Get daily updates directly to your inbox + Subscribe Thank you for subscribing! Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email 
 
 The true identity of notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper can now be revealed thanks to a DNA breakthrough, it has been claimed. 
 
 Author and self confessed "armchair detective" Russell Edwards claims to have solved perhaps the most notorious whodunit ever. 
 
 Mr Edwards claims Aaron Kosminski, a 23 year-old Polish immigrant who ended up dying in an asylum, was "definitely, categorically and absolutely" the man behind the grisly killing spree in 1888 in London's East End. 
 
 He said a blood-stained shawl he bought in 2007 after an auction in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, held vital DNA evidence which led him to the killer. 
 
 "I've got the only piece of forensic evidence in the whole history of the case. I've spent 14 years working on it, and we have definitively solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was," he said. 
 
 "Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt. This is it now - we have unmasked him." 
 
 (Image: Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) 
 
 Jack the Ripper murdered at least five women, slashing their throats, removing some of their internal organs and leaving their mutilated bodied in Whitechapel's darkened alleyways. 
 
 Mr Edwards, 48, from Barnet, north London, was "captivated" by the murder mystery and had been investigating it in his spare time, but had come to the conclusion it could never be solved. 
 
 But then in 2007 he saw a shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper's victims, was up for sale. 
 
 He bought it, and enlisted the help of Jari Louhelainen, an expert in molecular biology, who used pioneering techniques to find DNA from her blood and that of the killer. 
 
 He said: "Here I am with the shawl and possibly the evidence to solve the most unsolvable murder in English criminal history. But where do I start? That was the big question. 
 
 "I enlisted the help of Jari and we embarked on a three-and-a-half year journey. 
 
 "When we discovered the truth it was the most amazing feeling of my entire life." 
 
 Mr Edwards said the discovery 126 years after the murders proves beyond doubt that Kosminski - one of the six key suspects commonly cited as the Ripper - was the actual killer. 
 
 He said the shawl had been taken by acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, who was on duty the night of Eddowes's death and wanted it for his wife. 
 
 But horrified at the blood-soaked wrap, she never wore it, and it was stored away and passed down through the generations until it came to auction seven years ago. 
 
 Mr Edwards said: "Thank God the shawl has never been washed, as it held the vital evidence." 
 
 The author, who said he was part-inspired to take up the search for the killer after watching the Johnny Depp film From Hell about the Ripper murders, said police had identified Kosminski as a suspect, but never had enough evidence to bring him to trial. 
 
 Kosminski was a Polish Jewish immigrant who, fleeing persecution in his Russia-controlled homeland, came with his family to England in 1881 and lived in Mile End Old Town. 
 
 He was admitted to a string of lunatic asylums, where he died in 1899 of gangrene in the leg. 
 
 Naming Jack the Ripper will be published by Sidgwick & Jackson on Tuesday and costs £16.99 for a hardback. ||||| An amateur sleuth with a book to sell and a scientist working in his spare time claimed to have solved one of the biggest murder mysteries in history by naming Jack the Ripper as a Polish immigrant in the 19th Century after discovering what they said was conclusive DNA evidence. 
 
 Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew whose family had emigrated to London to escape pogroms, is “definitely, categorically and absolutely” the man behind the grisly series of murders in 1888 that left at least five women dead and mutilated in the streets of London’s East End, said Russell Edwards, the author of the latest in a long line of speculative books on the affair. 
 
 “I’ve got the only piece of forensic evidence in the whole history of the case. I’ve spent 14 years working, and we have definitely solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was. Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt. This is it now – we have unmasked him,” Mr Edwards said. 
 
 Leaving aside for a moment that Kosminski, who was 23 when the murders took place and died in a lunatic asylum at the age of 53, was already a leading candidate for the murders, what exactly is this new evidence that so definitely nails him as the culprit? 
 
