Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888

by Edwards, Russell

  I stood still for a moment to read the text, more or less on the spot where he dragged his victim into the yard. When I looked up from my phone, everything around me felt unreal: the world seemed to be going at high speed, with everyone rushing past, and me marooned in it, walking very, very slowly. I walked along Greenfield Road, where he and so many of Kosminski’s relatives lived, and I paused again, as the full eerie significance hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I was, on his territory, and Jari was telling me we now had, once again, a good sample to work from. It was something I could never have planned. It felt like a dream where you try to run but get nowhere: a weird, nonsensical feeling. I can’t find words to describe it: I was so close to proving he was the Ripper, and at that same moment so close, physically, to where he had lived.

  ‘I’ve got you, you bastard,’ I said to myself, looking around at the street. Knowing so much about the Ripper story, and for so many years having to keep it to myself, whenever I am in the East End I feel like a ghost, an outsider, looking in at it all. When the chattering groups of Ripper tourists follow their guides around the streets he trod, I have wanted, at times, to shout from the rooftops the full truth of the story, but I have always had to bite everything back. And here I was again, getting such momentous news just yards from where he lived, and not being able to share it with anyone.

  It was good news that the sample taken from the shawl was viable, but it still meant that we were a long way back in the process, and that this new sample would have to go to David Miller in Leeds and we’d be waiting for a few more months. Although I was relieved we had another chance, I was still disappointed to have taken several steps back in the hunt, in terms of the time it would take us.

  But I hadn’t reckoned on Jari’s ability to find a way through any problem. The man is a genius, I can’t praise him enough for the way he applies his mind to any problem and finds a solution.

  ‘Do you know what?’ he said. ‘We have the microscope slides on which David found those twelve epithelial cells. I think there may be a way to get the cells from the slides.’

  The slides had been fixed with a fixative and stained with Giemsa, a stain that was invented by an early German microbiologist, and one of its uses is to allow transparent cells to be seen with a microscope. Jari had to find a way to get the cells, which could only be seen with a 400x magnification microscope, off the slides. He explained to me that there was a huge risk of contamination in just scraping them off, and I tried to temper my hopes, because it sounded like a mission impossible. There was no standard scientific procedure.

  ‘I was puzzling about it all the time,’ he said, ‘when I was driving, when I was relaxing, whenever I had a spare moment. When I was in bed before sleeping, and first thing when I woke up. I knew there had to be a way.

  ‘Then I remembered using laser capture microdissection which I had been using in cancer research to isolate just single cells from microscope slides.’

  The method is not used in forensics, but due to Jari’s background and varied research interests he has a huge arsenal of methods up his sleeve, and just now this proved very useful. It was a ground-breaking development in forensics: isolating a single cell from a piece of evidence 125 years old, and then analysing the DNA of that single cell. It was a bit like looking through a telescope, finding a previously unknown planet from another galaxy, then zapping a sample of the planet down to earth to be analysed.

  When Jari told me about laser capture microdissection (LCM) he had to explain what it was and what it could do: over the time we have been working together Jari has had to explain a great deal of science to me, and he has done it very patiently. LCM is a state of the art method of isolating and harvesting cells by cutting away unwanted cells or other debris. A laser is coupled to a microscope and focuses on the tissue. When the cells have been identified and isolated, they can be extracted from the slide one by one. The technique does not alter the form or structure of the cell, which is why it is invaluable in medical research.

  So Jari had hit on a means by which we could extract the DNA we needed, but now the next big problem was: where was a suitable LCM microscope, and how could we use it? Jari knew of several universities and research establishments which had this very expensive piece of kit, but when he approached them they all said no: they were not prepared to allow their technology to be used for forensic purposes. There were protocols attached to its use, and we did not meet them. One university department would have allowed us to use their LCM, but only if Jari had undergone a day’s mandatory special training in its use, and he simply did not have time in his already bursting schedule.

  Again, I have great reason to be grateful to Jari. By this time, he was as much involved in the search for answers from the shawl as I was, and he refused to be defeated. He rang several manufacturers of the LCM, including the Carl Zeiss company in Germany, and from them he procured a list of all their customers in the UK who had the microscopes.

  One name that came up was Epistem, a company which specializes in biotechnology and personalized medicine, with particular expertise in stem cells in the areas of epithelial and infectious diseases. It is based in Manchester, and does a lot of work in partnership with Manchester University.

  Jari rang them, and after so many knockbacks we could hardly believe it when Dr Ross Haggart said yes, he could fit us into a gap in the LCM timetable. So I picked Jari up in Liverpool, drove to Manchester and we went to Epistem, which is located in the heart of the Manchester University area of the city. Jari, the scientist, was allowed to go in, but once again I was outside killing time, hoping everything was going well. I wandered into a church just round the corner: I have always been a spiritual person and I like churches, I always feel good when I’m inside a church. I prayed, selfishly I suppose, for the success of the work with the LCM.

