After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Who was Jack the Ripper? The Barber (Suspect 2)

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Part 2/4. By looking at the men accused of being Jack the Ripper, we uncover dark truths about Victorian society - and our own. Why were these men, most of them almost certainly innocent, singled out as monsters?Today Anthony Delaney tells Maddy Pelling about Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew living in Whitechapel who later became suspected of being Jack the Ripper. It's a story of immigration and antisemitism; of mental illness and of an effort to use DNA to link Kosminski to the crime.Written by Anthony Delaney. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick and Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Aaron Mordki Kosminski was born to a Jewish family on the 11th of September 1865 in Poland. Between 1881 and 1882, we know that he emigrated to Whitechapel with his sisters and their families. Whitechapel, at this time, was an overcrowded slum in the east end of London. It's very easy to imagine damp, gaslit, cobbled streets and an atmospheric fog enveloping the neighbourhood. You can, when you imagine this area, likely hear the jovial sounds of the working poor

enjoying themselves all together in local taverns after a long day's work. But as so often is the case, the reality is very different. And that is that nearly two in every ten people living here died before they were five years old. Its inhabitants were made up of the transient poor, immigrants, outcasts, all vying and many of them failing to scrape together some form of dignity from England's capital city. to scrape together some form of dignity from England's capital city. This was where many Jewish refugees escaping economic turmoil across Europe and the pogroms in Russia came to find a better life.

Aaron Kosminski found work intermittently as a barber, though it appears likely that he did not make enough money to support himself in this, and relied on financial assistance from his sisters to survive. Kosminski could be erratic, you see, unpredictable even. He suffered with an intersection of various mental health conditions, and as a result, it very often fell to his sisters

to take care of him. And they did so dutifully, when they were safely capable of providing that care. So far, then, this is in many ways a difficult but not extraordinary immigrant story. How then does Aaron Kosminski go from Jewish immigrant living in one of the poorest parts of England to becoming, some would say, the prime suspect in the Whitechapel murders? The only suspect linked to this case, some experts have argued, by peer-reviewed DNA evidence.

Now, to uncover that, Maddie and I invite you to join us for this, the second installment in our After Dark special, as we try to better understand the men who would be Jack the Ripper. Hello and welcome to After Dark. As Anthony said in his introduction, we are on episode two of our mini series exploring the suspects associated with the Jack the Ripper cases. This one, I have to say, Anthony, I'm particularly excited to get into because I have some ancestral skin in the game here.

Yeah. I mean, when I was going through this research, it instantly stuck out to me that to get into because I have some ancestral skin in the game here. Yeah. I mean, when I was going through this research, it instantly stuck out to me that you are going to explain this because we have spoken about this before. We've obviously spoken about Jack the Ripper and various guys in the past, both on the podcast and off the podcast. And one of the things that comes up is that your Jewish ancestry goes back to this time and this place. So rather than me trying to explain, I think let's look at this from your ancestry type of viewpoint so that we can get a kind of a personal insight into it. Yeah. So in some ways, my ancestors who were living in the East End in 1888 in Whitechapel at the time of the murders have a very similar story to Kosminski himself.

They came not from Poland, but from Germany. And they came across, I think a couple of decades, maybe three decades or something before. This is based on my dad's very rigorous family history research. Shout out to my regular listener, dad. Sorry, dad, you'll be cringing at this. Does he listen? He does. Yeah. Every episode. My parents don't. We should talk to them about that. He's a big fan. Okay.

Yeah. So they come over to Britain. They actually come to Edinburgh first and then work their way down to Manchester and eventually end up in the East End of London over the course of, I think, a couple, like a generation or something. And like Kosminski, the men in the family worked as barbers. We actually have a photograph of their barbershop from a little bit later than this. I think it might be the turn of the 20th century

instead, but with them stood outside in their uniforms in Whitechapel. I also know the women in the family and I always love this and I want to do more research into it. There were three sisters research into it. There was three sisters who were all singers who worked on the stage of the music halls. Yeah. And they toured all around Britain and then they abruptly stopped their careers and we don't know why. So I want to look into that, but I'm really interested in their experience in the East End. And it's kind of something in our family law, you know, that they were there during the Whitechapel murders and what would that have been like? I want to know more about the Jewish experience in this part of London at this time in the lead up to the murders as well because as you've set out there in the introduction, it's a slum. It's an incredibly

