Ripping Yarns:Who Was Jack The Ripper And Why Does He Get A Free Pass?

Jack the Ripper was a brutal murderer of women but unlike (most) other brutal murderers of women he's seen almost as a celebrity. Screaming Lord Sutch And The Savages released a record about him, there's a chip school in Whitechapel (appropriately enough) called Jack the Chipper, and Jack the Ripper walks tend to be very popular. Many years ago I went on one hosted by Donald Rumbelow who's known as one of the world's leading Ripperologists!

The fact that such a thing as Ripperologists even exist suggest maybe Jack the Ripper has become an almost mythical figure when he was, in fact, a real person committing atrocious crimes. To the best of my knowledge there's no chip shops or walking tours devoted to Peter Sutcliffe or Dennis Nilsen. Perhaps time plus tragedy equals curiosity and, essentially, a free pass.

Or maybe it's the unsolved nature of the Ripper's crimes, the fact we still don't know who he (and nobody seems to doubt it was a he) was. I was at Skeptics in the Pub - Online (five years in and still going strong-ish) to hear Mike Hall from the Merseyside branch of Skeptics deliver a speech called The Shawl of Suspicion:Why we still don't know the identity of Jack the Ripper and I was prepared to possibly ask a question about why this killer seems to be celebrated rather than damned.

But Mike Hall (who I found to be an excellent speaker) got there first. He talked about the dozens of true crime documentaries we can watch on Netflix and the multiple podcasts and books dedicated to serial killers. He talked about how we all, or most of us, know at least a little about Ed Gein, the Wisconsin murderer who inspired the creation of Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Buffalo Bill (Silence of the Lambs), and Norman Bates (Psycho) but how hardly anybody knows the name of, or anything about, any of his victims.

Mike Hall claimed not to be a fan of mythologising serial killers and none is more mythologised than Jack the Ripper. The trouble is, that put Hall in an awkward position as he was delivering a speech to an admittedly non-paying audience about ... Jack the Ripper. Does that play into the mythology or does it debunk it? In truth, the speech wasn't so much about the Ripper and his crimes but about those who claim to have solved them. A skeptic's guide to amateur sleuthing if you will, using one of the most celebrated unsolved cases of all time.

Jack the Ripper has turned up in Hammer Horror films, in Alan Moore's From Hell, and even in Star Trek where it turns out the serial killer was an alien all along. An alien that would go on to possess Scotty. Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience abound and have done since the time of the actual killings. The first hoax postcards date from 1888 and even the name Jack the Ripper is believed to come from a fraudulent letter claiming to be from the killer.

Yet we still don't know who he was. Or do we? Many believe the Ripper was Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish barber who certainly lived in the Whitechapel area at that time. The smoking gun as regards Kosminski's guilt is believed to be a shawl (the shawl of suspicion) that is said to have been recovered from the body of the Ripper's fourth victim Catherine Eddowes.

It is claimed that a police constable, one Amos Simpson, removed the shawl from the scene so he could present it as a gift to his wife (how lovely, a spunk stained shawl taken from the body of a murdered woman) who thought, understandably, it was a shit gift and put it away, unwashed, in the cupboard where it was handed down through the family for the next century or so.

In the year 2007, Amos Simpson's great nephew auctioned off the shawl and it was bought by the author Russell Edwards who got Jari Louhelainen (an expert in historic DNA analysis) from John Moores University in Liverpool to have a look at it. Louhelainen identified the DNA of both Eddowes and Kosminski and this, Edwards believed and wrote in his book, was proof that Kosminski was the Ripper.

There's a major problem with this version of events though and that is that it's all absolute bollocks. As most stuff that finds its way into The Daily Mail is. But why is it absolute bollocks? Or why does Mike Hall think it's absolute bollocks? That's where his skeptical, inquiring, mind comes in.

Let's start by looking at the shawl itself. No contemporary documentation even mentions the shawl. There is a long and very detailed list of items found on the murder scene. It includes such seemingly insignificant things as a red mitten, a matchbox, and a thimble but for some reason neglects to include an 8ft long silk shawl.

