His name is known worldwide. No one ever saw his face. In the autumn of 1888, in Whitechapel, the poorest district of London, five women were murdered in thirteen weeks. All five had their throats cut.
In four cases the body was also opened, and in three, organs were taken away. The killer was never caught and never identified. The name he is known by did not come from a court or from the police. It came from a letter signed, in red ink, Jack the Ripper.
The case file was never officially closed. The letters are still held at Britain's National Archives. And today there is a new claim: a disputed DNA analysis says the killer was a specific man — a barber who died in an asylum, whom history had almost forgotten. Descendants of the victims are now fighting to reopen the case in a British court.
This is what happened in 1888, how the killer got his name, who the named suspect is, and exactly what the DNA can and cannot prove — based on the case files, the inquest records, and the letters themselves. 01 THE ABYSS · WHITECHAPEL 1888 Whitechapel is a district in the East End of London. In 1888 about eighty thousand people lived there, in some of the worst housing in Britain. Police records counted more than two hundred common lodging houses in the district — buildings that rented single beds by the night — sleeping roughly eight and a half thousand people every night.
A bed cost fourpence, about the price of a loaf of bread. Anyone who could not raise fourpence by nightfall slept in the street or walked until morning. The same police records estimated that about twelve hundred women in Whitechapel were surviving, fully or partly, through prostitution. The economics were direct: to earn the fourpence for a bed, a woman took a client into an unlit alley, a backyard, or a doorway.
This is why every victim in this case was found in exactly that kind of place — a dark, enclosed space a few steps from an open street. Police work in 1888 had no forensic tools. Fingerprinting was not adopted by Scotland Yard until 1901, thirteen years later. There was no blood analysis.
Solving a murder depended on witnesses: if nobody saw the killer's face, the police had almost nothing to work with. Whitechapel was policed by the Metropolitan Police's H Division. When the murders began, the ground investigation was led by Inspector Frederick Abberline, a detective who had served about fourteen years in this exact district and knew its streets, its lodging houses, and its criminals in detail. Between the last day of August and the ninth of November 1888 — thirteen weeks — five women were murdered in and around this district.
This is what happened, in order. 02 THE PATTERN EMERGES The first victim was Mary Ann Nichols, called Polly. She was forty-three years old and had five children. On the night of the thirtieth of August she had earned her bed money at least twice and spent it on drink.
At about 1:40 in the morning, the deputy of her lodging house turned her out because she did not have fourpence. Witnesses recorded her answer: "I'll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I've got now." At 2:30 a.m. a friend saw her, drunk, on a street corner.
That was the last time anyone saw her alive. At 3:40 a.m. on the thirty-first of August, a cart driver named Charles Cross, walking to work along a narrow street called Buck's Row, found her lying on her back in front of a stable gate. Her throat had been cut twice, through to the spine.
Her abdomen had been cut open. A doctor examined her at 4:00 a.m. and estimated she had been dead about half an hour. A constable patrolled that street roughly every thirty minutes, and families were asleep a few metres from the gate.
Nobody had heard anything. Eight days later it happened again. Annie Chapman was forty-seven. She had also been turned out of her lodging house that night for lack of fourpence — she asked the deputy to keep her bed for her, saying she would soon have the money.
At 5:30 a.m. on the eighth of September, a witness saw her talking with a man outside number 29 Hanbury Street. At about 6:00 a.m., John Davis, an elderly resident of that house, found her body in the backyard — a yard reached through a passage that residents walked through all night. Her throat was cut.
Her abdomen had been opened, her intestines had been lifted out and placed over her shoulder, and her uterus had been removed and taken away by the killer. At the inquest — the public court inquiry held after a violent death to establish how the person died — the examining doctor testified that the removal showed anatomical knowledge: it had been done with a narrow blade, in near-darkness, in a few minutes, without damaging the surrounding organs. Two murders, eight days apart, in the same square mile, with the same sequence — throat first, then the abdomen, organs taken. Police and press concluded it was one man.
