The Jack the Ripper Suspect Known as Aaron Kosminski
In September 2014 Russell Edwards brought out a book with the title Naming Jack the Ripper. He named Jack the Ripper as Aaron Kosminski.
The second candidate that Melville Macnaghten put forward in his memorandum of 1894 was Aaron Kosminski.
Kosminski was a Polish Jew born on September 11 1865. In the 1880s, he emigrated to England and worked as a barber in Whitechapel. In 1891, he threatened his sister with a knife, and he was confined to the Colony Hatch Lunatic Asylum, then later moved to the Leavesden Asylum.
One problem with assessing Kosminski is that he was a Jew, and around 100,000 of them had arrived in London’s East End.
At all levels of society, there was virulent antisemitism, and the police were not immune to prejudice.
They also struggled with the spelling of the names of these immigrants. And this suspect was not the only Kosminski in town.
A problem exacerbated by the fact that the police didn’t record his first name.
It was only a hundred years later that an Aaron Kosminski was identified but there wasn’t much evidence to link him to the suspect that Macnaghton was writing about six years after the murders took place.
Sir Robert Anderson
Assistant Chief Constable Sir Robert Anderson, in his memoirs written in 1910, wrote:
“Undiscovered murders are rare in London, and the "Jack-the-Ripper" crimes are not in that category...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...In saying that he was a Polish Jew I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact…”
So Sir Robert is saying that he knew who the killer was because an eyewitness identified him but refused to testify against him because he was a fellow Jew.
Sir Robert doesn’t mention the name of the witness, but we can narrow it down to two.
Joseph Lawende and Israel Schwartz because they were eyewitnesses and they were Jewish.
On October the 11th, 1888, 11 days after the murder, Joseph Lawende gave evidence at the inquest into the death of Catherine Eddowes.
Joseph Lawende: I reside at No. 45, Norfolk-road, Dalston, and am a commercial traveller. On the night of Sept. 29, I was at the Imperial Club, Duke-street, together with Mr. Joseph Levy and Mr. Harry Harris. It was raining, and we sat in the club till half-past one o'clock, when we left. I observed a man and woman together at the corner of Church-passage, Duke-street, leading to Mitre-square.
Coroner: Were they talking?
Joseph Lawende: The woman was standing with her face towards the man, and I only saw her back. She had one hand on his breast. He was the taller. She had on a black jacket and bonnet. I have seen the articles at the police-station and believe them to be those the deceased was wearing.
Coroner: What sort of man was this?
Lawende: He had on a cloth cap with a peak of the same.
Coroner: You have given a description of the man to the police?
Lawende: Yes.
Coroner: Would you know him again?
Lawende: I doubt it. The man and woman were about nine or ten feet away from me.
Coroner: Did you overhear anything that either said?
Lawende: No.
Coroner: Did either appear in an angry mood?
Lawende: No.
Coroner: Did anything about their movements attract your attention?
Lawende: No. The man looked rather rough and shabby.
Coroner: When the woman placed her hand on the man's breast, did she do it as if to push him away?
Lawende: No; it was done very quietly.
Coroner: You were not curious enough to look back and see where they went.
Lawende: No.
The fact that Joseph Lawende wasn’t curious about the couple isn’t surprising.
It wasn’t until the police were doing their house-to-house calls during the days after the murder that Lawende realised it might be important. It was then, in response to their questions, that he told them what he had seen.
The Times on October the 2nd reported that the man standing in Church Passage was "of shabby appearance, about 30 years of age and 5ft. 9in. in height, of fair complexion, having a small fair moustache, and wearing a red neckerchief and a cap with a peak”.
I have to say I couldn’t give any kind of description of anybody that I walked past last night. And the streets I walked down were well-lit.
This couple were standing at the entrance to a narrow alley just after the rain had stopped.
