I dissect the ‘Dear Boss’ letter.

[Richard Patterson]

I must point out though, I agree that the t's in the Jack letter are both consistent throughout that text AND distinctly different to those in Thompson's writing example. At the moment, I am seeing the letter as poor evidence for the argument.

The rest is interesting, though.

Please bear in mind, I have never said that Thompson's handwriting matches that of the Dear Boss letter. I posted both simply to be expedient, since a comparison of handwriting seems the next obvious step. All I can say is that the Dear Boss letter seems to be about Francis Thompson. Why would Thompson have written the 'Dear Boss' letter anyway? There is no reasonable motive?

[Richard Patterson]

Very interesting concept.
Are you a scholar of English Literature, Mr. Patterson? I suspect as much.

I'm an English teacher who minored in English Literature, while studying philosophy.

Thompson wasn't "dumbing down" his writing by writing in dialect.

I agree he was being respectful of future employees. He might have well addressed it as 'Dear Boss'. Thanks for finding the idea of my book interesting.

[GUT]

Please bear in mind, I have never said that Thompson's handwriting matches that of the Dear Boss letter. I posted both simply to be expedient, since a comparison of handwriting seems the next obvious step. All I can say is that the Dear Boss letter seems to be about Francis Thompson. Why would Thompson have written the 'Dear Boss' letter anyway? There is no reasonable motive?

But why did anybody write any of the letters, I don't think that anyone believes that every one of the 100s of letters were sent by the one person.

So if we want motive we must acknowledge than many letters were sent by people other than Jack.

Any one who cries SOLVED purely on proving someone wrote letters is going to be disappointed, more is essential.

[Richard Patterson]

But why did anybody write any of the letters, I don't think that anyone believes that every one of the 100s of letters were sent by the one person.

So if we want motive we must acknowledge than many letters were sent by people other than Jack.

Any one who cries SOLVED purely on proving someone wrote letters is going to be disappointed, more is essential.

Did Meynell Kill Thompson? Did the writer of the Dear Boss letter have a ripper suspect executed.

Many researchers say it is unlikely that the Dear Boss letter was sent by Jack.. This is despite the metropolitan police placing up hundreds of facsimiles of the letter, all over London, in the hope that someone may recognize the handwriting leading to the Ripper’s arrest. It widely held that it was just one hundreds of letters sent by the misguided pranksters. People rightly ask if Jack wrote the ‘Dear Boss’ letter then why didn’t he authenticate it. Here’s why.

One look at Francis Thompson as the Whitechapel murderer, and Wilfrid Meynell as his co-conspirator, shows how the last person you would expect may have found a way to authenticate the Dear Boss letter – Francis Thompson. This was may have been what cost him his life.

There is strong circumstantial evidence, found in an old tin box, to back the premise that Thompson believed he was about to authenticate the ‘Dear Boss’ letter as written by Wilfrid Meynell. The evidence makes it looks like, at the time of his death; he had found a way to implicate Meynell with his murders. The sinister circumstances of his death seems to show that Meynell arranged to have the poet secretly euthanized soon after Thompson had threatened to go to the authorities with his ‘proof’. I have already described how the writer of the letter was by someone who knew all about Thompson’s intimate circumstances. Added to this the events surrounding Thompson’s death seem to show a possible motive for the writer of the letter, Meynell? To want Thompson silenced.

Wilfrid Meynell who, in 1888, ‘rescued’ a homeless Thompson became his publisher and heir to his fortune and estate. Meynell was also a journalist, with many years experience, and a volunteer at various homeless shelters around London.

In 1907, an apparently healthy Thompson was tricked, through the Meynell’s daughter faking a sever illness, into entering hospital. Meynell had Thompson placed in an isolation ward. Within a week Thompson was dead. The cause? Morphomania - the 19th century’s equivalent for a drug overdose.

Francis Thompson had only just hours before signed his will. By then, he was well under the influence of the copious amounts of laudanum that had been proscribed to him by the hospital doctor. Thompson’s barely a scrawled signature, left all rights to Meynell. (The signing was witnessed by a patient who Thompson had never met.) The first priest refused to give Thompson last rights. The send priest could not be sure of his identity. The lawyer, who wrote the will, was the husband of Meynell’s daughter. In 1907 the same lawyer rose to become a vocal member of the leading turn-of-the-century eugenicists the precursor to the emerging advocates for euthanasia and now outlawed uses of it in some Axis nations in WW2.

The Meynells wrote that his condition was aggravated by tuberculosis. This disease, typified by the coughing up of mucus mixed with blood hardly fits a man who showed no signs of this. I doubt, before entering hospital, even had a cough.
I suppose some may see it as simply a conspiracy of fate, that Thompson was aged 47, when he died, the same age as the oldest Ripper victim.

