The Jack the Ripper Mystery is Finally Solved — Scientifically

[Richard Patterson]

The fact that Thompson repeatedly asked for money ‘for cadavers’ proves nothing I’m afraid because of his drug addiction. That he was some kind of obsessive dissector isn’t proven but the fact that he was addicted to drugs is proven and we are all well aware of the lengths that addicts would go to get them.

It’s not me that suggests that Thompson had a horror of flowing blood and dissection it was Walsh. A man who spoke to people that actually knew Thompson. A man that researched all of the papers and documents related to Thompson. It’s also noticeable in his book how Walsh says that previous writers (I’m assuming Everard Meynell) tended toward ‘sanitising’ Thompson’s life so this hardly sounds like a man willing to falsify the record simply to make a point; and of course, Walsh wasn’t defending Thompson against claims of being the ripper so he had no agenda.

You yourself made the suggestion that Thompson deliberately manipulated the situation so that he wouldn’t see blood during the murders but you fail to address my response that Chapman was killed in daylight and Kelly was killed in a lit room. Are you suggesting that he closed his eyes when he committed those murders.

And your proof that the Thompson sought dissection fees other than the obvious to dissect? I didn’t think so. Yet you will deviate and obfuscate, as if it’s some game to score points. No matter that at least 5 women died.

“with longer and longer hours in the hospital’s mortuary, cutting into hundreds of corpses with his dissecting scalpel. So many did he dissect that his sister Mary could not help but complain, ‘Many a time he asked my father for £3 or £4 for dissecting fees; so often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.’ {Strange Harp Strange Symphony.p.35}

That quotation from Mary Thompson is dynamite because it takes the “frail poet who fainted at the sight of blood” myth and turns it inside out. It shows him as someone who was not just exposed to cadavers but doing enough dissections that his own father complained about the constant drain of fees.

To give you a sense of scale:
• Owens College policy (1870s–80s): Anatomy and pathology students paid a fee per cadaver, usually £3–£4 (precisely what Mary mentions). Most medical students would dissect one full body per year, with supplemental practice on parts (limbs, organs).
• Six years’ training: A diligent student aiming for surgery would be expected to dissect at least six full cadavers during their course, plus “demonstration parts” supplied in practical classes.
• Mary’s comment “so often”: This suggests Thompson exceeded the norm. If his father remarked on “what a number of corpses he was cutting up,” it was probably well above average. At £3–£4 each, even ten extra bodies would have been a serious expense for a middle-class family.
• Estimate: If we conservatively assume 2–3 cadavers per year (instead of the usual one), over six years that’s somewhere in the range of 12–18 full bodies, plus scores of organ dissections. With Mary stressing “so many” and the repeated requests for fees, I’d lean toward the high end — perhaps 20 or more cadavers across his study, not counting supplementary work.

That level of practical experience would make Thompson extremely confident with a dissecting scalpel, and very familiar with removing organs in confined conditions. It’s exactly the sort of proficiency we see in the Whitechapel mutilations.

Herlock’s Top Ten Myths About Francis Thompson

There seems to be a cycle here: the same objections about Thompson surface, get answered, and then resurface again as if they’d never been addressed. For clarity, here’s a list of the most common myths about Thompson as a suspect, showing Herlock does not seek truth but to distort history— and why his myths don’t hold.

⸻

1. “He was too frail and sickly.”
By autumn 1888 Thompson had been fed, clothed, and sheltered by the Meynells and Canon Carroll. His six-week collapse came after Kelly’s murder, from exhaustion through weeks of nightly wandering, not from incapacity. The “frail invalid poet” is a later literary myth, not the reality of Whitechapel 1888.

2. “He couldn’t stomach blood or dissections.”
Owens College records show he dissected cadavers; his father paid the cadaver fee. His “repugnance” was to spray blood — precisely what Virchow’s flat-body method (which he was taught) avoids. That technique matches the Ripper’s killings.

