Plausibility of Kosminski

[lynn cates]

nego

Hello Trevor.

"That's if the ID ever took place and if it did where and when."

Precisely. Mac seems to indicate that it did not.

Cheers.
LC

[PaulB]

Paul
I think you should speak to Stewart and get hin to explain how the police collators system used to operate. I think it will give an indication as to how names of "suspects" for not only these murders but day to day crimes were entered onto police records and by whom.

It is clear from the SB registers that in 1888 they operated a similar system and we know the CID in 1888 also had a registry so it could explain how these names have been entered in records without their being any substance to them. You only have to look at the Ripper suspects named in the SB registers as proof

For example Mrs Smith landlady has a single male lodger called Brown who keeps himslf to himself and she is aware he comes home in the early hours knowing that the murders are committed in the early hours she stops Pc Jones in the street and say "I have a lodger Mr Brown who is out to the early hours I think he could be Jack The Ripper" so Pc Jones goes back to the station and writes some brief details down abouy what she has said and hands it in. That information then gets recorded as exactly that an no doubt someone then looks at Mr Jones and no doubt perhaps then finds Mr Jones works late in a bakery. The entry regarding Mr Jones is not erasaed but the file would be marked up accordingly. So 100 years later we read that a Mr Brown was a Ripper suspect and react accordingly.

I beleive that this is how MM came to write his memo from this type of vague information contained in the records and explains its innacuracy. As we know there are no remaining police files on his suspects. That not becuase they were stolen or lost or bombed during the war its simply the fact that there when many of the police files were got rid of there was nothing in them to warrant keeping them.

I was not asking how Macnaghten came to name Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog, but for an explanation of what appears to be the logical fallacy or non-sequitur that "grave doubts" about the Macnaghten memoranda arise from asking what evidence got Ostrog added to the list. And why this by implication challenged Martin Fido's statement.

I appreciate that you believe that Macnaghten's named suspects were taken from a register such as the SB one, but that is just one of several ways in which the information could have been obtained, another, and perhaps more likely one, would be from the suspects file itself, which we know beyond doubt existed, copies of reports it contained having been kept by the likes of Stephen Knight who saw them as late as the mid-'70s. Furthermore, Macnaghten himself clearly favoured Druitt and Anderson's Polish Jew appears to have been "Kosminski", so at least two of the three named were "serious suspects" and not, it would seem, just names plucked at random and without reason from a register.

Any chance of you admitting that you hadn't read Martin Fido's book and had no idea what his thinking was?

[Trevor Marriott]

Hello Trevor.

"That's if the ID ever took place and if it did where and when."

Precisely. Mac seems to indicate that it did not.

Cheers.
LC

YOu would have thought that if it did ever take place it would have been recorded somewhere and having regards to his position at the time in 1894 would have had full knowledge and included it in the memo.

[Stewart P Evans]

Ostrog

Michael Ostrog, alias Stanislaus Lublinsky, was sentenced at Aylesbury Quarter Sessions on 2 July 1893 to 5 years penal servitude for obtaining goods at Eton by false pretences.

Ostrog alleged that at the time of this offence he was confined as a lunatic in the Maison Centrale at Gaillon, France, under the name of Lublinsky, who had been transferred to that prison from the depot des condamnet on 26 January 1889, and was discharged on 14 November 1890 in order to be expelled from France. Ostrog stated that he was first arrested some time in 1888 and was photographed and measured. He was first sent to prison at Mazas, afterwards sentenced to two years' imprisonment and transferred to the prison of La Roquette, before being lodged in the lunatic side of the prison at Gaillon.

The Home Secretary instructed that Ostrog be discharged from prison and recommended the remission of the remainder of his sentence. Ostrog made application for compensation for wrongful conviction and the police were directed to give him £10, taking his receipt as in full discharge of all claims.

[lynn cates]

yup

Hello Trevor.

"You would have thought that if it did ever take place it would have been recorded somewhere and having regards to his position at the time in 1894 would have had full knowledge and included it in the memo."

Indeed!

Cheers.
LC

[Lechmere]

An ID could have been used to satisfy the police that they had their man even if they couldn’t prove it to the satisfaction of the courts, or perhaps because the suspect was out of their reach due to their being detained in an asylum.

