No more Whitechapel speculation?

The recent days have brought about the amazing news that the mystery of Jack the Ripper has finally been solved using the latest forensic DNA technologies. And as the Finnish newspapers have noted, the analyses were all done by a Finn, Dr Jari Louhelainen, a senior lecturer in molecular biology at the Liverpool John Moores University. This work was apparently partly funded – or at least publicized as a world exclusive by that every archaeologist’s favourite read, The Daily Mail. At least there is a book out available on the matter.

Map of Whitechapel (from whitechapeljack.com)

Elsewhere in the Independent the naysayers were suggesting that this is all unreliable and there is no guarantee that there was no cross contamination when these new analyses were carried out. The story is quite amazing. A man called Russell Edwards had seen Johnny Depp movie ‘From the Hell’ and started his ‘extensive’ research into the matter. I assume this research was more thorough than mine that happened when ‘Ripper Street’ TV series by the BBC started some years ago and I spent one night reading the Wikipedia on the Whitechapel murders. He made his way to the National Archives and has read original documents in Kew.

However, Russell made an even more far reaching additional step: he bought in an auction in 2007 an old tatty, bloody shawl in Bury St. Edmunds (as you do) that had already featured in a Channel 5 documentary. This had allegedly been taken from a murder scene of Catherine Eddowes by a police man called Amos Simpson and had never been washed by the lucky wife of the police man who had got it as a present. Unwashed and dirty – soaked in what turned out to be blood and semen in the analyses. It was tucked away and a descendant of this policeman, one David Melville-Hayes, wrote a letter and gave his word that this was true and the shawl had been taken with a permission from policeman’s superiors. Melville-Hayes had even given the shawl to the Crime Museum, which had put it into the storage, since the provenance could not have been proven. The shawl was more expensive than an assumed alcoholic prostitute could afford and one had to believe that Jack the Ripper came with a shawl that he did not take with him afterwards. Thus, Melville-Hayes returned and reclaimed his gift back and sold it instead.

Russell managed to find Dr Louhelainen and some descendants of both Catherine Eddowes and the main suspect of all times, Aaron Kosminski, who had been sent to an asylum about the same time as the gruel murders came to an abrupt end. Amazingly, Dr Louhelainen could find DNA of the ancestors of both Eddowes and Kosminski – or their descendants. This is the dubious provenience and provenance that raises the eyebrows together with the quality of the analyses and descendant DNA. The quality of the latter seems to be fine with Eddowes’s three times great-grantdaughter and a female relative of Kosminski’s sister. It seems plausible that the mystery has been solved.

These new breakthroughs of forensic science do have something of a letdown in them. Even if it is exciting that Richard III has been found in a Leicester car park and was not chucked into the river and that Aaron Kosminski was the lunatic who hated women and slashed them, the mystery is disappearing. Undoubtedly, there will be a series of new mysteries and unsolved dilemmas, but nothing seems better than an unsolved murder mystery with out-of-this-world details. Now the endless line of TV series (Ripper Street, Whitechapel etc. etc.) and the cottage industry of home-made sleuths may come to an end. Luckily, something stays: the mental image of a murder landscape along the narrow lanes of Whitechapel. More research is also carried out about the women murdered and it is clear that they may not have been prostitutes, but have had more complicated stories.

As an interesting note, one can see that the Wikipedia entry of the Jack the Ripper has been locked until September 10, 2014 due to an 'editorial dispute'. Russell's book is out on September 9, 2014. It seems some Ripperlogists are not happy... Pseudo-academic publication disputes!