CBS– Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer who terrorized the streets of London more than a century ago, may have finally been identified by forensic scientists in Great Britain. Genetic tests published last week in the Journal of Forensic Sciences point to Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old Polish barber and a prime police suspect at the time.
Jack the Ripper is thought to have claimed the lives of at least five women in the Whitechapel area of London between Aug. 31, 1888, and Nov. 9, 1888. No one was ever charged in the murders.
Kosminski has previously been named as a possible suspect, but this is the first time the supporting DNA evidence has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, according to Science.
The results come from a forensic examination of a stained silk shawl that investigators said was found next to the mutilated body of Catherine Eddowes, the killer’s fourth victim, whose badly mutilated body was found Sept. 30, 1888. The shawl is stained with what is claimed to be blood and semen, the latter thought by some to have belonged to the killer.
Researchers compared fragments of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down solely from one’s mother, retrieved from the shawl with samples taken from living descendants of Eddowes and Kosminski to one of Kosminski’s living descendants, Science reported.
OK so there’s no direct link to 23 and Me but, like, that’s what happened. This Aaron Kosminski has been a suspect since the murders happened over one hundred years aho but in the 1880’s you could actually get away with murdering people on the street because there weren’t cameras on every corner and teenagers taking videos and putting them on social media.
There was also no DNA testing which helped ole Aaron out here. He left blood and cum on this victims clothes and STILL didn’t get caught. We had to wait until 1986 for that to be a thing. (It must have been so easy to commit murder pre 1986. Still not a lot of cameras, no DNA testing, people generally didn’t care about anything as much as we do today. If you got caught the community of killers were probably laughing at how dumb you were).
This dude got named because they took the DNA from a descendant of the then suspected but not confirmed killer and matched it. I highly doubt this person willingly gave up their arm to a needle.
“Hey so your great-great-great-great grandfather was probably the most notorious killer in London and we never caught him, but if you could give us some blood that’d be great!”
Who wants their family legacy to be tied to JTR? This man, or woman, probably saw a commercial for a genetic test, thought they’d find out they were 26% South American with a dash of Eastern European and that’d be it. But now you have been used to identify the first real serial killer. Not great!
And look, everyone knows that these companies are selling out genes to the government. I took one of these tests fully knowing that. I just don’t care. Have them. I would advise not making a clone of me though because you’ll just have a slightly overweight, mildly depressed 23 year old moping around your building like Debbie Downer.
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