True they were standing under a gaslight although it must be noted that these were nothing like the gaslights that illuminate St James’s Park. The gas mantles that glow bright white in those gaslights were not available in 1888. The light was just the soft yellow light of a gas flame.
Given the circumstances it is remarkable that Lawende not only saw that the man had a small moustache but also that it was fair. And remarkable that he could see that he had on a neckerchief. And it is truly astounding that he could see that it was red.
As Lawende pointed out when the coroner asked: “Would you know him again?” Lawende said: “I doubt it. The man and woman were about nine or ten feet away from me.”
Some researchers believe that Joseph Lawende, having walked past a couple standing in a narrow alley at 1:35 on the morning of September 30th, 1888, was taken to identify a suspect in July 1890.
This was 20 months after his fleeting glimpse of a man whom Lawende said just days after the sighting that he wouldn’t be able to recognise.
Of course, in 1888, forensic investigating, and in particular, the use of DNA, had not exposed the dangers of eyewitness evidence.
But even today, when the unreliability of eyewitness evidence is widely known, books about the Ripper murders still debate who it was who was taken to identify the suspect and, indeed, who the suspect was.
An identification that took place nearly two years after the briefest of sightings is far from ideal conditions and must be very unreliable.
Even without proof of the unreliability of eyewitness evidence, surely common sense should have made Assistant Chief Constable Sir Robert Anderson a little more sceptical. “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.”
Joseph Lawende, by his own admission didn’t get a good view and the idea that nearly two years later he “unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him” is difficult to believe.
The story of the eyewitness Joseph Lawende has become so much a part of the Jack the Ripper saga that it is included in every serious book written about the subject
And, one part of the Lawende story that is almost universally taken as read is that his evidence placed Catherine Eddowes at the entrance to an alley that led into Mitre Square. And placed her there just 9 minutes before she was discovered murdered and mutilated.
Almost universally accepted even though Lawende said she had her back to him and, “She had on a black jacket and bonnet. I have seen the articles at the police station and believe them to be those the deceased was wearing.”
Not exactly the ideal way to identify anybody.
And the sighting took place just a two-minute walk from St Botolph’s Church.
In the 19th century, St Botolph Without Aldgate was known as ‘The Prostitute’s Church’ because scores of prostitutes gathered there to pick up clients. A dark hat and jacket would not have been a rarity among them.
But maybe it was reassuring for Sir Robert that, looking back 22 years, he could say that on his watch, the Jack the Ripper murders were not among those “rare undiscovered murders in London”.
Sir Robert Anderson was a product of the confident and expanding British Empire and a man with very little patience for the weak and the vulnerable. And he didn’t hold back.
“When the stolid English go in for a scare, they take leave of all moderation and common sense. If nonsense were solid, the nonsense that was talked about and written about those murders would sink a Dreadnought.”
He was equally clear about the victims. He said they “belonged to a very small class of degraded women who frequent the East End streets after midnight, in hope of inveigling belated drunkards, or men as degraded as themselves”.
Of course, there is no evidence that Sir Robert ever met any of these women, but he had no doubt about what kind of people they were.
Women who lived at the centre of the Empire. They could not though, as Cecil Rhodes put it, be seen as members of the first race in the world; winners of the first prize in life’s lottery.
Cecil Rhodes
“I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for human race...if there be a god, I think that what he would like me to do is a is paint as much of the map of Africa British as possible.”
"Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won the first prize in the lottery of life.”
“It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.”
Both Macnaghton and Anderson were writing years after the investigation ended, which partly explains the contradictions and confusion that they helped create.
So, what real evidence is there that Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper?
In The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Source Book, complied by Keith Skinner and Stewart Evans, they include a passage by Paul Bonner, who worked at the BBC, eventually becoming Head of Science and Features:
“Many men, at least 100 in the file, were taken to Police stations just for carrying black bags, having foreign accents, accosting women, or talking about the “Ripper” in pubs, but then released on being able to prove their identity.”
