discussion of Aaron Kosminski's psychological profile

[robhouse]

Let's stay on subject here... so you are saying that the Ripper would have gone on a prostitute killing rampage within the confines of Colney Hatch?

[Natalie Severn]

I have no idea but I know there would have been a lot of egg on their faces if anything like the Autumn of Terror was repeated in the open wards of Colney Hatch or Leavesdon.
But above all I see no support for Anderson"s assertions.Quite the opposite from City Police chief ,Henry Smith---and he knew very well what Anderson had claimed and ridiculed it,in print .

[robhouse]

So you are saying that the police would have used extralegal (ie. illegal) methods to have Kozminski put in Broadmoor, despite the fact that they could not prove his guilt?

[Natalie Severn]

Rob,
But I really don"t think that a criminal such as Jack the Ripper would have been allowed to go "relatively " free, however careful the police were supposed to be ,not to arrest someone without sufficient justification.Colney Hatch would not have been considered, by anyone with any sense at all, as being adequate to detain and "restrain" a violent murderer--or a man suspected of being a violent murderer such as JtR ,and therefore it would have been considered a very dangerous thing to do to simply send him to an asylum.The Chief Commissioner of the City Police,Henry Smith would not have dismissed Anderson"s Jewish suspect in the way he did---and he called Anderson"s allegation that the suspect"s Jewish family had shielded him from Gentile Justice a "reckless assertion"---and actually he said much worse than that.
So Anderson"s suspect ,far from being viewed by others such as Smith --as important was almost brushed aside in his autobiography which came out after Blackwoods magazine.
Best,
Norma

[robhouse]

Natalie,

You say that "I do believe if they had been pretty sure they had got their man,they would have nailed something on him." Again, the Metropolitan Police was not the Gestapo. They followed the law, and did not to my knowledge go around pinning crimes on people against whom they were unable to prove guilt. In other words, the British legal system then as now was "a system designed to protect innocent persons wrongly accused of crime." Anderson remarked on this [ie. the difference between police procedure in England vs. the methods of "Foreign Police Forces"] when he said the following:

"Detractors of the work of our British Police in bringing criminals to justice generally ignore the important distinction between moral proof and legal evidence of guilt. In not a few cases that are popularly classed with ‘unsolved mysteries of crime,’ the offender is known, but evidence is wanting. If, for example, in a recent murder case of special notoriety and interest, certain human remains had not been found in a cellar, a great crime would have been catalogued among `Police failures’; and yet, even without the evidence which sent the murderer to the gallows, the moral proof of his guilt would have been full and clear. So again with the ‘Whitechapel murders’ of 1888. Despite the lucubration of many an amateur `Sherlock Holmes,’ there was no doubt whatever as to the identity of the criminal, and if our ‘detectives’ possessed the powers, and might have recourse to the methods, of Foreign Police Forces he would have been brought to justice. But the guilty sometimes escape through the working of a system designed to protect innocent persons wrongly accused of crime. And many a case which is used to disparage our British ‘detectives’ ought rather to be hailed as a proof of the scrupulous fairness with which they discharge their duties."

[jason_c]

Thanks Rob,
However,I do believe if they had been pretty sure they had got their man,they would have nailed something on him and would have made sure he was not free to say carry out a murder rampage in a hospital which was not secure.

This part of your scenario did actually happen Natalie.

[Natalie Severn]

Natalie, I am sure even you are aware that just because the authorities may not be able to prove a person's guilt, that does not mean that the person is "innocent," except in the strict legal sense of the word. Indeed, by a strictly legal definition, whoever the Ripper was would have been "innocent" in the eyes of the law, since the government was unable to prove a case against anyone.

RH

Thanks Rob,
However,I do believe if they had been pretty sure they had got their man,they would have nailed something on him and would have made sure he was not free to say carry out a murder rampage in a hospital which was not secure.

[Natalie Severn]

Natalie, I am sure even you are aware that just because the authorities may not be able to prove a person's guilt, that does not mean that the person is "innocent," except in the strict legal sense of the word. Indeed, by a strictly legal definition, whoever the Ripper was would have been "innocent" in the eyes of the law, since the government was unable to prove a case against anyone.

RH

Thanks Rob,
However,I do believe if they had been pretty sure they had got their man,they would have nailed something on him and would have made sure he was not free to say carry out a murder rampage in hospital which was not secure.

[Natalie Severn]

Natalie, I am sure even you are aware that just because the authorities may not be able to prove a person's guilt, that does not mean that the person is "innocent," except in the strict legal sense of the word. Indeed, by a strictly legal definition, whoever the Ripper was would have been "innocent" in the eyes of the law, since the government was unable to prove a case against anyone.

RH

Thanks Rob,
However,I do believe if they had been pretty sure they had got their man,they would have nailed something on him and would have made sure he was not free to say carry out a murder rampage in hospital which was not secure.

[Natalie Severn]

The problem I have with your prognosis is that it's based on mental conditions that almost assuredly do not exist. The words "psychopathy" and "sociopathy" are used as catch-alls for any behavior that takes a perfectly respectable cultural paradigm and runs with it to its logical end. And "schizophrenia" as a pathological type has been almost entirely destroyed by the likes of Thomas Szasz. All these labels tell us are the prejudices of the doctors who diagnose them, not the subjective states of the mind of those who 'suffer' from them.

Any attempt to deduce an individual's interior state of being, particularly after twelve decades, is doomed to failure. Far better for Ripperologists would be to focus on the objective, quantifiable circumstances of the crime.

