Jack the Ripper 'may have been a woman'

SYDNEY - The notorious serial killer who stalked London's East End, butchering prostitutes and terrorising the population, may not have been Jack the Ripper - but Jill.

An Australian scientist has used swabs from letters supposedly sent to police by the Ripper to build a partial DNA profile of the killer.

The results suggest that the person who murdered and mutilated at least five women from 1888 onwards may have been a woman.

Ian Findlay, a professor of molecular and forensic diagnostics, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that he had developed a profiling technique that could extract DNA from a single cell or strand of hair up to 160 years old.

Conventional DNA sampling methods, by contrast, require at least 200 human cells.

Dr Findlay, who is based in Brisbane, travelled to London, where the evidence from the still unsolved murders is stored at the National Archive.

The material, which was kept by Scotland Yard until 1961, includes letters sent to police at the time, some of them signed "Jack the Ripper".

Most are believed to be fakes, but a handful are thought to have been written by the killer.

Dr Findlay took swabs from the back of stamps and from the gum used to seal envelopes, as well as from what appeared to be bloodstains.

He took his haul back to Brisbane, where - concentrating on swabs from the so-called "Openshaw letter", the one believed most likely to be genuine - he extracted the DNA and then amplified the information to create a profile.

The results, he admitted, were "inconclusive", since the samples were very old, miniscule and poorly preserved.

He was able to construct only a partial profile that did not reach forensic standards or identify an individual. However, on the basis of his analysis, he said, "it's possible the Ripper could be female".

The victims were all prostitutes, murdered and horribly mutilated after being set upon in the foggy alleyways of Whitechapel.

Because of the way that they were slashed with a sharp knife or scalpel, the killer was assumed to have some medical knowledge.

The chief suspects at the time, who included a barrister, a Polish boot-maker and a Russian confidence trickster, were all men.

But Frederick Abberline, the detective inspector brought in from Scotland Yard to lead the investigation, raised the possibility that the killer was a woman.

This was because the fifth victim, Mary Kelly, was seen by witnesses hours after she was killed.

Abberline thought this was the murderer running away, dressed in Kelly's clothes.

The only female suspect was Mary Pearcey, who was convicted of murdering her lover's wife, Phoebe Hogg, in 1890 and hanged.

She is said to have employed a similar modus operandi to the Ripper.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the crime writer, theorised that the murders might have been carried out by a woman working as or pretending to be a midwife.

This would have enabled her to be seen with blood on her clothes without attracting suspicions.

She could also have gained the trust of victims more easily than a man.

Jack the Ripper was the name that the writer of a letter forwarded to the Metropolitan Police in September 1888 gave himself.

In it, he wrote: "I am down on whores and I shan't quite ripping them til I do get buckled."

The name Jack the Ripper caught the public imagination, and in October - after two more killings, both on the same day - police received a postcard, written in red ink by a person who called himself "saucy Jacky".

- INDEPENDENT