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The Borough Poisoner: George Chapman · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:08
  Dispersions. On the fourteenth of December eighteen sixty five, a Polish carpenter and
• 0:42
  his wife welcomed their new son into the world. Swearin Klosowski entered into a
• 0:48
  life of opportunity. Instead of apprenticing with his father and becoming a carpenter,
• 0:53
  as was commonly done in Poland in those days, Swearin apprenticed with a surgeon.
• 1:00
  He was still young, and he didn't take part in any major surgeries
• 1:03
  or practices that doctors would be trained in today. But Swerin learned how to
• 1:07
  apply leeches and perform blood lettings, and apparently he was pretty good at it.
• 1:14
  His master most Coo Rapaport, said that Swarin was diligent, he always
• 1:19
  had quote exemplary conduct and studied with zeal the science of surgery. Another source
• 1:25
  said that Swearin was very skillful assistant to patients. So it was perhaps no
• 1:30
  surprise when Swearin enrolled in the studies of practical surgery at the Warsaw Praga Hospital.
• 1:37
  But perhaps what was a surprise was how long Swearin actually stayed there.
• 1:42
  He was only there for three months studying before he dropped out. He stayed
• 1:47
  on another year at the hospital, working as a nurse and sometimes a doctor's
• 1:51
  assistant. But it looked like Swearin's medical career had come to an abrupt end
• 1:57
  shortly after he moved to London in the UK, where he settled in in
• 2:00
  the East End and became a hairdresser's assistant. It looked like Swarin had officially
• 2:06
  swapped the scalpel for the scissors. He was apparently good enough to open up
• 2:10
  his own barber shop within about a year of moving to London. It's difficult
• 2:15
  to say how long it took him for sure, as his entry date into
• 2:19
  the UK is a little bit of a mystery, but it's safe to say
• 2:22
  that he was living, working, and running his own establishment in London by
• 2:27
  eighteen eighty nine. The shop was located in Cable Street, Saint George in
• 2:31
  the East a name that Swarin would adopt to make a living in the UK
• 2:36
  easier. Now going by George, he married a young Polish woman named Lucy.
• 2:42
  The pair of them had met at the Polish Club in Saint John's Square
• 2:46
  only five weeks before the wedding, but it looked like George had swept poor
• 2:50
  Lucy off of her feet within months. There was a knock on the young
• 2:54
  couple's door, and Lucy was confronted with an unexpected truth. It turned out
• 3:00
  that George was already married. His first wife had stayed behind in Poland when
• 3:05
  George had emigrated to London, but there she was, and she wanted her
• 3:08
  husband back. Almost unbelievably, George managed to somehow twist the situation to his
• 3:15
  benefit. He then had both of his wives living with him under the same
• 3:20
  roof in London, possibly both vying for his attention and competing with each other.
• 3:25
  He told them, don't hate the player, hate the game. He
• 3:30
  didn't say that, but everything would change. Less than a year later.
• 3:35
  In September eighteen ninety Lucy and George welcomed a son and to their lives,
• 3:39
  and George's first wife moved out. George and Lucy were now official, if
• 3:45
  still only unofficially married. In eighteen ninety one, they upheaved everything and moved
• 3:51
  to America, where George found work another barbershop in New Jersey. Things seemed
• 3:55
  to go pretty well at first, but over the short years of their marriage,
• 4:00
  something had changed within George and it didn't look like things would be getting
• 4:03
  any better. George had turned violent, and the person who bore the brunt
• 4:09
  of his frustrations, his outbursts, his rages was his wife, Lucy.
• 4:15
  He often beat her and very cruelly, but Lucy later told of the beating
• 4:19
  that ended everything. According to her later statement, in February eighteen ninety two,
• 4:26
  George dragged Lucy into their bedroom and he threw her onto the bed.
