Aaron Kosminski
In 2014, Ripperologist and businessman Russell Edwards published Naming Jack the Ripper, in which he said he had DNA evidence identifying a 23-year-old Polish barber Aaron Kosminski as the killer. At an auction seven years earlier, Edwards bought the only surviving physical evidence from the murders: a bloodied, silk shawl that was found beside the fourth victim’s body. (An officer from Scotland Yard had taken it home with permission.)
Edwards asked scientists at Liverpool John Moores University to analyze DNA from the shawl; the experts linked semen on the evidence to Kosminski, but they wanted to wait to publish the results. Edwards went ahead and used the unpublished results to identify Kosminski in his book, which led geneticists to say it was impossible to be sure if he was right since most technical details of the analysis were not public yet.
According to his book publisher, Simon & Schuster, Edwards had also examined police reports, eyewitness accounts and postmortems, among other evidence.
In 2019, scientists behind the DNA analysis—Jari Louhelainen and David Miller—published their results in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, saying that DNA on the shawl matches that of a descendant of Kosminski. Their analysis also suggested that the murderer had brown hair and eyes, which matches eyewitness accounts. Though that isn’t a unique characteristic, blue eyes are more common than brown ones in England today, the researchers noted.
Critics say the scientists’ analysis did not definitively prove the killer’s identity.
A reader of genetics and archaeology at the University of Leicester, Turi King, raised questions about the origin of the shawl, contamination of genetic material and the methods used to conduct the analysis. She told Live Science in 2019 that the analysis had so many holes that it's a wonder it was published at all.
University of Arizona researcher Felice Bedford published a paper in 2021 saying the analysis was done in a way that raises the odds of a match to a supposed relative “from chance alone.” King told Live Science that she believed the descendant of Kosminski who participated in the study had been in the presence of the shawl; all he needed to do is breathe near it to get his DNA on the evidence.
The results also do not show key details about the specific genetic variants identified and used in the DNA comparison, reported Science.org. Bedford wrote that the analysis shows “only confusing crude graphical blocks” that mislead the reader about the odds of a chance match and do not allow for independent verification. The scientists say these graphics are easier for non-scientists to understand, especially "those interested in true crime.”
Bedford also pointed out that information that could have facilitated an independent evaluation of the claim that the murderer was of Russian Jewish descent was withheld. The scientists behind the discovery say they did not publish certain information under the 2018 Data Protection Act, the U.K.’s national data privacy law. Bedford disagrees with their assessment of the Act.
The journal later published an “expression of concern" about the conclusions drawn from the mtDNA analysis with the consent of the authors.
In 2025, in light of the new DNA evidence, descendants of several victims of Jack the Ripper called for an inquest and asked that the killer be named in court.
Montague John Druitt
On December 31, 1888, a waterman by the name Henry Winslade discovered a man’s body in the river Thames in west London and called authorities. Large stones were found in the man’s pockets, which had kept his body from surfacing for about a month. His brother, William, identified him: It was Montague John Druitt.
Druitt was a barrister and assistant schoolmaster. He is said to have had an interest in surgery. At an inquest about Druitt’s death, William revealed that 20 days before Druitt was found, a friend had told him that the barrister had not been seen in his chambers for more than a week. Searching for his brother, William learned that he had been dismissed from his position at the school in November for “some serious trouble.”
After the last murder associated with Jack the Ripper, Druitt had disappeared.
Druitt’s death was ruled a suicide. A note at his house addressed to William read, “Since Friday I felt that I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die.” Druitt’s mother, Ann, had been in an asylum since June for suicidal depression, which ran in her family.
Five years after Druitt’s death, The Sun published a series of articles claiming a man in an asylum in a village west of London was Jack the Ripper. Sir Melville Macnaghten, the chief constable of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, then wrote what is known as the “Macnaghten Memorandum,” a private police memo, naming three people more likely to be the serial killer. Topping the list was Montague John Druitt. Second was Kosminski.
George Chapman
George Chapman, also known as Seweryn Klosowski, was a Polish barber. Three of his wives died under suspicious circumstances; when antimony was found in his third wife’s system after her death, the other spouses’ bodies were exhumed as the police investigated the deaths.
Chapman was arrested in 1902 for poisoning his wives and was ultimately sentenced to death. He was referred to by journalists as the “Southwark Poisoner.”
The poisoner is considered a suspect in the Jack the Ripper killings because of his criminal record, timing and knowledge of medicine. He moved to the area where the killings took place in August 1888, around the time they began, and when he left for the United States, the killings stopped. Then, murders occurred in the U.S that were apparently similar to those committed by Jack the Ripper.
For decades it was believed the five women Jack the Ripper murdered were sex workers (though historian Hallie Rubenhold’s book, The Five, argues that three of the women were not), and in 1891, a sex worker was stabbed at a New York City hotel, closely mirroring the Whitechapel killings. While Chapman and his wife lived in New Jersey, similar crimes were reported in the area.
Chapman had also studied medicine in Russia, which gave him an understanding of the human anatomy.
But critics of this theory point out that for Chapman to be Jack the Ripper, he would have had to change his means of killing from stabbing and ripping women to poisoning them.
Francis Tumblety
American “quack” doctor Francis Tumblety was considered a “very likely” suspect by former head of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard, John George Littlechild, according to an 1888 letter to a journalist and author.
Tumblety had been arrested for “gross indecency,” a term then used for homosexual activity, on November 7 and released on bond on November 8. The next day, Jack the Ripper’s fifth victim was found with her heart and uterus removed. Charles A. Dunham, a Civil War double agent, told The New York World that year that Tumblety kept jars of surgically removed uteruses in his office.
Tumblety was arrested again on November 12 under suspicion of the Jack the Ripper killings but jumped bail, fleeing to New York.
