Book naming Ripper loaned to museum
http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329529475-99819,00.html
· Mentally-ill man was thought to be serial killer
· Black Museum given detective's memoirs
Maev Kennedy
Friday July 14, 2006
Guardian
A book in which a Victorian detective recorded his conviction that he knew
the real identity of Jack the Ripper, but would go to his grave unable to
prove it, was loaned yesterday by his great grandson to Scotland Yard's
infamous Black Museum.
Long after the country was convulsed by the butchery of a succession of poor
women in Whitechapel, east London, Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson
added a long handwritten note to the margin and back pages of a memoir
published in 1910 by his friend and colleague Assistant Commissioner Robert
Anderson. The murderer was a mentally ill Polish man called Aaron Kosminski,
Swanson wrote, suspected after an attack on his sister who was covertly
brought by the police to "the Seaside Home"- the police convalescent home at
Brighton - for an unofficial identify parade. He added that the only man who
could identify Kosminski would never give evidence "because the suspect was
also a Jew, and also because his evidence would convict the suspect and (sic)
witness would be the means of murderer being hanged which he did not wish to
be left on his mind". Swanson wrote that Kosminski had died in a mental
asylum: in fact if he has been correctly identified in the hospital records,
the unfortunate man lived on until 1919.
Swanson took over the shambolic investigation of the murders that were
terrifying and thrilling Victorian England. Yesterday Detective Chief
Superintendant Steve Lovelock said he gave "considerable weight" to his
predecessor's final conclusions on the case.
The museum, more properly known as the Crime Museum, is world famous for its
gruesome memorabilia of some of the most infamous murders of the last two
centuries, including the cooker used by Dennis Nilsen to render down the
victims he killed at 195 Melrose Avenue.
The collection began in the 1870s and has moved three times with the
headquarters of the Metropolitan police, and has just been re-displayed.
The curator, Alan McCormick, said yesterday it was a serious teaching tool
for young police officers. It has never been open to the public though
thousands of visitors including the Queen Mother and Charlie Chaplin have
been given guided tours.
Other candidates proposed as Jack the Ripper have included Queen Victoria's
grandson Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, who died in an 1891 flu
epidemic and Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice In Wonderland. In the past
decade the American crime writer Patricia Cornwell has spent a small fortune
of her own money trying to prove that the artist Walter Sickert was the
Ripper.
"There isn't a shred of evidence against Kosminski," Keith Skinner, one of
the most diligent researchers of Ripper material said yesterday, "there is
absolutely no material evidence against any of the suspects."
Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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