It is the
greatest murder mystery of all time, a puzzle that has perplexed
criminologists for more than a century and spawned books, films and
myriad theories ranging from the plausible to the utterly bizarre.
But
now, thanks to modern forensic science, The Mail on Sunday can
exclusively reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial
killer responsible for at least five grisly murders in Whitechapel in
East London during the autumn of 1888.
DNA
evidence has now shown beyond reasonable doubt which one of six key
suspects commonly cited in connection with the Ripper’s reign of terror
was the actual killer – and we reveal his identity.
A
shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s
victims, has been analyzed and found to contain DNA from her blood as
well as DNA from the killer.
The
landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48,
bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari
Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from
historical crime scenes.
Using
cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract
126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from
descendants of Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect
match.
The
revelation puts an end to the fevered speculation over the Ripper’s
identity which has lasted since his murderous rampage in the most
impoverished and dangerous streets of London.
In
the intervening century, a Jack the Ripper industry has grown up,
prompting a dizzying array of more than 100 suspects, including Queen
Victoria’s grandson – Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence – the
post-Impressionist painter Walter Sickert, and the former Liberal Prime
Minister William Gladstone.
It was March 2007, in an auction
house in Bury St Edmunds, that I first saw the blood-soaked shawl. It
was in two surprisingly large sections – the first measuring 73.5in by
25.5in, the second 24in by 19in – and, despite its stains, far prettier
than any artefact connected to Jack the Ripper might be expected to be.
It was mostly blue and dark brown, with a delicate pattern of
Michaelmas daisies – red, ochre and gold – at either end.
It
was said to have been found next to the body of one of the Ripper’s
victims, Catherine Eddowes, and soaked in her blood. There was no
evidence for its provenance, although after the auction I obtained a
letter from its previous owner who claimed his ancestor had been a
police officer present at the murder scene and had taken it from there.
Yet
I knew I wanted to buy the shawl and was prepared to pay a great deal
of money for it. I hoped somehow to prove that it was genuine. Beyond
that, I hadn’t considered the possibilities. I certainly had no idea
that this flimsy, badly stained, and incomplete piece of material would
lead to the solution to the most famous murder mystery of all time: the
identification of Jack the Ripper.
When my involvement in the
126-year-old case began, I was just another armchair detective,
interested enough to conduct my own extensive research after watching
the Johnny Depp film From Hell in 2001. It piqued my curiosity about the
1888 killings when five – possibly more – prostitutes were butchered in
London’s East End.
Despite
massive efforts by the police, the perpetrator evaded capture, spawning
the mystery which has fuelled countless books, films, TV programs and
tours of Whitechapel. Theories about his identity have been virtually
limitless, with everyone from Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of
Clarence, to Lewis Carroll being named as possible suspects. As time has
passed, the name Jack the Ripper has become synonymous with the devil
himself; his crimes setting the gruesome standard against which other
horrific murders are judged.
I
joined the armies of those fascinated by the mystery and researching
the Ripper became a hobby. I visited the National Archives in Kew to
view as much of the original paperwork as still exists, noting how many
of the authors of books speculating about the Ripper had not bothered to
do this. I was convinced that there must be something, somewhere that
had been missed.
By 2007, I
felt I had exhausted all avenues until I read a newspaper article about
the sale of a shawl connected to the Ripper case. Its owner, David
Melville-Hayes, believed it had been in his family’s possession since
the murder of Catherine Eddowes, when his ancestor, Acting Sergeant Amos
Simpson, asked his superiors if he could take it home to give to his
wife, a dressmaker.
Incredibly,
it was stowed without ever being washed, and was handed down from
David’s great-grandmother, Mary Simpson, to his grandmother, Eliza
Smith, and then his mother, Eliza Mills, later Hayes.
In
1991, David gave it to Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum, where it was
placed in storage rather than on display because of the lack of proof of
its provenance. In 2001, David reclaimed it, and it was exhibited at
the annual Jack the Ripper conference. One forensic test was carried out
on it for a Channel 5 documentary in 2006, using a simple cotton swab
from a randomly chosen part of the shawl, but it was inconclusive.
Most
Ripper experts dismissed it when it came up for auction, but I believed
I had hit on something no one else had noticed which linked it to the
Ripper. The shawl is patterned with Michaelmas daisies. Today the
Christian feast of Michaelmas is archaic, but in Victorian times it was
familiar as a quarter day, when rents and debts were due.
