The supposed identity of Jack the Ripper was revealed, again, last week. But we shouldn't be so quick to close the case. The 131-year-old murder mystery is as fixed in our cultural imagination as the fog-enshrouded Victorian streets of London. The Ripper legend has yielded a seemingly endless list of potential suspects over the years, including author Lewis Carroll and painter Walter Sickert. Now these dubious tales are begetting legends of their own, aided and abetted by dubious science.
Consider the myth that has grown up around a shawl that supposedly belonged to the Ripper's fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes. Since the shawl's first appearance in the news in 2014, media outlets have identified Jack the Ripper as Aaron Kosminski, a Polish immigrant who worked in Whitechapel, and whose DNA is said to have been found on Eddowes's shawl.
But such evidence is far less conclusive than it first appears. Dr. Turi King, a geneticist at the University of Leicester who sequenced the DNA of Richard III, is one of a number of experts who are unconvinced. She told the website Live Science that so many people have handled the shawl over the years that the DNA found on it means very little. Whereas evidence from contemporary crime scenes is collected by technicians wearing protective clothing, face masks, and latex gloves, and is then stored in sealed receptacles, the so-called Eddowes shawl has been handled and exposed to the DNA of untold numbers of people, including the descendants of both Kosminski and Eddowes. “All you need to do is breathe anywhere near the shawl” to put DNA on it, King said. This is especially problematic since the researchers only examined certain low-resolution segments of the mitochondrial DNA, and not nearly enough to rule out many other potential sources. “The fact that there's a match with a relative, who may or may not have breathed on the shawl in the first place … statistically, that's not very strong evidence,” King said.
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