Statements from Meynell hint that there was an unrecorded dissection of Thompson’s corpse. The Meynell family arranged to wait for three days before releasing the news of his death. The Meynells held the funeral in private.

In 1907, when after Thompson’s death, Meynell went into his lodgings to go through his meager possessions. He fetched from inside a tin box, a cutting from the “Daily Mail”. The article that, Thompson had kept along with just a handful of items was titled, “Maria Blume’s Will”. It was about the first successful use of handwriting, in August of that year, as evidence in a murder trial.

The trial was for a carpenter named murdered Maria Louisa Blume in early in the year. Mrs Blume was seventy-seven years old when she and Brinkley met. Brinkley drew up a will leaving him Mrs Blume’s house and her money and tricked her into signing it. Two days Brinckley poisoned her. Brinkley’s trial at Guilford Assize was amongst the first to introduce forensic evidence. The inks used for the will’s signature were compared and the handwriting was examined.

It was on the handwriting evidence that Brinkley was found guilty. On August 31 1907, nineteen years since the Ripper wrote ‘Red ink is fit enough I hope Ha ha.’ and on the anniversary of the Ripper’s first murder, Brinkley was hung in Wandsworth prison. Why Francis Thompson would consider the subject of the Brinkley case worth his while is anybody’s guess. Here’s one in six billion. It could have been because Thompson was about to scrape together a few coins and have Meynell’s handwriting analyzed by a forensic examiner.

[pinkmoon]

Then you must not have read that the Metropolitan Police placed handbills with facsimiles of it all over the East End. In the belief that someone would recognize the handwriting and be able to provide information that would lead to an arrest.

I think it might have been out of desperation if you have no real clues than surely it makes sense to follow up something that might have a chance of being a clue no matter how slight

[Richard Patterson]

I think it might have been out of desperation if you have no real clues than surely it makes sense to follow up something that might have a chance of being a clue no matter how slight

When I wrote that the police, investigating the Whitechapel murders, believed the ‘Dear Boss’ letter was genuine, do you also think that everything we read so far points in the contrary?

[Ausgirl]

Here Hopkins introduced a relatively early account of the Ripper murders. It introduced an unknown suspect, who he dubbed, Moring,’ an opium-addicted poet who was friends with Mary Kelly. Here is some of what Hopkins wrote.

‘...Obviously, too, the cunning of Jack the Ripper was needed at this time to " get away with " such a crime. No mere amateur could have escaped arrest with the whole police intelligence of the metropolis concentrated on this type of murder…One small point in the case of Elizabeth Jackson suggests that the murderer may have been a member of the medical profession. One of the last portions of the body which turned up was enveloped in a piece of medicated gauze similar to that used by students engaged on surgical cases...One of Mary Kelly's friends was a poor devil-driven poet who often haunted the taverns around the East End. I will call him " Mr. Moring," but of course that was not his real name. Moring would often walk about all night and I had many long talks with him as together we paced the gloomy courts and alleys…He had black, lank hair and moustache, and the long, dark face of the typical bard…. Moring, who knew every opium den in the East End, although at that time they were not counted in with the sights of London, often gave himself up to long spells of opium smoking. "Alcohol for fools; opium for poets, was a phrase which recurred constantly in his talk. "To-morrow one dies," was his motto, and he would sometimes add " and who cares-will it stop the traffic on London Bridge?" After reading the above statement [George Hutchinson’s inquest testimony for Kelly.] I looked back on my memories of the wandering poet and curiously enough that description fitted him down to the ground! But I could not connect a man of such extraordinary gentleness committing such a dreadful series of outrages...."

Hopkins remarked that his poet dressed the same as the man seen by George Hutchinson outside Miller’s court with Mary Kelly on the night of her murder. Hutchinson said ‘The man was about thirty-five years of age, five feet six inches high, of a dark complexion, with a dark moustache. He wore a long, black coat with astrakhan collar, spats with pearl buttons over button boots." Thompson was about five foot seven inches, he was aged 29, and many portraits have him with a moustache. Thompson’s hair was so dark as to appear as jet black at first. It was in the very weeks before the last murder that Thompson who had destitute and almost penniless was given a sum of money, enough to buy a suit, for an Essay published in the November 1888 edition of a Catholic literary magazine. In this essay, published on the eve of the murder of Mary Kelly, Thompson couldn’t help himself remarking,

'He had better seek some critic who will lay his subject on the table, nick out every muscle of expression with light, cool, fastidious scalpel and then call on him to admire the "neat dissection"'

I had not read about this poet friend of Mary Kelly's before, thank you for that. If the poet can be positively identified, I think that would be a major discovery. In my opinion, at least!