He then goes on to say:
“There was no mention, in this file or anywhere else, either in the Scotland Yard files or the Home Office ones, to McNaughton’s candidates Druitt, Kosminski or Ostrog.”
This hasn’t stopped researchers from beavering away to explain all the contradictions around the suspect known as Kosminski.
Martin Fido
In his 1987 book The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper Martin Fido offers some support to Anderson’s assertion that “Undiscovered murders are rare in London, and the "Jack-the-Ripper" crimes are not in that category.”
Martin Fido writes: “He and Munro knew, and unless positive evidence to contrary can be produced, they must be assumed to have been justified in their certainty.”
Well, Martin Fido may assume that, but just because two men claim that the Jack the Ripper crimes were not undiscovered murders doesn’t mean they were right.
To make a judgement, we need to hear the evidence upon which Sir Robert Anderson and James Munro based their assertion. Neither Martin Fido nor any other researcher can produce that evidence.
Munro was Assistant Commissioner for Crime before he replaced Sir Charles Warren, who resigned as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in November 1888.
Munro didn’t write a memoir, and I have not been able to find where he said that the killer was known. Although, he did say the case should have been solved which is not the same thing as saying it was solved.
At the end of his book, Martin Fido attempts to explain the confusion around Kosminski.
He says that Aaron Kosminski could not have been Jack the Ripper, but he says Aaron Kosminski may have been confused with another Jew who was in his early 20s when the murders took place.
Like Kosminski, Nathan Kaminsky was living in Whitechapel in 1888 and was confined to an asylum, where he died in October 1889.
This may be a subject for another post, or, of course, you can always read Martin Fido's The Crimes, Detection, and Death of Jack the Ripper for yourself.
So, do we write off Aaron Kosminski?
Russell Edwards
Not according to Russell Edwards. As I said at the beginning of this post, in September 2014, Edwards brought out a book with the title Naming Jack the Ripper. As the title suggests, the killer is finally unmasked.
“I’ve spent 14 years working on it, and we have definitely solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was. Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt. This is it now - we have unmasked him.”
Russell Edwards bought a rather fine-looking silk shawl at auction. The family who put it up for sale claimed it belonged to the fourth victim. Kate Eddowes.
So, after 14 years of research, what does Russell Edwards think of the idea that Joseph Lawende “unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him”?
He dismisses the idea.
“It is difficult to believe that Lawende, who was always unsure about his ability to recognise the man if he saw him again, would be able to do so many months after the event, or that the police would expect him to.”
Which makes sense.
Russell Edwards points not to Joseph Lawende but to Israel Schwartz because,
“With Israel Schwartz, we have none of these problems. From a distance of only tens of feet away, he saw Elizabeth Stride being attacked by a man, just fifteen minutes before her body was found only yards from the scene. He is the ONLY witness to see a Ripper victim being physically attacked, a major reason for me feeling sure it was him.”
So, for Russell, one point in favour of Schwartz was that he was “only tens of feet away” from the suspect. But Lawende said he was only nine or ten feet from him.
That would seem to be a point in favour of Lawende.
True, according to Schwartz, the “Ripper victim was being physically attacked”. And for Russell Edwards, that makes Israel Schwartz “an important plank in my case”.
Russell says:
“Schwartz was on his way to his new home and was walking towards the gateway of Dutfield’s Yard at about 12.45 a.m. The report of what he saw was written down in a statement taken by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson”.
The statement explains that Israel Schwartz got as far as the gateway where the murder was committed and saw a man stop and speak to a woman who was standing in the gateway.
The man tried to pull the woman into the street, but he turned her round and threw her down on the footway and the woman screamed three times, but not loudly.
On crossing to the opposite side of the street he saw a second man standing lighting his pipe.
The man who threw the woman down called out, apparently to the man on the opposite side of the road, ‘Lipski’, and then Schwartz walked away. Upon being taken to the mortuary, Schwartz identified the body as that of the woman he had seen.
