Jack the Ripper identified...

[Shona]

...or not?

The story caught my attention:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2746321/Jack-Ripper-unmasked-How-amateur-sleuth-used-DNA-breakthrough-identify-Britains-notorious-criminal-126-years-string-terrible-murders.html

A businessman, Russell Edwards, bought a shawl. The story goes that the shawl was found next to the body of Catherine Eddowes, who was murdered by Jack the Ripper. A policeman liked the shawl and was allowed to take it home to his wife who, a dressmaker. She saw blood on it and popped in a shoebox, unwashed. Said shoebox was passed down through the generations until it was appeared at auction in Bury St Edmunds.

DNA was extracted from the shawl and compared to a descendant of victim, Catherine Eddowes. There was a match. Another DNA sample was compared to a descendant of a suspect's sister. There was a match.

The chap writing the book (for there is one...) unmasks the Ripper as hairdresser, Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish migrant who lived in the East End at the time.

Anyone reckon there are holes in this story? :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

[Merry]

Sounds pretty dodgy to me.

Another DNA sample was compared to a descendant of a suspect. There was a match.

I know Catherine Eddowes had children so fair enough if they could find her descendants to compare samples of DNA, but did Aaron Kosminski have descendants? He was recorded as single on the census when already in the asylum.

In any case, I think the policeman's wife would have either washed the shawl or binned it or given it away.

[Shona]

The DNA was taken from a descendant of Aaron Kosminski's sister. Will edit post.

[maggie_4_7]

...or not?

The story caught my attention:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2746321/Jack-Ripper-unmasked-How-amateur-sleuth-used-DNA-breakthrough-identify-Britains-notorious-criminal-126-years-string-terrible-murders.html

A businessman, Russell Edwards, bought a shawl. The story goes that the shawl was found next to the body of Catherine Eddowes, who was murdered by Jack the Ripper. A policeman liked the shawl and was allowed to take it home to his wife who, a dressmaker. She saw blood on it and popped in a shoebox, unwashed. Said shoebox was passed down through the generations until it was appeared at auction in Bury St Edmunds.

DNA was extracted from the shawl and compared to a descendant of victim, Catherine Eddowes. There was a match. Another DNA sample was compared to a descendant of a suspect. There was a match.

The chap writing the book (for there is one...) unmasks the Ripper as hairdresser, Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish migrant who lived in the East End at the time.

Anyone reckon there are holes in this story? :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

More holes than a sieve. I don't remember a shawl being one of the items found with Catherine Eddowes but I suppose their answer would be 'because the policeman took it'.

DNA certainly compromised. Even if this is true I am sure someone at some point would have cleaned it!!

[Olde Crone]

From the bit I read (I stopped at that point!) the DNA was mtDNA which is not unique to any one woman.

I also think the provenance of the shawl is extremely dodgy. It was apparently a very expensive one and I am sure, as Merry says, the policeman's wife would have washed it and either worn it herself or flogged it. It almost certainly didn't belong to Catherine Eddows who reputedly pawned everything of any value including her clothes.

OC

[Merry]

I'm always suspicious when someone writes a book following some surprise new evidence.

[maggie_4_7]

I'm always suspicious when someone writes a book following some surprise new evidence.


I don't know why! :rolleyes:

[Shona]

There was a policeman named Amos Simpson - the one who was meant to have got the shawl to take home to his wife.

http://interactive.ancestry.co.uk/2352/rg14_10537_0067_03/43534950?backurl=&ssrc=&backlabel=ReturnRecord

The 1911 census record states that Amos had been married for 36 years and that he and his wife Jane has two children, both living. Daughter Ellen, her husband and children are living with Amos and Jane in 1911.

The other child was a son named Henry.

http://interactive.ancestry.co.uk/7572/LNDRG11_208_213-0065/14031000?backurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ancestry.co.u k%2fcgi-bin%2fsse.dll%3findiv%3d1%26db%3duki1881%26rank%3d 1%26new%3d1%26MSAV%3d1%26msT%3d1%26gss%3dangs-d%26gsfn%3damos%26gsfn_x%3dNN%26gsln%3dsimpson%26g sln_x%3dNN%26cpxt%3d1%26catBucket%3drstp%26uidh%3d fpy%26cp%3d11%26pcat%3d35%26fh%3d4%26h%3d14031000% 26recoff%3d%26ml_rpos%3d5&ssrc=&backlabel=ReturnRecord

According to the story, the shawl was meant to have been passed down via Amos's daughter Mary. Prob is, Mary doesn't seem to exist.

