Jack The Ripper Identified Via DNA Evidence

When Jack The Ripper was skulking through the streets of London, ending the lives of sex workers in a most brutal fashion, he could never have imagined that DNA would be the thing that eventually identified him. How could he? Jack the Ripper committed his murders more than 130 years ago, but DNA wasn’t discovered by Watson and Crick until the 1950s. If he knew it was a possibility, he probably wouldn’t have left a scarf behind at one murder scene that was covered in both the victim’s and his own blood.

Now, generations after he became the legendary demon barber, it looks like researchers may have finally cracked the case. Over the years, there have been several people that experts fingered as the ripper including none other than Alice In Wonderland author, Lewis Carrol. In the end, it looks like it isn’t anyone quite that fancy.

According to Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University who tested the bloody scarf, the infamous Jack The Ripper was really just a Polish butcher named Aaron Kosminski. Here’s what the scientists involved in the study had to say:

“We describe for the first time systematic, molecular level analysis of the only surviving physical evidence linked to the Jack the Ripper murders. Finding both matching profiles in the same piece of evidence enhances the statistical probability of its overall identification and reinforces the claim that the shawl is authentic.”

The bloody shawl can be connected to only two of the victims of Jack the Ripper, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, on the night of Sept. 30, 1888 in Whitechapel, but that is considered to be enough of a connection to pin the reported five-18 murders allegedly committed by the Strangler on Kominski.

Source: The Sun