poor part of the city where the life expectancy is incredibly low. It's a very dangerous place. It's a place riddled with people who have problems with addiction, the sex trade is absolutely booming there. There's real levels of poverty, levels of indignity, but also levels of ingenuity and hopefulness and striving to make something of life, especially with these immigrants coming into the community. I wonder what that would have felt like coming in as a Jewish immigrant having escaped the pogroms and the hatred in Europe. That's not to say that it didn't exist in England, in Britain, but they make it here to this incredibly dank,

dirty, smelly, dangerous place and they have to make a life for themselves. And then we have these murders and the finger is turned, at least in part, on the Jewish community and one person in particular. And I find that fascinating. It makes me feel very uneasy. I can't wait to get into it. The Jewish experience is in many ways very similar to other immigrant community experiences, but at the same time has its own tribulations actually, and its own

triumphs of course, but in this case we are confronted with some of those tribulations. Certainly there were levels of suspicion against the Jewish community at this time in Whitechapel and immigrants in general, again, not much change sometimes, but certainly within the Jewish community, there was suspicion around their presence in Whitechapel. And the segregation as well, isn't there, thinking about the Jews' free school, which I think is the building that you can still go and see and it says the Jewish free school

above it in letters. I think that's still there in Whitechapel in the East End. I'm pretty sure I've seen that. And there was a Jewish soup kitchen as well. So there were, there was specific infrastructures, institutions for the community already in place, but they were all separate. And I think that must've created a divide. And then the Jewish community becomes explicitly linked to these murders in a very strange

way almost. So on the night of the 30th of September 1888, what people have interpreted as and we'll talk about whether this is true or not, but people have picked this up as a clue appears on a wall in Whitechapel. Or did it appear? Certainly it was noted on the night of the 30th of September. And again, we'll talk about this. And the ripper that night on the 30th of September had claimed two victims. This was the night that Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were killed and they were killed within an hour of each other. And actually what's happening is there is a frenzy because at this point they know that there's a killer in Whitechapel. These are the third and fourth victims at this point, they know that there's a killer in Whitechapel. These are the third and fourth victims at this stage.

You know, there's a high police presence. They know that Elizabeth Stride is being killed. So now let's concentrate maybe a little bit on the events that unfold when Catherine Edo's body is discovered, because this is where this link starts to come about. Edo's, it's believed, was last seen at Mitre Square and it's believed that she was seen with the man who was reportedly Jack the Ripper. Her body was then discovered at 1.44am. So we can very much place her in a specific area at this time. The general area, as I said, is being patrolled by detectives anyway, but somehow they missed not just the first murder,

but the second murder too. So now they're kind of scrambling to try and make up for this. And there's, as I said, there's a bit of a frenzy going on. And just to set the scene a little bit there as well, and to think about why the police would have missed this murder taking place. You know, this is a part of the city where, as we've said, sex work, and we acknowledge that potentially not all of the victims were sex workers, but to the eyes of the police, they very much were and would have been therefore invisible on the street to these men of the law to a certain extent. And women going off into dark alleyways, into houses with strange men would not

have been unusual. And it's very possible that Catherine Eddowes that night with whatever man she was with slipped through the net and escaped the notice of the police. And crucially, let's bear this in mind as we go through this particular history, despite the big police presence, there's no kind of lockdown, there's no clamp down, people are like, there's no curfew, people are moving around and drinking. But also within this case, this particular night on the 30th of September, lends credence to the idea that whoever Jack the Ripper was, was either intimately aware of the layout of Whitechapel

or lived there. And we know Kosminski is living in Whitechapel at this time because you may know faces. So they would just think, well, this person lives there. They're going wherever they're going. They are interviewing certain men, stopping certain men and interviewing them, but, because Minsky is not one of those men, he's in no way connected at this particular point. But at 2.55am, things change slightly because a fragment of Edo's apron is discovered. It's identified as hers because we know it was missing from the body, very quickly discovered in a doorway on

