Francis Thompson - A Reality Check

**Richard Patterson** · 2025-09-09T16:55:33+00:00

Originally posted by Herlock Sholmes View Post

Having a suspect is fine. Making the case for him is fine. Altering reality isn’t. Spotting non-existent links isn’t. Claiming opinion as facts isn’t. Claiming that the case is 100% solved isn’t. Claiming that we all have some kind of moral duty to accept Thompson’s guilt certainly isn’t.

Let’s list the points made by Richard in his original post on the other thread (which was taken from Facebook and posted on here by Geddy) and examine them individually. No leaps of faith, no assumptions, no one plus one equals three and certainly no propaganda.

> That by using modern probability analysis and Bayesian maths Francis Thompson is over 100,000 times more likely to have been Jack the Ripper then any other suspect.

This can be dismissed without discussion. I’m no mathematician but Richard plugs in the information about Smith’s suspect which a child could see are inaccurate. Garbage in, garbage out. This will be discussed further down.

> That he was medically trained.

Accepted by me without question as the evidence is cast-iron. What isn’t cast-iron is the level of medical knowledge that the killer possessed. The doctors at the time weren’t unanimous and modern day experts aren’t unanimous. I’m not qualified to make a judgment either way but I’m certainly not willing to accept this as fact from someone trying to promote a medically trained suspect.

> That he had a ‘documented history of psychotic violence toward women.’

Absolutely and conclusively untrue. We haven’t a single piece of evidence of Thompson being violent (and certainly not to women). Words aren’t violence. Richard states categorically ‘violence toward women.’

> He lived within 100 metres of the ripper sites.

This is another untruth. We have Thompson mentioning seeing men outside the Providence Row mission and he may (no more that ‘may’) have stayed there at some point but we don’t know this for anything close to a certainty or indeed when if he had. To claim that he was there at the time of the murders is untrue and Richard knows it.

> He was an active arsonist.

Absolutely untrue.

As a child, in church, Thomson wanted to swing the thurible but another boy had the job. Thompson grabbed it and swung it around causing the smouldering charcoal to come out. It was stamped out with a shovel by a housekeeper. It doesn’t even sound as if it was an actual fire.

He also accidentally knocked over a lamp in a room that he was staying in. We all know how drug addicts and alcoholics are always at risk of doing things like this. There was nothing sinister about it. To assume that he did this purposely is a deliberate distortion to make a point.

Likewise when he accidentally left a pipe in his coat pocket which hadn’t ’gone out.’

If Thompson had wanted to start fires he could have done better than these pathetic ‘examples.’

How far can anyone stretch credibility to claim that this made Thompson a proven arsonist (which is a possible sign of psychopathy)? Is there anyone that would call this child/man an arsonist? Of course not.

> He wrote essays describing prostitutes as putrid ulcers and called for them to be drowned in the Thames.

Did he? I have by no stretch read everything by Thompson but I’ve read some and I haven’t yet seen him use the word prostitute (maybe he has but wouldn’t evidence of this be welcome?) He certainly wrote about immorality and women and other big religious topics. He was a deeply religious man who was often conflicted by his desire to be a poet and matters of religion. We should also remember the fact that Thompson was an opium addict so it’s hardly surprising that he should write about these subjects in an extremely dramatic way. Words don’t make a man a murderer. How would we judge a man who wrote a graphic book about a sadistic, torturing serial killer? Would we call him psychotic? Would we suggest that he was dangerous? Of course not.

> He was removed from the area after the final murder (Kelly) and that his movements aligned with the murders.

We have even no remotely detailed plan of where Thompson was for a huge part of his life and simply saying “London” isn’t good enough. He spent 6 weeks in a hospital but we don’t know exactly when but his biographer suggested that it was in October. He was placed in The Priory due to his drug issues but this was in 1889.

> He was a ‘night wanderer,’ ‘wearing disguises’ and ‘carrying scalpels.’

‘Night wanderer’ is highly dramatic. Thompson, like thousands of others, was a vagrant for sizeable periods of time. Unwashed, poorly fed, in the grip of addiction. This isn’t sinister and it certainly isn’t unique.

I don’t know where the ‘disguises’ part comes from but I’d have to ask how the penniless Thompson managed a costume change?

