Saucy Jack Redux.

 In the process of writing last night's piece about the new DNA evidence in the Jack the Ripper case, I made a minor mistake that I need to rectify.

 Unfortunately, it's the kind of minor mistake that is extremely hard to explain clearly without going into massive amounts of detail. Still, in the interests of fairness, I'm going to clarify it and go into massive amounts of detail.

 I said yesterday that author Martin Fido named Aaron Kosminski as Jack the Ripper. Aaron Kosminski is the man who has allegedly come up as a DNA match in the new evidence.

 What Martin Fido actually said was that the police at the time made the same mistake I did, and confused Aaron Kosminski with a man named Kaminski.

 Later memoirs by three police officers active at the time of the Ripper murders - Sir Melville McNaughten, Sir Robert Anderson and Superintendent Donald Swanson - mentioned a Polish Jew with "great hatred of women and strong homicidal tendencies," (McNaughten) whilst Anderson also mentioned in his memoir a "low class Polish Jew" and considered unmasking this suspect, but refrained. Donald Swanson, who was helping Anderson, wrote in the margin of Anderson's manuscript that this same suspect was apprehended by police and eventually sent to Colney Hatch mental institution where he died. His final notation says that the man's name was Kosminski.

 As mentioned before, this is often seen as odd as Aaron Kosminski was noted to be harmless once confined to an institution, rather than being the frothing maniac remembered by Melville McNaughten. Kosminski was also not incarcerated until two years after the final proven Ripper murder.

 Martin Fido, then, suggested that the police were confusing two suspects of a similar name.

 In December of 1888, a month after the last Ripper killing, a man was found wandering the streets of Whitechapel, dazed and mumbling to himself, mostly in Yiddish. He was detained by police and became extremely violent, and was eventually taken to an asylum where he was sectioned under the name David Cohen - a sort of catch-all Jewish name for when no identification was possible, like John Doe.

 Martin Fido contends that this unknown, violent mental patient was in fact a man named Nathan Kaminski, who had previously been treated for syphilis brought about by contact with prostitutes. In naming Kosminski in his memoirs, Fido believes Sir Robert Anderson (or his assistant Donald Swanson) was mis-remembering the name Kaminski.

 Which is exactly what I did last night. So, to recap: Martin Fido did not, as I stated, name Aaron Kosminski as the Ripper.

 Fido's is a plausible theory and easy to see why people get confused. Aside from the similar names, both men were confined to asylums within a few years of each other - Nathan "David Cohen" Kasminski in 1889 and Aaron Kosminski in 1891. Both died in their respective institutions. Both were Polish Jews who lived in the Whitechapel area.

 For the record, however, I don't necessarily buy Nathan "David Cohen" Kasminsky as the Ripper, either. Kasminsky was clearly, dangerously insane. Whilst it's possible that in the month between Mary Jane Kelly's mutilation and being found wandering the streets his last lingering threads of sanity had snapped, I find it hard to reconcile this gibbering lunatic (he was straight-jacketed in the institution as he was too violent to be left unrestrained) with someone who could fool a nervous hooker into taking his custom.

 I appreciate that almost all hookers are forced into their line of work by desperate poverty, and as such they can't afford to be overly choosy of their clientele. I also appreciate that in a Victorian slum poverty and desperation existed on a level I can't really imagine. Nonetheless, after word got out that a murderer was cutting up prostitutes in horrific ways, I think most prostitutes would have been on high alert. They would be extremely wary of customers who seemed in any way strange, and I can't help but feel that Nathan Kaminsky, a man who was only a month away from being found incoherently wandering the streets, would have had a hard time maintaining enough of a veneer of normality to fool a suspicious prostitute.

 As I've said before, my preferred suspect remains "we don't know."

 But hopefully I've cleared up my mistake regarding Martin Fido's theories.