Was Jacob Levy Jack the Ripper?
Early Life and Family Background
Jacob Levy was born in March 1856 in Whitechapel, to father Joseph and mother Catherine, who was sometimes known as Caroline. Jacob had two older brothers, Isaac and Abraham, two older sisters, Hannah and Elizabeth, one younger brother named Moses, and two stepsisters – Catherine’s children from a previous marriage. The family trade was butchery, and the Levys had been butchers at least as far back as Jacob’s great grandfather. Jacob’s parents had both been born in Aldgate, so they were born and bred Londoners.
In 1861, when Jacob Levy was 5, the family butcher’s shop was situated at 111 Middlesex Street, Aldgate. Some sources from 1888 refer to the street as being in Aldgate, while others describe it as being in Whitechapel, but what we do know is that there were many butchers in the road and it was also referred to as the Petticoat Lane Market, which encapsulates Middlesex Street, Wentworth Street, and all the lanes in between. Petticoat Lane’s origins stem from the 17th century and took its name from the lace and petticoats that were traditionally sold there. It was a vibrant, bustling marketplace crammed with traders, leather goods sellers, costermongers, and bargain hunters. The area was a tapestry of different languages and cultures and was home to a large Jewish population, as tens of thousands of Jews had fled Eastern Europe due to persecution and arrived in London to set up homes and businesses.
Jacob’s mother Catherine helped run the butchery business, and Jacob’s stepsister Jane Solomons was the bookkeeper. They also employed a 28-year-old servant named Eliza, and during Jacob’s childhood, they had two lodgers in the house – 19-year-old Sophie Harris who worked as an umbrella maker, and an elderly laundress called Mary Lee. When Jacob left school aged 14, he too joined the family business and he and his brother Abraham began learning the trade from their father. By this time, the lodgers had both vacated, and Jacob’s eldest sister Hannah had married and moved out, while the other elder brother, Isaac, was working for a cigar manufacturer.
By all accounts, life was busy but normal in the Levy household until 1875, when Jacob was 19. His brother Abraham, now 22, had developed a gambling habit. On Wednesday 26 May, he appeared melancholy and distant, revealing to Jacob that he had just lost a big bet on the Derby horse races. After dinner, he went upstairs to his bedroom and locked the door. Concerned by his brother’s mood and receiving no response to his knocks, Jacob broke the door down, revealing a scene that would remain etched in his mind for the rest of his life. His brother was dead, his body hanging from a clothesline fastened to the door. At the inquest, the jury returned a verdict of ‘suicide whilst of unsound mind’. For some reason, perhaps due to seeing his brother’s contorted neck marked by a red welt from the ligature, the facts twisted in his perception, and he began telling people that Abraham had slit his own throat.
The Butcher of Middlesex Street
Four years later in 1879, 23-year-old Jacob found happier times and married 22-year-old Sarah Abrahams, the daughter of a tailor, and the pair moved into 11 Fieldgate Street, about a 15-minute walk from Middlesex Street. By now, Jacob was a butcher himself, and their first child was born later that year, named Joseph after Jacob’s father. Another son, Isaac, followed at the beginning of 1881, and they supplemented their income by taking in paying lodgers; a family called the Turners. More children arrived over the next few years: Lewis, Hannah, Nathan, Jacob Junior, and Moss. Jacob was a loving husband and attentive father to his six sons and one daughter, and his wife described him as a shrewd businessman.
By this time, Jacob’s brother Isaac was still working as a cigar maker but had moved out of Middlesex Street and was married to a woman named Clara, with whom he had two children. From 1888 onwards, Isaac and Clara lived at 214 Wentworth Model Dwellings in Goulston Street – within feet of where the scrap of bloody apron and the cryptic graffito was found after the murder of Catherine Eddowes.
By 1886, Jacob had purchased a butcher’s shop at 36 Middlesex Street from his aunt and uncle, Frances and Hyam Levy, who were too old to run it, and the family moved out of Fieldgate Street and into the premises above the Middlesex Street shop. This shop was situated next to another butcher’s shop, run by Hyam Sampson, who employed two members of staff – 30-year-old Morris Phillips and 16-year-old Moss Woolf. Soon, Hyam Sampson noticed that meat was going missing, so he contacted the police, who put his premises under surveillance.
