Dr Findlay's DNA casebook provides a Ripper yarn

Could an Australian gene-test company's uniquely sensitive new DNA fingerprinting technique finally finger history's most notorious serial murderer, London's Jack the Ripper?

A research team at Gribbles Molecular Science in Brisbane, led by chief scientist Dr Ian Findlay, has recovered high-quality DNA profiles from dried follicle cells adhering to hair samples preserved in a Melbourne family's 160-year old mourning brooch.

He said he had expected to test only a single hair from the brooch, and was "a bit surprised" when the owner supplied four hairs -- three brown, one grey -- that turned out to be from four genetically unrelated individuals. Findlay said they were possibly related by marriages within an extended family.

In the age before photography, people used mourning brooches to preserve mementos of deceased love ones. Findlay said the quality of the DNA profiles obtained from the hairs in the brooch rivalled those from modern blood, semen and epithelial cells from mouth swabs.

The Gribbles researchers employed a technique called short tandem repeat (STR) profiling, which exploits multiple DNA markers found in non-protein coding DNA. STR markers are inherited in Mendelian fashion.

In an article in the international journal Nature in 1997, Findlay's team reported the successful extraction, amplification and typing of DNA from a single cell or sperm, containing only few picograms of DNA.

Findlay said the discovery that very old DNA could be recovered and typed raised the exciting possibility that single-cell STR profiling could be applied to other unsolved crimes -- for example, to solve rape or murder cases from the 1940s or even earlier, or to recover DNA from old passports or documents that might have been handled notorious fugitives like the Nazi war criminal Martin Bormann, or the British peer Lord Lucan.

"There are probably scores of Australian households that have potentially valuable forensic materials with recoverable DNA on them, stored in drawers or cupboards," he said.

"Fresh DNA usually degrades quite rapidly and then stabilises. You lose some of the larger markers, but still get very good profiles. We don't know how far we can extend the current limit. It could be 200, 600 or 1000 years."

Over a two-and-a-half-month period between August 31 and November 9, 1888, five prostitutes were murdered in horrific circumstances within a one square mile area centred on inner London's Whitechapel district. The murders ceased just as suddenly as they had begun.

The identity of the presumably psychopathic killer remains a mystery 117 years later, and been the subject of speculation and theory, including lurid conspiracy theories involving prominent figures in Victorian London.

In recent decades, several TV documentaries have reviewed what remains of the forensic evidence, and surviving contemporary records on the case. Most of the original police files were incinerated in the London Blitz of 1940.

The list of suspects extends to high-profile figures like Queen Victoria's son Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence, the royal surgeon Sir William Gull, and prominent British Impressionist artist William Sickert.

Findlay said it was possible that DNA samples from the Ripper's saliva might preserved on stamps on letters purportedly written by the killer to police investigators.

Police received scores of letters, most of them almost certainly non-authentic, but one was accompanied by a piece of a kidney supposedly cut from the Ripper's third victim, Catherine Eddowes. Eddowes suffered from Bright's disease, and the tissue sample showed histological signs of the common kidney disorder.

Findlay said if DNA was present in the saliva, it could be compared with DNA samples from the living descendants of the 10 main suspects.

STR profiling is faster, more amenable to automation, and thus less vulnerable to contamination and human error than other DNA fingerprinting techniques.

Findlay said the big advantage was that the technique had been validated and standardised, and the data could be readily stored in existing DNA-fingerprinting databases.

Since the Ripper story began attracting publicity, Dr Findlay said he had received dozens of emails -- including one from a private collector claiming to have a hair sample from one of the Ripper's victims.

In addition to being the first company in the world to profile the DNA of a single cell, Findlay said the Gribbles was also the first to employ radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to keep automatic track of forensic samples moving through its system, and in storage.