Let´s talk about that identification again

[Lechmere]

I think that is a good summary Fisherman.

If Swanson’s Kosminski was Aaron Kosminsky, then he got the time he was taken out of circulation wrong and his date of death wrong.
The significance of not knowing when the person Anderson and Swanson supposedly regarded as Jack the Ripper died (not just an average suspect) is that people get released from Asylums. They don’t always die inside. They also escape.
If Swanson regarded Kosminski as banged to rights the worst killer in British history, and if he was Aaron Kosminsky, then failing to keep tabs on his whereabouts was grossly incompetent.

If it wasn't Aaron Kosminsky (but was say Cohen) then Swanson must have got the name completely wrong. This implies gross incompetence if he thought this person was banged to rights as the Ripper.

Particularly if Swanson was ‘in charge’ of the investigation.
If he was actually only in charge of the massive amount of incoming and outgoing paperwork, then his confusion becomes more explicable and less damning.

But Swanson was a policeman so he must be defended to the hilt.

I’m not quite sure what the commendations for individual cases that were quite unlike the scope and reach of the Whitechapel Murder investigations prove.

The Peter Principle is a belief that, in an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, that organization's members will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, "Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence." In more formal parlance, the effect could be stated as: employees tend to be given more authority until they cannot continue to work competently.

Jonathan
If Anderson didn't tell Swanson and kept it a secret initially it doesn't say much for Swanson's role as the person 'in charge' of the investigation.
If his memory was failing him then his annotations are unreliable and any theory based on the Seaside Home identification is built on foundations of sand.

My view is that Swanson had no first-hand knowledge as he was not in charge of the investigation. He based his opinions on the mass of paperwork that passed his desk, which is what he was in charge of. He was overloaded with information, and overworked by having to also liaise with the City police into the small hours of the morning. He understandably got muddled which was exacerbated by age by the time he came to recollect his thoughts.
I also think he was subservient to Anderson.
Warren wasn’t a police man. But he was used to commanding in a late 19th century British military manner. They had no concept of appointing a chief of staff, particularly not of relying for imagination and decision from someone from a working class background from the far north wilds of Scotland. They appointed staff and commanded personally. Warren took direct command of the Ripper investigation. He did not appoint Swanson to be anything more than his eyes and ears and to make sense of the mass of paperwork coming in and out of Scotland Yard with respect to this case.

[Fisherman]

So, Edward tells us that it would be gross incompetence on Swanson´s behalf to get the date of death wrong, and he has before said that it would be odd in the extreme if Swanson did not keep track of the Ripper, if he had been incarcerated.
Monty points out that there is no conclusive evidence that the Kosminski who died in Leavesden Asylum was the man Swanson referred to as "Kosminski" in his annotations.
Stewart Evans presents rather an impressive list of commendments visavi Swanson - who apparently was regarded a highly efficient and professional policeman both before and after the Ripper scare.
And it has been stated that it would be odd if the same police force thought a 23-25 year old Jew interchangable with a British sailor around his fiftieth year in life.
Can the conclusion be any other than one - Aaron Kosminski was not Swanson´s Kosminski. And it therefore follows that he was probably not the man subjected to the Seaside home identification somewhere inbetween 1888 and 1891. Moreover, logically, the witness who performed the ID was reasonably not Lawende.
But Lawende was the witness that was brought in to ID Sadler.

Question: If Lawende was the man that was considered their best chance to ID Sadler, then why would he not have been the best bet for the Seaside home ID?
Possible answer: Because there was another witness that was considered better.
Question: Then why not use that witness for the Sadler identification?
Possible answer: Because that witness had already voted for the Seaside home suspect. And if Anderson was correct, there was no hesitation whatsoever on behalf of the witness.

So, somebody else than the guy we normally propose as the suspect was the suspect. And somebody else than the guy we normally propose as the witness was the witness.

Could this be true? Of course it could. It tallies better with the facts in many ways.

The obvious next best bet for the suspects role must be Aaron C. Aaron Davis Cohen. He shared the same first name, the same age, and, crucially, the same religion with Aaron K. And personally, I think he makes a better fit timewise with the ID process, which to my mind would have taken place in December 1888.
Interestingly, we also have Anderson flatly denying that Rose Mylett had been murdered in that exact same period. He travelled to Poplar on the 22:st of December, the day after Cohen had been sent on to Colney Hatch, after having spent a fortnight at the work house, a fortnight during which he could well have been subjected to the ID process. Is this why Anderson felt so confident that it was not a Ripper killing - and went as far as to deny that it even WAS a murder, perhaps trying to calm the public down?

We have indications that December 1888 was a period at which there had been a very recent and thorough search of the asylums by the police. I don´t think there is any realistic chance that the news that a violent, insane Jew had been taken of the East End streets did not end up on Swanson´s desk at a very early stage. The police must have taken a very keen interest in him, since he seemingly fit the bill very well. They would, I will propose, have sent somebody down to the workhouse to take a close look at him. And if he could not provide an alibi for the relevant nights - or if he was so ramblingly mad that he did not even try to do so - then the next step would be to try and ID him as the killer.

How am I doing so far?

The best,
Fisherman

[Monty]

A very poor Policeman indeed Stewart.

Many thanks for posting Swanson reward record, appreciated.

Monty

[Stewart P Evans]

Commendations and Rewards

Donald Swanson's commendations and rewards -

[Monty]

Swanson got the death date of a suspect wrong?

That's a catagoric fact? Or another unsubstantiated accusation placed to boloster an opinion?

We have no idea if the Kosminski Swanson refers to is the same one who died in 1919.

But apprently Warren put a doddering old fool in charge of the biggest case of his Commissionership so far, as the Police were incompetent idiots. So incompetent that their template and processes were copied throughout the world.