The Macnaghten letter to Banstead concerning Ostrog is interesting. He wanted to know when Ostrog might be released. Clearly the police took an interest in the release date of a serious criminal, violent, murderous or otherwise when they were detained for mental health reasons. This should tell us something about the real level of interest in Kosminski as a contemporary suspect, given the confusion shown over when he died.

Lynn - on Grove Hall – who ran that establishment?

[lynn cates]

Grove Hall

Hello Lechmere. The chief medical officer was Dr. William Julius Mickel. The establishment itself was run by the Byas family.

The LMA have informed me that the records are not there.

Cheers.
LC

[Lechmere]

Sorry - I meant was it a private establishment or under one of the Board of Guardians

[lynn cates]

private

Hello Lechmere. My understanding is that it was private, but not necessarily for the well off.

Cheers.
LC

[fido]

An ID could have been used to satisfy the police that they had their man even if they couldn’t prove it to the satisfaction of the courts, or perhaps because the suspect was out of their reach due to their being detained in an asylum.

The Macnaghten letter to Banstead concerning Ostrog is interesting. He wanted to know when Ostrog might be released. Clearly the police took an interest in the release date of a serious criminal, violent, murderous or otherwise when they were detained for mental health reasons. This should tell us something about the real level of interest in Kosminski as a contemporary suspect, given the confusion shown over when he died.

Anderson's Blackwood version suggests that the asylum was no impediment. It is extremely regrettable that the Colney Hatch Male Side Visitors Book is missing.

The second paragraph represents what has always been my thinking, and would explain why Swanson knew the suspect had died - which would mean, for all his naming Kosminski, he had to have someone else in mind whom he wrongly thought to be Kosminski with a brother in Whitechapel: Kosminski evidently being somebody of whom he had heard, but whose records had not come under his observation. I admit at once this is all deduction and nowhere near demonstrable fact: also that the dates of Cohen's incarceration and death, while eliminating the absurd idea of relying on a one-sighting witness's identification two years later leave "Cohenites" under an obligation to offer some explanation for the continued high level interest in any later case that looked Rippery, with the Grainger case entailing the apparent re-use of Anderson's witness: also that Anderson's various descriptions of the case as unsolved have to be considered.

Now for a real card off the bottom of the deck...
If Swanson's witness were Pc William Smith we would have a possible explanation for an ID at the Seaside Home. We might well imagine Anderson thinking a reliable police officer the only person who could give a really valid description and be depended on to make an accurate recognition. Of course we then have the non sequitur of the witness being described as Jewish and the improbability of a Pc declining to give the evidence his superiors wanted. But this case is full of such hiatuses and lacunae.

Martin Fido

[Stewart P Evans]

Identification

Apropos of the identification, as described by Anderson, I have always been intrigued by his (apparently) careful wording of the procedure.

Taking his claims as he made them, he is specific about the witness being a Jew. Anderson wrote (Blackwood's) '...when the individual whom we suspected was caged in an asylum, the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer at once [i.e. immediately] identified him, but when he learned that the suspect was a fellow-Jew he declined to swear to him.'

In repeating the story in the Globe he said 'In stating what I do about the Whitechapel murders, I am not speaking as an expert in crime, but as a man who investigated the facts. Moreover, the man who identified the murderer was a Jew, but on learning that the criminal was a Jew he refused to proceed with his identification.'



The third version, in his book, ran 'I will merely add that the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him.' The book version appears much modified as a result of Jewish objections raised in the press between the Blackwood's publication and the book publication.

[Wickerman]

Now for a real card off the bottom of the deck...
If Swanson's witness were Pc William Smith we would have a possible explanation for an ID at the Seaside Home. We might well imagine Anderson thinking a reliable police officer the only person who could give a really valid description and be depended on to make an accurate recognition. Of course we then have the non sequitur of the witness being described as Jewish and the improbability of a Pc declining to give the evidence his superiors wanted. But this case is full of such hiatuses and lacunae.

Martin Fido

Hi Martin.
There is one possible explanation, that there may have been two identifications.

