Plausibility of Kosminski

[Trevor Marriott]

[QUOTE=fido;189198]

No no other refernce to another Kosminski.

My point in relation to all of this and i cant see why the Kosminki`ites wont accept it is that clearly "Aaron Kosminski" was not the Kosminski named in the dubious questionable MM and the marginalia there is not one scrap of evidence to connect Aaron Kosminki with any of this.

His malignment stems from the fact that he came onto the police radar simply because he threatened his sister with a knife and was later deemed to be mad and he lived in Whitechapel. The same scenario applies to Cutbush and how he came to the notice of the police.



If the marginalia is genuine then Swanson would have already known the name of Kosminski from the MM. It should be noted heonly refers to the name Kosminski notice no christian name if he was involved as the head of the investigation I would have expected hom to remeber the full name of a prime suspect.

There has been no trace found by anyone of another Kosminski who could fit with the content of the aforementioned documents.

I don't know how to put all the above in one of the shaded boxes that usually identify quotations, but they all come from Mr Marriott's posting.


A handful of observations on this: in the marginalia it is said that Kosminski had a brother in Whitechapel - fact, and was taken to the infirmary and thence to the asylum - fact. Two scraps of evidence linking the Kosminski of the marginalia with the Aaron Kosminski of history.

What is meant by calling the Macnaghten memoranda dubious and questionable? They contain demonstrable error - but so do almost all the other documents naming suspects that have been traced back to contemporary police officers. Erroneous conclusions arising from misunderstood, misreported or misremembered evidence are common to such police enquiries - consider the false trails followed in the Yorkshire Ripper and Cannock Chase murders. Imagine where we should be if those cases had never been solved, and we relied on police memoranda and public statements.

The notion that Kosminski came under suspicion because of the incident with his sister is pure speculation on Mr Marriott's part. We have no idea why he came under suspicion - it could have been suspicion passed on by an informant, observation of bizarre behaviour on the street, physical similarity to one of the witness descriptions of a suspect: one could go on inventing hypotheses for a long time without any of them coming near the status of fact.

What is meant by "If the marginalia is genuine"? Is Mr Marriott suggesting that any member of the Swanson family (out of whose possession the book had never passed until sent to the Police Museum) has tampered with them? What makes Mr Marriott certain that Swanson would have read the Macnaghten marginalia? Do we have any evidence that he was still involved in the case in 1894? The last document from him in the Sourcebook is dated 1891. Press reporting on the Grainger case of 1894 suggests that Swanson had settled his mind with a theory that satisfied him, and this suggests that he was no longer actively receiving and assessing information.

Since there is no trace of any other Kosminski who fits (and I have searched records for Kominskies and Kaminskies as well), Mr Marriott's conclusion that Aaron was possibly not the character referred to by Macnaghten and Swanson must imply that they were fools, liars or hallucinators. Where does he imagine the name came from - their imagination? I don't ask him to accept my suggestion that the erroneous data come from confusion with another similar character. But I do ask him to stop suggesting that errors in police knowledge and records completely vitiate their historical value.

Martin Fido

I have alreday give an explantion in a previous post as to how Aaron Kosminski would have come to the notice of the police which you obvioulsy havent read.

It is quite clear that the police were blinkered in their approach to this investiagtion. How can you rely on macnagten his investigative skills were non existent like some on here.

Where did he get the info from to include in the memo. I will tell you. From files which had been created by officers in 1888 or thereafter. Thosefiles were no doubt created by officers with good intent and put into the system and were likely as not based on nothing more than hearsay.

To prove a point we only have to look at the new names relased from the registers Wilson,Magrath,Obrien Churchill all shown as being suspects according to police officers. I dont see you all jumping up and down about these and their viabilty.

I think you ought to speak to Stewart Evans and ask him to describe a police collators sytem and how it was set up and what it was designed for and how information was inputed. This might give you and others a clearer picture as to how some of these names including Kosminki could have come to be mentioned.

Dont forget The CID in 1888 operated a register which was identical to The Special Branch Register which i have been involved in for the past 3 years.