Gulston street by PC Alfred Long. Now it was covered in blood and feces. So this is a very striking discovery and there were other marks on the apron, which suggested that some type of implement potentially a knife had been cleaned on the fragment of apron. So this is what they discovered in a doorway not too far from Mitre Square where the body was found. So P.C. Long bends down and he picks up the apron and he is then, the way it's described in the archives, is that he stands up and as he's standing up, he sees something written on the wall. The writing is on the jam of an open archway or doorway visible to anybody who's been in the street. And it read, the Jews are the

men who will not be blamed for nothing. So the Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing. So this was written essentially over the scrap of fabric that PC Long recovered. This is a really famous piece of graffiti. And I think there's some really interesting things to say about it. Not least that the message doesn't really make sense. The Jews are the men who will not be blamed for nothing. You can almost hear an East End voice in that, right? It's a double negative and you can hear it in that accent actually. What do you think it means, first of all? Well, a lot of people at the time, and we'll look at this, but a lot of people at the time thought that it was an accusation of some sort towards members of the Jewish community who were

potentially getting away with something here. Some people I've seen this, it doesn't quite add up, I don't think logically, but it's part of the lore. So we'll address it. Some people, I've seen this, it doesn't quite add up, I don't think logically, but it's part of the lore, so we'll address it. Some people think that Jack wrote it himself, having dropped the piece of the apron there, that it was very purposeful. Some people think it was a witness that was too afraid and wrote something on the wall as a message, but certainly very quickly is being seen as a clue. The police don't necessarily think it is. Yeah. So I think there's multiple things to say here. very quickly is being seen as a clue. The police don't necessarily think it is.

There's multiple things to say here. I think the fact that it's supposedly over where the apron is could be a complete red herring. That could be completely irrelevant. Graffiti in the 19th century, as indeed the century before, is everywhere in a way that it is a little bit today, but everyone did it. It wasn't just something on the margins, it wasn't something just of motorway underpasses and pub toilet doors. It really was on every surface. And the fact that this is written in chalk, chalk was carried in the pockets of everyone, from merchants to gamblers to children. It would be used for keeping score of your card game in the pub. It would be used to leave a message to a neighbour if you'd knocked on their door and they weren't in. It was a useful way of keeping all kinds of accounts

of showing someone directions down the road of drawing hopscotch on the floor if you're a child or some other board game, especially in poorer communities. If you don't have those objects, like for example, a board game or a game of cards, you can draw it out and chalk and imagine those objects. It gives you a way into play and conversation and reason and rationality that isn't available to you through other physical items. So graffiti and chalk graffiti in particular would have been everywhere. There's nothing to say that this message was written that night. Nothing at all. It could have been there already in an area that has a high concentration of Jewish immigrants. And it seems to me that this is an anti-Jewish

message that's been left by someone in Whitechapel in this melting pot with all these tensions and these different communities and these animosities and attempts to assimilate and all these layers of different people, that it's just someone's momentary expression of anti-Jewish feeling. I'm fascinated by the fact that this is drawn into the Jack the Ripper story. You can see why the connection is made on that night that the policeman stands up in the first thing in his line of vision after discovering this horrible clue of the apron is this message. You can see why that connection is made. But I don't even think that the police – I sort of don't buy the story because

I don't think the police would notice graffiti in the way that we're imagining that they would. By the 19th century, certainly by the 1880s in this moment, graffiti was being legislated against. People looked down on it as a bad thing, but people were still doing it with incredible regularity. The police were aware of it. We know that in police handbooks, for example, at the time, when you issued your handbook when you first joined the police, there was a whole section in there about graffiti on the street and its different codes, codes for beggars that they would use, codes for different gangs and things that you would look out for. So you would maybe look for it on the street, but it was part of a moving urban landscape that was changing all the time that had secret messages hidden within

it, but it's not out of the ordinary. That may have very well been the case. Well, that was the case, I think I agree with you entirely. And suddenly it becomes out of the ordinary because of the actions that the police take next. PC Alfred Long is now in possession of a vital piece of evidence relating to the latest victim of Jack the Ripper. The night has been frenzied and hellish. The police must steady themselves and, within the expectations of the day, act rationally to process the evidence as it comes to them. Without delay then, PC Long must take the portion of Catherine Eddow's apron to Commercial Street Police Station so it can be properly

inspected. Before he goes, Long asks another PC who had now joined him on Goulston Street to stand watch over the comings and goings of that street. He warns him to keep an eye on the writing on the wall and then leaves. But news of this supposed clue spreads quickly through the Metropolitan Police Force, and soon a number of PCs stand staring at the inflammatory inscription. Within moments, worried glances apparently turned to murmurs of hushed concern, and then to outright worry. Officers gathered speculate that this writing could lead to a resurgence of racial unrest

that had occurred in the district, hampering their investigations and adding to their already pressurized workload. The city police were certain this incoherent scribbling was a significant clue and should be photographed. But the Met were worried that the longer this stayed on the wall, the more likely it was to cause unrest. Their debate was settled later that morning, when between 5am and 5.30am Sir Charles Warren arrived. Now he is the head of the London Metropolitan Police. This graffiti was in his territory so he would decide its fate and Warren agreed with his men.

