One of the greatest mysteries out there is the identity of Jack The Ripper – a man who killed and brutalised several women in Victorian London – but it looks like it might finally have been solved with the recent publication of an academic paper that claims to have identified him.

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The paper was written by Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University and David Miller of Leeds University and used DNA evidence to test the shawl of Jack’s fourth victim Catherine Eddows which had the semen and blood of the killer on it and they identified him as Aaron Kosminski, a 23 year old barber.

Kosminksi had been previously questioned by the police over the killings, but there was never enough evidence to formally charge him with any of them so this is a legitimate suspect as well, not just some random dude who was living in another area entirely at the time.

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Unfortunately though, a whole bunch of people are criticising the validity of the results. There are a few arguments floating around that say the evidence is inadmissible and here’s a rough summary of them:

The shawl has been touched by countless people over the past 130 years meaning there is a hell of a lot of DNA on it from all over the place.

There’s no proof that the shawl even belong to Eddows and no proof that the semen and blood is that of the killer.

The author of the study even said that the DNA evidence wouldn’t stand up in a murder trial right now, so it seems kinda dumb to think that it works for something that happened 130 years ago.

Yeah that last one is pretty definitive isn’t it? Still, it kinda makes sense that it might have been this Kosminski fella so why can’t they just let it go and let these guys have their day in the sun with their dumb shawl? Or do some other kind of testing somehow to confirm it’s this guy. That would be way better.

For more of the same, check out this article that argues he was never caught because the police didn’t want to catch him. Say what?