Sadly we dont have it but if we did II am sure we would find many entries and names listed and written by the side of those entries "suspect for The Whitechapel murders or belived to be JackThe Ripper"

As to Swanson i will say this again for the last time if he did write the name Kosminski in the book why didnt he write the full name after all he was in charge of the investigation. The reason was that he only knew the surname because only the surname appeared in The MM.

As far as Anderson is concerned he was an early relative of Hans Christian.

I have nothing further to say now this is becoming tiresome to me for those who want to still beliveing in Aaron Kosminski.

Begg has resorted to name calling Iguess the truth hurts still remember the clock is ticking tic tock tic tock !!!!!!!!!

[Wickerman]

Gentlemen.
When all is said and done I think there are three distinct issues here which are unfortunately being merged into one.

The first issue appears to be whether Aaron K. was the person referred to in official sources (Anderson, Swanson, Macnaghten), therefore the subject of police attention.

Thanks to much research we are able to provide a reasonable "yes" to this first issue.



The second issue is whether there is anything known about Aaron K. which might allow us to judge him as a reasonable suspect in our eyes. We cannot speak to what the police knew about him, only what has been unearthed by modern research.

This is where the Aaron K. theory as a Ripper suspect begins to slip from our grasp. Yes, we have some interesting circumstantial evidence concerning the location of Aaron's family in Whitechapel.
However, we do not know where Aaron lived, we do not know what Aaron looked like, nor how he dressed when he went out at night. Does he fit any of the suspect descriptions, or does it matter?

What we do know is his age, at 23 years old we need to employ a degree of special pleading to entertain Aaron as a suspect in a murder case where the principal "wanted man" is described as in his mid 30's, and a broad age-window of between 28 to 40?



The third issue is whether Aaron was suspected at all before his family offered him up for "observation"? at the Mile End Institution in 1890.

We cannot place Swanson's personal notes in any kind of dated sequence, for all we know they may all refer to his suspicions 'after' 1890, a good 18 months after the Millers Court murder.
The surveillance of Aaron, if indeed it was Aaron they were watching, may have taken place long after the Ripper murders were finished.

Aaron's age is the only detail we know about him which we may use to include him on the suspect list, and to me it does quite the opposite.

Regards, Jon S.

[Garry Wroe]

I have never believed that Kosminski was Jack the Ripper. Never.

In which case, Paul, we are left with Anderson's assertion that the killer was positively identified along with further clarification from Swanson that his name was Kosminski. Assuming that Kosminski wasn't the Whitechapel Murderer, how do you account for the erroneous conclusions of two such well-informed senior investigators?

[Phil Carter]

Hello Garry,

Spot on. If Anderson was wrong with the Polish Jew confirmed as Kosminski by Swanson...where does that leave dear old Sir MM with his list of most likely suspects?.. We already know that Ostrog is a non-starter..Well now, if the above is true, that Kosminski is a "wrong-un", are left with Druitt, who there isn't the slightest bit of evidence against. So what price the value of the Marginalia and Sir MM's evaluations?

kindly

Phil

[Wickerman]

So what price the value of the Marginalia and Sir MM's evaluations?

kindly

Phil

The recollections are of no factual value, but they do have a curiosity value.

As with all recollections, these officials are reflecting back and resigning themselves to thinking that with all the suspects they interviewed, all the suspicious characters they watched, there were a handfull who, one among them, might have been the one.

To say Kosminski "was the suspect", decades after the series of murders concluded carries no appreciable weight. Being "the suspect" is not the same as being the Ripper. The opinions of "well-informed senior officials" only carry conviction when they are expressed at the time, not decades later.

Regards, Jon S.

[PaulB]

In which case, Paul, we are left with Anderson's assertion that the killer was positively identified along with further clarification from Swanson that his name was Kosminski. Assuming that Kosminski wasn't the Whitechapel Murderer, how do you account for the erroneous conclusions of two such well-informed senior investigators?

Hi Gary
I can't account for it. That's why I say that Kosminski is the primary candidate for research. If we could understand why Anderson thought he was the Ripper then we'd be able to properly assess the probability of him being right (or wrong).

[PaulB]

The recollections are of no factual value, but they do have a curiosity value.

