It's the first documented case of a serial killer in modern times: Jack the Ripper.

Striking the Whitechapel section of London from 1888 to 1891, notorious Jack the Ripper was responsible for at least five murders, but perhaps as many as 11, or more, of prostitutes working the back alleys of the British capital. Confounding law enforcement of the day, the Ripper taunted society with gleeful letters reveling in his murders. One letter contained half a kidney; the other half, said the letter-writer, was eaten.

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And then the Ripper simply vanished.

The murders stopped, the letters ceased, and London police were no closer to identifying the person then than they were during the spree. In the years since, as many as 100 suspects have been named, ranging from children's author Lewis Carroll to Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and grandson of Queen Victoria. Some surmise that the murderer was a woman, whose gender allowed her to slip by police intent on finding a male killer.

Author Russell Edwards recently postulated that the true killer was neither female nor famous, but a mundane man with a brutal history. In his book, Naming Jack the Ripper, Edwards uses DNA evidence left at the scene of the murder of Catherine Eddowes, the fifth murder attributed to Jack to identify Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish Pole recently immigrated to the United Kingdom, as the perpetrator.

Kosminski, a Whitechapel resident and one of the suspects police brought in for questioning during the Jack the Ripper murders, was violently insane and at least one witness placed him with Eddowes just before she was killed.

Lacking any hard evidence, London police were obliged to let Kosminski go. However, Eddowes clothes and shawl were kept, passing from evidence bins to Jack the Ripper enthusiasts. Edwards bought the shawl, which had never been washed, at auction and had it tested for DNA using baselines from the descendants of Eddowes children and Kosminski's nieces and nephews. DNA from both were pulled from the shawl.

Skeptics claim that the shawl only proves that, at most, Kosminski was a client of Eddowes, but the pathology fits modern serial killers who visit prostitutes only to kill them. Unlike any other evidence still on file, the shawl is unique to tie a person to a known victim, and many of the remains found on the shawl, claims Edwards, could only have come from inside the body.

Kosminski died in a lunatic asylum in 1919, committed there in 1894 after he became too violent for his family to control. The Jack the Ripper case, to this day officially unsolved, remained popular, moving from crime to sensationalism, but was dropped from the headlines when World War I broke out in Europe.

TagsJack the Ripper, Aaron Kosminski, crime, serial killers, jack the ripper solved