The Artificial Intelligence (AI) has just offered us what may be the closest look we have ever had at Jack the Ripper, the most infamous serial killer in history. Jeff Leahy, a 63-year-old Welshman obsessed with the mysterious criminal for decades, used technology to unveil the face that could belong to Aaron Kosminski, one of the main suspects in the brutal murders that terrorized London’s East End.
Kosminski, a Polish-born barber residing in Whitechapel during the time of the murders, was identified by experts as the possible Jack the Ripper, although his guilt was never conclusively established. Leahy, who already produced a miniseries about the killer in 2011, turned to the Midjourney software and photographs of Kosminski’s relatives to create this revealing image.
“It’s astonishing to finally have an image of him. I was surprised by how striking the image is,” said Leahy, a television professional. “There has never been a photo of him, and this is the best representation we could have. It’s incredibly exciting to finally put a face to the world’s most notorious serial killer.”
Leahy relied on two photographs of Matilda, Kosminski’s sister, one of his uncle, another of a close relative, and one of his brother-in-law. “The families were very interconnected, with cousins marrying each other for generations, which made the images extremely useful for this purpose,” he explained.
Since he was ten years old, when his aunt took him on a tour of the East End, Leahy has been fascinated by the case of Jack the Ripper. Now, decades later, his passion for the mystery led him to use AI to bring to light a representation that could very well be the face behind the heinous crimes that still capture the public’s imagination today.