The district reacted at once. Crowds chased and beat men on rumour. Police arrested a bootmaker nicknamed "Leather Apron", then released him when his alibis held. Lodging houses that had never locked their doors began locking them.
Women began walking in pairs. The next development in the case was not a murder. It was a letter. THE SAME HAND.
AND IT WAS NOT GOING TO STOP. 03 THE LETTER THAT NAMED A MONSTER On the twenty-seventh of September 1888, a letter arrived at the Central News Agency in London. The Central News Agency was a wire service — it sold news stories to papers across the country, so anything sent there could reach the national press within hours. The letter was written in red ink.
It mocked the police — "they won't fix me just yet" — claimed credit for the murders, and made one specific promise: the next time, the writer would clip off the victim's ears and send them to the police. It was signed with a name nobody had heard before: Jack the Ripper. Scotland Yard treated it as a probable hoax. Senior officers later wrote that they believed it was the work of a journalist feeding the story.
That suspicion was never proven. But three days after the letter arrived, a victim was found with part of one ear cut off. The police could no longer ignore the letter. At the start of October they printed facsimiles of it and posted them outside police stations, asking the public to recognize the handwriting.
Nobody did. What the posters actually accomplished was to publish the signature. The newspapers printed the name, and from that week the unknown killer of Whitechapel was called Jack the Ripper. The name the world still uses came from that letter — and the police themselves believed the letter was fake.
The timing mattered. London in 1888 had dozens of cheap mass-circulation newspapers in direct competition — a situation no city had had before. The Illustrated Police News sold crime with full-page woodcut illustrations. Every development in this case filled front pages for days.
And once the name existed, hundreds of imitation letters signed "Jack the Ripper" arrived at police stations and newspapers from across Britain and abroad — each one requiring police time to check, each one adding to the noise around the real evidence. Public confidence collapsed in steps that can be dated. On the tenth of September, tradesmen led by a builder named George Lusk had formed the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee: civilian night patrols, formed because residents no longer believed the police could protect them. The committee hired private detectives and petitioned the government to offer a reward.
Queen Victoria herself pressed her ministers about the failing investigation. The letter had given the killer a name, and the press had made it national. Three days after it arrived, he killed two women in one night. THE KILLER NOW HAD A NAME.
HIS OWN JOKE. 04 THE DOUBLE EVENT At 1:00 a.m. on the thirtieth of September, a man named Louis Diemschutz drove his pony cart into Dutfield's Yard, off Berner Street, arriving at the club where he worked as steward. The pony pulled to the left and refused to go forward.
Diemschutz struck a match. A woman lay inside the gate with her throat cut and blood still running from the wound. She was Elizabeth Stride, forty-four years old, born in Sweden. Her body was warm and carried no other injuries.
The doctors concluded she had been attacked only minutes earlier — and the police concluded that the arriving cart had interrupted the killer, possibly while he was still standing in the dark yard. Catherine Eddowes was forty-six. At 8:30 that evening she had been arrested for being drunk in the street, and she slept it off in a cell at Bishopsgate police station. At 1:00 a.m.
— as Stride's body was being found — the police released her. She walked toward Mitre Square, about ten minutes away. Mitre Square lay just inside the City of London, which has its own police force, separate from the Metropolitan Police. A City constable walked through the square at 1:30 a.m.
and found it empty. He came back on his round at 1:44. In those fourteen minutes Eddowes had been killed: her throat was cut, her face was deliberately cut, part of one ear was severed — the exact injury the Dear Boss letter had promised — her abdomen was opened, and her left kidney and most of her uterus were removed and taken away. Two murders in one night, forty-five minutes apart, under two police forces with no shared command.
A follow-up postcard signed Jack the Ripper called it "the double event", and that phrase became its permanent name. At 2:55 a.m., a Metropolitan constable found a piece of Eddowes's apron, cut off and bloodstained, dropped in a doorway on Goulston Street, back inside Whitechapel — which showed the killer had run east, into Whitechapel, after the murder. On the wall above it was a sentence written in chalk: "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing." Whether the killer wrote it has never been established. What happened next is established.
