Aaron Kosminski
Aaron Kosminski | |
---|---|
Born | Aron Mordke Kozmiński 11 September 1865[1] |
Died | 24 March 1919 | (aged 53)
Nationality | Polish |
Occupation(s) | Barber, hairdresser |
Known for | Jack the Ripper suspect |
Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozmiński; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish barber, hairdresser, and suspect in the Jack the Ripper case.
Kosminski was a
Police officials from the time of the murders named one of their suspects as "Kosminski" (the forename was not given), and described him as a Polish Jew in an insane asylum. Almost a century after the final murder, the suspect "Kosminski" was identified as Aaron Kosminski; but there was little evidence to connect him with the "Kosminski" who was suspected of the murders, and their dates of death are different. Possibly, Kosminski was confused with another Polish Jew of the same age named Aaron or David Cohen (real name possibly Nathan Kaminsky), who was a violent patient at the Colney Hatch Asylum.
In September 2014, author Russell Edwards claimed in the book Naming Jack the Ripper to have proved Kosminski's guilt. In 2007, he had bought a shawl which he believed to have been left at a murder scene and gave it to biochemist Jari Louhelainen to test for DNA.
Life
Aaron Kosminski was born in Kłodawa in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents were Abram Józef Kozmiński, a tailor, and his wife Golda née Lubnowska.[6] He may have been employed in a hospital as a hairdresser or orderly for a time. He emigrated from Poland in 1880 or 1881, likely with his sisters' families. The family initially lived in Germany. A nephew of his was born there in 1880 and a niece in 1881. It is not known precisely when Aaron left Poland to join his sisters or whether he lived in Germany for any length of time, although he may have left Poland as a result of the April 1881 pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the impetus for many other Jews to emigrate. The family moved to Britain and settled in London sometime in 1881 or 1882. His mother, who was listed as a widow, apparently did not emigrate with the family immediately, but had joined them by 1894. It is unknown whether his father died or abandoned the family, but he did not emigrate to Britain with the rest of them. It is known that he had likely died before 1901, and an 1887 death certificate indicates that an Abram Kosminski had died in the Polish town of Koło, only five miles from Grzegorzew, the hometown of Kosminski's father.[7][8][6]
In London, Kosminski embarked on a career as a barber in Whitechapel, an impoverished slum in London's East End that had become home to many Jewish refugees who were fleeing economic hardship in Eastern Europe and pogroms in Tsarist Russia.[6] However, he may have worked only sporadically: it was reported that he had "not attempted any kind of work for years" by 1891. He possibly relied on his sisters' families for financial support, and may have lived with them at 3 Sion Square in 1890 and 16 Greenfield Street in 1891, indicating that his sisters possibly shared responsibility for caring for him and he alternated living between their family homes.[7]
On 12 July 1890, Kosminski was placed in
Jack the Ripper suspect
Between 1888 and 1891, the deaths of 11 women in or around the Whitechapel district of the East End of London were linked together in a single police investigation known as the "Whitechapel murders". Seven of the victims suffered a slash to the throat, and in four cases the bodies were mutilated after death. Five of the cases, between August and November 1888, show such marked similarities that they are generally agreed to be the work of a single serial killer, known as "Jack the Ripper". Despite an extensive police investigation, the Ripper was never identified and the crimes remained unsolved. Years after the end of the murders, documents were discovered that revealed the suspicions of police officials against a man referred to as "Kosminski".[12]
An 1894 memorandum written by Sir
In 1910,
In 1987, Ripper author
Anderson claimed that the Ripper had been identified by the "only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer", but that no prosecution was possible because both the witness and the culprit were Jews and Jews were not willing to offer testimony against fellow Jews.[16] Swanson's notes state that "Kosminski" was identified at "the Seaside Home", which was the Police Convalescent Home in Hove near Brighton. Some authors express scepticism that this identification ever happened, while others use it as evidence for their theories. For example, Donald Rumbelow thought the story unlikely,[28] but fellow Ripper authors Martin Fido and Paul Begg thought there was another witness, perhaps Israel Schwartz,[29] Joseph Lawende, or a policeman.[30] In his memorandum, however, Macnaghten stated that "no-one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer", which directly contradicts Anderson's and Swanson's recollection.[31] Sir Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police at the time of the murders, scathingly dismissed Anderson's claim that Jews would not testify against one another in his own memoirs written later in the same year, calling it a "reckless accusation" against Jews.[32] Edmund Reid, the initial inspector in charge of the investigation, also challenged Anderson's opinion.[33] There is no record of Aaron Kosminski in any surviving official police documents except Macnaghten's memo.[34]
In Kosminski's defence, he was described as harmless in the asylum. He had originally been taken into custody for threatening either his sister or the sister of a witness to his admittance with a knife, and brandished a chair at an asylum attendant in January 1892, but these two incidents are the only known indications of violent behaviour.
