Illustration showing a man with a knife in front of the Big Ben in Victorian-era London. For representational purposes.
Credit: iStock Photo
The identity of the infamous 19th century London-based serial killer Jack the Ripper may finally have been uncovered, with a historian matching DNA from one of his crimes to that of a 23-year-old Polish barber, who, incidentally, had been linked to the murders earlier as well.
The man in question—Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski—arrived in Whitechapel in London in 1881 alongside his brother, and went on to work as a barber in the British capital.
Kominski was aged 23 around the time the murders took place in 1888.
While the Polish immigrant had earlier been a suspect in the murders as well, this is the first time that he has been identified as Jack the Ripper in a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Who was Jack the Ripper?
Unidentified for over a century, Jack the Ripper is a serial killer who is believed to have killed at least five women between August and November 1888.
Attacks by the killer had a distinct marker: the victims would have their throats slit prior to abdominal mutilation and the removal of internal organs.
The murders, known for their brutality, rocked London at the time, but police failed to identify the suspect, leading to the case going cold.
Owing to the gruesomeness of the murders and the mystery surrounding the killer, Jack the Ripper became canon in popular culture and has gone on to inspire several books, movies, and other cultural productions.
How did scientists 'identify' Jack the Ripper?
Historian and author Russell Edwards took the initiative to tie a name to the infamous serial killer, and claims to have achieved the same using DNA from a shawl found beside the mutilated body of Catherine Eddowes, the killer's fourth victim.
The shawl was found to have been speckled with blood and semen, with the latter believed to have come from the killer.
Edwards had purchased the shawl in 2007 and had given it to biochemist Jari Louhelainen, who conducted the first genetic tests on them, but held off on releasing the results.
Then, in 2014, Edwards used the unpublished test results to identify Kominski as the killer, and declared the same in a book titled Naming Jack the Ripper.
At the time, however, Edwards' claim was contested as some geneticists questioned technical details of the analysis that was conducted.
The recently-published paper—titled Forensic Investigation of a Shawl Linked to the “Jack the Ripper” Murders and published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences—addresses these concerns and most importantly matches the DNA found at the crime scene to samples taken from living descendants of both Kominski, the purported killer, and Eddowes, the victim.
The paper suggests that the killer had brown hair and brown eyes, which reportedly matches testimonies from an eyewitness.
That being said, the paper does not furnish key details on specific gentic variants identified and compared between the DNA samples, citing privacy concerns associated with the Data Protection Act in the UK.
This may not sit well with critics: a scientist interviewed by Science.org suggested that DNA sequences should ideally have been published in the paper, while another suggested that mitochondrial DNA analysis can only reliably show how two people are not related. Simply speaking, the DNA found at the crime scene could, technically speaking, belong to someone else as well.
That being said, the paper is still the first academic attempt to identify Jack the Ripper using DNA tests.
What happened to Aaron Kominski?
Kominski, of course, was never convicted of the murders and died at the age of 53 at a mental asylum in 1919. Medical reports on Kominski from the time indicate that he had symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.