Levy Arrested For Theft
At 6 a.m. on Wednesday 10 March 1886, Hyam Sampson went to the market as he did every morning. During this time, a constable stationed outside the butcher’s shop, the humorously named Samuel Bacon, noticed Jacob Levy going into his neighbour’s shop, and coming out a few minutes later along with Morris Phillips and Moss Woolf, all of them with their arms full of meat. Jacob Levy took the meat into his own shop, and PC Bacon followed him in, asking sternly, ‘What are you doing with that?’. Jacob replied, ‘We are only having a lark. I am going to weigh it.’ PC Bacon was unconvinced and arrested them for stealing 14 lbs of beef valued at 14s. When Levy had his belongings catalogued at the police station, he was found to have an enormous £32, 10s and 9 pence in his pocket which would be worth about £3,000 today. It therefore seemed unlikely he would have stolen his neighbour’s beef for financial reasons, but his true motivations remain unclear. Around this time, Jacob’s mother Caroline was diagnosed with cancer, and, compounding the tragedy, his father died a week after Jacob’s arrest.
Imprisonment and Mental Illness
The trial was held at the Old Bailey on 5 April 1886 and several character witnesses spoke in defence of Jacob Levy, as there had been nothing in his life up to this point to suggest any tendency towards lawbreaking. Even Hyam Sampson admitted that Jacob would have struggled to secure a butcher’s licence if he had been of bad character. Levy’s counsel for the defence was Gerald Geoghegan, who would also defend Israel Lipski the following year in the strange murder of Miriam Angel just a stone’s throw from the scene of Liz Stride’s murder.
Jacob Levy was sentenced to one year’s hard labour at Holloway Prison for knowingly receiving stolen goods, while Moss Woolf received 4 months, and Morris Phillps escaped jail time. During his incarceration, Jacob was certified insane after attempting suicide by strangling himself and was admitted to the Essex County Lunatic Asylum in Brentwood on 26 May 1886. The medical officer’s report read, ‘He is in a state of melancholia, cries with adequate cause – is very despondent – from the fact that he attempted suicide by strangulation at gaol and that a brother committed suicide and insanity is hereditary in his family, I consider him suicidal and insane. He is in fair health and condition.’ He also suffered from insomnia and often talked about people who didn’t exist, expressing a desire to harm others.
Released From Asylum
In February 1887, Jacob Levy was discharged as ‘cured’ and said to be of ‘sound mind’. He returned to 36 Middlesex Street and carried on the butchery business, but his behaviour was erratic. He frequently gave people the wrong amount of change, and his wife Sarah noticed their finances were suffering, saying ‘he makes away with every penny he can put his hands on’. He ordered goods indiscriminately, stole other people’s possessions, and wandered the streets at night for hours. He also developed paranoia and became convinced that people wanted to hurt him. He began visiting prostitutes and contracted syphilis, a disease whose early signs include ulcers or lesions in the mouth or genitals, rashes on the palms of the hands, a weakened immune system, and flu-like symptoms. The most common treatment at the time was mercury pills, which may have done more harm than good, and most syphilis patients eventually died an unpleasant death. Around this time, Jacob began drinking alcohol in pubs, which was unusual as he had previously abstained. He also showed signs of a grandiose or histrionic personality, a form of narcissistic personality disorder, telling people he was rich and had the power to grant them land and money. He sometimes visited his brother Isaac at 214 Wentworth Buildings in Goulston Street, as well as his mother Catherine, who now lived nearby at 198 Wentworth Buildings. It was here that his mother died in May 1888. Could her death have been the final trigger that prompted a murderous spree in the autumn of that year? Jacob Levy started neglecting his children and became unkind, complaining that he heard voices compelling him to do violence, believing that he would do so unless he was restrained.
