The clincher

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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]

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]

The problem is,as with most things nowadays,people would stand in the way of this simply because' the final resting place of the women are being disturbed and haven't they been through enough and should be left alone ' etc.
I think there would be quite a lot of opposition to any exhumation,there would need to be a very very good reason for it to go ahead,and if it is only closure of the case i don't think that would be accepted as enough.

[kensei]

Closure of the case, and positive identification of Jack the Ripper for all time, not enough? You may be right, but that is rather amazing to contemplate. Of course it's all hypothetical, and the emotional aspects would indeed compete with the practical.

[halomanuk]

Believe me it wouldn't be enough - not in this PC world we live in.

[smezenen]

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.

The day he died and was no longer available for prosecution I would think.

[Christine]

The DNA would come from the victim's graves and the comparison sample could either be based on known relatives of suspects, or it could simply be based on population databases. I have said this before, but just as an example, we might find that a male descended from a particular man who lived in an Irish village in 1100 AD touched a victim. Then we start going down the suspect list and find that one of them had an ancestor from that part of Ireland. Then you start looking at that suspect more closely: say you find that his sister's children had descendants who are still living. You match one of them to the DNA on the victim. So it's now certain that this suspect or one of his close relatives touched the victim.

[jason_c]

Putting aside any ethical issues of re-opening the graves.

I dont think the theory is totally far fetched. It's safe to assume JtR (along with Dr Bond etc) touched part of Kelly's skeleton. DNA evidence may theoretically be found on Kelly's skeleton.. If not now, then at a future date when DNA technology advances.

[Mascara & Paranoia]

Any traces of DNA would've surely had faded or been destroyed years ago. That and the small problem of the bodies' having been stripped and washed in the mortuary; dozens of individuals' DNA would've been all over the cadavers and the clothing, and not just the killer's. Plus we have no idea and never will know who the Ripper was, so there's nothing to compare any of the DNA samples too, especially if Jack was the highly probably outcome of being a complete unknown local man at the time.

[Steelysama]

Although I did mention DNA myself, I find that it is the less likely means of discovering the truth.

The most probable thing, in my opinion, would be to find some lost document or documents which would shed light on these matters. I am not thinking of something spectacular like a "Ripper Diary". Rather, some further police evidence or someone's account which gives just enough information about a suspect to fill in a missing puzzle piece.