Kosminski - Dead or Alive

[Wickerman]

Hi Roy, Wickerman,

Jonathan has answered your question much better than I could. What do you think?

Sincerely,

Mike

Hi Mike.

In all fairness, there are differences between the two versions (Donner/Aberconway). In the Aberconway version Mac. suggests that he was inclined to exonerate Kosminski & Ostrog, and that "he believes" Kosminski may still be alive.

In the better known Donner version these lines were removed, therefore, we cannot justify including contrary claims just to substantiate a theory. We should go with one, or the other.

Either, Kosminski is a weak suspect (exonerated), and he may still be alive, or, Kosminski is a strong suspect, and Mac. does not know if he still lives.

We traditionally take the Donner view.

[mklhawley]

Hi Roy, Wickerman,

Jonathan has answered your question much better than I could. What do you think?

Sincerely,

Mike

[Jonathan H]

Dead AND Alive?

To Roy

Yes, you've missed it but you are hardly alone.

Macnaghten from 'Aberconway', which so far as we know was seen only by cronies and family, and which was written sometime between 1894 and 1898:

"No 2. Kosminski, a Polish Jew, who lived in the very heart of the district where the murders were committed. He had become insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, with strong homicidal tendencies. He was (and I believe still is) detained in a lunatic asylum about March 1889. This man in appearance strongly resembled the individual seen by the City PC near Mitre Square."

Macnaghten's proxy, Sims, wrote the following discarding this suspect in 1907:

'The first man was a Polish Jew of curious habits and strange disposition, who was the sole occupant of certain premises in Whitechapel after night-fall. 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. He had at one time been employed in a hospital in Poland. He was known to be a lunatic at the time of the murders, and some-time afterwards he betrayed such undoubted signs of homicidal mania that he was sent to a lunatic asylum.

The policeman who got a glimpse of Jack in Mitre Court said, when some time afterwards he saw the Pole, that he was the height and build of the man he had seen on the night of the murder.

The second man was a Russian doctor ...

Both these men were capable of the Ripper crimes, but there is one thing that makes the case against each of them weak.

They were both alive long after the horrors had ceased, and though both were in an asylum, there had been a considerable time after the cessation of the Ripper crimes during which they were at liberty and passing about among their fellow men.'

Sir Robert Anderson never mentions the suspect being alive, or dead, after being 'safely caged', in any extant source by him, but it can be inferred from two other sources who were close to him that this was, indeed, his mistaken opinion.

Firstly, the biography by his son:

'Sir Robert Anderson and Lady Agnes Anderson'
by Arthur Ponsonby Moore-Anderson, 1947.

Chapter IV Scotland Yard

'The facts were that the locality in which the crimes occurred was full of narrow streets with small shops over almost every one of which was a foreign name. The victims belonged to a small class of degraded women frequenting the East End at night. However the fact be accounted for, no further murder in the series took place after a warning had been given that the police would not protect them if found on the prowl after midnight. The criminal was a sexual maniac of a virulent kind living in the immediate vicinity. The police reached the conclusion that he and his people were aliens of a certain low type, that the latter knew of the crimes but would not give him up. Two clues which might have led to an arrest were destroyed before the C.I.D. had a chance of seeing them, one a clay pipe, the other some writing with chalk on a wall. Scotland Yard, however, had no doubt that the criminal was eventually found. The only person who ever had a good view of the murderer identified the suspect without hesitation the instant he was confronted with him ; but he refused to give evidence. Sir Robert states as a fact that the man was an alien from Eastern Europe, and believed that he died in an asylum.'

Secondly, the last section of the 'Swanson Marginalia', written sometime between 1910 and 1924:

"Continuing from page 138, after the suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home where he had been sent by us with difficulty in order to subject him to identification, and he knew he was identified. On suspect’s return to his brother’s house in Whitechapel he was watched by police (City CID) by day & night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back, he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards – Kosminski was the suspect – DSS"

Swanson writes that 'Kosminski' died soon after 1888 and yet in 1894, or thereabouts, Macnaghten is aware that he is still alive.

Of course a suspect who is safely deceased does not require any follow-up checking -- or can be checked.