How many addicted poets were wandering around Whitechapel, I wonder. Keeping in mind that it was a very different thing to be called a 'poet' then, compared to now, when anyone with a keyboard and rhyming dictionary can call themselves a poet and find five hundred people to agree with them in a week, no matter how dreadful their doggerel might be. The term "poet" carried weight back then, so I'm dead curious about who this person was, and what they were writing. Thompson's a pretty good candidate, for sure.. but were there others?

What I'm having trouble with here is this... having known a good many poets in my time, several addicts and half a handful of addicted poets...

I find it hard to believe that an addict who is so addicted as to be known in "every" opium den in the area (Mary's friend), and a man who seemed to be quite unconcerned with appearances of wealth and generally went about looking very down at heel (Thompson), would splurge a windfall on pearl-buttoned spats and such, rather than bolting for the nearest source of opium and staying there for a "long spell" until the money ran out.

The picture of Thompson I have in my mind so far doesn't gel at all with Astrakhan Man's relative extravagance. A decent coat, for someone who -prefers- to live on the streets - sure, I can see that. But pearl buttoned spats? It just seems a bit unlikely to me, unless it can be shown that Thompson had a predilection for dressing up to the nines now and then, at the expense of his need for opium. Though I think it likely to get him beaten and robbed, what with him sleeping in doss houses or on the streets, at the time.

For now, though, I am quite excited to think that perhaps Thompson was this friend of Mary Kelly. Not yet quite as excited (pending a few more feasible connections) about him being JtR.

Also, apologies for my confusion re the handwriting.. and for still being confused. Are you saying it was Meynell who wrote the Dear Boss letter? If so, then why put Thompson's and not Meynell's handwriting up for comparison?

It's early here. Perhaps I've just not had enough coffee yet.

[GUT]

Many researchers say it is unlikely that the Dear Boss letter was sent by Jack.. This is despite the metropolitan police placing up hundreds of facsimiles of the letter, all over London, in the hope that someone may recognize the handwriting leading to the Ripper’s arrest. It widely held that it was just one hundreds of letters sent by the misguided pranksters. People rightly ask if Jack wrote the ‘Dear Boss’ letter then why didn’t he authenticate it. Here’s why.

And later decided it was written by a journalist, so which inerpretation was correct.

[Richard Patterson]

What I'm having trouble with here is this... having known a good many poets in my time, several addicts and half a handful of addicted poets...

I find it hard to believe that an addict who is so addicted as to be known in "every" opium den in the area (Mary's friend), and a man who seemed to be quite unconcerned with appearances of wealth and generally went about looking very down at heel (Thompson), would splurge a windfall on pearl-buttoned spats and such, rather than bolting for the nearest source of opium and staying there for a "long spell" until the money ran out.

The picture of Thompson I have in my mind so far doesn't gel at all with Astrakhan Man's relative extravagance. A decent coat, for someone who -prefers- to live on the streets - sure, I can see that. But pearl buttoned spats?

Perhaps it’s just me, or because I have studied Thompson as a suspect for many years, but it can be shown very easily that he resembled Hutchinson's apparently wealthy suspect. What we know of Thompson was that he had trained in military drill, giving him a sharp gate. Thompson was pale skinned with very dark, brown hair. He was 29 years old, but three years on London’s streets may have made him appear older. He was around 5 foot 7 inches in height. (175cms) By November of 1888 Thompson, who shaved with his dissecting scalpel, kept sharp as a matter of routine, sported a moustache. Thompson had come to a small sum of money, from his poems, which he spent, on a suit and coat. As well as play costumes; worn when he once joined a theatre group back in Manchester, Thompson had already been attired as a priest, a doctor, and a soldier, and beggar. Even though he refused to leave the streets, claiming to be still seeking out his missing prostitute lover. He always wore a consecrated medal on a chain. Thompson wore a waistcoat, necktie and a wide brimmed soft slouched hat. Astrakhan was not a type of coat but a material. (wool from a baby lamb or the foetus) Although I have not found this material alongside a description of Thompson’s coat, it is not impossible that it had astrakhan. Here is a description of Thompson, detailing his clothes and the parcel he carried,

‘His great brown [Inverness] cape...nondescript garb...a basket slung over his shoulder on a strap a strange object his fish – basket’

In 1888, Thompson was using this same parcel to carry his few remaining books from an extensive library that he had sold to sustain his addiction to laudanum. Parts of Hutchinson’s description, of the man seen talking to Mary Kelly on the night she was murdered, states,

‘He also had a kind of a small parcel in his left hand with a kind of strap round it…age about 34 or 35. height 5ft 6 complexion pale, dark eyes and eye lashes slight moustache, curled up each end, and hair dark, very surley looking dress long dark coat… waistcoat dark trousers dark felt hat turned down in the middle…Wore a very thick gold chain ... Respectable appearance walked very sharp.'

