1. Jacob Levy

Jacob Levy was born in Aldgate in 1856.  He followed in his father’s trade as a butcher, and by 1888 he was living in Middlesex Street with his wife and children, which was right in the heart of Ripper territory (and close to where Catherine Eddowes was murdered).

Jacob had a history of violence, criminal behaviour and mental instability.  In 1886 he was sentenced to 12 months prison for stealing meat from another butcher (but was instead sent to an asylum in Stone to serve his time).  It was during this time that his wife claimed that Jacob almost ruined her business and also added that “he also feels that if he is not restrained he will do some violence to someone; he complains about hearing strange noises; cries for no reason; feels compelled to do acts that his conscience cannot stand; and has a conscience of a feeling of exaltation”.  She also revealed that “he does not sleep at nights and wanders around aimlessly for hours”.

In August 1890, Jacob was admitted to the City of London Lunatic asylum as an insane person.  His cause of illness was listed as ‘mania’ (which was noted that he’d had for ‘some time’), perhaps a result of contracting syphilis, and he died 29 July 1891 from complications of the disease.

Jacob Levy is an interesting suspect for a number of reasons.  First off, he knew the area well, having lived his whole life in the Aldgate/Whitechapel area.

Most of the doctors who examined the victims were of the opinion that the killer possessed at least some anatomical knowledge.  Whoever Jack was, he worked fast, in often very poorly lit areas, and yet under these conditions he was able to remove parts of the victims’ internal organs, usually slicing the poor women from pelvis to breastbone and cutting their throats deeply (echoes of how a butcher might slaughter and gut a pig or a cow).  Being a butcher, Levy possessed both anatomical knowledge and was skilled with a knife.

Also, city police were known to have strongly suspected a man who worked on the same street Levy worked.  Inspector Robert Sagar reportedly said in his memoirs: “We had a good reason to suspect a man who worked in Butcher’s Row, Aldgate.  We watched him carefully.  There is no doubt that this man was insane, and after a time his friends thought it advisable to have him removed to a private asylum.  After he was removed, there were no more Ripper atrocities”.  Levy not only worked as a butcher in Aldgate, but was insane and eventually removed to an asylum.

Another report given by ex-Inspector Harry Cox shares similarities to both Sagar’s account and one of Levy’s strange personality traits.  Inspector Cox was assigned to a suspect in “a certain street” and watched him “in his place of business” for nearly three months.  Of particular interest, Inspector Cox gave a chilling account of one night when he shadowed the suspect on “one of his late night walks”.  Apparently the suspect, who had “a wilder look than usual on his evil countenance” led the officer on a late-night trawl through the labyrinthine streets of Whitechapel, accosting numerous women, and generally acting strange and suspicious, before leading Cox back to his place of business.

According to Levy’s wife, Jacob would often take late night walks, walking aimlessly for hours.  So while Levy may have been both Sagar’s and Cox’s suspect, it should be noted that the description of Cox’s suspect doesn’t tally with that of Levy, and so the likelihood of Levy being the man Cox tailed for three months is slim.

Jacob Levy was a convicted criminal who, by his wife’s own admissions, harboured feelings of violence.  He was committed to an asylum suffering from mania, and died shortly thereafter from complications of syphilis.  So not only was he mentally unbalanced (with a history of petty crime, often present among serial killers), but very possibly frequented prostitutes in the Whitechapel/Aldgate area.  Also Robert Anderson’s wife once said that the Ripper was interned in an asylum near Stone.  The asylum Levy was sent to in 1890, the City of London Asylum, was in Stone.

Then there are some interesting and possibly pertinent facts regarding his family.  His mother died in June 1888, just a few months before the first generally accepted Ripper murder – was this a stressor to the murders?  While serial killers live in a deviant fantasy world most of their lives, and have sometimes advanced to petty crime or even killing small animals by their teenage years, often it takes a tragedy or traumatic event in their lives to trigger their killing career.

And Jacob’s older brother, Isaac, was apparently living in the Wentworth Buildings in 1888 (he lived there until his death in 1891).  The Wentworth Buildings was where the graffito and bloody piece of apron were found.  Did Jacob, after butchering Catherine Eddowes, head to his brother’s house to either find shelter, or to try and deflect heat off his own house, in case he was being followed?