He described Liz Stride’s attacker as about 30 years of age. Height 5ft 5in. He was fair with dark hair and a small brown moustache. He was broad shouldered and wearing a dark jacket and trousers, black cap with peak, and nothing in his hands.
Russell Edwards says that The Star newspaper interviewed Israel Schwartz.
The attacker in this account now appears to be “half-tipsy”, and rather than dragging her out of the gateway and throwing her down onto the footway, “The Hungarian saw him put his hand on her shoulder and push her back into the passage”.
The Star also reported that rather than the “second man standing lighting his pipe” the Hungarian stated “positively that he saw a knife in the second man’s hand.”
Russell is satisfied these discrepancies were due to “Schwartz’s poor English” or “over-enthusiastic journalism”.
Possibly, but can we just assume that? These are major discrepancies.
It must be pointed out that there are no other witnesses to support the story that Israel Schwartz reported to the police.
However, the story that Schwartz gave to the police was good enough to get him a free pass to enter the mortuary and see the body of Liz Stride.
By September 30th, of course, the newspaper coverage had managed to whip up a frenzy of mass hysteria among the East End population.
Huge crowds gathered at the murder sites. In the case of the second murder, people whose houses offered a view of the backyard where Annie Chapman’s body was found made a good living charging people to get the view. A view of the body of a victim was high on the wish list of some residents.
Israel Schwartz's story was good enough to get him a viewing at the mortuary days after Liz Stride had been identified.
And it is difficult to reconcile what Israel Schwartz claimed he saw at 12:45 with what Fanny Mortimer of 36 Berner Street said about the night of Elizabeth Stride’s murder:
“I was standing at the door of my house nearly the whole time between half-past twelve and one o'clock this Sunday morning and did not notice anything unusual. I had just gone indoors, and was preparing to go to bed, when I heard a commotion outside, and immediately ran out, thinking that there was another row at the Socialists' Club close by. I went to see what was the matter and was informed that another dreadful murder had been committed in the yard adjoining the clubhouse, and on going inside I saw the body of a woman lying huddled up just inside the yard with her throat cut from ear to ear. A man touched her face, and said it was quite warm, so that the deed must have been done while I was standing at the door of my house. There was certainly no noise made, and I did not observe anyone enter the gates.”
It does then seem difficult to understand why Russell says: “Schwartz was considered then, and now, a very important witness.”
It is, however, clear that Russell believes Schwartz was both important and reliable. He recounts what Alan McCormack, the curator of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum told him about the identification of the suspect that the police arranged in 1890.
“The scenario Alan put to me is the one suggested by Anderson and apparently confirmed by Swanson. This is my summary of it. Aaron Kosminski was placed in a room at the Seaside Home. Israel Schwartz was led into the room by a police officer and confronted with Kosminski. He was then immediately led out of the room and asked if this was the man he saw attacking Elizabeth Stride on the night of her murder. Alan McCormack was adamant that there was what he described as ‘an unhesitating ID’.”
Now, we must remember the questions about the reliability of Schwartz’s evidence.
But even if we accept that Schwartz did see this man attacking the woman, as Russell Edwards says, Schwartz was ‘tens of feet away” at one o’clock in the morning on a very dimly lit street. Then, add the fact that 20 months had passed since that sighting.
Russell goes on to say: “The police asked Schwartz if he would be willing to testify to the fact, and he refused on the grounds that he could not bear to have it on his conscience that he had sent a fellow Jew to the gallows.”
