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I thought I'd share with Klosowski-ites my summary of a curious magazine article Stewart P Evans kindly sent me. The article was written by a prison warder who had Chapman under his care, so he must have been "in the know", eh?
"In ‘My experiences as a Prison Warder’, published in the Weekly News 18th October 1919, the anonymous writer claims to have attended ‘Leverino Kloshoffski’ at Holloway Prison, a place in which he was never held.
As the biography unfolds it turns out to be a bizarre blend of truth and lies. According to the ex-warder, Chapman was born in 1865 and grew up in Warsaw, where he ‘passed many examinations in medicine and surgery. Eventually he married there, and had three children’. That is fast going for a man who was still only twenty-two when he left Poland. ‘In 1888’ the narrative continues, ‘he came to London, leaving his wife and family behind and opened a barber’s shop in Whitechapel, where he lived as a single man until 1889, when a Russian woman with three children joined him.’ He refused to have anything to do with them and Russian neighbours looked after them.
He left Whitechapel ‘suddenly’ and was next heard of in a Tottenham barbershop and when Annie Chapman moved in with him he started using her name. Annie, he claimed, ‘could not be traced’ (not true: she gave evidence at the Old Bailey). He then claims that Mary Spink’s husband left her ‘in consequence of her connection with Chapman’ and two months later she gave birth to a son. As Willie was born in 1888 that places Chapman with Mary before the abandoned wife caught up with him. Chapman then pretended to marry Mary ‘according to the Jewish law.’ Chapman’s story, he claimed, was one of the murder of three women ‘and the suspected deaths of many more’, leaving one intrigued as to the details of the others. The warder further stated that the police found two revolvers in his possession (it was one) and that the poison which killed all three victims was arsenic. The wife who identified Chapman at the Old Bailey was the Russian with the three children.
The warder rounded off this garbled mess of a biography with the information that he was one of the three warders who accompanied Chapman from the dock where he received his death sentence and attended him until his execution. According to the warder, the very last thing Chapman did before the white cap was pulled down was to nod goodbye to him and his colleague.
The annoying aspect of this story is that the errors make it an unreliable source, but the accuracies make it potentially a rich source of information on Chapman’s life in prison."
Helena
"In ‘My experiences as a Prison Warder’, published in the Weekly News 18th October 1919, the anonymous writer claims to have attended ‘Leverino Kloshoffski’ at Holloway Prison, a place in which he was never held.
As the biography unfolds it turns out to be a bizarre blend of truth and lies. According to the ex-warder, Chapman was born in 1865 and grew up in Warsaw, where he ‘passed many examinations in medicine and surgery. Eventually he married there, and had three children’. That is fast going for a man who was still only twenty-two when he left Poland. ‘In 1888’ the narrative continues, ‘he came to London, leaving his wife and family behind and opened a barber’s shop in Whitechapel, where he lived as a single man until 1889, when a Russian woman with three children joined him.’ He refused to have anything to do with them and Russian neighbours looked after them.
He left Whitechapel ‘suddenly’ and was next heard of in a Tottenham barbershop and when Annie Chapman moved in with him he started using her name. Annie, he claimed, ‘could not be traced’ (not true: she gave evidence at the Old Bailey). He then claims that Mary Spink’s husband left her ‘in consequence of her connection with Chapman’ and two months later she gave birth to a son. As Willie was born in 1888 that places Chapman with Mary before the abandoned wife caught up with him. Chapman then pretended to marry Mary ‘according to the Jewish law.’ Chapman’s story, he claimed, was one of the murder of three women ‘and the suspected deaths of many more’, leaving one intrigued as to the details of the others. The warder further stated that the police found two revolvers in his possession (it was one) and that the poison which killed all three victims was arsenic. The wife who identified Chapman at the Old Bailey was the Russian with the three children.
The warder rounded off this garbled mess of a biography with the information that he was one of the three warders who accompanied Chapman from the dock where he received his death sentence and attended him until his execution. According to the warder, the very last thing Chapman did before the white cap was pulled down was to nod goodbye to him and his colleague.
The annoying aspect of this story is that the errors make it an unreliable source, but the accuracies make it potentially a rich source of information on Chapman’s life in prison."
Helena