccyx from his humerus and wasn't worth paying any attention to!
I don't think anyone seriously suggests that the police hushed up the finding of the Ripper because he was Jewish. They hushed up the fact that they were still looking for a Jewish suspect while the murders were going on, and it's my belief they used the wrong identification of Pizer as Leather Apron to suppress the dangers of antiSemitic rioting. But if Anderson's serialized implication is corect, they didn't give out the identity of Anderson's suspect because he was already certified insane before he was identified. It would be quite improper to release the name of a suspect who couldn't have his day in court. Note that they have still not released the name of the suspect who committed suicide and Du Rose avers they were sure was the 'nudes-in-the-Thames' murderer or Jack the Stripper of the 1960s. (Yes, i know it's recently been indicated that Du Rose was probably wrong. But Scotland Yard has still never released the name).
All the best,
Martin F
________________________________________
Leather_Apron
16th September 2007, 10:04 AM
Well heres Mr Fido right here saying the same thing I suspected!
So perhaps Im not as dumb as some people think.
The whole Pizer thing just dont seem right to me unless Pizer was pretending He was Leather Apron. Then it seems to me the story makes sense.
________________________________________
Grey Hunter
16th September 2007, 11:05 AM
"...After a stranger has gone over it [Whitechapel] he takes a much more lenient view of our failure to find Jack the Ripper, as they call him, than he did before." - Dr. Robert Anderson, August, 1889.
________________________________________
Grey Hunter
16th September 2007, 11:27 AM
I don't think anyone seriously suggests that the police hushed up the finding of the Ripper because he was Jewish. They hushed up the fact that they were still looking for a Jewish suspect while the murders were going on, and it's my belief they used the wrong identification of Pizer as Leather Apron to suppress the dangers of antiSemitic rioting. But if Anderson's serialized implication is corect, they didn't give out the identity of Anderson's suspect because he was already certified insane before he was identified. It would be quite improper to release the name of a suspect who couldn't have his day in court. Note that they have still not released the name of the suspect who committed suicide and Du Rose avers they were sure was the 'nudes-in-the-Thames' murderer or Jack the Stripper of the 1960s. (Yes, i know it's recently been indicated that Du Rose was probably wrong. But Scotland Yard has still never released the name).
All the best,
Martin F
It's all very well suggesting that the police suppressed information with regard to the public and did not release identities of suspects. However, it's a very different thing to suggest that such information was also suppressed in regard to official internal police reports and memos. A thorough reading of the surviving official records shows no evidence whatsoever of any such suppression and a reading of the below extract from the 7 September 1888 report by Inspector Helson, the J Division Local Inspector, clearly shows that the police knew Pizer as 'Leather Apron' - 'bending' of these official records seems to become a necessity for anyone pushing their own favoured suspect into the frame -
8636
[MEPO 3/140 f 238]
________________________________________
Mishter Lusk
12th January 2008, 02:54 AM
Not to mention that there have been lots of serial killer cases where the murders had ended or the police only thought they had and the killer was alive, well, not locked up and still living in the area, just no longer killing for whatever reason.
Name a few!
![Smile](https://forum.casebook.org/core/images/smilies/smile.png)
Mishter Lusk
________________________________________
dannorder
12th January 2008, 09:02 PM
How many are a few? The Green River Killer (Gary Ridgway) and BTK (Dennis Rader) are certainly the most widely-publicized, but there are others too.
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Mishter Lusk
12th January 2008, 10:31 PM
Thanks for the reply. While I agree that Ridgway did dramtically reduce his number of kills compared to the early eighties I believe he still killed a few in the late eighties and in the nineties. But not that many relatively speaking.
As for Rader well yeah he pretty much did stop.
Interesting to note both these guys had family commitments
![Smile](https://forum.casebook.org/core/images/smilies/smile.png)
But although I'm not a complete expert on serial killers aren't these guys pretty much the exception?
Notwithstanding, I would say these guys have different profiles than JTR as I don't think JTR tortured victims as in the case of BTK, or had any sexual involvement as per Ridgway and BTK.
Would be interesting to know if there was a ripper/mutilation type murderer who stopped. Jeffrey Dahmer pretty much kept going till he got caught.
Comment