Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (22 page)

Jari, as usual, responded encouragingly: ‘Definitely the same style, and the material looks similar.’ He stressed, in typical Jari style, that this new information
was not going to influence him or his work. Quite right, but I was desperate for even more progress. I’d been immersed in the Ripper case for twelve years at this point, and it felt as if I
was on a pebble beach,
turning over every pebble to find something. Every so often, I turned the right pebble and the case moved forward.

Now the big question facing us was: we knew that the stains on the shawl appeared to contain human DNA, most likely to originate from human blood and other bodily fluids,
including semen. We also knew that the shawl almost certainly predated 1888, the year of the Ripper. But could we link the garment conclusively with the murder in Mitre Square? To discover if the
DNA recovered from the shawl was truly that of Catherine Eddowes, I would have to find a living descendant who was willing to give us a reference DNA sample for comparison. But my previous research
into the Eddowes family tree had hit a dead end.

And then, fortune stepped in yet again. Although I have gone down many blind alleys, and most of the achievements in this quest have been the result of dogged, time-consuming research, I also
know that from time to time I have some good luck. This was one of those occasions.

Throughout late 2011, the digital TV channel Yesterday had been broadcasting a programme called
Find My Past.
Each episode set out to reveal how three people were related to characters
from a significant historical event by searching the records on www.findmypast.co.uk. Usually, the programme would take on one specific theme per episode, such as the Dam Busters raids, the
Gunpowder Plot, the
Titanic
and the mutiny on the
Bounty.
Often the characters from these events had some interaction with each other; in a programme about Dunkirk, for example,
the story of how one soldier saved the life of another was covered and their descendants introduced to each other.

In the sixth episode of the first series, first broadcast in November 2011, the theme was Jack the Ripper. Three descendants of people directly linked to the Ripper case
were featured: Oliver Boot, the great-grandson of journalist Henry Massingham, deputy editor of the radical
Star
newspaper which created so many sensational stories during 1888; Dan
Neilson, whose ancestor George Hutt was the duty officer at Bishopsgate Police Station the night Catherine Eddowes was taken there for being drunk and incapable the evening before her death; and
finally, Karen Miller, the three times great-granddaughter of Catherine Eddowes herself

I missed the programme when it was first broadcast but saw it online in April 2012, after hearing about it from a Ripper website.

Catherine Eddowes’ only daughter, Catherine ‘Annie’ Conway, had married Louis Phillips in Southwark in 1885 and together they had seven children. Their eldest daughter Ellen
(born 1889) married Joseph Wells in 1912 and they had six children, one of whom was Catherine Annie Wells who married Albert J. Foskett in 1943. In turn their daughter, Margaret Rose, married Eric
Miller in 1965 and to them Karen Elizabeth was born in 1971. I now had my
direct
living descendant of Catherine Eddowes.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. A descendant of Catherine’s was, at that moment, my Holy Grail. And there she was, on the screen, talking openly about the tragic incident in
her family’s past. Following clues in the programme and doing some detective work of my own, I discovered where Karen worked and quickly found her contact details.

The thought of cold-calling a direct descendant of Catherine Eddowes to tell them about the blood on the shawl
and
ask for
DNA samples was rather a daunting one.
At first, I felt that somebody else should do it, somebody I could find who would have perhaps more gravitas or standing in historical research than I did and therefore could add the required
authority to the request. My lack of confidence was mainly because of the abrupt response I had received from the researcher with links to the victims’ families. I did not want to frighten
her off, and see another door close in my face. In the end, I opted to do it myself, schooling myself to be as sensitive as possible.

I knew this phone call to Karen Miller could go either way – acceptance and cooperation, or the conversation cut short by the sound of the receiver being slammed down. On the positive
side, I had seen a couple of Ripper documentaries that were made with the cooperation of the other victims’ families and they appeared to accept their lineage. One showed a Ripper expert
taking a direct descendant of Mary Ann Nichols around the East End, even showing her the site where her ancestor had met her death and kick-started history. After the initial shock of discovering
they were descended from a Ripper victim it seemed these descendants were keen that the memory of their ancestors should be kept alive because, regardless of the terrible ends these women met, it
was history on a wider stage, as well as their own personal family history.