 It turns out to hinge on an old shawl that Mr Edwards bought in 2007 at an auction in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. He claims this large piece of cloth was found at the scene of the murder of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s victims, and has a letter to “prove” it from a descendent of Sergeant Amos Simpson, the policeman on duty the night Eddowes was killed who had claimed the abandoned shawl for his wife. 
 
 Horrified by the blood-soaked wrap, Mrs Simpson never wore or even washed it, but stored it away where it became a family heirloom to be passed down the generations until it was sold to Mr Edwards. 
 
 Leaving aside, again, whether we can believe the provenance of this crucial piece of evidence, or that it was never washed, or Mr Edwards’ assumption that the shawl was left at the crime scene not by Eddowes – who was far too poor to own such an expensive item – but by the Ripper himself, what links the cloth with Kosminski and the murder? 
 
 It turns out that Mr Edwards has been able to track down living descendants of both Eddowes and Kosminki and found that their DNA sequences match DNA samples recovered from the shawl, presumably from the blood of Eddowes and the semen of Kosminski. 
 
 The scientist who performed this remarkable feat is Jari Louhelainen, a molecular biologist at Liverpool John Moores University. Unfortunately, he has not so far published his study in a peer-reviewed scientific journal so it is impossible to verify his claims or analyse his methodology. 
 
 Leaving aside (yet again) the claim that the shawl was never washed or cleaned at any time during the past 126 years, the biggest problem in carrying out such sensitive DNA analysis is the question of cross contamination. For instance, if Dr Louhelainen’s laboratory worked with the DNA of the two living descendants, how sure is he that this DNA has not contaminated the samples he has extracted from the shawl itself? 
 
 When other labs have worked on the ancient DNA of important samples, such as the DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones or the remains of the Romanovs, the last Russian royal family, they have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid the possibility of cross contamination. 
 
 They have also worked on “blind” samples to ensure they do know which sample they are analysing in order to avoid unwitting prejudice, and have even carried out duplicate blinded experiments in two different laboratories to replicate each other’s work. 
 
 None of this, as far we know, has been done in this case. Dr Louhelainen may be satisfied that he has found the culprit, but many other scientists are not, including Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the man who invented the DNA fingerprint technique 30 years ago this week. 
 
 “An interesting but remarkable claim that needs to be subjected to peer review, with detailed analysis of the provenance of the shawl and the nature of the claimed DNA match with the perpetrator's descendants and its power of discrimination; no actual evidence has yet been provided,” Sir Alec told The Independent. 
 
 In any case, as Sir Alec pointed out: “If I remember correctly when I visited the Black Museum at New Scotland Yard, Kosminski was long regarded as by far the most likely perpetrator.” ||||| WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Jack the Ripper unmasked: How amateur sleuth used DNA breakthrough to identify Britain's most notorious criminal 126 years after string of terrible murders 
 
 DNA evidence on a shawl found at Ripper murder scene nails killer 
 
 By testing descendants of victim and suspect, identifications were made 
 
 Jack the Ripper has been identified as Polish-born Aaron Kosminski 
 
 Kosminski was a suspect when the Ripper murders took place in 1888 
 
 Hairdresser Kosminski lived in Whitechapel and was later put in an asylum 
 
 GUILTY: A DNA sample has proven Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper 
 
 It is the greatest murder mystery of all time, a puzzle that has perplexed criminologists for more than a century and spawned books, films and myriad theories ranging from the plausible to the utterly bizarre. 
 
 But now, thanks to modern forensic science, The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer responsible for at least five grisly murders in Whitechapel in East London during the autumn of 1888. 
 
 DNA evidence has now shown beyond reasonable doubt which one of six key suspects commonly cited in connection with the Ripper’s reign of terror was the actual killer – and we reveal his identity. 
 
 
 
 A shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s victims, has been analysed and found to contain DNA from her blood as well as DNA from the killer. 
 
 The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes. 
 
 Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match. 
 
 The revelation puts an end to the fevered speculation over the Ripper’s identity which has lasted since his murderous rampage in the most impoverished and dangerous streets of London. 
 
