Jack the Ripper was Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski

Num7

Num7

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A self-confessed “armchair detective” claims to have solved perhaps the most notorious whodunit ever by claiming to have discovered the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Russell Edwards claims Aaron Kosminski, a 23 year-old Polish immigrant who ended up dying in an asylum, was “definitely, categorically and absolutely” the man behind the grisly killing spree in 1888 in London’s East End.

Edwards said a blood-stained shawl he bought in 2007 after an auction in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, held vital DNA evidence which led him to the killer.

“I’ve got the only piece of forensic evidence in the whole history of the case,” he said. “I’ve spent 14 years working on it, and we have definitively solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was.

“Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt. This is it now – we have unmasked him.”

Jack the Ripper murdered at least five women, slashing their throats, removing some of their internal organs and leaving their mutilated bodies in alleyways in Whitechapel.

Read more:
Jack the Ripper was Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski, book claims | UK news | theguardian.com
 
TimeWizardCosmo

TimeWizardCosmo

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So... Jack the Ripper has been DEFINITIVELY identified by running DNA tests on a shawl that's been handled without gloves and stored in unknown conditions for 126 years?

Also, the person behind the theory is a self-described armchair detective that just happens to be releasing a book in 2 days.

The scientist appears to have used a method of extracting the DNA which he devised himself. Please keep in mind that this method is entirely novel and has not been tested for accuracy. I acknowledge though that the DNA didn't just appear out of thin air.

The DNA at best only points to one in 400,000 match. The population of England at the time was about 40 million in which 1 in 400,000 would have had the same mtDNA type.

The origin of the shawl and the contamination (handling it for decades without gloves without chain of custody evidence) makes this source extremely doubtful.

Mitochondrial DNA is secondary evidence and the present claim is not possible with mtDNA. Primary DNA matches are 1 in 1,000,000,000.

From the FBI website:
"Since mtDNA is maternally inherited and multiple individuals can have the same mtDNA type, unique identifications are not possible using mtDNA analyses"

There needs to be much more than this to be certain. 1 in 400,000 people in the UK at that time would have shared this mtDNA, the entire population was 40 million. How many people who handled the shawl in the century since its origin might have had that mtDNA? We don't know.

This guy wasn't even on the list of suspects; his name came up decades after the events, I believe first from Melville Macnaghten's memoir. Druitt was probably the most popular suspect among the police at the time. The truth is, nobody had a clue.

Kosminsky lived in the area, and he's amongst about 20 or more suspects, some more likely than others. There's really no good evidence to link him to the murders, present claim notwithstanding, and he wasn't put in the asylum until three years after the Kelly killing. If he was the Ripper, why did he stop?

His symptoms described at the time don't really indicate the kind of ordered, highly focused planning that the Whitechapel killer displayed. Kosminski was a disordered paranoiac who ate food from the garbage and heard voices.
 


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