[Nell]

I read a review of this book - can't remember where - which said that the shawl is probably covered in several people's DNA. And even if someone's DNA is on a shawl owned by a victim (which is disputed) it doesn't necessarily follow that they must have murdered her, merely that they've had contact with the shawl.

[Asa]

This might be it, Nell - excellent either way

http://usvsth3m.com/post/96977532433/are-you-jack-the-ripper-no-and-neithers-aaron

[Olde Crone]

Interesting article, Asa, thankyou.

As one of the commenters points out, if it WAS Aaron thingy, then he wasn't the person who wrote the Ripper letters because as a Polish Jewish immigrant he spoke only broken English, his native tongue was Yiddish and if he could write at all it would have been in Cyrillic script, not an assured hand of written English.

Also interesting - if rather worrying on a purely personal note! - the shawl was not a shawl, it was a ****** pashmina!

OC

[Tilly Mint]

Interesting article, Asa, thankyou.

As one of the commenters points out, if it WAS Aaron thingy, then he wasn't the person who wrote the Ripper letters because as a Polish Jewish immigrant he spoke only broken English, his native tongue was Yiddish and if he could write at all it would have been in Cyrillic script, not an assured hand of written English.

Also interesting - if rather worrying on a purely personal note! - the shawl was not a shawl, it was a ****** pashmina!

OC


:d:d:d sorry couldn't help but laugh at the pashmina, OC

[Nell]

Asa

That wasn't it, but it was an excellent read. I wonder about these people, Edwards & Cornwell amongst them, who start off by picking a suspect and then looking for evidence to fit. Not very scientific! Why is the suspect always someone we already know about anyway? Far more likely he was an insignificant chap. I have always wondered about what happened after the final horrific murder & butchery of Mary Kelly. Why did he stop? Was the frenzy what tipped him over into insanity? Was he confined to an asylum where he couldn't harm anyone? Or did he kill himself?

As you probably know, Jacob Isenschmid, briefly suspected of being the murderer at the time, ended up in Colney Hatch. His daughter Catherine/Kate was 2nd wife of my gt grandfather Charles Williams. But it is interesting that there were a lot of semi-sane men around the streets threatening to kill people. Now we'd call it "Care in the community" with the same tragic results.

[Michael]

This might be it, Nell - excellent either way

http://usvsth3m.com/post/96977532433/are-you-jack-the-ripper-no-and-neithers-aaron

I didn't bother scrutinising the rest of the evidence since I don't know much about DNA, but I do know how the scientific method works, I know how marketing works - and they are not the same way.

If you're aiming to make a serious discovery which will be accepted by the scientific community, you start from a neutral standpoint and consider more than one possible outcome, e.g. note that there have been numerous people suggested to have been the Ripper, but many of them have been dismissed as there are one or more convincing reasons why they could not possibly have committed the murders; list a few of those who are generally considered to be at least plausible suspects; and examine the evidence for and against each. Once you have done all that, write it up in a paper along with your conclusions and the degree to which you can be certain of them (X was definitely the Ripper; X was probably the Ripper but it could possibly be Y; there is no sufficiently strong evidence against any one suspect to be sure that he was the Ripper), and submit it to a research journal which will then have it reviewed by other experts in the field before publication. If they find flaws in it, they may ask you to redo some parts of the research to strengthen the evidence in favour of your claim; if they think the flaws are significant enough to cast major doubt on the whole paper, they may reject it out of hand.

If you're aiming to sell a book, you start by making an announcement in a publication which will reach the largest audience possible. No point publishing it in a specialist journal where it will only be read by those with a professional interest in the subject matter; a popular national newspaper is a far better bet. The announcement must be something decisive: very few people are going to buy a book which concludes that someone "might" be Jack the Ripper, and certainly not one which concludes that on the evidence available, no-one can possibly tell. It should bring something new, tangible and seemingly decisive to the matter; you won't get any interest just by re-examining the existing evidence. See, I've got this shawl, and it's much better than any of the other evidence - that PROVES it! Don't ask awkward questions about where it came from or whether its connection to the crime is proven.

