George Chapman: The Wife Poisoner
Wikimedia CommonsGeorge Chapman, born Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski, is one of the most notorious Jack the Ripper suspects.
Who was he?
George Chapman was born Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski (sometimes also spelled Severin Klosowski) in Poland in 1865.
Little is known about his early life in Poland, other than the fact that he was apprenticed to a surgeon and later studied at a hospital in Warsaw. According to records, he was “diligent, of exemplary conduct, and studied with zeal the science of surgery.”
Around 1887, Kłosowski decided to move to London. There, he took a job as a hairdresser’s assistant and then as a barber. He also married Lucy Baderski, despite already having a wife back in Poland. The first wife attempted to stop the relationship, but apparently gave up after Baderski became pregnant (the couple’s son would later die of pneumonia when he was just a baby).
In 1891, Kłosowski and Baderski moved to the United States, where they would briefly settle in New Jersey. There, Baderski would later claim that Kłosowski abused her, at one point threatening to cut her head off and describing where he’d hide her body.
After this incident, Baderski went back to London and gave birth to Kłosowski’s daughter there. Though Kłosowski followed her back to London by 1892 and attempted to restart their relationship, it wouldn’t last.
Soon afterward, Kłosowski began calling himself George Chapman, taking the last name of one of the women he had a relationship with. And from there, Chapman would go on to enter a number of common-law arrangements with women who would all go on to die after experiencing “stomach problems.”
The common-law wives — Mary Spink, Bessie Taylor, and Maud Marsh — were all later revealed to have been poisoned by Chapman. Marsh’s family members were extremely suspicious of her sudden illness and ordered a doctor to take a closer look, leading to the discovery of poison in her system.
The bodies of Spink and Taylor were soon exhumed, and it became clear that there was poison in their systems as well. Chapman was ultimately found guilty of murder and hanged on April 7, 1903.
Why is he one of the Jack the Ripper suspects?
Inspector Frederick George Abberline of the London Metropolitan Police was quoted as saying, “There are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man.”
Abberline noted that Chapman had arrived in London around the time that the Ripper murders began, and that he left for America around the time that the murders stopped. And Abberline also described Chapman as an “expert surgeon” who lived close to where one of the brutal Ripper murders occurred.
Supposedly, Abberline was so confident that Chapman was responsible for the crime spree that when officers arrested Chapman for the murder of his common-law wives, Abberline said, “You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!”
But while Chapman was undoubtedly a murderer who was responsible for horrific crimes, that didn’t mean that authorities had actually uncovered the identity of Jack the Ripper. And not everyone was as confident as Abberline that the Ripper had been caught.
Does the case against him hold up?
Maybe.
Though there is little evidence connecting Chapman to the murders, there is no solid evidence to completely eliminate him as a suspect. However, all of Chapman’s known murder victims were women who he personally knew. And poison seemed to be his murder weapon of choice.
For him to have killed and mutilated strangers with a knife seems to be outside of his usual methods. And while Chapman did indeed have experience performing surgeries, it’s unclear whether the Ripper was actually a surgeon — let alone an expert surgeon.
Furthermore, it’s unclear whether Chapman could speak English at the time of the murders, something the Ripper likely would have needed to do in order to lure some of his victims. He would have also needed to know Whitechapel well enough to flee his crime scenes undetected.