All these details can be attributed to Thompson’s appearance at that time.

Are you saying it was Meynell who wrote the Dear Boss letter? If so, then why put Thompson's and not Meynell's handwriting up for comparison?

I am saying that Meynell might have arranged to have the letter written even though anybody could have written it. I was happy to post up Thompson’s handwriting, because I had already engaged a professional forensic examiner to compare it to the ‘Dear Boss’ letter. This was after I had visited the Kew Archives and taken photographs of the original letter. I did so using a template that measured size and angle. This was done so a professional could state, with little degree of error their, findings. The examiner I hired informed me that it was unlikely that Thompson wrote the letter. I have not done the same groundwork with original samples Wilfrid Meynell’s handwriting so I did not see how posting Meynell’s handwriting bring any further certainty to my premises.

[Richard Patterson]

And later decided it was written by a journalist, so which inerpretation was correct.

Both are correct. Pranksters can be journalist and vice versa. A reading of biographies on the journalist Wilfrid Meynell, who 'rescued' Thompson, describe his fondness for pulling pranks.

[Ausgirl]

Perhaps it’s just me, or because I have studied Thompson as a suspect for many years, but it can be shown very easily that he resembled Hutchinson's apparently wealthy suspect. What we know of Thompson was that he had trained in military drill, giving him a sharp gate. Thompson was pale skinned with very dark, brown hair. He was 29 years old, but three years on London’s streets may have made him appear older. He was around 5 foot 7 inches in height. (175cms) By November of 1888 Thompson, who shaved with his dissecting scalpel, kept sharp as a matter of routine, sported a moustache. Thompson had come to a small sum of money, from his poems, which he spent, on a suit and coat. As well as play costumes; worn when he once joined a theatre group back in Manchester, Thompson had already been attired as a priest, a doctor, and a soldier, and beggar. Even though he refused to leave the streets, claiming to be still seeking out his missing prostitute lover. He always wore a consecrated medal on a chain. Thompson wore a waistcoat, necktie and a wide brimmed soft slouched hat. Astrakhan was not a type of coat but a material. (wool from a baby lamb or the foetus) Although I have not found this material alongside a description of Thompson’s coat, it is not impossible that it had astrakhan. Here is a description of Thompson, detailing his clothes and the parcel he carried,

‘His great brown [Inverness] cape...nondescript garb...a basket slung over his shoulder on a strap a strange object his fish – basket’

In 1888, Thompson was using this same parcel to carry his few remaining books from an extensive library that he had sold to sustain his addiction to laudanum. Parts of Hutchinson’s description, of the man seen talking to Mary Kelly on the night she was murdered, states,

‘He also had a kind of a small parcel in his left hand with a kind of strap round it…age about 34 or 35. height 5ft 6 complexion pale, dark eyes and eye lashes slight moustache, curled up each end, and hair dark, very surley looking dress long dark coat… waistcoat dark trousers dark felt hat turned down in the middle…Wore a very thick gold chain ... Respectable appearance walked very sharp.'

All these details can be attributed to Thompson’s appearance at that time.

If all of this is so.. then he's a much better suspect than some featured here. Or at least, there's a lot more information that might be verifiable enough to put him squarely on the suspect list: he had clear motive (hatred specifically for prostitutes), means (his scalpel, anatomical knowledge) and opportunity (hanging about Whitechapel a lot).

As for him being Astrakhan Man, I remain dubious, but a little less for knowing he did in fact pay attention to his personal grooming and did own decent clothes (having "enough money for a suit" is quite a different thing to actually owning a recently purchased suit). What are your sources for this detailed info on his dressing habits, if I might ask?

Have to wonder where, though, if he kept all these sets of clothes including his finery, where he kept them while living on the streets and toting things about in a fish basket? I also wonder how he wasn't robbed for that thick gold chain or avoided the temptation to hock it, being both homeless and a junkie, and selling of his books and all.

I think there's quite a lot here to be excited about. Looking forward to more details.

[miss marple]

Richard's posts are very interesting, but for me the real story here is the possibility that Meynell may have murdered Thompson.

Miss Marple

[pinkmoon]

Richard's posts are very interesting, but for me the real story here is the possibility that Meynell may have murdered Thompson.

Miss Marple

Why would someone murder a serial killer?

[Bridewell]

Why would someone murder a serial killer?

To stop him?

[Bridewell]

Then you must not have read that the Metropolitan Police placed handbills with facsimiles of it all over the East End. In the belief that someone would recognize the handwriting and be able to provide information that would lead to an arrest.

An arrest of a murderer or of a hoaxer?