The Polish barber who could have been Jack the Ripper

It’s one of the greatest crime mysteries in British history. Jack the Ripper, the infamous serial killer who stalked the streets of Victorian London between August and November 1888 – yet has never been unmasked. 

Making Whitechapel, east London, the focus of most of his crimes, the Ripper took the lives of at least five female sex workers and left all, except one, horribly mutilated in the fatal attacks.

The ‘style’ of such gruesome killings, gave some people reason to believe the culprit could perhaps be a doctor. Dr Llewellyn, who investigated the death of Ripper victim Mary Nichols in 1888, theorised the murderer had ‘some rough anatomical knowledge’ as he ‘seemed to have attacked all the vital parts [of Mary’s body].’

In the years following the murders, more than 2,000 people were interviewed, 300 investigated and 80 detained, yet police in London never caught the killer.

Howeverm that has stopped so-called ‘ripperologists’ debating the true identity of Jack the Ripper over the last 135 years.

Popular suspects include Aaron Kosminski – a paranoid schizophrenic with a known hatred of women – and Montague John Druitt – a schoolmaster deemed ‘sexually insane.’ There’s also some more obscure theories, such as that Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor was behind the deaths or that Mary Pearcey, who killed her lover and his family in 1890, could be the Ripper.

But for FG Abberline, the Scotland Yard detective tasked with hunting Jack the Ripper at the time of his or her killings, there was only one name on his mind: George Chapman.

‘I cannot help but feeling that this is the man we struggled so hard to capture,’ Abberline told the press in 1903, in a statement which shocked the country. 

Who was George Chapman?

Born Severin Klosovski in Poland in 1865, Chapman moved to London in 1888 to work in a barber shop on Whitechapel High Street. He then spent a few years in New Jersey, America before he returned to England – the exact date is unknown – and adopted the name George Chapman. He worked at a barbershop in Hastings, East Sussex, before returning to London to continue his work.

In 1889 the barger married Lucie Badewski, from Poznań in Poland, who he met at Polish club in Clerkenwell, London, but left her after three years. Chapman would frequently commit his love to one woman, only to lose interest and move on to another.

Three of his wives – Mary Spink, Bessie Taylor and Maud Marsh – all died in suspicious circumstances. They grew incredibly sick incredibly quickly and, after Maud’s family raised the alarm, it emerged they had been poisoned by Chapman.

While Spink had left him £500 (around £70,000 in today’s money), the killer gained nothing from the deaths of his other two wives.

‘He was quite a charming and flamboyant character apparently,’ Joel Griggs, curator at the True Crime Museum in Hastings, tells Metro. Among his collection is a string of pearls and a family bible once owned by Maud Marsh.

Joel continues: ‘Chapman would seduce each new wife and get this desire to kill them. I can’t quite get to grips with his motives. But he presumably was a lust killer – someone who enjoyed holding the power of life and death over his victims. He didn’t stand to benefit financially from the majority of the women we know he killed.’

How did George Chapman kill?

Chapman purchased emetic tartar – a poison used by the infamous ‘Teacup Murderer’ Graham Young in Hertfordshire – from a chemist in Hastings, Sussex which he used against his wives.

Mary Spink, who had worked with Chapman at a barbershop in Hastings, died on Christmas Day in 1897 after her kidneys and liver failed. His next wife Bessie Taylor lost her life on February 13, 1901 and the doctor said the cause of death was ‘exhaustion due to vomiting and diarrhea.’ 

Maud Marsh, who Chapman met just six months after Bessie’s death, died on October 22 1902. Her parents had taken a dislike to her strange husband and, at their daughter’s bedside, their suspicion only grew as she became more ill seemingly without reason.

At Maud’s post-mortem, antimony [poison], was found in her system and the bodies of Bessie and Mary were exhumed as the police rounded on Chapman after traces of poison was found.

What happened to Chapman?

Journalists christened Chapman the ‘Southwark Poisoner’ during his three-day trial at Central Criminal Court in London. On March 19, he was sentenced to death by hanging and held in Wandsworth Prison.

The Worcestershire Chronicle [April 4, 1903] reported: ‘He [Chapman] sleeps little, pacing the cell for the greater part of the night, with his head bowed, as if in deep thought. No one visited him except his solicitor.’ His first wife Lucie had requested to visit, but the killer had refused to see her.