This made at least one Jew furious. Writing under the pen name of ‘Mentor’ in The Jewish Chronicle of March 4th 1910:
“According to Sir Robert Anderson, the police "formed a theory" - usually the first essential to some blundering injustice. In this case, the police came to the conclusion that "Jack the Ripper" was a "low-class" Jew, and they so decided, Sir Robert says, because they believe "it is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile justice". Was anything more nonsensical in the way of a theory ever conceived even in the brain of a policeman? Here was a whole neighbourhood, largely composed of Jews, in constant terror lest their womenfolk, whom Jewish men hold in particular regard - even "low-class" Jew do that - should be slain by some murderer who was stalking the district undiscovered. So terrified were many of the people - non-Jews as well as Jews - that they hastily moved away. And yet Sir Robert would have us believe that there were Jews who knew the person who was committing the abominable crimes and yet carefully shielded him from the police. A more wicked assertion to put into print, without the shadow of evidence, I have seldom seen.”
Surely, even the most ardent supporter of Russell Edwards would have to concede that ‘Mentor’ makes a good point.
But Russell goes on to say: “Even though Aaron Kosminski had been clearly identified, (Really? Clearly identified for Russell maybe.) the manner in which this identification was made was problematical, because to present it as evidence in court it would have to have been a full line-up of men from whom Kosminski was chosen. As a result, the police had the moral proof, but the legal proof was not good enough, a matter bemoaned by Robert Anderson.”
Robert Anderson may well have bemoaned this failure to convict after Israel Schwartz “clearly identified” Aaron Kosminski. However, it’s possible that another miscarriage of justice was averted.
“Eyewitness misidentification has been found to be the leading cause of known wrongful conviction, contributing to approximately 70% of known wrongful convictions that have been overturned by DNA testing. Eyewitness identification error - when a witness identifies an innocent suspect.”
As reported in policing insight.com on 3rd December 2022 by Dr Joanna Pozzulo, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Russell says, “Alan McCormack stressed to me that there was no other evidence . . . I believe the fact there was a confrontation and not line-up is the reason why Jack the Ripper has remained such a hot topic down the years: if Kosminski had been prosecuted and convicted, the Ripper case would be of interest only to experts studying serial killers”.
So, for Russell, all that was needed to make this eyewitness ‘evidence’ effective was a police line-up.
Russell believes that: “As a Jew himself, he knew the prejudice against his race that was rampant at the time: if the Ripper was Jewish, it would feed into this growing anti-Semitism. And as far as his own community was concerned, he would possibly have been regarded as a traitor to have stirred up more bad feeling towards them all.”
As ‘Mentor’ wrote in The Jewish Chronicle; “A more wicked assertion to put into print, without the shadow of evidence, I have seldom seen.”
So, what’s the real evidence in Naming Jack the Ripper?
In 2001, Russell Edwards went to the Vue Cinema in Cambridge to see the film From Hell. It was this film about the Ripper murders that first attracted Russell to the subject.
In 2007 he went to an auction in Bury St Edmunds. He writes: “Why was this auction so important to me?” He explains it was all because of “an old silk shawl, damaged, with pieces missing”. He thought it was beautiful.
But the real draw for him was its provenance. “According to the vendors’ family history, this shawl is purported to have been removed from Jack the Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes by his great-great uncle, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson”.
The first time that the public would have heard of this shawl was in 1991 in Paul Harrison’s book Jack the Ripper: The Mystery Solved.
Paul Harrison when researching his book had seen pieces that had been cut from the shawl.
Then in 1993 in his book The Black Museum Bill Waddell, the Curator of The Black Museum, wrote: “Recently I acquired a silk screen printed shawl. It had been in the donor’s family for years . . . I am told that it was the shawl worn by Catherine Eddowes when she was killed”.
Russell writes: “If genuine, this was one of the few physical remains from the scenes of the crimes committed by Jack the Ripper”.
He goes on to say that although there was no proof it had belonged to Catherine Eddowes, he “believed it was genuine, and I wanted it. I wanted it very badly.”
Now, whilst his belief in its authenticity would give him the enthusiasm to seek proof, it is also a possible warning.
The scientific method for acquiring knowledge requires careful observation and rigorous scepticism because our desire to make assumptions can distort how we interpret what we discover.
Would Russel’s enthusiasm to prove it genuine fuel his desire to make assumptions and stop him from applying that rigorous scepticism?