DNA evidence claims
2014 Louhelainen study
On 7 September 2014, Jari Louhelainen, an expert in historic
In his book Naming Jack The Ripper, Edwards names Kosminski as Jack the Ripper. Edwards was inspired to try to solve the case after the release of From Hell, the 2001 Johnny Depp film about the Whitechapel murders.[41] He bought the shawl at auction and commissioned Louhelainen, with Dr. David Miller assisting, to analyse it for forensic DNA evidence.[41] Edwards states that Kosminski was on a list of police suspects but there was never enough evidence to bring him to trial at the time. Kosminski died at the age of 53 of gangrene of the leg in a London mental hospital in 1919.[42] He said that the DNA samples proved that Kosminski was "definitely, categorically and absolutely" the person responsible for the Whitechapel murders committed by Jack the Ripper. He told The Independent, "I've got the only piece of forensic evidence in the whole history of the case."[39] He continued, "I've spent 14 years working on it, and we have definitively solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was. Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt. This is it now—we have unmasked him."[41]
Criticism of the report included complaints that the findings first appeared in Britain's tabloid
Professor Alec Jeffreys, the forensic scientist who invented DNA fingerprinting in 1984, initially commented that the find was "an interesting but remarkable claim that needs to be subjected to peer review, with detailed analysis of the provenance of the shawl and the nature of the claimed DNA match with the perpetrator's descendants and its power of discrimination".[39] Jeffreys and others later stated that a claim presented in the book as a statistically significant match with the DNA from Eddowes's descendant—a sequence variation described as 314.1C and claimed to be rare—was the result of an error in nomenclature for the common sequence variation 315.1C, which is present in more than 99% of people of European descent.[45]
Former City of London Police officer and crime historian Donald Rumbelow criticised the claim that the evidence proved Kosminski was Jack the Ripper, saying that no shawl is listed among Eddowes's effects by the police.[46][47] Mitochondrial DNA expert Peter Gill said the shawl "is of dubious origin and has been handled by several people who could have shared that mitochondrial DNA profile".[46] The shawl or other material could have been contaminated before or while DNA was being tested;[48] two of Eddowes's descendants are known to have been in the same room as the shawl for three days in 2007, and in the words of one critic, "The shawl has been openly handled by loads of people and been touched, breathed on, spat upon".[46] Despite the criticisms, Louhelainen continued to defend his work.[49][50]
2019 Louhelainen study
Louhelainen's 2014 findings were criticised as they had not been subject to peer review by other scientists or investigators.[39][51] In March 2019, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published a study analysing the mitochondrial DNA from cells extracted from a shawl claimed to have been found near the body of victim Catherine Eddowes, as well as samples from maternal relations of the victim and suspect (Kosminski). This study, conducted by scientists at Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Leeds, stated in its conclusion that "the presence of mtDNA on the shawl matches the female victim's mtDNA derived from stains on it and that mtDNA also on the shawl matches the suspect candidate's mtDNA"; however, Figure 7 of the same paper shows two differences between the suspect candidate's mtDNA sequence and the sequence obtained from the shawl, and in their conclusion the authors state, "According to the SWGDAM 2013 guidelines, if samples have two or more nucleotide position differences, they can be excluded as coming from the same source or maternal lineage, except when heteroplasmy is encountered." There is no suggestion that heteroplasmy is present.[3]
Kosminski and "David Cohen"
Another Polish Jew proposed as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders was
The implication is that Kaminsky's syphilis was not cured in May 1888 but in remission, and he began to kill prostitutes as an act of revenge because it had affected his brain. However, Cohen's death certificate makes no mention of syphilis but gives the cause of death as "exhaustion of mania" with
Nigel Cawthorne dismissed Cohen as a likely suspect because in the asylum his assaults were undirected, and his behaviour was wild and uncontrolled, whereas the Ripper seemed to attack specifically and quietly.[57] In contrast, former FBI criminal profiler John Douglas said in his 2000 book The Cases That Haunt Us that behavioural clues gathered from the murders all point to a person "known to the police as David Cohen ... or someone very much like him".[58]
In popular culture
A BBC documentary Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, broadcast in 2019 and presented by Emilia Fox, concluded that Kosminski was the most likely suspect.[59]
A waxwork with Kosminski's likeness was created for the 2022 reopening of the Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors exhibition.[60]
See also
References
Notes
- ^ "Akt urodzenia Aarona Mordki Kuźmińskiego" [Birth certificate of Aaron Mordke Kuźmiński]. Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu. 15 September 2014. Retrieved 15 September 2014.
