Is this the final proof that Jack the Ripper was a Polish barber?
THE identity of Jack the Ripper remains one of crime’s most enduring mysteries.
But now the name of the man behind the murder of at least five women in Victorian London may be step closer to being confirmed.
A letter unearthed in a university library on the other side of the world describes how one of the main suspects in the case – Aaron Kosminski – had attacked an acquaintance with a pair of scissors less than a year after the killings.
In an apparent reference to the Ripper killings, the author, a church administration assistant who went on to become a priest, said: ‘It’s a wonder he hasn’t hung for what he did to those poor girls’.
The document was apparently found in an old book in Australia during a clear- out of stock from the University of Melbourne’s Theology department.
It was rescued and sold on eBay, where amateur ‘Ripperologist’ Tim Atkinson spotted it. Fatherof-two Mr Atkinson, 53, says the document is a ‘game changer’ in the Ripper story because it is evidence that Kosminski was violent and aggressive. Sceptics of the Kosminski theory claim that although the Polish barber was known to be mentally ill, he was not known to be violent.
Mr Atkinson, a self- employed carpet fitter from Bradford, said: ‘The letter shows that Kosminski was not mild and unaggressive but much the reverse. The possibility of solving the Jack the Ripper case is getting closer.’
The letter, sent in 1889 from a Reverend William Patrick Dott, tells of an attack on a woman named Mary by a ‘Kosminski’ who ran screaming at her with scissors in the East End.
It also mentions ‘Tilly’ – thought to be a reference to Matilda Kosminski, the suspect’s sister.
Kosminski, a Polish Jew, was rumoured to have worked in a hospital as an orderly before turning up in Whitechapel around seven years before the Ripper killed at least five women in three months in 1888.
Kosminski was sectioned several times for suspected schizophrenia, but was not said to have displayed violent tendencies.
Mr Atkinson discovered that the letter’s author was a helper at All Hallows church, Barking by the Tower, at the time. Mr Atkinson has been to All Hallows and matched the signature on his letter with that of the Reverend’s on an old parish register from 1897.
Mr Atkinson paid £242 for the letter to an eBay seller specialising in antiquities in March. Paper historians have dated the paper and ink to the relevant period. A relative of Mr Atkinson has also created what calls the first ‘realistic’ picture of Kosminski.
It was produced by overlaying pictures of the Pole’s two brothers and two of his sisters to create a composite image.
Kosminski was one of three men suspected of being the Ripper by police at the time, but in the mind of the case’s senior officer, Detective Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson, he was always the prime suspect. He died in a lunatic asylum in 1919.