Has Jack the Ripper been identified?

Who was Jack the Ripper? If you believe the claims of Russell Edwards, whose book “Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888� (Globe Pequot: 336 pp., $25.95), out this week, he was a 23-year-old Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski, who was committed to an asylum in 1891, shortly after the last of what are known as the Whitechapel murders, which include the five Ripper killings and six more that may or may not be related.

Kosminski was a barber, which means he knew his way around a knife, and he lived in the neighborhood; his last name shows up in a memo written by London Police Assistant Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten in 1894. And yet, Edwards claims to have discovered evidence that is far less circumstantial: a shawl, purportedly found near the body of the Ripper’s fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, stained with both her blood and semen that matches Kosminski’s DNA.

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FOR THE RECORD

A caption in a previous version of this post said the shawl was taken from the murder scene of Catherine Eddowes. The shawl’s provenance is uncertain.

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This is not the first time DNA has been used to try to solve the Ripper murders; in 2002, the mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell published a book called “Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed,� which fingered the British painter Walter Sickert, based on DNA from a stamp the Ripper reportedly licked.

As has Edwards, however, Cornwell relied on mitochondrial, not nuclear, DNA, which is relatively non-specific; “many people,� reports an NBC news story, “can share the same mtDNA signature. … Thus, the determination doesn’t mean much unless the signature can be narrowed down to a rarer subtype.�

More problematic for Edwards is the chain of evidence; the shawl has had a life of its own in the 126 years since Eddowes was killed.

“The inquest reports and official files show everything Eddowes had on her and with her the night she was murdered. There is no mention of the shawl,� notes Ripperologist Mike Covell in an interview. What’s more, Covell “worked with a television crew on the shawl in 2010. We tested several stains and whilst they were discovered to be blood and semen we could not get any matches or DNA sequences because the samples were too old and too degraded.�

So why the uproar about a flawed solution to an ancient set of killings, one in which the principals (those we can identify and those we’ll never identify) are long since dead?

For me, it gets back to the essence of the mystery, which is a metaphor for all the mysteries, for everything we cannot understand. Jack the Ripper, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Zodiac killer — what remains compelling about these stories is what they tell us about ineffability. We don’t know because we can never know, because the chaos of the world, the universe, can assert itself at any time.

This is one reason we are drawn to crime novels, which, Michael Connelly once suggested, “bring order to disorder. They reassure us about the malevolent forces in the world. … And when you finish the last page, you should be reassured, even if it’s only subliminally, that things do work out.�

And yet, the implication, as it must be, is that life doesn’t work like that.

Life, rather, is open-ended, without the neat punctuation of narrative. It is full of randomness, serendipity, devoid of lessons. It happens and we have no choice but to go along.

This is the appeal of Jack the Ripper, whose story (unsolved, perhaps unsolvable) reminds us of everything we can’t control.

Was Aaron Kosminski the Ripper? Maybe. But Edwards’ assurances to the contrary — “Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt,� he declares. “This is it now — we have unmasked him� — the only thing we can say for sure is that we do not know.

twitter: @davidulin