A 14-line letter found in an old book in Australia that was sold on eBay for £240 appears to have revealed the identity of Jack the Ripper.
The 1889 letter, which could now be worth up £125,000, appears to describe how one of the prime suspects in the east London killings, Aaron Kosminski, had attacked a woman with a pair of scissors less than a year after the murders.
The author of the letter, a Reverend William Patrick Dott, writes in an apparent reference to the notorious murders about an on a woman called Mary by a ‘Kosminski’, who ran screaming at her with some scissors in the East End.
‘It’s a wonder he hasn’t hung for what he did to those poor girls’, Dott wrote.
The letter also mentions a ‘Tilly’, believed to be a reference to Kosminski’s sister Matila.
At the time of the letter’s penning, Dott was a priest at All Hallows church, Barking, east London.
Bradford carpet fitter Tim Atkinson, 58, bought the letter, believed to have been found in an old book auctioned off by the University of Melbourne’s theology department, on eBay and asked a scientist at the University of Liverpool to examine the note.
The scientist, using a Video Spectral Comparator, found the paper has not been altered since it was written on, and that the handwriting and fountain pen were correct for the period.
The 1889 letter, which could now be worth up £125,000, appears to describe how one of the prime suspects in the east London killings, Aaron Kosminski, had attacked a woman with a pair of scissors
An illustration from the time showing Jack the Ripper in one of his notorious slashing attacks
The paper was found to have been original, and was not artificially aged.
Atkinson told the Mirror: ‘I saw it on eBay and thought I’d take a punt on it and now I’ve got it authenticated and it came back as positive.
‘It’s the most important letter to come to light. It proves Kosminksi was around and could be the murderer.
‘It could be worth up to £125,000 but I’m not a money man.’
Kosminski was a Polish immigrant who lived with his two brothers and a sister in Greenfield Street, Whitechapel.
He was rumoured to have worked in a hospital as an orderly before turning up in Whitechapel around seven years before the Ripper killed at least five women in three months in 1888.
Kosminski was sectioned several times for suspected schizophrenia, but was not said to have displayed violent tendencies.
Kosminski was one of three men suspected of being the Ripper by police at the time, but in the mind of the case’s senior officer, Detective Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson, he was always the prime suspect. He died in a lunatic asylum in 1919.
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