Featured Image Credit: Russell Edwards
Topics: Crime, UK News, Jack the Ripper, History, True Crime
Anish Vij
Topics: Crime, UK News, Jack the Ripper, History, True Crime
Jack The Ripper's true identity has been 'revealed' 130 years after he terrorised the women of London’s Whitechapel district.
Historians say the unidentified serial killer brutally claimed the lives of at least five women by the names of Mary Ann Nichols, 43, Annie Chapman, 47, Elizabeth Stride, 44, Catherine Eddowes, 46, and Mary Jane Kelly, 25, between 31 August and 9 November, 1888.
The Ripper - who would kill mainly sex workers - often would pull out their internal organs.
In 2007, researcher Russell Edwards purchased a shawl recovered from the scene of Eddowes' brutal killing all those years ago.
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He says the shawl contained DNA of both the victim and a man named Aaron Kosminski, a Polish barber who moved to the UK in the 1880s. He also happened to be a prime suspect at the time.
“When we matched the DNA from the blood on the shawl with a direct female descendant of the victim, it was the singular most amazing moment of my life at the time,” he told Today in Australia.
“We tested the semen left on the shawl. When we matched that, I was dumbfounded that we actually had discovered who Jack the Ripper truly was.”
The reason why the killer hasn't been named is because a legal application for a new inquest into the death of Eddowes is yet to be approved.
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Edwards' legal team are fighting for an inquest due to the new evidence available, which the coroner could take into consideration.
Descendants of both Eddowes and Kosminski have approved the inquest, according to the MailOnline.
53-year-old Karen Miller - who is the three-times great-granddaughter of Eddowes - provided a DNA sample which matched her ancestor’s blood on the shawl.
"What about the real name of the person who did this? Having the real person legally named in a court which can consider all the evidence would be a form of justice for the victims," she said.
However, critics have argued that without the genetic sequences of the living relatives being published in the findings due to 'UK law', we do not have the full results.
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Walther Parson, a forensic scientist at the Institute of Legal Medicine at Innsbruck Medical University in Austria, believes that the DNA sequences pose no risk to privacy and should be shared.
"Otherwise the reader cannot judge the result," Parson insisted, according to science.org. "I wonder where science and research are going when we start to avoid showing results but instead present coloured boxes."