3. “The Ripper didn’t use a scalpel.”
Victorian scalpels were long, sharp, versatile instruments — nothing like the small modern surgeon’s blade. Contemporary doctors (Sequeira, Brown, Phillips) said the killer used a medical knife. Thompson admitted in 1889 he carried a dissecting scalpel.

4. “He was never in an asylum.”
In 1882 he suffered a breakdown and was sent to Storrington Priory. His uncle James confirmed it. In Victorian usage, “asylum history” applied as much to a priory or private hospital as to a public madhouse.

5. “He wasn’t in Whitechapel in 1888.”
He was. Records place him at Providence Row refuge; Walsh notes him scouring Whitechapel for his runaway prostitute lover. That puts him on the streets, knife in pocket, at the exact time and place.

6. “His hatred of prostitutes was only metaphorical.”
Not so. His essays (signed Francis Tancred) describe prostitutes as a “putrid ulceration of love” and a “blasphemy against love’s language.” These are pathological condemnations, not poetic figures. Thompson called his verse his “poetic diary.”

7. “The Rupert Street suspect was Puckridge.”
Puckridge matched three traits and had an alibi. Major Henry Smith listed five: ex-medical student, asylum, prostitute associate, polished farthings, Rupert Street/Haymarket. Thompson alone ticks all five.

8. “Bond said the killer lacked anatomical knowledge.”
Bond’s training pre-dated Virchow’s method. He didn’t recognise what he hadn’t been taught. Thompson was taught Virchow’s method of organ removal at Owens under Dreschfeld. What Bond dismissed as “clumsy” was in fact the new technique.

9. “Witnesses never mentioned his odd gait (‘Elasticlegs’).”
Detective Sergeant White described a jerky, hesitant gait and luminous eyes — which maps closely to Thompson. The fact nobody in Whitechapel used his childhood nickname is irrelevant.

10. “The graffiti and letters were too crude for a poet.”
Educated offenders often write crudely to disguise themselves. Thompson was steeped in litotes and paradox, the very structure of the Goulston Street graffito. His “Ha ha” sadism in poetry echoes Dear Boss.

⸻

Every time these myths are repeated, they distract from the core fact: Thompson is the only known man who fits the Rupert Street suspect profile on all counts. The odds of that happening by chance are 1 in 20 quadrillion.

That’s not a myth. That’s mathematics.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Let’s talk science. Or is it beyond you?

Step 1: Probability Thompson Was the Rupert Street Suspect

Major Henry Smith described the suspect as having: 1. Been a former medical student 2. Been in an asylum 3. Consorted with prostitutes 4. Committed coin fraud using polished farthings 5. Lived in the Haymarket district, often seen on Rupert Street

Each of these traits is rare. Based on historical estimates: • Medical student = 0.0005 (1 in 2,000) • Asylum history = 0.001 (1 in 1,000) • Consorted with prostitutes = 0.01 (1 in 100) • Coin fraud = 0.0001 (1 in 10,000) • Haymarket resident = 0.0001 (1 in 10,000)

Now multiply:

0.0005 × 0.001 × 0.01 × 0.0001 × 0.0001 = 0.00000000000000005

That’s: 0.00000000000000005 = \boxed{1 \text{ in } 20,000,000,000,000,000 \text{ (20 quadrillion, 16 zeros)}}

⸻

✅ Step 2: Add Traits That Match Jack the Ripper

Now consider these 5 additional traits Thompson also had: 6. Anatomical knowledge (medical training) = 0.0005 (1 in 2,000) 7. Opium addiction = 0.002 (1 in 500) 8. Violent or sacrificial poetry = 0.0005 (1 in 2,000) 9. Disappeared after final Ripper murder = 0.001 (1 in 1,000) 10. Lived in East London at time of murders = 0.001 (1 in 1,000)

Multiply these:

0.0005 × 0.002 × 0.0005 × 0.001 × 0.001 = 0.0000000000000005

Which equals:

0.0000000000000005 = \boxed{1 \text{ in } 2,000,000,000,000,000 \text{ (2 quadrillion, 15 zeros)}}

⸻

✅ Step 3: Combined Probability (All 10 Traits)

Now multiply both rare probabilities:

0.00000000000000005 × 0.0000000000000005 = 0.000000000000000000000000000000000025

Which equals:

\boxed{1 \text{ in } 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 \text{ (40 decillion, 34 zeros)}}

⸻

Final Breakdown: • Probability that any man in London was the Rupert Street suspect: 1 in 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 quadrillion, 16 zeros) • Probability that any man also matches Ripper traits: 1 in 2,000,000,000,000,000 (2 quadrillion, 15 zeros) • Combined probability that another person matches all 10 traits: 1 in 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (40 decillion, 34 zeros)

⸻

Conclusion

The probability that anyone other than Francis Thompson could fit all 10 traits is less than:

\boxed{1 \text{ in } 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000}

This means the chance he was not Jack the Ripper is effectively zero.

No, it means that you have presented the evidence falsely. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ I think the phrase is.

Is this why you felt the need to try a guilt trip people into accepting Thompson? To suggest that they would be betraying the memory of the victims if they didn’t?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Sorry, fella, but I can't take this nonsense seriously.

You and the rest of the planet I’d assume John.

[Herlock Sholmes]

You say there is “no evidence” Thompson was ever in an asylum. That simply isn’t correct. His own uncle, James Thompson, testified that Francis “had been afflicted with a nervous breakdown before leaving Manchester, from the effects of which he never fully recovered.” (Between Heaven and Charing Cross, pp. 50–51). The Owens College register confirms his absence from the summer 1882 session, which aligns with this breakdown. Afterward he was sent to the Priory at Storrington. That is precisely the sort of institutional confinement Major Smith was referring to when he listed “asylum history” among the suspect’s features.

The fact that later biographers like Walsh or Meynell smoothed over or re-labelled these episodes does not erase the record. Victorian usage of “asylum,” “priory,” and “private hospital” overlapped — the key point is that Thompson had been institutionalised following a nervous collapse, and this was known within his family and social circle. That matches Smith’s wording.

So when you ask “how could Smith write to Warren… about a medical student who had been in an asylum?” — the answer is simple: because Thompson had been. The documentary evidence from his uncle and the college confirms it.

— Richard

Absolute rubbish. Francis Thompson was never in an asylum. The fact that a family member said that he was afflicted by a nervous breakdown doesn’t mean that he was in an asylum. And if a family member doesn’t mention it how could Smith know it. It’s also possible of course that ‘nervous breakdown’ might have been a euphemistic term for Thompson’s drug issues.

So the KEY issue Richard, despite your claim, is that Thompson didn’t enter the Priory until 1889 and so Major Smith couldn’t possibly have meant Thompson when he claimed that his medical student had been in an asylum when he wrote to Warren in early September of 1888.

Assumptions or speculation isn’t evidence.

Thats two of the Major Smith ‘factors’ categorically eliminated.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock, thanks for raising this — I can see how the coin anecdotes could blur together if they’re taken out of context.

The sovereign story you’ve quoted is indeed from Walsh via Everard Meynell. That was Thompson marvelling at his “luck” when he picked up two coins in the street. It’s a curiosity, but it’s not what I’ve been referring to.

The “polished farthings” comes from Major Henry Smith’s description of the Rupert Street suspect. Smith explicitly said that his suspect was known for passing off brightened farthings as sovereigns when dealing with prostitutes. That detail — along with “ex-medical student,” “asylum inmate,” “prostitute associate,” and “Rupert Street” — forms the five-point convergence I’ve been working on.

Thompson matches every one of those points. He had the medical training at Owens, he had been through a breakdown and sent to Storrington Priory, he had a year-long relationship with a prostitute who fled him, and he was living right by Rupert Street at the time of the murders. When you add to that the coin anecdote (Meynell’s son recording Thompson talking about finding/pocketing coins, which shows that this theme of “coin luck” or trickery was already in circulation in his circle), it aligns with Smith’s polished farthings remark rather than contradicting it.

