Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozmiński; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish barber who is a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.
Kosminski was a Polish Jew who emigrated from Congress Poland to England in the 1880s. He worked as a hairdresser in Whitechapel in the East End of London, where a series of murders ascribed to an unidentified person nicknamed "Jack the Ripper" were committed in 1888. Beginning in 1891, Kosminski was institutionalised after he threatened his sister with a knife. He was first held at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum and then transferred to the Leavesden Asylum.
Police officials from the time of the murders named one of their suspects as "Kosminski" (the forename was not given) and described him as a Polish Jew in an insane asylum. Almost a century after the final murder, the suspect "Kosminski" was identified as Aaron Kosminski. Still, there was little evidence to connect him with the "Kosminski" who was suspected of the murders, and their dates of death were different. Possibly, Kosminski was confused with another Polish Jew of the same age named Aaron or David Cohen (real name possibly Nathan Kaminsky), who was a violent patient at the Colney Hatch Asylum.
In September 2014, author Russell Edwards claimed in the book Naming Jack the Ripper to have proved Kosminski's guilt. In 2007, he bought a shawl, which he believed to have been left at a murder scene, and gave it to biochemist Jari Louhelainen to test for DNA. A peer-reviewed article on the DNA analysis was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2019. Scientists from Innsbruck Medical University criticised the paper and its conclusions, substantiating that there were mistakes and (mis)assumptions made by its authors, and the journal printed an expression of concern.
Life Aaron Kosminski was born in Kłodawa in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents were Abram Józef Kozmiński, a tailor, and his wife Golda née Lubnowska. He may have been employed in a hospital as a hairdresser or orderly for a time.This is based on a statement by George R. Sims that a police suspect "had at one time been employed in a hospital in Poland" (in Lloyd's Weekly News, 22 September 1907; see copy at Casebook). Kosminski emigrated from Poland to England, arriving in or around 1881.The record of his burial in March 1919 stated that he had been in England for 37 years (Begg, Jack the Ripper: The Facts, p. 506, note 52 (2006)). He probably accompanied his brother Woolf and his sister Matilda and brother-in-law Morris Lubnowski, who arrived in London in June 1881 (Woolf having married at Klodawa in May 1881, and the Lubnowskis having lived in Germany in the late 1870s).House, p. 33. The arrival of both Woolf and Morris in June is recorded in their later applications for naturalisation. Note that Aaron's brothers adopted the surname Abrahams in England, and because Woolf's wife Betsy was also a Kozminski, it was wrongly assumed by earlier researchers that she was Aaron's sister and that Woolf was Aaron's brother-in-law. Woolf and Aaron may have left Poland as a result of the April 1881 pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the impetus for many other Jews to emigrate. His mother, who was listed as a widow, apparently did not emigrate with the family immediately, but had joined them by 1894.House, p. 195 His father died in 1874.House, pp. 32, 33
In London, the family settled in Whitechapel, an impoverished district in London's East End that had become home to many Jewish refugees who were fleeing economic hardship in Eastern Europe and pogroms in Tsarist Russia. English records describe him as a hairdresser, but he may have worked only sporadically: it was reported that he had "not attempted any kind of work for years" by 1891. He presumably relied on his siblings for financial support, and is known to have lived with his brother Woolf at 3 Sion Square in 1890 and his sister Matilda at 16 Greenfield Street in 1891, indicating that his siblings possibly shared responsibility for caring for him and he alternated living between their family homes.
On 14 December 1889, Aaron was fined 10 shillings at the City of London Summons Court for having a dog unmuzzled in Cheapside. He was also accused of having given the police a false name and address. Apparently he had given his name as Abrahams rather than Kosminski, and in court he explained that "II goes by the name of Abrahams sometimes, because Kosmunski [sic] is hard to spell", and called his brother as a witness to confirm this. According to one report, he refused to pay the fine on Saturday because it was the Sabbath, and was given until Monday to pay.Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, 15 December 1889; Times, 16 December 1889; City Press, 18 December 1889.On 12 July 1890, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town workhouse due to his worsening mental illness, with his brother Woolf certifying the entry, and was released three days later. On 4 February 1891, he was returned to the workhouse, possibly by the police, and on 7 February, he was transferred to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. A witness to the certification of his entry, recorded as Jacob Cohen, gave some basic background information and stated that Kosminski had threatened his sister with a knife. It is unclear whether this meant Kosminski's sister or Cohen's. Kosminski remained at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to Leavesden Asylum.Colney Hatch Register of Admissions, quoted in Begg, pp. 269–270 Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe.Asylum case notes quoted by Begg, p. 270; Fido, p. 216; and Rumbelow, p. 180 The cause of his insanity was recorded as "self-abuse", which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation. His poor diet seems to have kept him in an emaciated state for years; his low weight was recorded in the asylum case notes. By February 1919, he weighed just . He died the following month, aged 53.
