The Jack the Ripper Mystery is Finally Solved — Scientifically

[Herlock Sholmes]

Herlock, you’ve spent a long time studying this case and I respect the sharp eye you bring to the small details. That’s why I’d love to see you put that same energy into something that really shifts the ground — the mathematics of probability around Major Henry Smith’s Rupert Street suspect. Thompson is the only man we know who matches all five rare traits Smith listed, and the odds of anyone else fitting that profile in 1888 London are vanishingly small.

Instead of sparring over side issues like gait or nicknames, your research skills could be a real asset in testing and refining the probability case. If you’re serious about evidence and accuracy, that’s where the real work is — and it’s work that could finally move the debate forward.

When did Thompson enter an asylum? Are you talking about the Priory at Storrington?

[Richard Patterson]

From Walsh, p32.

“…neighbours remembered the dragging shoelaces of the young man who passed their doors on Stamford Street, and “the quick, short step, the sudden and apparently causeless hesitation or full stop. Then the old, quick pace again, the continued muttered soliloquy, the frail and slight figure.” His erratic walk was emphasised, it appears, by some peculiarity in the gait, which at one time among the small boys of the neighbourhood had earned him the nickname of “Elasticlegs.”

Can anyone recall any one of the witnesses mentioning this peculiar kind of gait?

Herlock, you’ve spent a long time studying this case and I respect the sharp eye you bring to the small details. That’s why I’d love to see you put that same energy into something that really shifts the ground — the mathematics of probability around Major Henry Smith’s Rupert Street suspect. Thompson is the only man we know who matches all five rare traits Smith listed, and the odds of anyone else fitting that profile in 1888 London are vanishingly small.

Instead of sparring over side issues like gait or nicknames, your research skills could be a real asset in testing and refining the probability case. If you’re serious about evidence and accuracy, that’s where the real work is — and it’s work that could finally move the debate forward.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Sounds to me like the "frail and slight figure" of Thompson should be downgraded to (A) Age/physical health > 1 = issues creating doubt.

He doesn’t sound the most robust of men Fiver? No one would suggest the ripper needed to have been 15 stone of muscle but Thompson appears frailer than the norm. At one point in 1886 he was given a job learning the boot making trade but the guy, who was helping him for religious and philanthropic reasons, had to let him go because his opium addiction meant that he couldn’t perform even the simplest of tasks.

[Fiver]

From Walsh, p32.

“…neighbours remembered the dragging shoelaces of the young man who passed their doors on Stamford Street, and “the quick, short step, the sudden and apparently causeless hesitation or full stop. Then the old, quick pace again, the continued muttered soliloquy, the frail and slight figure.” His erratic walk was emphasised, it appears, by some peculiarity in the gait, which at one time among the small boys of the neighbourhood had earned him the nickname of “Elasticlegs.”

Can anyone recall any one of the witnesses mentioning this peculiar kind of gait?

Sounds to me like the "frail and slight figure" of Thompson should be downgraded to (A) Age/physical health > 1 = issues creating doubt.

[Herlock Sholmes]

From Walsh, p32.

“…neighbours remembered the dragging shoelaces of the young man who passed their doors on Stamford Street, and “the quick, short step, the sudden and apparently causeless hesitation or full stop. Then the old, quick pace again, the continued muttered soliloquy, the frail and slight figure.” His erratic walk was emphasised, it appears, by some peculiarity in the gait, which at one time among the small boys of the neighbourhood had earned him the nickname of “Elasticlegs.”

Can anyone recall any one of the witnesses mentioning this peculiar kind of gait?

[Herlock Sholmes]

John Walsh, Thompson’s biographer spent a year studying the primary documents concerning Thompson and also studied the Thompson Collection at Boston College and even talked to people that knew Thompson. A man that knew his subject. Tbh I’d forgotten about this next point from when I first read the book a few years ago.

“an admission that he more than once employed a dissecting scalpel in place of a razor to shave himself and, in conversation, a confession of physical repugnance for the dissection of corpses and the sight of flowing blood,”

A post mortem mutilator who was repulsed by the sight of corpses and flowing blood.

Surely a first?