Lastly, there were the eye-witness testimonies.  Out of all the witnesses who may or may not have seen the Ripper, two stick out in my mind as the ones most likely to have actually seen the murderer with his victims.  I’ve long held the opinion, before ever hearing about Jacob Levy, that the two likeliest groups to have seen the Ripper were Elizabeth Long and the threesome that included Joseph Lawende and Joseph Levy.  Long claimed she saw a woman she later identified as Annie Chapman with a man outside the house where Chapman was found brutally murdered, and only a short time before the body was discovered.  The threesome saw a woman and man by an alleyway that led into Mitre Square only ten minutes before Catherine Eddowes was found butchered there, and one of the men, Lawende, identified her clothing as similar to what he had seen the woman wearing.

Now, whether these people actually saw the Ripper, or indeed even the victims, is always open to debate.  But I think it highly likely that they did see the infamous murderer with his victims, and so what of their descriptions of the man they saw?  Well, here’s where we run into some discrepancies…or do we?

Elizabeth Long described the man she saw with Annie Chapman as “a little taller than the deceased”.  Chapman was only 5ft, so we can conclude that the man was somewhere between 5ft 1in and 5ft 3in.  Lawende, on the other hand, said the man he saw with the victim was 5ft 9in (or 5ft 7/8in, depending on which report you read) – considerably taller than Long’s man.

However, if we look at Joseph Levy’s inquest testimony, we get a remarkably different description of the man’s height.  According to Levy: “I should think he was three inches taller than the woman, who was, perhaps, 5ft high.”

A very astute observation from a man who claimed he barely took any notice of the couple!  Like Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes was exactly 5ft tall – just as Levy described. However, here we have two strikingly different opinions regarding the man’s height by two friends who saw the same man with the woman at the same time.  Both of them can’t be right: so who was wrong – and who was right?  The police seemed to have favoured Lawende as the man most likely to have seen the killer, and gave his description the most weight.  However, Joseph Levy was still called to give his testimony at the inquest (whereas the third man, Harry Harris, wasn’t), and furthermore, he was able to provide the exact height of the deceased, and his description of the man as being only three inches taller was both exact and a stark contrast to his friend (you would have expected them to give similar height readings, since they did see the same man at the same time).  So, why such a difference between the two descriptions?  Did the police ever wonder why there was such a discrepancy?  A one or two inch difference in opinion is understandable; a four to six inch difference is another matter entirely.

It’s interesting to note how similar in height both Chapman and Eddowes were, and how short the men Long and Levy saw with the two women were – both around the 5ft 3in mark.  Was this a coincidence?  Or did both Long and Levy see the same man with two of the Ripper’s victims (and, thus, see the Ripper himself)?

And so what of Jacob Levy?  What was his height?  Exactly 5ft 3in!

Another interesting aspect to the witness Joseph Levy was the way he acted at the time of the sighting, some things he said, and his demeanour four days later at the Eddowes inquest.  On the night of the murder, he apparently said to his companion Harry Harris: “I don’t like going home by myself when I see these sort of characters about.  I’m off!”  He further added that the Court ought to be watched.  When this was brought up at the inquest, and the Coroner asked Joseph: “Your fear was rather about yourself?” Levy answered: “Not exactly”.

Did Joseph Levy know more than he was letting on?

The Evening News on the 9^th of October reported that: “Mr Levy is absolutely obstinate and refuses to give the slightest information and he leaves one to infer that he knows something but that he is afraid to be called on the inquest”.

Could it even be that Joseph Levy recognised the man he and his companions saw with Catherine Eddowes that night?  Could it be he recognised Jacob Levy, a man he not only lived near, but was related to?   A relation he knew to be a criminal, even mentally disturbed?

It’s very likely that Jacob Levy and Joseph Levy were cousins, as it appears that their fathers were brothers, and if this is the case, then it’s easy to understand why Joseph appeared to have acted strangely at the inquest, like he was holding something back.

But even if they weren’t related, both men were butchers, and worked barely fifty yards from one another.  So it’s safe to say that in all probability they did know each other, regardless of whether or not they were cousins.

If Joseph did recognise Jacob Levy with the murdered woman, why didn’t he say anything to the police about it?  If they were related, perhaps it’s more understandable why he didn’t – maybe the family were suspicious of the police and wanted to handle Jacob their way.  If they weren’t related, maybe Joseph was simply too afraid for his and his family’s life to tell the police what he saw?  Or perhaps he did tell the police what he saw, but without sufficient evidence, they couldn’t arrest Jacob and had to be content to merely watch him and hope he’d slip up.  It is interesting to note that the period of time between the double murder on the 30^th of September and the next Ripper murder on the 9^th of November was the longest of the entire series.  Was this because the Ripper knew he was being watched by the police and had to wait until things cooled off before slipping away and committing another murder?

