One of the great mysteries of life may have been solved. No, not definitive proof of a creator god. Nor what makes Popeyes taste way better than KFC. It’s the identity of Jack the Ripper, one of history’s great unsolved murder cases. According to a new case report published last week by the Journal of Forensic Sciences (as per The Sun), the culprit, thanks to new DNA testing, may be a 23-year-old Polish barber named Aaron Kosminski. Unless it’s not, and we’ll simply have to keep on keepin’ on knowing some things we can’t know.
This isn’t the first time Kosminski has been ID’d by a DNA match. Back in 2014, another test directed its fingers Kominski’s way. The damning evidence was a blood-soaked shawl linked to Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride, two of the five known Ripper victims killed in and around the Whitechapel district of London between 1888 and around 1891, though there may have been as many as eighteen.
This latest batch of tests has been heralded by researchers as “the most systematic and most advanced genetic analysis to date regarding the Jack the Ripper murders.” The report, they said, describes “for the first time systematic, molecular level analysis of the only surviving physical evidence linked to the Jack the Ripper murders.”
Kosminski was confirmed as the probable murderer after researchers compared fragments of DNA taken from the shawl to those taken from Kosminski’s known living descendants.
“Finding both matching profiles in the same piece of evidence enhances the statistical probability of its overall identification and reinforces the claim that the shawl is authentic,” the researchers said.
According to the 2014 report, the shawl was absconded with by acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, allegedly as a gift to his wife. Said wife was not fond of a shawl soaked in blood, so she put into storage, where it became a family heirloom. It was auctioned off over a decade ago, at which point it wound up in the hands of researchers with modern-day data-testing gizmos.
Kosminski, who died at age 53 after being institutionalized in an insane asylum, has long been one of Ripperologists’ top likely culprits, including another barber — one George Chapman, who was hanged for poisoning three of his wives — and no less than Prince Albert Victor. In his celebrated comic From Hell — later turned into an uncelebrated Johnny Depp movie — Alan Moore laboriously worked out a theory that he admitted was untrue: that the one whodunnit was well-connected physician William Gull, with a cameo appearance from Prince Albert. (Again, Moore said this was all fiction.)
So that’s that unless it’s not. Now, someone get cracking on that Zodiac Killer case.
(Via The Sun)