• 4:30
  He began to strangle her, ignoring how she fought back and the fact that
• 4:34
  she was pregnant at the time. He only stopped when he heard a customer
• 4:39
  entering the shop that was adjoined to their room, and left Lucy gasping for
• 4:44
  breath on the bed. It was then that Lucy spotted the handle of a
• 4:46
  knife poking out from under his pillow, and she knew that things could have
• 4:50
  potentially gotten a lot worse. She hid the knife, and when she later
• 4:55
  confronted George about it, he admitted that he had planned on killing her.
• 5:00
  He had hidden the knife under his pillow because he had planned on decapitating her,
• 5:04
  and he even showed her where he was going to hide the body.
• 5:08
  Afterwards, Lucy called his bluff and claimed that he wouldn't have gotten away with
• 5:13
  it, especially because the neighbors would have noticed that she had disappeared. Lucy
• 5:17
  later recalled George, saying in response, oh, I should simply have told
• 5:23
  them that you had gone back to New York. Lucy didn't stick around to
• 5:27
  take her chances and moved back to London to live with her sister. Shortly
• 5:30
  after the birth of their daughter, George returned to his wife, but it
• 5:34
  was clear that the marriage was over. George moved out and found work in
• 5:40
  another barber shop to keep himself afloat. Their son had unfortunately died of pneumonia
• 5:46
  while George and Lucy had been living in the States, but George cut ties
• 5:49
  with Lucy and his newborn daughter and never sent them any type of financial support
• 5:56
  from the wages that he earned from his new job. Instead, he met
• 6:00
  a woman named Annie Chapman, and a familiar story played out. George swept
• 6:05
  Annie off of her feet, and within weeks they had struck up a relationship
• 6:10
  and moved in together. George took Annie's last name, and George Chapman became
• 6:15
  his new identity, covering his tracks and hiding the life he had just left
• 6:20
  behind. But Player's Gonna play, and only a year later, George brought
• 6:26
  home another woman to live with him and his then pregnant Annie, possibly thinking
• 6:30
  that he could have his cake and eat it too, just like he had
• 6:33
  for a time with Lucy and his first wife from Poland. It took Annie
• 6:39
  only a few weeks before she drew the line in the sand and moved out.
• 6:43
  When she later told George about their newborn child, George cut ties with
• 6:47
  them and moved on, just like he had before. George then found Mary
• 6:53
  Isabelle Spink through his workplace, and he smelled an opportunity. Mary had a
• 6:58
  bit of money stashed away, and she was on a little bit of a
• 7:01
  downward spiral. She was an alcoholic, and her husband had just left her
• 7:05
  and taken their son with him. George then stepped up to try to heal
• 7:11
  Mary's broken heart. The pair of them first opened their own unsuccessful barber shop
• 7:16
  and poor area of town before picking up shop and moving to a wealthier area.
• 7:21
  There, Mary played the piano while George cut hair, and what would
• 7:26
  become known as their musical Shavings was a massive hit. Business boomed for a
• 7:31
  while, but like any fad, they had also died out. George had
• 7:36
  to take to managing a local bar to make money, and Mary bore the
• 7:41
  brunt of his temper at that time. A neighbor later told of often hearing
• 7:46
  Mary crying out in the nights, and she would see the marks and bruises
• 7:49
  on Mary's body the following day. This was the routine until Mary fell ill.
• 7:56
  After that, George started looking after his wife, dutifully preparing her medicine
• 8:01
  for her and doing everything he could to make her well again. Within months,
• 8:07
  Mary was dead. She'd suffered from terrible cramps in her stomach, vomiting,
• 8:11
  and diarrhea until her body had simply given up. A friend who'd later
• 8:16
  helped prepare Mary's body for burial described it as a mere skeleton. Witnesses said
• 8:22
  that when Mary died, George stood over her body and said, Polly,
• 8:28
  Polly speak, before going into the next room and crying. He then went
• 8:33
  downstairs and opened the pub, even though now he had a lot more money.