Still, despite this encouragement, I was aware that this had to be approached correctly and unsensationally. In May 2012, I bit the bullet and made the call. I made it clear to Karen early in
the conversation that I am a married man with children: I didn’t want her to think I was a stalker or loner living in a garret with the walls covered in Ripper photos and memorabilia.

I need not have worried: Karen is a lovely person, and she was very receptive to what I had to say. She, too, could see the
importance of directly linking the shawl to
her great-great-great grandmother. She said she was very happy to supply me with a sample of her DNA, on swabs taken from inside her mouth.

In criminal cases, the use of DNA evidence has become increasingly common and we read about it all the time in court cases. Where evidence of DNA is found at a crime scene, reference samples are
required from a relevant party for comparison purposes. The preferred form of reference sample is a buccal or oral swab. Buccal cells are found inside the mouth, lining the cheeks (
buccal
is Latin for cheek) and are easy to collect; collection devices are simple to use, inexpensive, and most importantly buccal cells are a reliable source of DNA, hence their frequent use.

I wrote a letter of confirmation to Karen to effectively seal the deal and then sent her the clean and sterile swabs in their required storage containers with a stamped-addressed envelope to
return them to me. And then nothing happened. I was anxiously checking the post every day, and nothing came. I was very worried, convincing myself that she had had second thoughts, that she had
talked to someone who had persuaded her against helping. I was on tenterhooks. Thank goodness for my wife Sally, who took a much more sensible perspective, and told me not to bombard Karen with
phone calls, texts or emails until at least two weeks had elapsed. I found it hard being patient: here was vital evidence, and it was dangling just out of reach.

But Sally was right. After the prescribed two weeks, in which I kept myself busy and tried not to think about it, I texted Karen, asking, ‘Is everything all right?’ Back came the
reply: it seemed my swab containers had arrived just before she
went away for a fortnight’s holiday. It was a salutary reminder to me that normal life went on outside
my project, and I could not expect others to share my urgency.

Before long, two sealed samples of Karen’s DNA, taken from her mouth, were sitting in my freezer to protect them from any contamination or degradation, ready to be worked on. I delivered
them to Jari, and was only happy when I knew they were safe in his freezer. I knew that if Karen’s DNA matched that of Catherine Eddowes, we could prove, once and for all, that this old piece
of stained clothing was the only genuine, verifiable artefact in the Ripper case that could really lead somewhere. But progress on this strand of the investigation would have to wait until Jari had
time.

In the meantime Jari turned his attention to acquiring evidence from the stains that had fluoresced green and which suggested the presence of semen, although as ever Jari was
cautious and pointed out that there were other possibilities. The worst case scenario was that the stain was washing powder, but we were both convinced by this stage that the shawl had never been
washed.

Talking about luck: that has got to be one of the greatest strokes I, and anyone else interested in solving the Ripper case, could possibly have had. After all the hands it has passed through,
and after the story that the original owner, Jane Simpson, hated it because of the bloodstains, it is nothing short of remarkable that nobody, in the shawl’s long history, has ever tried to
clean it up by washing it. If they had, all the vital evidence would have been lost.

