DNA error undermines Polish Jack the Ripper 'proof'

The Illustrated Police News newspaper, October 1888

The book 'Naming Jack the Ripper' by Russell Edwards, published this September, claimed that a DNA test of a shawl found by the mutilated body one of the Ripper's victims, Catherine Eddowes, showed "definitely, categorically and absolutely" that the murderer was Kosminski, a Jewish-Polish immigrant to the East End of London who had been working as a barber.

From 1891, Kosminski was detained in an asylum was the insane, where he died in 1919 at the age of 56.

The Jack the Ripper murders lasted from 3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891 and then suddenly stopped, with police unable to solve the mystery as to who the murder was up to this day.

"I've got the only piece of forensic evidence in the whole history of the case. I've spent 14 years working, and we have finally solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was,” author Russell Edwards, who bought the shawl in 2007, said to contain the damning evidence against Kosminski at an auction in 2007 told the UK's Daily Mail, which serialised his book.

But several scientists, including Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting, have dismissed the DNA test by molecular biologist Dr. Jari Louhelainen, which is the centrepiece of the case against Kosminski, pointing to an “ "error of nomenclature" when using a DNA data base of one of the victim's relatives.

Consequently, the DNA could have been left by anyone at the crime scene after the frenzied attack in the early hours of 30 September 1888 on Catherine Eddowes, the Ripper's second victim.

“There is no significance whatsoever in the match between the shawl and Eddowes' descendant, and the same match would have been seen with almost anyone who had handled the shawl over the years," Professor Jeffreys has told the Independent newspaper.

A spokesperson for book's publishers Sidgwick & Jackson said that the author stands by his conclusions and that the Ripper mystery had been “solved”. (pg)