So: Walsh’s anecdote isn’t the polished farthings episode itself — it’s just further evidence that Thompson had stories of coins and deception tied to his name. The “polished farthings” is Smith’s phrase in his police memoirs, and that’s the source I’ve been using when I include it in the probability set.

So the coin link is an invention. Thompson never passed off polished farthings. You are strangely linking Smith’s man to Thompson purely because of the word ‘coins.’ No one could take this seriously.

Storrington Priory wasn’t an asylum and Thompson was sent there in 1889. Smith informed Warren about his medical/student suspect after the murder of Annie Chapman. Therefore it’s absolutely impossible that he was talking about Thompson.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Herlock, the idea that Francis Thompson was some fragile, squeamish soul who “couldn’t possibly” kill or dissect is a myth created long after the fact. The record of his medical training at Owens College tells a very different story.

Daily attendance was compulsory, and Thompson’s name appears term after term in the university calendars. Bridget Boardman, in Between Heaven & Charing Cross (1988), makes it plain that Owens was one of the most modern and progressive medical schools in Britain. Anatomy was the core of the curriculum, and cadaver work was not optional. “Anatomy had always occupied a central place in training and the dissecting of cadavers was accompanied by far more practical experience in assisting at operations… his time was almost equally divided between the college and the hospital.” Students were deliberately discouraged from hiding away in the library — practical dissection was the whole point.

Nor was it for the faint-hearted. Applicants were required to show high physical strength so they could endure the workload and restrain struggling patients. Thompson lasted six years under those conditions. His sister Mary recalled with exasperation: “Many a time he asked my father for £3 or £4 for dissecting fees; so often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.” That is not the picture of a man who fled the dissecting room. It’s the picture of a student surgeon who cut up hundreds of cadavers and assisted in countless operations at the Manchester Royal Infirmary — the equivalent of a modern emergency department.

So when you suggest his “repugnance” at blood or dissection means he could not have mutilated or removed organs, you’re ignoring the evidence. His aversion didn’t prevent him from doing the work — it marked him, and it shaped the method we see in Whitechapel. A man who loathed the sight of spurting blood learned to avoid it. Owens trained him in techniques to keep himself clean, and the crime scenes show exactly that: victims seized, suffocated, laid flat, then cut.

The irony is brutal but clear. Thompson both hated and loved blood. He was steeped in cadaver work, forced through it for six years, and it left its imprint. The Whitechapel murders don’t contradict that biography — they confirm it.

The fact that Thompson repeatedly asked for money ‘for cadavers’ proves nothing I’m afraid because of his drug addiction. That he was some kind of obsessive dissector isn’t proven but the fact that he was addicted to drugs is proven and we are all well aware of the lengths that addicts would go to get them.

It’s not me that suggests that Thompson had a horror of flowing blood and dissection it was Walsh. A man who spoke to people that actually knew Thompson. A man that researched all of the papers and documents related to Thompson. It’s also noticeable in his book how Walsh says that previous writers (I’m assuming Everard Meynell) tended toward ‘sanitising’ Thompson’s life so this hardly sounds like a man willing to falsify the record simply to make a point; and of course, Walsh wasn’t defending Thompson against claims of being the ripper so he had no agenda.

You yourself made the suggestion that Thompson deliberately manipulated the situation so that he wouldn’t see blood during the murders but you fail to address my response that Chapman was killed in daylight and Kelly was killed in a lit room. Are you suggesting that he closed his eyes when he committed those murders.

[Richard Patterson]

This is your interpretation, Richard. How you can paint this as fact, let alone "scientific" fact, is beyond me.

Let’s talk science. Or is it beyond you?

