For 136 years people around the world have been simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the spate of brutal murders that happened in the London district of Whitechapel, London in the autumn of 1888. Five women were killed and their bodies were extensively mutilated between August and November that year, becoming known as the ‘canonical five’ victims of the unidentified serial killer.
During this horrific crime spree, letters were received by the Metropolitan Police that purported to come from the killer, one of which was signed off as ‘Jack the Ripper’ – the name that became attached to the criminal who was never caught. The case became the first to receive widespread media attention in a way we would recognise today, with huge coverage and speculation in newspapers in Britain and worldwide as the cases progressed – or didn’t progress. w intense (and often knowingly deceptive) speculation in 1888 as journalists, commentators and self-appointed ‘experts’ provided the answers that the public was so desperate for. Existing prejudices and moral panics were mixed up, and fingers were pointed at everyone from British royalty to Portuguese cattle herders.
The Most Enduring Criminal Mystery
The ‘canonical five’ were not the only women killed in Whitechapel in the 1880s – another six women, all engaged in some sort of sex work, were murdered between April 1888 and February 1891. For residents of Whitechapel, the ‘arrival’ of Jack the Ripper in the autumn of 1888 was merely an escalation of a period of fear and violence in the impoverished area of London where they lived and worked. Some later researchers have assigned varying numbers of these other crimes to Jack the Ripper, as well as other murders and serial killings in the UK or even in different countries.
The interest in Jack the Ripper shows no signs of diminishing over 130 years after the Whitechapel murders. The internet has provided fertile ground for information – both accurate and inaccurate – to be spread and theories and suspects to be put forward. Books continue to be published with the latest information and ideas, and visitors to London can go to a Jack the Ripper Museum and take a Jack the Ripper Tour.
The one thing that was equally limiting and driving interest in Jack the Ripper through three centuries was that their identity was unknown. While professional and amateur investigators had dedicated entire careers to this question since 1888, no conclusive evidence has ever emerged tying any of the dozens of suggested suspects to any of the Ripper’s crimes.
A Fresh Lead
The first signs of that changing came in 2014 when Russell Edwards, a dedicated amateur researcher and investigator into the Ripper murders, published a book laying out how commissioned DNA tests had provided an answer to the 136-year-old mystery. In 2007 Edwards had purchased a shawl that purported to have belonged to the fourth of the canonical five victims, Catherine Eddowes (the second victim to killed in the space of an hour, after Elizabeth Stride, on the night of 30th September 1888 – the ‘double event’ as it was called in one of the letters supposedly written by the Ripper).
The shawl was said to have been acquired directly from the scene of Eddowes’ murder by a policeman – in a time before blood groups and DNA were known, such items were of no forensic value and were discarded. The policeman’s wife refused to reuse or even clean the blood-soaked shawl and it remained a family curio before passing into the private ‘Black Museum’ at Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police headquarters. Beyond the story handed down through generations of the family, there was no definitive proof that the stained garment had anything to do with Jack the Ripper.
Without a definitive provenance and ownership trail, the shawl was of limited historical value and even less forensic use. But Edwards was seized by one key fact – the embroidered pattern on the shawl matched a passing description in the police records when Catherine Eddowes’ clothes and possessions were listed.
Russell Edwards purchased the shawl and commissioned a battery of modern forensic tests. These not only confirmed that the stains were blood, but also found traces of seminal fluid on the fabric. Other tests were able to isolate what appeared to be a kidney cell – and Catherine Eddowes had her kidneys removed after her death by the murderer. The shawl suddenly seemed to not only have provenance but major forensic possibilities.
After tracking down descendants of Catherine Eddowes, Russell Edwards commissioned comparative studies of Mitochondrial DNA (passed down the female line and much more durable than genomic DNA) found a near-perfect match – the shawl samples and the modern comparative sample not only shared mDNA characteristics indicating common relations but both had a rare mutation that would only have been present in about a dozen individuals in London’s population in 1888.
The shawl appeared to be genuine and covered in Catherine Eddowes’ blood. But who was her killer?
Aaron Kosminski – A Name Through History
One name that continually appears on lists of the most likely Jack the Ripper identities is Aaron Kosminski. Kosminski was a Polish-born Jew who, like many others of his community, moved to London in the late 1880s to escape Russian pogroms. In 1888 he was working as a barber in Whitechapel, although later evidence suggests that by this time he was working ‘only sporadically’ and relied on other members of his family for support. This was because he had been in a worsening mental state since 1885 (when he turned 20 years old). His mental illness took the form of paranoia, auditory hallucinations and episodes where he lost self-control. Modern reviews suggest that he was suffering from schizophrenia or a severe bipolar disorder.
Kosminski was a prominent suspect in 1888. The Metropolitan Police internal memo written by Sir Melville Macnaghten in 1894 which summarised the official findings of the Ripper investigation named a Polish Jew with the surname ‘Kosminski’ as one of the main suspects. The official in charge of that investigation, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, wrote ‘Kosminski’ in the margin of his copy of Assistant Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson’s memoirs where Sir Robert says that the Ripper was positively identified as a “low-class Polish Jew” in the years after the murder spree.
Several high-ranking figures in the Metropolitan Police, including those involved in the investigations in 1888/1889, said that informants in Whitechapel had identified a particular mentally-ill working-class Jew as the murderer. But further action was not taken because these people refused to testify against a fellow Jew and the police did not want to risk sparking racial tensions in a time and place when antisemitism was rife. Later sources state that Kosminski was instead covertly monitored in the months after the last of the ‘canonical five’ murders. This close watch, coupled to Kosminski’s deteriorating mental state, explained why the murders ended despite no one being apprehended or even publicly identified.
Aaron Kosminski had a spell in a workhouse in 1890 due to his worsening mental illness that made it increasingly difficult for his family to properly care for and control him. In February 1891 he was committed to the infamous lunatic asylum at Colney Hatch after threatening a woman with a knife. Hospital records show that his paranoia had worsened, to the point where he refused to eat food prepared by others out of fear that it was poisoned. He was to remain in psychiatric hospitals for the rest of his life, dying in 1919 at Leavesden Asylum in Hertfordshire.
With Kosminski being a prime suspect of those who investigated the crimes at the time, Russell Edwards made him the first subject of his own investigations. It took seven years to find a female descendant of one of Kosminski’s sisters to obtain a modern mDNA sample and then extract viable samples from the stains on the shawl. Some of the techniques used to analyse these samples had not existed when Edwards purchased the shawl.
The results that finally emerged showed that the seminal fluid on the shawl came from someone with Jewish and Russian ethnicity, and was a strong match for Kosminski’s descendants.
Jack the Ripper Unmasked?
If this evidence is as definitive as it appears to be, then one of the world’s greatest criminal mysteries has been solved: Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper and the killings stopped because of his worsening mental state, the ongoing police surveillance of him and his eventual committal to an asylum – exactly as was described by Sir Melville Macnaghten in 1894, albeit without giving a name.
There are concerns about the veracity of some of this evidence. There is no conclusive proof of the provenance of the shawl – despite the strong suggestions made by the forensic analysis there is nothing definitive to say that the shawl was ever in Whitechapel. There are questions to be asked about the quality of DNA evidence after more than 130 years on a shawl handled by unknown numbers of people. And the tests themselves have yet to be independently repeated and verified.
But for now this is by the far the closest evidence there has ever been that ties one of the contemporary suspects directly to the scene and act of one of the Ripper’s crimes. For now, this story will surely only fuel further interest in Jack the Ripper, rather than closing the casebook once and for all?