 In the intervening century, a Jack the Ripper industry has grown up, prompting a dizzying array of more than 100 suspects, including Queen Victoria’s grandson – Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence – the post-Impressionist painter Walter Sickert, and the former Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. 
 
 
 
 
 
 It was March 2007, in an auction house in Bury St Edmunds, that I first saw the blood-soaked shawl. It was in two surprisingly large sections – the first measuring 73.5in by 25.5in, the second 24in by 19in – and, despite its stains, far prettier than any artefact connected to Jack the Ripper might be expected to be. It was mostly blue and dark brown, with a delicate pattern of Michaelmas daisies – red, ochre and gold – at either end. 
 
 It was said to have been found next to the body of one of the Ripper’s victims, Catherine Eddowes, and soaked in her blood. There was no evidence for its provenance, although after the auction I obtained a letter from its previous owner who claimed his ancestor had been a police officer present at the murder scene and had taken it from there. 
 
 Yet I knew I wanted to buy the shawl and was prepared to pay a great deal of money for it. I hoped somehow to prove that it was genuine. Beyond that, I hadn’t considered the possibilities. I certainly had no idea that this flimsy, badly stained, and incomplete piece of material would lead to the solution to the most famous murder mystery of all time: the identification of Jack the Ripper. 
 
 An image depicting police discovering one of the victims of the murders in London which took place in 1888 
 
 When my involvement in the 126-year-old case began, I was just another armchair detective, interested enough to conduct my own extensive research after watching the Johnny Depp film From Hell in 2001. It piqued my curiosity about the 1888 killings when five – possibly more – prostitutes were butchered in London’s East End. 
 
 Despite massive efforts by the police, the perpetrator evaded capture, spawning the mystery which has fuelled countless books, films, TV programmes and tours of Whitechapel. Theories about his identity have been virtually limitless, with everyone from Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, to Lewis Carroll being named as possible suspects. As time has passed, the name Jack the Ripper has become synonymous with the devil himself; his crimes setting the gruesome standard against which other horrific murders are judged. 
 
 I joined the armies of those fascinated by the mystery and researching the Ripper became a hobby. I visited the National Archives in Kew to view as much of the original paperwork as still exists, noting how many of the authors of books speculating about the Ripper had not bothered to do this. I was convinced that there must be something, somewhere that had been missed. 
 
 By 2007, I felt I had exhausted all avenues until I read a newspaper article about the sale of a shawl connected to the Ripper case. Its owner, David Melville-Hayes, believed it had been in his family’s possession since the murder of Catherine Eddowes, when his ancestor, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, asked his superiors if he could take it home to give to his wife, a dressmaker. 
 
 Incredibly, it was stowed without ever being washed, and was handed down from David’s great-grandmother, Mary Simpson, to his grandmother, Eliza Smith, and then his mother, Eliza Mills, later Hayes. 
 
 In 1991, David gave it to Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum, where it was placed in storage rather than on display because of the lack of proof of its provenance. In 2001, David reclaimed it, and it was exhibited at the annual Jack the Ripper conference. One forensic test was carried out on it for a Channel 5 documentary in 2006, using a simple cotton swab from a randomly chosen part of the shawl, but it was inconclusive. 
 
 Most Ripper experts dismissed it when it came up for auction, but I believed I had hit on something no one else had noticed which linked it to the Ripper. The shawl is patterned with Michaelmas daisies. Today the Christian feast of Michaelmas is archaic, but in Victorian times it was familiar as a quarter day, when rents and debts were due. 
 
 I discovered there were two dates for it: one, September 29, in the Western Christian church and the other, November 8, in the Eastern Orthodox church. With a jolt, I realised the two dates coincided precisely with the nights of the last two murder dates. September 29 was the night on which Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were killed, and November 8 was the night of the final, most horrific of the murders, that of Mary Jane Kelly. 
 
