CARL FERDINAND FEIGENBAUM
a.k.a. Karl Zahn, Anton Zahn.
By Wolf Vanderlinden
Editor's note: Carl Feigenbaum has most recently been put forward as a Jack the Ripper suspect by author Trevor Marriott, in his 2nd paperback edition of Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation (2007). Marriott believes Feigenbaum committed the Whitechapel murders as well as a series of other knife and axe attacks across the United States and Europe in the 1880s/1890s. This overview doesn't cover Marriott's assertions, but rather focuses on the contemporary (1890s) suggestions that Carl Feigenbaum was, in fact, Jack the Ripper.
At 11:10 on the morning of Monday the 27th of April, 1896, Carl Ferdinand Feigenbaum was led to the death chamber in Sing Sing prison, New York, and became the 19th man to be strapped into the electric chair there. By 11:18:30, after 1,780 volts had been passed through him, he was pronounced dead. This might have been an end to the matter except that later that same day his lawyer, William Sanford Lawton, announced to the press that it was his belief that Feigenbaum was actually Jack the Ripper. The lawyer believed that his client had also been responsible for several other murders including the murder of Carrie Brown.
Carl Feigenbaum, a gardener, had been put to death for the murder of Mrs Juliana Hoffman, a widow, who had rented a furnished room to him at her 54 (or 540, reports varied) East Sixth Street New York apartment. A poor woman who lived with her son Michael Mrs. Hoffman had only two small rooms but needed the money that a boarder could bring in.
Feigenbaum, who had lost his job on Long Island in late July or early August of 1894, had tramped through the country side doing odd jobs and, upon arriving in New York City, was sleeping rough on the benches in Tompkins Park. Sometime in the last week of August he answered a sign advertising a room for rent and although he had no money he told the Hoffmans that he had been promised a new job as a gardener and that he would be able to pay them his rent on Monday, (the 1st of September, 1894). Mrs. Hoffman, a fellow German, trusted the out of work gardener and allowed him to stay. Unfortunately she would pay for that trust with her life.
At 1:00 am on the appointed day Michael Hoffman was awakened by a noise in the room that he shared with his mother. Looking over he saw the boarder attack his mother with a long carving knife, cutting her throat from ear to ear. He sprang from his bed and attacked Feigenbaum from behind but the man, turning his attention to the boy, held the upper hand and Hoffman only escaped death by climbing out a window and onto the ledge where he screamed for help.
Feigenbaum returned to Mrs. Hoffman and stabbed her in the chest. Her son, looking in through the window, saw her slowly rise and attempt to struggle towards him but fell dead before she had gone a half dozen steps. The murderer, meanwhile, fled through a back window and had climbed down to the yard and from there down an alleyway to the street, dropping the bloody knife as he ran. Michael Hoffman’s shouts of “murder” had alerted the police and Feigenbaum was quickly arrested.
His defence in front of Recorder Frederick Smyth, the same man who had overseen the Ameer Ben Ali trial, was simple: he did not commit the murder but his friend, one Jacob Weibel, probably had. He claimed that he had met Weibel when he was tramping through the countryside and the two of them had quickly become friends and travelled together. He knew that Mrs. Hoffman wouldn’t approve of two men sharing her room without either one paying so he had said nothing about Weibel to the Hoffman’s. He claimed that Weibel would slip into the room to sleep at night and would be gone by morning. Weibel must have been the murderer and had attacked the Hoffman’s while he, Feigenbaum had slept.
Against this was the testimony of Michael Hoffman who identified Feigenbaum as the man who murdered his mother before his eyes. Feigenbaum was found guilty and sentenced to death. A year and a half later the sentence was carried out.