‘Carrying scalpels’ is yet another point that stretches the word ‘tenuous’ to its fullest tolerance. He admitted to carrying a scalpel which he used for shaving. It’s never been suggested that the ripper’s victims met their end by scalpel. I’m no surgeon but I’d ask how Thompson could have butchered Kelly with a scalpel? How many non-points?

> His writings match the tone and sadistic psychology of the ripper letters.

How many believe that the ripper letters are genuine is the first and most obvious point. Matching the tone? Come on…no one can take this seriously?

> He claims that the medical student suspect suggested by Major Henry Smith matches Thompson exactly. Points of similarity - Rupert Street, passing off polished farthings, medical student, time in an asylum. And that this mathematically proves that he was the suspect.

Richard so far hasn’t explained the Rupert Street link (it may or may not exist but it would be helpful to know what it was) Surely it can’t just be that Rupert Street was in the West End and that Thompson’s prostitute friend lived in the West End. Or that it was in the Haymarket with its links to prostitution. He would be that tenuous…would he?

That Thompson was a former medical student is of course accepted.

The passing off of polished farthings is of course absolutely untrue. We know of no example of or even the suggestion of Thompson doing this. The only coin based ‘link’ (although it’s clearly not a link) is that Thompson once spoke of finding two sovereigns in the street. How this can be considered a ‘link’ is baffling.

The suggestion that Thompson spent time in an asylum is simply untrue. He spent 6 weeks in a hospital because he was ill and at near collapse some time in 1888. His biographer Walsh places this in October but he only does this by using Thompson’s poetry so we can’t be certain. If it was in October however it would cast a serious doubt on Thompson’s availability for the Double Event and the Kelly murder. Thompson was placed in The Priory at Storrington (which also wasn’t an asylum and could by any stretch be mistaken for one) due to his drug addiction but this didn’t happen until 1889. Smith however wrote to Charles Warren to inform him about the suspect just after Chapman was killed on September 8th by which time Thompson hadn’t been in the hospital or The Priory.

The above enough to dismiss the notion of Thompson being Smith’s suspect but we can add what Smith said next in his book:

“Sir Charles failed to find him. I thought he was likely to be in Rupert Street, Haymarket. I sent up two men, and there he was; but, polished farthings and all, he proved an alibi without the shadow of a doubt.”

Need more be said?

So as we call all see the 4 ‘matches’ aren’t even approaching matches and yet this is an example of Richard’s allegedly unimpeachable mathematical approach.

…..

In addition, Thompson’s biographer John Walsh (who remember wasn’t defending Thompson from suggestions that he was the ripper) said that Thompson had a horror of the dissection room and the sight of flowing blood.

Richard contends that Thompson’s 6 years of training rebuts this point but does it? Thompson was desperately trying to please his father by becoming a respectable doctor. Walsh didn’t suggest a phobia just a horror; a dislike. So it’s not difficult to imagine somewhere persevering through something that they find distasteful in order to try and achieve an important goal. It’s important to point out of course that Thompson failed. He never finished the course and never qualified as a doctor.

Then strangely Richard claimed that Thompson skill, plus the darkness, would have allowed him to avoid seeing the flowing blood. I have to ask how. Chapman was killed in daylight and with Kelly he spent up to an hour in a lit room (butchering away with his scalpel apparently)

….

I’ll end by asking you to check out the following. As I said, everyone is entitled to favour a suspect and to set out and debate the case. But does anyone here think that someone favouring a suspect is entitled to say the following:

“The maths is solid. The evidence is vast and consistent. The logical conclusion is no longer in doubt: Francis Thompson was Jack the Ripper.”

Sadly though it gets worth as the depths really are ploughed when he states:

That the sooner that this truth spreads it will replace the cases lies and myths.

That the victims can finally be honoured.

That those accepting the ‘truth’ will be remembered by history.

That you will be seen by your family and friends as someone open-minded and with integrity and moral courage.

That you will be showing that truth and science wins through.

That you will restore the victims dignity.

That will end the 'glamorisation’ of the murders.

That you will stop the endless recycling of false suspects.

That you will be helping future generations the value of real history as opposed to myths.

That you will create closure for the victims.

That you will be contributing toward peace, healing and awareness.

