Aaron Kosminski was born on September 11, 1865 and grew up in Klodawa, near Warsaw, the youngest of seven children.
When he was eight, his father died and his mother remarried. Records suggest the young boy may have been sexually abused.
In 1882, the family fled to London to escape anti-Semitism in Poland and settled in the East End, where Kosminski would become a serial killer at the age of 23.
At the time of the Ripper murders, the head of London’s CID, Dr. Robert Anderson, already suspected that he was the perpetrator.
Confidential police reports revealed that police believed Kosminski had a “great hatred of women, especially the prostitute class, and that he had strong murderous tendencies.” However, the police had no hard evidence and feared accusations of anti-Semitism.
In 1890, Kosminski suffered a suspected schizophrenic breakdown and threatened his sister with a knife.
The following year he was committed to the Colney Hatch lunatic asylum in north London.
A new computer-generated image of Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish immigrant from Poland rumored to be the legendary killer Jack the Ripper
A newspaper clipping about the Whitehall Murders – a series of brutal murders that took place in 1888
The Whitechapel murders were truly very nasty. Each of the five female victims was savagely disfigured and her blood flowed onto the cobblestones of Victorian London.
He died 28 years later in Leavesden Asylum, Hertfordshire.
His eldest brother, Isaac, was a wealthy tailor who moved to London in April 1870 before changing his name to Abrahams.
Author and Ripper researcher Russell Edwards has discovered photos of Isaac dressed as a member of the Lodge of Israeli Freemasons, which could explain why Kosminski escaped justice.
He believes Kosminski’s mutilation of the victims was related to the Masonic blood oaths that refer to the cutting of the throat and the removal of certain body parts.
Mr. Edwards recently used photos of Kosminski’s family and facial remodeling technology to create a composite of what the Ripper suspect looked like in real life.