A centuries old mystery may have been solved. In a new book, Russell Edwards claims that Jack the Ripper, the man behind the grisly murders in London's Whitechapel neighborhood, was a man named Aaron Kosminski thanks to DNA evidence.

In a new book titled "Naming Jack the Ripper," Edwards contends that new DNA evidence he obtained provided the evidence to solve the mystery, according to Mashable. The evidence led to one of the suspects for the serial killings in 1888 was a Polish immigrant who later died in an asylum.

Edwards purchased a shawl in 2007 that was covered with blood and semen.

"By 2007, I felt I had exhausted all avenues until I read a newspaper article about the sale of a shawl connected to the Ripper case," Edwards said in a letter to the Daily Mail.

"Its owner, David Melville-Hayes, believed it had been in his family's possession since the murder of Catherine Eddowes, when his ancestor, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, asked his superiors if he could take it home to give to his wife, a dressmaker. Incredibly, it was stowed without ever being washed, and was handed down."

According to Metro, Edwards enlisted the help of Finnish historic DNA expert Dr. Jari Louhelainen. His tests concluded, "The first strand of DNA showed a 99.2 percent match, as the analysis instrument could not determine the sequence of the missing 0.8 percent fragment of DNA. On testing the second strand, we achieved a perfect 100 percent match."

The DNA was matched to Kosminski's descendants, or rather his sister's descendants. She had given samples via a mouth swab. However, the DNA evidence does not prove conclusively that Kosminski committed the murders, but merely he encountered Eddowes. Yet, it puts him closer than any other suspect.

Kosminski was born in 1865 in Klodawa, Poland, controlled then by the Russian Empire. He emigrated to London with his family in 1881.