Expert issues damning response after DNA testing reveals Jack the Ripper's 'true identity'

It is being claimed that the identity of Jack the Ripper has been 'proven' due to DNA testing done on a shawl which was allegedly recovered from the scene of one of his crimes, but experts have cast doubt on the claim.

The identity of the 19th century serial killer is one of the most famous unsolved crimes in history and over the years there have been a plethora of possible candidates mooted.

Assuming he's not the world's oldest ever person, whoever committed those grisly murders is long dead along with all witnesses, leaving precious little evidence remaining to definitively say who the Ripper really was.

However, one man who is convinced he knows the Ripper's true identity is Russell Edwards, who in 2007 bought a shawl he claims was recovered from the scene of the murder of Catherine Eddowes, the fourth officially recognised Ripper victim.

He claims that DNA evidence from the shawl points towards Aaron Kosminski, saying that tests he had conducted on it show traces of Eddowes and Kosminski on it.

Russell Edwards claims the shawl was recovered from one of the Ripper's crime scenes and contains DNA which proves it was him (Russell Edwards)

However, his DNA tests have been called into doubt by several.

Edwards published the results in a 2014 book he called Naming Jack the Ripper, but according to Science.org, there was criticism at the time that the claims couldn't be assessed because of the lack of technical details.

When more information was released in 2019 using mitochondrial DNA which claimed that DNA on the shawl matched a living relative of Kosminski, though critics still called the findings into question and published an 'expression of concern'.

Mitochondrial DNA expert Hansi Weissensteiner warned that using such methods 'one can only exclude a suspect' and while the DNA on the shawl could have been Kosminski's, it could also have belonged to thousands of other men in London at the time, so it hardly proves he's the Ripper.

Other critics have warned that the shawl may not even be legitimately from the crime scene, or that in the more than a century since Catherine Eddowes was murdered it had likely become contaminated.

Edwards claims the DNA points towards Aaron Kosminski, but experts have warned his evidence isn't enough to pick one man out of thousands (Russell Edwards)

Earlier this year, forensic DNA interpretation expert Jarrett Ambeau told NewsNation that the claimed proof of Kosminski being the Ripper was 'a mile off' being enough to claim for certain it was him due to the lack of clear information mitochondrial DNA can provide.

He said: "It doesn’t have the kind of power to identify someone individually that nuclear DNA has, or cellular DNA.

"We have the second problem of the fact that this DNA is degraded over years. What about all the other people that touched this item in the 137 years between the date of the murder and the date it was tested?

"The information just isn’t there in the science to be able to show exactly when the DNA was deposited and by whom."

It's entirely possible we'll never know who Jack the Ripper was.