Kosminski Shawl DNA published as peer reviewed paper in Journal of Forensic Sciences

[The Baron]

How about that the deceased had no signs of intercourse.

Can we be 100% sure of this ?!

And that was not the point, yet we have the so called shawl, that happened to have mDNA that match both Eddows and Kosminski.

Do with this piece of Information whatever you want.

Imagination can take us everywhere, we have seen researchers that bieleve the name Kosminski was a mistake, although we have it written by two of the three police heads of the time, instead the name must have been Levy, Kamnski, Hayam, Cohen.....

We have even researchers that claim the witness was not a jew!

And then came the new generations of ripperologists, to say this identification didn't even take place.


You cannot stop a beautiful mind!


The Baron

[GUT]

Do you mean that the first suspect in the case, who was identified, could have been innocent, and just happened to contact Eddows before the ripper even came ?!

Sure.. why not, everything is possible, I can imagine more than this, that Druitt too contacted Eddows before both of them Kosminski and the ripper.. Or that Ostrog escaped from his prison in france, came to Whitechapel, contacted Eddows, then came Druitt, then Kosminski, before the ripper striked.

Nothing can disprove this.

The Baron

How about that the deceased had no signs of intercourse.

[The Baron]

Could Catherine have solicited Aaron and her "shawl" became contaminated from this interlude, before the Ripper even comes into the picture? Or are the results relatively conclusive- Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper.

Do you mean that the first suspect in the case, who was identified, could have been innocent, and just happened to contact Eddows before the ripper even came ?!

Sure.. why not, everything is possible, I can imagine more than this, that Druitt too contacted Eddows before both of them Kosminski and the ripper.. Or that Ostrog escaped from his prison in france, came to Whitechapel, contacted Eddows, then came Druitt, then Kosminski, before the ripper striked.

Nothing can disprove this.

The Baron

[KRS]

Could Catherine have solicited Aaron and her "shawl" became contaminated from this interlude, before the Ripper even comes into the picture? Or are the results relatively conclusive- Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper.

Certainly. We would not be following the economy principle if we did, more recent contamination would be more likely I would think, but it's not impossible.

[Fisherman]

The shawl? Again? Really?

[Busy Beaver]

Could Catherine have solicited Aaron and her "shawl" became contaminated from this interlude, before the Ripper even comes into the picture? Or are the results relatively conclusive- Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper.

[KRS]

I signed up to post due to an interesting question of what evidence would convince one that the case was solved. It's something I've been thinking about for a while. When I was in my twenties, I was very certain that Martin Fido's identification of David Cohen was the correct solution to the case. But when I began reading about the case for Tumblety, I began to realize how serious our lack of knowledge about the case is. When I was first introduced, for example, it was considered certain that grapes were found with Elizabeth Stride, that is less commonly asserted today, similarly, the fact that Francis Tumblety was a police suspect was unknown when I was younger, and led me to conclude the police were less certain as to a suspect than I had previously believed from the extant information we had. Without finding the lost casefiles, I came to the conclusion that the case will never be solved, at least not definitively with the information we currently possess.

But instead of just rejecting the tests or accepting them as "Proof," it does not follow that we can't weigh suspects, arguing that some are strong suspects, others are relatively weak. All things being equal, outside of rejection or proof, we can take this as some added weight to the Kosminski theory, without treating it as absolute proof of the matter. Like the GSG it can be explained in various ways, and it is not "evidence of the first rank" it is merely the information that may, or may not, lend light onto the case. Perhaps something will happen to disprove the tests being raised here more definitively, if so we should at that point dismiss the cloth completely, but until that point, it seems to me we should just treat it as one more reason to consider Kosminski.

[KRS]

So, The facts above need to be accounted for, usually when new evidence or DNA is brought into the case, we discuss things primarily from sets of two facts or factors, not three, which usually leads to an almost syllogistic case. For example, Patricia Cornwall's major contribution in her second edition could be thought of as:

1. The Ripper wrote most of the Ripper letters at the national archives.
2. Paper samples demonstrate Walter Sickert wrote a number of those letters at the national archives.
3. Therefore Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

Or, the Maybrick diary could be represented this way.

