Читать книгу The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick - Shirley Harrison - Страница 14

Sir Robert Anderson (Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police CID at the time) does not name Kosminski, but in speaking of the Ripper says: ‘In saying that he was a Polish Jew I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact’. Kosminski was a misogynist with homicidal tendencies who had become insane from years of indulgence in ‘solitary vices’. He was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then, in 1891, to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum when, it was said, ‘he goes about the streets and picks up bits of bread out of the gutter.’ However, in the police evidence against him, dates, times and places are wrongly listed.

In 1987 there came to light some pencil notes by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who had also played a leading role in the Whitechapel investigation. These were comments, written in about 1910 in the margins and on the endpapers of his own personal copy of the memoirs of Sir Robert Anderson. Published in the Daily Telegraph, Swanson’s marginalia identified Anderson’s own, unnamed suspect: Kosminski. Nevertheless the marginalia contained inaccuracies which only served to fuel rather than end the debate.