Ye Olde Crimes for Modern Times

One of the questions true-crime people ask each other is “what is your favorite case??” Or, if you know them better, “who is your favorite serial killer?” A lot of ink has been spilled about whether it’s appropriate for people to be fascinated with the human misery that is human crimes, and all I will say about it is that it‘s nothing new. We need to look no further than my personal favorite case, The Whitechapel Murders, where bloodthirsty press and public came together to create one of the first true criminal media darlings, Jack the Ripper. I love this case for many reasons – the late Victorian era, the myriad social implications, and the fact that it will probably always remain unsolved.

OR WILL IT?? The Daily Mail recently got a bunch of attention for claiming the murder has finally been solved using DNA. Listen, I love to read about this story. I have read all the books, listened to all the podcasts, been on all the tours. In order to find out what was going on, I had to go onto THE DAILY MAIL SITE, and holy hell it’s like having my eyeballs mutilated by JTR all over again. The entire page is covered in cheap, maudlin video ads, and not one but THREE fucking pop up ads blocked the story. A video playing along the side cannot be closed. The cookie warning came up and when I went to select DO NOT COLLECT, it said lol and ignored my request. No wonder conservatives’ brains are scrambled, this website is a seizure waiting to happen. Go read the Vice recap instead.

The Illustrated Police News – 17 November 1888.
The scene of the murder, Miller’s Court

In case you’re not deep in the bowels of British crime history like I am (Thames Torso Murders, anyone?) the Whitechapel murders were the brutal killings of at least five women in the late 1880s. The prime suspect was known as Jack the Ripper, but he was never caught. The killings got progressively more heinous and outrageous as they went on, with the final murder of Mary Kelly being an absolute gore fest. Over time, the victims have become known as sex workers, but mostly they were just poor women living on the margins in a dangerous neighborhood.

ANYWAY, the Daily Mail named Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jewish hairdresser, as the killer. The claim is based on blood and semen samples collected from a scarf purportedly worn by one of the victims, Katherine Eddowes [I’ve seen the name spelled with both a C and a K, don’t @ me]. The mitochondrial DNA extracted from the scarf was compared to descendant DNA of both Kosminski and Eddowes, and it is a match. The testing was facilitated by Russell Edwards, an author who has written about the case. The testing was actually done and reported in a peer reviewed journal in 2019 – this is not really news. I’m not sure why it’s back as a story, except maybe because they are requesting an inquest by the UK government.

The Suspects

The Ripperverse is full of suspects and theories, ranging from totally absurd (the Elephant Man did it at the behest of the Masons) to totally plausible (a boyfriend). The Whitechapel murders got A LOT of attention when they were committed. Newspapers made a killing scaring the absolute shit out of everyone in London, and theories and rumors emerged early on. The Ripper was popularly thought to be a foreigner, or a Jewish man.

London in the 1880’s was xenophobic and anti-Semitic. A lot of Eastern European immigrants, including Jews, lived in Whitechapel. The area was a slum full of laborers crowded into tenements and functionally homeless poor people who went in and out of workhouses. One suspect, called “Leather Apron,” was said to be a Jewish butcher or laborer. Even though he was cleared by police, violence and anti-Semitism increased. After the so-called “double event,” the murders of Katherine Eddowes and Liz Stride in one night, graffiti was discovered on Goulston Street, along with a piece of Eddowes’ apron. Attributed to the killer, it read “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” There is no shortage of Jewish suspects in contemporary or modern theories.

1894 ordnance survey map of Whitechapel annotated with the locations of 6 murders and one clue. Red circles indicate sites where murdered women were discovered. The red triangle indicates the position of the Goulston Street graffito, where a piece of one of the victims’ clothing was discovered.

Other men who came into focus as suspects for the police and the public were convicted killers and rapists in the area. Surprise! There’s a lot of those too! A long line of serial rapists, wife poisoners, sex worker abusers, and the like have been theorized as the Whitechapel killer. Life for women in the slums was hard. They were held to the same standards as middle and upper class women in terms of chastity, behavior, and employment, but with none of the resources. The work available to them was dirty, back breaking, and paid a pittance. Despite popular assumptions, most of the women who were killed by Jack the Ripper were not sex workers. They were just poor, inconsistently housed, and drinking a lot. They were easy targets.

The Whitechapel killer was characterized in the Victorian press as a maniac and a lunatic, so part of the image in contemporary and modern accounts is one of an out of control psychopath. Like most slums, Whitechapel had plenty of mentally ill people living marginal existences, who probably acted out in the streets. And JUST LIKE TODAY, they were blamed for violence and crime that they mostly had nothing to do with. There were few treatment options and even less empathy for the suffering.

Finally, it’s worth noting that at the time, the killer was assumed to be from Whitechapel; that he was a local ruffian. The idea that he was a gentleman, or a surgeon who was slumming it for victims seems to be a new one. He was most commonly described as having a laborer’s build, and being shabbily dressed. The image of a man in a topcoat and cloak under lamplight is a modern one.

Aaron Kosminski

Kosminski is at the intersection of these suspect types. He was a Jewish immigrant from Poland, and he lived in the area. He fit the description of a shabbily dressed man. He was occasionally employed as a hairdresser, which is different from a “barber surgeon” – one of the suggested JTR profiles. At this time, those trades had been moving apart, as medicine became more professionalized. But also, he was frequently unable to work and taken care of by family or the workhouse.

