Maud Marsh died on October 22, 1902, in the rooms above the Crown, a public house in Borough High Street, Southwark, with her mother beside her; one local account puts her death a day later. For months she had been vomiting and in pain. She had been admitted to Guy's Hospital and improved there, then fell ill again as soon as she came home. A doctor her family consulted, Dr. Grapel, concluded that she was being poisoned and questioned the publican she lived with as his wife, who told him the two of them had eaten rabbit that day; the remains of the meal showed nothing. When she died, Dr. Stoker, who had been attending her, would not sign a death certificate without a post-mortem. The publican objected. Her parents insisted.
The post-mortem, by Dr. Stevenson for the Home Office, found tartar emetic in her organs, which were saturated with antimony. In the house police found a bottle that had recently been washed, with the remains of a white powder that proved to be antimony. Dr. Stoker had never prescribed it and had not kept it in his surgery for ten years. Inspector George Godley arrested the publican on October 25, and it came out that George Chapman was a name taken years before by a Pole named Severin Klosowski. Charged, he said he knew nothing about it and did not know how she had got the poison, and that he would not have hurt her for the world.
He was born Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski on December 14, 1865, at Nagórna, now part of Koło, in Congress Poland, the son of Antoni and Emilia Kłosowski; his father was a carpenter. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a senior surgeon, Moshko Rappaport, in Zwoleń, helping with procedures such as bleeding patients with leeches. He took a short course in practical surgery at the Praga Hospital in Warsaw from October 1885 to January 1886 and worked as a doctor's assistant in Warsaw until December 1886. The last record of him in Poland is a receipt for hospital fees from February 1887, and when he reached London has never been fixed; witnesses at his trial seemed to place it in 1888. He found work as a hairdresser's assistant with Abraham Radin at 70 West India Dock Road, then opened his own barbershop at 126 Cable Street in St George in the East, the address an 1889 directory gives as his home.
In 1889 he married a young Polish woman, Lucie Badewski, although he already had a wife in Poland, who came to confront him and then went home. Lucie and he had two children and in 1891 moved to Jersey City, New Jersey, where he worked in a barbershop. The marriage was violent. In February 1892 he attacked Lucie while she was pregnant and threatened to kill her; she said later that he had once forced her down on their bed and begun to strangle her, stopping only when a customer came into the adjoining shop, and that she afterward found a knife under the pillow. She went back to London, and after a brief reunion there they parted for good. In 1893, working at Haddin's hairdressing shop, he met Annie Chapman, lived with her and took her surname. In 1894 he brought another woman to live with them, and Annie, pregnant, left. By 1895 he was an assistant in William Wenzel's barbershop at 7 Church Lane, Leytonstone.
There he met Mary Isabella Spink, a drinker whose husband and son had left her. They went through a sham marriage, and she brought him a legacy of £500. They leased a barbershop in a poor part of Hastings, moved it to a better street when it failed, and drew custom with musical shaves, Spink playing the piano while he shaved the customers. He bought a sailing boat and called it the Mosquito. He also beat her; a woman in the same building said she often heard Spink crying out at night and saw bruises on her face and marks on her throat. On April 3, 1897, he bought an ounce of tartar emetic from William Davidson, a chemist in the High Street at Hastings. When the business failed he took a pub in Bartholomew Square, and there he poisoned her. She died on Christmas Day 1897.
He then hired Bessie Taylor, who had managed a restaurant, and she became the next wife in name. He shouted at her and once threatened her with a revolver. When she began to show the same symptoms Spink had shown, he took her out of London to Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire, where he ran the Grapes, and then back to London and the Monument Tavern in Union Street, Borough. Despite an operation she grew steadily worse and died on February 13, 1901. He tried to set fire to the Monument, whose lease was running out. In August 1901 he hired Maud Marsh, a young woman from Croydon, as a barmaid there, went through another false marriage and beat her too, and by June 1902 they had moved to the Crown.
After Marsh's death the bodies of Spink and Taylor were exhumed. Both contained antimony, and both were remarkably well preserved. At the Old Bailey in March 1903 he faced three indictments, but an indictment for murder could carry only one count, and he was tried for Maud Marsh alone. The Solicitor General, Sir Edward Carson, prosecuted with Archibald Bodkin. He was convicted on March 19 and sentenced to death by Mr. Justice Grantham, and he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on April 7, 1903. Why he did it was never clear: Spink's £500 aside, he gained nothing from any of them.
Inspector Frederick Abberline of Scotland Yard, one of the original investigators of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, is said to have told Godley, "You've got Jack the Ripper at last!" In two interviews with the Pall Mall Gazette in 1903 he set out his suspicion by name, resting it partly on what Lucie Badewski had told him during the original inquiry, that her husband often went out at night for hours at a time. Chapman had arrived in the East End at about the time the first murder took place, and he was undoubtedly violent toward women; as far as is known, though, he was not a suspect in 1888. Later writers are divided. Philip Sugden thought him the likeliest of the known suspects but the case far from proven; John Eddleston rated him two, a remote possibility, on a scale of zero to five; Paul Begg gave him only brief attention.