- ^ "Does a new genetic analysis finally reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper?". Science Magazine. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
- ^ PMID 30859587.
- ^ Adam, David (15 March 2019). "Does a new genetic analysis finally reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper?". Science. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
- ^ Coyne, Jerry (19 March 2019). "Adam Rutherford calls the Jack the Ripper identification "a joke"". Why Evolution Is True blog. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
- ^ a b c House, Robert (March 2006). "The Kozminski File". Ripperologist. New York City: Mango Books. Retrieved 21 March 2019 – via Casebook.org.
- ^ a b c House, Robert. "Casebook: Jack the Ripper – Aaron Kosminski Reconsidered". casebook.org. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
- ^ Begg, pp. 269–273
- ^ Colney Hatch Register of Admissions, quoted in Begg, pp. 269–270
- ^ .
- ^ Asylum case notes quoted by Begg, p. 270; Fido, p. 216 and Rumbelow, p. 180
- ^ Begg, Jack the Ripper: The Facts, p. 345
- ^ Woods and Baddeley, p. 125
- ^ a b Macnaghten's notes quoted by Evans and Skinner, pp. 584–587; Fido, p. 147 and Rumbelow, p. 142
- ^ Anderson, Robert (1910). The Lighter Side of My Official Life. Hodder and Stoughton. Retrieved 26 August 2022.
full text
- ^ a b Quoted in Begg, p. 266; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 236 and Evans and Skinner, pp. 626–633
- ^ Begg, p. 269; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 243; Evans and Skinner, p. 635; Rumbelow, p. 179
- ^ Begg, p. 269; Evans and Rumbelow, p. 253; Evans and Skinner, p. 635; Rumbelow, p. 179
- ^ "Ripper case notes given to museum". BBC News. 13 July 2006. Retrieved 20 January 2010.
- ^ Tendler, Stewart (14 July 2006). "Official: Jack the Ripper identified". The Times. Retrieved 20 January 2010.
- ^ Begg, p. 269; Fido, p. 215
- ^ Marriott, p. 238
- ^ Begg, pp. 269–270
- ^ Fido, p. 170
- ^ e.g. Fido, p. 229
- ^ Begg, p. 273
- ^ a b Whitehead and Rivett, p. 109
- ^ Evans and Rumbelow, pp. 249–253; Rumbelow, p. 182
- ^ Begg, p. 276
- ^ Fido, pp. 77, 152, 207
- ^ Evans and Rumbelow, p. 255
- ^ Wilson and Odell, p. 78
- ^ Interview with Reid in the Morning Advertiser, 23 April 1910, quoted in Cook, p. 178
- ^ Evans and Skinner, pp. 262, 604
- ^ Fido, p. 228; Rumbelow, p. 182; Whitehead and Rivett, p. 108
- ^ Marriott, pp. 237, 240
- ^ Whitehead and Rivett, p. 108
- ^ "Identity of Jack The Ripper finally 'revealed' with the help of DNA evidence". Metro. 7 September 2014.
