Jack The Ripper 'Identified By DNA Breakthrough' As Aaron Kosminski
Has The World's Most Infamous Serial Killer Finally Been Identified?
Jack Sommers— The Huffington Post UK
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The most infamous serial killer in history has reportedly been unmasked, 126 years later.
Jack The Ripper stalked the East End in 1888 and murdered at least five women.
According to various theories, he was a member of the Royal family, a former prime minister or painter Walter Sickert.
Now, the latest theorist has stepped forward, saying the murderer was none of these but in fact, a Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski who was later committed to an asylum, where he died.
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A contemporary illustration of the discovery of Catherine Eddowes' body. She was the fourth, not fifth, victim of the killer
Using a shawl of one of the Ripper's victims, Catherine Eddowes, DNA tests have shown Kosminski's blood is present, according to businessman and amateur sleuth Russell Edwards.
Mr Edwards bought the shawl at auction in 2007 and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, an expert in the forensic investigation of historic crime scenes.
Writing in The Mail On Sunday, Mr Edwards said he and Dr Louhelainen tested semen on the shawl against a DNA swab taken from a distant British descendant of Kosminski.
Story continues beneath slideshow
9 Things You Didn't Know About Jack The Ripper
The letters supposedly from the murderer, which gave us the name "Jack the Ripper," were almost certainly written by journalists.(01 of08)
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Some were sent to Scotland Yard, but many were sent to the Central News Agency. A few newspapers of the time said outright that they were fraudulent, and one magazine even produced a parody of Macbeth to indicate who they thought was responsible for them, and why: "Enter three Editors…" they wrote: "Round about the cauldron go, In it slips of ‘copy’ throw. / Headlines of the largest size -- / Murderer’s letters – all faked lies…Bubble, Bubble! Crime and Trouble / Make our circulation double." (credit:AP)
The Ripper learns from Sherlock Holmes (02 of08)
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Sherlock Holmes’s first outing was in 1887, the year before the Ripper appeared, in A Study in Scarlet. When Catherine Eddowes was found dead, there was an inscription on a nearby wall which may have said "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing." The police had it erased immediately, fearing it would lead to anti-Semitic riots. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes had found the mysterious world "Rache" written in blood on the wall of the room in which a dead man lay.The foolish police thought the dying man had tried to write "Rachel," but Holmes (ta-da!) recognized it as German for "revenge." It is hard to see this inscription near Mrs. Eddowes as anything other than another journalistic confection, by a reporter who had read his Conan Doyle.
…and Holmes learns from the Ripper(03 of08)
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In October 1888, the Times newspaper agitated for bloodhounds to be brought in to attempt to track the scent of the murderer, and the police acquiesced, running trials in Regent’s Park – literally running for Sir Charles Warren, the police commissioner, who agreed to be the "fox" for the hounds to chase. (It is, apparently, not true that one of the dogs bit him.) But a mere 10 days later, the hounds had been returned to their owners – the smells of London were discovered to be too complex for them to follow a single trail. Conan Doyle must have read these reports, for when Holmes wants to use a dog to track a suspect in London, Watson has doubts "when I reflected upon the great traffic which had passed along the London road." Holmes’s dog only succeeds because the suspect steps in creosote before fleeing, something the Ripper was not considerate enough to do. (credit:Getty)
Robert Louis Stevenson gets caught up too(04 of08)
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Stevenson’s novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published two years before the murders, and by 1887 had already been turned into a popular stage play. Once the murders began, the idea of a respectable man who turned into a murdering beast seemed too close to home, and the play closed. Even so, its star, Richard Mansfield, could not escape the taint of a connection. An anonymous letter to Scotland Yard pointed out that, while "I should be the Last to think because A man take A dretfull Part he is therefore Bad," the actor was nevertheless "the Man Wanted:" no one else was "So well able to disguise Himself in A moment…So well able to Baffel the Police," making himself "Short…or Tall in A five Seconds if he carried a fine Faulse Wiskers in A Bag." (credit:Getty)
Entertainment for all(05 of08)
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While the murders were still occurring, entertainment venues joined the newspapers in exploiting the crimes. Jack the Ripper waxwork shows were popular. Mme Tussaud’s, the most respectable of the waxworks, didn’t show the murderer, since it had made a point of always modeling from life, but others were not so troubled. One ad, selling heads to waxwork-proprietors, promised that its head of the Ripper was "carefully Modelled from Sketches published in the 'Daily Telegraph,' Furnished by witnesses who had actually seen him." (It was followed by an advertisement which offered for sale "Eighty Serpents, for Charming.") Another waxworks opened in the Whitechapel Road, only yards from the location of the murders. The illustration displayed outside as advertising was "too strong," declared the local magistrates, and had to be removed, but the exhibition itself continued.
