Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 (33 page)

I had come so far, wandered blindly up cul de sacs, struggled to keep going against the odds. Finally, we had reached a really good place, only a short step from the most important development
in the Ripper story since 1888. And now . . .

I was, to use a cliché, gutted. And another cliché: sick as a parrot. Devastated. I felt my stomach dropping away in sheer misery. We were, I thought, back at the drawing board as
far as the Ripper part of the equation went. We could start again: Jari could take more samples from the semen stain on the shawl, but then David would have to process them again. We were lucky the
first time when he found the epithelial cells, but there could have been a lot more trial and error repeating the whole process. I took the shawl back to Jari and he took more samples. It was
dispiriting to have been so near and now so far. I was psychologically preparing myself for another long wait.

I was travelling by tube to meet an estate agent, Jeremy Tarn,
in Commercial Road. Jeremy’s company, a prestigious one, has been in Whitechapel since 1955, and I
have been dealing with him for several years as I have been determined to buy a property in the area (which I have now, finally, done). I was changing trains, but the one I was about to board was
held up, and the whole tube line was temporarily at a standstill. I decided it would be quicker to walk than wait. I walked down a back road by some arches, the arches filled with stall holders
selling all sorts of exotic foodstuffs. It is an area where strangers don’t feel welcome, and I attracted some uncomfortable stares. But I knew I was heading in the right direction. I had
turned into Berner Street and was just passing the site where Elizabeth Stride was murdered – and Israel Schwartz saw the killer – when Jari’s text pinged on to my phone screen,
telling me that this latest sample was viable.

I stood still for a moment to read the text, more or less on the spot where he dragged his victim into the yard. When I looked up from my phone, everything around me felt unreal: the world
seemed to be going at high speed, with everyone rushing past, and me marooned in it, walking very, very slowly. I walked along Greenfield Road, where he and so many of Kosminski’s relatives
lived, and I paused again, as the full eerie significance hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I was, on his territory, and Jari was telling me we now had, once again, a good sample to work from. It
was something I could never have planned. It felt like a dream where you try to run but get nowhere: a weird, nonsensical feeling. I can’t find words to describe it: I was so close to proving
he was the Ripper, and at that same moment so close, physically, to where he had lived.

‘I’ve got you, you bastard,’ I said to myself, looking around at the street. Knowing so much about the Ripper story, and
for so many years having to
keep it to myself, whenever I am in the East End I feel like a ghost, an outsider, looking in at it all. When the chattering groups of Ripper tourists follow their guides around the streets he
trod, I have wanted, at times, to shout from the rooftops the full truth of the story, but I have always had to bite everything back. And here I was again, getting such momentous news just yards
from where he lived, and not being able to share it with anyone.

It was good news that the sample taken from the shawl was viable, but it still meant that we were a long way back in the process, and that this new sample would have to go to David Miller in
Leeds and we’d be waiting for a few more months. Although I was relieved we had another chance, I was still disappointed to have taken several steps back in the hunt, in terms of the time it
would take us.

But I hadn’t reckoned on Jari’s ability to find a way through any problem. The man is a genius, I can’t praise him enough for the way he applies his mind to any problem and
finds a solution.

‘Do you know what?’ he said. ‘We have the microscope slides on which David found those twelve epithelial cells. I think there may be a way to get the cells from the
slides.’

The slides had been fixed with a fixative and stained with Giemsa, a stain that was invented by an early German microbiologist, and one of its uses is to allow transparent cells to be seen with
a microscope. Jari had to find a way to get the cells, which could only be seen with a 400x magnification microscope, off the slides. He explained to me that there was a huge risk of contamination
in just scraping them off, and I tried to temper my hopes, because it sounded like a mission impossible. There was no standard scientific procedure.

‘I was puzzling about it all the time,’ he said, ‘when I was driving, when I was relaxing, whenever I had a spare moment. When I was in bed before
sleeping, and first thing when I woke up. I knew there had to be a way.