The first involving a Jewish citizen who was taken to an asylum to face the suspect, this is the one that failed.
This identification is the one referred to by Anderson, and where Swanson offers the two marginalia, a Jew confronting a Jew.

On the endpapers Swanson then refers to another occasion, this time at the Seaside Home, where this witness (a P.C.?) is not identified.

Any attempted solution will require a stretch of imagination, we all likely accept the evidence at hand is unsatisfactory and requires some alternate explanation - ie; something is missing.

I think the clue lies in the wording, on the first occasion, according to Anderson, the "suspect" is incarcerated, the witness being brought to him.
On the second occasion, according to Swanson, it is the "suspect" who is brought to face the witness (albiet, an odd scenario).
Therefore, two identifications?

Regards, Jon S.

[Hunter]

I believe its possible that Anderson got it wrong about the 'suspect' being incarcerated first and part of Swanson's notations seem to clarify this because it was he who conducted the procedure. As mentioned by Stewart, that part was not in Anderson's book.

How Swanson came to believe that the suspect died some time after placement in an asylum is anyone's guess and Martin's theory is a plausible one. Its likely to me that many 'lunatics' were rounded up and placed in asylums in the months - and even years- after the murders, with the hope that one of them might be the culprit. I would imagine several discreet ID attempts were made; more than what we are aware of at this late date. Without substantial evidence against anyone, this would have been a logical strategy to pursue, given the 'profile' they appeared to have of the murderer and the belief that he would keep killing if something didn't happen to him.

Get the murderer off of the streets by process of elimination; even if formal charges could not be brought. If no more murders 'of this type' took place, they may have thought, in retrospect, that they had gotten their man somewhere and at some point. This may explain why Swanson took a special interest in the Coles murder if he thought there was a good chance that they may have found their man before this murder took place.

That would not deter someone like Swanson from investigating others (such as Grainger) because there was no certainty in his mind at that point and he had to carry out the duties he was responsible for. Anderson's 'certainty' appears to have developed at a later date and after no more possible suspects emerged... and probably came from information supplied by Swanson in the wake of his investigations of many suspects.

[Trevor Marriott]

I was not asking how Macnaghten came to name Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog, but for an explanation of what appears to be the logical fallacy or non-sequitur that "grave doubts" about the Macnaghten memoranda arise from asking what evidence got Ostrog added to the list. And why this by implication challenged Martin Fido's statement.

I appreciate that you believe that Macnaghten's named suspects were taken from a register such as the SB one, but that is just one of several ways in which the information could have been obtained, another, and perhaps more likely one, would be from the suspects file itself, which we know beyond doubt existed, copies of reports it contained having been kept by the likes of Stephen Knight who saw them as late as the mid-'70s. Furthermore, Macnaghten himself clearly favoured Druitt and Anderson's Polish Jew appears to have been "Kosminski", so at least two of the three named were "serious suspects" and not, it would seem, just names plucked at random and without reason from a register.

Any chance of you admitting that you hadn't read Martin Fido's book and had no idea what his thinking was?

And out comes the old chestnut "well there could have been and it might have been in the file that were lost,stolen or destroyed". If there ever was any such information and it had been seen by "anyone" would they have sat on it ? and if they did sit on it for what purpose.

How can you say they were serious suspects you could say the the suspects from the registers were serious suspects when clearly they werent. So where do you draw the line on catergorizing anyone as a serious suspect"

[Phil H]

Retired officials are much freer to express their personal views than are serving ones.

As the current UK case of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, demonstrates (he was a Minister, but much the same conventions apply) where he claimed unity of approach in office, he now lambasts colleagues (Prime Minister Brown, Governor King of the Bank of England) freely in his memoirs.

No doubt Anderson's generation did something similar, perhaps exaggerating slightly in memoirs, but feeling free of make known their peronal as against their official views.

I remain convinced that whatever errors may have crept into their writings given the lapse of time, Anderson, Swanson et al had good reason for saying what they did. Notwithstanding mistakes in phrasing or detail, I firmly believe that if we had all the papers before us that had passed before them, we would understand, even if not agree with, what they wrote.

Phil