Death at Stone Asylum
On 15 August 1890, 34-year-old Jacob Levy was admitted to the City of London Lunatic Asylum in Stone, near Dartford, with the reason noted as ‘mania’ and being of ‘unsound mind’, although he was not thought to be suicidal this time. The medical officer recorded that he had several syphilitic boils on his back and neck, was 5’3” and weighed 9 stone 3lbs. He was in reasonably good physical health with no obvious problems with his organs, but he did not sleep at night and continually ranted about killing someone. While at the asylum, he began to show some improvement in his eating and sleeping patterns and was more talkative, expressing a desire to go home. This was shortly followed by a relapse, and he lost weight and sank into depression. By the spring of 1891, doctors noticed that one of his pupils was larger than the other and he was weakening further, with a rapid and feeble pulse. Eventually, he required the help of two attendants to dress him and spoon feed him. On 29 July 1891, he had a seizure at 8 o’clock in the morning and died just before 8 p.m. the same day. The official cause of death was “exhaustion from general paralysis of the insane” but was more likely due to syphilis. His widow Sarah took the children to live with her sister-in-law at nearby 87 Middlesex Street, abandoning the butcher’s shop she had run with her husband.
The Case for Jacob Levy as Jack the Ripper
What elements of Jacob Levy’s story stand in his favour as a Jack the Ripper suspect? Firstly, he had lived in the heart of Ripper territory since birth and would have known the area well. Middlesex Street, where he spent most of his life, was about half a mile from the canonical five murder locations, and he was familiar with the Wentworth Buildings in Goulston Street where the scrap of Catherine Eddowe’s apron and the cryptic graffito were found. Goulston Street ran parallel to Middlesex Street, and it was just a 2-minute walk between them, and his brother lived there at the time of the killings.
We also know from Levy’s medical record that he visited prostitutes and roamed around the area at night. Could contracting syphilis have sparked a desire for revenge against the women he blamed for giving him the illness? As he had taken up drinking, it would have been possible for him to pick up or follow his intended victims after they left the pub, and as he would have spoken like a true Londoner, he would have appeared less overtly Jewish or ‘foreign’ than some other suspects, like Kosminski. Prostitutes may have been cautious about being approached by Jewish men, particularly after the first couple of murders, as anti-semitic sentiment was common – but Levy would likely have blended in more, although we don’t know exactly what he looked like.
His general appearance may also be evidence for his Jack the Ripper candidacy. At 5’3”, he was three inches taller than Catherine Eddowes, matching the description given by witness Joseph Hyam Levy about the man he saw talking to her near Church Passage, one of the alleyways leading into Mitre Square. 47-year-old Joseph Hyam Levy ran a butcher’s shop at 1 Hutchinson Street, Aldgate, within 100 yards of Jacob’s premises. Interestingly, Joseph Hyam Levy was also Jacob’s cousin. Apparently, Hyam said to his friends that night, ‘Look here, I don’t like going home by myself when I see those characters about.’ The press speculated that this meant he knew the man and reported that Hyam was evasive and reluctant to give evidence. The Evening News even said, ‘He is absolutely obstinate and refuses to give the slightest information. He leaves one to infer that he knows something but that he is afraid to be called to the inquest.’
Could he have recognised his own cousin talking to Catherine Eddowes minutes before she was murdered, and been frightened or uncomfortable about identifying his own family member as a killer? This might make sense in the context of the star witness who, according to Chief Inspectpr Donald Swanson, was taken to a seaside home to identify a suspect but had refused to do so – which some said was because the witness did not want to be the cause of a fellow Jew being hanged.
However, Hyam’s friend, Joseph Lawende, contradicted the description and thought the man’s height was 5’7”. Also, the lighting in Church Passage would have been very dim, and we don’t know if it was possible to see the man’s face clearly enough to identify him. That said, Levy’s height of 5’3” also matches the testimony of Elizabeth Long, who saw a man with Annie Chapman in Hanbury Street.
She said he was a little taller than the deceased, and Annie Chapman was five feet tall. Long described the man as dark and about 40 years old, and some sources say she thought he was a foreigner, although she only saw him from the back. The fence in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street was five and a half feet tall, and witness Albert Cadosh of number 27 told police that he did not see either Chapman’s head or her killer’s above the fence when he heard a thump, suggesting that the killer was under five feet six inches.