Perhaps that's because light-fingered PC Simpson had already bagged it for his ungrateful wife. That's entirely plausible but there are other issues with the shawl. The blue dye in the shawl suggests that it's not a shawl at all and even if it had been it would have been a very expensive item for someone like Catherine Eddowes to own. She's on record as having recently had her shoes pawned.

Russell Edwards reckons the shawl belonged to Kosminski and he had left it on the murder scene on purpose to give clues to his identity. Obviously DNA testing wasn't around in the 1880s so the clues, according to Edwards, came in the fact that the shawl contained images of Michaelmas daisies and his next murder took place on Michaelmas. A very esoteric clue and one worthy of a QAnon fruitcake or an episode of 3-2-1. Also one undone by the fact that the Ripper's next murder did not take place on Michaelmas.

There's no actual evidence that Aaron Kosminski was ever even at the crime scene. Or, for that matter, PC Amos Simpson. Simpson's jurisdiction didn't cover Mitre Square in the City of London where Eddowes' body was found (it was not even under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police). In fact Simpson's beat was over twenty-five miles away in Cheshunt. Official records list several police who arrived at the crime scene and were involved in the inquest but Simpson's name never appears.

What of the DNA samples found by Louhelainen. Well, DNA is fragile and unless kept in very precise conditions (which the shawl, clearly, was not) it degrades in months. This shawl was over one hundred years old and any samples found would have been all but unreadable. Louhelainen has claimed he'd used a new form of mitochondrial DNA testing to get his samples but that form of testing, regarding blood and semen, can often turn up thousands of possible matches.

So the semen that Edwards and Louhelainen claim they have identified as Kosminki's could actually be anyone's. There's also no evidence anywhere that Jack the Ripper ejaculated at the scene of his crimes. Other DNA tests, including one carried out by Channel 5, have proven inconclusive. It should also be noted that the shawl had been handled by many many people over the years and even included in Jack the Ripper adjacent exhibitions. Edwards has even shared a picture of himself handling it though I wouldn't go so far as to claim he jizzed on it.

In the hunt for the Whitechapel murderer, the Ripper, there were three main suspects. There was the barrier Montague Druitt who died not long before the murders stopped, there was the Russian con man Michael Ostrog, and there was man known simply as Kosminski, a Polish Jew. But was he the same Kosminski?

There are certainly similarities. The surnames are the same, they were both Polish, and they were both Jewish. They also both lived in Whitechapel and were both sent to a lunatic asylum in Colney Hatch. That's a lot of rather big coincidences but Mike Hall had done his research. There were a huge number of Polish Jews living in London at that time and most of them lived in or around Whitechapel and it was not uncommon for poor people to be sent to asylums for jumped up reasons in that era. You could be sent to an asylum for being unemployed or even for having a wank.

The suspect Kosminki was sent to Colney Hatch in 1889 and died soon afterwards but Aaron Kosminski didn't go there until 1891 and died many years later in 1919. In fact the name Aaron Kosminski was not mentioned in relation to the Whitechapel murders until as recently as 1987. None of that, of course, proves Aaron Kosminski's innocence but what it does prove is that we can't be certain of his guilt and that is, I believe, how the law works in this country.

Mike Hall ended his talk by reiterating his belief that we probably shouldn't make cultural icons out of murderers and perhaps we should move on from Jack the Ripper. Which, clearly he hasn't done and, in writing this, neither have I.

A Q&A touched on John Wayne Gacy, Fred West, Ted Bundy, the Moors Murderers, HP Lovecraft, Ben Goldacre, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, the Leather Apron (another serial killer around at the same time as Jack the Ripper, some say the same one), and a 1977 Dr Who episode called The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Mike Hall also mentioned his pet cats (a Skeptics online tradition) who had the rather fantastic names Leopold, Big Chungus, and Hubert Cumberdale.

Thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online, host Gerard Sorko, and Mike Hall for another interesting evening in my front room. Now to focus on something less murdery.