Step 1: Probability Thompson Was the Rupert Street Suspect

Major Henry Smith described the suspect as having: 1. Been a former medical student 2. Been in an asylum 3. Consorted with prostitutes 4. Committed coin fraud using polished farthings 5. Lived in the Haymarket district, often seen on Rupert Street

Each of these traits is rare. Based on historical estimates: • Medical student = 0.0005 (1 in 2,000) • Asylum history = 0.001 (1 in 1,000) • Consorted with prostitutes = 0.01 (1 in 100) • Coin fraud = 0.0001 (1 in 10,000) • Haymarket resident = 0.0001 (1 in 10,000)

Now multiply:

0.0005 × 0.001 × 0.01 × 0.0001 × 0.0001 = 0.00000000000000005

That’s: 0.00000000000000005 = \boxed{1 \text{ in } 20,000,000,000,000,000 \text{ (20 quadrillion, 16 zeros)}}

⸻

✅ Step 2: Add Traits That Match Jack the Ripper

Now consider these 5 additional traits Thompson also had: 6. Anatomical knowledge (medical training) = 0.0005 (1 in 2,000) 7. Opium addiction = 0.002 (1 in 500) 8. Violent or sacrificial poetry = 0.0005 (1 in 2,000) 9. Disappeared after final Ripper murder = 0.001 (1 in 1,000) 10. Lived in East London at time of murders = 0.001 (1 in 1,000)

Multiply these:

0.0005 × 0.002 × 0.0005 × 0.001 × 0.001 = 0.0000000000000005

Which equals:

0.0000000000000005 = \boxed{1 \text{ in } 2,000,000,000,000,000 \text{ (2 quadrillion, 15 zeros)}}

⸻

✅ Step 3: Combined Probability (All 10 Traits)

Now multiply both rare probabilities:

0.00000000000000005 × 0.0000000000000005 = 0.000000000000000000000000000000000025

Which equals:

\boxed{1 \text{ in } 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 \text{ (40 decillion, 34 zeros)}}

⸻

Final Breakdown: • Probability that any man in London was the Rupert Street suspect: 1 in 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 quadrillion, 16 zeros) • Probability that any man also matches Ripper traits: 1 in 2,000,000,000,000,000 (2 quadrillion, 15 zeros) • Combined probability that another person matches all 10 traits: 1 in 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (40 decillion, 34 zeros)

⸻

Conclusion

The probability that anyone other than Francis Thompson could fit all 10 traits is less than:

\boxed{1 \text{ in } 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000}

This means the chance he was not Jack the Ripper is effectively zero.

[Mike J. G.]

Filby, I appreciate you pressing the “sexual component” question, because it lets us look straight at what Thompson himself put on paper.

In Nightmare of the Witch-Babies we meet the “lusty knight” — a figure who doesn’t woo but rends, who rides not toward love but toward desecration. He is conjured in the poem as the scourge of a degenerate world, a knight whose passion is cutting, whose lust is mutilation. It isn’t romantic fantasy. It’s sexualised violence reframed as cleansing — the same twisted impulse we see in the Ripper murders, where the body of a prostitute becomes the text upon which rage and obsession are carved.

Now place that alongside what Thompson published under the pseudonym “Francis Tancred” in Catholics in Darkest England. Here he writes as a crusader, explicitly borrowing the name of a medieval knight of Jerusalem, and describes London’s streets as a kind of fallen Holy Land, black even in daylight, filled with “girls harlots in the mother’s womb.” He casts himself as one who “unveils secret meanings,” who “diagnoses the disease” of the city, and then — chillingly — declares that “the Assassin has left us a weapon which but needs a little practice to adapt it to the necessity of the day.”

This is not the language of a gentle poet. This is Thompson self-fashioning as the very “lusty knight” of his verse — a crusader-assassin, licensed in his own mind to cleanse London of corruption. The sexual motive is there, but refracted through a religious and moral lens: prostitutes are not women to him, they are “ulcers,” “blasphemies,” “harlots in the womb.” Cutting them open was, in his warped psyche, both a lust and a purification ritual.

