Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (29 page)

There is nothing in any records I have found to show that he ever worked as a hairdresser, and with the family history of tailoring it is a surprising occupation, but there is equally no reason
to doubt the information given on his admission papers to the workhouse: perhaps he did, at some point, work as a hairdresser. He was discharged back into the care of his brother three days later
and it is unlikely that he saw a doctor or was given any help. Perhaps the family felt guilty about leaving him there, perhaps they worried that without more secure accommodation he would be able
to resume his murders. We will never know.

Six months later, Aaron was readmitted to the workhouse, and this time his address was given as 16 Greenfield Street, the home of his sister Matilda and her husband Morris Lubnowski, which shows
the family probably shuttled him around between their homes. The date was 4 February 1891, and it appears that his mental health had now deteriorated to a state that the family, who had been
sheltering and supporting him, could no longer cope. On his admission the register of patients stated that he was suffering from ‘mania’ and he was
examined by a
doctor, Edmund Houchin, who wrote a report on his findings and declared Kosminski insane:

Houchin ended his report with the words: ‘The said Aaron Kosminski appeared to me to be in a fit condition of bodily health to be removed to an asylum, hospital or
licensed house.’

The decision to commit him is recorded as ‘unchallenged’, which means that nobody in his family opposed him being
locked up: if they had (as I am sure they
must have had) suspicions about him, they probably felt great relief at the responsibility for him being taken from them.

Jacob Cohen, who gave the information about the attack on a sister (who must have been Matilda, unless the report inaccurately uses ‘sister’ for ‘sister-in-law’) and the
way that Aaron was behaving, was Woolf’s business partner, and could also, perhaps, have been Woolf’s brother-in-law. Woolf’s wife Betsy had a brother Jacob who took the name
Cohen after he left Poland, and although he lived and worked (successfully, as a butcher then a draper) in Manchester, it is possible that he was an investor and partner in Woolf’s business
venture, and visited London because of the business. The address he used when he gave the information about Aaron Kosminski is the address of Woolf’s business. But this is speculation: I
think it sounds plausible, but nobody has established the true identity of Jacob Cohen, and Ripper researchers have worked hard at it.

The siblings may have asked Jacob Cohen to give the details of Aaron’s progressive degeneration because he would be seen as more independent of the family. Possibly the family also gave
evidence and this simply wasn’t recorded. Houchin would have been dealing with many cases, and we are lucky that such a detailed report has survived.

When Aaron was arrested for walking the unmuzzled dog he said in court that the dog was ‘Jacob’s’, and this is probably another reference to Woolf’s partner.

From the workhouse, he was taken to Colney Hatch Asylum on 6 February 1891. This institution was opened at Friern Barnet in July 1851 as the second pauper lunatic asylum for the county of
Middlesex. Designed in the Italianate style
by S. W. Dawkes, it had 1,250 beds, making it the largest and most modern institution of its kind in Europe. Within ten years it
was enlarged to take 2,000 patients. It had its own cemetery (closed in 1873 after which the patients were buried in the Great Northern Cemetery in New Southgate), its own farm on which many
patients were employed, its own water supply, and its own sewage works built after the local residents complained of untreated sewage from the asylum flowing into a nearby brook.

The Colney Hatch admission register describes Kosminski as twenty-six years of age, Hebrew, single and, again, a hairdresser. The cause of his condition, originally entered as
‘unknown’, was amended in red ink to ‘self abuse’ and the period of his current ‘attack’ was initially listed as ‘6 months’ but again amended to say
‘6 years’, suggesting that Aaron had been showing mental health problems since 1885, when he was twenty. It was recorded that he was not deemed to be a danger to others. Brother Woolf
was again listed as nearest relative.

Through my own research at the LMA I have copies of his notes, and they show him ranging between quiet, morose periods and episodes of great excitement:

This last note shows that Aaron Kosminski was transferred to the overcrowded Leavesden Asylum near Watford in Hertfordshire in 1894, where conditions
were far worse than at Colney Hatch. No reason was given for the transfer, but it is possible that his intractable condition meant that he was never going to be rehabilitated. When he was admitted
to Leavesden his bodily condition was noted down as ‘impaired’. For the first time, his mother Golda is listed as his next of kin, her address given as the house where his sister
Matilda and her family lived.

The sparse notes taken at Leavesden relating to the last years of his life, which were procured for me by the archivist at the LMA, show that his behaviour continued to fluctuate, and later on
his physical health also began to deteriorate. The notes below from Leavesden have been compiled from various loose sources in the records and have been arranged in chronological order to give a
better sense of Kosminski’s decline:

According to Aaron Kosminski’s death certificate, the cause of death was gangrene. He was fifty-three when he died, and weighed less than seven stone, probably the result
of refusing to eat and years of inactivity. The marks on his hip and leg could well have been bedsores. From the sparse notes we can deduce he was in a near catatonic state much of the time, but we
do not know whether he was drugged. Although antipsychotic drugs were not developed until the 1950s, workers in the noisy, understaffed asylums routinely sedated patients to make caring for them
easier.

Aaron’s body was passed into the possession of ‘I & W Abrahams’, his two brothers, Isaac and Woolf. He was buried by the Burial Society of the United Synagogue on 27 March
1919 at East Ham Cemetery at a total cost of twelve pounds and five shillings, and his address was given as 5 Ashcroft Road, Bow, which was at that time the home of his brother-in-law Morris
Lubnowski and sister Matilda. The inscription on the gravestone read: ‘Aaron Kosminski who died the 24th of March 1919. Deeply missed by his brother, sisters, relatives and friends. May his
dear soul rest in peace’.

Although the gravestone refers to only one brother, Isaac was alive for another year – so it is likely the gravestone was added later, after Isaac’s death. The siblings and their
mother Golda are all buried together, in a different cemetery, and their surnames are all recorded as Abrahams. So despite the loving inscription, it seems the rest of the family were happy to keep
their mentally ill brother separate from them, even in death.

Looking at these records, it is understandable that Martin Fido and others find it difficult to reconcile this steadily deteriorating and sad figure with the dreaded Jack
the Ripper. Yet Aaron Kosminski is the only ‘Kosminski’ in the asylum records fitting the time period, and a ‘Kosminski’ was named by Melville Macnaghten as ‘a strong
suspect’; Robert Anderson was convinced that the Ripper was a poor, insane Polish Jew who had been identified as the Ripper and sent to an asylum and Donald Swanson appeared to agree with
him, albeit misnaming Mile End Workhouse as ‘Stepney Workhouse’, and then named him. I believe there are enough circumstances to make the police’s ‘Kosminski’ and
Aaron Mordke Kosminski one and the same, and that is why, in my pursuit of the scientific evidence to prove who the Ripper really was, I made him my prime target.