Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (34 page)

For the profiling, another amplification of the DNA was needed. This second step uses the polymerase chain reaction, which Jari explained to me was the same method used on the samples from
Karen, me and him. With a little bit of luck, we would now get the mtDNA fragments amplified from just single cells.

It was a rainy Friday morning when I got the news that the amplification process had worked, giving us a massive resource to work from.

It was a major victory: now Jari had to start work amplifying specific segments, and then to do the DNA sequencing. He was about to start comparing it to match M’s DNA against that of the
Ripper, when he suffered a serious blow. His father died unexpectedly, back in Finland, and he had to fly there straight away.

His personal problems obviously took precedence at this juncture, and over the next couple of weeks he had to go back to Finland, twice, to sort everything out. It was a tough
time for him, emotionally and physically. Neither he nor I were able to sleep, for different reasons, and we were texting each other late into the night. I really appreciate the fact that as soon
as he was back at work, he started work on comparing M’s mitochondrial DNA with that of the cells extracted from the semen stain on the shawl.

It was a very testing time for me, and I was living on nervous energy, knowing that he was back at work on this crucial stage. I wasn’t sleeping, I lost half a stone in weight, and I was
constantly checking my phone and emails for news of the test results. It was quarter past eight on a Friday evening when an email pinged into my inbox titled First Results. I hardly dared read
it.

What Jari had found was a 99.2 per cent match when he ran the alignment in one direction, and going the other way it was a 100 per cent perfect match. These results were
fantastic, mind-blowing for me. Jari was cautious, as ever, noting that
there were two anomalies and further testing would be needed. He explained that the problem could be
because the DNA had been amplified billions of times, and any mistake with the enzyme copying the DNA could also be amplified. The other possibility was contamination, although this was unlikely as
he works in a pressurized room with special pipettes and ultraviolet light to eliminate unwanted DNA from other sources. But he was pleased with the result, and he was also pleased with the
scientific work that achieved it. As he wrote in an email to me:

He even allowed himself a brief moment of pride and pleasure: ‘I think this has been one hell of a masterpiece of work (quite proud of this) and it would not have been
possible to attempt before 2006 as the technologies were not available.’

Later he said, ‘Given the fact that we are working from amplified cells it is not outlandish that there would be one mistake.’

I, not as cautious as Jari the scientist, was thrilled: it felt as
if we were home and dry. I looked at the attachment he sent me, a multicoloured sequence of blocks that
aligned the DNA of M and our suspect, and I could see we had a near-perfect match. Jari explained that the anomaly did not mean there was a difference: it simply meant that the test did not take at
that point in the sequence.

Not long ago, looking at a DNA sequence would have meant nothing to me, but under Jari’s tutelage I can now scan the colours and see the match. I was bowled over, although at first I could
not take it in fully. I felt a massive sense of relief and release. We had, I knew for sure, nailed Aaron Kosminski.

I had to delay my celebration to the following Tuesday, when I went to the East End – where else? I went to my favourite curry house for a meal: my good mood was infectious and the staff,
who know me well, plied me with drinks. Then I decided to visit all the pubs and bars in Whitechapel that I had walked past for years but never been inside. It was my own private celebration but I
felt I deserved it. Sheer persistence had paid off. I’d been living on adrenalin for years, and finally I was getting the right results.

But after that celebration, I had to put my excitement on hold as Jari carried on with his work. Now he needed to eliminate Karen (and through her, her ancestor Catherine Eddowes), himself and
me, because our DNA was present on the shawl through handling it. A few weeks later this had been done, and we know for certain that the DNA extracted from the semen stains are not a contamination
by either Jari or me, nor was it from the victim.

We also decided to test for ethnic and geographic background, although Jari cautioned me that we might not get a full profile from the samples we have. With good quality
DNA it is not a problem. Jari has done the testing on himself: ‘I know that based on my mitochondrial DNA I am 96.3% Finnish, but the rest of me comes from Spanish farmers,
which was a surprise. Somewhere in the past one of my ancestors might have married a Spaniard. I am looking into whether we have sufficiently good genomic DNA to be able to get the same precise
information about our suspect, but we have to remember that it is very old DNA.’

So by the end of May all we were waiting for was, with luck, a geographic location of which area of the world Aaron Kosminski came from. Of course, we know the answer, but it would be great to
have scientific evidence to underline it.

I
t was half past two in the morning when Jari’s email came through.

He had established a 100 per cent match of the genome of our suspect’s DNA to haplogroup T1a1. It sounded very impressive.

I had to wait until 7 a.m. to get a layman’s explanation of what this means, and needless to say, I didn’t sleep. What Jari emailed then gave me another, huge, ‘wow’
moment: the Ripper’s haplogroup type is very typical in people of Russian Jewish ethnicity (with ‘Russian’ embracing Polish as well, as Jari later explained). With all the other
DNA evidence we have, this is the cherry on the top of the cake: it matches Aaron Kosminski and his origins.

I can’t pretend to understand the science of this amazing discovery, but as Jari explains it, in molecular evolution a haplogroup is a group of haplotypes (which are single nucleotide
polymorphisms) which have the same mutations in all the haplotypes in the group, and therefore represent a clade, which is a group of people sharing the same common ancestry. In other words, DNA
can be analysed to say which part of the
world a person’s ancestors came from. The process Jari used to establish this haplogroup for Kosminski is the same one that
tells him he is Finnish with a dash of Spanish farmers: but, of course, working on his own DNA was easier because it is fresh – not well over a hundred years old like the DNA extracted from
the shawl.

These mutations have different characteristics from the ones scientists use to track diseases, like cancer. They are not affected by disease, which is why they became common in a given
population.

