Confirm the identity of Jack the Ripper

A team of forensic experts has revealed the details of a genetic study that would have confirmed the identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer who terrorized London in the late nineteenth century by murdering five prostitutes and separating the bodies from their victims. lying in the streets of the British capital.

The study, whose results were published last Tuesday in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, suggests that these crimes were committed by a Jewish Pole named Aaron Kosminski, who had emigrated a few years earlier to London to devote himself to the profession of hairdresser.

This theory is based on the badysis of mitochondrial DNA extracted from blood and sperm stains present in a shawl that would have been discovered in 1888 next to the body of Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim of the murderer.

Genetic Match

According to the researchers, the genetic material is in agreement with the living descendants of the woman and the hairdresser. Therefore, they described this study as "the most advanced and systematic genetic badysis to date in relation to the Jack Ripper's murders".

Although the name of Kosminski has already been identified in 2014 as the perpetrator of crimes, it is the first time that the details of this study are published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, explains the Science Magazine portal.

A crazy barber

The Polish immigrant was born in the city of Klodawa, then belonging to the Russian Empire. Once in London, he settled with two brothers and a sister on Greenfield Street, less than 200 meters from the body where Elizabeth Stride's throat was found – another victim of Jack the Ripper – killed an hour before. that Eddowes is dead.

Kosminski was one of the suspects examined by the police, but his involvement in the crimes could not be proven. The investigators point out that the man was 23 years old at the time of the murders and that he was schizophrenic. He was admitted to a psychiatric center and died there at the age of 53.

Contaminated samples?

The new publication did not take long to awaken the skepticism of other scientists. For example, Walther Parson, a forensic scientist at the Innsbruck School of Medicine, criticized the work for not detailing any of the DNA sequences on which he claims to be based, and replacing these key data with simple graphs of color.

In turn, his colleague from the same school, Hansi Weissensteiner, pointed out that the badysis of mitochondrial DNA can only be reliable to exclude the relationship between two people and thus exclude a suspect, but not to So, although the genetic material in the shawl may be that of Kosminski, it could also come from thousands of other Londoners at the time.

Finally, other critics have pointed to the lack of convincing evidence that the shawl was found at the scene of the crime and that it could have been contaminated by those who had touched it with their hands.

RT.