The From Hell Companion
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism
The From Hell Companion Details
About the Author Alan Moore is widely regarded as the best and most influential writer in the history of comics. His seminal works include Miracleman and Watchmen, for which he won the coveted Hugo Award. Never one to limit himself in form or content, Moore has also published novels, Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, and an epic poem, The Mirror of Love. Four of his ground-breaking graphic novels—From Hell, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—have been adapted to the silver screen. Moore currently resides in Northampton, England. Read more
Reviews
George Chapman/Severin Klosowski (both the same guy) was almost without a doubt Jack-the-Ripper. Inspector Frederick Abberline knew it over a hundred years ago, and every "ripperologist" who looks objectively at the evidence today should know it also. In 1903 Klosowski would (as George Chapman) become notorious as the 'Borough wife poisoner'. But 15 years earlier, in 1888, when he lived on George Yard Road in the heart of London's East End, his disgustingly sneaky and insanely brutal manner of going after what he wanted would lead him (as Jack-the-Ripper) to achieve far more notoriety than he would have ever imagined. It all began when Klosowski first heard of an American who was then in London, who was contacting various London medical schools, offering twenty pounds apiece for uteruses left over from hysterectomy procedures. (20 pounds was quite a large sum in 1888) Naturally, the staff at these medical schools had outright refused this unidentified American, but it seems that Klosowski (who had been trained in Poland as a 'surgical-barber') wanted the money, and was more obliging..... in his own unhinged way. As unlikely as that all may sound now, it was known throughout the medical community of London at that time that an American had made this highly unusual 20 pound offer. The coroner at the Annie Chapman inquest knew about it (Annie had been one of Jack-the-Rippers early victims), and had brought it up as the probable motive for the current Whitechapel murders of 1888. The American had even specified how he had wanted the organs to be preserved during their shipment to the States. (You can read about this in the inquest transcript, published in Stewart P. Evans & Keith Skinner's book, 'The Ultimate Jack-the-Ripper Companion', pgs. 102-107. More importantly, read the 1903 interview by the 'Pall Mall Gazette' with inspector Frederick Abberline, conducted as "Chapman" was on trial for murdering his 3 "wives"; the interview is the 'Rosetta Stone' of ripperology. It's also in Philip Sugden's 'The Complete History Of Jack-the-Ripper'.) I feel that the reason the Ripper was mutilating the faces of his victims was to disguise his motive of killing the women for their uterus. The grotesque cuts on Catherine Eddowes' face were intended to take attention from noticing the missing organ. (The corpses which received the really awful facial wounds were the corpses which had missing uterus, and the corpses that didn't have the missing organs were those in which the attacks had been carried-out in almost complete darkness, and the Ripper hadn't found the organs quickly enough to get at them on time in those instances. [this was foggy, gas-lit, Victorian London; it was very dark at night. To safely avoid detection, the Ripper would have needed to work very quickly, calmly, on a strict time limit. On some attacks he would not be able to beat the clock, and would need to abort the mission before obtaining a uterus] Most every cut on each victim had been necessary to either kill the woman or to obtain her uterus, EXCEPT for the grisly facial mutilations on Eddowes, those were done only to take attention from this 'uterus motive'. And the attack on Annie Chapman, one week after he had failed to obtain the uterus of Polly Nicholls; witness statements indicate that the Ripper waited on Hanbury Street until the break of dawn to strike on that attack, in order to have enough light to see what he was doing so that he could locate and extract the womb quickly. And he was successful: Annie Chapman was his first successful uterus extraction). But after it had been in the newspapers that the Ripper was taking the uterus - following Annie Chapman - the Ripper felt he needed to obscure this motive, or police might track him down. After it had been printed in the 1888 newspapers that the uterus of Annie Chapman had been so expertly removed and taken, the coroner reported that he had:-"received an urgent communication from the sub-curator of one of London's great medical schools; that they had information which might have a distinct bearing on our case. Some months previous an American had called on him and asked him to procure a number of specimens of the same organ (uterus) that was now missing in our deceased woman. The American stated his willingness to give 20 pounds apiece for each specimen. He was told his request was impossible to be complied with, but he still urged his request"......