He ordered the writing to be erased without delay and before any photograph could be taken. According to Manny this was the biggest blunder made throughout the entire investigation, and Charles Warren would later be called upon to defend this decision to the Home Office. And in his defence, Warren argued, property would have been wrecked and lives would probably have been lost. Have you ever wondered if the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually real? Or what made Alexander so great? Join me, Tristan Hughes, twice a week every week on the Ancients from History hit, where I'm joined by leading academics, bestselling authors and world-class archaeologists to shine a light on some of ancient history's most fascinating questions like who built Stonehenge and why? What are the Dead Sea Scrobs and why are they so valuable?

And were the Spartan warriors really as formidable as the history books say? Join me, Tristan Hughes, twice a week every week on the Ancients from History hit wherever you get to your podcasts. Now I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Warren actually isn't incorrect. Graffiti can incite real violence. The city had seen this almost a century before in 1780 when the Gordon Riots happened. And when graffiti that was religiously and racially relevant against the Catholics and the Jews in the city spread as a riot spread. It directed a mob, it identified houses that could be burned down, it identified houses where people who were vulnerable were living there who could be attacked and robbed and awful things done to them. There's a real understanding that graffiti has this power

within the city, so you can see its anxiety. Having said that, the fact that he doesn't photograph it is both incredibly irritating for the people looking into this, investigating at the time. And also as a historian of graffiti, there are not that many records of graffiti in the 19th century. The way that you really find images of graffiti, particularly photographs, is if there just happens to be graffiti in the background of a photo of a building, an alleyway, some people gathered, whatever it is. And it's always never the focal point. And so I'm so gutted. One of the famous things, I suppose, about the Ripper case is the photography. And we all know, and we're not going to talk about them in detail here, but we all know the crime scene photos are so famous and so

them in detail here, but we all know the crime scene photos are so famous and so widely available online for better or worse. And it's so gutting to me. The one photograph I want to see from this case, because I will not look at the others, is the picture of the graffiti and it doesn't exist. It really shows that he's clued into his community and to his beast, right? That he knows that this would be inflammatory. He's also, it's a real acknowledgement of the anti-Jewish feeling and physical violence that can occur at this point in London history. And it's showing us that it has occurred because it says there's been problems and it will occur again. And it just brings into focus how much of a hotbed it is in Whitechapel and what could go wrong.

I wonder though, as well, whether the problem isn't the graffiti itself, it's the fact that the police are now drawing attention to it and that the connection has been made. The news has gone out, the connection between the graffiti, the anti-Jewish sentiment. Well, it does, I think, because it's the anti-Jewish sentiment being tied to the Ripper case. Yeah, no, but that's what I mean. It doesn't matter actually what the what the message of it is. What the origin of it is, because ultimately the story that's going to be told is that this is a clue to the identity of Jack the Ripper and Jack the Ripper is Jewish.

Yeah, those words being put together, that is going to ignite something. That's what everybody will interpret that as being. And I think he's right in that. I think probably should have been photographed, but it needed to be curtailed to a certain extent because what are you going to be dealing with riots then the next morning, you know, if that doesn't happen. But how then does this link to Kosminski specifically? There are loads of Jewish people and loads of Jewish men living in this area. So how do we get to him? Why is he picked out? Well, I mean, there are a few reasons. At the time on the streets, he's not being mentioned, but let's just rewind it a little bit.

So we talked about in episode one, how Prince Albert Victor was not in Whitechapel or even in London during any of this. Aaron Kuzminski is, he's in Whitechapel during all of this. So it puts him there the entire time. Based on the events of particularly that night, the 30th of September, it is thought by Manny who researched this case that the Ripper had to live in Whitechapel because he would have had to have been known to some of the women that he was interacting with for them to follow him or whatever it might've been, but also that he had to know the roots of the city.

