George Chapman (murderer)
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- This article is about George Chapman the Victorian poisoner; see George Chapman for the English literary figure of the same name.'
George Chapman (December 14, 1865 - April 7, 1903) was the English name taken by serial killer Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski. He was originally from Poland but later relocated to England, where he committed his crimes. He was convicted and executed after poisoning three women, but is remembered today mostly because some authorities suspected him of having been the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.
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[edit] Early life
Born in 1865, in the village of Nargornak, occupied Poland, he trained as a surgeon from 1880 to 1887, then he moved to London sometime in 1887 where he eventually took the name George Chapman. Because he failed to fully qualify as a doctor, he started working at a barber's shop, eventually running his own hairdressers by 1889. Also that year, he married a fellow Pole, Lucy Baderski. Chapman already had a wife in Poland, and although she came to England to try to reclaim her husband, she gave up and returned home after Chapman and his new bride had a baby, who subsequently died in infancy. George and Lucy Chapman briefly lived in New Jersey, although they returned sometime in 1892.
[edit] Crimes and execution
Chapman took several mistresses, who often posed as his wife, three of whom he subsequently poisoned to death. They were Mary Spink (died December 25 1897), Elizabeth Taylor (died 14 February 1901) and Maud Marsh (died 22 October 1902). He used the metallic element antimony, which causes a painful death with symptoms similar to arsenic poisoning.
His motives for these murders are unclear. In one case he stood to inherit £500, but there was no inheritance from the other two. As he was never legally married to his "wives" he presumably could have got rid of them without murdering them.
Suspicions surrounding the death of Maud Marsh led to a police investigation. It was found that she had been poisoned, as had the other two women, whose bodies were exhumed.
Chapman was charged only with the murder of Maud Marsh. He was convicted on March 20, 1903, and hanged at Wandsworth Prison on April 7 that year.
[edit] Was he Jack the Ripper?
One of the detectives at Scotland Yard, Frederick Abberline, is reported to have told the policeman who arrested Chapman: "You've got Jack the Ripper at last!" In two 1903 interviews with the Pall Mall Gazette, Abberline spelled out his suspicions, referring to George Chapman by name. Speculation in contemporary newspaper accounts and books has led to Chapman, like fellow killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, becoming one of many individuals cited as a possible suspect in the infamous Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. One recent writer, Philip Sugden, considers Chapman is the most likely candidate among known suspects, but the case is far from proven. As far as is known, Chapman was not a suspect at the time of the murders either under his proper name (Severin Antoniovich Klosowski), or as "Ludwig Schloski," a name he was using in London (perhaps for easier pronunciation). "Chapman" was a later surname borrowed from one of his poisoned "wives."
The case against Chapman rests mainly on the point that he undoubtedly was a violent man with a misogynistic streak, capable of carrying out the apparently motiveless murders of women. Chapman is known as a poisoner and not a mutilator, but was known to beat his "wives" and was prone to other violent behaviour; once during a fight with his wife, Lucy Klosowski, he forced her down on their bed and began to strangle her, only stopping to attend to a customer who walked into the adjoining shop he owned. When he left, she found a knife under the pillow, and he later told her that he had planned to kill her, even pointing out the spot where he would have buried her and reciting what he would have said to their neighbours.
In some other points he does fit the likely profile of the Ripper: he was living in Whitechapel at the time of the murders, and he probably had some medical knowledge--attempting to qualify as a junior or assistant surgeon in 1887 in his native Poland. His shop and probable residence at 126 Cable Street in London during 1888-9 places him within walking distance of the five "canonical" murder sites (and surprisingly close to the location of the 1889 Pinchin Street "Torso" murder site, although there is no consensus that this was a Ripper killing.) Being the proprietor of a hairdressing shop, he had steady employment, which fits with the murders being committed on or near weekends and bank holidays.
It is even suggested that he may have carried out a Ripper-style killing in New York City, the murder of Carrie Brown, but recent research suggests he did not reach the United States until after this case.
However, there is a lack of hard evidence against Chapman. Some criminologists doubt him as a Ripper suspect on the basis of the psychological motivations and behaviour of serial killers. Usually, serial killers select a single method of murder (eg, stabbing, strangulation and poisoning) as well as associated rituals (eg, torture and mutilation). As such, it is generally considered unlikely that a serial killer would go from butchering and disembowelling victims to the less physical method of poisoning. Most scholars also believe the Ripper selected victims who were previously unknown to him, while Chapman killed acquaintances.
[edit] References
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, ISBN 0-7867-0276-1