Edwards has done everything on the "sell a book" list and nothing on the "make a scientific discovery" list. His book may well sell, but unless other forensics experts examine the same evidence (which of course he won't let them, because he wants the glory of the discovery for himself) and verify his conclusions, he can't be considered to have solved the mystery or even made a meaningful contribution towards doing so.

[Asa]

I felt the first clue that it might not be an accurate identification was that it was an exclusive article in a newspaper. The second is, as OC says that the author and DNA expert can't identify a ****** pashmina :)

Nell, I do remember your connection but I think I need to read a good book on the Ripper again. It's quite sad to think that we still don't help understand enough mental issues, especially schizophrenia, to stop people suffering with them committing awful crimes.
I'm always a bit disappointed that with all my East London connections I haven't got so much as a witness!

Michael, I understand very little about science generally but I'm often bemused at claims of discoveries or findings that seem to do just as you say - here's a theory and here's how it must be true.

[Lindsay]

Didn't Patricia Cornwell 'prove' it was Walter Sickert a year or so ago?

I think she had a book to sell too :rolleyes:

[Lindsay]

I'm always a bit disappointed that with all my East London connections I haven't got so much as a witness!


Ooh, I do! Someone in my family (possibly my g-grandfather? I'm ashamed to say I can't remember the details) was in an east end pub with his dog. A man came in with a bag and sat down. The dog started growling and wouldn't leave the bag alone, and the man left hurriedly. A few minutes later someone rushed in to say another victim of Jack the Ripper had been found.

Of course, this assumes that the killer hung around in a local pub round the corner from where he had left his victim, which sounds a little unlikely to me.

Should I write a book?

[Asa]

I think so, Lindsay. And probably claim it proves who the killer was

[Olde Crone]

It reminds me of quite a few earnestly researched trees I have ssen. Every individual FACT is correct and has elaborate sources to back it up. It's the links between each proven FACT that are a bit dodgy and require blind leaps of faith from fact to fact.

(Asa - my daughters keep giving me pashminas for Xmas and birthdays and I have about 50 now, that's why I was so worried! Actually, the length of the Ripper "shawl" suggests a table runner more than any kind of garment.)

OC

[Nell]

As for the Jack the Ripper letters (from which we get his nickname) I thought it had been proved a long time ago it was a hoax by a journalist wanting to sell a few papers? Much like the Yorkshire ripper/Wearside Jack tape.

[Rosie Knees]

Interesting article, Asa, thankyou.

As one of the commenters points out, if it WAS Aaron thingy, then he wasn't the person who wrote the Ripper letters because as a Polish Jewish immigrant he spoke only broken English, his native tongue was Yiddish and if he could write at all it would have been in Cyrillic script, not an assured hand of written English.

Also interesting - if rather worrying on a purely personal note! - the shawl was not a shawl, it was a ****** pashmina!

OC

:d:d:d

[Michael]

Polish is written in the Latin alphabet (with the addition of a few extra accented letters), although since Poland was occupied by Russia at the time he might have had Cyrillic forced on him... either way, fluent English seems pretty unlikely. The spelling of the Ripper letter is somewhat strange, but the grammar is fine - suggesting either the usual variations in 19th century spelling (other people on here will probably know more about that than me), or someone who actually spoke perfectly good English but was misspelling words deliberately in order to give the impression the killer was illiterate.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/FromHellLetter.jpg/640px-FromHellLetter.jpg

If the letter was indeed a hoax, though, its style provides no clue at all to the identity of the murderer!

The verdict from one DNA expert is pretty much the same as that which most of us have reached on here: "can't be sure until their work has been more thoroughly checked" - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/has-jack-the-rippers-identity-really-been-revealed-using-dna-evidence-9717036.html

There's a rule of thumb in science that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to back them up - announcing that you've solved a mystery which has had everyone else stumped for 100+ years is certainly an extraordinary claim, and the evidence Edwards is offering appears to be some distance short of being considered extraordinary.

[Olde Crone]

His native tongue was Yiddish though, not Polish, if we want to split hairs.

By the time this claim has been thoroughly discredited (if it ever is) they will have sold more than enough books for it not to matter one way or the other!

OC