Following the evidence

[Herlock Sholmes]

There is nothing wrong with favouring a suspect. There is nothing wrong with expressing a points that someone feels is in favour. But a respect for evidence and an accurate representation of it has to come before the promotion of a suspect. Yes, long drawn out points can be boring but we have to at least try to get things right.

This is not about whether Francis Thompson is a worthy or good or poor suspect. Everyone can make up their own minds on this. This is about taking an honest approach and following what the evidence tells us and not what we want it to mean. So..


The poll question is: Is Major Smith’s suspect a certain match for Francis Thompson? Or is he not a match?

…..


Richard’s contention is that the suspect (described but not named) that is mentioned in Major Henry Smith’s book is a fit for Thompson. To make clear, Richard has used these phrases:

“Major Henry Smith’s five-point description of his Rupert Street suspect aligns with Thompson uniquely (ex-medical student, asylum history, prostitute connection, coin motif, Haymarket residence).”

“A tight, unusual five-point bundle (ex-medical student; asylum history; prostitutes; coin-bilking; Haymarket/Rupert Street presence).”

“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 Richard is absolutely clear. He is stating that Thompson is a slam dunk for Smith’s suspect.

…..


Boring I know, but I’ll repeat exactly what Smith said in his book:


“After the second crime I sent word to Sir Charles Warren that I had discovered a man very likely to be the man wanted. He certainly had all the qualifications requisite. He had been a medical student; he had been in a lunatic asylum; he spent all his time with women of loose character, whom he bilked by giving them polished farthings instead of sovereigns, two of these farthings have been found in the pocket of the murdered woman. 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 a shadow of doubt.”


So we can sum up the ‘traits’ as:

1. A former medical student.
2. Had been a patient in a lunatic asylum.
3. Bilking prostitutes using polished farthings.
4. Connected to Rupert Street, Haymarket
5. Spent all of his time with women of loose character.

My information comes from Strange Harp, Strange Symphony. A biography of Thompson by John Walsh (who Richard accepts as a reliable source of information)

1. That Thompson was a former medical student is of course 100% true - match

2. Francis Thompson had never in his entire life been in a lunatic asylum. He entered a hospital in October of 1888 after his friend persuaded him to see a doctor. The doctor said that he was on the verge of total collapse so he was admitted to a hospital to recover. Richard tries to get around this inconvenient fact by claiming that hospitals were often called asylums. This is clearly not the case. Smith’s suspect entered a lunatic asylum because he was mentally ill in some way. Thompson entered a hospital because he was physically ill. The two are very clearly not the same. Thompson was provably never in an asylum - no match

3. Francis Thompson was never, at any point in his life bilking prostitutes with polished farthings, conning prostitutes in any way or even of being in possession of farthings (polished or otherwise) The only coin-related issue mentioned in Walsh’s book is of Thompson finding 2 sovereigns in the street. As Thompson had, whilst on drugs, hallucinated seeing the ghost of Chatterton, it’d question if the sovereign incident ever happened but that not relevant to the point. So, he never conned prostitutes and he was never mentioned in regard to farthings - no match

4. Smith sent men to Rupert Street, Haymarket where they found this man. So what was Thompson’s connection to Rupert Street? Absolutely none. He never lived there; we have no reason for suspecting that he ever went there. From the early part of August and going back a fair time Thompson was living with his prostitute friend in Chelsea. Geography isn’t my strong point but I believe that’s around 2 miles away. Thompson certainly would have been around in the west end but we cannot connect him to Rupert Street and that’s where Smith sent his men. We cannot match Chelsea and various locations in the west end with Rupert Street and suggest it’s a match when it’s clearly not - no match

5. Did Thompson spend all of his time with prostitutes? He certainly lived with one but we have no evidence of him spending all of his time with them. I’d suggest - 50/50 at best on this.


And let’s not forget. This guy was found and he provided an alibi that satisfied Smith. During the period in question Thompson was wandering around trying to find his girlfriend. He was sleeping in doorways and doss houses and wherever he could. How easy would it have been for a vagrant to find a solid alibi?

[Richard Patterson]

There is nothing wrong with favouring a suspect. There is nothing wrong with expressing a points that someone feels is in favour. But a respect for evidence and an accurate representation of it has to come before the promotion of a suspect. Yes, long drawn out points can be boring but we have to at least try to get things right.

This is not about whether Francis Thompson is a worthy or good or poor suspect. Everyone can make up their own minds on this. This is about taking an honest approach and following what the evidence tells us and not what we want it to mean. So..


The poll question is: Is Major Smith’s suspect a certain match for Francis Thompson? Or is he not a match?

…..


Richard’s contention is that the suspect (described but not named) that is mentioned in Major Henry Smith’s book is a fit for Thompson. To make clear, Richard has used these phrases:

“Major Henry Smith’s five-point description of his Rupert Street suspect aligns with Thompson uniquely (ex-medical student, asylum history, prostitute connection, coin motif, Haymarket residence).”

“A tight, unusual five-point bundle (ex-medical student; asylum history; prostitutes; coin-bilking; Haymarket/Rupert Street presence).”

“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 Richard is absolutely clear. He is stating that Thompson is a slam dunk for Smith’s suspect.

…..


Boring I know, but I’ll repeat exactly what Smith said in his book:


“After the second crime I sent word to Sir Charles Warren that I had discovered a man very likely to be the man wanted. He certainly had all the qualifications requisite. He had been a medical student; he had been in a lunatic asylum; he spent all his time with women of loose character, whom he bilked by giving them polished farthings instead of sovereigns, two of these farthings have been found in the pocket of the murdered woman. 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 a shadow of doubt.”


So we can sum up the ‘traits’ as:

1. A former medical student.
2. Had been a patient in a lunatic asylum.
3. Bilking prostitutes using polished farthings.
4. Connected to Rupert Street, Haymarket
5. Spent all of his time with women of loose character.

