More than a dozen suspects who could have been Jack the Ripper, one of the earliest well known serial killers, have been seriously considered.
A police investigation into a series of eleven brutal murders committed in Whitechapel and Spitalfields between 1888 and 1891 was unable to connect all the killings conclusively to the murders of 1888. Five victims—Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—are known as the "canonical five" and their murders between 31 August and 9 November 1888 are often considered the most likely to be linked. The murders were never solved.
Several other murders, less definitively connected to this spree than the "canonical five" also occurred in the vicinity before the man who is now clearly the prime suspect was committed to an insane asylum.
But, DNA evidence has tipped the balance and arguably cracked this cold case case and linked the killings to one of the top suspects.
A Polish barber by the name of Aaron Kosminski was a suspect at the time of the five murders in Whitechapel, east London, in 1888. . . . A bloodstained shawl said to have been found on the body of one of the victims – which was purchased at auction in 2007 by author and Ripper researcher Russell Edwards – was recently found to have the DNA of both the victim and Kosminski. In October, the Daily Mail revealed that Mr Edwards had uncovered new evidence of Kosminski’s links to the highly secretive Freemasons which may have motivated his sadistic killings and shielded him from law enforcement, ensuring he was locked away in an asylum, where he eventually died. . . . Aaron Kosminski was a Polish immigrant who worked as a barber upon moving to London. He was only a young man when he embarked on his killing spree – 23 years old to be exact. To uncover the killer’s identity, Kosminski’s oldest brother’s great-great-granddaughter actually helped Edwards. She provided a DNA sample that was able to be matched with that of the shawl. . . . When the original inquest was held on October 4, 1888, a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ was returned. But police were still hunting for the serial killer at the time.
From here.
While the DNA match isn't ironclad, it apparently relied on mtDNA which isn't as useful at definitively fingering a suspect as autosomal DNA, it also corroborates other evidence against him which was stronger than the evidence against of any of the other leading suspects, even without DNA evidence. He was formally diagnosed at the asylum with paranoid schizophrenia.
On 12 July 1890, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town workhouse due to his worsening mental illness, with his brother Woolf certifying the entry, and was released three days later. On 4 February 1891, he was returned to the workhouse, possibly by the police, and on 7 February, he was transferred to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. A witness to the certification of his entry, recorded as Jacob Cohen, gave some basic background information and stated that Kosminski had threatened his sister with a knife. It is unclear whether this meant Kosminski's sister or Cohen's. Kosminski remained at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to Leavesden Asylum. Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe.
The cause of his insanity was recorded as "self-abuse", which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation. His poor diet seems to have kept him in an emaciated state for years; his low weight was recorded in the asylum case notes. By February 1919, he weighed just 96 pounds (44 kg). He died the following month, aged 53.
While the evidence that Kosminski was Jack the Ripper might not meet modern standards of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, in a case that is 130 years old occurring at the dawn of modern policing, there is enough evidence that is is very likely that he was the Ripper, and he is far more likely to have been the killer than any of the other leading suspects.
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