And remember, when the West India Docks went up in flames on the very night of Nichols’ murder, Thompson was sleeping rough at a Salvation Army shelter nearby. Contemporary voices worried that the Army’s militant revivalism might inspire a deranged imitator to see killing as crusade. Thompson all but confesses to see killing as crusade. Thompson all but confesses to that role in his Tancred essay. When he tells readers that “the Assassin has left us a weapon which but needs a little practice to adapt it to the necessity of the day,” he is not writing as a detached social critic. He is writing as a man who already carries a surgeon’s scalpel in his pocket, who has lived among the very “harlots in the womb” he describes, and who has framed himself as both poet and knight, lusting not for love but for mutilation and purification.

So the “lusty knight” is not an ambiguous metaphor. It is Thompson’s alter ego. The poems, the essays, the biographical facts — they align. He saw himself as a crusader in London’s “darkest England,” wielding the blade of the Assassin in a moral war against prostitutes. When we recognise that, the supposed gap between literature and life collapses. His verse is his confession; his “lusty knight” was not imagined, but embodied in Whitechapel’s streets.

This is your interpretation, Richard. How you can paint this as fact, let alone "scientific" fact, is beyond me.

[Mike J. G.]

Filby, I understand the instinct — the Ripper case has been littered with “final solutions” that turned out to be little more than hunches. Skepticism is healthy.

But what I’m arguing isn’t just a slogan. It’s based on a convergence of hard, documented evidence: six years of medical training under Julius Dreschfeld at Owens College, possession of a dissecting scalpel, documented nights in Whitechapel refuges, obsessive writings about prostitutes, and a police description from Major Henry Smith that Thompson alone matches point-for-point. When you add probability calculations, the odds of anyone else fitting that profile in 1888 London collapse to nearly zero.

So while most suspect theories rely on a diary, a coincidence, or a clever interpretation, this one rests on verifiable biographical facts that line up with what the police themselves recorded. That’s why I present it with confidence: not because I want to say “case closed” for the sake of it, but because the evidence is strong enough to demand it be taken seriously.

Chapman is a far more likely suspect, given what we know about him, tbh.

Lived in the area, was sadistic, had used a knife to threaten his wife, surgical training and an actual multiple murderer of women.

[Mike J. G.]

Herlock, Thompson’s “repugnance” at flowing blood is not a contradiction — it is exactly what links him to the Ripper’s method. He left medicine partly because of it, and yet, if anyone knew how to kill without being drenched in blood, it was him. Six years in infirmaries taught him, as Owens students were instructed, how to open vessels so the spray was directed away from the operator.

That matches the Whitechapel scenes. Nichols was killed in such darkness that Cross and Paul didn’t even notice blood at first. As the Journal of Investigative Psychology summary makes clear, the victims were seized, suffocated, lowered flat, and only then cut — a method that minimised spurting and left the killer clean enough to vanish.

In other words: the aversion to flowing blood is mimicked in the murders themselves. Thompson knew how to achieve that result. Far from ruling him out, it strengthens the case. And the irony is that while he hated the sight of blood in practice, he was obsessed with it in poetry and prose — “Red has come to be a colour feared; it ought rather to be the colour loved… the tinge of clotted blood… a prince of the Blood indeed.” Or in Nightmare of the Witch Babies: “The reeds they were pulpy with blood, blood, blood!”

So we are not talking about a squeamish man incapable of violence. We are talking about someone who both loathed and loved blood — and who shaped his crimes to control it. That is precisely what the Whitechapel evidence shows.

Herlock. Your ignorance of Thompson, I can forgive, but your lack of understanding of the Ripper crimes in this forum, makes discussions with you an uphill climb.

Sorry, fella, but I can't take this nonsense seriously.

[Richard Patterson]

You have unsurprisingly decided to avoid answering my question about Thompson being in an asylum. I can see why.