My information comes from Strange Harp, Strange Symphony. A biography of Thompson by John Walsh (who Richard accepts as a reliable source of information)

1. That Thompson was a former medical student is of course 100% true - match

2. Francis Thompson had never in his entire life been in a lunatic asylum. He entered a hospital in October of 1888 after his friend persuaded him to see a doctor. The doctor said that he was on the verge of total collapse so he was admitted to a hospital to recover. Richard tries to get around this inconvenient fact by claiming that hospitals were often called asylums. This is clearly not the case. Smith’s suspect entered a lunatic asylum because he was mentally ill in some way. Thompson entered a hospital because he was physically ill. The two are very clearly not the same. Thompson was provably never in an asylum - no match

3. Francis Thompson was never, at any point in his life bilking prostitutes with polished farthings, conning prostitutes in any way or even of being in possession of farthings (polished or otherwise) The only coin-related issue mentioned in Walsh’s book is of Thompson finding 2 sovereigns in the street. As Thompson had, whilst on drugs, hallucinated seeing the ghost of Chatterton, it’d question if the sovereign incident ever happened but that not relevant to the point. So, he never conned prostitutes and he was never mentioned in regard to farthings - no match

4. Smith sent men to Rupert Street, Haymarket where they found this man. So what was Thompson’s connection to Rupert Street? Absolutely none. He never lived there; we have no reason for suspecting that he ever went there. From the early part of August and going back a fair time Thompson was living with his prostitute friend in Chelsea. Geography isn’t my strong point but I believe that’s around 2 miles away. Thompson certainly would have been around in the west end but we cannot connect him to Rupert Street and that’s where Smith sent his men. We cannot match Chelsea and various locations in the west end with Rupert Street and suggest it’s a match when it’s clearly not - no match

5. Did Thompson spend all of his time with prostitutes? He certainly lived with one but we have no evidence of him spending all of his time with them. I’d suggest - 50/50 at best on this.


And let’s not forget. This guy was found and he provided an alibi that satisfied Smith. During the period in question Thompson was wandering around trying to find his girlfriend. He was sleeping in doorways and doss houses and wherever he could. How easy would it have been for a vagrant to find a solid alibi?

Herlock,

You’ve framed this as a sober “follow the evidence” exercise and a poll about whether Major Henry Smith’s five-point description “is a certain match” for Francis Thompson. Fair enough. But your summary of those five points, and your rulings of “no match,” rely on narrowing definitions and ignoring contemporaneous context that the sources themselves don’t require. When you put the full record back on the table, the five-point bundle does not fall apart—it coheres. And when you combine that bundle with Thompson’s independently documented movements, writings, training, geography, and post-Kelly removal from London life, the posterior probability that anyone else in 1888 London satisfies the same total pattern collapses toward zero.

Let’s go point-by-point—then look at why the convergence matters.

⸻

1) “Former medical student” — undisputed match

You concede this, so we can be brief. Thompson spent six years in medical studies at Owens College (Manchester). His sister Mary described repeated fees paid for dissections (“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”). Thompson himself carried a scalpel while on the streets. This isn’t armchair “knife familiarity”; it’s formal anatomical training, reinforced by repeated cadaver work and a blade he kept on his person.

Status: Match (and the most relevant competency for these crimes).

⸻

2) “Had been in a lunatic asylum” — you’ve made this too black-and-white

You’ve insisted that because Smith used the phrase “lunatic asylum,” only a county madhouse commitment “counts,” and therefore Thompson cannot match. That treats Victorian terminology as if it were ICD-10. It wasn’t.

Three near-contemporaneous facts sit in tension with your absolutist reading:
• Breakdown & sequestration. Thompson’s uncle (James Thompson) attested that Francis had a breakdown by 1882 and “never fully recovered.” Owens College records show his erratic attendance thereafter. That culminates in institutional sequestration: after Meynell rescued him, Thompson was (a) hospitalized for six weeks and (b) then removed from London to a religious house (Storrington Priory). Victorian actors—including police memoirists—used “asylum,” “sanitarium/sanatorium,” “private hospital,” and “house of retreat” with considerable looseness when referring to mental and nervous collapses.
• The six-week institutionalization after Kelly. Walsh dates the London private hospital stay to the late-1888 window by deduction—not by a hospital ledger: he infers it from internal evidence (Meynell’s “Six weeks, my son!” marginal note on the 1913 biography MS; Thompson’s relapse “about four days” after discharge; his being shipped to Storrington by New Year’s). Using the Providence Row calendar (opening 5 Nov 1888), the arithmetic places the six weeks squarely after the Kelly murder, not in early October. That sequence—collapse → hospital → brief relapse → cloister—is exactly the sort of “asylum history” a senior policeman would shorthand in a memoir.
• Police language. Major Smith’s book is not a committal register; it’s a senior officer’s memoir written twenty years later. CID and press alike routinely flattened the taxonomy of institutions into “asylum” when describing persons under care for nervous or mental derangement. The functional gist is breakdown with sequestration, not the precise brass plate on the door.

You are free to maintain a hyper-literal dictionary line, but it’s neither how Victorians wrote nor how Smith’s audience would have read him. On the evidence we actually have, “asylum history” describes Thompson’s 1888–89 trajectory quite well.

Status: Match in the sense Smith is clearly using the term (breakdown + institutional care), with the added (and case-relevant) detail that Thompson’s six-week removal neatly brackets the end of the series.