‘Then I remembered using laser capture microdissection which I had been using in cancer research to isolate just single cells from microscope slides.’

The method is not used in forensics, but due to Jari’s background and varied research interests he has a huge arsenal of methods up his sleeve, and just now this proved very useful. It was
a ground-breaking development in forensics: isolating a single cell from a piece of evidence 125 years old, and then analysing the DNA of that single cell. It was a bit like looking through a
telescope, finding a previously unknown planet from another galaxy, then zapping a sample of the planet down to earth to be analysed.

When Jari told me about laser capture microdissection (LCM) he had to explain what it was and what it could do: over the time we have been working together Jari has had to explain a great deal
of science to me, and he has done it very patiently. LCM is a state of the art method of isolating and harvesting cells by cutting away unwanted cells or other debris. A laser is coupled to a
microscope and focuses on the tissue. When the cells have been identified and isolated, they can be extracted from the slide one by one. The technique does not alter the form or structure of the
cell, which is why it is invaluable in medical research.

So Jari had hit on a means by which we could extract the DNA we needed, but now the next big problem was: where was a suitable LCM microscope, and how could we use it? Jari knew of several
universities and research establishments
which had this very expensive piece of kit, but when he approached them they all said no: they were not prepared to allow their
technology to be used for forensic purposes. There were protocols attached to its use, and we did not meet them. One university department would have allowed us to use their LCM, but only if Jari
had undergone a day’s mandatory special training in its use, and he simply did not have time in his already bursting schedule.

Again, I have great reason to be grateful to Jari. By this time, he was as much involved in the search for answers from the shawl as I was, and he refused to be defeated. He rang several
manufacturers of the LCM, including the Carl Zeiss company in Germany, and from them he procured a list of all their customers in the UK who had the microscopes.

One name that came up was Epistem, a company which specializes in biotechnology and personalized medicine, with particular expertise in stem cells in the areas of epithelial and infectious
diseases. It is based in Manchester, and does a lot of work in partnership with Manchester University.

Jari rang them, and after so many knockbacks we could hardly believe it when Dr Ross Haggart said yes, he could fit us into a gap in the LCM timetable. So I picked Jari up in Liverpool, drove to
Manchester and we went to Epistem, which is located in the heart of the Manchester University area of the city. Jari, the scientist, was allowed to go in, but once again I was outside killing time,
hoping everything was going well. I wandered into a church just round the corner: I have always been a spiritual person and I like churches, I always feel good when I’m inside a church. I
prayed, selfishly I suppose, for the success of the work with the LCM.

Jari and Ross spent a couple of hours scanning the whole of David’s slides in high resolution, and they were pretty sure they had located the cells, but could only
confirm this by comparing it with David’s original results. Jari said, ‘We found lots of debris, plant cells, even a micro worm, which could have come on to the slide at any point. It
was like having a map of London with no street names and having to find Big Ben. My eyes were sore from looking by the time we had finished.’

In the end what we had was a high-resolution scan of the microscope slides, a few hundred megabytes, and now this had to be compared with David’s images of the epithelial cells. It was a
mammoth task, like looking for a needle in a haystack in a field full of haystacks.

Back in Liverpool Jari set to work in the evenings. Because his family live in Bradford, he spends four evenings a week on his own in Liverpool, and was quite prepared to finish his day job and
then start work on this.

It was laborious and time-consuming work, but after his first long evening he found a cell. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was exactly the same cell as David had found. I was
staring at it, I could hardly take it in. Although I hoped I’d find the cells, I had a fair degree of scepticism about my chances,’ he said later.

My phone pinged with a text to tell me he’d found it. I’d been waiting all evening, knowing he’d started the search, hoping we would get a result, but not daring to believe we
would. It was after 1 a.m. when he sent me the message, but I was not asleep. It was a very intense time and I’d been picking up my phone every half hour or so, checking in case I’d
missed a message. When it finally came through I was relieved and excited.

Jari carried on with the search for the next two evenings, spending more than six hours on it. Finding the first cell gave him a boost, plus he reckons he got better at
recognizing what he was looking for.

