‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!’ The words with which Abberline congratulated Godley. The two detectives had hunted the fiend of Whitechapel fourteen years previously, but failed to catch him. George Chapman, a man facing the death penalty for poisoning his girlfriend, had a secret past. Born Seweryn Klosowski in Poland, he’d lived in London’s East End during the Ripper’s killing spree in 1888. Former Chief Inspector Abberline had ‘a score of reasons’ for naming Chapman as the Ripper. And Arthur Neil, former Superintendent of Scotland Yard, agreed with him. Chapman had committed ‘a series of murders which for sheer heartlessness are almost unprecedented in the annals of crime’. He was described as ‘one of the most loathsome murderers in criminal history, and the director of public prosecutions stated that his ‘cruelty, hypocrisy and daring’ had rarely, if ever, been equalled.
