Aaron Kosminski

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Aaron Kosminski (born as Aron Mordke Kozminski ; born September 11, 1865 in Kłodawa / Congress Poland ; † March 24, 1919 in London ) was a Polish immigrant living in London. He is considered one of the prime suspects who could be responsible for the murder of several prostitutes in 1888, attributed to Jack the Ripper . The investigators at the time already counted him among the narrower group of suspects. After a DNA analysis of traces on a scarf that was probably found on one of the victims, the author Russell Edwards postulated in September 2014 that he could identify Kosminski as Jack the Ripper. In March 2019, a - although not undisputed - study was published in a specialist journal, according to which the DNA traces can actually be linked to Kosminski.

Life

The "Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum" in which Aaron Kosminski was housed

Aaron Kosminski was born in the Polish city ​​of Kłodawa as the son of Abram Jozef Kozminski and his wife Golda, nee. Lubnowska, born. To escape the anti-Semitic pogroms in Congress Poland , he and his family emigrated to London in 1881 in the Mile End district in the East End . He worked as a barber on Greenfield Street . As early as 1885 he was classified as mentally ill, this was expressed in hallucinations and paranoid delusions. In 1890 he was sent to a workhouse as a mentally ill person, but was released again.

After threatening his sister with a knife, he was housed in various mental hospitals from 1891 until his death on March 24, 1919 .

More suspicious than Jack the Ripper

Contemporary suspicion

So-called "Macnaghten Memorandum", in which Melville Macnaghten suspects a man named "Kosminski" to be Jack the Ripper

Early on after the serial murders attributed to Jack the Ripper, which included at least five homicides of prostitutes in the London boroughs of Whitechapel , Spitalfields, and the City of London between August and November 1888, a person with the surname Kosminski was considered one of the prime suspects. In an 1894 note found in 1959 in the estate of Assistant Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten , an abridged version of which was also published by the Metropolitan Police Service in 1970 , named a suspect known as a "Polish Jew" by the name Kosminski . Macnaghten considered Kosminski, whose first name was not noted, to be a prime suspect, as he is said to have had a pronounced hatred with murderous tendencies towards women.

Robert Anderson , who at the time of the Ripper murders was the head of crime investigation at Scotland Yard , wrote in his autobiography The Lighter Side of My Official Live (1910) that he considered a "lower class Polish Jew" for Jack the Ripper. Donald Swanson, who was responsible for solving the murders, noted the name Kosminski on a copy of this biography, which is on display in the Crime Museum at Scotland Yard. He also added that Kosminski, who lived in his brother's house, was under police surveillance and was eventually admitted to a psychiatric ward.

At the end of the 1980s, based on these statements , the author Martin Fido examined the lists of psychiatric institutions that existed at the end of the 19th century under the name Kosminski and found only the name Aaron Kosminski. At the time of the Whitechapel murders, Aaron Kosminski lived on Providence Street and later on Greenfield Street, both of which are in the Mile End district, close to the crime scenes. The psychiatric records indicate that Kosminski suffered from paranoid schizophrenia , a disease that other serial killers have also been diagnosed with.

Robert Anderson goes on to write in his memoir that there should have been a person who Aaron Kosminski could clearly identify as Jack the Ripper, but did not do so because she was also Jewish and Jews would not incriminate one another. Donald Swanson also supported this statement. In contrast, Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police at the time of the murders, describes Anderson's claim that Jews never incriminate one another as reckless insinuation towards Jews. Whether Aaron Kosminski was actually identified by another person of Jewish faith is therefore highly controversial, especially since he is only mentioned in the above-mentioned note from Melville Macnaghten in an official police document. As a result of the widespread anti-Semitism came also the rabbinic scholar Hermann Adler and his counterpart Moses Gaster and the Jewish shoemaker John Pizer, who by his nickname "Leather Apron" ( dt. "Leather Apron") was known under suspicion.

The murders of the so-called canonical five ended in November 1888, but Kosminski was able to live completely unmolested until his admission in 1891. During his stay in the mental health facilities, Aaron Kosminski was considered harmless. Only two violent abnormalities are known: He threw a chair at a nurse and threatened a nurse with a knife.