1. A diary contains a confession of Jack the Ripper.
2. William Maybrick wrote the diary.
3. Therefore William Maybrick was Jack the Ripper.

But the triple set of factors makes this a more difficult case than the binary nature of these syllogisms, and none of the facts gives us something that is certain, but the combination is something I don't think we should simply dismiss either. We can explore the various segments, but an answer would need to explain all of them. As I noted first, I think our approach should be abductive, not deductive, in this case, to allow for the uncertainties. A case for the best explanation could start by noting the possibilities. These include

1. Aaron Kosminski was Jack the Ripper and the cloth is from the crime scene.
2. The tests performed were either seriously compromised or have been misrepresented (incompetence or fraud).
3. The three facts cannot be explained by a single cause.

Usually 3 is considered to be weaker than alternate explanations (on the economy principle), but how much weaker differs from case to case, given the amount of time, it is not "critically weak." I won't speculate on 2.

[KRS]

So I'm a very recent poster, but I've been to the Casebook a number of times over the years. I'm in PhD work in an area that intersects with a number of areas in philosophy, including epistemology. I'm going to break this in pieces, deliberately, not to be overly talkative or to attempt to dominate the conversation, but to try to break the issues down.

It seems to me we are going about this one the wrong way, perhaps because of recent pieces of “evidence” that were different in kind. The question is multiplicative, we all understand if I have two cups, one with two marbles (one black, one white) and a second cup with five marbles, (non are black or white, and only one of which is red), the odds of my pulling only one marble from each and coming up with a black and red marble is one in ten, not one in five or one in two. Further, we tend to overestimate our knowledge of the facts in the case, when history of the case seems to indicate our knowledge of the facts is, in point of fact, weaker than we tend to realize. When it comes to Kosminski, one other factor we need to take into account is that a post-modern biases seems to be one of the major factors underlying the rejection of Kosminski as a suspect, though not the only one.

There are three facts with this possible piece of evidence; an explanation of some type needs to be rendered. As I suggested before, I think the evaluation on its genuineness and value for the case are best thought of abductively, to capture all three strands.

1. There is a piece of cloth, commonly called a shawl, that has some family history associating it with the killing of Catherine Eddows by Jack the Ripper. There are significant issues of provenance that are unanswered, for example, how Amos Simpson would have come into possession of the cloth, how Eddows would have come into possession of such a silk piece of cloth, or why it is not listed in the newspapers account. However, in evaluating this point, we need to account not only for the problems of provenance, but the problems of how the family history arose, that is, one must ask, why the family thought this piece of silk came from the slaying of an “unfortunate.” Additionally, while there are problems with the lack of reference to such a cloth in any of the records, as pointed out above, this may simply be one of the problems with our own overestimation of the facts in the case; the loss of the case notes for the Ripper killings creates major problems for moderns in trying to understand the police case. The reliability of this testimony is one we can’t calculate, in a lot of philosophy it would therefore be used as a .5, but in the real world, the actual probability is unknown.
2. Second, the cloth has mtDNA associated with Eddows in a recent test. I am not an expert in DNA, and care should be taken in overestimating our understandings of fields we are not active participants in. Yes, this is not a conclusive link to Eddows, there are a large number of women (or men) who might fit that particular bit of evidence. There are great possibilities of contamination over the hundred years plus since the murders were committed, so that even if the artifact is authentic, the DNA may not be from the crime, itself. But, on the other hand, there are certain probabilities at play, I will not pretend to know the precise numbers, that suggest Eddows is a part of the community that could have deposited this bit of evidence, if it is 1 in 20,000 (not to suggest that is the proper number, 20,000 is chosen solely for illustrative purposes), then she is a red marble as opposed to being one of the 19,999 non-red marbles in our cup illustration above; there is, in analyzing this a number of issues of time, not only is this a question of sample size in Eddowes day.
3. Third, the cloth has an mtDNA trace associated with one of the major police suspects in the case. There are issues with the identification, as we have the information on Kosminski years later, but we cannot dismiss the fact that three officers who had access to either the investigation itself, or those involved in the identification considered Kosminski a strong suspect. We once again do not have enough of our case notes to know how strong the case is against Kosminski, other than suggestions that an eye witness was involved. This leads to a similar issue with his candidacy as the source of the DNA as was true of the Eddowes above, but besides those issues, one other open question exists, and that is this type of testing has not been compared to other serious suspects.