None of the above is an exaggeration although it reads like one. These are exactly the claims made by Richard. Has anyone ever read a more cynical and deliberate attempt at guilt-tripping people into believing this theory; or to falsely portray the validity of a theory. Has anyone ever stooped to this kind of thing before? Has anyone ever heard anything like it?

So we have another suspect with a publicity machine. I call it ‘pretty low’ but I’ll leave it to others to form their own opinions.

The so-called case against Thompson is built entirely on shifting sands as the actual evidence (not the imagined variety) tells us.

Herlock, you’ve put your case forcefully, but I think you’re missing something important. The issue here isn’t invention, propaganda, or “garbage in, garbage out.” It’s that three independent authorities — a biographer, a police commissioner, and a forensic pathologist — all, in their own ways, left a trail pointing straight at Francis Thompson.

First, John Walsh. In Strange Harp, Strange Symphony (1967), Walsh had privileged access to Thompson’s notebooks, papers, and letters. He was not some crank; he was Thompson’s careful literary biographer. And yet, in a footnote, he admitted to what he called “the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson’s life”: that in August and September 1888 Thompson was tramping the East End searching for his prostitute lover at the exact same time prostitutes were being butchered there. Walsh did not invent this. He buried it in a footnote because the literary establishment of the 1960s would never have tolerated him putting it front and centre. But the record is there.

Then we have Major Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City Police. He was in Mitre Square on the night of Eddowes’ murder. In his memoirs, he describes the suspect his officers tailed in Rupert Street: an ex-medical student, with asylum history, known prostitute associations, polished farthings, and tied to Rupert Street/Haymarket. To dismiss this as meaningless is to dismiss Smith himself. And yet those five rare traits converge, not vaguely, but uniquely, in Thompson. That is why the probability analysis matters — because the odds of a random man in London matching them all are not merely low, they are astronomically close to zero.

Finally, Dr Joseph Rupp, a forensic pathologist with fifty years’ experience and some 9,000 autopsies behind him. In 1988, he looked at Walsh’s biography and at the Whitechapel mutilations and published in The Criminologist that Thompson was the best-fitted suspect he had ever seen: six years of medical training, laudanum addiction, mental instability, hatred of prostitutes, a presence in the East End, and a collapse into hospital just as the murders stopped. You can dismiss my mathematics, but Rupp’s scalpel and autopsy table gave him the authority to know how much medical skill those mutilations required. And he saw it in Thompson.

So no, this isn’t “shifting sands.” It’s convergence. Walsh flagged the coincidence. Smith described the suspect. Rupp confirmed the anatomy. And when you add them together — geography, psychology, pathology, chronology — the probability that another man fits it all is vanishingly small.

You ask whether anyone should claim the case is “solved.” I’d ask instead: when three independent authorities from three different domains point to the same man, how many more coincidences do we allow before we call it what it is?

I’ll leave Francis Thompson aside for a moment and look instead at how you’re handling the investigation itself, because your dismissals aren’t really aimed at him — they’re aimed at undermining the work of the investigators who were actually there. That’s where your footing slips.

1. Misuse of Bond’s Report

You constantly treat Dr. Thomas Bond’s opinion as a trump card — that the mutilations required no anatomical skill. But Bond was trained before Virchow’s technique was even taught in Britain. He judged by older standards, so of course he missed what newer students like Thompson would have recognised. To build an absolute wall around Bond is to fossilise the investigation at the point of its blind spot.

2. Downplaying Major Henry Smith

Smith was Acting Commissioner of the City Police. He was at Mitre Square that night, and his memoir records his force tailing a suspect from Rupert Street who had medical training, asylum history, prostitute links, and even the polished farthings trick. You can dislike Thompson, but brushing off Smith as if his testimony carries no weight is to undermine the City Police investigation itself.

3. Ignoring the Problem of Convergence

You treat each fact in isolation — medical training, asylum, Rupert Street, prostitutes — as if they’re trivial alone. But Smith gave them as a bundle. The whole point of police profiles is convergence. That’s not “ink blot” speculation, it’s how investigators narrow the field. Dismissing convergence is dismissing how police work.

4. Treating Testimony as Fabrication

Whenever a line of evidence troubles your position, you wave it away as if Smith, Walsh, or Rupp simply made it up or exaggerated. Yet these men came from very different backgrounds — police, biographer, forensic pathologist — and their testimonies converge decades apart. To suggest they all somehow erred in the same direction is not critical thinking, it’s conspiracy thinking.

