At his second trial, Kokoraleis decided to recant everything he had confessed (four different times) and to deny that he had killed or raped anyone.   He claimed that the police had coerced each of his confessions, had made false promises, and had even beaten him into admitting what they wanted him to say.  Prosecutor Brian Telander went through the interrogations performed by six separate detectives and two prosecutors, but , Kokoraleis insisted they had told him exactly what to say.  He also indicated that one police officer had told him the details of the crime scene, giving him all that he needed to confess.  Yet when Detective Warren Wilcosz took the stand to describe his interrogation, he said that when he had shown Kokoraleis a line of photos, Kokoraleis had picked out Loraine Borowski and said, "That's the girl Eddie Spreitzer and I killed in the cemetery." 

Thomas Kokoraleis

So his attorneys tried a different tack.    Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  They argued that Kokoraleis was a killer suffering from schizophrenia, so that he had not known what he was doing when he committed the murder.  They claimed that the trial lawyers should have entered an insanity defense, but had not.  They had not even had him psychiatrically evaluated, which was a significant oversight on their part.  The appeals attorneys also argued that when those lawyers had failed to see the need for an evaluation, the trial judge should have ordered one for the court.  He had not, however.  In fact, a prison psychiatrist had diagnosed Kokoraleis with borderline personality disorder and found him incompetent to stand trial.  (However, psychiatric diagnosis would not make him incompetent or insane, so it was a weak argument at best.)  They argued that Kokoraleis had been "vulnerable" to a strong influence and was therefore not entirely responsible for what he had done.

When the district judge queried the trial attorneys about these issues, they claimed that no pattern of aberrant behavior had made anyone who knew the defendant suspect a psychiatric disorder.   That satisfied the judge that the pending affidavit was unpersuasive.  Yet the appeals attorneys pointed to Kokoraleis's bizarre behavior as proof of his aberrant condition.  The court considered this and decided that abnormal behavior does not imply the type of mental impairment required for a finding of insanity.  In a 41-page opinion, the court said that it found no reversible error and affirmed the sentence again.

But that was not the end of the story, for a movement was afoot to overturn all death sentences in the state.

For reasons that are not clear, he immigrated to London early in 1887. He took a job working as a hairdresser's assistant for five months and then opened a barbershop of his own at 126 Cable Street, St. George's-in-the-East. He was most likely at this Whitechapel address during the Ripper murders. In 1890, he worked in a barbershop at the corner of Whitechapel High Street and George Yard, very close to where Martha Tabram was murdered in August of 1888.

Klosowski married Lucy Baderski, expecting that the wife he left in Poland wouldn't find out about it. The first wife moved to London for awhile, but appeared to give him up after Baderski bore him a son in 1890. The son died of pneumonia in March of 1891 and the couple moved to Jersey City in New Jersey.

He first showed his violent streak when he attacked his wife. She claimed that he "held her down on the bed, and pressed his face against her mouth to keep her from screaming. At that moment a customer entered the shop immediately in front of the room, and Klosowski got up to attend him. Lucy chanced to see a handle protruding from underneath the pillow. She found to her horror that it was a sharp and formidable knife, which she promptly hid. Later, deliberately told her that he meant to have cut her head off, and pointed to a place in the room where he meant to have buried her. She said, "'But the neighbors would have asked where I had gone to."

"Oh," retorted Klosowski calmly. "I should simply have told them that you had gone back to New York."

Lucy went back to London alone and bore Klosowski a daughter in May of 1892. In June of that year he returned to London, but his relationship with Lucy did not continue long. In 1893, he moved in with and impregnated Annie Chapman (obviously not the woman who died at the hands of the Ripper in 1888), but the relationship ended in 1894 because of Klosowski's philandering.

He changed his name to George Chapman and soon lived in a common law arrangement with Mary Spink, who turned over to him her inheritance of 500 pounds. They set up a barbershop, which prospered because of their "musical shaves." Mary played the piano while George took care of the barbering.

While they prospered financially, their domestic life was turbulent. George beat his wife frequently. He bought some tartar emetic, a colorless, odorless and nearly tasteless poison containing antimony. In small doses it brings on a gradual painful death. Interestingly enough, the drug has the effect of preserving its victim's body for years after death.

When the musical barbershop's novelty wore off, it went out of business and George ended up working as manager in a pub. About the same time, Mary Spink began to suffer from severe stomach problems, which caused her death in 1897. Tuberculosis was the cause of death listed.

George Chapman with Bessie Taylor

George found another "wife" called Maud Marsh and  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire treated her just as badly as his other wives. Maud began to suffer from the same stomach illness. Her mother was suspicious and called in another doctor. Chapman was frightened and gave Maud a huge dose of poison, which killed her the following day. Chapman was arrested when Maud's body was found to contain a lethal amount of antimony.

His other two wives were exhumed and found remarkably preserved from the amount of antimony in their bodies. While Chapman was charged with three murders, he was convicted only of Maud's. He was hanged on April 7, 1903.

Retired Chief Inspector Abberline told the Pall Mall Gazette:

As I say, there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when Chapman went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came over here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by Chapman's wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored.

There were other factors that led to Chapman being a suspect: He was single at that time and had the freedom to roam around at all hours of the night and morning; he worked a regular job which kept him occupied during the week but allowed him weekends free —when the murders all occurred on weekends. He was violent and homicidal with women and committed multiple murders of women.

There were, however discrepancies. One was age. Many eyewitnesses thought the killer was between 30 and 40 years old, while Chapman was 23 in 1888. Perhaps he looked older than his years. A more significant discrepancy was the difference between the Ripper murders and Chapman's poisonings. Abberline attempted to address that issue in the Pall Mall Gazette:

As to the question of the dissimilarity of character in the crimes which one hears so much about, I cannot see why one man should not have done both, provided he had the professional knowledge, and this is admitted in Chapman's case. A man who could watch his wives being slowly tortured to death by poison, as he did, was capable of anything; and the fact that he should have attempted, in such a cold-blooded manner, to murder his first wife with a knife in New Jersey, makes one more inclined to believe in the theory that he was mixed up in the two series of crimes.

Did Chapman murder a woman named Carrie Brown in Jersey City by strangulation, followed by mutilation? Possible, in the sense that Chapman may have been in New Jersey on April 24, 1891, though no direct evidence implicates him.   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In summary, there is a great deal to be said for suspecting George Chapman. The question that remains is whether or not the terrible mutilator known as Jack the Ripper changed his style to become the smooth poisoner George Chapman some years later.

Jack the Ripper! Few names in history are as instantly recognizable. Fewer still evoke such vivid images: noisome courts and alleys, hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog, prostitutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cry of newsboys - and silent, cruel death personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night, armed with a long knife and carrying a black Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire   Gladstone bag.

—Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper

Johnny Depp in the movie
From Hell

Why then, over a hundred years later, are there allegedly more books written on Jack than all of the American presidents combined? Why are there stories, songs, operas, movies and a never-ending stream of books on this one Victorian criminal? Why is this symbol of terror as popular a subject today as he was in Victorian London?  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Because Jack the Ripper represents the classic whodunit. Not only is the case an enduring unsolved mystery that professional and amateur sleuths have tried to solve for over a hundred years, but the story has a terrifying, almost supernatural quality to it.   He comes from out of the fog, kills violently and quickly, and disappears without a trace. Then, for no apparent reason, he satisfies his blood lust with ever-increasing ferocity, culminating in the near destruction of his final victim, and then vanishes from the scene forever. The perfect ingredients for the perennial thriller.