Earlier
this week I was scanning through the news seeing what kind of interesting things
were going on the world when I came across an article that really got my
attention. As it turns out, an amateur investigator and historian, Russell Edwards, has seemingly solved the Jack the
Ripper case through the use of DNA evidence found on a shawl at the murder scene
of Catherine Eddowes nearly 126 years ago. In the end, it was
determined that the killer was not royalty, a surgeon, or a barber but rather a
Polish immigrant who lived a mere 200 yards from one of the five (or more)
crime scenes in London.
After
a number of years that had led to countless dead ends, Edwards was made aware
of the shawl heading to the auction block in 2007. After hearing the story of
where it was found and how it had survived in such remarkable condition, the
real investigative work began. As was written in The Mail on Sunday (UK):
I reasoned that it made no sense for Eddowes to have
owned the expensive shawl herself; this was a woman so poor she had pawned her
shoes the day before her murder. But could the Ripper have brought the shawl
with him and left it as an obscure clue about when he was planning to strike
next? It was just a hunch, and far from proof of anything, but it set me off on
my journey.
Before buying it, I spoke to Alan McCormack, the officer
in charge of the Crime Museum, also known as the Black Museum. He told me the
police had always believed they knew the identity of the Ripper. Chief
Inspector Donald Swanson, the officer in charge of the investigation, had named
him in his notes: Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew who had fled to London with his
family, escaping the Russian pogroms, in the early 1880s.
Kosminski has always been one of the three most credible
suspects. He is often described as having been a hairdresser in Whitechapel,
the occupation written on his admission papers to the workhouse in 1890. What
is certain is he was seriously mentally ill, probably a paranoid schizophrenic
who suffered auditory hallucinations and described as a misogynist prone to
‘self-abuse’ – a euphemism for masturbation.
McCormack said police did not have enough evidence to
convict Kosminski, despite identification by a witness, but kept him under
24-hour surveillance until he was committed to mental asylums for the rest of
his life. I became convinced Kosminski was our man, and I was excited at the
prospect of proving it. I felt sure that modern science would be able to
produce real evidence from the stains on the shawl. After a few false starts, I
found a scientist I hoped could help.
However,
even with the DNA now recovered, it was another monumental task to find a
current member of the family who was willing to potentially admit their
relation to one of the most famous and heinous murderers in history. Like many
of us research every day, the genealogical research was the key to finding the
results and bringing this century old case into the 21st century. The
decade long search finally came to a head as samples were recovered and
compared to the prime suspect.
Kosminski was 23 when the murders took place, and living
with his two brothers and a sister in Greenfield Street, just 200 yards from
where the third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was killed. As a key suspect, his
life story has long been known, but I also researched his family. Eventually,
we tracked down a young woman whose identity I am protecting – a British
descendant of Kosminski’s sister, Matilda, who would share his mitochondrial
DNA. She provided me with swabs from the inside of her mouth.
Further on in the
testing, a descendant of the victim, Karen Miller, the three times great
granddaughter of Eddowes provided the DNA sample for cross reference with the
blood on the shawl which had since been proven to be eastern European in origin.
Needless to say, all samples recovered were a perfect match. All of the pieces
have come together to paint a complete picture, confirming what the police
could not prove at the time, and providing answers not just to the questions of
the general public but of the families connected to those dark moments in history.
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