New DNA Analysis On Old Blood Pegs Aaron Kosminski As Jack the Ripper

It surely won't be the last theory offered, but a century and a quarter after the notorious crimes of Jack the Ripper, an "armchair detective" has employed DNA analysis on the blood-soaked shawl of one of the Ripper's victims, and has declared it in a new book an unambiguous match with Jewish immigrant Aaron Kosminski, long considered a suspect. Kosminski died in 1919 in an insane asylum. The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes. Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of [Ripper victim Catherine] Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match. (Also at The Independent.) It's not the first time DNA evidence has been used to try to pin down the identity of Jack the Ripper, but the claimed results in this case are far less ambiguous than another purported mitochondrial DNA connection promoted by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell in favor of artist Walter Sickert as the killer in a 2002 book. Update: 09/07 16:03 GMT by T : Corrected Sickert's first name, originally misstated as "William."

Comments

Bullshit claim.

[denzacar]

There was no blood other than the victims on the shawl. And even that was only determined to match through mitochondrial DNA.
What they claim to have matched "definitely, categorically and absolutely" to the murderer are "traces of semen thought to belong to the killer".
Traces of semen. On the clothes of ONE of the victims. Who was a prostitute.

Clearly, "Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt."
Non-believers perpetuating myths? I'm not sure that's how it goes.

From TFA:
       

A blood-stained shawl belonging to one of the Ripper's victims bought at an auction in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 2007 was used as the basis for the research.
As well as being soaked in her blood, it was found to have traces of semen thought to belong to the killer.
Mr Edwards said: âoeI've got the only piece of forensic evidence in the whole history of the case.
âoeI've spent 14 years working on it, and we have definitively solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was.
"Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt. This is it now - we have unmasked him."

BUT WAIT! There is more... it is once again mitochondrial.
In other words...

Critics, however, have pointed out that the DNA comparisons focused on mitochondrial DNA, which could be shared by anything from between 1% and 10% of the population, so it was hardly unique to Sickert.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

It was impossible to extract DNA from the stains on the shawl using the method employed in current cases, in which swabs are taken. The samples were just too old.

Instead, he used a method he called âvacuumingâ(TM), using a pipette filled with a special âbufferingâ(TM) liquid that removed the genetic material in the cloth without damaging it.
As a non-scientist, I found myself in a new world as Jari warned that it would also be impossible to use genomic DNA, which is used in fresh cases and contains a humanâ(TM)s entire genetic data, because over time it would have become fragmented.

But he explained it would be possible to use mitochondrial DNA instead. It is passed down exclusively through the female line, is much more abundant than genomic DNA, and survives far better.

Making it exactly as valid as the Walter Sickert "evidence" from postage stamps.

some interesting facts

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The blood on the rag was the female's and the semen on the rag was Aaron's.
2. This doesn't necessarily prove that Aaron was the Ripper, just that he was there. It's possible that someone else killed her and left her for dead. Then Aaron walking by found the corpse and masturbated on it. He was known to have been a sicko who did unspeakable things.
3. There is a strong case that it was Cohen because he was specifically linked to murders of prostitutes, and the crimes stopped the same year he was confined to the asylum.
4. There's some suggestion that Cohen was an alias the Asylum used because Aaron's last name was too difficult to pronounce. It may have been the same man.

Re: tldr; why is blood the perpetrator's?

[Artifakt]

It's the previous DNA analysis that was based on just mitochondrial DNA - This one isn't. It's based on what is allegedly a new improvement in DNA testing, but it involves testing conventional nuclear DNA. Also, given the rest of Kosminski's history, if he was, say, merely a pimp who was wounded at the same time as the death of one of his prostitutes, his subsequent behavior was rather unlikely, to say the least. He was suspected of being Jack while he still lived. I don't know about you, but if the police were looking into the possibility I was Jack the Ripper, and the real Jack had tried to kill me, then proving my own innocence by giving them information that might lead to the real killer looks a lot more rational than shutting up about it. It's pretty much killing two birds with one stone at that point. (As opposed to Jack's method of killing birds, I guess). There are people pointing to K's mental illness history, and how he might not be particulalry rational, but there's a big difference between saying someone is mentally ill, and saying, they were mentally ill, and it was definitely in a way that would make them not do what most people would do here, but definiitely also not in a way that would make them commit murder either.
        People taking the other side have to either beleive this new evidence isn't a real improvement in genetic testing and that claim is essentially false (which is fine by me if they do - time will settle whether it is or isn't), or they have to make some pretty bizarre and often self contradictory claims about the few other items of evidence we have, such as claiming Kosminski was a real bad apple who the police wanted enough for very serious crimes (just what, they never wrote down), that he couldn't have whitewashed his own reputation even by giving them Jack, or that Kosminski had some major underworld contacts who would have paniced if he had gone to the police (but these contacts couldn't take care of the Ripper if Kosminski went to them instead). ,
    Other such evidence that has to be tweaked is there are some good sketches of the crime scenes, and for this one Jack had to, for example, fight Kosminski only in places where it was too dark to see his face, then kill the prostitute and move her body indoors past some well lighted areas without K hanging around to see who the real Jack was, and do it all quickly enough that the real Jack could get out of there before K could have returned with the police. (Or somehow, the real Jack had to know K was not the type to return with police, or something else both odd and very much not in evidence.).
            There's also the claim which has been around for decades, that the word Jewes in the grafitti scrawled at one crime scene has to refer to some Masonic ritual and not be a misspellling of Jews, and other such things which have always been oddish speculations, but had better be taken as basic assumptions to make it less likely that K did it - people who seriously want to claim there's no other evidence than this 'questionable' DNA test to link Kosminski will just about have to buy into one or another of these oddish assumptions like the "It had to be a Mason" bit, as well. People willing to go down such roads usually end up "proving' that jack was Queen Victoria, or the Loch Ness Monster, or other such candidates.