Witness George Hutchinson’s description of ‘astrakhan man’ outside Millers Court on the night of Mary Jane Kelly’s murder made the man sound overtly Jewish, and he also told the police he had seen the man again in Middlesex Street – where Levy lived and worked. However, Hutchinson’s statement has been criticised by many, and the police never found any evidence of ‘astrakhan man’s’ existence.
Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, who conducted the postmortem on Eddowes, felt that the perpetrator must have had expert medical knowledge, but admitted at the inquest that someone used to cutting up animals could have been responsible. Dr George Bagster Phillips, the coroner at the inquest into Chapman’s death, agreed that the killer had some anatomical knowledge. Jacob Levy would have had the requisite skills as a butcher and access to knives. The Goulston Street graffito was written in chalk, and Levy would likely have had access to chalk, as butchers typically used it to write their prices on a blackboard. However, it is still debated whether the graffito was really written by the killer or was simply a red herring.
Although Levy’s name isn’t mentioned in any surviving police documentation, there is some evidence that the authorities might have been aware of him. City of London detective Robert Sagar, in whose jurisdiction Catherine Eddowes was murdered, believed he knew the identity of the killer, and stated in a newspaper interview that he was a butcher who worked near Butcher’s Row in Aldgate High Street, which ran along the bottom of Middlesex Street. Reynolds News printed an extract from Sagar’s memoirs in September 1946, which read, ‘We had good reason to suspect a man who worked in Butcher’s Row, Aldgate. We watched him carefully. There was 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.’ This sounds a bit like Jacob Levy, although the Stone Asylum was not a private one, and he wasn’t admitted until August 1890, almost two years after the last of the canonical murders. Unfortunately, Detective Sagar’s memoirs were never published in full, and are now untraced, so we don’t know what else he may have said about the case.
Detective Inspector Harry Cox of the City of London police partly corroborated Sagar’s tale, writing in 1906 that he had been involved in a 3-month surveillance of a Jewish suspect after the Mary Jane Kelly murder, who ran a business in the East End. Cox claimed the motive was revenge as he had been wronged by a woman of the lower classes. He said the suspect had spent time at a Surrey asylum and was known to take nightly walks, and that the reason there were no further murders was because the suspect knew he was being watched. Detective Cox didn’t know what became of the suspect. Could he have been referring to Jacob Levy? The only discrepancy is that Levy was in an asylum in Kent, not Surrey.
In Paul Begg and Martin Fido’s 1996 edition of The Complete Jack the Ripper A-Z: The Ultimate Guide to the Ripper Mystery, they point out that Steward Hicks, a researcher from Norfolk, alleged that Lady Anderson, the wife of Assistant Met Police Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson, had once remarked that ‘the Ripper was interned in an asylum near Stone’. Steward Hicks died in 1993, so any further knowledge about this statement has died with him.
We have solid evidence that Jacob Levy spent time in an asylum and that he was mentally deteriorating around the time of the murders. As a young man, he had found his brother hanging in his bedroom, which may have affected him psychologically, possibly contributing to his desire to strangle himself. His fixation with incorrectly telling people his brother had slit his own throat may also point to a potential link to the Ripper’s MO of slashing his victim’s throats, before performing the mutilations.
Curiously, the official case files on Jack the Ripper were closed in 1891, the year of Levy’s death. So what do you think? How does Jacob Levy stack up against other suspects like Kosminski, Druitt, Tumblety, Lechmere, or others? Let me know your thoughts in the comments and tell me which suspects you’d like to hear me cover soon. Don’t forget to check out my Ripper series for a refresh of the facts and all the canonical crime scenes.
Will we ever know the truth? For now, the mystery remains…
Prash Ganendran
Video Documentary Version of this Case
Related Cases
Jack the Ripper suspect Aaron Kosminsky
Sources
Ancestry.com
Old Bailey Court Record
Jack The Ripper | Full True Crime Documentary: Victorian London & Whitechapel Murders | Parts 1–7 https://youtu.be/Gi7WjSOYtTo
London Evening Standard, Wednesday 10 March 1886
Evening Mail, Friday 12 October 1888
https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/suspects/levy-jacob/7873-jacob-levy-asylum-records
Daily Telegraph, 12 October 1888
Reynolds News, 15 September 1946