How 'face of serial killer' Jack the Ripper could have looked published for the first time
An author has revealed what Jack the Ripper could have looked like. A new book by Russell Edwards - Naming Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Reveal - Edwards used cutting-edge technology to produce a composite image of what the Ripper might have looked like.
Aaron Kosminski, a barber originally from Poland who emigrated to the UK in the 1880s, was a suspect at the time of the murders in east London 128 years ago. Now Edwards claims to expose a "conspiracy of silence" that shielded the alleged serial killer.
Between August and November 1888, Jack the Ripper slashed the throats of at least five prostitutes in Whitechapel, east London. Four were mutilated. The author claimed ten years ago to have carried out DNA tests on a bloodstained shawl said to have belonged to one of the victims, prostitute Catherine Eddowes, the Mirror reports.
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Edwards, who said he bought it at auction in Suffolk in 2007, got expert Dr Jari Louhelainen to compare it to DNA from a descendant of Ms Eddowes to confirm it was indeed authentic. But experts have described the case as "very shaky", questioning the validity of DNA said to have been left on a shawl for over a century.
In his latest Ripper book, Edwards writes that at the time of the murders, the head of London's CID, Dr Robert Anderson, already suspected Kosminski to be the perpetrator. Police reports - published in 1894 as the so-called Macnaghten Memorandum - revealed detectives believed Kosminksi to have a "great hatred of women, specially of the prostitute class, and had strong homicidal tendencies". But Kosminski was never arrested and died in an asylum.
Edwards claims that there "has always been a nod, or reference to a cover-up by the masons" to protect him. He said his discovery of photographs of Kosminki's brother dressed as a member of the Israel Lodge of Freemasons explains why he was locked away in an asylum rather than arrested and publicly prosecuted.
Edwards used photographs of Kosminki's family and "ground-breaking facial remodelling technology" to create a "definitive composite of Jack the Ripper".