  Jari and Ross spent a couple of hours scanning the whole of David’s slides in high resolution, and they were pretty sure they had located the cells, but could only confirm this by comparing it with David’s original results. Jari said, ‘We found lots of debris, plant cells, even a micro worm, which could have come on to the slide at any point. It was like having a map of London with no street names and having to find Big Ben. My eyes were sore from looking by the time we had finished.’

  In the end what we had was a high-resolution scan of the microscope slides, a few hundred megabytes, and now this had to be compared with David’s images of the epithelial cells. It was a mammoth task, like looking for a needle in a haystack in a field full of haystacks.

  Back in Liverpool Jari set to work in the evenings. Because his family live in Bradford, he spends four evenings a week on his own in Liverpool, and was quite prepared to finish his day job and then start work on this.

  It was laborious and time-consuming work, but after his first long evening he found a cell. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was exactly the same cell as David had found. I was staring at it, I could hardly take it in. Although I hoped I’d find the cells, I had a fair degree of scepticism about my chances,’ he said later.

  My phone pinged with a text to tell me he’d found it. I’d been waiting all evening, knowing he’d started the search, hoping we would get a result, but not daring to believe we would. It was after 1 a.m. when he sent me the message, but I was not asleep. It was a very intense time and I’d been picking up my phone every half hour or so, checking in case I’d missed a message. When it finally came through I was relieved and excited.

  Jari carried on with the search for the next two evenings, spending more than six hours on it. Finding the first cell gave him a boost, plus he reckons he got better at recognizing what he was looking for.

  Having identified them, we now had to go back to Manchester to capture them from the slides. Ross was very helpful again, but because of pressure on his lab we had to be there at 8.30 a.m. Jari caught the train from Liverpool and I picked him up at Eccles station on a raw, cold morning. I was there so early I slept in my car in the
station car park until he arrived, then I dropped him back at Epistem.

  He and Ross worked hard, examining the slides and deciding which cells they could capture. Some cells had no nuclei, a by-product of the staining process, so therefore would yield no DNA. They managed to capture thirty-three cells, having screened them as the right size, the right morphology (form and structure), and confirmed they had nuclei. (David Miller had stopped looking after he found twelve: he had only been trying to confirm that they were there, and when he found a sufficient number he was satisfied.) The cells were tagged by putting an electronic flag on the image (a bit like you do with Google maps) in order to find them again easily. They were then captured using the LCM and put in separate tubes, thirty-three in total. Finding thirty-three may sound a lot, but think how many cells are in a square centimetre of skin: approximately 110,000–125,000.

  All of the cells except one looked like epithelial cells. The odd one looked like a kidney cell. I was tremendously excited when Jari told me this: it is not surprising, remembering that the Ripper removed Catherine Eddowes’ kidney, but it was an unexpected bonus. To date, Jari has not had the time to work on this cell, so we have no confirmation that it is definitely from a kidney, but he says that the morphology very much resembles a kidney cell. (As a cautious scientist, he points out: ‘It could be something else, but when I look at it the first thing that comes to my mind is a kidney cell.’) When there is time, Jari will examine this cell to confirm what he suspects.

  It was after midday when Jari emerged from Epistem, triumphant but exhausted, with the captured cells. I had filled in the tense hours that he was in the lab by walking around Manchester, calling in at a museum, trying to settle in a coffee shop. I was distracted and on edge until I heard the good news. I drove Jari back to Liverpool and we went to Chinatown for a meal. We were both shattered: we had been up very early, and Jari had been concentrating hard, while I was expending a great deal of nervous energy just hoping for a good result. We were so tired we were not jubilant: we spent the meal talking rubbish to each other, and afterwards, when I set off to drive back to Hertfordshire, Jari was genuinely concerned about me making such a long journey in my exhausted state.

  So now we had the DNA from M, the descendant, and we had the cells from, we believed, her ancestor Aaron Kosminski. Now Jari’s great experience and expertise came to the fore, yet again. He decided to do a whole genome amplification, a relatively new technique, on the cell samples. The WGA amplifies (copies) both genomic and mitochondrial DNA from the single cell to a level where we have enough material to do genetic profiling. We already had the DNA from the two descendants, Karen and M, and from the other main people who had handled the shawl, like me and him (to eliminate us).

  Whole genome amplification means that tiny quantities of DNA can be amplified to provide a much greater supply for scientific work. According to Jari, five years earlier we would not have been able to use this method, and although it had been used in genetic sciences it was not routinely used in forensics. It is usually applied to a small number of cells that are in good condition. Here we were talking about one single cell, more than a hundred years old, and not in its best condition. (The other thirty-two cells were being stored in case we needed them in future.) Once again, Jari was working at the frontiers of science.

  If a scientist has only one cell it is virtually impossible to do a whole genome profile from it, but if we can make multiple 100 per cent identical copies of the genetic material which is inside the cell, the task becomes possible. It was back to the lab for Jari, where he isolated single cells, added biological buffers to stabilize them, and then by adding a mixture of chemicals was able to extract copies of the DNA that was inside the cell. He explained it as a bit like a photocopying machine, which will make endless copies of one page of writing: through this technique he could make many copies of all the different DNA samples from the cell, giving him enough material to do DNA profiling and sequencing. Each segment of DNA was amplified about 500-million-fold. After this amplification step we would now, fingers crossed, have enough material for the actual profiling.

