Just from conjecture, is there a better candidate?

[Lombro2]

I think it is generally accepted that someone aged less than 40 is not yet middle-aged.

Middle age would fit more with the conventional wisdom that serial killers are generally slightly older than their victims. (Marshall said Stride was with a middle-aged man.)

I would go with conventional wisdom over the prevailing or popular one. Although even conventional wisdom has to advance with the times.

But Bond got age and cold-bloodedness right in his profile IMO and so conjecture should go back to that.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Middle age would fit more with the conventional wisdom that serial killers are generally slightly older than their victims. (Marshall said Stride was with a middle-aged man.)

I would go with conventional wisdom over the prevailing or popular one. Although even conventional wisdom has to advance with the times.

But Bond got age and cold-bloodedness right in his profile IMO and so conjecture should go back to that.

a general profile of serial killers indicates they are generally white males from 25 to 34 years old.


https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/profiles-terror-serial-murderer#:~:text=While%20each%20of%20these%20types ,involve%20contact%20with%20the%20victim.


Most German serial killers of the twentieth century started committing and even finished committing murder before reaching middle age.

Many started while still in their teens or twenties.

The same goes for serial killers in the Soviet Union, a very large percentage of whom did not even survive to middle age.

[Lombro2]

I’m glad you’re looking at Continental stats and not just American. But everything must be considered, not one popular view based on the top of a bell curve and some witnesses in the dark.

I can’t go with conjectures on a specific case based on generalities, especially when the conjecture goes against another general convention and there isn’t a good or proven reason given for the deviation.

Here’s the old graph I took off Openscience.com before it disappeared.

Blue represents number of SK Rookies by age.

Orange are “retirees”.

[Richard Patterson]

A few clarifications, since some points here are drifting into conjecture rather than the hard evidence we actually do have on Francis Thompson.

1. Not just conjecture: Thompson isn’t simply a “profitable exercise in speculation.” He uniquely matches the five rare traits described in City of London Police Commissioner Major Henry Smith’s 1910 memoir: ex-medical student, asylum inmate, prostitute associate, coin fraudster, and seen living in Rupert Street/Haymarket. The probability of another man in London sharing all those traits at the same time is about 1 in 20 quadrillion. That is evidence, not guesswork.
2. Direct Whitechapel connection: There is locational evidence. Between 1885 and 1888 Thompson lived rough in the East End, lodging in common lodging houses, hospitals, and sleeping outdoors. His own letters, plus his editors’ testimonies, confirm he was destitute and wandering the streets of Whitechapel during the murders. The “missing link” isn’t missing at all — it’s in his biography.
3. Health myth: The idea that he was too frail to kill is contradicted by the facts. He survived three years on the streets in extreme conditions, carrying his dissecting scalpel, and only succumbed to poor health decades later. He was 30 in 1888 — fitting the standard age bracket for serial killers.
4. Timing: The murders stopped immediately after Thompson was hospitalized in November 1888. This matches the well-established pattern of serial killers ceasing only when incarcerated, institutionalized, or dead.
5. “Getting help in April 1888”: It’s been claimed this rules him out. Not so. He briefly sought help but was still living rough through the “autumn of terror.” The institutional admission that removed him from the streets occurred after Mary Jane Kelly’s murder.
6. Not “too famous”: In 1888 Thompson was unknown. His fame as a poet came decades later through the efforts of his patrons, the Meynells, who also suppressed his darker writings and shaped his public image.
7. Literary evidence: His poetry and prose are not just “references” but sustained obsessions with evisceration, mutilation, and sacrificial violence, far beyond what was typical of Victorian gothic writing. They read as symbolic confessions once set alongside his biography

So when people say “the evidence takes us nowhere,” I’d counter that the evidence takes us precisely to Thompson — and probability leaves virtually no room for anyone else.