Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888

by Edwards, Russell

  By the beginning of 2007, David Melville-Hayes had made the decision to sell the shawl. Now in his seventies, suffering from poor health and with his own two sons not interested in taking on custody of the shawl, he felt it was time to pass this peculiar family heirloom on to a permanent owner who, appreciating its potential significance, would look after it as well as he had done. He told me that whenever he took the shawl out of its wrapping he felt a coldness descend on the room, and a strange feeling would come over him, which strengthened his resolve to sell it. An auction seemed to be the logical step forward and Melville-Hayes decided that proceeds from any sale would go to the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. This is where I came into the picture.

  My belief in the importance of the shawl increased the more I knew about it: the provenance sounded authentic, although I am always cautious of stories that have been handed down through families. But here there was enough powerful detail to convince me. The next, obvious, step was to take up where the TV documentary failed: I determined to find scientific proof to back up the history of the shawl. Despite their inconclusive testing, I was convinced that the key lay in the scientific developments of recent years.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FINDING HUMAN BLOOD

  I was driving along the M6 on my way to North Wales, where my business was based. I had to make an important phone call at 6.30 p.m., so I pulled into the service station on the toll road that loops around Birmingham, and called the number.

  We can’t nail this until we can test a living descendant of Catherine Eddowes,’ said Ian Barnes, Professor of Molecular Palaeobiology at the University of London. I had called Ian soon after I started my search for a scientist who could investigate the shawl for possible DNA. It was the summer of 2007, and I had approached Mark Thomas, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at University College London. Professor Thomas was an expert in ancient DNA and in 1994 was one of the first people to read the DNA sequence of the extinct woolly mammoth. He put me on to Ian Barnes, one of his colleagues and another specialist in ancient DNA.

  Ian was very enthusiastic about the project, and we chatted more over the phone over the next few days. I was keen to find out if the stains on the shawl were human blood.

  But it was the phone call I made from the service station car park that shifted my research up a gear. Ian told me then that the only value of extracting DNA from the shawl would be if there was something to compare it with, and we would need the DNA of a direct descendant of the victim. Just getting DNA from the shawl was a pointless exercise: it proved nothing unless it could be tied to Catherine Eddowes.

  So this had to be my next effort. I am not a trained researcher, although I have become much better over the years since I started this quest, but I soon heard about a book which gave family trees for the descendants of the Ripper victims. It was out of print, and I found that there were only a couple of places in the country where I could see it. One was the Cambridge University Library, which was where I chose to go, as we were living in Newmarket at the time. I went into the hallowed library on a day pass, having been photographed, issued with a badge, and told that I had to make notes in pencil (to prevent books being defaced) and that I could not photocopy more than 10 per cent of the book. I ordered the book, waited about twenty minutes until it arrived, and then began excitedly tracing Catherine’s family.

  To my great disappointment the family tree ended with Catherine Sarah Hall, who was descended from Catherine Eddowes’ daughter, and who died in Blackheath in the 1950s. It was interesting to see that the name Catherine had come down through the family, but ultimately very frustrating because I was no closer to finding a living descendant. Then I wondered if the author of the book had deliberately kept the family tree short of the present generation, perhaps to protect the family from unwanted attention.

  I managed to make email contact with him, tracing him through a Jack the Ripper website. His response to my request for help was a sharp rebuff. The message was clear: leave well alone. I was disappointed and annoyed at his attitude at the time, but today I can understand that he was protecting the family members. Interest in anybody descended from a victim (or suspect) in the Ripper case is very strong and the author of the book had spent many years gaining their trust and treating their stories with sensitivity. He probably felt that the last thing he needed was some newcomer to the field barging in and potentially spoiling the relationship. At the time, however, it was quite a blow. All my attempts to find a living descendant had stalled. I felt, as I have done at several points on this journey, as if I was trying to run uphill in flip-flops and the hill was getting steeper all the time.

  For a time it went on to the back burner, because I was completely absorbed in family matters and business problems. I put the shawl out of my mind but I never forgot about it, and would from time to time take it out and look at it, but it was certainly not centre stage in my life.

  I was trying to sell my care homes business, and the sale was long and protracted, and took more than six months, and was a time-consuming and complicated affair. The shawl and the Ripper were not at the forefront of my mind. Eventually the sale went through in the spring of 2008, and I made a good enough profit to be able to take some time off from business and decide what I was going to do next.

  A couple of years after Alexander was born we decided to try for another baby, because we didn’t want him to be an only child. There were major gynaecological problems, and again we had to use IVF. We were excited when we heard Sally had conceived twins, boys, at the beginning of 2008, but we were warned immediately that one of them had a heart defect and would not survive. The other one was healthy, but at risk because of the position of the other baby and the medical team told us that there was only a slight chance of the baby surviving.

  We lived with it day by day: is this going to be the day when we lose our babies? It was a harrowing, unbearably painful time. It was the only thing we could focus on. The day came when Sally felt less movement and she knew, deep down, that one of the babies had died. It was the healthy baby who had died. His twin could not survive without open-heart surgery immediately after being born. We had to make the heartrending decision to put our poorly baby to sleep, and then Sally had to go through the hell of an induced labour after carrying our dead twins inside her for almost a week.