Whitechapel had a large Jewish immigrant population, and there had already been anti-Jewish crowd violence during the Leather Apron scare. Sir Charles Warren — Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the head of London's police — came to Goulston Street in person and ordered the writing washed off before it could be photographed, because a street market would fill the area at daybreak and he feared a riot. The only possible written message from the killer was destroyed on the direct order of the man leading the hunt. It remains the single most criticized decision of the investigation.
Two weeks later, on the sixteenth of October, George Lusk — the vigilance committee chairman — received a small cardboard box in the post. Inside was half a human kidney. The letter with it was headed "From Hell". The writer claimed the kidney came from Catherine Eddowes, and that he had fried and eaten the other half.
Eddowes was missing her left kidney. The doctors who examined the kidney in the box could not agree on whether it was hers, and the question has never been settled. TWO MURDERS. ONE NIGHT.
ZERO WITNESSES. 05 MILLER'S COURT, AND THEN SILENCE The last of the five was Mary Jane Kelly. She was about twenty-five — the youngest — and the only one who had a room of her own: number 13 Miller's Court, a single room roughly three and a half metres square, off Dorset Street. The rent was four shillings and sixpence a week, and she was twenty-nine shillings behind.
On the morning of the ninth of November, her landlord sent his assistant, Thomas Bowyer, to collect the arrears. Bowyer knocked at 10:45 a.m. No answer. One window pane was broken; he reached through it, pushed aside the coat hanging there as a curtain, and looked in.
Every earlier murder had been committed outdoors, in minutes, under the risk of interruption. This one had happened in a private room, behind a closed door. The doctors who examined the scene estimated the killer had spent around two hours in that room. What Bowyer saw is recorded in the police surgeon's report, and these are its clinical facts: Kelly lay on the bed.
Her face had been cut until she could not be recognized. The surface of her body had been extensively cut away. Her organs had been removed and placed around the room, on the table beside the bed. Her heart was missing.
Burned remains of clothing were in the fireplace — investigators concluded the killer had burned them for light while he worked. The police photographed the room, and those photographs still exist in the archives. This murder is documented more completely than any of the others. And with it, the series ended.
Kelly was the last of the five deaths that investigators then, and historians now, attribute to this killer. No arrest. No confession. No further letter the police considered genuine.
The institution hunting him was already breaking. Sir Charles Warren, the police commissioner, had resigned on the eighth of November — the day before Kelly was found — after months of public criticism and a dispute with the Home Office over the handling of the case. The investigation itself continued for years: officers interviewed more than two thousand people, investigated more than three hundred, and detained around eighty. No one was ever charged.
For the next hundred years the case produced theories but no new evidence. What eventually reopened the question was two internal police documents that were never meant to be published — and one piece of cloth. AND THEN THE MURDERS JUST... STOPPED.
06 THE BARBER, THE SHAWL, AND THE DNA The first document is the Macnaghten memorandum. In 1894, Sir Melville Macnaghten, Chief Constable of Scotland Yard, wrote an internal memo to rebut a newspaper story that had named the wrong man. In it he listed the three suspects the police considered most likely. One: Montague Druitt, a barrister found drowned weeks after the last murder.
Two: Michael Ostrog, a Russian confidence trickster. Three: "Kosminski, a Polish Jew", resident in Whitechapel. The memo was confidential and only surfaced decades later. The second document is more specific.
In 1910, Sir Robert Anderson — head of the detective branch during the murders — published a memoir claiming the killer had been identified by a witness but never prosecuted. Anderson did not print the man's name. His former case officer wrote it down. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, the man who had managed the Ripper files day to day, made pencil notes in the margins of his private copy of Anderson's book.
