The clincher

[kensei]

I wonder- IF there was some hypothetical way of possibly identifying the Ripper based on something found on the victims' remains, even though we are way past being able to arrest someone, I'm sure there would still be a strong argument made for doing it simply because the case is so notorious and there are so many people who want to know.

A Nazi war criminal- possibly the last- was just deported to Germany this week to stand trial at age 89. I wonder when the time passed beyond which the Ripper had officially gotten away with it no matter who he was. Somewhere between WW2 and the Korean War, I would think.

[halomanuk]

Correct Kensei,Chapmans grave has been lost i'm afraid.
As for exhuming anything,this is more than just a 'cold case' scenario as whether or not the Ripper's identity would be found it makes no difference to anything, so they would not exhume simply for that reason among many other humanitarian reasons.

[kensei]

Grave Maurice, just to clarify, the gravesites of some of the victims are indeed known. As I understand it (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), Chapman's exact spot has been rather lost track of, and Nichols & Eddowes are within yards of each other but there is now a road built over them, but Stride and Kelly still have graves which could potentially be unearthed. I'm torn over whether this would be wildly inappropriate or whether it should be done if there was a chance of finally solving this mystery once and for all. Really, the little angel and devil sitting on my shoulders can't seem to come to a concensus on the matter. But how likely is it that it would be allowed unless it was a case in which the killer might conceivably still be caught? If still alive, the Ripper would be an absolute minimum of 140 years old today, putting him firmly into the Guinness Book of records. If there's one thing we can all agree on, I think it's that JTR is as dead as his victims. He has escaped justice. Might he still be conclusively identifed? I hold out just enough hope to say yes, I think there might possibly be some undefined way in which it might still happen. But will it? Probably not.

[Barnaby]

Solving the case might be too high of a bar. Will it ever be possible to make a case against a suspect in which a jury of reasonable Casebook users might find him guilty based on a simple preponderance of evidence?

[The Grave Maurice]

OK, I know I'm thick about matters scientific, but I'm not following any of this. DNA from whom on what? As far as I know, the victims can't be disinterred because we don't know where, exactly, they were buried. As for the suspects....which suspects? Again, as far as I know, there are no samples available from any of them and no one is likely to get permission to dig them up. So what do we compare with descendants' DNA? And what the heck has Eddowes' dress got to do with it? Unless JtR slobbered over his work, why would his DNA be on it?

If there is any "clincher" (and I doubt there is) it would have to be a document of some sort.

[Christine]

I agree with that brummie the DNA evidece would be a great peice of evidence to lock the case but first we have to have DNA from a suspect or his living decendents to compair it to.

I'm not to well informed of the process but isnt it the case that the farther down the line we go in respect to living relitives the less reliable the match would be. Can anyone else elaborate on this?

No, this is not true. For example, there are many DNA sequences that are known to have originated with one person who lived in a certain village in Africa around 900 AD or something like that. They know this because almost everybody in that village has the sequence, but almost nobody else has it. They know it dates from 900 AD because they measure they amount of variance in the sequence from villager to villager and they know the rate of DNA mutation.

As far as descendants, they are also useful because these examples are all special cases, but children match their parents 50%, grandchildren match 25%, cousins match each other 12.5%, and so on. You would find as many relatives and descendants as you could and cross check their matches and determine what sequences came from the shared ancestor. Then you look for those sequences in your test sample. Obviously from 1888 you wouldn't have much to work with, but it has already been done with Thomas Jefferson and his known relatives and the descendants of Sally Heming (his slave).

I would expect the descendants route to be less useful, because a good many people won't even know that they've got a suspect in their family tree, so it order to run any sort of a test you'd have to have a suspect in mind and research his descendants. The difficulty in tracing the George Hutchinsons of yore is a good example; we'd have even less luck tracing his descendants. But someday we'll be able to test and sample and say an awful lot about it, like he was of Irish descent and red-headed, or he was a Polish Jew, or he was unusually tall and thin.

[smezenen]

I agree with that brummie the DNA evidece would be a great peice of evidence to lock the case but first we have to have DNA from a suspect or his living decendents to compair it to.

I'm not to well informed of the process but isnt it the case that the farther down the line we go in respect to living relitives the less reliable the match would be. Can anyone else elaborate on this?

[brummie]

One day a peice of evidence will emerge which will definately point to a suspect. I personally believe that Eddows' dress is the key - there is a DNA profile on that, even if our technology cannot yet access enough information from it.

Trouble is even if you could extract usable and un-contaminated DNA there are still two problems that immediatrly spring to mind 1) With Eddowes working as a prostitute you would expect to obtain several different samples from her dress, how do you decide which one is the killer? and 2) What would you compare the sample to?

[DarkPassenger]

One day a peice of evidence will emerge which will definately point to a suspect. I personally believe that Eddows' dress is the key - there is a DNA profile on that, even if our technology cannot yet access enough information from it.

[babybird67]

i also have great hopes...

for Steve's work on the photos of MJK. (see his thread, by sgh, in MJK part of site)

[halomanuk]

I think it is a possibility of course,but it will have to be another piece of very important information that suddenly turns up to solve this.

There are obviously other clues,letters,photos out there - it's just finding them.
So basically luck will be the factor if JTR is to be known now.

[babybird67]

excavate some previous Klosowski homes...

body parts might show up.

[Archaic]

I agree with SteelySama... Hope Springs Eternal! -Archaic

[Christine]

Hi, c.d.

There may still be deteriorated DNA on the victims. We might someday be able determine that a person who touched the victims was an ancestor or relative of a person still living, or that he had an ancestor from a very small geographic area.

This sounds unlikely, but actually we can do all this now with a piece of hair or bone. The main obstacle to doing this with deteriorated DNA is not the condition of the DNA but the lack of knowledge about how to interpret the data. It would be like trying to rebuild a book from shredded pieces of paper--the amount of success you have depends greatly on whether you can figure out what the book was originally about. Currently our "known library" is small.

Of course DNA in a grave would be any very poor condition, and better tools would be needed. But the difference at this point is more quantitative than qualitative. However I'm also told that the grave sites may not actually contain the victims, so that would also be an issue.

Anyhow, there are other possibilities, for example, we might find the Diary of Jack the Ripper with a bit of dried up kidney in it, and that could be a clincher, although as I said, if there is such a thing, it would likely have been found years ago....

[Mascara & Paranoia]

I'm certain it won't be solved. There'll never be a way of knowing for sure who the killer was and all the suspects are only theories who aren't physically evidently linked to either of the murders.

To be honest, I think it's unlikely the actual murderer is among any of that lot, but that's just my opinion.