2/22/22, 1:00 PM Has Jack the Ripper’s Identity Been Revealed?

- HISTORY

Has Jack the Ripper’s Identity Been Revealed?

A book author claims to have solved one of history’s coldest cases and
unmasked the identity of Jack the Ripper.

CHRISTOPHER KLEIN • UPDATED: AUG 19, 2019 · ORIGINAL: SEP 9, 2014

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?

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2/22/22, 1:00 PM Has Jack the Ripper’s Identity Been Revealed? - HISTORY

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.

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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.

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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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