One of history's most famous mysteries, that of the identity of infamous 19th century London murderer Jack the Ripper, may have finally been solved. The world's most notorious serial killer - whose target was prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London, whose throats he cut before mutilating their bodies - evaded English law in 1888, after having committed at least eleven murders. Up until this month's release of Russell Edward's book 'Naming Jack the Ripper', the killer had remained unidentified.
In his new work, Edwards, a self-confessed "armchair detective", reveals to have found the definitive evidence in a bloodstained shawl from one of the victims, in which he performed DNA testing. The author bought the piece of clothing, which was said to have belonged to Catherine Eddowes (the Ripper's fourth victim) and then took it to a senior lecturer in molecular biology, later providing the sample to a specialist in genetics and forensics.
The DNA testing resulted, first, in a match with Karen Miller, a direct descendant of the victim. Incredibly enough, Jari Louhelainen (the molecular biology specialist) also found enough seminal remnants in the shawl to obtain a DNA sample ... which, in turn, was a 100% match to a descendant of the sister of one of the suspects at the time, Polish-born hairdresser Aaron Kosminski, a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered from hallucinations and spent years in mental asylums, from 1891 until his death in 1919.
The information, if it were true, would solve a 126-year-old case, one that terrorized the London population in the last years of the 19th century and became the food for all sorts of literature, films and television - most recently, the Jack the Ripper cases were mentioned in the Showtime series 'Penny Dreadful'. Also, the Ripper cases has spawned, since the time they first came into light, a broad array of conspiracy theories, bringing up a genre of "Ripperology", a pseudo-science dedicated solely on the study of the murders.