The first challenge came when Russell became aware that among the incredibly detailed list of Catherine Eddowes’s possessions - from her black cloth jacket and chintz skirt right down to an empty tin matchbox - a total of more than 30 separate items carefully itemised - there was no mention of a silk shawl.
How was this to be explained?
Russell writes that:
“Unlike the police list, a press report in the East London Observer said, ‘Her dress was made of green chintz, the pattern consisting of Michaelmas daisies. This description was repeated by other periodicals and newspapers at the time.’
But Russell believes that the reporters got it wrong. They were not describing a dress, they were describing the shawl.
As you can see in the images the Michaelmas daisies is on a small section of the shawl. Quite how the newspaper reporters got close enough to notice the pattern of Michaelmas daisies but failed to notice that they were looking at a shawl not a dress is not explained.
As the reader we may want the time we spent reading to be rewarded by having this mystery finally cleared up. An understandable desire and so we may well feel a strong ‘desire to make assumptions’ even when we know that they ‘can distort how we interpret what we discover’
However, Russell says:
“This is a vital piece of information, and it is on this item of clothing that my whole investigation into the identity of Jack the Ripper rests. So why was it not on the police list of her belongings? As I found out, and as I am going to show you later, while the body was being transported to the mortuary, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson who was accompanying it, asked another, more senior officer if he could have this piece of clothing, which was in fact a shawl not a skirt.”
There is no evidence apart from a family story handed down through the generations that this shawl belonged to Catherine Eddowes.
Russell got his story from David Melville-Hayes, the great, great nephew of police officer Amos Simpson. Russel says that it’s “important to put the specific version of events across, as the story of the origins of the shawl has been muddled with the passing of time”.
Sergeant Amos Simpson as he appears in Naming Jack the Ripper by Russell Edwards.
Sergeant Simpson had been on special duties and had gone to Mitre Square and ended up accompanying Catherine Eddowes body to the City mortuary. “Seeing the shawl, he asked one of the senior officers if it was fine to take it.”
So, the evidence rests solely on a family story that “has been muddled with the passing of time”.
Now, “our desire to make assumptions can distort how we interpret what we discover” and, so it may encourage us to accept this ‘specific version of events’. But perhaps we shouldn’t ignore the need to apply some ‘rigorous scepticism’.
Would a “more senior officer” just hand this item over to Sergeant Simpson?
Russell says in those days, “no importance was attached to the belongings of a victim”.
Rigorous scepticism could make us question that statement.
The detailed list of Catherine Eddowes's possessions seems to indicate that some importance was attached to the belongings of a victim,
And we know that police surgeons complained that important information was lost because mortuary assistants would strip the clothes off the bodies of the victims before the police surgeon had time to carry out a full post-mortem examination.
And PC Long was sufficiently motivated to pick up a blood-soaked cloth that he discovered 600 metres from where Catherine Eddowes had been murdered.
And when he took it in to be examined his senior colleagues did not take the disgusting object and chuck it into the bin.
They attached sufficient importance to it that an examination was carried out, and it was believed to be one of the belongings of the victim, Catherine.
And, the whole story of Sergeant Amos Simpson and the ‘senior officer’ becomes more challenging to our rigorous scepticism when it is remembered that Sergeant Simpson was a member of the Metropolitan Police Force whereas the ‘senior officer’ was a member of the City of London Police Force. And there was intense rivalry between these two forces.
Also, this was the fourth brutal murder of a woman on the streets of Whitechapel in less than five weeks. And it was the first one to be committed in the City of London. Hard to believe that a ‘senior officer’ in the City of London Police would be so casual about anything connected to this murder.
Realising that apart from a family story passed down through the generations there was no evidence that this silk shawl was among Catherine Eddowes possessions was not the only problem that faced Russell after buying the shawl.
