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An historian claims to have uncovered the identity of Jack the Ripper by using modern police forensic techniques.
Mei Trow also believes that the notorious Whitechapel murderer was responsible for the deaths of an additional two women.
He has concluded that Robert Mann, a local morgue attendant, was the killer who terrorised east London in 1888 and who was officially credited with dismembering five prostitutes.
Another suspect: Historian Dr Mei Trow has claimed that Jack the Ripper was mortuary attendant Robert Mann and that he killed seven - not five - women
Mr Trow's theory is based on two years of intensive research during which he used forensic techniques including psychological and geographical profiling.
The beginnings of Mr Trow's investigation are rooted in 1988, when a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) examination of the Ripper case worked up a comprehensive criminal personality profile using standard agency procedures.
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The FBI profile of the Ripper concluded that the killer was a white male from the lower social classes, was probably from a broken home, had a menial job such as a butcher or medical examiner's assistant, and because of prolonged periods without human interaction, was socially inept.
Mr Trow said: 'I wanted to go beyond the myth of a caped man with a top hat and knife, and get to the reality, and the reality is simply that Jack was an ordinary man.'
He also believes that Martha Tabram, found with 39 stab wounds to her body in Gunthorpe Street, was the first Ripper victims, and that Alice Mackenzie, brutally murdered eight months after the confirmed five killings, was his last.
The two women, along with confirmed victims, would have been delivered to the Whitechapel mortuary in which Mann worked.
After the killing of Polly Nichols, the Ripper's first official victim, Mann unlocked the mortuary for the police so they could examine the body and as such, was called as a witness in her inquest to help establish the cause of death.
Most damningly, he undressed Polly's body with his assistant, despite being under strict instructions from police to not touch the body. Mr Trow suspects this was an opportunity for Mann to admire his handiwork.
The coroner, in his summation of Mann's testimony concluded that, 'It appears the mortuary keeper is subject to fits, and neither his memory nor statements are reliable.'
A local of impoverished Whitechapel, Mann was from an extremely deprived background, his father having been absent for much of his upbringing.
In addition, he tasted the ultimate Victorian humiliation of being an inmate in the workhouse, which all citizens regarded as a hellish place to where the lowest strata of society who were unable to support themselves were relegated.
Professor Laurence Alison, forensic psychologist at Liverpool University, said: 'In terms of psychological profiling, Robert Mann is the one of the most credible suspects from recent years and the closest we may ever get to a plausible psychological explanation for these most infamous of Victorian murders.'
Mr Trow's theory forms the basis of the documentary Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed, which airs on Discovery Channel this Sunday and in the Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer.
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