5. Applying Double Standards

You’ll seize on one shaky anecdote if it harms a suspect you dislike, but demand unattainable certainty for any fact that supports Thompson. That’s not the standard historians or detectives work by. The investigation itself ran on probabilities, convergences, and elimination, not on courtroom-ready proof.

6. Forgetting the Investigators’ Context

The Whitechapel murders unfolded in an environment of panic, press interference, and political pressure. Investigators like Smith were balancing public order with fact-gathering. To knock them down casually a century later because their memories or phrasing don’t meet your standard of neatness is to miss the reality of Victorian policing.

You don’t have to like Thompson. But if you keep dismissing the officers, doctors, and witnesses who formed the investigation itself, then you aren’t just attacking me — you’re tearing down the scaffolding of the case. And once that scaffolding goes, no suspect stands at all.

**Herlock Sholmes** · 2025-09-09T17:27:00+00:00

Originally posted by Richard Patterson View Post

Herlock, you’ve put your case forcefully, but I think you’re missing something important. The issue here isn’t invention, propaganda, or “garbage in, garbage out.” It’s that three independent authorities — a biographer, a police commissioner, and a forensic pathologist — all, in their own ways, left a trail pointing straight at Francis Thompson.

First, John Walsh. In Strange Harp, Strange Symphony (1967), Walsh had privileged access to Thompson’s notebooks, papers, and letters. He was not some crank; he was Thompson’s careful literary biographer. And yet, in a footnote, he admitted to what he called “the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson’s life”: that in August and September 1888 Thompson was tramping the East End searching for his prostitute lover at the exact same time prostitutes were being butchered there. Walsh did not invent this. He buried it in a footnote because the literary establishment of the 1960s would never have tolerated him putting it front and centre. But the record is there.

This isn’t even a coincidence. It’s a nothing.

Then we have Major Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City Police. He was in Mitre Square on the night of Eddowes’ murder. In his memoirs, he describes the suspect his officers tailed in Rupert Street: an ex-medical student, with asylum history, known prostitute associations, polished farthings, and tied to Rupert Street/Haymarket. To dismiss this as meaningless is to dismiss Smith himself. And yet those five rare traits converge, not vaguely, but uniquely, in Thompson. That is why the probability analysis matters — because the odds of a random man in London matching them all are not merely low, they are astronomically close to zero.

I’ve explained this. And I’ve asked a question that you still haven’t answered - what is the Rupert Street link?

Thompson never used polished farthings. So this ISNT a point. You can’t just make things up.

He wasn’t in an asylum. You invented that. A hospital isn’t an asylum. The Priory wasn’t an asylum. And The Priory was in 1889 a year AFTER Smith mentioned his suspect.

And the suspect was located with his polished farthings!

How much more conclusive could it be that this wasn’t Thompson.

Finally, Dr Joseph Rupp, a forensic pathologist with fifty years’ experience and some 9,000 autopsies behind him. In 1988, he looked at Walsh’s biography and at the Whitechapel mutilations and published in The Criminologist that Thompson was the best-fitted suspect he had ever seen: six years of medical training, laudanum addiction, mental instability, hatred of prostitutes, a presence in the East End, and a collapse into hospital just as the murders stopped. You can dismiss my mathematics, but Rupp’s scalpel and autopsy table gave him the authority to know how much medical skill those mutilations required. And he saw it in Thompson.

Again, you are clutching at straws. You accept Rupp but conveniently dismiss those that disagree. This is cherrypicking.

So no, this isn’t “shifting sands.” It’s convergence. Walsh flagged the coincidence. Smith described the suspect Who clearly wasn’t Thompson.. Rupp confirmed the anatomy. And when you add them together — geography, psychology, pathology, chronology — the probability that another man fits it all is vanishingly small.

Absolute nonsense.

You ask whether anyone should claim the case is “solved.” I’d ask instead: when three independent authorities from three different domains point to the same man, how many more coincidences do we allow before we call it what it is?

I’ll leave Francis Thompson aside for a moment and look instead at how you’re handling the investigation itself, because your dismissals aren’t really aimed at him — they’re aimed at undermining the work of the investigators who were actually there. That’s where your footing slips.