• 8:37
  Mary had left her unofficial husband five hundred Great British pounds or what would
• 8:43
  be over sixty thousand Great British pounds in today's money, and George put it
• 8:48
  to good use. He hired Bessie Taylor to be the new manager, but
• 8:52
  it wasn't long before Bessie was a little bit more than just an employee.
• 8:58
  Bessie took Mary's place, and George soon turned violent against her. George not
• 9:03
  only beat her, but once reportedly threatened her with the revolver, and then
• 9:09
  Bessie was suddenly struck by the same mysterious illness that had killed Mary. To
• 9:15
  avoid scandal, George first moved Bessie away to Hertfordshire, where she underwent surgery,
• 9:20
  but nothing seemed to be getting Bessie better. Eventually he moved them back
• 9:26
  to London, where Bessie's condition just grew worse and worse. A friend made
• 9:31
  a point of visiting Bessie every single day and was a new opportunity for George
• 9:35
  to get his thrill. More than once, George would answer the door and
• 9:41
  tell Bessie's friend that Bessie had died during the night. Her friend would then
• 9:46
  race up the stairs, only to find Bessie still sick in bed, but
• 9:48
  alive. One time, George told her that everything was fine and Bessie was
• 9:54
  just the same as she'd been the day before. It was that time that
• 9:58
  Bessie's friend went in to find that Bessie had actually died the day before.
• 10:03
  George, of course moved on. He hired a new barmaid, and now
• 10:07
  an all too familiar story played out. The new couple wed in an unofficial
• 10:13
  ceremony because George was still married to his first wife in Poland, and George
• 10:18
  turned violent and then George's new wife, Maud Marsh was her name. She
• 10:22
  became sick, thinking that her new son in law was a little too keen
• 10:26
  about preparing her daughter's medicine. Maud's mother intervened. She took over control of
• 10:33
  administering her daughter's medicine and called an independent doctor in to examine her daughter.
• 10:39
  Probably feeling trapped, George then gave Maud a massive dose of his heir Quotes
• 10:45
  medicine, and she died the very next day. Maud's death sparked suspicion and
• 10:52
  also cast suspicions on the deaths of George's previous unofficial wives. Before long,
• 10:56
  the authorities had exhumed both of their bodies and his discovered that all three women
• 11:01
  had actually been poisoned. George was arrested and taken to trial, where he
• 11:05
  was found guilty of murdering Maud The sentence was death by hanging, a sentence
• 11:11
  that was carried out only a few weeks after George Chapman was found guilty.
• 11:16
  His motives for committing these crimes still remain a mystery. Mary was the only
• 11:20
  one in her death that seemed to directly benefit him, at least financially.
• 11:26
  The other two women had nothing and left him nothing, but it speculated that
• 11:30
  George had even more unsavory reasons for committing these murders. When George was arrested,
• 11:37
  the inspectors at the station commented that the infamous Jack the Ripper had finally
• 11:41
  been caught. George did fit the profile. He matched the witness's description of
• 11:46
  a man with a thick, dark mustache, and he also somewhat fit the
• 11:50
  witness testimonies of a man with a Russian accent. George spent most of his
• 11:56
  time in London, either living directly inside or around the Whitechapel area where most
• 12:01
  of Jack the Ripper's killings took place. He even had a background in surgery,
• 12:07
  which could fit the theory of Jack the Ripper's supposed experience with scalpels and
• 12:11
  anatomy. Lucy later testified that George would disappear for hours at a time during
• 12:16
  the nights. But all of this is circumstantial at best. There is no
• 12:20
  concrete evidence that George Chapman was actually Jack the Ripper. In fact, most
• 12:26
  modern theorists place him very low on the list of possible suspects. We do,
• 12:31
  however, know that he poisoned three women to death and tried to cover
• 12:35
  his tracks, but we possibly will never know if he was capable and did
• 12:39
  commit even more heinous crimes than that. That's ten Minute Murder for today,
• 12:54
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• 12:58
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