Excellent post.However since the Chief Commissioner of the London Police,Sir Henry Smith,knew all about the claims made by his colleague in the Metropolitan Police, Sir Robert Anderson,and roundly dissed them,saying he[the Ripper]" had them all beat"-and writing 20 yearslater "still had them all beat"in 1910, its surely worth taking note?
Smith was also emphatic,when referring directly to Anderson"s claims as being "reckless allegations and that " nobody ever knew where he[the Ripper] lived".
Since it is the words of City police such as Robert Sagar,who have been quoted as probably having given the information to Anderson via Swanson,it seems to me to be just plain nonsense that the Chief Commissioner ,Smith ,would have known nothing at all about it.So it seems he did,as he confirms he did in his 1910 autobiography and that he thought the claim not worth mentioning---because "he had us all beat."

[Chris]

almost immediately after Kosminski is incarcerated for good, the Lubnowskis move from Greenfield Street and change their names. No explanation for this is known.

No doubt they eventually became known as Cohen rather than Lubnowski because Cohen sounded less foreign - just as the Kozminskis themselves were known as Abrahams. But in common with other immigrant families they continued to use the original surname for some purposes until much later, and they were already using the surname Cohen before the Autumn of 1888.

For example, Morris appears as Cohen as early as July 1888 (the qualifying date for the 1889 electoral register), and Matilda appears on the electoral register simply as Matilda Lubnowski as late as 1931.

[robhouse]

To be admitted to Broadmoor, a person had to be found either guilty but insane as outlined in the M'Naughten Rules, or be determined to be unfit to plead. In either case, I believe that the state still needed to have sufficient evidence to prove the criminal actually committed a crime. As Anderson stated, “the author of those murders [i.e. the Whitechapel murders] was a lunatic, and if evidence had been available to bring him to justice he would have been sent to Broadmoor." It is clear that Anderson was talking about Kozminski here. Can someone clarify this? I.e. what exactly were the legal requirements for admission to Broadmoor? I assume that the state did not have the right to just take any person against whom they had suspicion of guilt, and throw them, gestapo-like, into a maximum security asylum.

Natalie, I am sure even you are aware that just because the authorities may not be able to prove a person's guilt, that does not mean that the person is "innocent," except in the strict legal sense of the word. Indeed, by a strictly legal definition, whoever the Ripper was would have been "innocent" in the eyes of the law, since the government was unable to prove a case against anyone.

RH

[Defective Detective]

The problem I have with your prognosis is that it's based on mental conditions that almost assuredly do not exist. The words "psychopathy" and "sociopathy" are used as catch-alls for any behavior that takes a perfectly respectable cultural paradigm and runs with it to its logical end. And "schizophrenia" as a pathological type has been almost entirely destroyed by the likes of Thomas Szasz. All these labels tell us are the prejudices of the doctors who diagnose them, not the subjective states of the mind of those who 'suffer' from them.

Any attempt to deduce an individual's interior state of being, particularly after twelve decades, is doomed to failure. Far better for Ripperologists would be to focus on the objective, quantifiable circumstances of the crime.

[Pontius2000]

-Kosminski was a suspect sometime between 1888 and 1890, probably (in my opinion) after the murder of Alice McKenzie in July 1889

-George R Sims: "This man was in the district during the whole period covered by the Whitechapel murders, and soon after they ceased certain facts came to light which showed that it was quite possible that he might have been the Ripper." Soon after they ceased? would that be the murder of Mary Kelly or Alice McKenzie? I would guess McKenzie. Kelly was the last of the canonical "Ripper murders" but not the last of the "Whitechapel murders". Frances Coles was the last "official" Whitechapel murder but there is evidence that the police felt they had their man in Sadler.

-Anderson: the witness "at once identified him." Swanson: "he knew he was identified". Swanson: "and after this identification which suspect knew, no other murder of this kind took place in London." This identification almost without doubt took place in July 1890. And indeed, no more murders took place except for Coles, which the police did not believe was a Ripper victim.

-it is pretty clear that Kosminski had an affective disorder, whether is was Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, or Schizoaffective Disorder (I stick by Bipolar until I see more evidence). This would have increased his likelihood of also being a Sociopath by 7 times more than the general population. This would, without much doubt at all, have made him more prone to violence than a member of the general population.

-the only evidence that the naysayers have to Kosminski being non-violent is a single word, "no", in his admission papers. However, there are many instances in these same notes as Kosminski being "violent", "troublesome", "excitable", "noisy". and these are very scant notes without much details at all. He allegedly threatened his sister's life with a knife and attempted to hit a hospital staff with a chair....non-violent?

-almost immediately after Kosminski is incarcerated for good, the Lubnowskis move from Greenfield Street and change their names. No explanation for this is known.

-The Ripper case file at Scotland Yard is inexplicably closed in 1892. hmm? This would've been within a year of the time that Coles was murdered, less than 4 years after the Ripper murders. I challenge anyone to show me any other case in history where the case on 11 murdered women is closed, without a known perpetrator, within 4 years of when the crimes were committed.

So yes, anyone who thinks that Kosminski is a very viable suspect obviously needs to "get real".

[jason_c]

Hi All,
Lets not forget that in the Autumn of 1889 a year after Mary Kelly"s murder, Aaron Kosminski was walking the dog around Cheapside .We know this because the dog he was walking didnt have the recently,legally required muzzle on so Aaron was taken to court.
Once Aaron Kosminski had been incarcerated,he was diagnosed as "not being a danger to others"---there was never any reference to him being suspected of being Jack the Ripper either. He spent his time in an ordinary ward for similarly mentally ill people and he displayed no particular signs of aggression either on admission nor in the thirty years he spent in these institutions for the mentally ill.Nor had he ever had any conviction,prior to admission for violent behaviour .His symptoms had included paranoia and visual and auditory hallucinations.
And you think he could have been Jack the Ripper? Get real.

He didnt have access to very many drunken prostitutes during those 30 years either.

I dont see what the problem is with Kosminski walking his dog. Serial killers can, and do, function in society.