For a long time now, people have been yearning to pin the identity of Jack the Ripper on a Jew, namely Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jewish immigrant. As far back as Melville Macnaghten’s 1894 Memoranda, of the main suspects, Kosminski was far more likely to have done the deed than Thomas Cutbush. About Kosminski, Macnaghten wrote:
[Kosminski was ] a Polish Jew, & resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, especially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889.
Fast forward to 2007, at which point Russell Edwards, a businessman, purchased a shawl found near the body of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, Catherine Eddowes. DNA was extracted from blood found on the shawl and the scientists published.
“It was Kosminski!” or so they said, which can also be read as, “‘Twas a dirty Jew done the deed.”
Imagine the chagrin of the experts when it was now discovered that there may have been an error in the analysis of the DNA. A decimal placed wrong, which means that GADZOOKS! It might not have been the Jew after all.
From the Daily Mail:
Scientists claim that Dr Louhelainen made an ‘error of nomenclature’ in his analysis and therefore the 126-year-old mystery of the killer’s identity still remains.
They suggest Dr Louhelainen may simply have put a decimal point in the wrong place, leading him to mistakenly assume the DNA sequence he found was far more rare than it was and could be matched to descendants.
In fact, they say, the sequence he found could be shared by the majority of the population and therefore cannot be matched to Kosminski – one of the suspects in the string of murders which took place on London’s streets more than 100 years ago – or the Ripper’s victim.
Science: taking the blood out of matzoh, one day at a time.
