Aaron Kosminski

Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozmiński; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish barber, hairdresser, and suspect in the Jack the Ripper case.

Kosminski was a Polish Jew who emigrated from Congress Poland to England in the 1880s.

He emigrated from Poland in 1880 or 1881, likely with his sisters' families.

The family initially lived in Germany.

A nephew of his was born there in 1880 and a niece in 1881.

It is not known precisely when Aaron left Poland to join his sisters or whether he lived in Germany for any length of time, although he may have left Poland as a result of the April 1881 pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the impetus for many other Jews to emigrate.

The family moved to Britain and settled in London sometime in 1881 or 1882.

Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885.

His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe.

The cause of his insanity was recorded as "self-abuse", which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation.

His poor diet seems to have kept him in an emaciated state for years; his low weight was recorded in the asylum case notes.

He worked as a hairdresser in Whitechapel in the East End of London, where a series of murders ascribed to an unidentified figure nicknamed "Jack the Ripper" were committed in 1888.

Between 1888 and 1891, the deaths of 11 women in or around the Whitechapel district of the East End of London were linked together in a single police investigation known as the "Whitechapel murders".

Seven of the victims suffered a slash to the throat, and in four cases the bodies were mutilated after death.

Five of the cases, between August and November 1888, show such marked similarities that they are generally agreed to be the work of a single serial killer, known as "Jack the Ripper".

Despite an extensive police investigation, the Ripper was never identified and the crimes remained unsolved.

Years after the end of the murders, documents were discovered that revealed the suspicions of police officials against a man referred to as "Kosminski".

He possibly relied on his sisters' families for financial support, and may have lived with them at 3 Sion Square in 1890 and 16 Greenfield Street in 1891, indicating that his sisters possibly shared responsibility for caring for him and he alternated living between their family homes.

On 12 July 1890, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town workhouse due to his worsening mental illness, with his brother Woolf certifying the entry, and was released three days later.

From 1891, Kosminski was institutionalised after he threatened his sister with a knife.

He was first held at Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, and then transferred to the Leavesden Asylum.

Police officials from the time of the murders named one of their suspects as "Kosminski" (the forename was not given), and described him as a Polish Jew in an insane asylum.

Almost a century after the final murder, the suspect "Kosminski" was identified as Aaron Kosminski; but there was little evidence to connect him with the "Kosminski" who was suspected of the murders, and their dates of death are different.

Possibly, Kosminski was confused with another Polish Jew of the same age named Aaron or David Cohen (real name possibly Nathan Kaminsky), who was a violent patient at the Colney Hatch Asylum.

However, he may have worked only sporadically: it was reported that he had "not attempted any kind of work for years" by 1891.

On 4 February 1891, he was returned to the workhouse, possibly by the police, and on 7 February, he was transferred to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum.

A witness to the certification of his entry, recorded as Jacob Cohen, gave some basic background information and stated that Kosminski had threatened his sister with a knife.

His mother, who was listed as a widow, apparently did not emigrate with the family immediately, but had joined them by 1894.

It is unknown whether his father died or abandoned the family, but he did not emigrate to Britain with the rest of them.

It is unclear whether this meant Kosminski's sister or Cohen's. Kosminski remained at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to Leavesden Asylum.

It is known that he had likely died before 1901, and an 1887 death certificate indicates that an Abram Kosminski had died in the Polish town of Koło, only five miles from Grzegorzew, the hometown of Kosminski's father.

In London, Kosminski embarked on a career as a barber in Whitechapel, an impoverished slum in London's East End that had become home to many Jewish refugees who were fleeing economic hardship in Eastern Europe and pogroms in Tsarist Russia.

By February 1919, he weighed just 96 lb. He died the following month, aged 53.

In 2007, he had bought a shawl which he believed to have been left at a murder scene and gave it to biochemist Jari Louhelainen to test for DNA.

In September 2014, author Russell Edwards claimed in the book Naming Jack the Ripper to have proved Kosminski's guilt.

A peer-reviewed article on the DNA analysis was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2019.

However, scientists from Innsbruck Medical University have criticised the paper and its conclusions, pointing to a number of mistakes and assumptions made by its authors.

Aaron Kosminski was born in Kłodawa in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire.

His parents were Abram Józef Kozmiński, a tailor, and his wife Golda née Lubnowska.

He may have been employed in a hospital as a hairdresser or orderly for a time.