Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-born barber living in Whitechapel, appears in the 1894 Macnaghten memoranda as one of three named suspects, and he died in Leavesden Asylum in 1919. In 2007 author Russell Edwards bought a shawl attributed to the Catherine Eddowes scene; in 2014 his book Naming Jack the Ripper announced the case solved via tests by Jari Louhelainen; in 2019 Louhelainen and David Miller's peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Forensic Sciences claimed the most systematic genetic analysis to date, matching shawl mitochondrial DNA to living relatives of Eddowes and Kosminski.
In early 2025 Edwards, joined by Eddowes descendant Karen Miller and descendants of Kosminski himself, demanded a fresh inquest to legally name the killer, citing reported 99.2 percent and 100 percent strand matches. Supporters call it a form of justice for the victims; the Attorney General had already refused a previous request in 2023 for insufficient new evidence, and as of the campaign the new claims had not been published in any peer-reviewed journal.
The counter-file is thick. The 2019 paper presented the key variant comparisons as colored boxes rather than sequences, citing privacy; Innsbruck forensic scientists Walther Parson and Hansi Weissensteiner objected that mitochondrial sequences pose no privacy risk and that mtDNA can only exclude, and the journal printed an expression of concern. No 1888 record places the shawl at the scene, it was handled openly for decades, and Edwards has also publicly tied Kosminski to Freemasons as motive and shield, per the Daily Mail, welding the file to the Warren legend without new evidence.
If the shawl was never proven to be at the scene, what exactly does the DNA prove?