Were there any Ripper copycats at the time Jack was active?

Were there any Ripper copycats at the time Jack was active?

Plenty.

Lots of unsolved prostitute murders involving cut throats and, sometimes, mutilation as well were happening in Whitechapel that mad autumn. The Ripper killings were but a subset of these.

Were any of the suspects mothers prostitutes?

I don’t know but as far as the major named suspects I don’t think so.

The suspect I tend to like best, William Henry Bury, was married to a woman thought to be a prostitute. He eventually killed her and was hanged for it. I think he could have been JTR but it is not a smoking gun level of evidence. There are some other good suspects as well.

AK Wilks – are you of any relation to Melissa Wilks of Grange Hill fame?

(As a child, she was also on a kids show where she was talking about the South African Grand Prix – except she pronounced it "Pricks" instead of "Pree"!)

Were there any Ripper copycats at the time Jack was active?

One of the strangest set of killings was known as the London Torso Murders. This is a very good summary of the events (and pretty much all other significant crimes of the time that are of similar nature)
http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/thames-torso-murders.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davian-ho … mg00000021

Interesting piece on the latest claims. Swap JTR for Z and it’s also applicable.

I appreciated the spirit of the article but it seems to be rather fruitless at making any kind of statement.

It’s good that the author tried to think outside of the box by asking experts in other fields, but I think he went too far outside the box because they didn’t have any basis for making claims about JTR or this evidence specifically.

The point to be made about how a lack of peer review for the DNA examination was not a worthwhile criticism, I think missed the point about that critique. The response was that DNA analyses was a commonly used technique and so it wasn’t reasonable to assume the method to be faulty or having an error in technique necessary for further peer review. That’s a criticism about the technique itself, which I don’t think anyone was questioning. What they were questioning is the results, or rather the interpretation of those results.

We want to know what the actual results and population pool is, and if other tests were done for comparison to these results….instead of just saying that it is a "match". That is an almost meaningless statement for these purposes.

Case in point Patricia Cornwall produced a DNA "match" for her suspect… but neglected to mention that the population pool for a match also yielded over 100,000 other people, so basically every person in the region matching any of the characteristics of that suspect. In criminal court there is a good chance that would not hold up as a positive ID.

It was supposed to have been the definitive piece of scientific evidence that finally exposed the true identify of Jack the Ripper after he had brutally murdered at least five women on the streets of Whitechapel in the East End of London, 126 years ago.

A 23-year-old Polish immigrant barber called Aaron Kosminski was "definitely, categorically and absolutely" the man who carried out the atrocities in 1888, according to a detailed analysis of DNA extracted from a silk shawl allegedly found at the scene of one of his murders.

However, the scientist who carried out the DNA analysis has apparently made a fundamental error that fatally undermines his case against Kosminski – and once again throws open the debate over who the identity of the Ripper.

The scientist, Jari Louhelainen, is said to have made an "error of nomenclature" when using a DNA database to calculate the chances of a genetic match. If true, it would mean his calculations were wrong and that virtually anyone could have left the DNA that he insisted came from the Ripper’s victim.

The apparent error, first noticed by crime enthusiasts in Australia blogging on the casebook.org website, has been highlighted by four experts with intimate knowledge of DNA analysis – including Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting – who found that Dr Louhelainen made a basic mistake in analysing the DNA extracted from a shawl supposedly found near the badly disfigured body of Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes.

They say the error means no DNA connection can be made between Kosminski and Eddowes. Any suggestion therefore that the Ripper and Kosminski are the same person appears to be based on conjecture and supposition – as it has been ever since the police first identified Kosminksi as a possible suspect more than a century ago.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien … 04325.html