 Found at the scene: Russell Edwards holds the shawl he bought in 2007, allegedly handed down from a policeman who took it from the scene, which had the incriminating DNA on it 
 
 I reasoned that it made no sense for Eddowes to have owned the expensive shawl herself; this was a woman so poor she had pawned her shoes the day before her murder. But could the Ripper have brought the shawl with him and left it as an obscure clue about when he was planning to strike next? It was just a hunch, and far from proof of anything, but it set me off on my journey. 
 
 Before buying it, I spoke to Alan McCormack, the officer in charge of the Crime Museum, also known as the Black Museum. He told me the police had always believed they knew the identity of the Ripper. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, the officer in charge of the investigation, had named him in his notes: Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew who had fled to London with his family, escaping the Russian pogroms, in the early 1880s. 
 
 Kosminski has always been one of the three most credible suspects. He is often described as having been a hairdresser in Whitechapel, the occupation written on his admission papers to the workhouse in 1890. What is certain is he was seriously mentally ill, probably a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered auditory hallucinations and described as a misogynist prone to ‘self-abuse’ – a euphemism for masturbation. 
 
 McCormack said police did not have enough evidence to convict Kosminski, despite identification by a witness, but kept him under 24-hour surveillance until he was committed to mental asylums for the rest of his life. I became convinced Kosminski was our man, and I was excited at the prospect of proving it. I felt sure that modern science would be able to produce real evidence from the stains on the shawl. After a few false starts, I found a scientist I hoped could help. 
 
 Dr Jari Louhelainen is a leading expert in genetic evidence from historical crime scenes, combining his day job as senior lecturer in molecular biology at Liverpool John Moores University with working on cold cases for Interpol and other projects. He agreed to conduct tests on the shawl in his spare time. 
 
 The tests began in 2011, when Jari used special photographic analysis to establish what the stains were. 
 
 Using an infrared camera, he was able to tell me the dark stains were not just blood, but consistent with arterial blood spatter caused by slashing – exactly the grim death Catherine Eddowes had met. 
 
 But the next revelation was the most heart-stopping. Under UV photography, a set of fluorescent stains showed up which Jari said had the characteristics of semen. I’d never expected to find evidence of the Ripper himself, so this was thrilling, although Jari cautioned me that more testing was required before any conclusions could be drawn. 
 
 Obsession: Russell Edwards points to Hambury Street where one of the murders took place 
 
 He also found evidence of split body parts during the frenzied attack. One of Eddowes’ kidneys was removed by her murderer, and later in his research Jari managed to identify the presence of what he believed to be a kidney cell. 
 
 It was impossible to extract DNA from the stains on the shawl using the method employed in current cases, in which swabs are taken. The samples were just too old. 
 
 Instead, he used a method he called ‘vacuuming’, using a pipette filled with a special ‘buffering’ liquid that removed the genetic material in the cloth without damaging it. 
 
 As a non-scientist, I found myself in a new world as Jari warned that it would also be impossible to use genomic DNA, which is used in fresh cases and contains a human’s entire genetic data, because over time it would have become fragmented. 
 
 But he explained it would be possible to use mitochondrial DNA instead. It is passed down exclusively through the female line, is much more abundant than genomic DNA, and survives far better. 
 
 This meant that in order to give us something to test against, I had to trace a direct descendant through the female line of Catherine Eddowes. Luckily, a woman named Karen Miller, the three-times great-granddaughter of Eddowes, had featured in a documentary about the Ripper’s victims, and agreed to provide a sample of her DNA. 
 
 Jari managed to get six complete DNA profiles from the shawl, and when he tested them against Karen’s they were a perfect match. 
 
 It was an amazing breakthrough. We now knew that the shawl was authentic, and was at the scene of the crime in September 1888, and had the victim’s blood on it. On its own, this made it the single most important artefact in Ripper history: nothing else has ever been linked scientifically to the scene of any of the crimes. 
 