⸻

3) “Bilking with polished farthings” — the point is the coin-fraud motif, not that the identical trick is documented on Thompson

You keep presenting this as: “Smith said ‘polished farthings’; unless Thompson is caught passing polished farthings, it’s a fail.” That’s a strawman.
• What Smith actually gives us is a profile bundle (a tight cluster of unusual traits) attached to a man frequently seen in the Haymarket/Rupert Street habitat. One element of his bundle is a distinctive coin-fraud habit used against prostitutes. Another is an ex-medical student; another, asylum history; another, the West End locus. The evidentiary function of the coin item is to reduce the candidate set—it’s a screening variable that makes the overall bundle rarer.
• What we document in Thompson’s case is (i) an independent coin motif embedded in his personal lore (Walsh’s sovereign episode), coupled with (ii) chronic proximity to vulnerable women and (iii) a documented moralized obsession with prostitution (see below). No one is claiming Walsh wrote “polished farthings.” I am claiming that the coin deception motif in a man matching the rest of the bundle is probative—not dispositive by itself, probative as part of the five-way conjunction.

If you insist that only a prosecution-grade example of “polished farthings” with Thompson’s name on it could allow the coin axis to count, you’ve misunderstood how convergent features operate in historical identification problems. The coin element is one of five screens; it does its job by being rare, not by being identical.

Status: The “coin trick on prostitutes” axis is satisfied at the motif level in a man who otherwise matches the set; it increases the weight of the conjunction rather than standing alone.

⸻

4) “Rupert Street / Haymarket nexus” — this is geography, not tenancy

You argue “no match” because Thompson never “lived” on Rupert Street. Smith’s line is: “I thought he was likely to be in Rupert Street, Haymarket. I sent up two men, and there he was.” That’s a haunt, not a lease.
• Thompson’s West End base: After Meynell’s rescue, Thompson’s postal and social axis sits on Charing Cross / Haymarket. He worked for, lodged with, and was ferried by the Meynells just off the Haymarket in Panton Street—a two-minute walk to Rupert Street. He frequented Providence Row in the East and walked nights between those poles. His editor records him vanishing for days and returning exhausted in precisely this window.
• Functional reading: Smith’s Rupert Street is not a cadastral claim—it’s a police pointer to a habitat. “Send two men to Rupert Street” reads as: go to the known prostitution artery where this subject is commonly seen. Thompson, demonstrably, was embedded in that West End ecosystem. If you want “no match,” you’d need positive evidence that Thompson never used Rupert Street and never moved through the Haymarket spine. You don’t have that; the record points the other way.

Status: Match at the level Smith uses: the suspect’s operating habitat sits on the Haymarket / Rupert Street spine, which is exactly where Thompson’s post-rescue life is situated.

⸻

5) “Spent all his time with women of loose character” — police hyperbole describing a known pattern

You label this 50/50 “at best.” Smith is not presenting a time-and-motion study; he’s writing a profile summary. What did City and Met observers routinely do? They over-represent the dominant social pattern that made a man visible to them. In Thompson’s case:
• He cohabited for a year with a prostitute and then searched obsessively for her across the very weeks of the canonical murders (Walsh’s “most bizarre coincidence” footnote).
• He haunted Providence Row, doss houses, and streets populated by “unfortunates.”
• His prose and verse teem with medicalized contempt for prostitution (e.g., “ulcers,” “harlots in the mother’s womb,” the Nightmare’s disembowelment of a “corrupted” woman, and the Tancred crusader rhetoric calling for drowning).
• Hopkins’ “Mr. Moring” account situates him night-walking the East End, intimate with opium dens and taverns, and looking exactly like Hutchinson’s companion at Kelly’s side.

Does “all his time” literally mean twenty-four hours a day? Obviously not. It’s the police way of saying: his associates and movements are consistently among unfortunates. That is the Thompson pattern in late 1888.

Status: Match at the level of police characterization.

⸻

About that “alibi”

You lean hard on Smith’s closing clause: “but… he proved an alibi without a shadow of doubt,” as if that logically retro-erases the five-point identification and applies across dates and jurisdictions. It doesn’t.
• Smith’s passage concerns one suspect-check episode (“After the second crime I sent word…”). An “alibi” accepted for a specific window (or for City jurisdiction) is not a blanket cancellation of identity for other dates or the series. Senior officers accepted alibis that later proved partial, conditional, or ill-tested. Even your own allies on Casebook have pointed out how many Victorian “alibis” boil down to a landlady’s assurance that a man “always slept here.”
• If you choose to identify Smith’s man as Puckridge (because City CID shadowed him to a Rupert Street coffee house and a proprietor said he’d slept there “every night” for four weeks), you have essentially conceded my structural point: the profile bundle was applied to a highly specific Haymarket denizen, in precisely the habitat and pattern that Thompson occupies. And you must still explain why Thompson independently matches the same five screeners and dovetails with the Ripper timeline.

The correct lesson from “alibi” is this: the City checked a man who perfectly fit the bundle; they accepted coverage for the slice of time they were testing. That doesn’t dissolve the bundle’s value as a selector; it shows how close the net already was—on a profile that Thompson uniquely satisfies as well.

⸻

Convergence, not cherry-picking: why the bundle matters

You accuse me of “promotion before evidence,” then trim each of Smith’s features down to a hairline reading and declare “no match.” That’s backwards. Identification in historical cases proceeds by convergent rare features.

You do not need each feature to be proven with courtroom rigidity; you need them to be independent screens that, when multiplied, make the chance of a random impostor negligible. Smith’s bundle gives five such screens. Thompson independently contributes more:
• Temporal dovetail: Walsh’s footnote: August–September 1888 Thompson is night-walking the East End looking for his prostitute lover (“the most bizarre coincidence in his life”).
• Removal after Kelly: The six-week private hospital stay (properly placed after 5 Nov), four-day relapse, then Storrington by New Year—precisely bracketing the cessation of murders.
• Psychological template: Nightmare of the Witch-Babies (1886)—the London hunt, stalking the “unclean” woman, abdominal opening, viscera, and womb fixation (“two witch-babies”)—prefiguring Chapman/Eddowes/Kelly in structure and focus.
• Anatomical competence under pressure: Six years of dissections; blade habit; poetic fixation on controlled bloodflow (matching the killer’s method of avoiding arterial spray).
• Direct mooring to Kelly’s orbit: Providence Row; Hopkins’ “Mr. Moring” (a veiled Thompson) who looked exactly like Hutchinson’s man; Hopkins’s explicit claim that “Moring” was Kelly’s friend; and Thompson’s West End anchor yards from Rupert Street.