1. Misuse of Bond’s Report

You constantly treat Dr. Thomas Bond’s opinion as a trump card — that the mutilations required no anatomical skill. But Bond was trained before Virchow’s technique was even taught in Britain. He judged by older standards, so of course he missed what newer students like Thompson would have recognised. To build an absolute wall around Bond is to fossilise the investigation at the point of its blind spot.

So no Doctor, trained after 1876 would have been aware of Virchow’s technique? I don’t need Bond. You just keep bringing him up.

2. Downplaying Major Henry Smith

Smith was Acting Commissioner of the City Police. He was at Mitre Square that night, and his memoir records his force tailing a suspect from Rupert Street who had medical training, asylum history, prostitute links, and even the polished farthings trick. You can dislike Thompson, but brushing off Smith as if his testimony carries no weight is to undermine the City Police investigation itself.

Ive proven that you’ve invented ‘coincidences’ that didn’t exist

3. Ignoring the Problem of Convergence

You treat each fact in isolation — medical training, asylum, Rupert Street, prostitutes — as if they’re trivial alone. But Smith gave them as a bundle. The whole point of police profiles is convergence. That’s not “ink blot” speculation, it’s how investigators narrow the field. Dismissing convergence is dismissing how police work.

They don’t invent links or make tenuous connections make invalid accusations of arson.

4. Treating Testimony as Fabrication

Whenever a line of evidence troubles your position, you wave it away as if Smith, Walsh, or Rupp simply made it up or exaggerated. Yet these men came from very different backgrounds — police, biographer, forensic pathologist — and their testimonies converge decades apart. To suggest they all somehow erred in the same direction is not critical thinking, it’s conspiracy thinking.

You're the one who won’t confront the points. I’ll ask you again Richard - WHERE IS THE CLAIM THAT THOMPSON USED POLISHED FARTHINGS? You must have that information because you are using that point.

WHERE IS THE SPECIFIC EVIDENCE THAT THOMPSON WAS IN AN ASYLUM AND I WANT THE NAME OF THE ASYLUM AND HIS DATE OF ENTRY.

WHEN WAS HE IN PROVIDENCE ROW REFUGE? EVEN WALSH CAN ONLY SUGGEST THE POSDIBILITY SO PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH PROFF ALONG WITH DATES. WITHOUT THAT…ITS NOT EVIDENCE.

5. Applying Double Standards

You’ll seize on one shaky anecdote if it harms a suspect you dislike, but demand unattainable certainty for any fact that supports Thompson. That’s not the standard historians or detectives work by. The investigation itself ran on probabilities, convergences, and elimination, not on courtroom-ready proof.

That he was in Providence Row is an anecdote.

6. Forgetting the Investigators’ Context

The Whitechapel murders unfolded in an environment of panic, press interference, and political pressure. Investigators like Smith were balancing public order with fact-gathering. To knock them down casually a century later because their memories or phrasing don’t meet your standard of neatness is to miss the reality of Victorian policing.

You don’t have to like Thompson. But if you keep dismissing the officers, doctors, and witnesses who formed the investigation itself, then you aren’t just attacking me — you’re tearing down the scaffolding of the case. And once that scaffolding goes, no suspect stands at all.

I’m tearing down the scaffold of the entirely fictitious case against Thompson. It’s based on the fact of his medical knowledge alone and that he was in London at roughly the time. Conjecture and speculation Richard and you have the verve to say that people are somehow morally obliged to accept his guilt.

**Lewis C** · 2025-09-09T20:20:00+00:00

Originally posted by Herlock Sholmes View Post

> He lived within 100 metres of the ripper sites.

This is another untruth. We have Thompson mentioning seeing men outside the Providence Row mission and he may (no more that ‘may’) have stayed there at some point but we don’t know this for anything close to a certainty or indeed when if he had. To claim that he was there at the time of the murders is untrue and Richard knows it.

Is it even possible to live within 100 metres of both the Nichols murder site and the Eddowes murder site? I thought that those locations were more than 200 metres apart.