 Months of research on the shawl, including analysing the dyes used, had proved that it was made in Eastern Europe in the early 19th Century. Now it was time to attempt to prove that it contained the killer’s DNA. 
 
 The suspects: The long line of men believed to be Jack the Ripper include, from top left to right, Prince Albert Victor, Edward VII’s son, allegedly driven by syphilis-induced madness, Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s doctor, painter Walter Sickert, a Jewish shoemaker, a polish barber who later poisoned three women - and Kosminski 
 
 
 
 Jari used the same extraction method on the semen traces on the shawl, warning that the likelihood of sperm lasting all that time was very slim. He enlisted the help of Dr David Miller, a world expert on the subject, and in 2012 they made another incredible breakthrough when they found surviving cells. They were from the epithelium, a type of tissue which coats organs. In this case, it was likely to have come from the urethra during ejaculation. 
 
 Kosminski was 23 when the murders took place, and living with his two brothers and a sister in Greenfield Street, just 200 yards from where the third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was killed. As a key suspect, his life story has long been known, but I also researched his family. Eventually, we tracked down a young woman whose identity I am protecting – a British descendant of Kosminski’s sister, Matilda, who would share his mitochondrial DNA. She provided me with swabs from the inside of her mouth. 
 
 Amplifying and sequencing the DNA from the cells found on the shawl took months of painstaking, innovative work. By that point, my excitement had reached fever-pitch. And when the email finally arrived telling me Jari had found a perfect match, I was overwhelmed. Seven years after I bought the shawl, we had nailed Aaron Kosminski. 
 
 As a scientist, Jari is naturally cautious, unwilling to let his imagination run away without testing every minute element, but even he declared the finding ‘one hell of a masterpiece’. I celebrated by visiting the East End, wandering the streets where Kosminski lived, worked and committed his despicable crimes, feeling a sense of euphoria but also disbelief that we had unmasked the Ripper. 
 
 Kosminski was not a member of the Royal Family, or an eminent surgeon or politician. Serial killers rarely are. Instead, he was a pathetic creature, a lunatic who achieved sexual satisfaction from slashing women to death in the most brutal manner. He died in Leavesden Asylum from gangrene at the age of 53, weighing just 7st. 
 
 No doubt a slew of books and films will now emerge to speculate on his personality and motivation. I have no wish to do so. I wanted to provide real answers using scientific evidence, and I’m overwhelmed that 126 years on, I have solved the mystery. 
 
 Shawl that nailed Polish lunatic Aaron Kosminski and the forensic expert that made the critical match 
 
 By Dr Jari Louhelainen 
 
 Evidence: Russell points to the part of the shawl where DNA was found 
 
 When Russell Edwards first approached me in 2011, I wasn’t aware of the massive levels of interest in the Ripper case, as I’m a scientist originally from Finland. 
 
 But by early this year, when I realised we were on the verge of making a big discovery, working on the shawl had taken over my life, occupying me from early in the morning until late at night. 
 
 It has taken a great deal of hard work, using cutting-edge scientific techniques which would not have been possible five years ago. 
 
 To extract DNA samples from the stains on the shawl, I used a technique I developed myself, which I call ‘vacuuming’ – to pull the original genetic material from the depths of the cloth. 
 
 I filled a sterile pipette with a liquid ‘buffer’, a solution known to stabilise the cells and DNA, and injected it into the cloth to dissolve the material trapped in the weave of the fabric without damaging the cells, then sucked it out. 
 
 I needed to sequence the DNA found in the stains on the shawl, which means mapping the DNA by determining the exact order of the bases in a strand. I used polymerase chain reaction, a technique which allows millions of exact copies of the DNA to be made, enough for sequencing. 
 
 When I tested the resulting DNA profiles against the DNA taken from swabs from Catherine Eddowes’s descendant, they were a match. 
 
 I used the same extraction method on the stains which had characteristics of seminal fluid. 
 
 Dr David Miller found epithelial cells – which line cavities and organs – much to our surprise, as we were not expecting to find anything usable after 126 years. 
 