I
discovered there were two dates for it: one, September 29, in the
Western Christian church and the other, November 8, in the Eastern
Orthodox church. With a jolt, I realized the two dates coincided
precisely with the nights of the last two murder dates. September 29 was
the night on which Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were killed,
and November 8 was the night of the final, most horrific of the murders,
that of Mary Jane Kelly.
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.
Dr
Jari Louhelainen is a leading expert in genetic evidence from
historical crime scenes, combining his day job as senior lecturer in
molecular biology at Liverpool John Moores University with working on
cold cases for Interpol and other projects. He agreed to conduct tests
on the shawl in his spare time.
The tests began in 2011, when Jari used special photographic analysis to establish what the stains were.
Using
an infrared camera, he was able to tell me the dark stains were not
just blood, but consistent with arterial blood spatter caused by
slashing – exactly the grim death Catherine Eddowes had met.
But
the next revelation was the most heart-stopping. Under UV photography, a
set of fluorescent stains showed up which Jari said had the
characteristics of semen. I’d never expected to find evidence of the
Ripper himself, so this was thrilling, although Jari cautioned me that
more testing was required before any conclusions could be drawn.
He also found evidence of split body
parts during the frenzied attack. One of Eddowes’ kidneys was removed by
her murderer, and later in his research Jari managed to identify the
presence of what he believed to be a kidney cell.
It
was impossible to extract DNA from the stains on the shawl using the
method employed in current cases, in which swabs are taken. The samples
were just too old.
Instead,
he used a method he called ‘vacuuming’, using a pipette filled with a
special ‘buffering’ liquid that removed the genetic material in the
cloth without damaging it.
As
a non-scientist, I found myself in a new world as Jari warned that it
would also be impossible to use genomic DNA, which is used in fresh
cases and contains a human’s entire genetic data, because over time it
would have become fragmented.
But
he explained it would be possible to use mitochondrial DNA instead. It
is passed down exclusively through the female line, is much more
abundant than genomic DNA, and survives far better.
This
meant that in order to give us something to test against, I had to
trace a direct descendant through the female line of Catherine Eddowes.
Luckily, a woman named Karen Miller, the three-times great-granddaughter
of Eddowes, had featured in a documentary about the Ripper’s victims,
and agreed to provide a sample of her DNA.
Jari managed to get six complete DNA profiles from the shawl, and when he tested them against Karen’s they were a perfect match.
It
was an amazing breakthrough. We now knew that the shawl was authentic,
and was at the scene of the crime in September 1888, and had the
victim’s blood on it. On its own, this made it the single most important artifact in Ripper history: nothing else has ever been linked
scientifically to the scene of any of the crimes.
Months
of research on the shawl, including analyzing the dyes used, had proved
that it was made in Eastern Europe in the early 19th Century. Now it
was time to attempt to prove that it contained the killer’s DNA.
Jari used the same extraction method
on the semen traces on the shawl, warning that the likelihood of sperm
lasting all that time was very slim. He enlisted the help of Dr David
Miller, a world expert on the subject, and in 2012 they made another
incredible breakthrough when they found surviving cells. They were from
the epithelium, a type of tissue which coats organs. In this case, it
was likely to have come from the urethra during ejaculation.
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.
Amplifying and
sequencing the DNA from the cells found on the shawl took months of
painstaking, innovative work. By that point, my excitement had reached
fever-pitch. And when the email finally arrived telling me Jari had
found a perfect match, I was overwhelmed. Seven years after I bought the
shawl, we had nailed Aaron Kosminski.
As
a scientist, Jari is naturally cautious, unwilling to let his
imagination run away without testing every minute element, but even he
declared the finding ‘one hell of a masterpiece’. I celebrated by
visiting the East End, wandering the streets where Kosminski lived,
worked and committed his despicable crimes, feeling a sense of euphoria
but also disbelief that we had unmasked the Ripper.
Kosminski
was not a member of the Royal Family, or an eminent surgeon or
politician. Serial killers rarely are. Instead, he was a pathetic
creature, a lunatic who achieved sexual satisfaction from slashing women
to death in the most brutal manner. He died in Leavesden Asylum from
gangrene at the age of 53, weighing just 7 stone.
No
doubt a slew of books and films will now emerge to speculate on his
personality and motivation. I have no wish to do so. I wanted to
provide real answers using scientific evidence, and I’m overwhelmed that
126 years on, I have solved the mystery.
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