[andy1867]

I'm not dismissing it Richard, I'm simply putting a different point of view
I have no problem with yours....I obviously haven't done the same amount of research as you have, if its not on "Google"or on this site I'm mainly useless
But I have seen folk get fixated on one particular person and simply look at nothing else.....I don't have a problem with the way you do it...it mainly makes sense, and you simply say it as you see it...which is a change from some..I remember one years ago that went through contortions to label Druitt...went so far as to state his "Cricket form" went off, and posted some scorecard where he had taken 7 wickets in his last game..Now I will readily admit me knowledge of JTR is sketchy, but I played cricket in Sheffield lower leagues for many years, and I know damn well if taking seven wickets is a "Drop off in form"..I would love to have seen his returns when he "Was in form"
Its why I go for "Uknown local man".....(it mainly means I have to do bugger all bar pick spots off others...)..but in the end..it all helps...thanks for your replies mate, its always easier when its a debate rather than argument

[Richard Patterson]

Francis Thompson, correct me If I'm wrong...I often am ..was a 19th century Catholic....Now you say "Confessional"..I was brought up as an Irish catholic..and simply "Thinking" an impure thought was a sin, so "Confessional" for a rabid catholic can be simply a thought, not an action,
Impure thoughts...considered a sin...Off you go ..kneel down...spit it out
look at literature, horror stories, murder, rape etc...all written by various authors that obviously "Thought" about what they were writing, but never actually DID any of it

Andy, you’re right that in Catholicism even impure thoughts are sins to be confessed. But with Thompson, the record shows something more serious than that.

He did go once to Cardinal Manning, and whatever he confessed left Manning shaken — so much so that biographers still remark on it. Thompson himself dreaded that confession for years afterwards, convinced he was bound for hell. And when Manning died, Thompson wrote a poem not so much about the Cardinal’s life but about his own “secret terrible” that God alone could confirm. That isn’t the language of someone merely confessing idle thoughts.

What makes Thompson different from “authors who imagine murder” is that he explicitly told his editors that his writing was confessional in the literal sense. In his own words: “verse written as I write it is nothing less than a confessional, a confessional far more intimate than the sacerdotal one… I am painfully conscious that they display me, in every respect, at my morally weakest.”

He warned Wilfrid Meynell that his poems and stories exposed his real sins, not just artistic imaginings. And when you put that alongside his medical training, his scalpel, his time in Whitechapel refuges, and the overlap with the police suspect profile, his “confessional” writing becomes a different category entirely. It is not safe to brush it off as just Catholic guilt over stray fantasies — he himself said his work revealed actual deeds and secrets.

So yes, “confessional” can mean thought alone in Catholic teaching. But with Thompson, he admitted that his written confessions went far beyond that. That’s why biographers like Walsh and Boardman flagged them, and why they can’t simply be dismissed as metaphor.

[andy1867]

Francis Thompson, correct me If I'm wrong...I often am ..was a 19th century Catholic....Now you say "Confessional"..I was brought up as an Irish catholic..and simply "Thinking" an impure thought was a sin, so "Confessional" for a rabid catholic can be simply a thought, not an action,
Impure thoughts...considered a sin...Off you go ..kneel down...spit it out
look at literature, horror stories, murder, rape etc...all written by various authors that obviously "Thought" about what they were writing, but never actually DID any of it

[Richard Patterson]

We're not talking likelihood. The autopsy shows a different method was used. Who had the knowledge of the different method? Not Bond. A student of Virchow, who developed the different method. So who had studied Virchow's method. Students of Virchow. And who was a student of Virchow. You know that the answer is not Bond.

Exactly. Bond could only measure the murders against what he had been taught two decades earlier, before organ removal was part of pathology. To him, it looked “unscientific.”

But it wasn’t unscientific at all — it was Virchow. The method of systematically removing organs was brand new, brought into England at Owens College by Dr Julius Dreschfeld, Virchow’s pupil. Francis Thompson sat through those classes. He wasn’t guessing or hacking — he had formal training in the very technique that baffled Bond.

So the key isn’t “would a doctor have done it differently?” It’s that Bond had never seen the method. Thompson had. That’s why the mutilations make no sense to Bond but perfect sense when set against Virchow’s teaching.

