jack ripper dna victims

[tali122]

is there any forensic evidence stored from the jack the ripper victims that could extract useable dna evidence? (which then could be matched with relatives of potential suspects?)

[tomestone]

I think i read that the letter the ripper wrote to the police has got saliva traces on the envolope,recent uncoverd evidence suggests that the ripper was a female,i am sure that this new evidence was submitted on the web site of unsolved crimes,may be worth a look because substatial forensic matter was collected.

[shammydodger]

Patricia Cornwell, the crime fiction writer, has written a book (Jack The Ripper: Case Solved)detailing her claim that she has "proved" that Jack was Walter Sickert, the acclaimed artist. As part of her research, she (and her team) took swabs ftrom various "Ripper Letters" and tested for DNA and....oh, I can't be bothered with the details. If you wish to read more on this subject, go to casebook.org

Sorry about the liberal use of quotation marks, but there are so many ifs, ands, buts and maybes connected with this research. If they do manage to get a DNA profile, what does this prove? Other than that someone or other may have written some crank letters to the police. As you can probably tell, I don't put much faith in the title of her book.

[shammydodger]

Sorry, tomestone, but substantial forensic matter was not collected at the time of the murders, if any at all. Certainly none survives or has come to light, unless one is counting the "Ripper Letters", and the overwhelming majority of Ripperologists seem to be able to agree that most, if not all, of these letters were hoaxes (which is fairly remarkable, considering that they can't agree on much else about the case.) There is some opinion that the "From Hell" letter is genuine, but certainly it is not a unanimous opinion, and as In a Pickle says, the chain of evidence is not there. Any "evidence" on the letter(s)will have been so corrupted. Forensic science, for what it was at the time (and it was extremely limited) was useless for the purposes of helping to solve these crimes.

[shammydodger]

Correction to one of my earlier posts.

The book by Patricia Cornwell is called "Portrait of a Killer: Jack The Ripper - Case Closed."

[spudqueen]

Is the book by Patricia Cornwell a recent book, as I read a book twenty years ago claiming that Jack the Ripper was Walter Sickert.

[shammydodger]

Spudqueen

It is indeed a recent book. There is another book, which is still being reprinted (I saw it in ASDA t'other day) called "Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution" by Stephen Knight. It popularised the tale that the murders were a masonic conspiracy, involving (among others) Prince Albert Victor, Sir William Gull (Queen Victoria's doctor) and, on the periphery, Walter Sickert. This book was the inspiration for a mini-series starring Michael Caine and, unfortunately, has lead many people to erroneously believe that the identity of Jack the Ripper has been solved beyond doubt.

In the early 1990s, Jean Overton Fuller wrote "Sickert and the Ripper Crimes", which claimed that Sickert himself was Jack the Ripper.

I've read Cornwell's and Knight's efforts, but not Fuller's.