- ^ a b c d e Conner, Steve (7 September 2014). "Has Jack the Ripper's identity really been revealed using DNA evidence?". The Independent. Archived from the original on 7 September 2014.
- ^ "DNA tests 'prove' that Jack the Ripper was a Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski". News.com.au. 7 September 2014. Archived from the original on 21 October 2014. Retrieved 7 September 2014.
- ^ a b c "Johnny Depp inspired the hunt for the 'real' Jack the Ripper". The Sydney Morning Herald. 8 September 2014.
- The Dundee Courier. 7 September 2014. Archived from the originalon 7 September 2014.
- ^ Bodman, Susanna L. (6 September 2014). "Jack the Ripper finally identified by DNA? Maybe, maybe not ..." The Oregonian.
- ^ Curtis, L. Perry Jr. (April 2003). "Recent Scholarship on Jack the Ripper and the Victorian Media". Reviews in History: Covering books and digital resources across all fields of history. Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Archived from the original on 13 June 2011. Retrieved 7 September 2014.
- ^ "Jack the Ripper: Scientist who claims to have identified notorious killer has 'made serious DNA error'". The Independent. 19 October 2014. Archived from the original on 19 October 2014.
- ^ a b c Burgess, Kaya (8 September 2014). "DNA row over 'proof' Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper". The Australian.
- ^ Satherley, Dan (8 September 2014). "Jack the Ripper: Mystery solved?". 3 News. Archived from the original on 8 September 2014. Retrieved 8 September 2014.
- ^ Scheinman, Ted (11 September 2014). "Did DNA Evidence Really Identify Jack the Ripper". Slate.
- ^ millenniumprize (11 October 2016). "Millennium Talks: Jari Louhelainen and the case of Jack The Ripper". YouTube. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
- ^ "Jack the Ripper: DNA expert maintains he has solved history's most notorious serial killer mystery". Techly.com.au. 10 November 2015. Archived from the original on 22 May 2018. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
- ^ "Are YOU Jack The Ripper? No. And neither's Aaron Kosminski". Us Vs Th3m. London. 8 September 2014. Archived from the original on 9 September 2014. Retrieved 8 September 2014.
- ^ Fido, pp. 219–220
- ^ Fido, pp. 219, 231
- ^ Fido, pp. 216–219
- ^ Fido, p. 220
- ^ Kendell, p. 80
- ^ Cawthorne, Nigel (2000) "Foreword", in Knight, p. 2
- ISBN 978-0-7432-1239-7.
- ^ Brown, Helen (4 April 2019). "Jack the Ripper: the Case Reopened review – not even Emilia Fox could crack this one". The Telegraph. Retrieved 14 September 2023.
- ^ "The Chamber of Horrors returns to Madame Tussauds this October". Wales Onlin. 16 October 2022. Retrieved 17 February 2023.
Sources
- Anderson, Robert (1910). The Lighter Side of My Official Life. Hodder and Stoughton. Retrieved 26 August 2022.
- Begg, Paul (2003). Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History. London: Pearson Education. ISBN 0-582-50631-X
- Cook, Andrew (2009). Jack the Ripper. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84868-327-3
- Edwards, Russell (2014). Naming Jack the Ripper. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
- Evans, Stewart P.; ISBN 0-7509-4228-2
- Evans, Stewart P.; ISBN 1-84119-225-2
- ISBN 978-0-297-79136-2
- Kendell, Colin (2010). Jack the Ripper – The Theories and the Facts. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley. ISBN 978-1-4456-0084-0
- ISBN 0-7537-0369-6
- Marriott, Trevor (2005). Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation. London: John Blake. ISBN 1-84454-103-7
- ISBN 0-14-017395-1
- Werner, Alex (editor) (2008). Jack the Ripper and the East End. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 978-0-7011-8247-2
- Whitehead, Mark; Rivett, Miriam (2006). Jack the Ripper. Harpenden, Hertfordshire: Pocket Essentials. ISBN 978-1-904048-69-5
- ISBN 0-593-01020-5
- Woods, Paul; ISBN 978-0-7110-3410-5