Actually it was Druitt who was dead, and whose family 'believed'.

So, back to the original question: how did Macnaghten have accurate intelligence about the fate of [presumably] Aaron Kosminski and Anderson (and Swanson) did not?

[Wickerman]

Good morning Mike, I just noticed what appears to be an error that your original question is predicated on -

Robert Anderson. Where did he say that? The unnamed man was not alive. Maybe I've missed something.

Roy

Actually I thought you were going in the other direction, like, where does Macnaghten say Kosminski was still alive?

Jon S.

[Roy Corduroy]

Good morning Mike, I just noticed what appears to be an error that your original question is predicated on -

Quick question: How did Melville Macnaghten know that 'Kosminski' was alive yet Assistant Commissioner Anderson and Chief Inspector Swanson did not?

Robert Anderson. Where did he say that? The unnamed man was not alive. Maybe I've missed something.

Roy

[Jonathan H]

Solitary vs Unmentionable?

How did Macnaghten know that 'Kosminski' was alive and Anderson and Swanson did not?

I am not aware that this was ever noticed before (it's in 'Aberconway'); it was always just voiced as how did the latter two make such a mistake.

In fact t's much worse, for the No.2 at CID knew he was not deceased 'soon after' being sectioned which seems to have been believed to be 'soon after ' Kelly by Anderson and/or Swanson, also wrong.

It begs the question: did Mac mislead Sir Bob?

As for homosexuality, Scotland Yard -- very unusually -- had in Macnaghten a police administrator who had experienced a prestigious, male-only institution where sexual activities, minus females, were common if below the radar. Arguably the inherent sado-masochism innherent in the corporal punihsment rituals is barely even that.

You had a top cop with potentially a greater sense of proportion about so-called 'sexual deviance' than the average plod, and this applies, equally, towards 'Kosminski' and Tumblety. The latter Mac only knew from interviews and files, the latter, on the other hand, was sectioned after he had been on the Force for many months.

Yet he backdates it to before he started.

I do not believe that that is a memory malfunction, it's deliberate.

Teh revised timeline makes the Polish Jew suspect more plausible. To Macnaghten, ipso facto, the timing of his actual incarceration in Feb 1891 'exonerated' Kosminski (a word he uses in 'Aberconway').

The moderate term 'solitary vices' is a world away from the hysterical and judgmental 'unmentionable vices'.

Both Mac and Anderson believed in deceased madmen as the fiend whose concerned families or 'people' also knew, yet only one actually was dead ...

[Errata]

Mke starts a Kosminski thread and we end up discussing Dr T. How'd that happen.

Oh yes he was a suspect all right. With Francis Tumblety it was a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In his younger days the doctor always had a steady boyfriend. But he was getting up in years, and on this sojourn to London he engaged in risky behavior to fulfill his desires. Which got him popped by the bobbies. And he was also given a lookover for the Ripper murders. Why? For one thing, when you are around a person, you get a certain 'vibe' from them. We don't know just what vibe Tumblety gave off because we weren't there. But the police were. He could very well have struck them as a dangerous person. Impulsive, unpredictable, odd. Said to be a 'doctor.'

Roy

Don't forget that homosexuality was a symptom of violent psychopathy back then. But not lesbianism. That didn't exist. Queen Victoria said so.

[mklhawley]

Hi Mike,

No need to get outraged; it was mere hyperbole.

Regards,

Simon

Not outraged at all. It just gave me too many visuals.

Very insightful Jonathan. Roy, we agree on much.

Sincerely,

Mike

[Roy Corduroy]

Mke starts a Kosminski thread and we end up discussing Dr T. How'd that happen.

Oh yes he was a suspect all right. With Francis Tumblety it was a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In his younger days the doctor always had a steady boyfriend. But he was getting up in years, and on this sojourn to London he engaged in risky behavior to fulfill his desires. Which got him popped by the bobbies. And he was also given a lookover for the Ripper murders. Why? For one thing, when you are around a person, you get a certain 'vibe' from them. We don't know just what vibe Tumblety gave off because we weren't there. But the police were. He could very well have struck them as a dangerous person. Impulsive, unpredictable, odd. Said to be a 'doctor.'

