Free Jack the Ripper by The Whitechapel Society

changed pencils, and wrote on one of the endpapers:

    After the suspect had been identified, by us, at the seaside home where he had been sent by us with difficulty, in order to subject him to identification and he knew he was identified.
    On suspect’s return to his brother’s house in White-chapel he was watched by police [City CID] by day and night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards – Kosminski was the suspect – DSS

    ‘DSS’ stood for Donald Sutherland Swanson, a retired Detective Chief Inspector of the Metropolitan Police who, in 1888, had been in charge of the day-to-day running of the Ripper investigation. The book in which he was making notes, The Lighter Side of My Official Life , by Swanson’s old boss, Assistant Commissioner (CID) Sir Robert Anderson, was published in 1910, when Swanson was sixty-two and Anderson, sixty-nine. The man Swanson had named was Aaron Mordke Kosminski, a Polish Jew from the province of Kalish. At the time Swanson was annotating the book, he believed Kosminski was dead. However, he was in fact alive and resident in the Leavesden home for imbeciles, although his incarceration there might fairly be described as a living death.
    But, it is Anderson’s number two in the 1890s, Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten, who we have to thank for first bringing Kosminski’s name to our attention. In 1894, he was asked to prepare a report for the Home Office on Thomas Cutbush, a man named as the Ripper in a series of newspaper articles. In his report, Macnaghten exonerated Cutbush and mentioned three men whom he thought were more likely to have been the killer. One of these three was Aaron Kosminski.

    Popular depiction of Aaron Kosminski. (Illustrated London News, 1888) .
    There are two extant versions of the Macnaghten Memoranda, as it has become known. One, the final draft, is preserved in the police files. The other, seemingly a preliminary draft, was in the possession of Macnaghten’s daughter, Lady Aberconway. The Aberconway version tells us that Kosminski was a Polish Jew, living in Whitechapel, who had become insane through indulging in ‘solitary vices’. He had strong homicidal tendencies, hated women and was detained in an asylum ‘about March 1889.’ He strongly resembled an individual seen by a City Police officer near Mitre Square.
    In the final draft, Machaghten adds that Kosminski specifically hated prostitutes and claims that there were many ‘circumstances connected with this man which made him a strong suspect.’
    So what we have here, on the surface at least, is a simple, straightforward story in which the top brass at Scotland Yard say that Kosminski was, at the very least, a gilt-edged suspect for these murders and in all likelihood was the perpetrator. Although, the point has to be made that, of his three suspects, Macnaghten apparently favoured Montague Druitt over him.
    Serious research into Kosminski only commenced in the mid-1980s, through Ripper-expert Martin Fido. Martin ended up opting for a different suspect, Aaron Cohen, but what he discovered about Kosminski was invaluable.
    He found that Kosminski had first been admitted to the Mile End Workhouse Infirmary on 12 July 1890, but was discharged three days later, into the care of his brother. However, on 7 February 1891 he was admitted to the Colney Hatch asylum. His age was recorded as twenty-six and his occupation as hairdresser. The form of his illness was described, simply, as ‘mania’, and his age at the time of the first attack – twenty-five – coincides with the six months duration of the illness given in the patients register.
    But the admission book discloses a crucial difference on the latter point. Here, ‘six months’ has been crossed out and ‘six years’ was written in red ink. Immediately below it is another amendment. Against the words ‘supposed cause’,