A book author claims to have
solved one of history’s coldest cases and unmasked the identity of Jack the
Ripper.
In the early morning hours of
September 30, 1888, police discovered the mutilated body of Catherine Eddowes,
her throat slit and left kidney removed, in London’s Mitre Square. Eddowes had
been the second prostitute inside of an hour found murdered in that section of
the city, and the slaying bore the grisly signatures of the serial killer who
for weeks had been terrorizing London’s East End—Jack the
Ripper.
As police from Scotland Yard
completed their work, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson reportedly made an odd
request to take home a blood-splattered shawl—blue and dark brown with a
pattern of Michaelmas daisies at either end—found at the crime scene as a gift
for his seamstress wife. His superiors granted permission, but unsurprisingly,
the present was not well received.
Simpson’s horrified wife
stashed the seven-foot-long fabric found next to Jack the Ripper’s fourth victim
in a box. It was never worn or washed as the search for one of the world’s most
notorious killers grew colder and colder. The person responsible for killing at
least five Londoners between August and November 1888 was never found, and
authorities officially closed the file in 1892.
Who Was Jack the Ripper?
The slayings never faded from
public consciousness, however. Legions of “Ripperologists” have developed their
own theories over the decades, and the lineup of possible suspects has included
the father of Winston
Churchill, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” author Lewis
Carroll, and Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen
Victoria and second in line to the British throne.
Some have even speculated that
Jack the Ripper was in actuality Jill the Ripper, and female suspects
include Mary
Pearcey, who was executed in 1890 after butchering her lover’s wife and
child with a carving knife in a similar manner to the notorious serial killer.
The Victorian-era shawl
reportedly taken by Simpson passed from generation to generation of the
policeman’s descendants until it was put up for auction in 2007 and purchased
by Russell Edwards, an English businessman and self-confessed “armchair
detective” who was fascinated by the coldest of cold cases. Although the silk
fabric was frayed and aging, it still contained valuable DNA evidence
since it was never washed.
Did DNA Analysis Find the
Killer?
Now, after more than three
years of scientific analysis, Russell says that Jack the Ripper’s true identity
has been found interwoven in the ragged, 126-year-old shawl, and he fingers
Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski as the serial killer in his book “Naming Jack the Ripper.”
Edwards enlisted forensic
geneticist Dr. Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University in 2011 to
study the shawl using a level of analysis that was only possible in the last
decade. Louhelainen identified the dark splotches on the shawl as stains
“consistent with arterial blood spatter caused by slashing.” He also discovered
evidence of split body parts, consistent with a kidney removal, as well as the
presence of seminal fluid.
Louhelainen found the
mitochondrial DNA taken from the shawl matched that taken from Karen Miller, a
direct descendant of Eddowes, as well as a female descendant of Kosminski’s sister,
Matilda, who provided swabs of mitochondrial DNA from the inside of her mouth.
Police who worked the case at
the time of the murders would not have been surprised to see Kosminski’s name
linked to the crime. At the time of the murders, Kosminski was among the
handful of primary suspects. The youngest of seven children, Kosminski was born
in Klodawa, Poland, in 1865. After the death of his father, the family fled the
pogroms flamed by Poland’s Russians rulers and immigrated to London’s
Whitechapel section in 1881.
Likely a paranoid
schizophrenic, Kosminski, whose occupation was listed as hairdresser, was
admitted into an asylum in 1891 after attacking his sister with a knife. In the
mid-1890s, a witness identified him as the person attacking one of the victims
but refused to testify. Lacking any hard evidence, police never arrested
Kosminski for the crimes. He remained institutionalized until his death in 1919
from gangrene.
Edwards has long theorized
that the shawl was of too fine a quality to have been worn by a London
prostitute and belonged to Jack the Ripper, not Eddowes. Using nuclear magnetic
resonance, another Liverpool John Moores University scientist, Dr. Fyaz Ismail,
determined that the fabric’s age predated the 1888 murders and was likely made
near St.
Petersburg, Russia. The region of Poland where Kosminski was born was under
Russian control, and it would not have been unusual for Russian goods to have
been traded there.
“I’ve spent 14 years working
on it, and we have definitively solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was,”
Edwards told London’s Independent newspaper. “Only non-believers that want to
perpetuate the myth will doubt. This is it now—we have unmasked him.”
‘Ripperologists’ Weigh In
Many Ripperologists, however,
are not so certain. The report has generated plenty of skeptics, some of whom
have noted that the laboratory analysis has yet to be published in a
peer-reviewed scientific journal and that Louhelainen was only able to test
mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mothers to children and offers
much less of a unique identifier than nuclear DNA. Many people can share
similar mitochondrial DNA signatures.
Other critics refute the
notion that Simpson was even at the crime scene the night of the Eddowes murder
and note that the shawl may have been contaminated over the decades since it
has been held by many members of the Eddowes family.
In addition, this is not the
first time that DNA evidence has supposedly cracked the case. American crime
novelist Patricia Cornwell asserted that DNA samples found on the taunting
letters sent by Jack the Ripper to Scotland Yard matched those of
post-Impressionist painter Walter Sickert.
And a 2006 study by Australian
scientist Ian Findlay extracted DNA from the saliva on the letters and
determined that it was likely that the sender was a woman. So even with the
latest news, it’s unlikely the debate on Jack the Ripper’s identity will
suddenly abate.
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