Policeman is stoopid.

Monty

[Jonathan H]

A defense of Swanson's competence could be made along these lines:

Donald Swanson knew nothing, whatsoever, about 'Kosminski' until 1895 and was simply told by Dr. Robert Anderson, whom he revered, that he only now had learned that 'Jack' was very likely to have been a local Polish Jew.

Furthermore, Anderson tells Swanson in 1895, this lunatic was a hater of harlots, driven homicidal by 'unmentionable vices', had threatened a female relative with a knife and who was sectioned by his fearful family soon after the Kelly atrocity.

There's no further checking that can be done, Anderson says, or should be done as the suspect died soon after in Colney Hatch.

He's been dead for a half dozen years.

In fact, it would be dangerous and potentially embarrassing for the Yard to start asking any questions, eg. let sleeping dogs lie.

The 'Kosminski' family should have told the police about their suspicions, but certain low-class Jews, grumbles Anderson, are reluctant to co-operate with so-called 'Gentile Justice'.

Swanson may have asked for the fiend's full name but Anderson could not recall it, or even recall if he ever knew it?

At that point the tale included no witness identification, and Anderson never refers to one until much later.\

I don't want to over-state the comparison but it reminds me of the Roswell myth. At first there are just indestructible scraps of debris in a field (though they are in pieces?) coevered with alien markings. No mention of alien bodies. As the story begins to gain momentum bodies are added spilling out of a crashed saucer.

A committed Protestant and an incorruptible administrator -- plus hugely conceited and judgmental -- Anderson started telling all and sundry, from 1895, about this slam dunk solution, though there would be no names mentioned.

By 1910, as his memory failed him -- check out his doozy of a 1908 interview -- and his recall began compressing years and people, self-servingly squeezing them all into 1888, Sir Robert added the witness identification perhaps after having read Sims' 1907 article, which ironically was fictitious on this point.

Sincerely mixing up Lawende and his affirmation of Grant in 1895, with 'Kosminski', Sir Robert told Swanson that the the reason the latter had never heard of this identification was because it was the City Police who botched the whole affair outside of London (Sadler's Sailor's Home of 1891 morphing into the police hospital). Tic cocktail was also created by Anderson's lingering frustration over what he perceived to be the Kosminski clan knowing and yet not helping the authorities, eg. they feared their member being hanged.

Swanson accepted all this and wrote it as an insider's annotation in Anderson's book.

But not an insider to first-hand knowledge, simply to what Anderson had told him over the years.

Of course this begs the question as to where the initial information about 'Kosminski' came from, and why so late?

It has to be Anderson's No. 2 with whom there seems to have been sustained ill-feeling (neither mentions the other by name in their respective memoirs, though Anderson cites Mac as a nervous nellie over a threatening letter. How galling for the 'action man'.)

Melville Macnaghten knew what Anderson (and Swanson) did not: that 'Kosminski' was alive, and what is more out and about for a great length of time after the Kelly murder (Sims, 1907) -- not his reign of terror 'cut short' by his committal to a madhouse.

That the suspect only has a surname originates with Mac's Report(s).

It was Druitt who was, in fact, dead and whose family were trying to put him away before he could be 'Jack' again -- or so Macnaghten believed.

[Lechmere]

And what of that able officer DSS getting such a fundamental thing as the death of his red hot suspect all wrong?
That smacks of incompetence - if Kosminsky were the Ripper it would have been gross incompetence. Possibly the worst case of incompetence in the history of British policing.

[Lechmere]

Simon
I was being ironic.
The Seaside Home reference doesn't make any sense.
Which is why it is discussed at such length with all sorts of attempts made to shoehorn it onto some realm of reality.
And the Sadler ID doesn't make any sense if the Seaside Home ID had already taken place (back on topic).
Hence my stance that Swanson was muddled.
But apparently because DSS was appointed to his role (whatever that might factually have been), he was well qualified for it and up to the task, as never in the history of mankind has anyone ever been appointed to a job at which they failed in any way, or which was beyond them.
Or if you want to be more charitable, he was appointed into an impossible role in which no one could succeed.

[Fisherman]

We´re drifting somewhat on the thread now. Does anybody have something to say about whether the same police force in a matter of a year or less, would subject a fifty year old british sailor to an identification with the hope of having it work out - after the purportedly same witness had already positively ID:d a 24 or 25 year old Jew for the same offence?

The best,
Fisherman

[Monty]

Well I'll be GM....

You mean I was playing under the old boring rules instead of these new fangled attention grabbing shiney new rules?

We truly are in a wonderous age.

Monty

[The Good Michael]

I'm suggesting Swanson had the experience and ability to deal with the case, hence his appointment.

I disagree. If I have a theory that necessitates Swanson being incompetent, insane, or a liar, then it must be so. Theory trumps logic on this site every time.
In fact, new logic is created to maintain a theory.

Mike

[Monty]

I'm suggesting Swanson had the experience and ability to deal with the case, hence his appointment.

Classy as ever Simon

Monty

[Simon Wood]

Hi Lechmere,

In which particular ways does Swanson's Seaside Home reference make perfect sense?

Regards,

Simon

[Lechmere]

Yes DSS was very clear headed and his Seaside Home reference makes perfect sense.
I agree that the murders were to an extent regarded separately, but at the same time they were pretty much immediately linked to each other in the minds of the police.
This case wasn’t unprecedented? What large scale, cross boundary, multiple crime investigation preceded it?
Are you seriously suggesting DSS’s role during this investigation was just all in a day’s work for him?

[Simon Wood]

Hi Monty,

Well played.

I await with trembling heart.

Regards,

Simon