 Then I used a new process called whole genome amplification to copy the DNA 500 million-fold and allow it to be profiled. 
 
 Once I had the profile, I could compare it to that of the female descendant of Kosminski’s sister, who had given us a sample of her DNA swabbed from inside her mouth. 
 
 The first strand of DNA showed a 99.2 per cent match, as the analysis instrument could not determine the sequence of the missing 0.8 per cent fragment of DNA. On testing the second strand, we achieved a perfect 100 per cent match. 
 
 Because of the genome amplification technique, I was also able to ascertain the ethnic and geographical background of the DNA I extracted. It was of a type known as the haplogroup T1a1, common in people of Russian Jewish ethnicity. I was even able to establish that he had dark hair. 
 
 Now that it’s over, I’m excited and proud of what we’ve achieved, and satisfied that we have established, as far as we possibly can, that Aaron Kosminski is the culprit. 
 
 Dr Jari Louhelainen is a senior lecturer in molecular biology at Liverpool John Moores University and an expert in historic cold-case forensic research. 
 
 © Russell Edwards 2014 ||||| The body of Jack the Ripper’s final victim is set to be exhumed as a new book claims the world’s most famous serial killer was her estranged husband. 
 
 The Ministry of Justice has indicated it will grant the first ever exhumation licence for the grave of a Ripper victim after examining the new theory, which is serialised exclusively in The Telegraph . 
 
 The author, Dr Wynne Weston-Davies, provided the Government with evidence that Mary Jane Kelly, an East End prostitute, was in fact his great aunt, and that her murder was an act of marital vengeance. 
 
 He names the Ripper as Francis Spurzheim Craig , who at the time of the murders in 1888 was a 51-year-old reporter covering the police courts and inquests in the East End of London. 
 
 He lived in Mile End Road, Whitechapel, just seven minutes’ walk from the first murder scene. 
 
 Dr Weston-Davies believes Craig’s knowledge of police methods of the day led him to kill four other women as a “cover” for his true intent - to murder his wife who embarrassed him by secretly returning to her life of prostitution just months after they wed in 1885. 
 
 The author hopes his theory will be proved, at least partly, by DNA evidence from the exhumation. 
 
 Wynne Weston-Davies at the graveside of Mary Jane Kelly in Leytonstone (Warren Allott) 
 
 He has even located what may be the only surviving image of the face of Jack the Ripper. 
 
 A contemporary sketch of the inquest into the murder of the Ripper’s earlier victims is thought to show Craig sitting near the front of the court, reporting on a murder he himself had committed. 
 
 “The only way of absolutely proving that the Ripper’s final victim was my great aunt is to exhume Mary Jane Kelly’s body,” said Dr Weston-Davies, a former surgeon. 
 
 “We will then attempt to extract DNA from her bones or teeth and compare them with DNA from myself or my brother who, as far as I know, are her only living relatives.” 
 
 Ministry of Justice officials wrote to Dr Weston-Davies in September last year after considering his research for six months. 
 
 His work had required “detailed consideration”, they said, before adding that they would be “happy to consider your application for an exhumation licence” providing two simple criteria were met. 
 
 He has been asked to provide a letter from a forensics laboratory which is prepared to carry out the DNA testing and – as a final formality – post a public notice on the grave for three months. 
 
 The key to unlocking the secret of the Ripper were documents discovered in the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, four years ago. 
 
 Dr Weston-Davies proposes in The Real Mary Kelly that the divorce papers showed his family links with Elizabeth Weston Davies, the true identity of Mary Jane Kelly, and Francis Craig. 
 
 The author said: “I didn’t know more than the average person about Jack the Ripper when I started out researching my family history more than 10 years ago. 
 
 The only way of absolutely proving that the Ripper’s final victim was my great aunt is to exhume Mary Jane Kelly’s body Wynne Weston-Davies 
 
 “My father, who died in 1996, always refused to speak about his family, saying they were a ‘bad lot’. 
 