[Herlock Sholmes]

We're not talking likelihood. The autopsy shows a different method was used. Who had the knowledge of the different method? Not Bond. A student of Virchow, who developed the different method. So who had studied Virchow's method. Students of Virchow. And who was a student of Virchow. You know that the answer is not Bond.

But you are assuming that the killer using a named method knew that he was using a named method. There surely can’t be that many ways to remove a heart?

[Herlock Sholmes]

I'm truly baffled by the "history of psychotic violence against women" bit.

So am I Mike. It’s simply an invention.

[GBinOz]

So someone with medical was much likelier to have used a different method?

We're not talking likelihood. The autopsy shows a different method was used. Who had the knowledge of the different method? Not Bond. A student of Virchow, who developed the different method. So who had studied Virchow's method. Students of Virchow. And who was a student of Virchow. You know that the answer is not Bond.

[Richard Patterson]

The trouble is, Richard, that whether he truly meant those words or not, it's not proof that he was in any way violent in real life. He wasn't just writing violent prose about women on his bedroom wall randomly, he was a writer, and so it's not really logical to take any of it as evidence of anything. It doesn't matter what a person writes, it's not a crime. It's not indicative of violence.

It was argued that the M*ybrick diary was indicative of a warped mind as well, and I've similarly never understood that, either.

You say Thompson’s violent writings can’t be taken as proof of violence. But you’ve left out the most important point: Thompson himself admitted his poetry was not mere imagination but confessional. In his own words to Wilfrid Meynell: “The poems were, in fact, a kind of poetic diary; or rather a poetic substitute for letters… often verse written as I write it is nothing less than a confessional.” (Letters, p.29).

So unlike the Maybrick diary or gothic stylists inventing for effect, Thompson tells us directly that his poems reflected his lived experience and sins. Nightmare of the Witch Babies reads like a Ripper murder in rhyme: a woman stalked, found “unclean,” gutted with foetuses torn from her belly. That is not abstract metaphor. It’s pathology put into rhyme, which he himself described as diary and confession.

And it doesn’t stand alone. We have prose essays (not poetry) where he describes prostitutes as “filth to be cleansed” and calls for them to be thrown in the Thames. We have his medical training, his scalpel, his life in Whitechapel refuges, his obsession with a runaway prostitute, and the murders ending when he was institutionalised. That is biographical context converging with his own admissions.

Finally, there’s the Rupert Street mathematics: Major Henry Smith’s 1910 police profile (ex-medical student, asylum inmate, coin fraudster, prostitute associate, Rupert Street) — a combination so rare it’s been calculated at 1 in 20 quadrillion odds of any other man fitting. Francis Thompson matches it precisely. The case has already been demonstrated scientifically: probability leaves us with Thompson alone.

So the “just poetry” defence doesn’t hold, because Thompson himself removed that shield. He told us what it was: confession. And the surrounding record proves it.

[Mike J. G.]

Mike, if it was only poetry, I’d agree. But Thompson isn’t just indulging in gothic imagery.

1. In Finis Coronat Opus and Nightmare of the Witch Babies he didn’t write in symbolic abstraction — he graphically described women being cut open, mutilated, and punished. That’s not “flowery metaphor,” it’s sustained pathological obsession.
2. In his 1891 essay under the pseudonym “Francis Tancred,” he openly called for prostitutes to be thrown into the Thames as “filth to be cleansed.” That’s not poetry. That’s direct prose, and it shows clear contempt for real women.
3. This wasn’t in isolation. It aligns with his medical training (six years of dissection at Owens College), his scalpel habit (he admits shaving with it in Jan 1889), his documented Whitechapel destitution, and his obsession with a runaway prostitute.

So no, the case isn’t “violent because of poetry.” The case is violent because of prose essays, private writings, personal obsessions, and biographical context that all point in the same direction. The poetry is just one part of a broader, consistent pattern of psychosexual hatred.

If you think that’s laughable, fine — but it’s still documented fact.

The trouble is, Richard, that whether he truly meant those words or not, it's not proof that he was in any way violent in real life. He wasn't just writing violent prose about women on his bedroom wall randomly, he was a writer, and so it's not really logical to take any of it as evidence of anything. It doesn't matter what a person writes, it's not a crime. It's not indicative of violence.

It was argued that the M*ybrick diary was indicative of a warped mind as well, and I've similarly never understood that, either.