I knew that the presence of male bodily fluids on an item that could be linked to a murder meant a strong likelihood that
the killer’s DNA was on it. There are
murder cases, particularly serial killer cases, where the murderer obtains sexual gratification from the act of killing or mutilation and promptly ejaculates, either on the body of the victim or on
clothing belonging to them. One that I had known about for some time was the case of Peter Kürten, the ‘Düsseldorf Vampire’, who killed men, women and children in a series of
sexually motivated murders in 1929. Kürten obtained sexual gratification from his crimes and the amount of times he stabbed his victims often depended on how long it took him to achieve
orgasm. The sight of blood was an integral part of his pleasure and a famous story about Kürten is that he wished to hear his own blood gushing into a bag immediately following his beheading.
Dennis Rader (the ‘BTK Killer’ – Bind, Torture, Kill), Andrei Chikatilo (the ‘Rostov Ripper’) and Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper’) are other notorious serial
killers whose horrific acts culminated in ejaculation. Semen and the DNA contained within it has been used to secure criminal convictions and also, in other cases, to exonerate the accused. A good
example of this is one of the earliest uses of forensic DNA comparison in Britain in the 1980s, in a case that became known as the Enderby murders.

In November 1983, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Lynda Mann, was found dead on a river towpath in Narborough, Leicestershire, having been strangled and raped. The only clue was a semen sample
taken from Mann’s body from which forensics deduced that the owner’s (and most likely the killer’s) blood group was Type A, but in the absence of any other evidence, the case went
unresolved. Almost three years later, another young girl, Dawn Ashworth, was found raped and murdered on another footpath in Enderby, only a mile from where Lynda Mann had died. Again there were
traces of
semen which was analysed and which showed the same blood group as that found on the previous victim. This made it highly likely that it was the same man who raped
and murdered the two girls.

Following extensive investigations, a man named Richard Buckland was arrested and confessed to the second murder, but strongly denied any involvement in the first. Investigators decided to try a
new and untested technique: ‘genetic fingerprinting’ through DNA analysis. Such testing had already been used in paternity suits to determine the real identity of a child’s
father, but it had never before been used in a criminal case. It was felt that this ‘genetic fingerprinting’, would solve the case, as well as confirm the technique’s viability,
so a sample of Buckland’s blood was taken for analysis. To everyone’s surprise, there was no match between his DNA and those taken from the semen found on the bodies of the two girls,
and Buckland became the first person in criminal history to be
proven innocent
based on a DNA test.

With the search to find the killer now back on, all the men from the area around where the bodies were found who had Type A blood were asked to voluntarily submit to a DNA test. Over 5,000 men
agreed to do it, but the object was actually to find any man who would not willingly take the test because they had something to hide. Colin Pitchfork, who had previous convictions for indecent
exposure and who was already of interest to the police, wanted to avoid detection and so persuaded a friend to take the test in his place, providing him with false identification and a cash payment
of £200 for his troubles. Unfortunately, when the friend foolishly bragged in a public place about what he had done, he was overheard by a woman who immediately contacted the police. With
attention now on Colin Pitchfork, he confessed and his genetic fingerprint turned out to be identical to that found in the semen at the crime scenes. In September 1987 he
became the first person to be
convicted
of murder based on ‘genetic fingerprinting’.

Since then the use of DNA in forensics has become a standard detection tool, and the science has improved exponentially. Naturally, it was the way forward for us to connect the shawl with both
victim and murderer.

In autumn 2012 I took the shawl back to Jari. It was my children’s half-term holiday from school and we were staying with Sally’s family in North Wales. I drove to Liverpool with the
shawl and left it with Jari, going back to join my children at the swimming pool in Prestatyn. Later in the day I went back to Jari’s lab, taking my father-in-law with me, to collect it
again. There was nothing Jari could tell me there and then, other than that he had taken the samples he needed.

He had used the same extraction method he’d used to take the blood samples from the shawl. Material from the possible semen stains was extracted from the relevant locations and placed into
three separate vials. As routine procedure, they were put into a special freezer at minus 80°C for maximum preservation. The likelihood of sperm surviving this long was extremely slim and the
standardized forensic methods for sperm detection tend not to work with samples as old as the ones we had. When ejaculated sperm ages, the tails are lost first, so the hypothesis Jari explained to
me was that if the sperm had dried quickly, and the cells were trapped within the textile, we might be lucky and find at least a few sperm heads which had avoided natural degradation.