Kate Eddowes spent the last 7 years sharing her life with a labourer called John Kelly. They survived with poorly paid work, staying in doss houses when they had eightpence at the end of the day or sleeping in the casual ward of a workhouse or in a dark corner when they didn’t.
Just before Kate was brutally murdered, they had come back from hop-picking in Kent. It was a bad harvest, and they returned flat-broke.
Things were so bad that Kate left John Kelly standing barefoot outside a pawnshop while she pawned his boots to get some money for food and drink.
Obviously, if Catherine had this silk shawl among her possessions that would have crossed the pawn shop’s counter first.
In Chapter Seven ‘The History of the Shawl’ Russell explains that:
“Knowing the stories of the victims and the line-up of suspects only increased my fascination with the case”.
And he says he would visit Cambridge bookshops:
“Looking for accounts I hadn’t read before, getting exasperated with some of the wilder theories, noting anomalies in evidence”.
And so displaying a considerable degree of rigorous scepticism.
“But after six years of trawling through books, I was unable to find anything to take the Ripper story forward”.
It was at this point in 2007 that he heard about the auction and Catherine Eddowe’s shawl.
“Some commentators denounced it as a fake . . . Yet something made me want to find out more . . . despite the fact that I’m a hard-headed businessman, I believe in hunches and following my feelings: my instincts are not always right, but they are far more often right than wrong.” And though “there may not be written evidence from the time that categorically proves the family story of how Simpson came into the possession of the shawl, equally it cannot be disproven”.
Which is an interesting insight into the scientific method that is being applied by Russell.
In Chapter Eight, Russell says that “Catherine was very poor” and she had pawned her partner’s boots obviously, if she had this silk shawl, she would have pawned that instead.
So, Russell says: “What if this shawl did not belong to Catherine at all? What if it had been left at the scene of the crime by the Ripper himself?’”
Now, before looking into the evidence for this assumption, let’s remember that there is no reliable evidence that this shawl was at the murder site.
Russell can say that we can’t prove it wasn’t there, but that is not our job. The job is for Russell to prove while displaying rigorous scepticism that it was there. And he has not done that.
So, using rigorous scepticism, what is Russell’s reason for saying Aaron Kosminski left the shawl at the scene of the crime?
“I also realized that, for the Michaelmas daisies to have real significance, they had to be connected to the Ripper. Perhaps he had left the shawl at the scene of the crime as an obscure clue to the police as to when he would strike again. Perhaps he had intended to take it away with him but was using it in his disturbed mental state because of its Michaelmas symbolism. Whatever he meant by leaving it there, it suddenly seemed blindingly obvious that it was nothing to do with Catherine and was entirely to do with him. He had taken the shawl with him on the night of 29 September, with the intention of killing, and he signalled that he would kill again, on the Michaelmas date that was (if he was Aaron Kosminski, as I strongly believed) part of his own background and the culture of his homeland, not this new Michaelmas he had had to learn in England.”
So, these Michaelmas daisies had real significance to Aaron Kosminski?
Isn’t Michaelmas a Christian festival, and wasn’t Aaron Kosminski a Jew?
Was this more than a two-metre-long shawl with him when he killed Liz Stride?
Did the Kosminski family ever mention the loss of this silk shawl?
To sum up what we learn about this shawl in Naming Jack the Ripper.
Nobody can doubt that Russell Edwards has done a lot of research buoyed by his commendable energy and enthusiasm.
However, his enthusiasm cannot hide the fact that there is only a story handed down through the descendants of Sergeant Amos Simpson to link the silk shawl to Catherine Edwards.
It is imaginative to say that the journalists were describing a shawl and not a dress when they wrote about the Michaelmas daisy design, but it is not proof that they had mistaken a two-and-a-half-metre by half-a-metre shawl for a dress.
It is equally imaginative to explain that this silk shawl became connected to the impoverished Catherine Eddowes because Aaron Kosminski brought it to the murder scene.
