Anatomy of Evil by Will Thomas

Whitechapel for him. He had a habit of stealing books from stalls and libraries.
    I could not count him out as a suspect. He was a homicidal maniac with a scalpel in his pocket. He hated women and he may have lived in the area. However, according to the file, no one had seen him for at least a month. He could be in Rio de Janeiro or the Congo, for all Scotland Yard knew. For that matter, he could be in Hanbury Street hunting for another unfortunate to slay.
    The next file had the name Ludwig Schloski written on it. Apparently, the suspect had recently arrived from Poland, and according to his common-law wife, Lucie Badewski, he was a violent man who enjoyed mistreating women. She had called the police after he had attempted to strangle her. He kept a knife under his pillow and routinely disappeared most nights during the killings, not returning until the morning. Searching through his private papers, she found his true name was Seweryn Klosowski of Kolo, Poland. Schloski was a good-looking fellow with a handlebar mustache and a swooping forelock of hair he combed high on his head, but he was a cold-blooded fellow who had an interest in poisons. He had earned a minor medical certificate from the Warsaw Hospital in practical surgery and worked as a nurse in various hospitals in London. If that wasn’t bad enough for Lucie Badewski, his wife arrived from Poland, and he attempted to move her in with them. It was enough and to spare as far as Lucie was concerned. Potential murder was one thing, but bigamy was out of the question. She moved out.
    The case against Schloski seemed to hang on the testimony of the one woman who had reason to hate him. There was no damning evidence from neighbors, for example, or arrests by the police. She had not pursued charges against him for the attempted strangulation. The poisons he carried could be explained by his continued studies in medicine, and if a fellow could be made a suspect for staying out late, most of Whitechapel would be kept under watch. That said, I’m sure he was no saint. Chances are he was aggressive, manipulative, and controlling, not to mention a bigamist. However, none of those things seemed to go with cutting up a woman on the street and removing her organs. This fellow was a charmer, who like as not would prefer to work inside. I had no doubt under the right circumstances he might kill, but not in the manner of the Whitechapel Killer. If Lucie Badewski were smart, she would be on a ship bound for America by now, well shed of him.
    I put down the second file and looked at my employer. He read more slowly than I, but that was because he tended to ponder between sentences. Nevertheless, he soon finished the first file and closed it in front of him before pushing it over to me.
    “If that’s another Polish Jew,” I said, pointing to the folder, “I’m going to suspect the government is looking for a scapegoat.”
    I took the file. It was another Polish Jew, this one named Aaron Kosminski.
    “Crikey,” I said. “I suppose they don’t believe an Englishman capable of such aberrant behavior. They’re all pure as Galahad.”
    I wiped my eyes, which were growing weary from all the reading, and began again. I picked up the third file. Kosminski was a young man of diminished mental ability. That’s my term; the file said he was a dummy. He was twenty-five years old and lived with his family who owned a factory. They watched over him during the day and apparently locked him in at night. Kosminski spoke a garbled form of Yiddish and according to the investigating officers sometimes sat and stared at nothing for hours on end. Recently he had been placed in an asylum temporarily while his brother’s wife gave birth, because there was no one to watch him closely. Shortly after he returned to the residence, the police were called, because he had threatened his sister-in-law with a pair of scissors. He was not arrested. The eldest brother explained that he occasionally had