The notes stayed in his family and were only made public in 1987, decades after his death. Swanson wrote that the suspect had been identified, at a police convalescent home, by the only witness who ever got a clear view of the killer; that the witness then refused to testify; that the suspect was watched day and night by City of London detectives; and that he was later committed to Colney Hatch asylum. The final line reads: "Kosminski was the suspect." These were private notes, written with no audience and no reason to perform — that is why historians treat them as significant. But they record a policeman's belief, not evidence tested in any court.
Aaron Kosminski was a barber, a Polish Jew whose family had come to Whitechapel in the early 1880s. In 1888 he was in his early twenties and lived with his brothers and sisters inside the murder district. In February 1891 he was committed to Colney Hatch, a London asylum. The admission records describe auditory hallucinations, refusal to accept food from other people, and eating bread from the gutter.
He remained in institutions for the rest of his life and died in Leavesden asylum in 1919, aged fifty-three. He was never charged with any crime. No photograph of him exists — not one image of his face survives anywhere. The piece of cloth is a shawl.
In 2007, a businessman named Russell Edwards bought a stained Victorian shawl at auction. The story sold with it: a police sergeant named Amos Simpson had taken it from the scene of Catherine Eddowes's murder in Mitre Square as a gift for his wife; she refused to wear it; the family kept it, unwashed, for over a century. No 1888 police list of Eddowes's possessions includes a shawl. The entire chain of custody rests on that family account, and whether the shawl was ever in Mitre Square has never been verified.
Edwards gave the shawl to Dr Jari Louhelainen, a molecular biologist at Liverpool John Moores University. Louhelainen reported recovering old DNA from the fabric. Some of it matched a living descendant of Catherine Eddowes. Some matched a living maternal-line descendant of Aaron Kosminski's sister.
In 2019 the analysis was published in a peer-reviewed forensic journal. Then the problems were documented one by one. The paper contained an error in its DNA nomenclature, which was acknowledged. The shawl had been handled, displayed, and photographed for years without protection, creating contamination risk.
And the DNA type used — mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the maternal line — is shared by every person in the same maternal lineage, potentially thousands of people. It can prove a sample did not come from a lineage. It cannot prove the sample came from one specific person. The journal attached an expression of concern to the paper — a formal published notice that the editors have documented doubts about the work.
The victims' descendants applied for a new inquest — the only legal procedure through which a British coroner could officially name the killer. In 2023 the application was refused. In 2025, Edwards declared the match was "one hundred percent" Kosminski, and through 2025 and 2026 the descendants have continued the legal fight to reopen the case. Louhelainen himself has stayed careful: researchers in this field do not say "solved".
What exists today is a police belief from the 1890s and a disputed DNA claim — both pointing at the same name, neither one a verdict. A NAME, WRITTEN IN DNA. BUT IS IT PROOF? 07 WILL A COURT EVER SAY HIS NAME?
Here is where the case stands. Five women — Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly — were murdered in 1888. The police files name a chief suspect: Aaron Kosminski, written down independently by two senior officers who worked the case. A DNA analysis of a shawl links the same man to one of the victims — if the shawl is genuine, and if the science holds.
Every link in that chain is disputed: the 2019 paper carries a formal expression of concern, the shawl's presence at the crime scene has never been documented, and mitochondrial DNA cannot single out an individual. For the claim to stand, every one of those links would have to hold. There is exactly one procedure that could turn any of this into an official finding: a coroner's inquest. The application was refused in 2023.
The victims' descendants are still fighting for one in 2026. Until an inquest examines the evidence, no institution of the British state has ever named the killer — and "Jack the Ripper" remains, legally, nobody. There is also a commercial fact. The mystery earns money: it fills museums, walking tours, books, and television series, and a solved case earns less than an eternal one.
That pressure works against closure, and it is part of the reason closure has not come in a hundred and thirty-seven years. If the DNA claim is true, the most famous killer in history was a barber in his twenties who was never arrested and never photographed, who died in an asylum in 1919 — and whose name the world only learned because two policemen wrote it down in private. Whether a court will ever say that name out loud now depends on the inquest fight that continues through 2026. 137 YEARS.
ONE RULING AWAY FROM A FACE.
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