Originally posted by Abby Normal
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Abby, you’ve thrown “Puckeridge” at this thread like it’s a silver bullet, but let’s slow down. If Smith’s suspect really was Puckeridge, we’ve got a serious problem: the math doesn’t work.
Smith set out five rare, converging traits—ex-medical student, asylum history, connection with prostitutes, tricking women with polished farthings, and ties to Rupert Street/Haymarket. Puckeridge only ticks three boxes, and even those are shaky. He never had the prostitute association, and there is no evidence whatsoever for the coin-fraud trick. On top of that, he was given an alibi that the City police themselves accepted. So unless you’re saying Smith was both wrong about the traits and chasing a man already eliminated, Puckeridge cannot be the Rupert Street suspect Smith described.
Thompson, on the other hand, matches all five traits cleanly and independently. He had six years of medical training, a documented nervous breakdown with institutional care, a prostitute lover who fled to Whitechapel in mid-1888, direct evidence of coin-related trickery in Walsh’s biography, and he lived right on top of the Haymarket/Rupert Street nexus. You can dismiss one trait here or there if you want, but you can’t hand-wave away the convergence. That’s why the probability calculations explode into the quadrillions: it’s statistically impossible for someone else to line up on all five.
So when you say “Smith’s suspect was Puckeridge,” what you’re really doing is trying to collapse the investigation’s credibility just to avoid acknowledging Thompson. If Smith’s description is meaningless, then the entire Rupert Street surveillance was meaningless. But it wasn’t—Smith was a Commissioner, present at Mitre Square, and his words carry weight. To deride him is to erase the case itself.
You don’t have to like the conclusion, but you can’t keep pretending that a partial fit with an accepted alibi somehow “beats” a full match with no such escape hatch. That’s not serious analysis—that’s obstruction.
If you want to defend Puckeridge, then by all means: show us where he meets all five traits, not just three. Until then, Thompson stands alone as the Rupert Street suspect.
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