It is not enough to say,’ “Well, you can’t prove the journalists didn’t get it wrong, can you? And you can’t prove Aaron Kosminski didn’t bring the shawl to the party, can you?”
The scientific method for acquiring knowledge doesn’t work that way. I can’t prove that in some dimension within our infinite universe the Archangel Gabriel and God aren’t waiting to receive the true believers into an eternal life in paradise.
The scientific method for acquiring knowledge requires careful observation and rigorous scepticism because our desire to make assumptions can distort how we interpret what we discover.
Russell has a perfectly understandable ‘desire to make assumptions’. He spent an undisclosed sum of money and invested a lot of time and energy because, as he said, “I believed it was genuine, and I wanted it. I wanted it very badly”.
All of which may have challenged Russell’s rigorous scepticism.
Now, while questions can be asked about Russell’s credentials as a scientist, his business credentials may well be excellent.
According to the East Anglian Daily Times, the ‘undisclosed sum’ paid by Russell at the Bury St Edmunds auction back in 2007 was £5,200.
Seven years of research culminated in the launch of Naming Jack the Ripper, which attracted international publicity that was beyond the wildest dreams of 99% of all nonfiction and fiction authors.
Then, one year after the book launch, The Daily Mail of the 9th of July 2015 ran a story under this headline:
Bloodied shawl worn by one of Jack the Ripper’s victims said to prove identity of serial killer goes to auction for £2.9 MILLION.
“I believed it was genuine, and I wanted it. I wanted it very badly”. And with that kind of potential return on investment, I believe many of us would find that our ‘rigorous scepticism’ would wilt under our dynamic entrepreneurial ‘desire to make assumptions’ that indeed this shawl ‘was genuine’.
Now, Russell was a savvy enough businessman to realise that he couldn’t completely ignore the science.
He found a top scientist, Dr Jari Louhelainen, who became sufficiently excited by Russell and his project that he agreed to “do these tests in his own time for me, free, as long as he could write a paper on his findings when it was all over.”
This is where the DNA testing began.
And the DNA testing is the one thing that everybody mentions when they talk about the book. The one thing that featured in all those headlines that generated that massive international press launch of Naming Jack the Ripper.
DNA testing is science at its purist. If any scientific investigation requires total adherence to the scientific method, it is DNA testing.
The scientific method for acquiring knowledge requires careful observation and rigorous scepticism because our desire to make assumptions can distort how we interpret what we discover.
Now Jari is doing work for Russell that he says is very expensive. He’s doing it for free.
He’s doing it so “he could write a paper on his findings when it was all over.”
Like Naming Jack the Ripper, Jari’s academic paper could generate an interest that other academic papers would never achieve. Could there be a ‘desire to make assumptions’?
The other problem that has been pointed out is that Russel’s infectious enthusiasm has alerted Jari to just what it is he is looking for.
The danger is that Jari will keep testing until he finally discovers what they are both looking for.
The problem could have been avoided if Russell had just handed over the shawl while saying, “Please examine this.”
No mention of Aaron Kosminski, Catherine Eddowes or - most important of all - no mention of that guaranteed headline grabber ‘Jack the Ripper’.
But then why would Jari agree to do the work for free?
Russell writes up the search for DNA with great spirit. It’s an exciting journey while always reminding the reader of Jari’s scientific approach.
As you may imagine, some experts expressed scepticism that a shawl examined in the early 21st century would be capable of providing any reliable DNA deposited on it in 1888. A lot of DNA would have accumulated as the shawl was handed around for over a hundred years.
More significantly, a mitochondrial expert from the Medical University of Innsbruck, Dr Hansi Weissensteiner, pointed out that mitochondrial DNA cannot be used to positively ID a suspect; it can only rule one out since thousands of other people could have had the same mitochondrial DNA.
Despite the revelations in Naming Jack the Ripper, most expert opinion is that Aaron Kosminski was not Jack the Ripper.
Thank you for checking out this post.