Possible confusion with Nathan Kaminsky

Like Aaron Kosminski, Nathan Kaminsky was of Polish-Jewish descent. From May 1888, all traces of the shoemaker , who lived in Whitechapel and suffered from syphilis , were lost. On December 12, 1888, just under a month after the last murder in the series of canonical five, a hitherto unknown David Cohen was admitted to the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum psychiatric institution, which later also housed Aaron Kosminski, who was of the same age. David Cohen died there in October 1889. David Cohen is described in the psychiatric files as antisocial and violent and was therefore restricted in his physical freedom. The ripper specialist Martin Fido comes to the conclusion in his book The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper from 1987 that the name David Cohen was a placeholder name, comparable to the English John Doe , and that it is in fact the im Nathan Kaminsky, who disappeared on May 28, 1888, acted. Since both Kosminski and Cohen (equated with Kaminsky by Fido) were born in the same year, both were of Polish-Jewish origin, both were housed in a mental hospital and both spoke only Yiddish , Fido concludes that the police were mistaken and wrongly suspected Aaron Kosminski of the Whitechapel murders because of the similar family names.

In David Cohen's medical files, however, there is no mention that he was suffering from syphilis, only tuberculosis is noted. Therefore, Fido's thesis that David Cohen should have been identical to Nathan Kaminsky is viewed critically by other Ripper experts, and the disappearance of Nathan Kaminsky in May 1888 can be explained by the fact that he died suddenly, completely unnoticed by his surroundings, which was nothing unusual at the time. The experts also disagree as to whether David Cohen even fit into Jack the Ripper's profile. While ripper expert Nigel Cawthorne assumes that the uncontrolled and anti-social behavior of David Cohen does not match the level-headed approach of the Whitechapel murderer, the profiler John E. Douglas assumes the exact opposite and believes that Jack the Ripper is a person was of Cohen's and Kosminski's age, who had an irrationally anti-social or moody demeanor and lived near the crime scenes.

DNA examination

On September 7, 2014, Russell Edwards reported in the British newspaper Daily Mail that traces of sperm and blood on a silk kerchief, which was allegedly found in connection with the murder of Catherine Eddowes near her body, were DNA Analysis . These were carried out by the Finnish biochemist Jari Louhelainen, who teaches at the Universities of Helsinki and Liverpool. According to Louhelainen's results, the blood traces match the DNA sample of a descendant of Catherine Eddowes, Karen Miller, to almost 100%. The DNA of the sperm traces was compared with a sample from a descendant of Kosminski's sister and, according to the scientist, matched 99.2% in a first test and 99.99% in a second test. At that time, however, the analysis of the samples was not published in any specialist journal subject to the peer review process.

The result of the DNA analysis was then reported internationally in the media, and various experts had divided opinions. Alec John Jeffreys , developer of the genetic fingerprint, described the result as "interesting and noteworthy," but noted that the samples and the circumstances surrounding the DNA examination would need to be verified and peer-reviewed by a third party before a statement can be made about the identity of Jack the Rippers. The police officer and ripper specialist Alan McCormick, on the other hand, was convinced of the result of the test even without a cross-assessment, while other Jack-the-Ripper experts, such as Donald Rumbelow , pointed out that it had not been proven at all that the scarf was really at the crime scene was found. The biochemist Peter Gill also questioned the authenticity of the scarf, and according to him it is possible that descendants of Catherine Eddowes, who were in a room with the scarf for three days in 2007, could have contaminated the evidence with their DNA.

Critical voices were also raised due to the fact that the result of the DNA test was first published in the Daily Mail newspaper . Susannah L. Bodman of The Oregonian, for example, suggested that the Daily Mail did not have a reputation for reliability when it came to scientific issues and results. Others pointed out that there was a difference between whether a scientific result was published in a daily newspaper or a scientific journal. After all, Jari Louhelainen himself admitted to having made methodological mistakes.

