DNA aside, isn't the provenance of the shawl questionable?
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According to the new study, a silk shawl was found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, a victim killed by Jack the Ripper during the early morning hours of Sept. 30, 1888.
Acting Sgt. Amos Simpson reportedly took this 8-foot-long (2.4 meters) shawl from the crime scene; the shawl was reportedly passed down through his family for generations until it was sold in 2007 to amateur sleuth Russell Edwards, who made it available to scientists for study.
Did the analysis [of the] shawl just provide a major clue in one of London's coldest cases, the identity of Jack the Ripper?
No. It doesn't. Not at all. That's according to two experts, a geneticist and a Ripperologist (a Jack the Ripper historian), who spoke with Live Science about the new study.
In fact, this study has so many holes in it — including the provenance of the shawl, contamination of genetic material on the shawl, and the methods used to analyze this genetic material — that it's a wonder it was published at all, said Turi King, a reader in genetics and archaeology at the University of Leicester, who was not involved in the study.
First and foremost, it's doubtful that the shawl belonged to Eddowes, Jack the Ripper's fourth victim.
London has two police forces. Most of the Jack the Ripper murders happened under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police Service, a force that operates out of Scotland Yard. But Eddowes was killed in an area overseen by the City of London Police.
Acting Sgt. Simpson worked for Scotland Yard, so it's unclear why he would have been working on Eddowes' case, given that it was a City of London Police case, said Paul Begg, a U.K.-based author who has written six historical books about Jack the Ripper, and was not involved with the new study. What's more, Simpson's patrolling area wasn't anywhere near the spot where Eddowes was murdered, so it's strange he would have gone out of his way to travel to the scene of the crime and take the shawl, Begg said.
On top of that, "there's no evidence that a shawl was connected with Catherine Eddowes' murder anyway," Begg told Live Science. "Effectively, the provenance of the shawl is extremely bad."
maximus otter