-"And it was known that this request was repeated at other institutions of similar character.".......-"Isn't it likely that the knowledge of this demand might have incited some 'abandoned wretch' to possess himself of a specimen?"..... (excerpts from the Annie Chapman inquest report, 1888.) It is not known why the American 'needed' the organs. Dr Baxter said it had something to do with a "publication" of the American's......whatever. Perhaps he was simply some unbalanced transexual who was resentful that he'd been born without female organs.* Regardless, coroner Baxter had explained all this to the jurists in Annie Chapman's inquest, and much of what he said was repeated by Frederick Abberline in his 1903 interview. Both men seemed certain that the Ripper had come into contact with this American at some point before the attacks. (* After I first wrote this I became aware of a likely candidate for this American who wanted the female organs [see Phillip Sugden's introduction to the revised edition of his 'Ripper' book, pg. xxvi] . There is a relatively recent Ripper-suspect; an American named Francis Tumblety [see wikipedia]. He being Jack-the-Ripper is unlikely; he was 58 years old, homosexual, tall, and he basically didn't match any witnesses descriptions. [FBI profilers are adamant that the Ripper would not be homosexual] However, it seems he was fascinated with collecting female organs. Not only that, but Tumblety was in the East End during the time of the Ripper and could have easily come into contact with Klosowski before the Ripper attacks began, and made him the same offer that coroner Baxter related to the inquest jurists. It's likely that Klosowski [who had reportedly sought out employment at London Hospital] also made the rounds in some of those same medical schools, perhaps looking for employment in some surgical-teaching capacity. Also, C.A. Dunham, an American Lawyer who knew Tumblety, recalled in 1888 having once seen Tumblety's 'anatomical museum'. It included, he said, "a dozen or more jars containing ...the matrices [wombs] of every class of woman." I have even wondered if Tumblety (who was reportedly lodging just around the corner from Berner St ; on Batty St.), was that 2nd man who was with the Ripper, seen by Israel Schwartz on Berner Street the night Liz Stride was killed there. Same height; 5'11''. "LIPSKI!" ) And at that same inquest, both the coroner; Dr. Wynne Baxter, and the police-surgeon; Dr. George Bagster Phillips, stated that:"The abstraction of the missing portion of abdominal viscera (uterus) was the object" of the murders, and that:"The difficulty in believing that the purpose of the murderer was the possession of the missing abdominal organ was natural, as it is abhorrent to our feelings that a life would be taken for so slight an object" (both quotes from the transcript of the Annie Chapman inquest, Sept 1888)-This "difficulty in believing the purpose of the murderer", by investigators, was a major source of the Rippers incredible luck, and one reason why he was never caught. It blinded the investigators then, and it blinds us today. I don't know if Klosowski (a convicted serial killer of women, who was tried and executed in 1903) had any preference either way about the method he used to kill women. He was carving up prostitutes, quickly, to procure women's organs in order to obtain money from an American who wanted them. Nearly ten years later he would begin killing his "wives" by poison, slowly, to rid himself of the obstacle that was standing between himself and his next female conquest. And he couldn't have carved his "wives" up, right? How would he have explained to police that all three of his "wives" were cut to shreds? Some 'Ripperologists' can't believe that a killer who would later go on to watch women slowly suffer and die by poison would also, 15 years earlier, have used a knife to kill prostitutes. But FBI profiler John Douglas knows that some serial killers take up new methods of killing as time passes. When motive changes, so does the means. Severin Klosowski arrived in East London from Poland about April 1887; less than a year before the Ripper murders began, -(there was another set of murders, of 5 women being dumped into the Thames, which began about one month after he 1st arrived in England)- and when he moved to New York for a year, -(he left London for NYC two months after the final Whitechapel murder, that of Francis Coles)- similar murders started happening in N.Y. also.-(And after returning from New York in the summer of 1892 he never went by the name Severin Klosowski again, and he wouldn't ever admit to even knowing anything about "that fellow", after returning to London in the wake of the Whitechapel murders, even when asked under oath in 1902!)