Serial killers hold a peculiar place in popular culture. Figures like Jack the Ripper were sensationalised even in their own time, with newspapers fuelling panic and speculation about Jolly Jack and when he will strike next.
Despite more than a century passing since the brutal Whitechapel Murders, public and popular fascination with the crimes persists. Many serial murderers have books, documentaries, and podcasts dedicated to them, but Jack the Ripper has had an unprecedented influence on British and American culture.
Alan Moore’s From Hell presents the Whitechapel Murders as part of a conspiracy, with the killings forming an occult ritual. Hammer’s Room to Let depicts Jack as Dr Fell, a softly spoken medical doctor in hiding long after the events in Whitechapel. Star Trek says Jack the Ripper was Redjac, an alien creature who possesses Scotty, in a script written by the author of Psycho, Robert Bloch. Another Hammer production, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, portrays Hyde as responsible for the Whitechapel Murders, while Jekyll struggles with the horrifying actions of his alter-ego.
However, this enduring focus on serial killers comes at a cost. The victims of such crimes are frequently overshadowed, their names forgotten, while the killers become cultural icons. Despite his historical significance, Jack the Ripper was ultimately a brutal murderer. Yet the way we remember him today reflects a wider cultural obsession with serial killers that is both compelling and problematic.
There is also a significant amount of pseudoscience surrounding the Whitechapel Murders. There are hoaxed diaries, fake letters, and conspiracy theories involving the Freemasons or the British Royal family. Some deny Jack the Ripper existed at all, and argue that the murders attributed to him were totally unrelated. Many of these conspiracies and hoaxes persist because, after 140 years, we still have no idea who Jack the Ripper was.
But could that be about to change? In recent weeks, multiple news outlets have reported on a DNA analysis claiming to identify the killer as Aaron Kosminski, a Polish barber who lived in Whitechapel at the time.
As the story goes, a blood-soaked shawl was found alongside the body of the fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, and was taken home by Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson. Simpson had taken the shawl as a gift for his wife, a seamstress, who quite understandably had no interest in making use of a bloody shawl taken from a murder victim. Rather than disposing of it, she placed it in storage and it was passed down through the family before finally being sold at auction by David Melville-Hayes, a descendant of Simpson, in 2007.
The buyer, a businessman named Russell Edwards, became interested in ‘Ripperology’ in 2001 after watching the movie adaptation of From Hell. Edwards employed Dr Jari Louhelainen, a molecular biologist based at Liverpool John Moores University, who in 2011 used modern forensic techniques to demonstrate that DNA from both Eddowes and Kosminski was present on the shawl, and therefore Kosminski must have been the killer.
Edwards first announced these findings over a decade ago, in a 2014 article for the Mail on Sunday, just days before the publication of his book on the topic. Louhelainen’s examination of the shawl was published five years later, in the Journal of Forensic Sciences – so this story is very much old news. The resurgence in press interest appears to have been driven by the publication of a new edition of Edwards’ book, which hit the shelves last October.
Regardless of the reasons for the renewed interest, there remain several problems with the shawl and its analysis.
First, no contemporary documentation indicates there was a shawl discovered with Eddowes. The list of items discovered with her is exhaustive, and includes a black straw bonnet, black cloth jacket with imitation fur, dark green skirt with a brown button on the waistband, a white man’s vest, a brown bodice, grey petticoat, a pair of men’s boots, large pocket handkerchief, brown knee stockings, two clay pipes, one tin box of tea, one tin box of sugar, one empty matchbox, six pieces soap, one comb, one table knife, one metal teaspoon, several buttons, one red mitten, and a thimble. Despite cataloging such inconsequential items as an empty matchbook and a thimble, the eight foot shawl is not mentioned.
So if no shawl is recorded as being found with Eddowes, how did Simpson have one? One theory suggests that Simpson took the shawl from the crime scene before Eddowes’ belongings were catalogued – an act that would constitute a serious dereliction of duty, even then. While it was common practice at the time to burn a murder victim’s clothing after examination, tampering with evidence before it was recorded would have been highly improper, especially in such a high-profile case.
This leads to a second problem: the silken shawl was very large and would have been extremely valuable. However, Eddowes lived in extreme poverty and had recently pawned a pair of shoes just to get enough money to eat. It seems unlikely that she would have owned such a garment.
Edwards speculates that the shawl in fact belonged to the killer, who deliberately left it at the crime scene to be found. He further argues that the pattern of Michaelmas Daisies on the shawl was a deliberate clue for police.
