Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (28 page)

I went to the archive because I discovered that the records of Colney Hatch Asylum, one of the two asylums he was held
in at the end of his life, were stored there, and I
spent a day trawling through them, photographing all the references to Aaron Kosminski. But I hit a wall when it came to getting the archives from the other asylum to which he was later
transferred, Leavesden. I was not able to get into these archives because they were too fragile to be handled by a member of the public; however, I paid one of the professional archivists to do the
research for me (see Appendix for a selection of documents). I was not the first researcher in the archives there: I saw Martin Fido’s name above mine in the log of who had been looking at
Aaron Kosminski’s records, the man who had rejected him in favour of David Cohen as the Ripper. But I still find it remarkable that in all the years since he was put on the list of three top
suspects, so little research had been done into him before.

So what do we know? Who was Aaron Kosminski, and what triggered his gruesome attacks on the prostitutes of the East End in a few terrible months in 1888?

Aaron Mordke Kosminski was born in Klodawa, in the Province of Kalish in central Poland, on 11 September 1865, the son of tailor Abram Josef Kozminski and his wife, Golda Lubnowski. They were
described in an undated entry in the Klodawa Book of Residents as ‘petty bourgeois’, which suggests that they had a reasonable standard of living. Aaron was the youngest of seven
children, although his oldest sister, Pessa, only lived until she was three, and died long before he was born. His next sister, Hinde, was born seventeen years before he was, in 1848, followed by a
brother, Icek (who later adopted the Anglicized name of Isaac), born in 1852. Next was a sister, Malke (who also changed her name to Matilda), and then another sister, Blima, born in 1854. Closest
in age to him
was his brother Woolf who was five years his senior. By the time Aaron was born, his mother Golda was forty-five, and she had spent twenty years giving birth
and rearing children.

Klodawa is a small town about ninety miles from Warsaw, with a salt mine which formed the backbone of its economy, and which is still the largest salt mine in Poland. The town has a chequered
and mostly unhappy history of being invaded and handed around between different states: in the seventeenth century it was destroyed by the Swedes, then it was ruled by Prussia, followed by a spell
as part of the Duchy of Warsaw. It was part of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, an autonomous state ruled by the tsars of Russia, from 1815 until a rebellion against Russia in 1863, which was
suppressed and the area became a province of the Russian Empire. It formally became part of Russia in the year that Aaron was born.

If his home town had a fractured history, the Jewish community within it had an even more troubled past, having at times been expelled from the town. By the time of Aaron’s birth, almost a
quarter of the population was Jewish. His father Abram was a tailor, and from everything we know about the work his sons did when they came to London, it’s clear he apprenticed them to his
trade.

In about 1871, when he was twenty, Isaac was the first of the family to move to London, with his young wife Bertha, probably moving to escape the poverty of Klodawa, and to work in a larger
population: there may not have been enough tailoring work in a town of less than 3,000 inhabitants.

Aaron was only eight or nine years old when his father died, at the age of about fifty-four, after Isaac had already left Poland. We don’t know the cause of his death, but the impact on
the family must have been huge. Hinde and Matilda were
married by then, and no longer living with the family. Their father’s death certificate lists him as leaving a
widow and three children living at home, presumably the youngest three, Blima, who was sixteen at the time, Woolf, fourteen, and the much younger Aaron.

They must all have felt the death of the father acutely, for financial reasons as well as emotional ones. But perhaps Aaron, so much the youngest, was more affected than the others. I am not
going to attempt to explore the psychology of separation and loss at such an early age in any depth, but we know today how profoundly children’s lives are influenced by losing a parent at a
crucial stage of their development.

In a patriarchal society, the head of the family was now Woolf, a young teenager who had to support his mother, sister and little brother. Aaron was no doubt recruited to work: it was normal for
children as young as ten to be employed. Blima may also have worked in the family business until her marriage.

We know almost nothing about the life of his sister Blima, although she changed her name to Bertha Held, from which we can deduce that she married and also, because of the anglicized first name,
left Eastern Europe. Matilda married her cousin Mosiek (later changed to Morris) Lubnowski. They moved to Germany where their first two children (they had four) were born and after at least two
years there they moved to London.

His oldest surviving sister, Hinde, married Aaron Singer, another tailor, in Poland and had two children there, born when their uncle Aaron was only ten and then twelve years old.

Other than this, very little is known about Aaron’s childhood in Poland. What we do know is that brother Woolf and his
wife Brucha (another cousin, who also
anglicized her name to Betsy) emigrated to London in 1881, when Woolf was twenty. Fifteen-year-old Aaron probably went with them and joined the thousands of Jewish refugees who were now descending
upon the East End to escape the pogroms, the Russian violence towards Jewish communities.

Whether Golda travelled with them is not known: she may have come later with her daughter Matilda, who lived in Germany when she first left Poland (and it’s a possibility that Aaron, too,
went with her) because we have records of Golda living with Matilda in London, and she is buried there. Hinde, who now went by the name Helena (and later was known as Annie) also travelled to
London with her family at about the same time. It is possible that her husband came earlier: there’s a reference to him fleeing Poland after a scandal, and he appears to have been a bit of a
ladies’ man who, much later, deserted his wife and family. The Singers stayed in London for two or three years, where two more children were born, before leaving for America in 1885, where
they settled in Boston.

