Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski (14 December 1865 – 7 April 1903), better known under his pseudonym George Chapman, was a Victorian-era Anglo-Polish serial killer known as the Borough Poisoner.
Born in Congress Poland, Chapman moved to England as an adult, where he committed his crimes. He was convicted and executed after poisoning three women, but is remembered today mostly because some contemporary police officers suspected him of being the notorious serial killer "Jack the Ripper".
Early life
Seweryn Kłosowski was born to Antoni and Emilia Kłosowski in the village of (today part of Koło) in the Warsaw Governorate of Congress Poland. His father was a carpenter. According to a certificate found in his personal effects after his arrest, he was apprenticed at age 14 to a senior surgeon, Moshko (Mosze) Rappaport, in Zwoleń, whom he assisted in procedures such as the application of leeches for blood-letting. He then enrolled on a course in practical surgery at the Warsaw Praga Hospital. This course was very brief, lasting from October 1885 to January 1886 (attested to by another certificate in his possession) but Kłosowski continued to serve as a nurse, or doctor's assistant, in Warsaw until December 1886.
Kłosowski later left Poland for the United Kingdom, settling in London; the exact time he arrived in the capital has never been reliably ascertained. A receipt for hospital fees from February 1887 indicating that Kłosowski was still there is the last record of him in Poland, and papers documenting his early life ended abruptly at that month, indicating that he potentially left for the UK at around that time.
However, there is a lack of any hard evidence that would link Chapman to the Ripper murders. The main argument against treating him as a serious suspect is that it would be unusual for a serial killer to change his modus operandi, from mutilation to poisoning, although some authorities have cast doubt on whether this is as unusual as is supposed. There is also some doubt about whether he could speak English at the time, as the Ripper would have almost certainly had to according to eyewitness reports about the suspect holding conversations with some of his victims, and whether as a recent immigrant, he would have had the intimate knowledge of the Whitechapel district that the Ripper seems to have had. The Ripper appears to have selected victims who were previously unknown to him, while Chapman killed acquaintances, and although Chapman did live in Whitechapel it was not particularly near the scene of the murders.
Chapman's story was dramatised twice by Towers of London, firstly in 1949 in Secrets of Scotland Yard as George Chapman... Poisoner, Publican and Lady Killer and then again in a 1951 episode of The Black Museum entitled "The Straight Razor". Both conclude with a brief argument for Chapman's identity as Jack the Ripper.
See also
- Jack the Ripper suspects
- List of serial killers in the United Kingdom