It was only in March 2019 that Jari Louhelainen published the required study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences and again argued that the DNA traces could be linked to Kosminski. In a commentary article in the journal Science , however, DNA experts immediately criticized the methodology of the study again. Accordingly, the comparison of DNA samples based on the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA is only suitable for excluding the relationship of two people, in other words: "The mitochondrial DNA from the scarf can come from Kosminski, but it can probably also come from thousands of others, who lived in London at the time. "

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Was Jack the Ripper a hairdresser? , Spiegel Online , July 15, 2006
  2. ↑ a b Russel Edwards: Jack the Ripper unmasked from September 7, 2014 at: dailymail.co.uk, accessed on: September 9, 2014
  3. ^ A b Jari Louhelainen and David Miller: Forensic Investigation of a Shawl Linked to the "Jack the Ripper" Murders. In: Journal of Forensic Sciences. Online advance publication of March 12, 2019, doi: 10.1111 / 1556-4029.14038
  4. ↑ Berliner Zeitung online from September 8, 2014: Jack the Ripper is said to have been Pole
  5. ↑ Arutz Sheva ( online )
  6. ^ Donald Rumbelow : The Complete Jack the Ripper. Fully Revised and Updated. Penguin Books, London 2004, ISBN 0-14-017395-1 , p. 180
  7. ^ A b Paul Begg: Jack the Ripper. The Definitive History , Pearson Education, London 2003, ISBN 0-582-50631-X , pp. 269-270
  8. ↑ Rumbelow, p. 142
  9. ↑ Stewart P. Evans, Donald Rumbelow: Jack the Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates. Sutton Publishing, Stroud 2006, ISBN 0-7509-4228-2 , p. 236
  10. ↑ Evans and Rumbelow, p. 253; Rumbelow, p. 179
  11. ↑ see section literature
  12. ↑ Begg, p. 266
  13. ↑ Colin Wilson, Robin Odell: Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict. Bantam Press 1987, ISBN 0-593-01020-5 , p. 78
  14. ↑ Stewart P. Evans, Keith Skinner: The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Constable and Robinson, London 2000, ISBN 1-84119-225-2 , pp. 262 and 604
  15. ↑ Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (editors) Judaism, anti-Semitism and German-language literature from the First World War to 1933/1938, Tübingen 1993, ISBN 3-484-10690-5 , pp. 221f
  16. ^ Mark Whitehead, Miriam Rivett: Jack the Ripper . Pocket Essentials, Harpenden 2006, ISBN 978-1-904048-69-5 , p. 108
  17. ↑ Rumbelow, p. 182
  18. ↑ Martin Fido . The Crimes, Death and Detection of Jack the Riper. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1987, ISBN 978-0-297-79136-2 , pp. 216-219
  19. ↑ a b Fido, pp. 219-220, 231
  20. ^ Whitehead and Rivett, p. 109
  21. ↑ Collin Kendell. Jack the Ripper - The Theories and the Facts . Amberley, Strout 2010, ISBN 978-1-4456-0084-0 , p. 90
  22. ↑ Stephen Knight. Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution . Bounty Books, London 1987/2000, ISBN 0-7537-0369-6 , p. 2
  23. ↑ John E. Douglas , Mark Olshaker. The Cases That Haunt Us. Simon and Schuster, New York City 2001, ISBN 978-0-7432-1239-7 , pp. 79-80
  24. ↑ a b We unmasked Jack the Ripper on: welt.de, accessed on September 9, 2014
  25. ↑ Compilation of press articles on Google News , accessed on: September 10, 2014
  26. ↑ Jack the Ripper: Mystery solved? ( Memento of the original from September 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at: 3news.co.nz, accessed on: September 9, 2014 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.3news.co.nz
  27. ↑ DNA row over 'proof' Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper , from: theaustralian.com.au, accessed on: September 9, 2014
  28. ↑ Jack the Ripper finally identified by DNA? Maybe, maybe not ... , on: oregonlive.com, accessed on: September 9, 2014
  29. ↑ Jack the Ripper: Scientist who claims to have identified notorious killer has 'made serious DNA error' , The Independent of October 19, 2014
  30. ↑ Does a new genetic analysis finally reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper? On: sciencemag.org from March 15, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Kosminski, Aaron
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kozminski, Aron Mordke (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Suspected serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Kłodawa
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1919
Place of death London