[IMPORTANT: I know I don't normally take anything seriously, but in the interests of fairness I should point out that this post contains one very, very unpleasant image of an actual murder victim. It's in context, I promise, but it's not fun.]
Many people have accused me of being outdated, and they probably have a point. It's not really helping my case, then, that I noticed an important headline today from a hundred and thirty years ago.
Let me back up a little. According to reports, new evidence has come to light that may prove the identity of Jack the Ripper. I've read a few books on the subject, and had basically chalked the answer of who the killer really was up to "fucked if I know." Many authors have gone to great lengths to prove that their suspect was the correct one, and many of them have been convincing.
Then again, a few have been amusingly, calamitously wrong. Crime writer Patricia Cornwell fingered artist Walter Sickert as the Ripper, writing a book and making a TV documentary on her findings. Nowhere in the production of either did someone pull Cornwell to one side and point out that Sickert had pretty good alibis for two of the murders, one of which was "being in France at the time." It's a great lesson in why "actual detective" and "writer of detective fiction" are different jobs.
In 1992, an alleged "Diary of Jack The Ripper" surfaced in the hands of a Liverpuddlian scrap dealer, who said he'd been given it by "a bloke down the pub." In a development that shocked nobody who had ever been in a Scouse pub, this diary turned out to be a fake, but not before Shirley Harrison had written a book about how it was clearly real and identified the true killer.
The less said about the insanely convoluted conspiracy theories involving Freemasonry and the Royal Family the better.
Indeed, even at the time, the papers received hundreds of hoax letters from people claiming to be Jack the Ripper, only two of which have are considered to possibly be genuine.
With all this in mind, it's clear that solutions to the Ripper mystery crop up every so often, and that they should be taken with a grain of salt. Or a big fuck-off gritting lorry full of salt, depending on the claim.
Where does that leave the current evidence?
The evidence in question is a bloodied shawl worn by one of the Canonical Five victims - the five prostitutes that experts agree were all killed by the same person in Autumn of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of London.
The shawl itself is a baffling story. It was taken from Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, by a policeman and given to his wife as a present.
"Here's the housekeeping money, love. Oh, and I got you this shawl covered in the blood of a mutilated hooker."
"Thanks, I've been looking for one of those!"
"I've not washed it as I don't know how, so there might be some semen around the edges..."
For whatever picky reason, his wife didn't want the shawl, but still buried it away in a cupboard where it became a kind of family heirloom until it was auctioned in 2007 and bought by Russell Edwards, who has spent the interim having the shawl DNA tested and writing a book on his findings.
Edwards claims that the blood on the shawl proveably belongs to Catherine Eddowes, and that there is also trace evidence of semen that can be matched with the descendants of Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew living and working in Whitechapel at the time of the murders, who was later incarcerated in a mental institution.
Much of this is significant. One of the few witnesses to the man believed to be the Ripper described a man with a "foreign accent" talking to a victim shortly before her death. Similarly, a piece of graffiti found near the scene of a Ripper murder read "The Juwes [sic] Are The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing."
The phrasing of this piece of graffiti is maddeningly ambiguous, and the writing itself was swiftly erased for fear of civil unrest. It speaks volumes of old-world misogyny that people were more worried about a riot caused by offensive graffiti than a riot over the number of women being disemboweled, but I digress. The message played into a larger web of heresay that the Ripper was a Jew. Indeed, a police report of the time claimed that a a local Jewish man had seen and could positively identify the Ripper, but refused to speak out against a fellow Jew.
Whilst this may seem odd (and indeed, may not be true at all) it's worth bearing in mind the casual anti-semitism of the time, as well as the fact that many Jews, Aaron Kosminski included, he fled Russian pogroms and as such had a very strong community bond.
Aaron Kosminski himself was named as the Ripper by author Martin Fido, and has long been one of the more favoured suspects of scholars.
In spite of all this, I have some doubts about the recent evidence. At the risk of setting myself up for a fall, I'm not convinced by the DNA angle.
Looking at the canonical five murders, there is a very clear progression of violence as the perpetrator loses his mind. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was strangled until unconscious or dead by her attacker, and then lowered to the ground. Her throat was cut, twice for the sake of insuring death, and her abdomen stabbed repeatedly after that.
By Ripper standards, this was mild.
As the crimes progressed, always with the same modus operandi (the strangulation, the lowering of the unconscious body, the double throat cut) the Ripper began inflicting more and more damage on the corpses. This culminated in the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, the only victim who was killed in her room instead of on the street. Again, this is where I include a very unpleasant picture.
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Aside from some pictures I saw of a guy who was mauled by a grizzly in Russia a few years back, that's probably the most damage I've ever seen inflicted on a human body. Her face (right hand side if you can't get your bearings) has been cut to ribbons. Her intestines are the messy clump removed and dumped on the bedside table in the foreground.
I bring this image up because it illustrates the dam-burst effect of the Ripper's killings. Once the killer snapped, he got worse, and worse, until we end up with the horror show pictured above.
And yet not one mention was ever made of semen.
Whoever the killer was, he didn't appear to actually have sex with his victims, either pre-or-post mortem, and there was no evidence ever mentioned of seminal fluid elsewhere at the crime scenes.
I'll admit right now that I'm not an expert at spotting semen on a pavement at night - hell, maybe I should be more vigilant; maybe I've walked through lakes of the stuff unwittingly - but the forensics of the Ripper reports weren't as completely amateurish as we would expect from our post-CSI vantage point. Also, if someone was going to have sex with his victim, then surely there would have been semen at the Mary Jane Kelly scene? He'd gone completely to town on her in terms of everything else, if he was ever going to make it sexual I have absolutely no doubt that this would be where it would have happened.
Maybe that whole scene was such a mess that something was missed, but I remain unconvinced. Also, Aaron Kosminski was not insitutionalised until 1891 - two years after the Ripper murders. Whoever butchered five women with rapid, marked increases in brutality didn't seem like someone who would suddenly give up and lay low for two whole years.
Whilst detained at an asylum, where he would die of an infection a few years later, Kosminski was noted to have no particularly violent traits and to be a compulsive masturbator. Again: If he wasn't concerned about playing with himself in front of hospital staff, then why wasn't there evidence of him doing it at every crime scene? The murders were clearly sexually motivated (victim Annie Chapman had part of her uterus cut out) but never before this new, shawl-stain evidence has there been any indication of the murderer doing anything actually sexual.
I'm intrigued to see how things play out on this one. Aaron Kosminski could have been Jack the Ripper - he probably was Jack the Ripper according to people who know more than me - but personally I'm going to wait and see before I buy into any of the "case closed" headlines.
And now, because this post has gone into some quite harrowing territory, here's a puppy as a palate cleanser:
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