**Herlock Sholmes** · 2025-09-09T20:20:04+00:00

I’d like to put aside the discussion of specific pieces evidence for a moment just look at Thompson himself, his situation, his health and habits, his associations, his words and his actions just before the murder of Polly Nichols to just after the murder of Mary Kelly so that people can see for themselves and judge if he looks, sounds or acts like a good candidate for Jack the Ripper. To do this I’m using Strange Harp, Strange Symphony John Walsh’s biography of Thompson. Richard accepts that Walsh is a reliable, unbiased and even-handed commentator. I’ll begin in April of 1888 or just before. I’ll also mention that in the early part of 1888 Thompson had attempted suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum somewhere near to Covent Garden but he claimed that he was prevented all the way by the appearance of the ghost of the poet Thomas Chatterton.

Francis Thompson is living somewhere in Chelsea with a prostitute (this woman has never been named or identified) He had previously sent some prose and poetry to the publication Merry England which was edited by Wilfrid Meynell. He gave the address of the chemist in Drury Lane where he bought his drugs as the address for the reply. Meynell was very late replying for whatever reason and by the time that he did Thompson had stopped using that chemist (probably because he owed money - a debt which Meynell paid)

Sometime in April of 1888 Thompson learned that one of his poems had been published in Merry England so he wrote again to Meynell and arranged a meeting. Thompson met Meynell in mid-May of 1888. Meynell’s son (and Thompson biographer) Everard gives this description of Thompson at this meeting (remember this is around 3 months before the Nichols murder): “…a waif of a man…more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes.”

Meynell offered Thompson a small sum per week for a room and food which would allow him to write but Thompson refused as he was staying in Chelsea. They both agreed that his essay ‘Paganism’ would be published in June. So things were looking up for a man who wanted nothing more that to be a writer from childhood.

During June and July Thompson continued to meet with Meynell. Sometimes at his office but sometimes at his house in Phillimore Place. Thompson was still reticent about his life; no doubt reluctant to mention the fact that he lived with a prostitute and that he was addicted to drugs. They persuaded him to take a bath though.

Then at some point, according to Thompson, his girlfriend said that people (I’m assuming that she meant his new friends now that he might be experiencing some success or even society in general) wouldn’t accept him living with a prostitute. Thompson tried to dissuade her of this notion but one day she left. Was this really why she left? Maybe it was indeed for altruistic reasons or, more cynically perhaps, maybe she just tired of this strange, unclean, drug addicted young man and saw her chance to be rid of him? We don’t know.

Through August and September of 1888 he searched for her. She was a west end prostitute but maybe he did look in the east end too? He wanted nothing more that to persuade her to come back. Around that time he had the idea for his most famous poem The Hound of Heaven but he said that it was:”…too great for my present powers of execution.”

Walsh, the reliable Walsh remember, describes Thompson at this time as suffering from malnutrition, addicted to opium and of having his strength sapped by “incipient tuberculosis.” Remember..this is August/September 1888.

By around mid-October he had pretty much given up hope of finding her. This is what our ‘hate-filled killer’ said about her years later:” Often since, I have longed to encounter her to thank her for that graciously delicate whisper which bought such healing to my hurt, indignant heart. But I never shall, till the Day which evens all debts. It is not like that these lines will ever have meeting with her sweet, sad eyes. Could that be, I would desire she might read in them a gratitude which passes speech and the accumulated silence of many years.” If we disregard his fictional writing as we surely should…because it’s fictional then we are left with a man who never wrote or said an angry or hateful thing about anyone at this time. Does this sound like the man who went around butchering prostitutes because this woman left him?

Now, in mid-October, being alone he was more amenable to receiving help from Meynell and he allowed himself to be examined by a doctor. So her he is in mid-October and the doctor finds him in a state of near total collapse. They consider the risks of getting him off drugs whilst he’s recovering but they decide to go ahead and he’s sent to a private hospital (not an asylum) Walsh ties this down to October because while he’s in the hospital Thompson writes the poem Not Even In Dream in which he makes specific mention of withdrawing from drugs; something that he hadn’t done before. He was in the hospital for around 6 weeks. So if Walsh is correct, which seems likely, Thompson was very probably in hospital when Mary Kelly was killed. At the very least this is a strong possibility.

In December he was out of hospital and living in lodgings (Walsh believes that it was in Paddington) but still visiting Meynell almost every day.

Now, I haven’t added anything of my own (apart from wondering at the reason for the woman’s departure) I haven’t distorted or twisted anything that the reliable Walsh said. So….

Does this Francis Thompson sound like Jack the Ripper?

