Aaron Kosminski

But I talk about a lot of unsolved mysteries here on Black Box Online Radio, and I have found that with the Jack the Ripper case, There are two theories that seem to dominate over all others.

Number one is that Jack the Ripper was a man named Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old hairdresser.

And number two is that Jack the Ripper was a man named Charles Lechmere, a 40-year-old car man.

Aaron Kosminski was from Poland and Charles Lechmere was from England.

And one of the first things that they showed in their documentary here, uncovering Jack the Ripper's London, was that they had the person playing Charles Lechmere in a recreation.

walking up to the body of Polly Nichols, Jack the Ripper's first victim, and he can't see her in the dark.

So it's the whole theory of Charles Lesmere got interrupted, so then he pretended to be a witness, viewing the body of Polly Nichols.

And that is something that I've talked about a lot here on Black Box Online Radio, because I think it's one of the defendable theories.

It's not proof that he committed the murders.

More recently, there's been a lot of discussion about Aaron Kosminski.

Kosminski was a Polish barber who lived in Whitechapel in the 1880s.

He's generally believed to be the Kosminski who was named as a suspect in the McNaughton memoranda back in 1894.

Russell Edwards has made the case that Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper.

This is based on DNA analysis of a shawl.

It's thought to have belonged to Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim.

But I don't know why this bothered me so much, but talking about the Jack the Ripper suspects in this documentary episode, Jack the Ripper, the tabloid killer...

Featured, well, Aaron Kosminski.

Aaron Kosminski was discussed as another Jack the Ripper suspect, and that's fine.

If you are watching a Jack the Ripper documentary, even if it's a TV special or made-for-TV presentation, you would expect that they were going to mention Aaron Kosminski at some point.

He is the prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper case.

But the photo of them that they used wasn't even a photo.

And as I understand it, two of them in the front are Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

And the man behind them is George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.

Which suspect was he trying to highlight? Which suspect was he trying to dismiss? And you just can drop everything in the comment section down below.

But believe it or not, after everything that I have just told you, over the last twelve months, I really have had just this type of waning reaction toward Aaron Kosminski, even though it sounds like I'm somebody who is just creating a nine-minute diatribe on what we need to think about in regards to Aaron Kosminski, some type of nine-minute rambling monologue about how Aaron Kosminski or just this Kosminski, any Kosminski is some type of defendable suspect.

I would state that, yes, he's defendable, but he's not my top suspect right now.

If anything, this just shows that there's some muddled thinking going on with law enforcement.

And when you look at the possibilities as we are going to do today, Jack the Ripper as being a homegrown Englishman starts to sound a little bit more plausible.

But it seems like they had reasons for suspecting this individual, Kosminski, whomever he was.

It could have been Aaron Kosminski, the twenty-three-year-old hairdresser.

It could have been somebody else, and somebody else actually seems to be somewhat defendable, but there you have it.

between that kidney that was sent in to the authorities and now apparently mitochondrial DNA recovered from a shawl that was connected to Catherine.

The results were promoted as evidence pointing toward Aaron Kosminski.

Similar claims continued circulating in 2025.

Why did I not hear about this? This was last year.

There's no provenance for the shawl at all.

There's no record that it belonged to Catherine Eddowes or to Aaron Kosminski, which is what is claimed in the book, which it comes from.

We don't, you know...

Shaw went to several conferences.

And one of the things he tried to do was to see if MacNaughton's Kosminski was the same as Anderson's Polish Jew.

And he came to the conclusion they were.

on the research he did and what all he had was information he found himself he decided that the only kosminski he could find going into an asylum at the right time was a guy called aaron kosminski well the information he could find he decided he wasn't violent and was unlikely and it appeared that he was completely harmless and a bit of an imbecile and unlikely to be the killer so martin suggested a guy called david cohen suggested that cohen was actually a sort of john doe um so you've got various things in anderson suspect basically but i'm firmly in the answer suspect was probably the best fit for anderson suspect is probably aaron kuzminski i also believe that robert anderson and donald swanson genuinely believe they knew who the killer was but i accept they could have been wrong And I think that's the best way.

I'm firmly in that camp, but I'm prepared to accept they could have been wrong.

He is somebody who actually has a real connection to the Jack the Ripper case, and he wasn't just some casual observer.

He is the one who actually said that there were three suspects who deserve very strong consideration: Montague John Druitt, Kosminski, whoever that was, maybe it's Aaron Kosminski, maybe somebody else, Montague John Druitt, Kosminski, and Michael Ostrog.

So Melville Macnaghten played a very large role in the way we understand the Jack the Ripper case this, to this day in the 21st century.

But let's keep going here with casebook.org.

Macnaghten had been privately informed that Druitt's family thought he was the Ripper, and he was sexually insane.

Two, Kaminski, Kosminski, or Kosmensky, a Polish Jew who lived in the very heart of the district where the murders were committed.

He had become insane owing to many years' indulgence in solitary vices, i.e. masturbating.

He was detained in a lunatic asylum about March 1889.

It was apparent that names had at last been put to Major Griffith's three suspects.

And Macnaghten endorsed Griffith's preference for the drowned English doctor, saying that the most likely explanation of the Ripper's disappearance was that his brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller's Court, and he then committed suicide.

Though he also permitted the less likely alternative that the Ripper's relatives found him to be so helplessly insane that they confined him to a lunatic asylum, an apparent reference to Kaminski-Kosminski, recalling Griffith's puzzling suggestion that his homicidal mania finally showed up after the commission of five atrocious murders.

Farson was rightly satisfied that this was the best historical document ever produced on the Ripper, the closest to the source of serious investigation.

They did a show in the late 80s.

It was kind of like on the Discovery Channel or the History Channel, where them two FBI, they profiled along with a member of the Scotland Yard who you know, the Jack Draper would have been, and they came up with Aaron Kosminski.

So they basically believe leather apron.

So it was this, you know, a person that was a butcher or that sort of mentality that they could get in and out.

going to say, it would be interesting, wouldn't it, if the DNA profiling that is used today could somehow be transported back to 1888 and used in the investigation back then to see what sort of effect, what sort of evidence that could have come up with.

Well, it's interesting because the last piece of research evidence that I saw, and it goes back, I don't know, about seven, eight years now it's got to be, with the scarf, that they were able to get some DNA off of a scarf that somebody's great, great, great, whatever, had it.

And they said, okay, this has got to be Aaron Kosminski's because it matches his.

But the problem is it was, you know, a blood sample that matched a tremendous majority of the population back then.

Her name was Catherine Eddowes.

His was Aaron Kosminski.

The claim seemed to close a case that had remained open for more than a century.

Catherine was one of five women commonly grouped together as victims of the murderer called Jack the Ripper.

They used photography and other imaging to examine possible stains.

They sampled material they considered relevant, including areas with features they interpreted as blood and semen.

They reported obtaining mitochondrial DNA profiles from those areas and compared them with samples from maternal-line relatives of Catherine Eddowes and Aaron Kosminski.

Mitochondrial DNA is useful in old material because cells contain many copies of it.