Ripper's True Identity 'Revealed'

Handwritten notes in which the police officer who led the hunt for Jack The Ripper names his chief suspect for the gruesome murders have been donated to Scotland Yard. The notes are contained within a book handed down through the family of Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, which was formally presented to the Metropolitan Police to mark the re-launch of its world-famous crime museum. In his annotations, Mr Swanson names Polish barber Aaron Kosminski as the prime suspect in the notorious Ripper case.

Kosminski came to the attention of police after threatening his sister with a knife.

Although he was soon identified as a possible suspect in the Ripper investigation, he was insane so detectives could not interview him.

Instead he was taken to the Metropolitan Police convalescent home in Brighton where he was put through an identity parade. The only alleged witness to any of the Ripper murders picked him out.

The witness was said to have been Jewish, like Kosminski, and refused to testify against a fellow Jew for a crime for which, if he had been found guilty, he could have been executed.

Kosminski ended up in a workhouse in Stepney, east London, and then an asylum in Colney Hatch. He died in 1919.

As there is no surviving forensic evidence from the case, it is impossible for detectives to prove the identity of Jack The Ripper.

The book, which was passed to Mr Swanson's daughter and then his nephew, was formally presented to the Metropolitan Police by the officer's relatives, including his great-grandson Nevill Swanson.

SOURCE: Yahoo Mail!

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For those of you who aren't aware, internationally renowned crime writer Patricia Cornwell published a book in 2003 entitled "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed" where she reveals who she thinks Jack the Ripper was.

Using the methods of her fictional character Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell's forensic investigation has pointed the bloody finger of guilt at a figure who has long figured prominently in the Ripper files. The investigation here is an intriguing mix of the personal and the professional: as well as orchestrating a Scarpetta-like search for the identity of the Ripper, Cornwell involves several very personal connections with the task she has set herself, and this is no dry thesis. Needless to say, the more gruesome aspects of this famously grisly case give no pause to a woman who has taken us into the grimmer aspects of forensics with her unsqueamish protagonist, and we are spared no details here (but who would purchase Portrait of a Killer if they had delicate sensibilities?). The arguments here are intelligently marshalled, and laid out with the precision and attention to detail of Cornwell's novels.

Cornwell concludes that Jack the Ripper's true identity was an artist by the name of Walter Sickert.