It’s been said that Anderson’s witness, called upon to identify his Polish Jew suspect at the Seaside Home, was either Joseph Lawende or Israel Schwartz, as, according to Anderson, “the only person who ever had a good view of the murderer, unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him”.  But perhaps this witness was Joseph Levy, the man who had become uneasy when coming upon the couple the night Eddowes was murdered, and who described the man as being 5ft 3in at the inquest; perhaps he had recognised fellow butcher (or cousin) Jacob Levy that night, but waited until Jacob was safely caged in an asylum before making a positive identification.  But if this is true, then it begs the question: why agree to go to the Seaside Home to identify the suspect if he already knew the suspect was a Jew and wasn’t going to testify against him on such grounds?  Because, according Swanson (in his marginalia), the witness refused to swear against the suspect “Because he was also a Jew and did not wish to have it left on his mind that he was responsible for the life of a fellow Jew.”

There are other niggling issues that weaken the case against Jacob Levy.  First off, there was the eighteen month gap between the last generally accepted Ripper murder (9^th November) and Levy being committed to the asylum (August 1890).  The gaps between the Ripper murders were between one week at the shortest and, at the longest, around six weeks.  So eighteen months seems a long time for Levy, if he was the Ripper, to lay low and not commit any murders.  It’s not uncommon for serial killers to have long cooling off periods.  These periods can last anywhere from a couple of hours to decades.  So, compared to such lengthy periods, eighteen months isn’t such a long time.  However, when taken with the cooling off periods of the Ripper’s previous murders, eighteen months is a long time for such a frenzied killer to be quiet.  However, there could be a number of reasons for this.  Maybe Levy, after Mary Kelly, simply fell apart, unable to function at a level where he could roam the streets and find suitable victims.  But then if his mania did grow to such a level to stop him from killing, why did his friends and family wait eighteen months before committing him?  Less likely, but still possible, after fulfilling every deviant fantasy in Miller’s Court, maybe the demons that drove him to kill died down enough for him to keep him in control for a good portion of the time afterwards; and only when his mania grew too strong was he finally committed.  Or maybe he simply felt too on edge with all the police presence on the streets after Mary Kelly’s murder, and decided to lay low for a while, but then his mania took over and he was committed before he could kill again.

Then there is the fact that Levy was married, with eight children.  While it’s not uncommon for serial killers to have families, it’s usually those of the organised type, that are cunning enough, in control enough, to be able to hide their true personalities and carry on seemingly normal relationships and even marry.  On the other hand, disorganised killers are much less likely to marry, or to even carry on relationships for long periods, due to them being generally less in control of themselves, shier and more introverted.  While Jack the Ripper seems to have displayed a mixed type of organised and disorganised traits, his crimes and victimology showed a greater leaning towards disorganised, and so, according to some of the leading experts in the art of criminal profiling, the Ripper would be less likely to have a wife, or even be in a relationship, instead preferring to be alone, or living with family.  The fact that Jacob Levy was both married and had children doesn’t mean he wasn’t the Ripper; it just clashes with some of the generally accepted views of a disorganised personality type.

Still, even with these issues, I feel that Levy is a strong suspect.  He lived and worked in the heart of Ripper territory, living close to where Eddowes was murdered (it is generally thought that the Ripper, after almost being caught in Dutfield’s Yard, fled towards the safety of home, which was Westwards, towards the City boundaries where Eddowes was found murdered – near where Levy lived and worked).  He was a butcher, thus knew his way around a knife and the internal workings of a body.  He was a criminal, known to harbour feelings of violence, and was committed to an asylum where he died from complications of syphilis (suggesting he might have been familiar with the loose women of the East End).  He matched two of the stronger witnesses who saw a short, stout ‘foreigner’ (euphemism for a Jewish person) with two of the victims shortly before their bodies were found mutilated.  He was the right age for a serial killer and for the various witness descriptions (Levy was 32 years old at the time of Whitechapel murders), and may have been the man certain detectives trailed and regarded as a strong suspect for the murders.

Jacob Levy may not have been Jack the Ripper, but I believe he’s the strongest candidate currently known.

Candidacy of Jacob Levy: ****½ (out of 5)