There is a theory that on this night in particular, after Elizabeth Stride has been killed, he goes home and changes so he's not covered in blood and then comes back out again and kills again. I've never thought about that actually, that those moments in between Elizabeth and Catherine being killed, that he must have changed his clothes. I mean, he's there in Whitechapel the whole time, but so are a lot of other men, some of them Jewish, some of them not Jewish. Why is Kosminski in particular picked for for this and is he actually arrested? Do they make those accusations to him or is this a suspect that we have inherited later

on in history? It's a suspect that we've inherited later on, but not too much later on. So he is arrested, but he is not arrested for these particular violent acts. However, they are violent acts that one might be able to link to these. So bear with me. On the 12th of July, 1890, he is placed in the Myland Old Town Workhouse because of his mental illness. It's getting worse. Because you said his sisters were looking after him. Yeah. And they weren't able to cope at this particular moment in time. But three days

later, this is not the best institution in the entire world. He is released and he's back out. A Victorian workhouse, not the best institution ever. You surprised me. Then let's fast forward a little bit to February 1891 and he has returned to the workhouse, but this time possibly by the police. So he's definitely becoming known to the police in the two, three years after the Jack the Ripper murders. 7th of February, so this is three days later, he was transferred to the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. And this time it was for threatening either his sister or the sister of his friend,

we're not quite sure from the archive, with a knife. So this then will entice people to make links with violent disorder towards women with knives. I mean, not to dismiss the fear that must have been palpable in that scene. A man with mental illness and a knife in his hand does not jack the ripper make. No, but what it probably does mean is that he is incredibly mentally unwell though, and he ends up in a lunatic asylum in Leavesden asylum actually on the 19th of April, 1894. And are there medical records from his time in these institutions? Do we know what he was suffering from or is it a case of hesitating

to speculate down the decades since? There's a mixture of both. We do have records of what he was. So we know that he was suffering from what we would now term some kind of paranoid schizophrenia. He was having auditory hallucinations. So he was hearing voices that were telling him to do things, although we don't have the full details of what they were apparently telling him to do. This is so specific. And it's also quite, I can imagine the panic and the heartbreak, but he was afraid of being fed by other people or receiving food from other people. So he just wouldn't take, if you made a meal, prepared a meal for him.

And this is one of the reasons why his sisters couldn't cope, because he wouldn't take the food from them. And so what he would do is in order to eat, he would pick up food that had been dropped as litter on the floor on the ground on the streets as he wandered through them. So he was eating. So tragic. Right? It's incredibly, incredibly sad. He dropped to 96 pounds. He was incredibly underweight.

I mean, that's not going to do wonders for your mental health if you already suffer from a condition. And this contact, he had this problem with contact. He wouldn't let anybody wash or bathe him. He had that going on as well. Thinking about these. He's being pushed to the edges of society in every way. And then the sexual element comes in and this is also linked.

This, well, I'm not going to say this is also linking him. People have suggested that this also links him to Jack the Ripper in that it's thought that there may have been some sexual element to some of those murders, although we don't know that for sure. But one of the causes, I mean, this would never stand up in modern medical terminology, but one of the causes that was given at the time for his mental distress was excessive self-abuse. We're talking about masturbation. Yeah. So.

Which again, I mean, it's interesting thinking about 19th century masculinity, that thinking about the morals and the standards of the 19th century man, and you have to be physically powerful, you have to be virulent. But if that sexuality is not directed in the direction of the domestic space, heterosexual relationship, and within the bounds of polite Christianity, then there's a problem. We saw it in the last episode with Prince Albert and the question mark over his sexuality and maybe him being present at a male-only brothel in the year after the Whitechapel killings. And here we've got it, again, we've got sexuality and mental health now being tied together in complicated ways

and quite derogatory ways actually. And that someone who behaves outside of the norm for whatever medical reason, sexually speaking, is then automatically being linked to these murders. And that's not to detract from obviously the terror that his sisters would have felt and the suffering that they would have gone through trying to deal with him and trying to get help and trying to get him institutionalized or whatever. I don't want to detract from that because obviously he would have been a very difficult individual to deal with. But that's not enough for me to say, okay, well, that's obviously he's Jack the Ripper. I mean, that seems like a ridiculous leap and that's a leap of logic that relies on

the same Victorian codes of morality that are in play in 1888. Yeah. I mean, in terms of that masculinity, one of the kind of linking points that we can talk about between the two cases that we've discussed so far is a failure to reach idealized standards and that's setting you apart and then that putting suspicion on you in whatever aspect. And both of these men become suspicious in terms of the Jack the Ripper case, but it's all linked to this failure in masculinity. But again, we talked about this in the last episode, again, 20th century

has a lot to answer for in these cases because there's so many unanswered questions. It's actually not until the 20th century that we think we can link Aaron Kosminski specifically to the case, not until 1910. So what are we talking 22 years later after the murders have taken place, but that of course means that the police force that were involved are still alive. And I'm talking about Sir Robert Anderson, who was the assistant commissioner in the case at the time. But in 1910, he claimed that the ripper was quote, a low class Polish Jew. So that is Sir Robert Anderson, who was involved in investigating the crime at the time.

