Bid to trace Jack the Ripper victims family links in Shropshire

The man who claims to have identified the real name of Jack The Ripper has visited Shropshire as part of his research into one of the killer’s victims.

Jack The Ripper killed at least five women in the East End of London during the “autumn of terror” of 1888.

Russell Edwards hit the headlines last year when he claimed to have used DNA from a shawl found at the scene of the fourth murder to name the killer.

He also claimed to have proved that a woman living in the Wolverhampton area is definitely related to that fourth victim, whose name was Catherine Eddowes.

Mr Edwards, who has run Jack the Ripper tours of Whitechapel for 25 years, was in Shrewsbury partly to research Catherine Eddowes’ life.

He said: “I can now confirm that I have a 100 per cent DNA match to one of the victims. I have the shawl that belonged to Catherine Eddowes and there is a definite match to a descendant living in Wolverhampton.”

The descendant, Karen Miller, is Eddowes’s three-times great-granddaughter.

Mr Edwards said: “I am now trying to track down people in Shropshire and the Black Country who are able to help me fill in the gaps of Catherine Eddowes’s life.

“Karen Miller and I will be doing something special for Catherine Eddowes in February, so it would be great if people could come forward with more details about.”

He added that Catherine had been born in Wolverhampton and there were other family descendants in the area.

He claims to have identified as Jack the Ripper as Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew who fled to London to escape the Russian pogroms.  He was 23 and lived  in Greenfield Street, near where the third victim, Elizabeth Stride, was killed.

Published : January 13th 2015
Shropshire Star