Mmmm... Yes!!!... Or, --- no... What do you think? Has modern DNA testing uncovered the identity of the infamous, mad Victorian serial killer of London's prostitutes? Was the Polish barber Aaron Kosminski really Jack The Ripper? Could he have had the surgical skill the killings indicated?
Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozminski; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1891.] "Kosminski" (without a forename) was named as a suspect by Sir Melville Macnaghten in his 1894 memorandum,] and by former Chief Inspector Donald Swanson in handwritten comments in the margin of his copy of Assistant Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson's memoirs. Anderson wrote that he had been identified as the Ripper but that no prosecution was possible because the witness was Jewish and refused to testify against Kosminski, who was also Jewish. Some authors are skeptical of this, while others use it in their theories.
In his memorandum, Macnaghten stated that no one was ever identified as the Ripper, which directly contradicts Anderson's recollection. In 1987, author Martin Fido searched asylum records for any inmates called Kosminski, and found only one: Aaron Kosminski. Kosminski lived in Whitechapel; however, he was largely harmless in the asylum. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people, a refusal to wash or bathe, and "self-abuse" In his book The Cases That Haunt Us, former FBI profiler John Douglas states that a paranoid individual such as Kosminski would likely have openly boasted of the murders while incarcerated had he been the killer, but there is no record that he ever did so.
In 2014, DNA analysis tenuously linked Kosminski with a shawl said to have belonged to victim Catherine Eddowes, but experts – including Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting – dismissed the claims as unreliable. This was because the genetic match, determined from maternal descendants of Eddowes and Kosminski, was based on mitochondrial DNA; strands of mitochondrial DNA can be shared by thousands of people, and therefore can only be reliably used in crime analysis to exclude a suspect, not to implicate them. Furthermore, many consider it conjecture without substantial evidence that the shawl, purportedly removed from the crime scene by police constable Amos Simpson, even belonged to Eddowes – who herself was impoverished, and arguably could not have afforded to purchase it herself.] In March 2019, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published a study that claimed DNA from Kosminski and Catherine Eddowes was found on the shawl, though other scientists have cast doubt on the study.
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