One key thing about the Jack the Ripper murders that ensures that these crimes, committed over 130 years ago, still hold a fascination for many people around the world, is that they were never solved. We don’t know who Jack the Ripper was and who was responsible for brutally ending the lives of five women – possibly more – in 1888. Even the name, one of the most famous names in criminal history, is a stand-in.
Across three centuries thousands of people have dedicated lifetimes to trying to solve the mystery. The five Jack the Ripper crime scenes have been visited and revisited by countless investigators and fascinated tourists. Professionals and amateurs, contemporaries and historians; they’ve all proposed identities for the Ripper and these have ranged from British royalty to a Portuguese cattle herder.
One name that has consistently been near the top of any list of probable identities for Jack the Ripper is Aaron Kosminksi.
Two of the most senior officers of the Metropolitan Police, charged with attempting to solve the Whitechapel Murders, named Kosminski as a prime suspect.
Sir Melville Macnaghten was Chief Constable of the Met in the 1890s – although he was not in the police when the murders took place, he had full and direct access to the people and evidence of the time and the results of the investigations that continued in Whitechapel for several years after the murders had ceased and the press had largely lost interest. In 1894 Macnaghten wrote a confidential memo for the Metropolitan Police files, summarising the findings of six years of investigation.
Macnaghten’s memo named three prime suspects. One of them was:
“Kosminski…a Polish Jew and 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, and had strong homicidal tendencies; he was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889.”
The man actually in charge of the investigation into the Whitechapel murders and trying to catch Jack the Ripper in 1888 was Chief Inspector Donald Swanson. In 1910, following his retirement, he received a signed copy of the memoirs of Sir Robert Anderson. Anderson had been Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at the time of the murders.
When Swanson’s copy of the memoirs was first made public in the 1980s, it revealed that Swanson had made numerous notes in the margins, adding further details and context to incidents mentioned by Anderson. These included the name ‘Kosminski’ next to a passage where Anderson asserts “the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him.”
Swanson’s notes state that the witness refused to testify because both men were Jewish, and the witness did not wish to give evidence that would inevitably condemn the other man to death. Swanson also states that having been brought in for identification, the suspect was returned to:
“…his brother’s house in Whitechapel he was watched by police by day and night. In a very short time the suspect, with his hands tied behind his back, was sent to?Stepney?Workhouse?and then to?Colney Hatch?and died shortly afterwards – Kosminski was the suspect.”
So Macnaghten, with full oversight of the collected evidence, put forward Kosminski as a key suspect. One of the most senior police officers of 1888 stated that the murderer had been positively identified but not apprehended and the man who led the Ripper investigation explicitly named him Kosminksi.
Following the emergence of Swanson’s notes, researcher Martin Fido combed the records of Stepney Workhouse and the mental hospital at Colney Hatch and found only one person whose name and timeline fell in with Macnaughten and Swanson’s statements – Aaron Mordke Kosminski.
Kosminski was a Polish-born Jewish immigrant. It is not known exactly when he arrived in London, but his father arrived in the early 1870s and set himself up with some success as a tailor in Whitechapel. Aaron seems to have arrived nearly a decade later (around 1880) when he would have been about 15 years old.
The public record of Kosminski’s life in London in the 1880s is virtually non-existent, beyond his name appearing in news reports covering a local court case of several people having unmuzzled dogs in public (this was in December 1889).
The historical record for Kosminski only really starts in July 1890 when he was admitted to the Mile End Old Town Workhouse, following a sudden mental disturbance (he was deemed to be “able-bodied but insane”). Despite this, he was discharged into his brother in law’s care three days later.
He was readmitted to the workhouse seven months later in February 1891, following another episode. He was now declared “of unsound mind” and the next day was committed to the asylum at Colney Hatch. The inciting incident this time was that he had threatened his sister with a knife.
Kosminski’s patent notes from Colney Hatch reveal something of his condition and mental state – “he declares he is guided & his movements altogether controlled by an instinct that informs his mind; he says he knows the movements of all mankind.” Interviews with family and locals recorded that Kosminski would wander the streets and pick food out of the gutters and drink only water from public taps. The patient said that same ‘instinct’ that drove his movements caused him to do this and refuse food and drink offered or prepared by others. He asserted that he was being poisoned and that the only way to avoid this was to scavenge discarded food.
Other notes state that at Colney Hatch Kosminski was “melancholic” (depressed), “practised self-abuse” (masturbation – the ‘solitary vices’ mentioned by Macnaughten) and refused to wash or be washed. Notably, despite the attack on his sister being the reason for his detainment, his committal order noted that he was not suicidal or a danger to others.
His records indicate that he had worked as a barber and hairdresser, but that at the time of his arrival at Colney Hatch he had “not attempted any kind of work for years” – perhaps indicating that his mental and physical condition had been deteriorating for a while before things became so bad that his family were unable to care for him and he had to be hospitalised. Kosminski’s notes state that he was generally harmless during his time in the asylum, apart from one instance where he tried to attack an attendant with a chair.
Was this the pattern of behaviour and mental illness that could point to Kosminski being Jack the Ripper?