He's saying that he believes that it was again, quote, low class Polish Jew. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, he actually led the Ripper investigation. So anybody who's familiar with this case will know in 1888, he named the chief suspect as a man called Kuzminski. This is a handwritten note that was written in the margins of a copy of Anderson's memoir. So Robert Anderson wrote a memoir and in that it said a low class Polish Jew was the person who did it. In Swanson's copy, he wrote Kuzminski. So that's two people involved in the case at the time who have said, yes, we think it's a low class Polish Jewish person.

And now Swanson is saying, and his name was Kosminski. But you know, these are police working in the same police force that when it picked up women's supposedly working in sex work, if you were any kind of vagrant, you would be put down on the police records as selling sex, whether you were or not. I mean, it's damning on the surface, but can we trust the words of these men? They follow up by saying this Kosminski had been incarcerated in an asylum. That's all the detail that he gives. Fast forward, it's 1959.

A memo is discovered that had been written in 1894. So 1894, we are now six years later. Okay. This was written by Sir Melville McNaughton and he was the assistant chief constable to the London Met at the time. And one of the suspects that he calls also Polish Jewish and also says that he was called Kosminski. He thinks Kosminski is the prime suspect, but there are two other men who he would have. So they hold on. There are two other men named?

Kozminski being the prime, but he gives two other options as well. But the link being the Polish Jewish identity. And he said that this man Kozminski had a great hatred of women with strong homicidal tendencies. Now, without a first name, so this is interesting what happens without a first name, then we fast forward to 1987. So all these pieces are getting plucked together in the 20th century. 1987, Martin Fido searches asylum records for anybody named Kosminski and he found only one person and that's Aaron Kosminski. But there is no record of Kosminski in any surviving official police

documentations except this memo. So at the time they're not naming him within a couple of years, they're naming him, but not at the time. And one final thing on that, somebody mentions, I can't remember which one of the police officers it was, but one of them mentions, Oh, and this Kosminski died at this time in this place and our Aaron Kosminski did not die at that time. So it might not be the same. So it might not be the same. Also, I will say, so Martin Fido, who looks at the asylum records in 1987, when we think

about archival research today, we can go to a digital database and search keywords and we can cross reference huge amounts of material. But even today, there are records in local archives that haven't been digitized and that we don't have access to. I'm not saying that Martin Fido didn't do the most rigorous research he could have done in 1987, but who's to say that he simply did not get to see all the available records. And so the fact that he's only found one Kosminski doesn't necessarily register with me as being conclusive evidence, but rather maybe inference of how limited archival research could be in the 80s. Well, you're talking about the distinction between research then and now literally today, this story pushes right up until our own time and we have, some claim,

DNA evidence to connect Aaron Kosminski to Catherine Eros. I don't know how I missed this, but in 2019 the murders of Maryanne, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary Jane were once more in the headlines. Not just because the Five had just hit the shelves, but because supposed DNA evidence which claimed to conclusively determine the identity of Jack the Ripper had been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. These results had been extracted from a rather interesting object. In 2014, British author Russell Edwards engaged renowned molecular biologist Dr. Yari Luhelenen

to carry out DNA testing on a shawl that reportedly belonged to Catherine Eddowes, the second woman who had been killed on the night of 30th September 1888, and whose fragment of apron had been found by P.C. Long near some potentially incriminating graffiti. Lou Halanin's tests revealed that the shawl contained genetic material that officially linked maternal descendants of Catherine Eddowes to the maternal descendants of Aaron Kosminski. This, surely, was the gold standard of DNA proof that RIPR researchers had been waiting for. Had he been identified finally? Luhelainen did not formally publish his findings in 2014, however, leaving Russell Edwards

to publish them informally instead without peer review. But critics claimed that the results were flawed because few technical details about the analysis of these genetic samples were made available. Others questioned the origins of the shawl. However, in 2019, Lou Hellenon, alongside David Miller, a reproduction and sperm expert at the University of Leeds,