Michaelmas, or the Feast of St Michael, is a largely forgotten Christian tradition today, but was still celebrated in the Victorian era. Two dates exist for the feast. In the Western tradition it is held on 29 September; Eastern Orthodox has it on 8 November. Edwards argues that this is no coincidence, since 29 September was the date on which both Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride were killed, and 8 November was the date of the final murder, that of Mary Jane Kelly.
Edwards further speculates that Kosminski procured the shawl specifically to leave at the scene, as a hint toward the date of his next murder. While it’s not beyond the realms of possibility for a serial killer to do that, there is no contemporary evidence to suggest that Jack the Ripper operated with this level of symbolic planning, and the argument smacks of a Texas sharpshooter fallacy. The apparent specificity is only apparent in retrospect, and is more likely to have been fitted to match the story than the other way around. And that’s leaving aside the fact that Stride and Eddowes were in fact attacked in the early hours of 30 September (not the 29th), and Kelly lost her life on 9 November (not the 8th).
On top of that, Aaron Kosminski was Jewish and Michaelmas is a Christian tradition. Is it reasonable to suppose that he would have known not only the Western date for the feast, but also the date of its Eastern Orthodox variant?
The next problem with the provenance of the shawl is that Amos Simpson did not attend the crime scene. Simpson is recorded as joining the Metropolitan Police Y Division in 1868, transferring to N Division in 1886, where he remained until his resignation in 1893.
The Whitechapel Murders were investigated by H Division, and there is no record of Simpson ever serving there. Moreover, Eddowes’ murder was in the jurisdiction of the City of London Police, so why would a Met officer have attended the crime scene? According to the oral family tradition accompanying the shawl, Simpson was supposedly on ‘special duties’ that night and was in fact the first officer to discover Eddowes’ body. However, the official record lists Constable Edward Watkins as the officer who found Eddowes, and a list of those present at the scene does not include Simpson. It is also Watkins who appeared at the inquest; Simpson does not attend.
The area where Eddowes was found, Mitre Square, is over a mile from N Division’s area. We might speculate that Simpson strayed from his beat that night and happened upon Eddowes, taking the shawl and leaving before Watkins arrived.
Again, the historical record challenges this theory. At 1:30am, PC Watkins had patrolled Mitre Square and saw nothing unusual. At 1:35am, witnesses saw Eddowes talking to a man near Church Passage. At 1:40am, PC James Harvey walked through Church Passage to the edge of Mitre Square but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. At 1:45am, Watkins returned to the square and discovered Eddowes’ body.
So Eddowes was seen alive at 1:35am, and found dead at 1:45am. And in between times, PC Harvey had walked through the area she was later found and saw nothing. Even leaving some slack for some variation in these timings (it’s not like everyone had iPhones synchronised with internet time), this means there would have been around five to ten minutes for Kosminski to murder and mutilate Eddowes and flee the scene, and for Simpson – having somehow strayed miles from his beat – to stumble upon the body, decide his wife might appreciate a bloody shawl from a murder victim, take it as a keepsake, and vanish before Watkins arrives.
The story stretches the limits of credulity, but let us assume for a moment that all this happened. Let’s assume that the killer wanted to leave an oblique clue to taunt the police, and acquired an expensive shawl featuring Michaelmas Daisies to leave beside a victim’s body. Let’s also assume that it was found by Amos Simpson, who instead of throwing it away, burning it, giving it away, or even giving it a wash – puts it in a cupboard. And let’s assume that all of this managed to avoid police records, but was passed down in the oral tradition of Amos Simpson’s family.
How does that lead us to Aaron Kosminski?
In his 2019 paper, Jari Louhelainen described how he extracted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the blood stains on the shawl, and matched those to the mtDNA of a descendent of Eddowes – confirmation, it appears, that the shawl was at the crime scene.
However, even this is an overstatement. Mitochondrial DNA is not typically able to identify individuals with such specificity. The mtDNA may have matched Eddowes, but will also have matched thousands of other people from London at the time. The match doesn’t rule out that this was Eddowes’ blood, but does not confirm it either.
Louhelainen also used mtDNA to link a semen stain found on the shawl to relatives of Kosminski, but this link suffers from the same problem. The mtDNA may match Kosminski, but would also have matched thousands of Londoners of the time.
Moreover, while there does seem to have been some sexual element to the Whitechapel Murders – given the victims were exclusively women and often had organs, including sex organs, removed – there is no clear evidence that Jack the Ripper assaulted his victims in a manner that would have left semen at the crime scene. This is simply not a known feature of the Whitechapel Murders.