**Herlock Sholmes** · 2025-09-09T20:21:36+00:00

Originally posted by Lewis C View Post

Is it even possible to live within 100 metres of both the Nichols murder site and the Eddowes murder site? I thought that those locations were more than 200 metres apart.

Correct Lewis. We can also ask for evidence that Thompson was staying there at this time but none will be forthcoming because there just isn’t any evidence. And yet Richard casually presents it as if it’s a fact.

**Richard Patterson** · 2025-09-10T02:37:05+00:00

Originally posted by Herlock Sholmes View Post

I’d like to put aside the discussion of specific pieces evidence for a moment just look at Thompson himself, his situation, his health and habits, his associations, his words and his actions just before the murder of Polly Nichols to just after the murder of Mary Kelly so that people can see for themselves and judge if he looks, sounds or acts like a good candidate for Jack the Ripper. To do this I’m using Strange Harp, Strange Symphony John Walsh’s biography of Thompson. Richard accepts that Walsh is a reliable, unbiased and even-handed commentator. I’ll begin in April of 1888 or just before. I’ll also mention that in the early part of 1888 Thompson had attempted suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum somewhere near to Covent Garden but he claimed that he was prevented all the way by the appearance of the ghost of the poet Thomas Chatterton.

Francis Thompson is living somewhere in Chelsea with a prostitute (this woman has never been named or identified) He had previously sent some prose and poetry to the publication Merry England which was edited by Wilfrid Meynell. He gave the address of the chemist in Drury Lane where he bought his drugs as the address for the reply. Meynell was very late replying for whatever reason and by the time that he did Thompson had stopped using that chemist (probably because he owed money - a debt which Meynell paid)

Sometime in April of 1888 Thompson learned that one of his poems had been published in Merry England so he wrote again to Meynell and arranged a meeting. Thompson met Meynell in mid-May of 1888. Meynell’s son (and Thompson biographer) Everard gives this description of Thompson at this meeting (remember this is around 3 months before the Nichols murder): “…a waif of a man…more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes.”

Meynell offered Thompson a small sum per week for a room and food which would allow him to write but Thompson refused as he was staying in Chelsea. They both agreed that his essay ‘Paganism’ would be published in June. So things were looking up for a man who wanted nothing more that to be a writer from childhood.

During June and July Thompson continued to meet with Meynell. Sometimes at his office but sometimes at his house in Phillimore Place. Thompson was still reticent about his life; no doubt reluctant to mention the fact that he lived with a prostitute and that he was addicted to drugs. They persuaded him to take a bath though.

Then at some point, according to Thompson, his girlfriend said that people (I’m assuming that she meant his new friends now that he might be experiencing some success or even society in general) wouldn’t accept him living with a prostitute. Thompson tried to dissuade her of this notion but one day she left. Was this really why she left? Maybe it was indeed for altruistic reasons or, more cynically perhaps, maybe she just tired of this strange, unclean, drug addicted young man and saw her chance to be rid of him? We don’t know.

Through August and September of 1888 he searched for her. She was a west end prostitute but maybe he did look in the east end too? He wanted nothing more that to persuade her to come back. Around that time he had the idea for his most famous poem The Hound of Heaven but he said that it was:”…too great for my present powers of execution.”

Walsh, the reliable Walsh remember, describes Thompson at this time as suffering from malnutrition, addicted to opium and of having his strength sapped by “incipient tuberculosis.” Remember..this is August/September 1888.

By around mid-October he had pretty much given up hope of finding her. This is what our ‘hate-filled killer’ said about her years later:” Often since, I have longed to encounter her to thank her for that graciously delicate whisper which bought such healing to my hurt, indignant heart. But I never shall, till the Day which evens all debts. It is not like that these lines will ever have meeting with her sweet, sad eyes. Could that be, I would desire she might read in them a gratitude which passes speech and the accumulated silence of many years.” If we disregard his fictional writing as we surely should…because it’s fictional then we are left with a man who never wrote or said an angry or hateful thing about anyone at this time. Does this sound like the man who went around butchering prostitutes because this woman left him?