  For the profiling, another amplification of the DNA was needed. This second step uses the polymerase chain reaction, which Jari explained to me was the same method used on the samples from Karen, me and him. With a little bit of luck, we would now get the mtDNA fragments amplified from just single cells.

  It was a rainy Friday morning when I got the news that the amplification process had worked, giving us a massive resource to work from.

  It was a major victory: now Jari had to start work amplifying specific segments, and then to do the DNA sequencing. He was about to start comparing it to match M’s DNA against that of the Ripper, when he suffered a serious blow. His father died unexpectedly, back in Finland, and he had to fly there straight away.

  His personal problems obviously took precedence at this juncture, and over the next couple of weeks he had to go back to Finland, twice, to sort everything out. It was a tough time for him, emotionally and physically. Neither he nor I were able to sleep, for different reasons, and we were texting each other late into the night. I really appreciate the fact that as soon as he was back at work, he started work on comparing M’s mitochondrial DNA with that of the cells extracted from the semen stain on the shawl.

  It was a very testing time for me, and I was living on nervous energy, knowing that he was back at work on this crucial stage. I wasn’t sleeping, I lost half a stone in weight, and I was constantly checking my phone and emails for news of the test results. It was quarter past eight on a Friday evening when an email pinged into my inbox titled First Results. I hardly dared read it.

  What Jari had found was a 99.2 per cent match when he ran the alignment in one direction, and going the other way it was a 100 per cent perfect match. These results were fantastic, mind-blowing for me. Jari was cautious, as ever, noting that there were two anomalies and further testing would be needed. He explained that the problem could be because the DNA had been amplified billions of times, and any mistake with the enzyme copying the DNA could also be amplified. The other possibility was contamination, although this was unlikely as he works in a pressurized room with special pipettes and ultraviolet light to eliminate unwanted DNA from other sources. But he was pleased with the result, and he was also pleased with the scientific work that achieved it. As he wrote in an email to me:

  There was a risk that we were genotyping dandruff from me or you. A fingerprint can contain more cells than we had as starting material, so I was really chuffed to see that the quality of the sample was so good. We created a decent sized DNA sample from a single microscopic cell isolated with a laser from the shawl prep (this could be compared with creating a standard size blood DNA sample from a dust particle). Then from this regenerated sample a segment of mitochondrial DNA region was amplified about 500 million fold. And the resulting sequence is 99.2% perfect. If we sequence in the other direction . . . the sequence is 100% perfect.

  He even allowed himself a brief moment of pride and pleasure: ‘I think this has been one hell of a masterpiece of work (quite proud of this) and it would not have been possible to attempt before 2006 as the technologies were not available.’

  Later he said, ‘Given the fact that we are working from amplified cells it is not outlandish that there would be one mistake.’

  I, not as cautious as Jari the scientist, was thrilled: it felt as if we were home and dry. I looked at the attachment he sent me, a multicoloured sequence of blocks that aligned the DNA of M and our suspect, and I could see we had a near-perfect match. Jari explained that the anomaly did not mean there was a difference: it simply meant that the test did not take at that point in the sequence.

  Not long ago, looking at a DNA sequence would have meant nothing to me, but under Jari’s tutelage I can now scan the colours and see the match. I was bowled over, although at first I could not take it in fully. I felt a massive sense of relief and release. We had, I knew for sur
e, nailed Aaron Kosminski.

  I had to delay my celebration to the following Tuesday, when I went to the East End – where else? I went to my favourite curry house for a meal: my good mood was infectious and the staff, who know me well, plied me with drinks. Then I decided to visit all the pubs and bars in Whitechapel that I had walked past for years but never been inside. It was my own private celebration but I felt I deserved it. Sheer persistence had paid off. I’d been living on adrenalin for years, and finally I was getting the right results.

  But after that celebration, I had to put my excitement on hold as Jari carried on with his work. Now he needed to eliminate Karen (and through her, her ancestor Catherine Eddowes), himself and me, because our DNA was present on the shawl through handling it. A few weeks later this had been done, and we know for certain that the DNA extracted from the semen stains are not a contamination by either Jari or me, nor was it from the victim.

  We also decided to test for ethnic and geographic background, although Jari cautioned me that we might not get a full profile from the samples we have. With good quality DNA it is not a problem. Jari has done the testing on himself: ‘I know that based on my mitochondrial DNA I am 96.3% Finnish, but the rest of me comes from Spanish farmers, which was a surprise. Somewhere in the past one of my ancestors might have married a Spaniard. I am looking into whether we have sufficiently good genomic DNA to be able to get the same precise information about our suspect, but we have to remember that it is very old DNA.’

  So by the end of May all we were waiting for was, with luck, a geographic location of which area of the world Aaron Kosminski came from. Of course, we know the answer, but it would be great to have scientific evidence to underline it.