Kosminski was described by his family as able bodied, but mentally ill. He was known to hear voices that ordered him to do strange things, like eat only trash. He survived on leftovers that were thrown in the street. He was described as literally eating bread out of the gutter. He was also frequently accused of “solitary vices” and “self abuse” which means masturbation, lol. Maybe he was doing this around other people? Which is odd and upsetting at any time in history, but Victorians would DEFINITELY have pathologized it.

He attacked his sister, leading to a stint in a workhouse and then in the Colney Hatch Asylum, where he attacked an attendant with a chair. He went in at age 26, in the year 1891. He was transferred to an Asylum for Adult Imbeciles (JESUS, BRITAIN) and lived there until he died in 1919. His stay there was unremarkable, he seems to have been mostly subdued. He refused to work, and he kept up his solitary activities, but he didn’t cause any more trouble.

Kosminksi checks a lot of boxes! There has been pushback on this theory, however. Philip Sugden, who wrote the door stop “Complete History of Jack the Ripper,” argues that it relies too heavily on one contemporary investigator’s theory. Sir Robert Anderson’s memoirs, serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1910, name Kosminski as the killer. Anderson was the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in charge of CID, and he worked on the Whitechapel murders investigation. He alluded to the killer as a sexual maniac and a low-class Polish Jew, hidden by other low class Jews from justice. He was obviously influenced by the antisemitic attitudes of the time, and ignores the fact that Kosminiski’s family did turn him in when he became violent with his sister.

Anderson also argued that everyone knew it was him, but the police were hamstrung from trying to arrest and convict him, sounding very much like every centrist reactionary in San Francisco lured into the clutches of Bari Weiss by watching videos of “rampant retail theft.” “If this had happened in France, they would have caught him,” is a convenient excuse for the failure of this powerful man to take down a notorious killer.

The cover of the September 21, 1889, issue of Puck magazine, featuring cartoonist Tom Merry’s depiction of the unidentified Whitechapel murderer Jack the Ripper.

Anderson based his conclusion on a witness identification. The witness saw a man in Mitre Square at the time of the Eddowes murder, and later identified Kosminski. The ID matches some other witness accounts that noticed a foreign or Jewish man dressed in a shabbily genteel manner. However, the witness identified him two years after the crime, which calls the validity into question.

Anderson called Kosminski a “sexual maniac,” but that seems to be based on his, ahem, masturbation habits. Kosminski was never accused of rape or sexual violence. In fact, there’s only proof that he had a violent episode twice – once with his sister, and once in the asylum. After he was admitted, he was quiet and subdued.

The Modern Forensic Case

There are also a lot of issues with the modern forensic case that Edwards is making. The provenance of the scarf has not been proven – supposedly it sat in a police detective’s wife’s storage for many years before being somehow identified and given to Scotland Yard. It hasn’t been proven to belong to Catherine Eddowes. The bodily fluids tested on the scarf are over a hundred years old, and DNA degrades over time. Furthermore, the researchers used mitochondrial DNA to connect the scarf to the descendants, which expands the results considerably. Mitochondrial DNA can only be used to rule suspects out, not to prove a match.

Another theory in the Ripper canon is that a single killer – Jack the Ripper – may not have existed. While there are similarities between the murders for sure, there is every possibility that the media ginned up a serial killer to sell papers. Many investigators believed that the letters sent to the press were hoaxes, perhaps sent by the journalists themselves to drive interest in the case. All of this is to say that assuming the DNA matches prove identity, they only prove that Aaron Kosminski ejaculated on Catherine Eddowes’ scarf, and might have killed her.

Into the Ripperverse

I think what I really want to say about this DNA test is that I think it’s marketing. Ripperology, as I said before, is its own industry. Hundreds of people make money leading tours, operating museums, writing books, podcasts, and websites devoted to these 130 year old murders. As a culture, we are still obsessed with the Whitechapel murders, and there’s always money and attention to be made – both off of preserving the mystery AND pushing a theory of a particular killer. To be clear, I’m not down on it. People love true crime and they always have. It’s always been a genre tinged with exploitation and gross elements, but HEY – THAT’S HUMANITY.

As to why we’re still talking about this fucking case from over a hundred years ago, there’s a quote in From Hell that kind of sums it. Inspector Abberline, who never wanted to be sent back to Whitechapel to work, and is being consumed by the case, says to his wife:

"Whitechapel’s not society at all. It’s something else. The people there, you can’t control em. ‘Ow d’ye threaten someone who’s already living with the worst? They don’t have morals there, or codes. They can’t AFFORD em. It’s like they’re in another time, before we were men. There’s something in them, Emma; in the squalor of em, something you can’t look away from, and it’s dangerous. It sucks you in."

We can’t turn away from any of it – the degradations, the prejudices, the violence. Not much has changed. Just as folks once bought The Sun from a kid hawking the latest, most gruesome crimes on the front page, we click through to Murdoch’s latest unholy headline for a little jolt of fear and dopamine. I think it’s a mistake to take this latest “news” about the shawl out of this context, whatever the motives of the researchers.

If you want some really great, thoughtful information on the case, check these out:

The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold
From Hell, by Allen Moore and Eddie Campbell
Unobscured, Season Three

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