published their findings formally in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. These findings were peer-reviewed and met the standard for authoritative publication. Their research states that The presence of mitochondrial DNA on the shawl matches the female victim's mitochondrial DNA derived from stains on it, and that the mitochondrial DNA also on the shawl matches the suspect candidate's mitochondrial DNA. The debate, however, rages on. Since 2019, other experts

have claimed that the collaboration between the University of Leeds and Liverpool John Moores did not comply with SWG DAM 2013 guidelines and therefore do not actually pass the credibility threshold. Both universities refute these claims. Most of this DNA jargon is, of course, entirely flabbergasting to us. This is a history podcast. It is not a science podcast after all. So, after talking to Senior Producer Charlotte, we decided to bring in an expert of our own to help us analyse these results and their findings. Professor Tori King is a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester and is best known for having led the genetic analysis

in the King Richard III case. If there was anyone we felt that we could trust to analyze this data, it was Professor King. And this is what she had to say. Okay. So there's a few issues with this DNA sort of study that they've done on this shawl. So going back to really basics here, when you have a shawl that you want to test against a potential suspect, you have to know the provenance of that shawl. And my understanding is there's a lot of issues with the provenance of this shawl. So first of all, they're not sure it's actually from that murder. I mean, that's a very, very serious issue because if you're going to do genetic testing to see whether or not something supposedly from a crime scene matches a potential suspect, you have to be sure that that's actually from the crime scene,

and there's issues with them. There's really big issues when you're working on ancient and forensic DNA around contamination. So what you want to be sure of is that the DNA that you're getting from a particular item is actually from the individual and not from contamination. Now, contamination happens really, really easily. So my understanding is that this shawl has been handled by loads and loads of people. And really not good for this particular thing is that they're taking DNA or they want to get DNA from this shawl and they want to compare it against the relatives, descendants they say of Kosminski. So what you do not do ever is have the shawl in the presence of these people because them just breathing could contaminate it with their

DNA. And my understanding, that's what happened. So just starting from the very get-go, there's all kinds of issues with provenance and contamination. The next thing they do is they try to get DNA out of samples that they think are blood-like and semen-like, but they don't know for sure. They basically say they're semen-like, but they aren't certain about this. And a really interesting thing around the Jack the Ripper murders is that in none of the cases was there thought to be sexual activity. So is there an issue with that there in that they're conflating the semen as being from a murderer when it may not be if it is indeed semen to start with. So what you do is you take DNA from the sample and you extract the DNA from the cells and

then what you'll do is you'll sequence bits of the DNA. So you'll try and sequence bits of DNA that are fairly specific to individuals. Because of the time gap between sort of now and when the crime is supposed to have happened, we can't do the standard forensic DNA testing, obviously, where you take the DNA from the shawl and you match it against a living individual

using markers that are really, really specific. We have to use pieces of DNA like mitochondrial DNA which comes down through the female line. So this is a small circular piece of DNA that's in the egg. So us gals, we pass it down to all of our children, but only daughters can pass it on. So what they've done is they've been getting, they say, female-lined relatives of Kosminski and of Catherine Eddowes. But there's an issue here because they say that the people who they've had involved are descendants of Kosminski. Now, he's a guy. Mitochondrial DNA is in the egg, not in the sperm, so he can't have passed down his mitochondrial DNA. So there's a real issue with that one as well. Then what they've done is

they've sequenced just a small part of the mitochondrial DNA. So it's not entire mitochondrial genome sequencing, which is something that I would do just immediately. They've done a relatively small section of it, and then they've tried to match it against this potential suspect. So given all the problems already that we've got, they don't do very high resolution mitochondrial DNA testing. And the really interesting thing is when you read this paper, they don't give their results. So ordinarily what you would do is you would show the sequence that you've got. They don't do that. They present it as like little, that was the best way to explain it, like little blocks representing DNA sequence,

but they don't tell you what the DNA sequence is. And the blocks represent more than one DNA letter. So they're representing chunks of DNA. So you don't know what they're doing. So you can't critically access it. And the thing is, I was actually shown this paper before it was published. And I said at the time, this is unpublishable. You haven't done what is normally done in a DNA testing where you present all the results that you've got and you weigh everything up about, you know, well, we've not managed to get all the DNA here. They have some issues in that they don't manage to get all the DNA here. They have some issues in that they don't manage to get all of the DNA sequence. And so they don't get