Foreign fiction(06 of08)
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The Ripper is known across the world – Jacques l’eventreur, Jack o Estripador, and Jack el Destripador, not to mention Johann der Ausschlitzer and Giovanni il Squattatore. Novels and plays about him abound, but the (unintentionally) funniest may be an American dime-store novel, Lord Jacquelin Burkney by "Rodissi," the pseudonym of Jacob Ringgold. Burkney is an aristocrat, disinherited by his father for his love of a poor but honest shopgirl. When his father dies, he leaves his work as "the most adroit dissector in all Paris" to return home, where his servants address him with remarkable impartiality as "Your highness" and "Your lordship." To the reader’s astonishment, the poor but honest girl has become a streetwalker, and the crazed aristo murders her amid "peals of demoniacal laughter."
Literature (07 of08)
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Sixteen months after the final murder, the actor Henry Irving’s business-manager made his first note for a novel on the "ghouls." The manager’s name was Bram Stoker, and the novel was Dracula. The Whitechapel crimes weave throughout his novel: the vampire’s five female victims match the Ripper’s five, one character is a doctor, as the Ripper was said to have been, the characters in the novel create a "vigilante committee," as Whitechapel’s residents did. And a person who is both respectable and evil is paramount, as it also was in the second great work that owed itself, in part, to these crimes: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Ripper also makes an appearance in Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, one of which was the basis for Pabst’s silent film, Pandora’s Box, and Alban Berg’s opera.
Merchandising (08 of08)
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Art was only for some. Others were happy to make the most of the situation more prosaically. A suburban jeweler advertised "The Great SURPRISE WATCH:" show your friends your new watch and, as they bend over to look, press a "secret spring" and up jumps a tiny Jack, presumably waving a knife, "to the horror and great astonishment of all beholders." Or families could buy a board game centering around Jack the Ripper, where the winner is the player who can help him escape a dozen policemen and another dozen journalists. Even as the murders were continuing, helping the murderer escape was fun for all the family.
He writes: "Amplifying and sequencing the DNA from the cells found on the shawl took months of painstaking, innovative work.
"By that point, my excitement had reached fever-pitch. And when the email finally arrived telling me Jari had found a perfect match, I was overwhelmed. Seven years after I bought the shawl, we had nailed Aaron Kosminski."
He adds: "Kosminski was not a member of the Royal Family, or an eminent surgeon or politician. Serial killers rarely are."
"Instead, he was a pathetic creature, a lunatic who achieved sexual satisfaction from slashing women to death in the most brutal manner. He died in Leavesden Asylum from gangrene at the age of 53, weighing just 7 stone.
"No doubt a slew of books and films will now emerge to speculate on his personality and motivation. I have no wish to do so.
"I wanted to provide real answers using scientific evidence, and I’m overwhelmed that 126 years on, I have solved the mystery."
Because of the age of the shawl, Dr Louhelainen used a method he called ‘vacuuming’, using a pipette filled with a special ‘buffering’ liquid that removed the genetic material in the cloth without damaging it.
Also writing in the Mail On Sunday, he said: "Now that it’s over, I’m excited and proud of what we’ve achieved, and satisfied that we have established, as far as we possibly can, that Aaron Kosminski is the culprit."
Kominski was committed to an asylum in 1891 and died there in 1919.
There is evidence that police at the time regarded Kosminski as the chief suspect.
In 2006, the Metropolitan Police's Crime Museum obtained a copy of the memoir of a senior officer in which Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who was the original officer in charge of the Ripper investigation, had made handwritten notes.
The final words he wrote were: "Kosminski was the supsect."
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'Kosminski was the suspect' - The last page of notes by Inspector Donald Crawson, who initially led the Ripper investigation