(NewsNation) — A historian and true crime sleuth may have cracked a case for the ages, sharing his bombshell findings with NewsNation’s “Banfield” Friday night.
Russell Edwards identified a 100% DNA match to locate the real identity of serial killer “Jack The Ripper.”
The infamous killer who terrorized London women may have been 23-year-old Aaron Kosminski, who had long been considered a suspect at the time.
“Oh, without a doubt, 100% it’s him,” said Edwards, who in 2007 bought a shawl that was found at the scene of the murder of Catherine Eddowes.
Who is the real Jack The Ripper?
He tested the shawl using DNA provided by Kosminski’s oldest brother’s great-great-granddaughter.
Kosminski, a Polish immigrant, became a barber in Whitechapel, England, and was in a mental health facility with schizophrenia at the time of his death in 1919.
A composite drawing was done to recreate Kosminksi’s image.
“This face is a facial reconstruction by an expert from the family photos that were given to me by one of the family members, by one of the descendants,” he said. “That’s actually what he looked like.”
Edwards turned his discovery into a book, “Naming Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Reveal.”
“With the evidence that we have, we can actually place Aaron Kosminski at the murder scene,” he said.
What evidence helped identify Jack The Ripper?
The most interesting piece of evidence, he said, is the 9-foot long and 2.5-foot wide shawl that helped bridge history’s mystery with forensic DNA.
It was in a police filing cabinet for over a decade, according to Edwards. Now, it’s in a bank vault, likely to go untested by police.
“They’ve never knocked on the door. And when we originally did this, they certainly weren’t interested. It’s curious that they sort of just not bothered,” Edwards said.
The curious case of “Jack The Ripper” became not a British fascination, not an American fascination, but a global one.
Edwards said, “It’s the eternal ‘who done it.’”
Smoking gun or red herring?
DNA expert and criminal defense attorney Jarrett Ambeau told NewsNation there is nowhere near enough information to definitively identify Jack The Ripper, calling the claim “a mile off.”
He said the DNA testing used was mitochondrial, which is not as accurate as nuclear DNA.
“It doesn’t have the kind of power to identify someone individually that nuclear DNA has, or cellular DNA,” Ambeau said. “We have the second problem of the fact that this DNA is degraded over years.”
The shawl that was used for testing was not preserved as evidence all these 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?” Ambeau questioned. “The information just isn’t there in the science to be able to show exactly when the DNA was deposited and by whom.”