a perfect match against Kosminski relatives, even if they are the right ones, which if it's actually male come down from him, they can't be. So there's just one thing after another where there's issues with this in terms of the way they've carried out the genetic research and presented it is just absolutely riddled with holes. And there's obviously like a huge fascination around the Jack the Ripper case and people are just desperate to work out who he was still over 100 years later. do you think it's something that would ever be able to solve with DNA evidence? So we would have to have a pretty amazing piece of evidence turn up that hasn't been handled to death. My guess is if that existed, it would have turned up by now. So I

think it's unlikely that unless something miraculous turns up, it's unlikely we're going to be able to use DNA to solve this particular issue. As for the fascination, it's an unsolved mystery. And people love unsolved mysteries because they want to try and solve it themselves. And I can completely understand that. And people go down rabbit holes. But sadly, I think it's going to be one of these ones that we probably just don't know the answer to. I want to reflect a little bit on this particular suspect because it's an incredibly tragic story alongside the already horrifying tragic story of the Whitechapel murders more broadly. And it's a story of an individual who obviously suffered

incredible mental illness at the expense of himself, at the expense of his family, his sisters who were trying to fit into a community where they were already on the outside. So he's such a peripheral figure and he ends up in institution after institution. And from the police perspective, he's described as being quote, a low class Polish Jew. And it's easy to see why the police would look to someone like Kuzminski to pin this on. I suppose you could say on the one hand that the evidence is quite damning. His name appears to be mentioned by multiple police who did work on the case. But we also know that the men working in the police at this time came with their own prejudices and very much at an institutional as well as personal level

that the police paperwork from this period, their record in terms of arrests, in terms of interrogation, in terms of policing on the street had its own biases and its own brutalities. I don't know if I buy that he was a realistic victim. Do we know anything about what happened at the end of his life? Yes, he dies in the asylum that he was last placed in in 1919 and he was 53. And those who looked after him at the asylum says, and this is their word, not mine, but they called him harmless, that they hadn't experienced that kind of violent tendency that has been associated with him afterwards. For me, there's not enough evidence here.

Listen, if you're tuning into these episodes to be like Anthony and Maddie are going to find out who Jack the Ripper are, you might as well skip ahead to another episode now, because we will never claim to do that. And that's not the purpose of these episodes. It's to explore the reasons around why some of these men were named as suspects in the context of 1888, but also in the context of the 20th century when a lot of them are named. And in Kosminski's case, we have mental health coming into the picture. We have these concepts of failed masculinity. We have concepts of his Jewishness, his immigrant status, and the otherness of his identity in so many ways brings him into

focus but it didn't bring him into focus in 1888. It didn't. I will say that this case for me, it's made me think about my own ancestral presence in this moment and the parallels really with Kosminski and his journey from Poland to England and what that looked like and coming into that community. But it's also allowed us to go out onto the street level, unfortunately the same streets where these women were brutally killed, thinking particularly about Elizabeth and Catherine on the night of the 30th. But we've also

been able to stand there and hear the police footsteps and to see the graffiti that was on the walls, to think about how the policing in that space was done, how they managed the crowds, what public opinion and mood was like in that moment. And it's also taken us into the home of Kosminski and a Jewish family with three sisters struggling to care for a mentally ill member of their family who is violent towards them and other women around them potentially. It's taken us into the workhouse, into multiple asylums, into the police records. It's given us a real overview of what it would have been like to be an immigrant in this moment in Whitechapel, what it felt like on the street, and how record keeping was done, how people from the lower classes, from marginal communities were recorded in this period, and how

we can maybe access some of their stories today. And I think sadly, in a lot of cases, including this one, the way to access some of these histories is through true crime. ACP. Speaking of which, as we leave Aaron Kosminski behind us, we will turn our attentions in the next episode to a painter, an artist who it is suspected painted some of his experiences as potentially Jack the Ripper into his work. Tune in next time to find out about his history and why he has become involved in this case. If you've enjoyed this episode, we have a large back catalogue of Jack the Ripper related episodes

and others that are totally different but equally as interesting. You can find those wherever you get your podcasts. If you've enjoyed this, please leave us a five star view. It helps people find us and it helps to promote the episodes wherever people are listening. Thank you so much for listening and join us again for episode 3 in this limited series on the men who would be Jack the Ripper.