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Who was Jack the Ripper? Part 1 - Page 2

© Brenda Gambrell

The second of Macnaghten suspects was Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew, who lived in the Whitechapel district when the murders were committed. He was known to have a great hatred for women and strong homicidal tendencies. He was admitted to a lunatic asylum in March 1889. The only evidence against Kosminski was a positive identification by an eyewitness to the Ripper’s Mitre Square murder. At the time of the murder this witness declared that he could not identify the murderer again, then two years later he claimed that Kosminski was indeed the man who committed the crime. Many ripper investigators do not believe that this evidence holds enough weight to point the finger at Kosminski, claiming he may simply have been an insane man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Michael Ostrog, a supposed Russian doctor, is the last of Melville Macnaghten’s three suspects. Ostrog spent the majority of his life in prison for theft and was eventually transferred to a lunatic asylum where he registered himself as a Jewish doctor. Why was Ostrog a suspect? He claimed to be a doctor, he was a well-known criminal, and he had spent time in a lunatic asylum, however, no evidence exists that he was even in the Whitechapel area during the time of the murders. Ostrog was not a violent criminal, he was much too tall (5 ft 11 inches) and too old (in his fifties or sixties) to fit the eyewitness descriptions of the killer.

Considering the lack of valid evidence, why did the commissioner name these men as his primary suspects? Macnaghten was believed to have been grasping at straws, broadcasting his personal theories to the hungry press with little information to support them. Inspector Abberline, the head of the Jack the Ripper investigation, discredited Macnaghten’s suspects. “Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago,” he stated in 1903.

Tune in next time for part two of “Who was Jack the Ripper?” in which I will cover the most talked about Ripper suspect and Inspector Abberline’s top suspect, who is still believed by many to be the “true” Ripper.

So who really was Jack the Ripper? Share your theories in this month’s discussion!

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