[Joshua Rogan]

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something that glows blue under UV light?

[c.d.]

"Regarding the alleged semen stains, a correspondent sent me the following link from several years ago, which is well worth reviewing. Note the similarity between semen stains and urine stains in the photographs. I also wonder about mucus stains but have yet to find any reliable photographs. Obviously, if this cloth is a decorative table runner, as used at weddings, holidays, etc., it could have stains from any number of different sources, human and otherwise."

Yeah, you know what they always say any good wedding will always result in a semen stain or two.

c.d.

[rjpalmer]

I thought the following observation was worthy of a separate post.

My correspondent observed that there is no direct evidence that the shawl is even blood-stained. This is startling. In reading the paper, one is definitely left with the impression that blood is being examined, but where is the evidence that it IS blood? The only mention is a visual observation, where Dr. L states that the stains are consistent with arterial spray. But this is hardly evidence. Similar stains could be made by a wine bottle suddenly opening, a sneeze, etc.

Human mDNA was found in this “stain,” but, what proves that it originated in the stain?

Is this even blood?

As my correspondent notes, “In Edward’s book he states that a presumptive test for blood was inconclusive.”

Inconclusive?

Jeff--or anyone--what evidence is there that we are examining blood?

[rjpalmer]

Regarding the alleged semen stains, a correspondent sent me the following link from several years ago, which is well worth reviewing. Note the similarity between semen stains and urine stains in the photographs. I also wonder about mucus stains but have yet to find any reliable photographs. Obviously, if this cloth is a decorative table runner, as used at weddings, holidays, etc., it could have stains from any number of different sources, human and otherwise.

https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/victims/catherine-eddowes/8681-a-problem-with-the-eddowes-shawl-dna-match/page61

If you scroll through the link, a very interesting observation was made by a poster identified as Peter Griffith aka gryff:

“[Russell] Edwards…dates the shawl as early 1800s (1810-1830?). They had the blue dye tested using NMR spectroscopy and claim it was - woad (I'd like to know more about that but it is off topic).

At that time there were two methods of dying fabric with indigo (the blue dye in woad). One of them was the urine vat process where the fabric is soaked repeatedly in a vat containing urine and woad. Urine contains epithelial cells. A technique that was considered superior to the alternative "copperas vat" process as it was gentler to the fabric. Other processes were invented later such as the "zinc/lime vat" (1845) and the "hydrosulfite vat" (1880) - but they don't fit in with the dates Edwards ascribes to the shawl.

I note the similarity of the urine and semen images.”

Quite an intriguing post.

Since no sperm cells were found in the alleged “semen” stains, but epithelial cells WERE found, how do we know that what Dr. L and M recovered wasn’t from the urine used in the dying of the fabric?

The issue I have with Jeff’s comments above is that he seems to be assuming that the mDNA recovered from the stains, originated in the stains. This is a leap of faith, and why must it be the case? The stains could obviously have originated from hundreds of different sources and were then subsequently contaminated by human mDNA sometime over the preceding 100 years.

In reviewing what I have at hand, it doesn’t appear that any unstained sections of the fabric were independently examined to eliminate the possibility that the epithelial cells didn’t come from the dye stuff, rather than the alleged semen stain. Is there any information on this?

But all of this seems almost superfluous, considering that the provenance is so entirely dubious.

[JeffHamm]

P.S. Oh, one other thing.

