This article appeared today on The History Channel’s website and I found it extremely interesting.  Click over to The History Channel’s site to read the full article, but a couple of snippets I found intriguing:

In one of the more recent efforts to crack the long-cold case, an Australian scientist used swabs from the stamps and seals of some of the letters Jack the Ripper was believed to have sent to police in order to construct a partial DNA profile of the sender. Though the results were admittedly inconclusive, they indicated that the samples were likely to have come from an unexpected source—a woman.

. . .the police only had four actual suspects—all male. But after a witness said she saw the fifth Ripper victim, Mary Kelly, hours after she was murdered, the chief inspector in the case suggested it might have been the female killer escaping in Kelly’s clothing.

Now, this is an amazing theory that I had never considered.  Of course, I am not a detective or forensic examiner.  Hell, I don’t even like watching CSI on t.v.  While I have always been mildly interested in the case, an interest that was somewhat tempered when I bought a book which contained actual crime scene photos of the victims, I had never even considered that it could have been a woman.  What do you think?  Who do you think Jack the Ripper was and why?