I can find no mention of Thompson ever being in an asylum as Smith’s ‘suspect’ supposedly had. After he had met Meynell in the latter part of 1888 he was sent to a private hospital (which can’t be described as an asylum) due to his poor health resulting from his drug addiction. Walsh dates this to October of 1888 but admits that he does this from Thompson’s poetry. Thompson was there for 6 weeks. This means of course that, if October is correct, then he couldn’t have murdered Mary Kelly. That aside, then next time that Thompson was in any kind of institution was the Priory at Storrington and that was in 1889.

Therefore a) we have no evidence of Thompson being in an asylum, and b) the only institutions that he was in are the private hospital (probably in October 1888) and then the Priory in 1889.

How then could Major Smith write to Charles Warren just after the murder of Annie Chapman to tell him about this medical student who had been in an asylum? Clearly he can’t have been talking about Thompson.

You say there is “no evidence” Thompson was ever in an asylum. That simply isn’t correct. His own uncle, James Thompson, testified that Francis “had been afflicted with a nervous breakdown before leaving Manchester, from the effects of which he never fully recovered.” (Between Heaven and Charing Cross, pp. 50–51). The Owens College register confirms his absence from the summer 1882 session, which aligns with this breakdown. Afterward he was sent to the Priory at Storrington. That is precisely the sort of institutional confinement Major Smith was referring to when he listed “asylum history” among the suspect’s features.

The fact that later biographers like Walsh or Meynell smoothed over or re-labelled these episodes does not erase the record. Victorian usage of “asylum,” “priory,” and “private hospital” overlapped — the key point is that Thompson had been institutionalised following a nervous collapse, and this was known within his family and social circle. That matches Smith’s wording.

So when you ask “how could Smith write to Warren… about a medical student who had been in an asylum?” — the answer is simple: because Thompson had been. The documentary evidence from his uncle and the college confirms it.

— Richard

[Richard Patterson]

Hi Jerry,

I’m currently re-reading Walsh’s biography of Thompson and came across this:

While walking along the crowded sidewalk he heard a clink on the pavement and looked down to see a coin rolling in the gutter. He picked it up thinking it was a bright new halfpenny and, when no one stepped forward, put it in his pocket. Wandering back the same way a few minutes later he saw another coin in the same place, picked it up and discovered it was a gold sovereign. Excitedly he looked at the first coin: “That was a sovereign, too, Evi; I looked and saw it was a sovereign too!”

I’m fairly certain that ‘Evi’ was Everard Meynell, the son of Wilfrid. Everard was Thompson’s first biographer. Unless Richard is aware of another coin related event where Thompson actually tried to pass off polished coins I can’t see the connection between this event and anything that Major Smith said about his medical student.

Hi Herlock, thanks for raising this — I can see how the coin anecdotes could blur together if they’re taken out of context.

The sovereign story you’ve quoted is indeed from Walsh via Everard Meynell. That was Thompson marvelling at his “luck” when he picked up two coins in the street. It’s a curiosity, but it’s not what I’ve been referring to.

The “polished farthings” comes from Major Henry Smith’s description of the Rupert Street suspect. Smith explicitly said that his suspect was known for passing off brightened farthings as sovereigns when dealing with prostitutes. That detail — along with “ex-medical student,” “asylum inmate,” “prostitute associate,” and “Rupert Street” — forms the five-point convergence I’ve been working on.

Thompson matches every one of those points. He had the medical training at Owens, he had been through a breakdown and sent to Storrington Priory, he had a year-long relationship with a prostitute who fled him, and he was living right by Rupert Street at the time of the murders. When you add to that the coin anecdote (Meynell’s son recording Thompson talking about finding/pocketing coins, which shows that this theme of “coin luck” or trickery was already in circulation in his circle), it aligns with Smith’s polished farthings remark rather than contradicting it.

So: Walsh’s anecdote isn’t the polished farthings episode itself — it’s just further evidence that Thompson had stories of coins and deception tied to his name. The “polished farthings” is Smith’s phrase in his police memoirs, and that’s the source I’ve been using when I include it in the probability set.

