George Chapman - Local Man And Jack the Ripper Suspect
Seweryn Klosowski
Born in Nagórna, Congress Poland on the 14th of December 1865.
Executed at Wandsworth Prison, London for the murder of three women on the 7th of April 1903 aged 37.
From the early 1890s, Klosowski adopted the name George Chapman.
In 1903, Frederick Abberline, who had been involved in investigating the Whitechapel murders of 1888, said in an interview with The Pall Mall Gazette that he believed that George Chapman was Jack the Ripper.
Seweryn Klosowski, born in the village of Nagórna in Poland, used the name George Chapman. At 14, he was apprenticed to a surgeon and later assisted in the Warsaw Praga Hospital.
When he was 22, he emigrated to the United Kingdom and, in 1888, was working in a barber shop in London’s East End.
It is pointed out that one of the barber shops that he worked in was on the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard, which meant he was working just yards away from where Martha Tabram was murdered in George Yard Buildings.
However, Martha Tabram was murdered on August 7th, 1888, whereas Chapman didn’t begin working in that barber shop until 1890.
He married in 1889, and the couple had two children. In 1891, they moved to the United States.
It was not an easy relationship, and after he threatened to kill his pregnant wife, she returned to London and moved in with her sister.
Klosowski also returned to London, and for a time, the couple were reunited, but it didn’t last. By 1893, he was working in a barber shop in the East End and living with a woman named Annie Chapman, who was no relation to the second Jack the Ripper victim, who was also called Annie Chapman.
After just a year, Klosowski moved on from Annie Chapman, but from this time on, he used the name George Chapman.
In 1903, he was tried, convicted and executed for poisoning three women.
Although he does not seem to have been a suspect at the time of the murders, Frederick Abberline thought he was Jack the Ripper. Saying to the police officer, George Godley, who arrested Chapman: “You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last”.
So what’s the case against him?
George Chapman had been violent with his various partners. He arrived in Whitechapel about the time the murders began. The murders stopped when he went to America.
It was claimed that in New York, he killed a woman called Carrie Brown. Later evidence, though, appeared to show that he didn’t get to America until after that murder took place
Obviously, the case against Chapman is weak. What little evidence there is is purely circumstantial.
It has been pointed out that the murders that are known to have been committed by Chapman are very different from the murders committed by ‘Jack the Ripper.’
Chapman poisoned women he knew intimately. The Ripper cut the throats of women who were previously unknown to him.
In the end most expert opinion today suggests that George Chapman is not a strong candidate for the role of Jack the Ripper.
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