When you keep just one tile in view—say, “farthings” or “tenancy on Rupert Street”—you can talk yourself into a “no match.” When you step back and stack the tiles, the mosaic stops being an inkblot and turns into a portrait.

⸻

Walsh wasn’t blind. He was cautious.

You cite Walsh for your “no asylum / no farthings / no Rupert Street” rulings. But Walsh is the source who quietly flags the coincidence that topples the old complacency:

“At this time (August–September, 1888) occurred the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson’s life…. He was, after all, a drug addict, acquainted with prostitutes and, most alarming, a former medical student!”

Walsh had access to original papers and family sensibilities. In the 1960s, openly pointing to a Catholic poet as a potential serial killer was career poison. He did what careful scholars under constraint do: he footnoted the key, he hinted, he refrained from a trumpet blast. If you want to invoke Walsh, invoke all of him—including the footnote that declares the overlap the most bizarre coincidence of Thompson’s life.

⸻

Hopkins didn’t name him. He disguised him.

You can wave away “Mr. Moring,” but you can’t explain him. Hopkins:
• Knew Thompson’s haunts (interviewed McMaster in 1927; published his finds).
• Walked the East End at night with a poet-friend who smoked opium, haunted taverns, and looked exactly like Hutchinson’s man with Kelly.
• Called him “Moring” while leaving ring-based clues that point directly to Thompson (the “more rings” conceit attached to Thompson’s work and epitaph).
• Said “Moring” was Kelly’s friend.

If your poll means to be “honest,” factor that testimony in. Either Hopkins is inventing, or he’s telling you—carefully—that the poet at Kelly’s side lived in Thompson’s skin.

⸻

Probability isn’t a magic wand—but it does tell you when to stop pretending “anyone” could fit

You’ve caricatured the math as “garbage in, garbage out.” That’s true of bad models. It’s not true of this one.
• Start with a base population (adult males in London c. 1888).
• Apply five independent screens from Smith’s bundle:
1. ex-medical student,
2. asylum/sequestration history,
3. prostitutes in social orbit,
4. coin-fraud motif,
5. Haymarket/Rupert Street habitat.
Each cut shrinks the candidate pool by orders of magnitude.
• Now condition on Thompson’s independent traits:
• six years of anatomical training with demonstrated dissections;
• scalpel possession;
• violent, medicalized anti-prostitute rhetoric in prose and verse;
• Nightmare’s abdominal/womb obsession;
• Providence Row linkage;
• Hopkins/Moring mooring to Kelly;
• six-week removal immediately after Kelly.

When you multiply the rarity of the Smith bundle with the rarity of Thompson’s independent profile—and then add temporal and geographic dovetailing—the posterior that “some other random man” matches the whole picture goes beyond “implausible.” It sinks into “effectively nil.”

If you think another named man meets all the screens and the time-and-place dovetails, put him up and let’s cost it out side-by-side. Otherwise, a poll of impressions isn’t a substitute for updating beliefs when convergent data demand it.

⸻

Why your “no match” rulings don’t hold
• Asylum: You’ve equated “asylum” with “county madhouse only.” Smith didn’t. His audience didn’t. The functional match—breakdown plus sequestration in a private hospital and then a religious house—is exactly the history memoirists lumped under “asylum.”
• Farthings: You’ve demanded identical facticity on the coin trick as a precondition to letting the coin axis count. That’s not how profile bundles work. The coin motif screens; it doesn’t have to be the exact trick.
• Rupert Street: You’ve treated an officer’s “you’ll find him in Rupert Street” as if it were a leasehold search. It’s a habitat pointer. Thompson’s postal/social base sits on that grid, and Providence Row pulls his orbit straight through it.
• “All his time with loose women” is hyperbole for a known pattern, not a diary log. Thompson lived with and hunted prostitutes; his prose/verse treat them as pathological; his nights were spent among them. That’s precisely why the police would summarize him that way.

And the alibi clause? It narrows a window. It does not erase an identity that matches the five filters and the broader arc.

⸻

Following the evidence means following all of it

If your poll is genuinely about evidence over preference, then table all the relevant lines:
• Walsh’s footnote (the “most bizarre coincidence”).
• The Providence Row testimony tying both Thompson and Kelly to the same refuge.
• Hopkins’ “Mr. Moring” (Kelly’s friend; a poet; opium; Hutchinson lookalike; ring-clue to Thompson).
• Thompson’s West End base (Panton/Charing Cross) steps from Rupert Street.
• Smith’s five-point bundle and why those five points were chosen (to make the candidate rare).
• The six-week post-Kelly removal, four-day relapse, then cloister—i.e., the series closing with his sequestration.
• The 1886 Nightmare poem—London stalking, the “unclean” woman, abdominal opening, and womb fixation—two years before the murders.
• The blade, the dissections, the sister’s testimony about cadaver fees, and his own admissions about the dissecting room.

If you keep the focus on a single literal noun (“lunatic asylum,” “polished farthings,” “renting a bed on Rupert Street”), you can talk yourself into check-boxes that read “no match.” Once you replace the check-boxes with the pattern the boxes were meant to detect, the silhouette isn’t generic anymore. It’s Francis Thompson.

You titled your post “Following the evidence.” Good. Follow all of it. Not just the bits you can prune into tidy negations.

