The Jack the Ripper Mystery is Finally Solved — Scientifically

[FISHY1118]

Fiver, you’ve revealed more about yourself than about the case.

You’ve been a Casebook member since 2019, you wear the badge of “Assistant Commissioner,” and your posts show the same pattern: you don’t want the mystery solved. You need the case to stay unsolved, because that preserves your role as a gatekeeper. The thrill for you isn’t in evidence, it’s in endless debate — in being seen as the man patrolling the boundaries of possibility. If the case is solved, the kudos you earn by dismissing others evaporates.

That’s why you consistently degrade the work of investigators like Major Henry Smith rather than grapple with the convergence of evidence. That’s why you “pathologize” anyone who dares name Thompson. And that’s why your replies are filled not with meaningful contributions but with evasions.

Now to the factual record you brush aside:

1. “Smith never claimed those traits were of JTR.”
   False. Smith describes his prime suspect in From Constable to Commissioner (1910): an ex-medical student, asylum patient, constant with prostitutes, bilking them with polished farthings, and in Rupert Street. He explicitly writes: “I have no doubt we had him, but he produced an alibi.” He is not listing random trivia; he is explaining why this man was considered the Ripper.
2. “This does not match Thompson.”
   False again. Thompson studied medicine for six years at Owens College, dissected hundreds of cadavers (his sister Mary testified to the repeated fees for cadavers). He suffered a breakdown in 1882, his uncle testified to it, and he was sent to Storrington Priory. That is asylum history. He lived with a prostitute for over a year and scoured Whitechapel for her when she fled in June 1888. He literally carried a dissecting scalpel as he wandered the streets.
3. “No example of Thompson giving polished farthings.”
   You know full well this is Smith’s phrase for the kind of trick played on prostitutes by certain men. In Thompson’s case, John Walsh records the coin story in his biography (Strange Harp, Strange Symphony), and Everard Meynell repeats the anecdote in Poems. To pretend this is wholly absent is to deliberately ignore sources.
4. “Rupert Street was just Smith’s guess.”
   No. Smith’s force trailed his suspect in that very district — the Haymarket. Thompson lived yards away, in Panton Street, during this exact period. That is not a “guess,” it is geographic convergence.
5. “Smith said the suspect proved an alibi.”
   Yes, he wrote that. But “proved” in Victorian police memoirs often meant a patron vouched for him — not a courtroom-tested fact. If that alibi had been beyond doubt, Smith would never have bothered to immortalize the man in his memoirs. The persistence of the description shows how strongly the suspect fit.

And here’s what you continually ignore:

• Thompson’s poetry (Nightmare of the Witch-Babies, Finis Coronat Opus) contains imagery of knife, womb, disembowelling, and confessions that parallel the murders with disturbing precision.
• His timing: the murders begin after his prostitute leaves him, and they cease the very month he is hospitalized for exhaustion.
• His psychology: laudanum addict, pyromaniac, suicidal, with violent contempt for prostitutes (“putrid ulcerations of love, venting foul and purulent discharge”).
• His geography: documented at Providence Row refuge, yards from Whitechapel, on the very night Nichols was murdered.
• His training: six years in anatomy and pathology under Dr. Julius Dreschfeld, pupil of Virchow, giving him the exact technique later mistaken by Bond as “unskilled.”

You ignore all of this because admitting it would collapse the myth you’re invested in.

Fiver, the truth is simple: the statistical probability of any other man in London 1888 matching all five of Smith’s Rupert Street traits is about 1 in 20 quadrillion. Thompson matches them all. Others match one or two. None match the full set.

So the real question is this: do you love evidence, or do you love the mystery? Because if you loved the evidence, you’d see it converges in only one direction.

WOW ..... Brings back memories of the 'JFK' Thead. An astute observation i might add.



''Fiver, you’ve revealed more about yourself than about the case.

''You’ve been a Casebook member since 2019, you wear the badge of “Assistant Commissioner,” and your posts show the same pattern: you don’t want the mystery solved. You need the case to stay unsolved, because that preserves your role as a gatekeeper. The thrill for you isn’t in evidence, it’s in endless debate — in being seen as the man patrolling the boundaries of possibility. If the case is solved, the kudos you earn by dismissing others evaporates.''