Descendants of victims of the infamous "Jack the Ripper," the serial killer who terrorized London's East End and is tied to about a dozen murders in the late 1880s and early 1890s, are demanding a new inquiry be opened after DNA evidence has pointed to a not-so-new suspect. Per the UK Times, the revival of interest in the case started in 2007, when researcher Russell Edwards got his hands on a blood-spattered shawl said to belong to Catherine Eddowes, Jack the Ripper's fourth victim, who was killed in September 1888.
CBS News reports that Edwards later had seven tiny DNA segments extracted from the blood on the shawl, and that DNA was found to match with Karen Miller, a direct descendant of Eddowes, confirming that the blood on the shawl was indeed that of Eddowes. Meanwhile, DNA from semen stains on the shawl synced up with a relative of Aaron Kosminski, a barber who'd emigrated to England from Poland sometime in the 1880s. Kosminski, who didn't live far from the murder scenes, had actually been named as a suspect in the original investigation by London police, but he was never arrested and charges were never brought.
Instead, Kosminski was placed in an asylum in 1891 after he threatened his sister with a knife; he was kept in similar custody until he died in 1919 of gangrene. Now Miller, 53, and descendants of four other Jack the Ripper victims want the attorney general to approve a new inquest, even though just two years ago he rejected such a request based on a lack of evidence. "The name Jack the Ripper has become sensationalized," Miller says, per the Times. "It has gone down in history as this famous character." But "what about the real name of the person who did this? Having the real person legally named in a court ... would be a form of justice for the victims." (More Jack the Ripper stories.)
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