—Richard

[Herlock Sholmes]

Herlock,

You’ve framed this as a sober “follow the evidence” exercise and a poll about whether Major Henry Smith’s five-point description “is a certain match” for Francis Thompson. Fair enough. But your summary of those five points, and your rulings of “no match,” rely on narrowing definitions and ignoring contemporaneous context that the sources themselves don’t require. When you put the full record back on the table, the five-point bundle does not fall apart—it coheres. And when you combine that bundle with Thompson’s independently documented movements, writings, training, geography, and post-Kelly removal from London life, the posterior probability that anyone else in 1888 London satisfies the same total pattern collapses toward zero.

Let’s go point-by-point—then look at why the convergence matters.

⸻

1) “Former medical student” — undisputed match

You concede this, so we can be brief. Thompson spent six years in medical studies at Owens College (Manchester). His sister Mary described repeated fees paid for dissections (“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”). Thompson himself carried a scalpel while on the streets. This isn’t armchair “knife familiarity”; it’s formal anatomical training, reinforced by repeated cadaver work and a blade he kept on his person.

Status: Match (and the most relevant competency for these crimes).

⸻

2) “Had been in a lunatic asylum” — you’ve made this too black-and-white

Because it is black and white - Francis Thompson categorically was never in a lunatic asylum. It’s black and white.

You’ve insisted that because Smith used the phrase “lunatic asylum,” only a county madhouse commitment “counts,” and therefore Thompson cannot match. That treats Victorian terminology as if it were ICD-10. It wasn’t.

A lunatic asylum is a lunatic asylum. Would anyone call the Royal London Hospital or Bart’s a lunatic asylum because these titles are interchangeable. Of course not. A lunatic asylum is for the mentally ill. Thompson was in a hospital because he was physically ill.

Three near-contemporaneous facts sit in tension with your absolutist reading:
• Breakdown & sequestration. Thompson’s uncle (James Thompson) attested that Francis had a breakdown by 1882 and “never fully recovered.” But he was never in a lunatic asylum. Owens College records show his erratic attendance thereafter. That culminates in institutional sequestration: after Meynell rescued him, Thompson was (a) hospitalized for six weeks yes, a hospital, that treated people with physical ailments. Thompson had been diagnosed by a doctor as being near total collapse. (b) then removed from London to a religious house (Storrington Priory). A religious house, not a lunatic asylum and this was in 1889, way after Smith; stick to the facts. Victorian actors—including police memoirists—used “asylum,” “sanitarium/sanatorium,” “private hospital,” and “house of retreat” with considerable looseness when referring to mental and nervous collapses. But he wasn’t in a lunatic asylum ever. No one would call a religious retreat a lunatic asylum (except perhaps a lunatic)
• The six-week institutionalization after Kelly In a religious retreat which could in no way be confused with a lunatic asylum.. Walsh dates the London private hospital stay to the late-1888 window by deduction—not by a hospital ledger: He dates it to October he infers it from internal evidence (Meynell’s “Six weeks, my son!” marginal note on the 1913 biography MS; Thompson’s relapse “about four days” after discharge; his being shipped to Storrington by New Year’s) Storrington was in 1889 - is there an alternate Walsh book that you’ve found somewhere!? . Using the Providence Row calendar (opening 5 Nov 1888), the arithmetic places the six weeks squarely after the Kelly murder, not in early October. But we don’t have a scintilla of evidence that he was ever in the Providence Row refuge. You just made it up. That sequence—collapse → hospital → brief relapse → cloister—is exactly the sort of “asylum history” a senior policeman would shorthand in a memoir. Thompson was never, ever in a lunatic asylum. You can wriggle, twist, duck and dive all that you like…you are simply trying to shape the evidence to fit where it doesn’t. When Smith said LUNATIC ASYLUM HE COULD ONLY HAVE MEANT LUNATIC ASYLUM; NOTHING ELSE.
• Police language. Major Smith’s book is not a committal register; it’s a senior officer’s memoir written twenty years later. CID and press alike routinely flattened the taxonomy of institutions into “asylum” when describing persons under care for nervous or mental derangement. The functional gist is breakdown with sequestration, not the precise brass plate on the door. A Lunatic asylum is a lunatic asylum. No one called a hospital a lunatic asylum. You’ve simply made that up. Smith knew what a lunatic asylum was, as we all do. Francis Thompson was never in one. This is a fact.

You are free to maintain a hyper-literal dictionary line, but it’s neither how Victorians wrote nor how Smith’s audience would have read him. On the evidence we actually have, “asylum history” describes Thompson’s 1888–89 trajectory quite well. I will maintain the truth Richard, you can invent all that you like. Francis Thompson was never in a lunatic asylum and that is precisely where Smith said that his suspect had been. Therefore it wasn’t the same man.

Status: Match in the sense Smith is clearly using the term (breakdown + institutional care), with the added (and case-relevant) detail that Thompson’s six-week removal neatly brackets the end of the series.

Nope. You’re just trying to manipulate wording. You’re wriggling and it’s embarrassing. Smith knew what a lunatic asylum was, he’d have played a part in sending people to one. Thompson had never been in one. Therefore Smith clearly wasn’t talking about Thompson.

⸻

3) “Bilking with polished farthings” — the point is the coin-fraud motif, not that the identical trick is documented on Thompson