The journey from Klodawa to London was undoubtedly horrendous, with border guards demanding bribes and robbers taking advantage of the defenceless travellers. Crossing the North Sea typically
took two or three days, crammed with other emigrants in dirty, smelly conditions. The Kosminskis were fortunate compared to most of their fellow travellers: they had somewhere to go in London, and
someone to greet them. Isaac was living there with a successful tailoring business, and he was relatively comfortably off in his new homeland. By 1885, three of the Kosminski siblings, Isaac,
Matilda and Woolf, were renting houses in the East End in Greenfield Street (now Greenfield Road), off Commercial Road, and
which was described as a relatively respectable
street for the neighbourhood, inhabited by ‘a rather superior class of people’, according to Charles Booth’s survey carried out in 1888. Before they left for America, Helena and
her family, the Singers, also lived in Greenfield Street.

With their new anglicized first names, the Kosminskis changed their surname to Abrahams, simply because it was easier to pronounce and spell than Kosminski, although Aaron, at least, seems to
have preferred the old name. Perhaps he felt he had lost so much already – his father, his homeland, his language – that he was not prepared to surrender his name, too.

Woolf and his family, and Matilda and hers, may have found it harder to settle in London than Isaac did. Both families are recorded as moving to different addresses, all either in Greenfield
Street or very close by, in the next few years (Woolf lived at four different houses in the street, as well as in the nearby Providence Street, Yalford Street and Berner Street, where he had lived
next door to the scene where Elizabeth Stride would later be murdered). We don’t know which of his siblings gave Aaron a home: perhaps they all took care of their youngest brother at
different times, but as they all had children themselves, and Golda to house, conditions must have been cramped. It would be unlikely he lived separately: young single people in those days would
normally live with family.

Isaac was prospering in a small way, and by 1888 he had fourteen employees and a workshop in the yard behind his house, one of fifteen similar workshops along one side of Greenfield Street,
which shows that the Jewish tailoring business was well established. One reason for this is that they were making clothes for women: previously all tailoring in Britain
had
been done for men, and women were dressed by home dressmakers.

However, with so many people in the business, and keen competition, it is understandable that relative newcomers like Woolf struggled to make a mark. Matilda’s husband Morris was a
shoemaker, and he too appears to have found it hard to make ends meet in the early days in London, probably because shoemaking again was not a new trade in the area and there would be established
competition.

Although the East End was a popular place for the Jewish settlers to congregate, they were, by 1888, experiencing a backlash of anti-Semitism, being accused of stealing jobs from unemployed
British-born nationals; of undercutting each other on price so much that the wages they paid were not enough to sustain their employees; and there were firebrand Jewish Socialists condemning the
low-waged rag trade workshops. It was an unsettling time for the immigrants, and it must have seemed to the Kosminski/Abrahams family that they had lived their entire lives under anti-Semitism.

Whichever branch of his family he was living with, in 1888, when the Ripper murders happened, Aaron was close enough to the scenes of all the crimes to have easily got there and to have escaped.
I’ve traced the routes, I know these short distances well. On the night of the double murder, when he was interrupted at Dutfield’s Yard, he was compelled to strike again, and I believe
he was only successful because of the proximity of his home to the scene. There was a hue and cry in the streets, with police and public hunting him, yet he
needed
to strike again on that
significant date. Living just on the edge of Whitechapel meant he could commit the murder with time to carry out his ritual mutilations, and still get back
to the safety of
his home, which would be either in Greenfield Street (with Isaac or Matilda), or Providence Street or Yalford Street, where we know Woolf was living at about this time (we know he lived in both
streets from the dates his children attended local schools, but we don’t know exactly when he moved to each new address). All these streets give easy access to the crime scenes.

Immediately after the murders, the records on Aaron Kosminski are scanty, with just one tantalizing glimpse of him. In December 1889, he appeared in court after being arrested for walking an
unmuzzled dog in Cheapside. Fear of a rabies outbreak had led to a law requiring all dogs to be muzzled. Aaron’s appearance in court was reported in the press.
Lloyds Weekly News
said:

Another report in the
City Press
said:

The brother present at the court was probably Woolf, who was certainly using the name Abrahams. It is interesting that Aaron, who was twenty-four, was accompanied by his older
brother; it is not clear why he had to come along and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to assume that Aaron was having any sort of difficulty, either with language or ability, to
understand what was happening, although he probably needed help paying the fine.

From there, Aaron Kosminski disappears briefly from the historical record. When he reappears in 1890, it is in the records of the Mile End Old Town workhouse. On 12 July, Aaron was taken there
by one of his brothers, again probably Woolf. The exact reason why he was taken there is not clear, although it was probably because Aaron had begun to show unmistakable signs of being mentally
disturbed and Woolf may well have hoped there was treatment available, or at least to get a diagnosis: the record shows that the ‘cause of seeking relief’ was ‘Qy Insane’
which meant ‘query insane’, a common enough entry for pauper admissions at the time. Workhouses were institutions providing basic care for those who had reached the very bottom of the
social ladder, with no means of support and
no accommodation. They were also used to house the mentally ill and the elderly, and they were dirty, overcrowded, unsanitary
places: a refuge of last resort.

On admission Aaron was described as ‘destitute’. We can only guess that he was behaving sufficiently unusually for the family to be worried enough to seek help. His occupation was
given as ‘hairdresser’ and his address was 3 Sion Square, Woolf’s home. His religion was recorded as ‘Hebrew’, and he was classified as an ‘able bodied
man’ in terms of which meagre diet he would be allocated.