As with all recollections, these officials are reflecting back and resigning themselves to thinking that with all the suspects they interviewed, all the suspicious characters they watched, there were a handfull who, one among them, might have been the one.

To say Kosminski "was the suspect", decades after the series of murders concluded carries no appreciable weight. Being "the suspect" is not the same as being the Ripper. The opinions of "well-informed senior officials" only carry conviction when they are expressed at the time, not decades later.

Regards, Jon S.

Hi Jon,
I can't agree with you there. Just because the suspicion was expressed long after the event doesn't mean it wasn't reached a lot earlier.

[Wickerman]

Hi Jon,
I can't agree with you there. Just because the suspicion was expressed long after the event doesn't mean it wasn't reached a lot earlier.

Hi Paul.
We do have a handful of opinions from both Anderson & Swanson in contemporary writings. Nowhere is there any evidence in these writings of their later suspicions, considerably "later" suspicions. That, in itself I think speaks volumes.

Certainly we can claim that "we don't know what they were thinking at the time", but since when was that a basis for investigation?

We can only go on what they wrote, and during the murders their writings betray they had not the slightest clue with respect to any person, you agree?

Regards, Jon S.

[fido]

At the risk of sounding like Mr Marriott and repeating that "I have said this already...." I will observe once again that ever since 1988 I have offered an explanation for Swanson's erroneous data on Kosminski: to wit, as I had proposed before the marginalia were available, Kosminski and David Cohen had somehow been confused with each other and seen as one and the same person. The marginalia offered an explanation for such confusion: the City Police had followed Kosminski, and knowing his brother had definitely known his name. The Met had found the other 23-year-old Whitechapel Jew who went into Colney Hatch, and were uncertain enough of his name to register different forenames for him at the court and the infirmary. And since their man died in 1889, they would have no reason to look further into the records if they subsequently learned that the City had definitely established that the young Jew who went to the asylum was called Kosminski. Don Rumbelow explained to me in 1988 that in a case of this importance the two forces would have had no hesitation in covertly and competitively trodden on each other's territory, as would have happened if the City watched Kosminski in Whitechapel without informing the Met, and the Met used Lawende as an identifying witness without informing the City. Apart from the proposal of the confusion of the two as one, my only "if" hypothesis in this acceptance of Swanson's data is the addition of the exchange of information after Kosminski's internment.

This argument has, to my knowledge, only been critiqued twice: once by Donald Rumbelow, who made the direct observation "There must be a simpler explanation" - though no one has yet managed to propose one; and once by Paul Begg who assumes that the information recorded by the Met about this inarticulate non-English speaking man with no known relatives or acquaintances was all correct - that his name was, as first entered, Aaron Davis Cohen, and his age and address were as given in the records, and therefore the Met were fully apprised of accurate data about him. Paul's corollary is perfectly correct, that if I was right in my hypothetical suggestion that the address given - a Protestant Industrial School - contained a one-digit error, and Cohen really came from the poor homeless Jews Refuge, then he could not have been the Ripper as he would only have reached England in November. I think my hypothesis is more likely to be incorrect than my analysis of Swanson's data to show that it mixes details about Cohen and Kosminski as if they were one and the same, and that the reference to his death in the asylum which cannot possibly refer to Kosminski is a completely improbable casual error if the Ripper was actually a living patient who might have been released as cured if not watched. It is clear that Paul's critique does nothing to explain Swanson's errors: it is as blankly hoping for some simpler explanation as Don's, though he strengthens his position with another argument that I don't accept, that Schwartz was as likely to have been Anderson's witness as Lawende

The observation that a definite and a possible 23-year-old seem unlikely candidates for a suspect originally described by witnesses as in his thirties is obviously a fair comment, even if I personally don't find it conclusive. Likewise the observations that if a different name or names had been applied to another Kosminski on infirmary, asylum and death register records there really might have been one, though I find this dependent on so many hypothetical postulates that I can't myself entertain it.

Mr Marriott is right to think I have not read his explanation for the police thinking Kosminski a likely suspect, and I regret that, given his unwillingness to repeat it, I regret that I am not sufficiently impressed by such of his thinking as I have read to go looking for it.

