Mr. Russell Edwards, a respected businessman, made it a lifelong interest to unmask the identity of Jack the Ripper. He finally succeeded using incontrovertible proof: DNA. That said, arriving at the identity of the infamous serial killer was anything but easy. Nevertheless, this week he unveiled the identity of Jack the Ripper as Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski. Over the 126 years since the crimes rocked the Whitecastle district of London, six suspects emerged as being the notorious serial killer. They were:
- Prince Albert Clarence, the Duke of Windsor
- Sir William Gull, surgeon
- Walter Sickert, artist
- John Pizer, shoemaker
- George Chapman, barber
- Aaron Kosminski, hairdresser
Edwards had no clue which if any of the suspects was the actual killer, but that began to change when he purchased an important piece of evidence at auction in 2007. It was a large shawl that came in two pieces of 24″ x 19″ and 73.5″ x 25.5″. There was no evidence that it was taken from the crime scene of the Ripper’s second victim Catherine “Kate” Eddowes on Sunday, 30 September 1888. However, Edwards had a letter from the descendant of a police officer at the scene of the crime affirming the officer had snagged the shawl from her body.
Extracting DNA from the shawl took seven years and required the use of advanced methods for obtaining old mitochondrial DNA. In the end, Edwards, with the aid of a skilled geneticist, was able to first prove the shawl was evidence.
It contained blood from Eddowes, but, more importantly, it contained blood spattering, and other stains consistent with arterial wounds and the removal of vital organs. It also contained DNA from semen which matched Aaron Kosminki’s DNA.