  We had, at the time, moved into our apartment in Brighton Marina, and we were living there when we lost the twins. It was while we were there that something happened to rekindle my enthusiasm for the search for the Ripper. In Brighton I joined a gym, mainly to distract me from the moment-to-moment agony of worrying about the twins. Going to a gym is a very normal thing to do, but one that set me off again on my pursuit, for the oddest of reasons. When I went for the induction, the session where a fitness trainer assesses what you are capable of, the young man running the session said to me: ‘Do you have any hobbies? What do you do in your spare time?’

  He was only making polite conversation, in the same way that hairdressers always ask if you’ve got any holidays lined up. I replied with similar platitudes about going to the cinema, and out for restaurant meals. Then I added, ‘And I’ve got this strange, rather geeky interest.’

  I don’t know why I said it, because I knew from experience that other people tended to find my interest in the Ripper rather ghoulish. But naturally he asked what it was, and I told him.

  ‘Oh, that’s very interesting. I’m descended from one of the suspects, Aaron Kosminski,’ he said.

  I was floored. Not only was he claiming to be descended from a suspect, it was the suspect, the one Alan McCormack had told me with great certainty was the Ripper. Had fate just handed to me another amazing connection?

  It turned out to be a complete red herring. Another blind alley for me to stumble down. There was a story in the young man’s family about Kosminski being their ancestor, but research proved it to be completely wrong, confirming my innate suspicion about family yarns, even though I was foll
owing my hunch about the shawl on the basis of just such a yarn. But the young man had told me in good faith, and although I wasted a lot of time, I am grateful that he rebooted my interest in the case, and also reminded me that as well as the shawl’s connection with Catherine Eddowes, I also had the Kosminski angle to pursue.

  Thanks to the fitness trainer, I started on a substantial amount of research into Aaron Kosminski’s life and background. For a time, this was the main thrust of my research, and Catherine Eddowes was pushed into the background.

  Soon after we moved back from Brighton to our Hertfordshire home, I was working on maps of the East End, trying to sort out in my head where Kosminski had lived, and how close it was to the places the victims were murdered. It was hard to find maps of the area as it was in the 1880s, but I discovered Booth’s maps ‘descriptive of London poverty’, a series of maps made between 1886 and 1903 by the philanthropist and social reformer Charles Booth as part of his crusade to influence government policy towards the poor. The maps are available online, and proved to be a lot more use to me than Google street maps.

  It was on Halloween, 31 October 2008, that I was finally able to look at the layout of the area, and I was blown away by what I saw, realizing how close Greenfield Street (now renamed Greenfield Road) where Kosminski lived is to the scene of the third murder. It is less than a minute’s walk from the scene to his door. I couldn’t sleep, and jumped into my car in the early hours of the morning and drove to the East End. I stood at the corner of Greenfield Road looking over at Berner Street, and was filled with an immense sense of being right, of having found the Ripper, even though I had no more proof than anyone had for any of the other suspects. But I also had a deep conviction that one day, whatever it took, I would have the proof.

  This was when I first walked his routes through the streets, timing them to see just how easy it was for him to slip around the area and then take refuge back at home.

  But before I could go further with my Kosminski research – or any other Ripper research – I was again overtaken by family life. The great news is that Sally became pregnant, and this time it was a normal, healthy pregnancy which resulted in our daughter Annabel, who was born in June 2009. I also embarked on a series of new business ventures, building up a property portfolio, and once again the shawl and everything to do with Jack the Ripper was very much on the back burner.

  Then, in April 2011, I received an email from Andy and Sue Parlour who had always fronted the ownership of the shawl for me. They had been approached by a TV company to take part in a documentary. The programme was to feature former Metropolitan police detective and forensics expert Robin Napper conducting a ‘hunt’ for Jack the Ripper. The TV company said that Napper would be concentrating on the suspect Frederick Deeming and he was going to use cutting-edge forensic techniques to link Deeming with the Whitechapel murders.

  Deeming had, as I’ve said, at one time been my top choice as the likely suspect, and I was not the only person who favoured him: for many years, the Black Museum in Australia exhibited his death mask as that of Jack the Ripper. Despite claims of Deeming being in South Africa at the time of the murders, research for the documentary showed he was possibly in Hull in the north of England at the time. When Deeming’s skull was located in Australia, the potential to extract DNA material from it for a new investigation would, clearly, make compelling television. But, as I had learnt, they needed something to compare that DNA with, and that meant some piece of contemporary evidence from 1888. As far as the programme makers were concerned, this meant either the alleged Ripper letters or the shawl. In the end, they tried both.

  I agreed with the Parlours that, although I had turned down several approaches from television companies, this one was worth doing. I knew they were wrong about Deeming, after the information I had been given by Alan McCormack and my subsequent research into Kosminski (of which more later) but I was interested in them having DNA from Deeming: it was the solid scientific approach I felt needed to be taken, and if they got DNA from the shawl at least I would know if the stain was blood, and if it was human. So I agreed to cooperate with the programme makers.

