JACK THE RIPPER
G'day folks,
Here is some interesting background about Jack the Ripper.
Russell Edwards, a businessman
with no medical or law enforcement experience, devoted decades of his life to
figuring out the identity of Jack the Ripper.
After purchasing a shawl that was found next to the corpse of Catherine
Eddowes, one of the notorious serial killer’s victims, Edwards worked with
scientist Jari Louhelainen to analyze DNA that was found on it and compare it
to the DNA of Eddowes’s descendants and longtime Ripper suspect Aaron
Kosminski. In his book Naming Jack The
Ripper,
Edwards claims that both Eddowes and Kosminski’s DNA was found on the shawl,
proving: “He is no longer just a suspect. We can hold him, finally, to account
for his terrible deeds. My search is over: Aaron Kosminski is Jack the Ripper.”
However,
not everyone has accepted his findings. British newspaper The Independent asserted that
Louhelainen made a major error, misidentifying a mutation in both Eddowes and
her descendant’s DNA as extremely rare when in fact it’s present in over 90
percent of Europeans.
In
an exclusive interview, Edwards defends his research. “Number one, may I just
say that [article] was incorrect. And number two, it was one piece of a huge
puzzle and that wasn’t the significant piece... It had no influence on the fact
that we actually solved the mystery through the semen [on the shawl] and we had
the match with the blood of the descendant. [The Eddowes DNA match] was an
extra.”
Edwards
explained the process that Louhelainen used to come to his conclusions: “On the
reverse, on the inside of the shawl, is a blue square and it looks like it was
wiped off. There are two very clear blue clots on there. If you do a big C with
your hands, the clots are about that size and it looks like blood. I’m not a
scientist, but it just looks like blood. And those white dots were blood
spatter. Jari tested that and we got the DNA.”
Edwards
then struggled to find a female descendant of Eddowes. “It could have very well
been that there wasn’t a direct descendant in the female line and we would have
never been able to do anything. But lucky enough for me, there was a program
called Find My Past and
Karen Miller, Eddowes’s great–great-great granddaughter, was on the [show] and
she was a direct descendant on the female line and it was a massive revelation,
a massive Christmas moment if you like.”
Edwards
then had to persuade a complete stranger to give him a sample of her DNA. “The
daunting thing for me was to actually approach her and explain what we were
doing, explain the process and if there was any possibility of [procuring] the
DNA [sample]. It was excruciatingly [difficult] for me because I didn’t want
her to put the phone down as [had happened] so many times asking for other
people’s help... I made it very clear that I was a married man with children
and that I wasn’t some weird guy with a room covered in Ripper pictures and she
was very happy to cooperate.”
The
big breakthrough came when Louhelainen discovered traces of semen on the shawl.
“He said that there were stains on there that looked like they could be semen
stains because they fluoresced the same color. So he managed to extract these
samples from those semen stains..." He was also able to persuade a
descendant of Kosminski to donate her DNA. “I found the descendants of his
sister, which was on the female line. We found a 100 percent match with her; it
was just phenomenal.”
Edwards theorizes that
the shawl belonged to Kosminski, not Eddowes, who was an impoverished
prostitute. “What sort of made the whole thing fit together was when we
analyzed the shawl and the dye analysis of the shawl, the origin of the shawl
is Russian. We know he came from Poland, which was under Russian rule. We knew
that Catherine Eddowes wouldn’t have been able to afford a garment of such
quality. So we managed to piece together [that] it was left at the murder scene
by the Ripper, which means that the significance of the semen on the shawl was
that it was deposited by him and not just an average customer of the
prostitute.”
So is the science sound? According to Donna
Cline, the technical advisor for the forensics-driven television show Bones, when analyzing very
old DNA sample, “It depends on how viable your material is,” but it is possible
to find conclusive data. However, even if both Kosminski’s and Eddowes’s DNA is
on the shawl, there’s no way to prove that both the blood and the semen came
from the crime scene. For example, it’s possible that Kosminski was one of
Eddowes’s johns who gave her the shawl and someone else killed her. Said Cline,
“There’s no proof about their relationship.”
Edwards
takes the backlash to his research in stride. "There are so many people
that still want this to be a myth. There are so many people that still don’t
want this to be solved and whenever anybody comes up with a theory, people just
try and completely stomp it out of existence, but with this one they can’t. We
have done the scientific research in the correct manner. We know we've got this
murderer..."
Edwards added that
Louhelainen plans to submit his findings for peer review by other scientists.
“That’s exactly what Jari’s on the case to do now. We’ve conclusively done it,
but we want to show the world we’ve got nothing to hide.”
Clancy's comment: There ya go. Interesting, eh?
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