- If you check out all the "coincedences" that occur in these series of murders; the dates, the places Klosowski lived in Whitechapel, -(It is known that he was living on George Yard Road when the 1st Ripper murder happened on this very block; that of Martha Tabrum. Later, in 1987, while on a TV show about the Ripper, FBI profiler John Douglas had predicted that, going by his profile of serial killers: "when Jack-the-Ripper commit his very 1st murder, he was most likely living or working within just a couple blocks of this first attack!" Douglas was surprisingly adamant about this; he felt that if they wanted to learn the Ripper's real identity, they should try to check any and all census records on that immediate area at the precise time of the 1st murder)- then add to everything else the fact that Klosowski had been trained as a surgeon in Poland! So he knew more about cutting people up than he did poisoning them. But if you added up all of these "coincidences" and entered them into a computer spreadsheet, the odds would be about a-billion-to-one that Klosowski was the Ripper I bet. And now, the only thing preventing the 'Whitechapel Murders' from ever being officially solved is the so called "Ripperologists" themselves, the very people who claim to be interested in solving them. Ironic, right? But it is so easy to doubt & ridicule the "Chapman-theory", especially when you get into the 20 pound offer for uteruses. But consider the source of where we know about the offer from; from Coroner Wynne Baxter, who did the autopsy on Annie Chapman. Consider who it was who agreed with him; inspector Frederick Abberline , probably the greatest, most respected officer to have worked on the Ripper case. Abberline believed that Klosowski was the Ripper until his dying day. Personally, I find Abberline a lot more credible in regard to all this than I do the Ripperologists, (or anybody else). Also; witnesses at a couple of the Ripper killings have described seeing a suspect matching Chapman/Klosowski in almost every detail: foreign accent and appearance, handlebar mustache, the type of clothes and hat Klosowski usually wore, his same height: approx 5' 5''.....etc etc. The only difference was that they said he was older, Klosowski was 23, but they said the person they saw was in his 30s. Remember though, these old-world Slavic types from East Europe often appear to be older than they really are, especially to people unfamiliar with them. Also, wouldn't a man, being looked for by everybody in the city, wouldn't it seem likely that this person would do something to alter his appearance? I bring this up because it is the witnesses statements that the suspect they saw was in his 30's that some ripperologists (i.e. Martin Fido & Paul Begg,) use to 'prove' that these few witnesses must have seen someone other than Klosowski. So stubborn are they in this 'belief' that they almost totally ignore the fact that the witnesses identified Klosowski in about five out of six details! Yet only the age discrepancy, that's all Fido & Begg notice. Age is the most common thing for a witness to get wrong, ESPECIALLY in the pitch-dark....and fog. Something else that Begg and Fido don't like about this theory is that they can't believe that a serial killer would use a knife to butcher prostitutes in one instance, and then ten years later start killing his "wives" by poison. They don't believe its possible for a serial killing ghoul like Klosowski to do both. But Klosowski was killing with a knife much earlier, at a much younger age. Also, he was using the knife to cut up prostitutes for a specific, premeditated purpose: he needed to cut out their reproductive organs. He didn't need to do that anymore by the time he was killing his "wives". But he didn't only learn about anatomy when he was trained as a surgeon, and a cunning egomaniac like Klosowski would probably want to put all his skills to use if he could. He had learned a little about medicine and poisons also,.... except he didn't know as much as he thought. Or maybe he simply forgot that the poison he bought to kill his "wives" would also preserve their corpses, making it obvious to investigators, if they ever exhumed the bodies, what had killed them. This is what got Klosowski hanged. He had gotten away with so much, for so long, that he became over-confident. He probably began to believe he could never be caught. But he was arrested by Inspector George Godley, who had been involved with Abberline in investigating the Ripper killings 15 years earlier. And Godley was certain that "Chapman" was the Ripper also, and he kept Abberline appraised of his progress during his (Godley's) investigation, prior to "George Chapman's" trial. Abberline had retired from Scotland Yard by that time, but was in charge of the European branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The only other 'problem' these Ripperologists have brought up with the 'Klosowski theory' goes something like this: "He would have been a valid suspect, except that