The Jack the Ripper Mystery is Finally Solved — Scientifically

[GBinOz]

It contains no home truths whatsoever. Please point out where I have lied about Druitt. Please point out where I have exaggerated. Please point out where I have made untrue claims about Druitt. Please point out where I have ever said that Druitt was likely to have been the ripper.

Despite your dig George I absolutely know that I post without bias and that I post honestly.

Hi Herlock,

Calm down my friend, and I'll briefly parody some questions that you have posed to Richard. Where can it be shown that your suspect was ever east of his law office? Where is there any suggestion that he was violent? Where can it be shown that he hated prostitutes? What evidence is there that he had even the slightest interest in medical procedures.

If I have mis-understood that Druitt is your favoured suspect for having been the ripper then I offer my apologies. I'm not having a dig at you. I had hoped that we were all here on a collegiate basis rather than confrontational, but I understand that those with a preferred suspect feel the need to defend against others who have their own preferred suspect, and even those who have no suspect. Some assumption and speculation is inevitable, but there remains the fact that there is no actual proof against anyone.

Cheers, George

[Richard Patterson]

The issue is that the title of this thread claims to have proven a negative.

(I should know because I've made the same mistake and done the same thing myself several times - I'm called "Rookie" for a reason)


And what's one of the fundermental principals of investigation?...


You can't prove a negative.


Richard's claims on Thompson are as provable as saying that the first man to drown on the titanic had forgotten to take his broken watch with him when he jumped overboard, because a broken watch was found in a cabin in 1st class, and then arguing that because it was broken, he chose to leave it behind on purpose.

Total proof


Really?


The entire thing is pointless and nonsensical.

We know this, because Thompson's enigmatic qualities that supported his candidacy as the Ripper, have been pretty much obliterated in one go.

Like a soldier in an advanced position on a battlefield, running back to his comrades at the front line and shouting; "hey fellas, I just found this unexploded gren..."

Just ridiculous.

Rookie,

I think the snag in your reasoning comes from treating this as an attempt to “prove a negative.” That’s not what’s going on. The case for Thompson isn’t built on trying to disprove everyone else; it’s built on stacking rare, independently verifiable traits from a police profile and testing whether anyone in London at the time could have matched them. That’s not a negative claim, it’s a positive probability exercise .
Here’s where the analogy with a broken watch on the Titanic breaks down: the watch is random clutter in a sea of random clutter. Thompson’s profile is not random. He was an ex-medical student trained in dissection, confined for breakdown, living rough among prostitutes, linked to coin trickery anecdotes, and resident in the Rupert Street/Haymarket nexus at the precise time Major Henry Smith’s team trailed a suspect there . When you multiply the rarity of each trait across the London male population, the odds of coincidence drop to 1 in 20 quadrillion or worse . That isn’t “pointless” — it’s how probability works in criminology when direct forensic proof is absent.

And the “enigmatic qualities obliterated in one go” argument ignores chronology. The murders ceased the moment Thompson entered hospital in late 1888, a timeline match no other suspect offers . Add to this his violent misogynistic verse, which describes mutilations uncannily similar to the Whitechapel crimes, and his known scalpel possession, and you’ve got cumulative evidence far stronger than metaphorical unexploded grenades .

So yes — it’s not a courtroom “case closed.” But it’s also not nonsense. The mathematics and the biography converge to make Thompson not just “interesting,” but plausibly guilty. To dismiss it as “ridiculous” is to sidestep the very evidence that makes him unique.