You keep presenting this as: “Smith said ‘polished farthings’; unless Thompson is caught passing polished farthings, it’s a fail.” That’s a strawman. No, it’s comparing what Smith said to the FACTS of Thompson’s life not the imagined Patterson version.
• What Smith actually gives us is a profile bundle (a tight cluster of unusual traits) attached to a man frequently seen in the Haymarket/Rupert Street habitat. Thompson had no connection to Rupert Street. You can’t just imagine one. One element of his bundle is a distinctive coin-fraud habit used against prostitutes. Which Thompson was never accused of doing; so it doesn’t match. Another is an ex-medical student YES; another, asylum history DEFINITELY NO; another, the West End locus DEFINITELY NO (you keep increasing the vagueness of the location to encompass any area where Thompson might have visited at some point). The evidentiary function of the coin item is to reduce the candidate set—it’s a screening variable that makes the overall bundle rarer. Stop waffling Richard. Finding two sovereigns in the street isn’t on the same planet as conning prostitutes with polished farthings.
• What we document in Thompson’s case is (i) an independent coin motif embedded in his personal lore (Walsh’s sovereign episode), Not even remotely compatible (you might as well say that Smith’s suspect and Thompson both had legs) coupled with (ii) chronic proximity to vulnerable women (Where are you getting these weird phrases from? He lived with a prostitute…that’s not a chronic proximity..he was in love with her) and (iii) a documented moralized obsession with prostitution (see below). How are you managing to fit so much that isn’t true into one post Richard. This may be some kind of record. He had no obsession with prostitution. He fell in love with one. She left him. He searched for her for around two months and then gave up but never spoke of her but with absolute kindness) No one is claiming Walsh wrote “polished farthings.” I am claiming that the coin deception motif in a man matching the rest of the bundle is probative—not dispositive by itself, probative as part of the five-way conjunction. Utter, contemptible nonsense. No serious person could conflate conning prostitutes with polished farthings and finding 2 sovereigns.

If you insist that only a prosecution-grade example of “polished farthings” with Thompson’s name on it could allow the coin axis to count, you’ve misunderstood how convergent features operate in historical identification problems. The coin element is one of five screens; it does its job by being rare, not by being identical. No, I expect you to not keep trying to change the evidence to fit the point.

Status: The “coin trick on prostitutes” axis is satisfied at the motif level in a man who otherwise matches the set; it increases the weight of the conjunction rather than standing alone.

100% invention. Shameful.
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4) “Rupert Street / Haymarket nexus” — this is geography, not tenancy

You argue “no match” because Thompson never “lived” on Rupert Street. Smith’s line is: “I thought he was likely to be in Rupert Street, Haymarket. I sent up two men, and there he was.” That’s a haunt, not a lease. No one would have had the slightest reason to think “you will be likely to find Francis Thompson in Rupert Street.”
• Thompson’s West End base: After Meynell’s rescue, Thompson’s postal and social axis sits on Charing Cross / Haymarket. I’ve read Walsh. Sometime in early May Wilfrid Meynell went to the Charing Cross chemist look g for Thompson because he gave this chemist as his place for receiving mail. When Meynell got their Thompson no longer went there. He had done a runner leaving a debt which Meynell paid. So we can eliminate Charing Cross from your fantasy. He worked for, lodged with, and was ferried by the Meynells just off the Haymarket in Panton Street Could you please provide evidence that he lived with the Meynell’s. I recall him being a regular visitor but I can’t recall him living there. —a two-minute walk to Rupert Street. But not Rupert Street. Smith didn’t tell his men “go and look in the vicinity of Rupert Street. He sent them specifically to Rupert Street therefore Rupert Street was the relevant location. Not a few streets away or in the same post code or in the same city. He frequented Providence Row in the East I wish you would stop with this. Please try and post honestly as it would help. There is no evidence that Thompson ever stayed there. None. Zilch. Zero. and walked nights between those poles. His editor records him vanishing for days and returning exhausted in precisely this window.
• Functional reading: Smith’s Rupert Street is not a cadastral claim no one uses that word - speak English and stop trying the old ‘blind with science’ trick. —it’s a police pointer to a habitat. “Send two men to Rupert Street” reads as: go to the known prostitution artery where this subject is commonly seen. Absolutely nonsense. Thompson, demonstrably, was embedded in that West End ecosystem. If you want “no match,” you’d need positive evidence that Thompson never used Rupert Street and never moved through the Haymarket spine. You don’t have that; the record points the other way. Have you evidence that Rupert Street was significant to Thompson? No. So you should perhaps stop. I’m embarrassed for you.

Status: Match at the level Smith uses: the suspect’s operating habitat sits on the Haymarket / Rupert Street spine, which is exactly where Thompson’s post-rescue life is situated.

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5) “Spent all his time with women of loose character” — police hyperbole describing a known pattern

You label this 50/50 “at best.” Smith is not presenting a time-and-motion study; he’s writing a profile summary. What did City and Met observers routinely do? They over-represent the dominant social pattern that made a man visible to them. In Thompson’s case: Waffle. It’s either true or it isn’t. Whaddya know….its not.
• He cohabited for a year with a prostitute and then searched obsessively for her across the very weeks of the canonical murders (Walsh’s “most bizarre coincidence” footnote). He cohabited with ONE prostitute no more. He loved her. She left because she didn’t think that his friends would accept her. She left. He looked for her to ask her to come back. He didn’t find her. By October he’d given up. He wrote about her with love and kindness, never expressing any anger or hatred and yet you believe that while he was desperately searching for his lost love he stopped off to butcher a few prostitutes (with absolutely no evidence to back this up)
• He haunted Providence Row, No he didn’t. The only evidence we have is Thompson saying that he’d seen men queueing outside Providence Row. He never mentioning entering the place and you haven’t got a shred of evidence that he ever did and yet you keep repeating this lie as if it’s somehow a fact and you have the nerve to criticise me for not going along with it. doss houses, and streets populated by “unfortunates.”
• His prose and verse teem with medicalized contempt for prostitution (e.g., “ulcers,” “harlots in the mother’s womb,” the Nightmare’s disembowelment of a “corrupted” woman, and the Tancred crusader rhetoric calling for drowning). But he never mentions the word ‘prostitute.’ And writing is not physical violence. It’s not the same thing. Millions of written about violence and a whole lot worse than Thompson…are they all potential serial killers or is this theory only applicable to one man as appears to be the case?
• Hopkins’ “Mr. Moring” account situates him night-walking the East End, intimate with opium dens and taverns, and looking exactly like Hutchinson’s companion at Kelly’s side. What are you talking about?

