Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [39]
Aaron Kosminski (1864/65–1919)
Along with his championing of Druitt, Macnaghten was also the first to suggest Kosminski as a suspect. A Polish Jewish hairdresser, he was certified insane and committed to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891. He’d been suffering from periods of insanity for three years and roamed the streets, eating food out of the gutter. He heard voices and had once threatened his sister with a knife. However, usually Kosminski’s insanity sent him into a torpor, during which time he refused to bathe or to work. Plus, he remained insane and at liberty until 1891 while the murders ceased in 1888. Far from being Macnaghten’s ‘homicidal lunatic with a deep hatred of women’, Kosminski’s medical records assert that he was neither suicidal nor dangerous to others. Apart from the knife incident, Kosminski’s only other act of violence was in 1892, when he threw a chair at an asylum attendant.This did nothing to alter the authorities’ opinions that he was harmless. In addition, his build, small and slight, doesn’t fit the majority of most Ripper descriptions.
In July 2006, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson’s great-grandson donated the book containing the ‘Swanson marginalia’ to Scotland Yard’s ‘Black Museum’. Originally discovered by his grandson when the book passed to him around 1980, the notes were first published in the Daily Telegraph in 1987. Swanson’s handwritten note is in the margin and end-page of his copy of Commissioner Robert Anderson’s controversial memoirs, published in 1910. In these, Anderson sketchily described the suspect whom he believed to be the Ripper.Anderson’s description of the man extends little beyond mentioning he was a low-class Polish Jew from Whitechapel whose relatives shielded him from the police. He also states that ‘the only person who ever saw the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him’. Swanson’s notes continue, mentioning that the witness, also a Jew, refused to give evidence against the suspect as he did not want to be ‘the means of the murderer being hanged’. Swanson also states that the ‘…suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home where he had been sent to us with difficulty in order to subject him to identification and he knew he was identified.’The ‘Seaside Home’ was one of the Convalescent Police Seaside Homes. The first of these was opened in West Brighton in March 1890. If this is the correct location a period of eighteen months had passed since the original sighting of Kosminski, sixteen months alone would have passed since the last murder. The ‘marginalia’ further details that Kosminski was taken ‘to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards’ when, in fact, he lived on until 1919. Despite these anomalies, Swanson’s notations are clearly for personal consumption only.Thus, having no agenda to mislead anyone, they simply relate the truth as Swanson saw it from 1910. The margina-lia’s provenance is unquestionably from Swanson’s own hand. Despite Macnaghten’s, Anderson’s and Swanson’s enthusiasm for Kosminski-as-the-Ripper, there exists as much evidence against him as any of our other suspects.
There were other mentally-ill suspects. Aaron Davis Cohen (aka David Cohen and possibly aka Nathan Kaminsky) was an extremely violent lunatic whose capture and incarceration came closely after the cessation of the murders and who might possibly