there is simply NO CONCRETE EVIDENCE we can find linking Klosowski to the murders". There is no 'concrete evidence' linking ANY of the 'suspects' to the Ripper murders!!! Right? But that sure doesn't stop these two Ripperologists from nominating certain OTHER 'suspects' as 'strong candidates'; suspects who have far less evidence against them than Klosowski does! Some Ripperologist's entire careers have been built upon the Ripper mystery, do they feel they need to keep it a mystery? Why else are they always so prejudice against Klosowski, who has so much circumstantial evidence pointing squarely at him, while at the same time promote suspects who barely have any? (And the only reason there is no concrete evidence against Klosowski is because he was extremely cunning, and had repeatedly eluded detection. You can't find "concrete evidence" retroactively; you can only find 'circumstantial evidence' for a crime as old as this one. Concrete evidence needed to be found in 1888. Abberline might have had a shot at finding it in 1903, after learning of Klosowski's newest murders, but after Klosowski was hanged it seems police just dropped it for the time being; they felt it was over.) But let's not overlook the motive of the police either, (I am speaking most specifically about Sir Norville Macnaghten). In a famous 1894 report, Macnaghten wrote that: "Jack-the-Ripper had five victims, and five victims only". Now, how can he possibly make this statement, and state it as if it were the Gospel Truth?? What evidence does he have, for instance, that Martha Tabram was not killed by the Ripper? ...NONE! But London police were facing the most severe criticism they had ever faced because of not capturing The Ripper, they were ridiculed about it. Any time the subject of the Ripper came up, Magnaghten felt he was being made the butt of a rude joke. The N.Y. Times was calling Scotland Yard the "stupidest police force on the planet". Magnaghten wanted to diminish the successes that the Ripper had had against his police force; he probably would have claimed that the Ripper had only killed TWO women if he thought people might have believed it. Also, Doctors were under a cloud of suspicion, due to the fact that coroner Baxter had correctly pointed out that the Ripper could not have found those sexual organs he was so specifically seeking; extracted them; have done it so quick and nicely, unless he had received some training as a surgeon. Later, Dr. Thomas Bond would attempt to downplay this theory, saying that even a butcher could find the uterus in a woman and be able to extract it so expertly. But who could blame him for being so defensive? There was a mania at work, and East End citizens were out to lynch doctors nearly. This defensiveness of Doctors, Police, Jews, immigrants, etc, ended up compromising the investigation. It's absolutely ASTOUNDING that although Klosowski was an exact match to so many witness statements, and that he had both worked AND resided within short walking distance from each of the Ripper attacks.... that he had been trained as a surgeon, and had migrated from Poland only months before the Ripper attacks began.......etc.....etc...etc, yet he was never so much as QUESTIONED by the London Police! His name appears on NO POLICE REPORT, prior to his arrest as a serial murderer in 1902! It's appalling! ...... Scotland Yard, who supposedly questioned every man in Whitechapel during the Ripper manhunt, seems to have had no clue that Severin Klosowski even existed in 1888! I mean, the guy was working right under their noses, at the very epicenter of the killing-zone, right on Whitechapel High St., at that archway into George Yard, right under the 'White Hart' pub. He must have been LAUGHING as police would pass by! Yet even today, 'Ripperologists' (eg.Fido) downplay the 'Chapman theory', and they use the weakest of logic to make their argument, in the face of, by far, the strongest evidence that has ever been compiled about any other Ripper suspect! And they keep offering up the most unlikely suspects imaginable (Kosminski, Gull, Druitt, etc), while rolling their eyes in condescending derision when you mention Klosowski. It is bizarre! How many people in Victorian England do you suppose there were who had been trained to protect human life as a surgeon, but had also been a known serial killer of women? In my entire life I have heard of only two; Severin Klosovski/ George Chapman is one. Jack the Ripper is the other. And "BOTH" 'just happened' to be living in the heart of Whitechaple in 1888! "Both" were also on tiny George Yard Road the night Martha Tabrum was killed and mutilated there. I mean, what are the odds?? And out of all the many popular 'suspects' that are ever accused of being Jack-the-Ripper, only ONE of them is a known perpetrator of homicide: George Chapman, ... A.K.A. Severin Klosovski, ... A.K.A 'Borough poisoner', ... A.K.A Jack-the-Ripper!Part 2 begins in the 'comment' that follows this 'Review':