Does “all his time” literally mean twenty-four hours a day? No, but it has to indicate more than one prostitute. Obviously not. It’s the police way of saying: his associates and movements are consistently among unfortunates. That is the Thompson pattern in late 1888. He never bilked any with polished farthings though. All that you are doing is making convenient assumptions which are based on the known facts about Thompson. Imagination isn’t evidence.

Status: Match at the level of police characterization.

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About that “alibi”

You lean hard on Smith’s closing clause: “but… he proved an alibi without a shadow of doubt,” as if that logically retro-erases the five-point identification and applies across dates and jurisdictions. It doesn’t. It does. But we don’t need the conclusion because the points themselves erase the points.
• Smith’s passage concerns one suspect-check episode (“After the second crime I sent word…”). An “alibi” accepted for a specific window (or for City jurisdiction) is not a blanket cancellation of identity for other dates or the series. That’s just meaningless. Senior officers accepted alibis that later proved partial, conditional, or ill-tested. Even your own allies on Casebook have pointed out how many Victorian “alibis” boil down to a landlady’s assurance that a man “always slept here.” THEY FOUND THE MAN AND HE HAD POLISHED FARTHINGS ON HIM….THOMPSON NEVER CARRIED POLISHED FARTHINGS…THIS ISBT DIFFICULT STUFF RICHARD.
• If you choose to identify Smith’s man as Puckridge (because City CID shadowed him to a Rupert Street coffee house and a proprietor said he’d slept there “every night” for four weeks), you have essentially conceded my structural point: I’ve never mentioned Puckridge. What are you talking about? the profile bundle Please stop making up silly phrases just to make your point look academic was applied to a highly specific Haymarket denizen , in precisely the habitat and pattern that Thompson occupies. And you must still explain why Thompson independently matches the same five screeners and dovetails with the Ripper timeline. I’ve explained it very clearly Richard, using the English language, reason and actual evidence and not evidence that you’ve made up. It’s black and white. Thompson doesn’t match. It’s not even close. Smith’s man 100% wasn’t Thompson.

The correct lesson from “alibi” is this: the City checked a man who perfectly fit the bundle ; they accepted coverage for the slice of time they were testing. That doesn’t dissolve the bundle’s value as a selector; it shows how close the net already was—on a profile that Thompson uniquely satisfies as well. He doesn’t fit. Waffle all that you like Richard. You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole. Stick to the facts and not your desire to be the man who solved the case (and sold some books)


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Convergence, not cherry-picking: why the bundle matters

You accuse me of “promotion before evidence,” then trim each of Smith’s features down to a hairline reading and declare “no match.” That’s backwards. Identification in historical cases proceeds by convergent rare features.

You do not need each feature to be proven with courtroom rigidity; you need them to be independent screens that, when multiplied, make the chance of a random impostor negligible. Smith’s bundle gives five such screens. Thompson independently contributes more:
• Temporal dovetail: Walsh’s footnote: August–September 1888 Thompson is night-walking the East End looking for his prostitute lover (“the most bizarre coincidence in his life”). Explained. No anger. No Ill feeling. A man who had never been violent
• Removal after Kelly: The six-week private hospital stay (properly placed after 5 Nov), four-day relapse, then Storrington by New Year—precisely bracketing the cessation of murders. No. He was placed in the hospital sometime in October according to Walsh. For six weeks. Meaning that he was in hospital when Kelly was killed. Thompson has an alibi.
• Psychological template: Nightmare of the Witch-Babies (1886)—the London hunt, stalking the “unclean” woman, abdominal opening, viscera, and womb fixation (“two witch-babies”)—prefiguring Chapman/Eddowes/Kelly in structure and focus. Poems - utterly irrelevant.
• Anatomical competence under pressure: Six years of dissections; blade habit; poetic fixation on controlled bloodflow (matching the killer’s method of avoiding arterial spray). On a medical course that he failed. And opinion is divided on what if any medical knowledge the killer had.
• Direct mooring to Kelly’s orbit: Providence Row; As far as evidence goes he was never in there. Hopkins’ “Mr. Moring” (a veiled Thompson) who looked exactly like Hutchinson’s man; Hopkins’s explicit claim that “Moring” was Kelly’s friend; and Thompson’s West End anchor yards from Rupert Street. I still don’t know, or can’t recall, who Hopkins is. (Please don’t say that it’s the poet?) Fiction doesn’t count but as your case is fiction I can see why you’re drawn to it.

When you keep just one tile in view—say, “farthings” or “tenancy on Rupert Street”—you can talk yourself into a “no match.” When you step back and stack the tiles, the mosaic stops being an inkblot and turns into a portrait. What that means is - if you are going to read the evidence and not distort it - guilty as charged.

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Walsh wasn’t blind. He was cautious.

You cite Walsh for your “no asylum / no farthings / no Rupert Street” rulings. But Walsh is the source who quietly flags the coincidence that topples the old complacency:

“At this time (August–September, 1888) occurred the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson’s life…. He was, after all, a drug addict, acquainted with prostitutes and, most alarming, a former medical student!” And? Did Walsh think for a second that Thompson was the ripper…no. Did anyone that ever met him…no. I wonder why?

Walsh had access to original papers and family sensibilities. In the 1960s, openly pointing to a Catholic poet as a potential serial killer was career poison. He did what careful scholars under constraint do: he footnoted the key, he hinted, he refrained from a trumpet blast. If you want to invoke Walsh, invoke all of him—including the footnote that declares the overlap the most bizarre coincidence of Thompson’s life. It was placed in a footnote because of its staggering unimportance. How utterly desperate are you Richard.

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Hopkins didn’t name him. He disguised him.