 “One day in 2011, I was at the National Archives looking for documents and keyed the surname ‘Weston Davies’ into their database, and one result that popped up was ‘Weston Jones’. 
 
 “I was about to disregard it but ordered the document out of curiosity. 
 
 “When it arrived it consisted of a box of legal documents including a divorce petition and an affidavit. 
 
 “They related to my ancestor who had adopted a false surname – the ‘Weston Jones’ name - to pose as a widow when she wed, which was common at the time because although she’d never been married she was sexually experienced. 
 
 “An extraordinary story started to unfold about a woman marrying a man much older than herself, Francis Craig, and how this a marriage only lasted a few months, and then turned sour.” 
 
 Dr Weston-Davies went on: “It was several years before I made the connection with Jack the Ripper. 
 
 “I ordered Francis Craig’s death certificate and then tracked down reports of the inquest into his death. 
 
 “It was another bombshell. I realised he had committed suicide by slitting his own throat with a blade, exactly the same way the Ripper’s victims had been murdered.” 
 
 Francis Craig was a down-on-his-luck journalist. 
 
 A few years earlier Craig’s journalism career suffered an almost terminal blow when, as editor of the Bucks Advertiser he was brutally exposed as a plagiarist by a rival newspaper after stealing reports word-for-word from The Daily Telegraph. 
 
 The possibility of seeing the Ripper's face for the first time - in a courtroom sketch - is another tantalising aspect to the new research. 
 
 “There’s a sketch of a scene from the inquest of Annie Chapman which shows a man sitting on the front bench, the one reserved for the Press. 
 
 “I think this is very possibly Francis Craig, and therefore the only surviving image of Jack the Ripper. 
 
 “The reporter in the illustration looks very much like Francis’s father, who was a well-known phrenologist who moved in the west London bohemian set with William Morris and the like. 
 
 The scene at the inquest on Annie Chapman. Circled is the reporter believed to be Francis Craig (Pictorial News) 
 
 “We know Francis was living in the East End, covering the courts and it’s very likely he covered the Chapman inquest,” said the author. 
 
 Followers of the case have long puzzled over why a series of infamous letters which originated the “Jack the Ripper” nickname were sent to the Central News press agency at the Old Bailey rather than a national newspaper, which would have been the most obvious destination to an ordinary member of the public. 
 
 Dr Weston-Davies suggests Craig was indeed the author of these “Dear Boss” letters and sending them to a news agency would have been a straightforward choice for him. 
 
 As a journalist who sometimes syndicated his own work, Craig knew it was the best way to have their contents sent to every newspaper in the land, further deepening his camouflage as the killer. 
 
 Also, the letters used Americanisms and Craig had spent time in the US during his younger years. 
 
 Craig was a peculiar man. Reports survive of his odd habits and the author believes he was suffering from schizo-typal personality disorder, or STPD. 
 
 “A psychiatrist friend of mine has indicated this is the most likely diagnosis,” said Dr Weston-Davies. 
 
 Because Elizabeth - or Mary Kelly, as she has been known until now in the vast Ripper archives – was buried in a pauper’s grave there are more bureaucratic hurdles to mount before an exhumation can take place. 
 
 A notice must be displayed by the grave for three months warning relatives that their loved one’s grave may also be disturbed. 
 
 “I understand there have been previous applications to exhume her body and they were all refused,” said Dr Weston-Davies. 
 
 “I think it is my family connection to her which persuaded the authorities, after months of deliberations. 
 
 “I’ve already obtained an indication from the Ministry of Justice that they are minded to issue an exhumation licence. 
 
 “There’s a bit more red tape to complete but I believe that exhuming her body will solve the Ripper mystery once and for all. 
 
 “I will proceed with the exhumation depending on the reaction to the book. 
 