In response to this criticism, Louhelainen argues that Victorian forensic techniques were rudimentary, and investigators lacked modern tools like UV lights to detect semen. While this is a valid criticism of historical forensic methods, it also creates a circular argument. If the goal is to prove that Kosminski’s semen on the shawl links him to the Whitechapel Murders, this assumption relies on the very evidence we are attempting to validate. Without evidence that the semen is linked to the crime, the claim that it implicates Kosminski or confirms his identity as the Ripper is speculative at best.
This brings us to another issue: Aaron Kosminski was the only Ripper suspect that Edwards and Louhelainen chose to test, as Edwards already believed him to be the killer. Given the wide range of suspects that have been considered over the years, testing other plausible candidates alongside Kosminski might have strengthened Edwards’ claim… or undermined it. If more than one suspect matches the mtDNA on the shawl, what then?
In fact, even the notion of Aaron Kosminski being a genuine suspect is somewhat questionable. Much of the emphasis on him comes from an 1894 memorandum written by Melville Macnaghten, then the Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. In this memo, written years after the final murder, Macnaghten names three possible suspects: Montague Druitt, Michael Ostrog, and a man he refers to as ‘Kosminski’ (no first name given). Macnaghten describes ‘Kosminski’ as a Polish Jew living in Whitechapel, who was committed to an asylum in 1889
Many years later, Sir Robert Anderson, in his memoirs, also refers to a Polish suspect but did not name him as Kosminski. It was Chief Inspector Donald Swanson who, in handwritten notes in his personal copy of Anderson’s book, wrote ‘Kosminski was the suspect’ next to this passage, further noting that ‘Kosminski’ had been sent to the Colney Hatch Asylum and died shortly afterward.
It wasn’t until 1987 that the pseudonymous ‘Kosminski’ was linked to the barber Aaron Kosminski, on the basis of Aaron being the only recorded individual named Kosminski at Colney Hatch. However, there are differences between the suspect ‘Kosminski’ and Aaron Kosminski. The suspect is described as being sent to Colney Hatch in March 1889 and dying shortly afterward. In contrast, Aaron Kosminski was not sent to Colney Hatch until February 1891 and died over two decades later, at Leavesden Hospital, in 1919. Indeed, when Swanson wrote that ‘Kosminski’ had died shortly after going to Colney Hatch, Aaron Kosminski was still alive.
Records from his hospitalisation also show that Aaron Kosminski did not appear to speak English and communicated only in Yiddish during his time there. If he truly couldn’t speak English or had only rudimentary knowledge of it, this would contradict the description of Jack the Ripper, who was reportedly seen conversing with both Stride and Eddowes.
Turning back to the shawl itself – between 1991 and 2001, it was on loan to the Metropolitan Police ‘Black Museum,’ though it appears not to have been put on display, perhaps due to its dubious provenance. After reclaiming the shawl in 2001, Melville-Hayes exhibited it at Jack the Ripper conventions and had it DNA tested as part of a Channel 5 documentary in 2006 (Channel 5’s findings were inconclusive.) The shawl does not appear to have been kept in anything approaching reasonable forensic conditions, and has had ample opportunity to be contaminated, including by those connected to the case.
Following the publication of Louhelainen’s 2019 paper, the Journal of Forensic Sciences received critical letters from two commentators, both of whom questioned the validity of his conclusions. Louhelainen responded with rebuttals, but the debate was significant enough for the journal’s editor to request the raw data supporting the study. Unfortunately, Louhelainen was unable to provide it, citing ‘instrument failure.’ As a result, the Journal of Forensic Sciences has issued an ‘Expression of Concern,’ a formal notice warning readers that the article’s findings might be unreliable. This notice remains attached to the paper at the time of writing.
Russell Edwards has declared the findings to be the final word on the Whitechapel Murders. He has even gone as far as to call for the courts to officially recognise Kosminski as the killer and formally close the case. He has also stated that anyone unmoved by his arguments are simply ‘unbelievers’ motivated to ‘perpetuate the mystery.’
I have no particular enthusiasm for the Jack the Ripper case. I wouldn’t describe myself as a ‘Ripperologist,’ nor do I claim deep knowledge of the subject. In fact, I find the public fascination with serial killers somewhat vulgar. ‘Perpetuating mystery’ is not my motivation, nor is it for any skeptic. My interest lies in understanding what is true, based on the available evidence, and in following where that evidence leads – while remaining cautious not to fall prey to motivated reasoning or wishful thinking about what we would like to be true.
It is entirely possible that Aaron Kosminski is the true identity of Jack the Ripper. However, the evidence and arguments presented in support of this contain too many gaps and flaws to be convincing.
