Aaron Kosminski
This is an accepted version of this page Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozmiński; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish barber, hairdresser, and suspect in the Jack the Ripper case.
He worked as a hairdresser in Whitechapel in the East End of London, where a series of murders ascribed to an unidentified person nicknamed "Jack the Ripper" were committed in 1888.
Police officials from the time of the murders named one of their suspects as "Kosminski" (the forename was not given), and described him as a Polish Jew in an insane asylum.
In September 2014, author Russell Edwards claimed in the book Naming Jack the Ripper to have proved Kosminski's guilt.
[3] Scientists from Innsbruck Medical University criticised the paper and its conclusions, substantiating that there were mistakes and (mis)assumptions made by its authors,[4][5] and the journal printed an expression of concern.
[8] On 12 July 1890, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town workhouse due to his worsening mental illness, with his brother Woolf certifying the entry, and was released three days later.
A witness to the certification of his entry, recorded as Jacob Cohen, gave some basic background information and stated that Kosminski had threatened his sister with a knife.
His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe.
Five of the cases, between August and November 1888, show such marked similarities that they are generally agreed to be the work of a single serial killer, known as "Jack the Ripper".
Years after the end of the murders, documents were discovered that revealed the suspicions of police officials against a man referred to as "Kosminski".
[13] An 1894 memorandum written by Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Assistant Chief Constable of the London Metropolitan Police, names one of the suspects as a Polish Jew called "Kosminski" (without a forename).
Macnaghten's memo was discovered in the private papers of his daughter, Lady Aberconway, by television journalist Dan Farson in 1959,[14] and an abridged version from the archives of the Metropolitan Police was released to the public in the 1970s.
[15] In 1910, Assistant Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson claimed in his memoirs The Lighter Side of My Official Life[16] that the Ripper was a "low-class Polish Jew".
[17] Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who led the Ripper investigation, named the man as "Kosminski" in notes handwritten in the margin of his presentation copy of Anderson's memoirs.
[18] He added that "Kosminski" had been watched at his brother's home in Whitechapel by the police, that he was taken with his hands tied behind his back to the workhouse and then to Colney Hatch Asylum, and that he died shortly after.
[36] In the asylum, Kosminski preferred to speak his native language, Yiddish, which indicates that his English may have been poor, and that he was unable to persuade English-speaking victims into dark alleyways, as the Ripper was supposed to do.
[43] He said that the DNA samples proved that Kosminski was "definitely, categorically and absolutely" the person responsible for the Whitechapel murders committed by Jack the Ripper.
Other criticisms include questions about "the chain of evidence or provenance on the shawl", that publishing the information in the press "is not the same as reporting and publishing your methods in a peer-reviewed journal",[44] and concerns regarding the entire recent body of Jack the Ripper investigative and historical forensic work in general, notably how often the work of mediums and clairvoyants, human interest angles, recycled evidence from coroner's courts and other sources, and the general acceptance of misinformation and urban myth as fact have undermined and hobbled previous efforts to conduct objective, scientific investigations.
[55] Fido suggested that police officials confused the name Kaminsky with Kosminski, resulting in the wrong man coming under suspicion.
[57] Nigel Cawthorne dismissed Cohen as a likely suspect because in the asylum his assaults were undirected, and his behaviour was wild and uncontrolled, whereas the Ripper seemed to attack specifically and quietly.
[58] In contrast, former FBI criminal profiler John Douglas said in his 2000 book The Cases That Haunt Us that behavioural clues gathered from the murders all point to a person "known to the police as David Cohen ... or someone very much like him".
[59] A BBC documentary Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, broadcast in 2019 and presented by Emilia Fox, concluded that Kosminski was the most likely suspect.