Certainly, the known facts of Kosminksi’s life fit the timeline that can be constructed by combining the information provided by Macnaghten, Anderson and Swanson; Kosminski could have been taken before a witness during his first three-day spell at Mile End Old Town Workhouse. Many believe that this witness was Joseph Lawende, a Jewish cigarette salesman who saw a man with Catherine Eddowes in Church Passage (leading to Mitre Square, where her body would be found) less than ten minutes before her murder.
After this key moment, the suspect was then returned to his home, where a watch was kept on him (as per Kosminski’s discharge to his brother-in-law and sister’s house), later to be readmitted to the workhouse in restraints (following the knife attack) and then sent to Colney Hatch.
There are errors – Macnaghten places the date of Kosminski’s first admittance to the workhouse more than a year earlier than reality, states the wrong workhouse and says that the suspect had died in the asylum. But none of these are case-breaking mistakes, especially considering that Macnaghten was writing partially from secondary sources and partially from remembered conversations with those directly involved in the case. Although the Mile End Old Town Workhouse (where Kosminski was twice admitted) and the Stepney Workhouse (where Macnaughten erroneously claimed he was admitted) were different institutions, the former was in the parish of Stepney, even if it wasn’t the designated institution for it – an understandable error.
The only major divergence is Macnaghten’s insistence that Kosminski was dead, when in fact he was still very much alive at the time of the memo, and indeed he was still alive when Swanson made his notes in Anderson’s memoirs – Kosminski would not die until 1919.
We’ve seen that ‘Kosminski’ was a top suspect of the police officers who worked the Ripper case, and that Aaron Kosminski was the man who was positively identified as the murderer in the years after the crimes were committed.
But you’ll surely notice that beyond the one positive witness identification, there is no other evidence connecting Aaron Kosminski to the crimes of Jack the Ripper.
That seemed to change in 2014 when amateur investigator and author Russell Edwards commissioned DNA analysis on a shawl he had acquired at auction. The shawl was claimed to have been found next to the body of Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes. Edwards published a book, ‘Naming Jack the Ripper’ which states that stains on the shawl had proven to be blood and seminal fluid. Mitochondrial DNA (passed down the female genetic line) had been matched with Catherine Eddowes’ known descendants. The seminal fluid had also yielded viable genetic samples, and these had been confidently mDNA matched with a traced descendant of Kosminski.
Although several aspects of this analysis were criticised at the time, Edwards restated them in a second book in 2024 which also stated definitively that Kosminski was the perpetrator.
If the forensic analysis is correct, when combined with the positive identification from the 1890s, it would seem to provide the first real evidence that Aaron Kosminski – or anyone else – really was Jack the Ripper.
Several questions have been raised against the evidence put forward by Edwards. The provenance of the shawl is far from certain; it is not mentioned in the otherwise comprehensive list of objects found with Catherin Eddowes’ body when the scene was secured within minutes of the crime’s discovery.
Its status as a piece of Ripper evidence is based on a family tradition that says that it was taken from the scene by one of the police officers who attended that night in 1888 – and the man in question, PC Amos Simpson, was of the Metropolitan Police, not the City of London police that had jurisdiction over Mitre Square where Catherine Eddowes was murdered and whose men secured and documented the crime scene. Numerous and unknown people have handled the item in the years since.
There is some debate about whether it is a shawl at all. The descendants of Amos Simpson had two sections cut from the fabric to be framed and sold, and in total this textile item measures eight feet by two feet – extremely large for a shawl or cloak, especially for the 5ft tall and slim Eddowes. It has been suggested that the ‘shawl’ is more likely a table runner, which immediately raises serious questions about its provenance and any evidence collected from it.
There have also been questions about the quality of any DNA and other forensic evidence collected from the shawl after more than 130 years. It is possible to obtain good results from samples after this time, but only in cases where items have been most carefully preserved. The tests commissioned by Edwards have yet to be independently reproduced, and one review of the results raised serious doubts due to errors in the interpretation and presentation of the raw data.
Others have pointed out that even if the forensic evidence is true – that the blood on the shawl is Catherine Eddowes’ and the seminal fluid is from Aaron Kosminski – that does not directly implicate Kosminski in Catherine’s murder or any of the other Whitechapel murders. It may only mean that Kosminski engaged in sexual activity with Catherine shortly before her murder.
Neither this DNA evidence nor any other surviving accounts or evidence directly place Aaron Kosminski at any of the Jack the Ripper crime scenes at the relevant times.
However, the forensic evidence claimed by Edwards is, for now, the only such evidence even claimed to link an individual to one of the Ripper murders. And it builds on the web of evidence presented by senior contemporary police officers who suspected Kosminski and asserted that he had been positively identified as the killer.
The evidence against Aaron Kosminski is enough to convince many people that he is the most likely identity for Jack the Ripper, and enough for others to at least continue to rank him very highly as a suspect. But, as seems to be the way with the case of Jack the Ripper, no firm conclusions can be drawn and every piece of new evidence seems to just raise more questions about this enduring, fascinating and horrifying mystery.
You can learn more about the evidence against Aaron Kosminski, the debate about the forensic evidence and visit the site where the shawl was supposedly recovered and the other Jack the Ripper crime scenes on one of our expert-led tours. Book your tour now!
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