Free Jack the Ripper by The Whitechapel Society Page B

There has always been a whiff of anti-semitism about the police’s belief that the Ripper was Jewish. Anderson, in particular, never seems to have doubted it from day one. Yet it was based on little more than prejudice and ‘little’ may be putting it too high. In the 1880s the Jews were being demonised as alien hordes, taking British jobs and driving down living standards, in much the same way as immigrants are similarly pilloried today.
    The cry went up and was echoed from street to alley and lodging house to tenement, that no Christian could do such things to women; the culprit had to be a Jew and a foreign one at that. The history of serial murder since reveals this to be abject nonsense. Archetypal Anglo-Saxon types, like Peter Sutcliffe and Ted Bundy, are far more representative of the genre.
    Next, the identification. The ‘seaside home’ was the colloquial name given to the inaugural police convalescent home, opened in Brighton in March 1890. Why it was necessary to take the suspect and the witness all that way is unexplained, unless the police were terrified of the press getting wind of things. However, the date on which the home opened does tie in, very neatly, with what Swanson says about the aftermath of the identification, the records of the workhouse infirmary and the asylum. Kosminski could have been identified some time between March and July 1890, possibly during his July stay at the infirmary (Mile End subsequently became Stepney Workhouse), or shortly before February 1891, when he was finally sent to Colney Hatch.
    So far, so good. But now the hob-goblins begin to appear. A former Lord Chief Justice has described eyewitness identification as ‘the most serious chink in our legal armour’; and he is backed up by a conveyor belt of proven miscarriages of justice, emanating from faulty identifications. A battery of tests and experiments have, likewise, served to underline the frailty and flaws inherent in trying to recognise the person you saw, again. It all makes the point that, basically no identification can ever, by itself, be regarded as conclusive. And under what circumstances did Kosminski’s identification take place? Was he represented by a solicitor? Was there a proper identity parade, consisting of other working-class Jews of a similar age, height, build and clothing? These are considered to be the minimum requirements for a fair ID parade.
    Who was the witness? Two names are traditionally put into the frame: Israel Schwartz, the Hungarian immigrant, who observed Elizabeth Stride being assaulted some fifteen minutes before her body was found, and Joseph Lawende, who fifty minutes later saw Cathy Eddowes talking to a man in the passage leading to Mitre Square, where she was murdered. Neither would have been likely to fare well in court under a vigorous cross-examination. Both had briefly glimpsed a man in the darkness, eighteen months to two years earlier. Lawende had stated that he would not have been able to recognise the man again, whilst Schwartz’s description of the man he had seen, plus the seeming anti-Semitic shout of ‘Lipsky’ directed at him (Schwartz), strongly implied that the man was Anglo-Saxon.
    Other candidates for Anderson’s witness include one of Lawende’s companions that night, Joseph Levy, two unidentified men – who also, supposedly, observed Eddowes with a man in the precincts of Mitre Square – and an equally unidentified City Police officer, alleged by some to have been present that night. The latter is rather interesting. Macnaghten, if he can be relied upon, twice refers to this City Policeman in the Aberconway draft of his memoranda. First, ‘No one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer (unless possibly it was the City PC who was on a beat near Mitre Square)’; and then again in his synopsis of Kosminski, ‘This man in appearance strongly resembled the individual seen by the City PC near Mitre Square.’
    This mysterious officer keeps on cropping up. Major