You can wave away “Mr. Moring,” but you can’t explain him. Hopkins:
• Knew Thompson’s haunts (interviewed McMaster in 1927; published his finds).
• Walked the East End at night with a poet-friend who smoked opium, haunted taverns, and looked exactly like Hutchinson’s man with Kelly.
• Called him “Moring” while leaving ring-based clues that point directly to Thompson (the “more rings” conceit attached to Thompson’s work and epitaph).
• Said “Moring” was Kelly’s friend.

If your poll means to be “honest,” factor that testimony in. Either Hopkins is inventing, or he’s telling you—carefully—that the poet at Kelly’s side lived in Thompson’s skin. FICTION.

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Probability isn’t a magic wand—but it does tell you when to stop pretending “anyone” could fit

You’ve caricatured the math as “garbage in, garbage out.” That’s true of bad models. It’s not true of this one.
• Start with a base population (adult males in London c. 1888).
• Apply five independent screens from Smith’s bundle:
1. ex-medical student, YES
2. asylum/sequestration history, NO
3. prostitutes in social orbit, ONE PROSTITUTE
4. coin-fraud motif, NO
5. Haymarket/Rupert Street habitat. NO
Each cut shrinks the candidate pool by orders of magnitude.
• Now condition on Thompson’s independent traits:
• six years of anatomical training with demonstrated dissections; BE ACCURATE, 6 YEARS OF GENERAL NEDICAL TRAINING OF WHICH A PART WAS DISSECTION
• scalpel possession; RIPPER DIDNT USE A SCALPEL - THOMPSON USED IT TO SHAVE
• violent, medicalized anti-prostitute rhetoric in prose and verse; IRRELEVANT…NO ACTUAL, REAL VIOLENCE
• Nightmare’s abdominal/womb obsession; NO
• Providence Row linkage; NO, HE SAW IT, THATS ALL THE EVIDENCE TELLS US
• Hopkins/Moring mooring to Kelly; DONT KNOW WHO YOU NEAN
• six-week removal immediately after Kelly. BUT PROBABLY IN HOSPITAL WHEN KELLY WAS KILLED

When you multiply the rarity of the Smith bundle with the rarity of Thompson’s independent profile—and then add temporal and geographic dovetailing—the posterior that “some other random man” matches the whole picture goes beyond “implausible.” It sinks into “effectively nil.” The chances of it being Thompson are zero

If you think another named man meets all the screens and the time-and-place dovetails, put him up and let’s cost it out side-by-side. Otherwise, a poll of impressions isn’t a substitute for updating beliefs when convergent data demand it.

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Why your “no match” rulings don’t hold
• Asylum: You’ve equated “asylum” with “county madhouse only.” Smith didn’t. His audience didn’t. The functional match—breakdown plus sequestration in a private hospital and then a religious house—is exactly the history memoirists lumped under “asylum.” Francis Thompson was never in an asylum. I’ll keep saying this as long as you keep posting things that aren’t true.
• Farthings: You’ve demanded identical facticity on the coin trick as a precondition to letting the coin axis count. That’s not how profile bundles work. The coin motif screens; it doesn’t have to be the exact trick. Yes it does. Bilking prostitutes with polished farthings is not compatible to finding two sovereigns.
• Rupert Street: You’ve treated an officer’s “you’ll find him in Rupert Street” as if it were a leasehold search. It’s a habitat pointer. Thompson’s postal/social base sits on that grid, and Providence Row pulls his orbit straight through it.No, it meant that Smith had reason to believe that his man would be in Rupert Street….its impossible that he could have thought that about Thompson. WHAT YOU ARE IN EFFECT SAYING RICHARD IS THAT SMITH SAID TO HIS MEN “I KNOW, JUST GO DOWN TO RUPERT STREET ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT FRANCIS THOMPSON MIGHT, FOR SOME UNFATHOMABLE REASON, JUST HAPPEN TO WALK PAST”
• “All his time with loose women” is hyperbole for a known pattern, not a diary log. Thompson lived with and hunted prostitutes; his prose/verse treat them as pathological; his nights were spent among them. That’s precisely why the police would summarize him that way. Nope

And the alibi clause? It narrows a window. It does not erase an identity that matches the five filters and the broader arc. In English?

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Following the evidence means following all of it

If your poll is genuinely about evidence over preference, then table all the relevant lines:
• Walsh’s footnote (the “most bizarre coincidence”). No.
• The Providence Row testimony tying both Thompson and Kelly to the same refuge. Was never in there.
• Hopkins’ “Mr. Moring” (Kelly’s friend; a poet; opium; Hutchinson lookalike; ring-clue to Thompson). Don’t know what you’re talking about.
• Thompson’s West End base (Panton/Charing Cross) steps from Rupert Street. Invention. He had no base there. At that time he lived in Chelsea and nowhere else.
• Smith’s five-point bundle and why those five points were chosen (to make the candidate rare). Your invention.
• The six-week post-Kelly removal, four-day relapse, then cloister—i.e., the series closing with his sequestration. This does introduce the very, very real possibility that Thompson could have been in hospital for both the Double Event and the Kelly murder. This places a huge doubt against him as a suspect.
• The 1886 Nightmare poem—London stalking, the “unclean” woman, abdominal opening, and womb fixation—two years before the murders. Fiction doesn’t count for anything.
• The blade, the dissections, the sister’s testimony about cadaver fees, and his own admissions about the dissecting room. Meaningless.

If you keep the focus on a single literal noun (“lunatic asylum,” “polished farthings,” “renting a bed on Rupert Street”), you can talk yourself into check-boxes that read “no match.” Once you replace the check-boxes with the pattern the boxes were meant to detect, the silhouette isn’t generic anymore. It’s Francis Thompson.

You titled your post “Following the evidence.” Good. Follow all of it. Not just the bits you can prune into tidy negations.

—Richard

This whole lengthy post was just a series of repetitions; most of which are provably false. Thompson couldn’t have been Smith’s man. He wasn’t Smith’s man. I’m struggling to find the words to describe the stuff that you’ve posted heard Richard. I can’t say what I really think.