 I realised Francis Craig had slit his own throat with a blade, exactly the same way the Ripper’s victims had been murdered Wynne Weston-Davies 
 
 “If someone can show me clear evidence that Mary Kelly was not Elizabeth then of course there will be little point in proceeding. 
 
 “But otherwise I’m hoping we can go ahead and attempt to get the DNA evidence that will prove my theory once and for all.” 
 
 The murders took place three years after the marriage of Craig and Mary Jane/Elizabeth had broken down. 
 
 “There is evidence he spent a long time looking for her in the East End, even employing private detectives,” said the author. 
 
 “His initial aim – to win her back – turned to hatred.” 
 
 Dr Weston-Davies' book highlights other cases from history when disgruntled men killed innocent strangers in order to obtain revenge on a specific person, usually after being spurned. 
 
 It was Craig, the book says, who killed Mary Jane/Elizabeth in November 1888 at her room in Miller’s Court, a Whitechapel slum. 
 
 After her throat was slit, she suffered heinous disfigurement and – unlike all the other victims – was rendered unrecognisable through terrible facial mutilation. 
 
 “He went to great lengths to ensure that her real identity could not be discovered,” said Dr Weston-Davies. 
 
 “Elizabeth was only known by her pseudonym. 
 
 
 
 Miller's Court in Dorset street, where Mary Jane Kelly was killed, then and now (Hulton Archive/Warren Allott) 
 
 “He mutilated her face so her friends and family would never know it was her if the police published photographs of her face. 
 
 “He did not want her linked to him.” 
 
 • Who was Jack the Ripper? The suspects so far 
 
 Dr Weston-Davies, who worked as a general surgeon before moving into medical research, said: “Craig also went to great lengths to remove her heart, going for it through the diaphragm. 
 
 “The heart was never found despite an extensive search by police who arrived at the murder scene the following morning. 
 
 “It’s my belief there was a further piece of symbolism in her terrible evisceration. 
 
 “She had taken his heart, and now he was stealing hers.” 
 
 Read exclusive extracts from the book here: 
 
 Part One: How the new Jack the Ripper theory came to light 
 
 Part Two: Is this the only surviving depiction of the most famous serial killer in history? 
 
 Part Three: Did Francis Craig write the famous Jack the Ripper letters? 
 
 Part Four: How Jack the Ripper’s murders were motivated by love gone wrong 
 
 The Real Mary Kelly: Jack the Ripper’s Fifth Victim and the Identity of the Man that Killed Her by Wynne Weston-Davies is published by Blink priced £16.99. To order your copy for £14 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
– An amateur detective has written a new book that claims to reveal the real Jack the Ripper based on DNA evidence from a blood-soaked shawl found by one of the victims. Russell Edwards, author of Naming Jack the Ripper, writes in the Daily Mail that he bought the shawl at an auction and called upon a "world-renowned" DNA expert to help him identify the killer. He admits that most Ripper experts had dismissed the shawl, and "there was no evidence for its provenance," but it was apparently kept by the descendants of a law enforcement officer who took it home after Catherine Eddowes' murder in 1888. What Edwards found: a bloodstain that matched Eddowes' DNA, and a possible semen stain that matched a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski. Kosminski, who had fled Russian pogroms in the 1880s, was already "one of six key" Ripper suspects, says Edwards. But is the DNA match really a match? Edwards' expert, Dr. Jari Louhelainen, writes in the Mail that he used his own "vacuuming" method to "suck out" the cells—but because they're so old he had to use mitochondrial DNA rather than modern-day genomic DNA. (Another suspect, Walter Sickert, matched an earlier mitochondrial DNA test, but such matches "could be shared by anything from between 1% and 10% of the population," says a Ripper website.) What's more, Edwards' Kosminski matches—which were 99.2% and 100% on two DNA strands—weren't published in a peer-reviewed journal and may not have followed scientific safeguards, reports the Independent. Edwards, however, says he nailed it: "Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt," he tells the Mirror. "This is it now—we have unmasked him." (One detective says there is no Jack the Ripper.)