New DNA Tests CONFIRMS Jack the Ripper’s Identity After 137 Years — And It’s NOT Who You Think | HO!!

Jack the Ripper Unmasked: The DNA That Finally Named History’s Most Elusive Killer

For more than a century, he was a ghost.

A silhouette in the fog.
A knife in the dark.
A name without a face.

Jack the Ripper.

London whispered it.
Newspapers screamed it.
History never solved it.

Until now.

After 137 years of fear, speculation, and obsession, modern science has finally done what Victorian justice could not. A single, fragile piece of evidence—dismissed for generations—has spoken.

And it has named him.

Aaron Kosminski.

The revelation did not come from a courtroom or a confession. It came from a stained silk shawl, forgotten in a box, sold at auction in 2007 for the price of a curiosity.

Most experts had ignored it.

One man did not.

Russell Edwards, an author and amateur detective, had spent years consumed by the Whitechapel murders. When the shawl appeared at auction, he saw not a relic, but a possibility.

DNA.

The fabric was said to have been recovered from the scene of the Ripper’s fourth canonical victim, Catherine Eddowes, murdered in the early hours of September 30, 1888.

A police officer had taken it home.
It passed through generations.
It gathered dust, doubt, and disbelief.

Edwards took a risk that bordered on absurd.

The shawl was over a century old.
Handled by countless people.
Exposed to time, air, decay.

Most scientists would have laughed.

He did not.

Edwards brought the fabric to Dr. Jari Louhelainen, a molecular biologist at Liverpool John Moores University, a specialist in ancient and degraded DNA.

The kind of DNA everyone else assumes is gone forever.

The analysis began under sterile conditions, targeting visible biological stains on the silk. What the team sought was mitochondrial DNA—mtDNA—genetic material passed exclusively through the maternal line.

It does not recombine.
It does not dilute.
It endures.

If a living maternal descendant could be found, the comparison could span centuries.

First came the crucial question.

Was the shawl real?

Researchers located a living descendant of Catherine Eddowes’ sister and compared her mtDNA to the bloodstains on the fabric.

They matched.

The shawl had been at the murder scene.

But that was not all.

Mixed with the victim’s blood were other biological traces—material consistent with semen. Genetic residue left by the killer himself.

For the first time, Jack the Ripper had left something behind that science could read.

Investigators turned to a suspect long whispered about in police files but never officially named.

Aaron Kosminski.

A Polish Jewish immigrant.
A Whitechapel resident.
Twenty-three years old in 1888.

A living maternal descendant of his sister was found. DNA was collected. The comparison was run.

The result was a match.

After more than a century, the most notorious serial killer in history finally had a name.

“His name is Aaron Kosminski.”

Not a royal.
Not a surgeon.
Not a mastermind hiding in plain sight.

Just a man.

And that, perhaps, is the most unsettling truth of all.

Kosminski arrived in London in the early 1880s, fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. He settled with his family in the East End, working as a hairdresser in the very streets where the murders occurred.

By contemporary accounts, he was deeply unwell.

Modern psychiatrists reviewing historical records believe he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He experienced hallucinations. Violent impulses. A profound hatred of women.

Victorian police suspected him.

They always had.

Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten named Kosminski in an internal memorandum, describing him as possessing “strong homicidal tendencies.”

Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who oversaw the entire investigation, went further.

In the margins of a memoir, written years later in his own hand, Swanson confirmed the killer’s identity.

Kosminski.

Committed to an asylum.
Never released.
Died there.

The murders stopped in 1891.

The same year Kosminski was institutionalized.

The timing was not coincidence.

The police knew.

They simply could not prove it.

To understand why, you must understand Whitechapel.

Forget Victorian elegance.
Forget gaslit ballrooms and silk gloves.

Whitechapel was hell.

Nearly a million people packed into narrow streets. Overcrowded tenements. Disease. Hunger. Despair.

The fog was not romantic. It was lethal. Coal smoke and damp air formed “pea-soup” smog so thick you could not see your own hand.

Streetlamps failed.
Darkness ruled.

Women slept in doss houses for four pence a night. If they could not afford a bed, they rented a coffin. If not that, a rope to lean on while sleeping upright.

This was survival.

The Ripper’s victims were not symbols. They were women at the edge of existence.

Mary Ann Nichols, forty-three.
Annie Chapman, forty-seven.
Elizabeth Stride, forty-four.
Catherine Eddowes, forty-six.
Mary Jane Kelly, about twenty-five.

They were desperate.

And desperation made them vulnerable.

The Ripper did not need brilliance. He needed familiarity. Knowledge of alleys. Of escape routes. Of how fog swallowed sound.

Police launched the largest manhunt in British history.

Two thousand interviews.
Eighty suspects detained.
Thousands of leads.

They failed.

Not from incompetence, but from limitation.

There was no forensic science. No fingerprints. No blood analysis. Crime scenes were trampled by crowds and reporters within minutes.

Witnesses contradicted each other. Fog erased faces. Darkness rewrote memory.

They even destroyed evidence themselves.

Near Eddowes’ murder scene, police found a chalk message:

“The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

Fearful of riots, the message was erased before it could be photographed.

Gone forever.

Then came the letters.

Most were hoaxes.
One was not.

A box arrived at the home of George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Inside was half a human kidney.

Eddowes had lost one.

Doctors confirmed it was human. Diseased. Consistent.

Still, nothing could be done.

The police held the truth in their hands and had no way to use it.

When Dr. Louhelainen’s findings were published in 2019, they did not claim perfection. Ancient DNA never does.

They acknowledged contamination risks. Degradation. Limitations.

But combined with historical records, police testimony, geography, psychology, and timing, the conclusion was overwhelming.

Aaron Kosminski.

Critics still argue. They always will.

But history rarely offers certainty.

Only probability sharpened by evidence.

The bitter irony remains.

Jack the Ripper was not stopped by justice.

He was stopped by madness.

His illness consumed him until his family committed him. The streets grew quiet. The legend grew louder.

A mentally ill immigrant did not fit the myth.

So the myth endured.

Until science spoke.

The fog has lifted.

And history has finally answered back.