There was an article in the Smithsonian Magazine last Christmas, that stated that mDNA, in rare instances, can be passed on through the paternal line. I have no idea if this study is widely accepted, but it might be interesting to hear the geneticists duke it out.

Oh, that's interesting. I've not heard that, thanks for mentioning. I'll have to look to see if I can find anything on it.

- Jeff

[JeffHamm]

No offense, Jeff, but you'’re wrong about that.

UV detection is not a “positive” indication of semen. It’s just a fast, initial, and convenient indicator that needs to be verified through other tests. It’'s easy to sweep a crime screen with UV light, but other tests need to be conducted to confirm what is being seen.

No offense taken. I had at one point while composing my post had included something along the lines of "UV fluorescence is not unique to semen", but decided I was getting sidetracked. And I should have qualified "positive test" as simply indicating "consistency with" as opposed to "can only be". But yes, it leaves open the possibility the stains are not semen but could be some other molecule that shows similar UV patterns to semen. I don't know what those other molecules are, though, but if they are human biological material that might be deposited by the offender (meaning not something like a fluid from brain tissue, etc), then again it wouldn't matter with regards to the DNA interpretation only with the behavioural inferences that could be drawn. However, if the other molecules are not biological, or not human, the the fact that they found human DNA in the location of those stains, would rule out the alternatives. I'm well outside my own area of research, so the specific details of such are outside my knowledge base. But, they were examining stains, and found human cells, and random sampling of areas without stains, did not.

Sadly demonstrating my current state of idleness, I actually read several scientific articles last night on the detection of semen stains. Check out the following:

“There are many molecules (natural and artificial) that will fluoresce in a similar way as semen, and therefore, this detection technique is highly presumptive. Furthermore, not all semen stains will fluoresce under such specialized lights. Exposure of the sample to factors such as heat, humidity, oxidizing agents, and microorganisms such as bacteria and mold can affect this fluorescent activity.”


“High presumptive,” Jeff, not “positive.”

Yah, fair enough.

The question of heat, humidity, microorganisms, etc., also raises the question as to whether the protein cells that cause semen to fluoresce would not degrade significantly over time, indicating the stain is of a more recent origin. That said, some Italian scientists claim to have discovered confirmed semen stains using UV light that were known to be 100 years old, so it is an open question.

Sure, but it sounds like there is confirmation that 100 year old semen stains can retain their UV responsiveness. If it didn't, then the UV tests would, presumably, mean either the stain is semen and more recent than 100 years, or it's not semen. Given that 100 year old stains can respond to UV, then these concerns don't necessarily arise. Of course, if it can happen but is rare for it to retain it's UV responsiveness, then that is a different matter, but that is something that should have been caught during peer review (which is not, of course, infallible).

Further, though it is not recorded in the current paper, the alleged semen samples on the alleged “shawl” were subjected to other tests. Drs. L and M recovered 12 cells from the sample and found no evidence of sperm …which worried Dr. Miller. They concluded the substance contained “squamous epithelial cells” (not sperm cells) which could come from urine, spit, mucous, etc. This is not mentioned in the current paper. (Thanks to Chris P. for providing this citation)

That's a concern as it's always a problem when tests were done but not reported. Unfortunately, this can happen during the review process (reviewers insist some analysis be removed because it's "not necessary" or whatever, and the editor agrees) or it can happen during the writing phase as authors try and make the article concise, forgetting that knowing how many tests and what those tests were, are important things to consider when viewing results.

If spit, let's say, also contains molecules that react similar to semen, then while that might change the interpretation of what the stains were, and how they got there, but it wouldn't change the fact that they came from a human who, apparently, has a fairly similar mtDNA pattern to a known (or presumed known) individual who shares a maternal line with Aaron Kosminsky.

Considering that the other test showed no trace of acid phosphatase, which is present in high amounts in semen (coming from the prostate gland) this is another negative result, though it could be explained by the sample being old. Could be.

