Jack the Ripper identified

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Jack the Ripper identified through DNA traces: sleuth

http://news.yahoo.com/jack-ripper-ident ... 21946.html


Hmm, ya but i wouldn't count the case solved just yet, for one the semen was from a girls shawl that was a prostitute, it could have been any mans, secondly the findings have not been reviewed and substantiated by other researchers yet. and its rather questionable that a barber would have the medical knowledge that the ripper had..

Be that as it may, the fact that the semen belonged to Aaron Kosminski - who had been identified in the notes of a police higher up as the number one suspect - I think makes this a major break through. Now, if Kosminski had just been some Joe Blow who had never drawn any suspicion by law enforcement, I'd be less inclined to think the spooge stain of any particular relevance, but he was considerably more. On top of that, if Kosminski had lived in modern times, he almost certainly would have been diagnosed as a violent paranoid schizophrenic, which would explain the horrendous overkill concerning the Ripper victims' mutilations, as well as Kosminski's later mental disintegration.
I think Kosminski is probably the best suspect we know of, but he is probably also the least popular among amateur Ripper sleuths. Most people have an almost romantic idea about Jack the Ripper, imagining him as being everything from the eccentric artist Walter Sickert, to the royal physician Sir William Gull, to even Prince Albert Victor of the royal family. The idea that Jack was just a poor, anonymous loony Jew from Poland who had spent the rest of his life, demented in a mad house, just doesn't capture the imagination.

I agree that Kosminski is a more likely suspect than Sickert, or James Maybrick, or any of the Royals. Serial killers almost invariably come from underpriveleged backgrounds with a history of family abuse and violence - a cliche, true, but more recent cases like Peter Kurten's where the suspect has been caught usually bear it out. I'm still going to need more convincing before I accept that the case is closed, though - it doesn't seem to me that the provenance of the shawl has been investigated all that throughly, and there are still some Ripperologists who believe that the five murders commonly accredited to the Ripper weren't actually committed by the same person. Also - as Asperginan Mutantt points out above - even if the shawl did belong to Catherine Eddowes, she was a prostitute, and the fact that Kosminski was one of her clients doesn't necessarily mean he killed her.

Also, the fact that this information has been released just before the person who bought the shawl publishes a book on the subject seems a dubious coincidence, and lays open the possibility that this could be another scam like I believe the Maybrick diary was. Nonetheless I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Last edited by Bustduster on 10 Sep 2014, 8:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

The only way to know for sure if it's a scam or not is if/or when peer review proves or disproves the findings.

I always thought Sickert made a good candidate a there are simply too many coincidences in his lifetime, too many red flags. I'm also pretty sure I read a while back that his handwriting and the type of paper used in at least one of the Ripper letters is a complete match. Having written a letter does not mean you committed the murders, of course, as Mr. Sickert could have just done it for fun (like a 19th century Victorian troll) but then there's those paintings he drew in that time frame which I find rather disturbing and too much of a coincidence.

Now there's this Kosminski guy, who we now know jizzed on the shawl of one of the victims not long before her untimely demise. What does that tell us? Well, that poor ol' Aaron, schizo as he may have been, still got around. That he had some sex act performed on him by Ms. Eddowes on the day she was killed. It's a breakthrough, definitely. But the evidence is, at most, circumstantial like with Sickert's involvement.

Another thing: even if this proved Kosminski murdered Eddowes, does that mean he also HAD to have murdered the others? There's one theory that is often neglected, which is that the Ripper murders were committed by more then one killer operating at the same time. Then the (fake?) letters started appearing and a hype was born.

I honestly think we'll never know for a fact... but this is the closest we ever got in modern times so this is very impressive!

Actually, I had read up on Sickert, and the handwriting is indeed not a match - though that doesn't stop amateur sleuths from theorizing that he had disguised his handwriting .
And while it's possible that Kosminski had been just another one of Catherine Eddowes' johns, we know that a witness had unofficially identified Kosminski, but had refused to testify against him. This was because both witness and alleged murderer were Polish Jews, who were known for their clannishness, and their distrust of Gentile authorities.
And in closing, while it's possible that Kosminski had only murdered Eddowes but not the others, but it's unlikely, as there was a specific MO involved, implying that there was a single, psychopathic killer, whose mutilations had specific meaning to him - or in other words, mutilation as language.

It was H.G Wells friend Stevenson.

Was that the movie Time After Time?

Nonsense. The semen, if thats what was found, is far too old to be analyzed.

Yes

Very fine movie for it's day.

They say they were able to glean epithelial cells from the sample, as I understand it, rather than actual blood cells.

I heard on tv that it was just mitochondrial DNA. So the DNA could come from just about anyone related to him through the female line.

While that is true, he was still the number one suspect who had been identified by a witness. I'm going to still go with the notion that Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper.

He was what we would call 'mentally challenged' and thus ended up on the list of suspects. I find it very difficult indeed to believe that he could have been clever enough, AND had the knowledge of anatomy that the Ripper had.

Now of they could just figure out who killed Jonbenet Ramsey the world would sleep easier.