  In the documentary, Napper met the Parlours who showed him their framed portions of the shawl and Napper, in a contrived dialogue, asked where the rest of it was, and was told that I had it. For the filming, I took Napper to a ‘secret location’, a property I was developing at the time, so he could inspect the shawl. From here it became a bit of a farce. Napper looked at the shawl, enthused about it resembling the ‘published descriptions’ and then dropped the big question: Would you be happy to have it forensically tested?’ he asked me.

  I had been expecting it, but I was genuinely concerned about damage to the shawl by any invasive testing. The film crew assured me that no damage would result, and that I could be there to watch and voice my concerns, should I have any. So with my agreement in May 2011 the analysis went ahead at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and was filmed for the show.

  On the day of filming we discussed what testing was to be conducted and I realized that the work was going to be mainly superficial. There were going to be surface samples of one of the stains taken, and some samples from one of the edges of the shawl, which was explained to me as being the most likely point where the killer would have held it.

  It was clear that the tests were not invasive, and although I was relieved that the shawl was not being damaged, even a layman could see they were also likely to be ineffectual. I remember thinking ‘This doesn’t look like it’s going to cut it . . .’ The scientists were shown pointing out ideal areas for analysis, basically the stains that everybody had been saying for years were bloodstains, and then proceeding to rub cotton buds over the patches in an attempt to gather material from which DNA could be extracted.

  I found out later that all they were likely to get from this method was dead skin cells, dust or somebody else’s dandruff – superficial and recent detritus and hardly a definitive examination of a deep, ingrained century-old bloodstain. This method is the standard way to obtain samples from textiles for DNA analysis in recent cases, but it is wholly inadequate for an item as old as this, with many years of possible contamination from everyone who had handled the shawl. The scientists had not seen the shawl before, and were given a very short time frame, and short notice. Not surprisingly, the documentary declared that the results were inconclusive.

  Interestingly, after taking samples from the back of a stamp that was attached to an envelope that had once contained a Ripper letter, the analysis showed that the person who licked the stamp was definitely not Frederick Deeming, because it was the DNA of a woman. Apparently it would have been common in the nineteenth century for somebody posting a letter to take it to a post office where a counter clerk would put the stamp on, making any attempts to get the Ripper’s DNA from the saliva on the back of a stamp a complete waste of time.

  The ‘tests’ conducted on the shawl in May 2011 were no better than those done in the earlier 2006 documentary, and no results of the tests were included in the programme. So once again we had a Ripper documentary with high production values, lots of talk about ‘hard evidence’, ‘reinvestigating the case’, ‘new suspect’ but no evidence that actually solved anything. I was disappointed, because I was even more convinced that the answer to this whole case lay in science, the science that the shawl could, I believed, provide.

  But making the documentary was a seminal point in this story, because it was on this film set that I met a man who has become a vitally important part of my search for the Ripper, the man whose scientific expertise, allied with my determination to get all possible evidence out of the shawl, has meant that we can now lay the Ripper case to rest.

  When I first saw Dr Jari Louhelainen my initial thought was ‘scientist’. He looks what he is: he’s a giant bear of a man, with spectacles and tousled hair, and a Scandinavian pragmatism that makes him seem like an absent-minded professor. I have come to know him well, and ther
e is much more to him than this: he has a hinterland. He is an ex-ice hockey player, an avid skier, he is married to another scientist, Riitta, and he has two young daughters. He left his native Finland in 1994 when he moved to Sweden to finish his PhD at the internationally renowned Karolinska Institute, one of the world’s leading medical universities (which is also one of the Nobel Prize-awarding bodies). This is where Jari met his wife and where their first daughter, Rebecca, was born in 1997. After staying in Sweden for six years, he moved to England in 2000.

  On Jari’s part, when he first saw me he thought I was ‘eager and intense’. Those are good words to describe how I felt: I wanted to get on with decoding the information I was sure the shawl contained. Since that first meeting we have become allies in the quest, with me being the driving force while Jari was, and still is, the neutral, balanced expert who did not always understand my need for everything to be done as quickly as possible.

  He says: ‘When I met Russ, he was so different to the scientists and policemen I normally deal with, who have no personal interest in what they are doing, and are sometimes dispassionate. He was so enthusiastic, I did not know what to make of it all. At first, I didn’t take it too seriously.’

  Jari had heard of Jack the Ripper: he really is a global brand. In Finland he is known as ‘Viiltaja Jack, which translates as Ripper Jack.

  ‘I did not know too much about the case, it had not been of great interest to me,’ he says. ‘When I was asked to take part in the programme I regarded it just as another job.’

  Jari is a Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology at LJMU, as well as Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Helsinki and he has two major lines of research: forensic genetics and medical/mammalian genetics. The latter includes gene studies of top athletes, in collaboration with the university’s Department of Sport Science.