Yes, research papers are generally written using very conservative language. "Could be" simply means there's nothing to indicate this is wrong, though they acknowledge there "could be" an alternative explanation - even if they cannot think of one right now, and nobody has suggested one. It's basically acknowledging that we don't know everything. If there were an obvious alternative, again, that's supposed to come up in peer review, they should have been asked something like "well, what you have so far could also arise if the substance that produced the stain was lamp oil, or maybe a tallow wax stain, etc", and if so they need to verify that. However, if it were whale oil or tallow, the finding of human cells in that location, and not others, starts to stretch things.

Put all together, the claim that this is semen is not proven.

Ok, let's say it is not semen. It still marked location where they found old human cells, that apparently have mtDNA sequences similar to (but by my reading not actually identical) to the mtDNA of the Kosminsky test subject. Such cells were not found in locations that did not contain a stain.

While we might be interested in knowing what the substance was exactly, particularly if one of the alternative sources is human saliva rather than semen, simply because that would be indicative of JtR's behavioural pattern, if all of the alternatives are simply different human bodily fluids, for the purpose of the article it might not have been necessary to explore further (particularly if differentiating what fluid it was would require a destructive test - since the whole point of their paper is to illustrate a non-destructive method). And again, if other bodily fluids could also be a source for the stains and would result in the same pattern of results over all the tests they have reported (positive UV pattern, negative age pattern, possible source of the cells they found in that location), then that should have been picked up in the review process. Since they don't make any such qualifications, then either based upon all of what they did the obvious alternatives have been ruled out (and I just don't know enough to know that), or the review process missed it. If the latter, then someone will, probably, follow up and look at the alternatives.

I think I called it “prostrate” in my initial post, which probably signals that I should take a nap now, and get prostrate (and not prostate) for a good long while. Catch you tomorrow, Jeff.

Anyway, I think it's an interesting study and there are some interesting implications, one of which is that as far as I understand their results, the mtDNA seems to exclude Kosminsky (there are 2 markers that don't match, and that is the criterion for exclusion as they indicate in their discussion section). The shawl/cloth, doesn't appear to be listed in Eddowes' belongings, and the only thing listed that had a similar floral pattern on it is her skirt, but that is listed as being dark green, rather than "brown". It's hard to imagine how such a change in description could arise, though I was toying with that above, unless the shawl could also be described by someone else as her "apron", because then it sounds more like they were describing "how it was worn" rather than "what it is", except that line falls down because her apron is listed as being white.

The thing is, if the mtDNA matches Eddowes, which it does (and the mt sequence they found is reported as having a frequency of 1.3x10-3 (so 0.13%, so 1.3 people in a thousand), then while there would have been many people in London with that sequence, not many of them would have bled onto a piece of cloth that one family has a tradition of claiming it comes from a victim of JtR.

So, we're left with 1) the item is a genuine artifact 2) the item is historical, but does not come from Eddowes or any of the other JtR murders 3) there is something seriously flawed with the methods used to gather cells from the artifact and they are getting contamination from the maternal donor's 4) there has been some sort of hoax/forgery.

If it's #1, then it becomes the historian's job to work out how Eddowes got the shawl, why it's not listed in her list of belongings, and how it came to be in the possession of the Simpson family.

If it's #2, then what crime is it associated with, and what a coincidence that the victim in that crime also shared an mtDNA sequence with Eddowes

If it's #3 then this should have been caught during the review process because this was the real point of the study in the first place. It does happen than sometimes things get through that shouldn't, but that's just the standard "could be" argument that you've rejected above as the author's playing games, so I won't push it here.

If it's #4, then obviously it has nothing to do with the JtR murders, and we're back to everybody and their dog is JtR. The question then becomes who, and how, did they create a forgery/hoax that passed the tests performed to look for such a possibility. But that becomes less interesting to JtR focused research because once shown to be a forgery, it no longer informs to this question (mind you, Diary Days come to mind).

Anyway, good chatting with you. Hope you got some sleep.

- Jeff