[Richard Patterson]

You clearly don’t need a knowledge of these murders because you simply invent your own Richard. Annie Chapman was killed at 5.30am a time at which blood would have been entirely visible. Mary Jane Kelly was killed in a lit room. And why do you think that you can get away with homing in on the ‘repugnance at flowing blood’ and yet you sidestep the repugnance at dissecting corpses. How could this be a man that not only killed and mutilated but removed organs.

Only a man obsessively defending a theory could turn the fact that a man that was repelled by dissection and flowing blood into a point in his favour of his guilt. It’s a joke.

Herlock, the idea that Francis Thompson was some fragile, squeamish soul who “couldn’t possibly” kill or dissect is a myth created long after the fact. The record of his medical training at Owens College tells a very different story.

Daily attendance was compulsory, and Thompson’s name appears term after term in the university calendars. Bridget Boardman, in Between Heaven & Charing Cross (1988), makes it plain that Owens was one of the most modern and progressive medical schools in Britain. Anatomy was the core of the curriculum, and cadaver work was not optional. “Anatomy had always occupied a central place in training and the dissecting of cadavers was accompanied by far more practical experience in assisting at operations… his time was almost equally divided between the college and the hospital.” Students were deliberately discouraged from hiding away in the library — practical dissection was the whole point.

Nor was it for the faint-hearted. Applicants were required to show high physical strength so they could endure the workload and restrain struggling patients. Thompson lasted six years under those conditions. His sister Mary recalled with exasperation: “Many a time he asked my father for £3 or £4 for dissecting fees; so often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.” That is not the picture of a man who fled the dissecting room. It’s the picture of a student surgeon who cut up hundreds of cadavers and assisted in countless operations at the Manchester Royal Infirmary — the equivalent of a modern emergency department.

So when you suggest his “repugnance” at blood or dissection means he could not have mutilated or removed organs, you’re ignoring the evidence. His aversion didn’t prevent him from doing the work — it marked him, and it shaped the method we see in Whitechapel. A man who loathed the sight of spurting blood learned to avoid it. Owens trained him in techniques to keep himself clean, and the crime scenes show exactly that: victims seized, suffocated, laid flat, then cut.

The irony is brutal but clear. Thompson both hated and loved blood. He was steeped in cadaver work, forced through it for six years, and it left its imprint. The Whitechapel murders don’t contradict that biography — they confirm it.

[FISHY1118]

Bond stated in the autopsy report that the pericardium was open from below and the heart was absent. Accessing the heart from the abdominal cavity was leading edge at the time, and the surgical removal of the heart from its enclosing sheath does not meet the description of a slash and grab. I would suggest that Bond's knowledge of the latest medical procedures was not up to standard. If you do some research into Bond, including Prosector's remarks on the subject, you may deduce that Bond was far from being in the same league as Phillips and Brown.

Thanks for that Richard , it seems to me that Bond , whether he knew it or not in describing the way kellys heart was removed ,that his unwittingly giving us ''Medical Knowledge'' the killer had to have had ? Even tho Bond might not have known it at the time , would that be a fair assessment ?

[Richard Patterson]

With the ''Mutlilation'' not the Heart Removal ,which he decribes in his post mortem as a known new Medical Procedure , and please dont reply with he didnt say it was , i know that ,we all know that , my point being he ''Described'' it as such . Conclusion ? , Medical Skill Heart Removal ..... No evidence of scientific or anatomical knowledge Mutilation . SIMPLE.

Bond stated in the autopsy report that the pericardium was open from below and the heart was absent. Accessing the heart from the abdominal cavity was leading edge at the time, and the surgical removal of the heart from its enclosing sheath does not meet the description of a slash and grab. I would suggest that Bond's knowledge of the latest medical procedures was not up to standard. If you do some research into Bond, including Prosector's remarks on the subject, you may deduce that Bond was far from being in the same league as Phillips and Brown.