The lawyer, Lawton, claimed that there were various things which had led him to believe that Carl Feigenbaum was in reality jack the Ripper and the murderer of Carrie Brown. Lawton stated that Feigenbaum put on an act which made him seem simple-minded and imbecilic. During his arraignment, for example, he punched himself in the head and breast while exclaiming over and over “How foolish of me to trust a stranger. How foolish of me to trust a stranger.” In reality, Lawton said, his client was “crafty” and very intelligent and able to converse on such topics as surgery and dissection. Feigenbaum would clam up, however, if he was asked directly whether he had any practical knowledge on these subjects. Lawton also pointed out that although Feigenbaum acted as if he were a penniless tramp he actually left his sister property in both Cincinnati and New York in his will and he was also able to pay $90 for his own funeral arrangements.
Lawton’s defence assistant, Hugh O. Pentecost who did not agree that Feigenbaum might have been the Ripper, agreed, however, that there was more to their client than met the eye saying “he was a somewhat curious individual, with no small amount of instruction, and he wrote me some excellent letters in German about his case while in prison. The handwriting was better than you could expect from a practical flower gardener...” 1
Lawton also claimed that his client had confessed to him that “I have for years suffered from a singular disease which induces an all absorbing passion. This passion manifests itself in a desire to kill and mutilate every woman who falls my way. At such times I am unable to control myself.” 2 Lawton claims that he was able to ascertain that Feigenbaum had been in Wisconsin during a series of murders there as well as being in London in 1888. When he asked the gardener about the Whitechapel murders he was said to have confessed that he had indeed been in London in the Autumn of 1888 but that “the Lord was responsible for his acts and that to Him only could he confess.” 3
Lawton also believed that the murder of Mrs. Hoffman was a botched Ripper attack and he pointed out that there was some old blood on Feigenbaum’s knife, evidence, perhaps, of some earlier murder. The fact that Feigenbaum seemed to fit the murderer of Carrie Brown, he was after all German and had murdered a woman in New York with a knife, also led Lawton to believe that his client was responsible for the murder of “Shakespeare.”
Lawton had some support in his theory with Assistant District Attorney Vernon M. Davis, who had prosecuted Feigenbaum, stating “If it were proved that Feigenbaum was ‘Jack the Ripper’ it would not greatly surprise me, because I always considered him a cunning fellow, surrounded by a great deal of mystery, and his life history was never found out.” 4
Standing against this view was defence lawyer Pentecost who said that “I do not like... to spoil a good story , but I take no stock in my colleague’s story myself...In Feigenbaum I found nothing in his homicidal method to remind me of ‘the Ripper’.” 5 Interestingly the New York Times pointed out that Feigenbaum could not be the Ripper as Dr. L. Forbes Winslow had stated that “the Whitechapel murders were committed by a medical student of good family, whose mind was wrecked by study. His insanity took the form of religious fervor and homicidal impulse. He was found and incarcerated in a penal asylum. No anatomical murder occurred after this arrest.” 6 A.D.A. Davis was impressed enough by this statement that it seems to have tempered his own views pointing out “Of course, the statement of Dr. Winslow about the ‘Ripper’ should receive the consideration it deserves.” 7
Did Carl Feigenbaum murder Carrie Brown? there is not enough evidence to say either way. It could not be proved that he was even in New York on the night of the 23/24 of April 1891 and the New York Times pointed out that the motive for the murder of Mrs. Hoffman seemed to be based solely on robbery. Moreover, although he was German, Feigenbaum was forty nine years old in 1891 much older than the man seen by Mary Miniter. It should also be noted that Feigenbaum never really admitted to anything including the murder of Mrs. Hoffman. No one other than Lawton could claim to have actually heard any confession of homicidal mania from him and Lawton stated that he had proof that his client had been in London in 1888 but never produced it.
That Carl Feigenbaum was a cold blooded killer is an established fact but whether or not he murdered anyone other than Mrs. Hoffman is unproven.
1) The New York Times, 29 April, 1896.
2) The Stevens Point Daily Journal, 28 April, 1896.
3) Ibid.
4) The New York Times, op. cit.
5) Ibid.
6) Ibid. This interview, given at the time of Forbes Winslow’s trip to New York to chair the psychiatric section of the International Medico-Legal Congress, is yet another of the good doctors know it all solutions to the Ripper murders.
7) Ibid.