Jari compared the DNA sequences from the isolated cells to the collection of DNA databases stored at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), based in Bethesda, USA. This
database holds millions of sequences from various organisms, including humans. The answer took a while to compute, but the NCBI server came up with one perfect hit. This reference sequence, from
someone who had exactly the same long sequence Jari had obtained from the shawl DNA, had only been entered a few weeks earlier, so once again luck was on our side.

The hit was for mitochondrial haplotype T1a1; it matched our sequence perfectly, and the ethnicity of the person it belonged to was recorded as ‘Russian.’ Jari read it three or four
times before it truly sank in.

‘I’d been dreading it would say something like “Jamaican” or “Polynesian” – then we would have had a problem.’

We’d got the evidence we needed to name Kosminski definitively as the Ripper, with his perfect match with his descendant M, but, like Jari, I knew that if this geographic profiling had
shown him to come from a completely different part of the world, we might have had to rethink. But, thankfully,
it backs up everything we already know. We had our belt, now
we had the braces.

After the hit, Jari was also unable to go to bed, so wide-awake was he that he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep for thinking about it, so he carried on with the research. There we were,
hundreds of miles apart, both with our minds racing. Jari knew that Russian Jews are known to have moved to central and eastern Europe, including Poland. A major study in the
Annals of Human
Genetics
into mitochondrial DNA variability in Poles and Russians concluded that both countries have a similar DNA pattern, with all mtDNA haplogroups being represented equally in both nations
(with haplogroup T1 very slightly more represented among the Poles). So when Jari came up with ‘Russian’, it embraces Polish, too, hence Jari’s text stating Russian ethnicity.

As with everything on our quest, there were last-minute hitches, with a technical problem in the German lab which was customizing the oligonucleotides (short single-strands of DNA) for Jari,
which he needed in order to carry out the laboratory analysis, making the DNA sequence (a string of text/letters) which he could then compare to the American database. Instead of a twenty-four hour
turn around on our samples, we waited more than seventy-two hours. All edge-of-the-seat, nail-biting stuff for me, but I should be used to it by now . . . And we got the right result, so I’m
not complaining.

There was more good news a few days later, when Jari was able to deduce more from the DNA. He had been doing tests to establish the hair, skin and eye colour of the owner of the cells and he was
able to tell me that our man definitely did not have red or blond hair, but that his hair colour was likely to be dark (brown or black). He could also, to my amazement, tell that
there was some very preliminary evidence suggesting that our man had acne. This may not prove to be the case – the science in this area is new and Jari was cautious about
overstating this – but the fact that it could be possible to deduce this kind of detail is astonishing. As the research in this area develops, who knows what we might be able to tell from the
cells in the future.

Israel Schwartz, the man I believe to be the best eye witness of a Ripper attack, had described the assailant he saw as having ‘hair, dark, and a small dark moustache’. So although
these new results did not amount to proof, they increased my conviction that we had the right man.

There is a feeling of deep satisfaction, knowing that I have solved the greatest murder mystery ever. It has taken a long time, there have been many lows as well as highs. I have come close to
abandoning it more than once, and I have had moments of despair to counterpoint moments of wild jubilation. I have lost many hours of sleep over it, and my wife’s patience has been stretched.
Finally, everything I have done has been vindicated.

It has been an amazing journey. I have met some wonderful people along the way, and I have made good and lasting friendships. I have also discovered a great deal about myself, not least when,
the day before Jari’s final results came in, something surfaced from my subconscious that has helped me understand why I felt such a deep connection with the Ripper’s victims, those
unfortunate women who were forced to sell their bodies to pay for the basic necessities of food and a bed for the night. Yes, I had always empathized with them, partly because of my own short
experience of being homeless. But this was something far bigger.

I recalled a conversation I heard as a child, something I had
filed away, perhaps because I did not understand it fully at the time, and perhaps, also, because I did not
want to understand it. I was about six years old, because I know we were living in the two-up, two-down terraced house. My Auntie Enid was talking to Mum about my grandmother on my dad’s
side, who I would only meet twice.

‘She was a prostitute, that’s what she was,’ Enid said, her voice dripping with disapproval. Auntie Enid was a vivid redhead, married to my dad’s brother Mickey, a
milkman. She used to pop round from time to time to see Mum.

I had honestly never thought about this revelation until I reached the final chapter of my Ripper search. Why did it come back to me? A chance remark from a female colleague, in which she
likened being the mistress of a married man to being a prostitute, sparked an irrational anger in me. The two things are not the same, but why did it annoy me so much that she conflated them? It
was while I was trying to work out the answer that the conversation between Mum and Auntie Enid came back to me.

At the next opportunity I rang my mum, to check whether it was true. ‘Yes,’ she said, straight away. ‘Your grandmother was a prostitute.’

She had abandoned her family when my dad was young, and he and his brothers and sisters had been brought up by Auntie Ruth, the oldest sister, because my grandfather worked driving lorries.
There were six of them, and it must have been tough. When I was very small, when Mum and Dad were still living together, we lived on the tenth floor of a tower block, just a couple of streets away
from the Liverpool docks. My paternal grandmother lived on the ground floor of the same block, but there was no contact between her and our family, and the only
couple of
occasions I met her were when we literally bumped into her, and she would say hello.

Unlike my other grandmother, who was warm and loving and everything a grandmother should be, this woman was a stranger: I don’t even know her name. But I am still a descendant of hers,
some of her genes are replicated in me, and this whole sense of family connection is something I have been made aware of through my scientific work tracking down the Ripper. I no longer have any
connection with my dad’s side of the family: he emigrated to Australia twenty years ago and I have only seen him once since then, and we didn’t get on. But he, and this woman I never
knew, are part of my ancestry, just as Catherine Eddowes is part of Karen Miller’s.