Roy

[Simon Wood]

Hi Mike,

No need to get outraged; it was mere hyperbole.

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

I agree with Wolf that what we have here are contradictory primary sources which require an either-or interpretation.

I thought that Wolf's articles were well written and well argued, and would recommend them to anybody interested in history, and I look forward to reading Simon's rebuttal to the rebuttal because I find his pieces to be thought-provoking and sophisticated.

I found Palmer's brilliant articles to be judicious in the sense that they weighed up bits and pieces from a variety of angles but came down on the side of Andrews definitely investigating Tumblety.

Is bias involved?

Bias is involved in all sources, primary and secondary -- because they are created by human beings (even reference books make choices about what to include and what not to, and that is due to human opinion too. Other homo sapiens can disagree with those choices).

What counts is the veracity of an argument. As in, does an argument trasncend it's obvious bias and still convince?

My judgement is that Palmer provided the stronger argument for a number of reasons, one of them being because he considered the element of bias by the contemporaneous pro-Irish media, and that the complex, sectarian, of often bare-knuckled politics of the era made it much less likely that Tumblety was the 'cover' story.

Partisan newspapers made up stuff all the time to suit their own agendas, and please their readers -- and, today, in too many cases, that has not changed -- and even alleged interviews-scoops which never took place.

People have a right to their own opinions, and the discovery of new sources can show that an earlier argument -- perhaps initially much dismissed -- was more likely to be correct after all.

We see this with arguments put by Fido, and Begg, and Scott Nelson has a terrific new article pondering the enigma of the Polish Jewish suspect.

I myself have tried to show that Sir Melville Macnaghten was just as convinced about Druitt's culpability as Anderson was about his preferred suspect, and that he likely did know Montie's particulars (that he was not a doctor, that his brother was frantically trying to find him, that he did not kill himself on the night of the final murder as the MP asserted, and so on).

To what degree of success I have done this is entirely in the eye of the beholder (many believe that the theory is original but unconvincing, and that's their right).

Dr. Tumblety was a Ripper suspect in 1888, and 25 years later the retired head of the Irish Branch did not claim to a famous journalist that he was minor, or that he was cleared. Instead he was '... very likely ...' Other sources show, on balance, that he was important enough to have a detective sent abroad to check him out.

Whether by accident or design elements of Tumblety's profile -- a middle-aged, sexually deviant medico permanently off the scene after Kelly -- resurfaced in the public sphere during the Edwardian Era. In fact, to many Brtis of that time this was the solution -- it was not a mystery.

Therefore I disagree with those who argue that Tumblety was unaccountably forgotton until 1993. Whole this is true of his specific identity, his generic DNA is arguably an essential part of the 'drowned doctor', and evey other dodgy doctor suspect who supplanted Sims' scoop.

Furthermore, Tumblety seems to have been cleared in 1889 for the wrong reason: that there 'Jack' murders after Kelly. His suspect status for some police, or at least Littlechild, was subsequently reinstated only when Kelly was, rightly or wrongly, decided to be the final victim.

I think that it is of course fair and reasonable to mount an argument which debunks the conventional wisdom about a suspect. I do it too. I just find the arguments against Tumblety not being a major (if not the) police suspect of 1888 to be less convincing than the arguments that he was.

It's no big deal. Many people say the same about my revisionist Druitt arguments.

[mklhawley]

Hi Mike,

My nipples are aflame with anticipation.

Oh, how discusting!

[Simon Wood]

Hi Mike,

My nipples are aflame with anticipation.

I can't wait to hear how you finally contrive to spin Tumblety as a viable Ripper suspect.

Bonne chance, mon ami.

Regards,

Simon

[mklhawley]

And you'll enjoy my next few articles, as well. It will be interesting when Wolf and I compare notes in the future.

Sincerely,

Mike

[Simon Wood]

Hi Mike,

As usual, you're high on belief and low on facts.

I suggest you re-read "Smoke and Mirrors."

Also, you may have not yet read the second part of Wolf Vanderlinden's "Inspector Andrews in Canada" article which, I understand, has not yet been published, but which he was generous enough to send to me.

Give him a call.

Regards,

Simon