Now, in mid-October, being alone he was more amenable to receiving help from Meynell and he allowed himself to be examined by a doctor. So her he is in mid-October and the doctor finds him in a state of near total collapse. They consider the risks of getting him off drugs whilst he’s recovering but they decide to go ahead and he’s sent to a private hospital (not an asylum) Walsh ties this down to October because while he’s in the hospital Thompson writes the poem Not Even In Dream in which he makes specific mention of withdrawing from drugs; something that he hadn’t done before. He was in the hospital for around 6 weeks. So if Walsh is correct, which seems likely, Thompson was very probably in hospital when Mary Kelly was killed. At the very least this is a strong possibility.

In December he was out of hospital and living in lodgings (Walsh believes that it was in Paddington) but still visiting Meynell almost every day.

Now, I haven’t added anything of my own (apart from wondering at the reason for the woman’s departure) I haven’t distorted or twisted anything that the reliable Walsh said. So….

Does this Francis Thompson sound like Jack the Ripper?

I wonder why this prostitute runaway would runaway. Was it because she chanced to read some of his poetry on prostitutes? Perhaps his Nightmare of the Witch Babies, written in 1886, before the murders.

This is one of the most chilling windows into Thompson’s psychology—and when set against the Whitechapel murders, it looks less like gothic invention and more like rehearsal. Let’s take it step by step, in light of your question:

1. The “lusty knight” and the hunt in London

The poem opens with a “lusty knight” riding through a dark, corpse-haunted London. This isn’t medieval fantasy—it’s Thompson transposing chivalric crusader imagery onto the modern metropolis. He casts himself as both hunter and executioner. When he says he rides upon the “Strand of the Dead Men’s Groan,” he is imagining London’s streets as a killing ground. In 1886, two years before the Ripper murders, Thompson was already fusing urban geography, predatory pursuit, and sexual violence.

2. The stalking of a “maiden”

The knight spots a woman and follows her:

“Swiftly he followed her. Ha! Ha! / Eagerly he followed her. Ho! Ho!”

This is disturbingly close to how witness testimony later described Ripper victims being approached and shadowed before attack. The refrain “Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho!” mirrors the gloating tone in the infamous Dear Boss letter. The poem reveals the exhilaration Thompson associated with stalking—an emotional rehearsal for what he would later enact.

3. The disgust at her “corruption”

When the knight discovers she is “unclean,” the poem pivots into moral rage:

“Lo, she corrupted! Ho! Ho!”

This is the critical turn. For Thompson, prostitutes were not simply women—they were diseased, blasphemous bodies. His medical training gave him the vocabulary of “corruption,” “ulcer,” “ooze.” This is not metaphor; it’s pathology and judgment. In his worldview, fallen women deserved vivisection.

4. The anatomical mutilation

The knight slices her open:

“And its paunch was rent / Like a brasten drum; / And the blubbered fat / From its belly doth come.”

This is a grotesque foreshadowing of the Ripper murders, especially Chapman, Eddowes, and Kelly. The focus is not on stabbing or strangulation but on disembowelment. The clinical language—paunch, belly, fat—is the diction of the dissecting room. It mirrors the killer’s method: deliberate abdominal incisions, searching through organs.

5. The obsession with the womb

The poem climaxes with the discovery of “two witch-babies” inside the woman’s belly. Thompson lingers on the foetal image with glee. This grotesque fantasy links directly to the Ripper murders, where the womb was repeatedly targeted—removed in Chapman, mutilated in Eddowes, and destroyed in Kelly. It also aligns with Thompson’s obsession with prostitutes as corrupters of reproduction: women who sold sex produced “harlots in the mother’s womb” (as he wrote under his Tancred pseudonym).

6. The blood imagery and fixation

The repeated “blood, blood, blood” and “red bubbles” echo through the poem like a chant. He revels in gore, not recoils from it. Yet, as you’ve argued before, Thompson dreaded blood spray. Here the blood flows in controlled streams, like in dissection—exactly how the Ripper operated, laying victims flat, avoiding arterial spray.

7. Thompson’s own admission

Years later, Thompson explained:

“The poems were, in fact, a kind of poetic diary; or rather a poetic substitute for letters.”

If we take him at his word, Nightmare of the Witch-Babies is not abstract imagination. It is confession. It is a diary entry of his fantasies and intentions. Written in 1886, it predates the murders but shows the template—stalking, moral disgust, abdominal mutilation, womb obsession, blood imagery, triumphant glee.

Francis Thompson - A Reality Check

Francis Thompson - A Reality Check

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