For more than a century, the name Jack the Ripper has haunted the back alleys of history — a faceless monster who terrorized London’s East End, leaving behind a trail of horror and mystery.

But now, after 137 years, science may have finally closed one of the world’s most enduring cold cases.

New DNA evidence extracted from a centuries-old silk shawl has reportedly confirmed the identity of the Ripper once and for all.

And while the answer might seem familiar, the implications shake the legend to its core.

The story begins with a relic long dismissed as a fraud — a stained shawl said to have been recovered beside the body of Catherine Eddowes, the Ripper’s fourth canonical victim, murdered on the morning of September 30, 1888.

For decades, the item was little more than a curiosity in the world of crime memorabilia, passed between collectors and skeptics who doubted its authenticity.

 

That changed in 2007 when Russell Edwards, an author and amateur sleuth, purchased the shawl at auction.

Unlike others before him, Edwards was convinced it was real.

Determined to solve the mystery that had eluded Scotland Yard, he enlisted the help of Dr. Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in genetic forensics specializing in ancient or degraded DNA.

 

Louhelainen’s task was monumental. The shawl was over 120 years old, contaminated by countless hands and exposed to the elements.

Extracting any usable genetic material seemed nearly impossible.

But slowly, through advanced mitochondrial DNA testing — a method tracing maternal lineage passed unbroken through generations — the team began to see results.

 

First, they needed to confirm the shawl’s authenticity.

Samples from a living female descendant of Catherine Eddowes’s sister were compared to traces of blood on the fabric.

The match was perfect. The shawl, it turned out, was real — it had been at the scene of one of London’s most infamous crimes.

 

But then came the true revelation: mixed with Eddowes’s blood was another genetic signature — male DNA, preserved within trace biological material.

After months of testing, the results pointed to a name once whispered in police circles but long dismissed by history: Aaron Kosminski.

 

The revelation stunned both experts and the public — not because Kosminski was an unknown suspect, but because he had always been hiding in plain sight.

A Polish Jewish immigrant and hairdresser living in the heart of Whitechapel, Kosminski was already on the short list of Scotland Yard’s most likely suspects.

 

Police files from the time described him as mentally unstable, prone to violent outbursts, and known for his deep mistrust and hatred of women.

Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten, writing in 1894, called him “a man of strong homicidal tendencies.”

 

Even more damning were the personal notes of Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, the very man who led the original Ripper investigation.

In the margins of his copy of his superior’s memoirs, Swanson scribbled a chilling annotation: “The murderer was Kosminski… he was sent to an asylum and died there.”

Indeed, Aaron Kosminski was committed to an asylum in 1891 — and from that moment on, the Ripper killings stopped.

 

To understand why this revelation carries such weight, one must return to the world of Victorian London — a city split between opulence and decay.

While the wealthy lived in the grandeur of the West End, the East — particularly Whitechapel — was a hellscape of poverty, disease, and desperation.

 

Nearly a million people were packed into narrow, fog-choked streets.

The infamous “pea-soup” smog — a mix of mist, smoke, and soot — rendered the city nearly blind at night, providing perfect cover for a killer who knew its every shadow.

 

In this grim setting, survival was a daily battle.

Women, destitute and homeless, turned to sex work not out of choice but necessity — a few coins meant the difference between a bed in a crowded lodging house or a night freezing in the alleys.

It was among these women that Jack the Ripper found his victims.

 

The first known murder came on August 31, 1888, when 43-year-old Mary Ann Nichols was found in Buck’s Row, her throat slit almost to decapitation.

A week later, Annie Chapman, 47, was discovered mutilated in a backyard on Hanbury Street.

 

The brutality escalated. On September 30, the Ripper struck twice in one night — first killing Elizabeth Stride, then, less than an hour later, butchering Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square.

It was at Eddowes’s crime scene that the infamous shawl was found.

 

Finally, on November 9, the Ripper committed his most horrific act. Mary Jane Kelly, only 25, was murdered inside her small room in Miller’s Court.

The violence was unspeakable — a scene so gruesome that seasoned investigators reportedly wept upon entering.

 

And then, suddenly, it stopped. The killer vanished into the fog, leaving behind one of history’s greatest mysteries.

The police response was unprecedented but hampered by the limits of Victorian science.

There were no radios, no fingerprints, and no DNA. Crowds trampled over evidence before investigators could arrive. Journalists turned crime scenes into spectacles.

In one notorious instance, a bloody apron belonging to Eddowes was found beneath a chalked graffiti message: “The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

 

Terrified of sparking anti-Semitic riots, the police commissioner ordered it erased — destroying what may have been the Ripper’s only written clue.

 

As panic spread, the press fanned the flames. A taunting letter signed “Jack the Ripper” appeared at a news agency, mocking the police and promising more blood.

Though likely a hoax — possibly penned by journalists themselves — the name stuck, immortalizing the killer in infamy.

 

Meanwhile, detectives compiled their list of suspects: Montague Druitt, a barrister who took his own life after the final murder; George Chapman, a serial poisoner; and, most notably, Aaron Kosminski — the violent hairdresser whose madness was well known in Whitechapel.

But without modern forensic proof, none could be convicted.

 

More than a century later, that proof may finally exist. The mitochondrial DNA extracted from the shawl provided a match to a living maternal descendant of Kosminski’s sister — a genetic link that science could not easily dismiss.

The evidence, combined with historical police testimony and the abrupt end of the murders following Kosminski’s institutionalization, presents a compelling case.

Yet, controversy remains. Many experts question whether the shawl’s chain of custody — handled, displayed, and contaminated for over a century — undermines the results.

Could the DNA belong to a modern handler rather than the Ripper himself? Critics argue that, without sealed evidence and replication by independent labs, the conclusion remains suggestive rather than definitive.

 

For those who have built careers and fascinations around the mystery of Jack the Ripper, the name Aaron Kosminski feels anticlimactic — too ordinary, too real.

He was not a royal, not a surgeon, not an aristocratic monster hiding behind privilege, but a poor immigrant driven by delusion and rage.

The banality of that truth makes it harder to accept.

 

And perhaps that is why the myth has endured for so long — because people prefer the ghost story to the grim reality.

But science, in its cold precision, doesn’t care for legend. It only deals in evidence.

 

Whether one accepts the findings or clings to the mystery, one fact remains unchanged: the nightmare that began in Whitechapel in 1888 has, at last, a name.

 

Aaron Kosminski — the man who haunted London’s fog — may finally have been unmasked.

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