Chapman was hanged on a cold Tuesday morning in Wandsworth on April 7, 1903. The 37-year-old had risen around 6am, dressed quietly and took mass. Prison guards then offered him coffee, bread and butter but he ‘scarcely ate anything.’

‘He was then very moody and depressed,’ the South London Press reported. ‘As the dread hour approached, Chapman displayed a nervous fear of his approaching fate, and the slightest sound caused him to start. Just before leaving the cell he appeared pale and drank a glass of water.’ 

Hundreds watched on as Chapman took his final breath outside Wandsworth Prison.

What evidence points to him being Jack the Ripper?

The first Jack the Ripper murder occurred in Whitechapel in August, 1888. Chapman had moved to the area that year and had undergone medical studies in both Poland and Russia; meaning he knew his way around a body.

Chapman’s first wife, Lucie, claimed he was violent and threatened her with a knife when the pair lived in America. She told police he’d vanish for long stretches at night. While the couple lived in New Jersey, the area was in fact rocked by similar murders to the Jack the Ripper killings, which by this point had stopped in England.

A reporter at the Pall Mall Gazette [an evening newspaper in London] rang up FG Abberline, the Scotland Yard detective tasked with hunting the Jack the Ripper, to get his verdict on the theory after Chapman was hanged. It emerged the retired copper was convinced the two men were one and the same but, due to a fall which had injured his hand, he hadn’t been able to write and inform anyone of this revelation.

Abberline told the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘The idea has taken the full possession of me, and everything fits and dovetails so well that I cannot help but feeling that this is the man we struggled so hard to capture 15 years ago. There are a score of things which make one believe Chapman is the man; we never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind.

‘The date of the [Chapman’s] arrival in England coincides with the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact the murders ceased in London when Chapman went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there.

‘The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came over here is well established, and it is curious to note the first set of [Jack the Ripper] murders was the work of an expert surgeon. The story told by Chapman’s wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored, but something still more remarkable.’

While Abberline was confident the Ripper’s identity had been revealed once and for all, Chapman was never officially confirmed to be the infamous killer.

What do experts think?

Joel wouldn’t put money on Chapman being the Ripper.

‘He was regarded as the primary suspect by Abberline, but I think the police were desperate to pin it [the Ripper murders] on anybody,’ the museum curator muses. ‘They hadn’t come up with answers themselves. So when Chapman appears in the docks and they hear he lived in Whitechapel and murdered three women, they turn round and go “oh yeah, we’ve got him. He’s hanged now, Jack the Ripper is dead.’

One key argument which goes against Chapman being the Ripper is that serial killers rarely change their ‘modus operandi’ (MO) – their method of killing.

For example, ‘Grindr Killer’ Stephen Port used date rape drugs to immobilise then kill his victims, while serial killer John Christie strangled all his victims during the 1940s and early 1950s. Meanwhile, murderer Dennis Nielsen’s MO was to pick men up at gay bars and lure them to his home.

While the majority of serial killers do stick to one method of killing, Joel says there are many murders who prove to be a common exception to the rule. 

He says: ‘If the Ripper was Chapman, he’d have gone from stabbing women and ripping them up to poisoning his wives. But serial killers have changed their MO in the past.

‘Look at Richard Ramirez, [infamous murderer who killed 14 people in America] he found many different ways to murder people. He shot them, struck them with items from around the house like lamps, strangled them. Ramirez didn’t have one MO he stuck by, so I don’t see that as a reason to discount Chapman as a Ripper suspect.’ 

Will we ever find out who Jack the Ripper was?

Who was Jack the Ripper? Will we ever find out the truth? Perhaps not, Joel admits, adding that there’s a chance the infamous serial killer did not exist. 

‘If I’m honest, I’m not even sure there was a Jack the Ripper,’ he says.

‘There might have been seven, three, two murderers – who knows. Jack the Ripper was a story that sold newspapers. You could make the case for him being any man in Whitechapel. 

‘I am making no claim George Chapman was Jack the Ripper but, really, he’s as likely a suspect as you’d find.’

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Kirsten.Robertson@metro.co.uk 

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