New Book Claims to Identify Jack the Ripper Once and For All—but Can This Case Ever Be Officially Solved?

Ripper experts doubt that DNA from blood on a scarf supposedly found near one of the Ripper's victims could lead to an unequivocal conclusion

By Natalie Finn Sep 09, 2014 1:15 AMTags
Jack the RipperLacy Scott and Knight Auctions / AFP - Getty Images

Perhaps some mysteries just aren't meant to be solved.

But that adage hasn't stopped a hundred years' worth of conspiracy theories regarding the identity of Jack the Ripper, the still-never-officially identified serial killer who viciously murdered at least five women in London's Whitechapel district in 1888 and has been fodder for endless books, films and TV shows ever since.

Theories have been advanced over the years by everyone from Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle to best-selling mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell, and the list of suspects has grown to encompass a number of doctors, convicted criminals and even a member of the royal family (a royal conspiracy was the conclusion creepily settled upon in the 2001 Johnny Depp thriller From Hell, based on the graphic novel of the same name).

So, another year, another theory, and this time Polish hairdresser Aaron Kosminski has been fingered as the culprit in the new book Naming Jack the Ripper.

"I am a hundred percent certain," author and self-described "armchair detective" Russell Edwards told the U.K.'s ITV News. "Definitive proof, conclusively proven, put the case to bed—we've done this."

Edwards claims that DNA evidence, found on a blood-and-semen-spattered scarf that was passed down from generation to generation from the wife of a cop on the beat at the time (who supposedly took the scarf from one of the crime scenes to give as a gift, ew) and bought at auction, unequivocably identifies Kosminski as the killer.

"Incredibly, it was stowed without ever being washed," Edwards said about the scarf in an interview with the Mail on Sunday. As the book reportedly details, genetics expert Dr. Jari Louhelainen, a senior lecturer of molecular biology at Liverpool John Moores University, concluded that Kosminski was the killer after he found that DNA from semen residue on the scarf matched DNA taken from a so-called female descendant of the suspect's.

Globe Photos/ZUMAPRESS.com

But try proving it in a court of law.

Just as fast as the reliably thrilling story went viral, out popped the skeptics who don't for a minute believe that the traces of DNA left on the scarf, found near the body of victim No. 4 (of the five women identified as his victims) Catherine Eddowes, could pinpoint who Jack the Ripper really was.

"The shawl has been openly handled by loads of people and been touched, breathed on, spat upon," Richard Cobb, who guides Jack the Ripper tours in London, told The Times.

Moreover, message boards on the Casebook forum, which is devoted to the now 126-year-old case, have been blowing up with naysayers.

"There's kind of a 'CSI effect' going on," Casebook executive editor Stephen P. Ryder told NBC News. "People hear 'DNA,' and they think it's 100 percent solved." Ryder also dismissed the scarf itself, saying that Ripper experts have known about its existence through the years but never necessarily believed 100 percent that it was even found by Eddowes' body. 

DNA left on a postage stamp was the basis of Patricia Cornwell's foray into nonfiction, 2002's Portrait of a Killer—Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, which theorized that painter Walter Sickert was the killer.

The book's publication made Cornwell the target of all sorts of scorn from the massive community of armchair enthusiasts that, in the end, may not be hoping for answers as much as for another layer of mystery to add to the lore.