Having identified them, we now had to go back to Manchester to capture them from the slides. Ross was very helpful again, but because of pressure on his lab we had to be there at 8.30 a.m. Jari
caught the train from Liverpool and I picked him up at Eccles station on a raw, cold morning. I was there so early I slept in my car in the station car park until he arrived, then I dropped him
back at Epistem.

He and Ross worked hard, examining the slides and deciding which cells they could capture. Some cells had no nuclei, a by-product of the staining process, so therefore would yield no DNA. They
managed to capture thirty-three cells, having screened them as the right size, the right morphology (form and structure), and confirmed they had nuclei. (David Miller had stopped looking after he
found twelve: he had only been trying to confirm that they were there, and when he found a sufficient number he was satisfied.) The cells were tagged by putting an electronic flag on the image (a
bit like you do with Google maps) in order to find them again easily. They were then captured using the LCM and put in separate tubes, thirty-three in total. Finding thirty-three may sound a lot,
but think how many cells are in a square centimetre of skin: approximately 110,000–125,000.

All of the cells except one looked like epithelial cells. The odd one looked like a kidney cell. I was tremendously excited when Jari told me this: it is not surprising, remembering that the
Ripper removed Catherine Eddowes’ kidney, but it was an unexpected bonus. To date, Jari has not had the time to work
on this cell, so we have no confirmation that it
is definitely from a kidney, but he says that the morphology very much resembles a kidney cell. (As a cautious scientist, he points out: ‘It could be something else, but when I look at it the
first thing that comes to my mind is a kidney cell.’) When there is time, Jari will examine this cell to confirm what he suspects.

It was after midday when Jari emerged from Epistem, triumphant but exhausted, with the captured cells. I had filled in the tense hours that he was in the lab by walking around Manchester,
calling in at a museum, trying to settle in a coffee shop. I was distracted and on edge until I heard the good news. I drove Jari back to Liverpool and we went to Chinatown for a meal. We were both
shattered: we had been up very early, and Jari had been concentrating hard, while I was expending a great deal of nervous energy just hoping for a good result. We were so tired we were not
jubilant: we spent the meal talking rubbish to each other, and afterwards, when I set off to drive back to Hertfordshire, Jari was genuinely concerned about me making such a long journey in my
exhausted state.

So now we had the DNA from M, the descendant, and we had the cells from, we believed, her ancestor Aaron Kosminski. Now Jari’s great experience and expertise came to the fore, yet again.
He decided to do a whole genome amplification, a relatively new technique, on the cell samples. The WGA amplifies (copies) both genomic and mitochondrial DNA from the single cell to a level where
we have enough material to do genetic profiling. We already had the DNA from the two descendants, Karen and M, and from the other main people who had handled the shawl, like me and him (to
eliminate us).

Whole genome amplification means that tiny quantities of DNA can be amplified to provide a much greater supply
for scientific work. According to Jari, five years earlier
we would not have been able to use this method, and although it had been used in genetic sciences it was not routinely used in forensics. It is usually applied to a small number of cells that are
in good condition. Here we were talking about one single cell, more than a hundred years old, and not in its best condition. (The other thirty-two cells were being stored in case we needed them in
future.) Once again, Jari was working at the frontiers of science.

If a scientist has only one cell it is virtually impossible to do a whole genome profile from it, but if we can make multiple 100 per cent identical copies of the genetic material which is
inside the cell, the task becomes possible. It was back to the lab for Jari, where he isolated single cells, added biological buffers to stabilize them, and then by adding a mixture of chemicals
was able to extract copies of the DNA that was inside the cell. He explained it as a bit like a photocopying machine, which will make endless copies of one page of writing: through this technique
he could make many copies of all the different DNA samples from the cell, giving him enough material to do DNA profiling and sequencing. Each segment of DNA was amplified about 500-million-fold.
After this amplification step we would now, fingers crossed, have enough material for the actual profiling.