Martin Fido

[fido]

P.S. It will be seen that my dating of the hypothetical transfer of information from the City to the Met meets Jon S's objection, to which I would add my giving weight to Anderson's original assertion that thenidentification took place after the suspect had been committed to the asylum. I recognize the possibility of the counter-argument that Anderson's dropping it in the book was a correction and not an editorial decision made for some other reason. And, of course, I find the Seaside Home placing of the ID extremely mysterious. We know from the Harriett Buswell case that when necessary IDs were made in the place where the person being identified was. I personally think Swanson's memory here confused another - presumably "successful" though unenforceable ID, though this is fully as speculative as Don and Stewart's more complex suggestion about an ID ina Seaman's home.

Martin Fido

[Garry Wroe]

If Anderson was wrong with the Polish Jew confirmed as Kosminski by Swanson...where does that leave dear old Sir MM with his list of most likely suspects?

As I stated in my book, Phil, Macnaghten simply enumerated the names of three men who in his opinion were far stronger Ripper candidates than Cutbush. Those who insist that Kosminski, Druitt and Ostrog must have emerged as the three strongest candidates are taking Macnaghten's words out of context. As an aside, though, whereas Macnaghten insisted that 'No one ever saw the Whitechapel Murderer', Anderson stated that one person did get a good view of him.

So much for the official sources.

[PaulB]

[QUOTE=Trevor Marriott;189202]

[FONT="Arial Black"]

Begg has resorted to name calling Iguess the truth hurts still remember the clock is ticking tic tock tic tock !!!!!!!!!

Oh dear, yet further desperate evasion and hackneyed concepts. Now you have fallen back on saying I have resorted to name calling because I'm hurt by some truth or other you fondly imagine you've told, and we have the hackneyed concept of a clock ticking its way towards - what? The battery running out before you actually admit that you haven't read Martin Fido's book, don't have the foggiest idea what his thinking was and is, and have made yourself look pretty silly by rushing here to draw the attention of people to the video which you, self-proclaimed as "one of the leading experts on Jack The Ripper", should have known?

There's no truth hurting me, Trevor. There's no clock ticking. There's no book burning on the village green. There's no name-calling. There's just history, and people trying to establish the facts. And there's you, wriggling, squirming, and trying ever so hard to avoid admitting that you'd never read Martin's book and didn't know what he really thought. But the people here can see through that.

And as far as I am aware the police knew nothing about Aaron Kosminski threatening his sister with a knife. That information didn't emerge until his family were having him committed. As you are so certain that this was not the case, are so certain that this incident is what brought Kosminski to the attention of the police, you presumably have source material to back up that belief. Good. I hope to see it before my clock stops ticking. I won't hold my breath though.

[Garry Wroe]

No no other refernce to another Kosminski.

Thanks, Trev. It was more in hope than expectation that I asked whether the official records had thrown up another Kosminski. I should know better by now.

Thanks again.

[TomTomKent]

Hi Jon,
I can't agree with you there. Just because the suspicion was expressed long after the event doesn't mean it wasn't reached a lot earlier.

Even if the suspicion HAD been formed years or decades later it would remain a point to be researched if there was any possibility (which there seems not to be) of discovering what new information triggered the suspicion.

Discounting the improbable notion of the marginalia being some form of fraud, we can assume,right or wrong, there was a reason that name aroused suspicion at the time. Kosminski may have been mistaken for Cohen (or an as yet unidentified other) but why remember that name instead of any other suspects? I doubt it was plucked at random, even if the reason is now lost, there WAS a reason.

[PaulB]

Even if the suspicion HAD been formed years or decades later it would remain a point to be researched if there was any possibility (which there seems not to be) of discovering what new information triggered the suspicion.

Discounting the improbable notion of the marginalia being some form of fraud, we can assume,right or wrong, there was a reason that name aroused suspicion at the time. Kosminski may have been mistaken for Cohen (or an as yet unidentified other) but why remember that name instead of any other suspects? I doubt it was plucked at random, even if the reason is now lost, there WAS a reason.

Precisely.