Aaron Kosminski - ????

So someone is using DNA evidence to try and track the Ripper again. The work that Russell Edwards has done seems, from what I know so far, to be more convincing than Patricia Cornwell's efforts to nail Walter Sickert via DNA on an envelope flat. And, unlike her multi million dollar extravaganza, Edwards has proceeded with refreshing English amateurism - enlisting a scientist from John Moores University to work on the DNA 'during his spare time.' So good luck to him and his book. Of course we can ask lots of questions about  contamination of  Catherine Eddowes' scarf over the years, about DNA not being totally unique in fact, and about whether be semen and the blood can be definitely shown to have been deposited on the same night.

But leaving those questions aside, I am a little troubled by Edwards' reliance on Melville Macnaghten's notes. 'Kosminski, the insane Jew, Michael Ostrog, the Russian doctor, and Montague Druitt the sexually insane teacher', are three names that have been trotted out again and again over the years. If any of them were *really* the Ripper, would Macnaghten, only writing in 1894, simply have left their names in a secret notebook and done nothing about prosecuting them? This was only three years after the death of Frances Coles, after all - and who knows, really, whether or not Frances is canonical?

No.  I think these names were listed in an attempt to exonerate Thomas Cutbush. And as we can read in David Bullock's interesting little book, 'The Man who Would be Jack', Cutbush had to be exonerated as he was a close relative to a senior policeman.

Whether it was really Cutbush, whether it was someone else... No, I don't think the case is closed quite yet.