Research in a newly published forensic investigatory journal has made the claim that Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old Polish barber, is the true identity of the infamous serial killer “Jack the Ripper”.
According to a report published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, DNA evidence has proven that Jack the Ripper — a serial killer in the late 1800s who killed at least five women in London’s Whitechapel district between August and November of 1888 — was actually Kosminski.
Kosminski was actually a prime suspect at the time of the infamous murders.
The forensic investigation — which was published on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 — stated that researchers Jari Louhelainen and David Miller “ran genetic tests on a silk shawl stained with blood and semen that investigators say was found next to the body of the killer’s fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes,” according to USA Today.
Louhelainen and Miller then compared fragments of mitochondrial DNA to samples from living relatives of Eddowes and Kosminski and found they matched those of Kosminski’s relative.
Additionally, the study performed an analysis of Jack the Ripper’s appearance, suggesting that the killer had brown hair and brown eyes — a notion that matches the only reliable witness statement from the time.
The researchers have called their study the “most advanced study to date regarding this case.”
Here is the abstract from the ground-breaking study:
“A set of historic murders, known as the “Jack the Ripper murders,” started in London in August 1888. The killer’s identity has remained a mystery to date.
Here, we describe the investigation of, to our knowledge, the only remaining physical evidence linked to these murders, recovered from one of the victims at the scene of the crime. We applied novel, minimally destructive techniques for sample recovery from forensically relevant stains on the evidence and separated single cells linked to the suspect, followed by phenotypic analysis.
The mtDNA profiles of both the victim and the suspect matched the corresponding reference samples, fortifying the link of the evidence to the crime scene. Genomic DNA from single cells recovered from the evidence was amplified, and the phenotypic information acquired matched the only witness statement regarded as reliable.
According to historians, Kosminski — a Polish Jew who emigrated England in the 1880s — was a barber in London’s Whitechapel district before being institutionalized in an insane asylum in 1891.
This is not the first time that Kosminski’s name has been tied to the Ripper killings. Back in 2014, Naming Jack the Ripper author Russell Edwards claimed to have identified Kosminski as the notorious murder using mitochondrial DNA evidence from the same silk shawl that was analyzed in the 2019 study.
However, the study is not without its detractors, as a group of archaeological geneticists told Forbes magazine that the report “unpublishable nonsense.”
If you fancy yourself as a true crime buff, you can purchase the whole study for yourself and dive even deeper.
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