Jack the Ripper suspect
Between 1888 and 1891, the deaths of 11 women in or around the Whitechapel district of the East End of London were linked in a single police investigation known as the "Whitechapel murders". Seven of the victims suffered a slash to the throat, and in four cases the bodies were mutilated after death. Five of the cases, between August and November 1888, show such marked similarities that they are generally agreed to be the work of a single serial killer, known as "Jack the Ripper". Despite an extensive police investigation, the Ripper was never identified, and the crimes remained unsolved. Years after the end of the murders, documents were discovered that revealed the suspicions of police officials against a man referred to as "Kosminski".Begg, Jack the Ripper: The Facts, p. 345 (2006)
An 1894 memorandum written by Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Assistant Chief Constable of the London Metropolitan Police, names one of the suspects as a Polish Jew called "Kosminski" (without a forename). Macnaghten's memo was discovered in the private papers of his daughter, Lady Aberconway, by television journalist Dan Farson in 1959,Woods and Baddeley, p. 125 and an abridged version from the archives of the Metropolitan Police was released to the public in the 1970s. Macnaghten stated that there were strong reasons for suspecting "Kosminski" because he "had a great hatred of women ... with strong homicidal tendencies".Macnaghten's notes quoted by Evans and Skinner, pp. 584–587; Fido, p. 147 and Rumbelow, p. 142
In 1910, Assistant Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson claimed in his memoirs The Lighter Side of My Official Life that the Ripper was a "low-class Polish Jew".Quoted in Begg, p. 266; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 236 and Evans and Skinner, pp. 626–633 Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who led the Ripper investigation, named the man as "Kosminski" in notes handwritten in the margin of his presentation copy of Anderson's memoirs.Begg, p. 269; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 243; Evans and Skinner, p. 635; Rumbelow, p. 179 He added that "Kosminski" had been watched at his brother's home in Whitechapel by the police, that he was taken with his hands tied behind his back to the workhouse and then to Colney Hatch Asylum, and that he died shortly after.Begg, p. 269; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 253; Evans and Skinner, p. 635; Rumbelow, p. 179 The copy of Anderson's memoirs containing the handwritten notes by Swanson was donated by his descendants to New Scotland Yard's Crime Museum in 2006.
In 1987, Ripper author Martin Fido searched asylum records for any inmates called Kosminski, and found only one: Aaron Kosminski.Begg, p. 269; Fido, p. 215 At the time of the murders, Aaron apparently lived either on Providence Street or Greenfield Street, both of which are close to the sites of the murders.Pat Marshall and Chris Phillips, "New Light on Aaron Kozminski", Ripperologist no 128, pp. 59-69 (October 2012). The addresses given in the asylum records are in Mile End Old Town, just on the edge of Whitechapel.Begg, pp. 269–270 The description of Aaron Kosminski's symptoms in the case notes indicates that he had paranoid schizophrenia. Macnaghten's notes say that "Kosminski" indulged in "solitary vices", and in his memoirs Anderson wrote of his suspect's "unmentionable vices",Fido, p. 170 both of which may match the claim in the case notes that Aaron Kosminski committed "self-abuse".e.g. Fido, p. 229 Swanson's notes match the known details of Aaron Kosminski's life in that he reported that the suspect went to the workhouse and then to Colney Hatch,Begg, p. 273 but the last detail about his early death does not match Aaron Kosminski, who lived until 1919 (see below).Whitehead and Rivett, p. 109
Anderson claimed that the Ripper had been identified by the "only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer", but that no prosecution was possible because both the witness and the culprit were Jews and Jews were not willing to offer testimony against fellow Jews. Swanson's notes state that "Kosminski" was identified at "the Seaside Home". It has been suggested that this was the Police Convalescent Home in Hove near Brighton, though other possibilities have been proposed. Some authors express scepticism that this identification ever happened, while others use it as evidence for their theories. For example, Donald Rumbelow thought the story unlikely,Evans and Rumbelow, pp. 249–253; Rumbelow, p. 182 but fellow Ripper authors Martin Fido and Paul Begg thought there was another witness, perhaps Israel Schwartz,Begg, p. 276 Joseph Lawende, or a policeman.Fido, pp. 77, 152, 207 In his memorandum, however, Macnaghten stated that "no-one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer", which directly contradicts Anderson's and Swanson's recollection.Evans and Rumbelow, p. 255 Sir Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police at the time of the murders, scathingly dismissed Anderson's claim that Jews would not testify against one another in his own memoirs written later in the same year, calling it a "reckless accusation" against Jews.Wilson and Odell, p. 78 Edmund Reid, the initial inspector in charge of the investigation, also challenged Anderson's opinion.Interview with Reid in the Morning Advertiser, 23 April 1910, quoted in Cook, p. 178 There is no record of Aaron Kosminski in any surviving official police documents except Macnaghten's memo.Evans and Skinner, pp. 262, 604