Following the evidence

[Lewis C]

Ironically, it's the nonsense surrounding the 5 traits that serves to ruin Thompson's candidacy as the Ripper.

If the so called 5 traits was left on the sideline where it belongs, the case for Thompson then becomes stronger.

That may sound counterintuitive, but sometimes... less is more.

That's true, because whomever Smith was talking about has an alibi, and is therefore innocent. The only reason why Thompson can even be considered a remote possibility for being the Ripper is because he wasn't the person that Smith was talking about.

[Lewis C]

Richard,

Rookie needs to apologize to absolutely no one for the views he has posted.

Your support for Thompson has gone from obsession to complete fanaticism.

If you post here, you are going to get opinions that differ from yours. You need to deal with it.

c.d.

Absolutely. The anti-factual and illogical nature of Richard's 5 points argument is so extreme that it manages to make the Lechmerians' Mizen scam arguments seem sensible in comparison.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I’m genuinely glad that open-minded posters like C.D, RD, Lewis, John, Doc and others are seeing where this is going from Richard. The exact same kind of bias that we see all too often in the case against Cross. An obvious tendency to see everything through the ‘Thompson was the ripper’ goggles.

I have no issue with someone favouring a candidate and contrary to Richard’s claim I have never viewed Druitt with anything approaching bias. Richard invents this so that he can paint me as someone who uses bias to make Druitt the killer. Every single poster, whether they agree with my opinions or not, knows this to be false. But this is just one of many tactics used here and tactics they most assuredly are. Richard tries every trick in the book. He stretches out any ‘criteria’ until it’s so unrecognisable from the original intent that he can fit Thompson into every gap. Provable untruths become truths. ‘Might have’s’ become facts. Someone mentions a coincidence and it becomes evidence of a hidden opinion. Mention a point and you find that he later words it differently and hopes that no one notices. Any suspect loses ‘value’ if this kind of effort is required because real evidence doesn’t require invention. Then you get Richard trying to frame the argument in a way that suggests that someone that disagrees is trying to create an impossibly exacting standard. Everyone can see that this isn’t the case too. We cannot change criteria just to create circumstances where a suspect might fit. Most people on here won’t have read Strange Harp, Strange Symphony by John Walsh, a biography of Thompson written in the late 60’s and I blame no one for that. I bought it a few years ago on the recommendation of Gary Barnett. I’ve now read it twice. Richard agrees that Walsh is a reliable biographer and not someone who would ‘airbrush’ Thompson. Indeed Walsh points out that after Thompson had died his friend and publisher Wilfrid Meynell got his friends to write about Thompson stressing that he died from TB (which he did) but he obviously did this to avoid his name being tainted with the possibility of a drugs-related death. Walsh is the best source of information. So without bias. Without changing the evidence. Without speculation being spouted as fact. We cannot change criteria see where Thompson stands as a suspect….without bias.

A couple of quickies. Do we have evidence of Thompson being violent? Absolutely not. We have not one piece of evidence to suggest it. Richard desperately goes to poetry as he is clearly a supporter of the concept of Hate speech. Any poetry analyst will warn you against falling into the trap of assuming that the poetry is autobiographical. We are dealing with fiction here and fiction written by a deeply religious, troubled drug addict. Hardly surprising that it might be a bit dark. Words aren’t violence though so we cannot be so dishonest as to call poetry violence. Richard does though. Unsurprisingly as it turns out.

Then what about the evil Thompson stalking his victim through the east end? Hardly. Thompson bore no ill-feeling against the woman who left him. Even in later life he wrote of her with nothing but kindness and affection. That he would have gone searching for his lost love whilst butchering prostitutes on the way is nonsense.

Few things are more contemptible than Richard blatantly accusing Thompson of being an arsonist. This is a stunner. As a child in church Thompson, in a childhood strop, swung around Thucible causing the smouldering charcoal to come out. A housekeeper stamped out the charcoal with a shovel. Arson?! Unbelievable. Then in later life two equally pathetic examples. A drug addled Thompson knocked over an oil lamp in his room then fled in panic. A clear accident. What about our next inferno. Our drug addicted poet left a pipe in his coat pocket that hadn’t fully gone out. I’m not making this up but from these three pathetic incidents Richard brands Thompson an arsonist. You couldn’t make it up.

That Thompson was medically trained is beyond question true. Individuals can assess how important they think that this fact is but it’s a literal truth to say that expert opinion is divided. Walsh (the reliable) said that Thompson had a horror of dissection and free flowing blood. We don’t know where he got this from but Walsh appears unlikely to be the kind of person to make something like this up, especially as it serves no purpose. Richard makes two points, 1) that Thompson kept going back to his father for money to pay for cadavers for dissection, and 2) his medical skill and the darkness at the time would have allowed him to kill without seeing the blood. Do I really need to point this out? 1) It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to consider what the drug-addicted Thompson might have been actually repeatedly asking for money for is it? Can I really be accused of exaggerating this obvious possibility. In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s a far more likely explanation than a desire for corpses. Even his sister suspected that he wanted the money for other reasons. And 2) Chapman was killed in daylight and Kelly was killed in a lit room so it’s hardly difficult to rebut that point is it?

Then we have Richard stating it as a fact that Thompson was living 100 yards from the scene of he murders. Check for yourselves - this is exactly his claim. And yet we know that no such claim can be made - not if we are being honest. Richard bases this on the fact that in his writing Thompson recalled seeing the men queueing outside the Providence Row Refuge. Is this how evidence works? Someone sees a building and so we are safe to assume that he’d been inside it. I’ve seen lots of hotels but that doesn’t mean that I’ve stayed in them. Richard tries to defend himself by saying as if I’m expecting a guestbook to show his name or some such exacting evidence. This is nonsense of course. But what we do require though, before stating as a fact that someone stayed somewhere is at least some evidence or else anyone could have stayed anywhere. It’s the minimum requirement. Yet we have not a shred of evidence that Thompson ever stayed there. Absolutely none. And yet Richard states this as if it’s a fact and then gets annoyed when I question him. I question him because he’s stating an absolute falsehood. Was Thompson ever in the east end in August/September? Yes, it appears likely that he was there at some point. We know that he slept rough and used dosshouses so it’s certainly not impossible that he might have stayed at the Providence Row Refuge but that’s a million miles away from stating it as a fact. He would also have spent time in the west end because that’s where his prostitute friend lived. To say that Thompson was living within a 100 yards of the murder sites at the time of the murders is simply to state an unknown as a fact.

Then we have Richards ‘traits’ from Major Smiths suspect. We can easily concede the medical student point. No issue there of course. That he spent all of his time with prostitutes is baseless supposition. He certainly knew one but we have no evidence of him knowing others but the most glaring piece of subterfuge of course is the coins travesty. Smith said that his men ‘bilked’ prostitutes by using polished farthings. As far as we know Francis `Thompson never did this, was never accused of it and was never even suspected of it. All that we have is the story that he told of finding 2 sovereigns in the street. Richard calls this a match. Bilking with polished farthings is a match for finding two sovereigns. No one could accept this. Richard gets into full on slippery mode by calling it a coin trick to try and fool people into connecting two utterly unconnected incidents just because coins were involved. Could anything be weaker? Could anything be more obvious; or dodgy? And what we have to remember is that when Smith’s suspect was located he actually had polished farthings on him. Clearly this wasn’t Thompson.

Then we have the risible suggestion that Thompson was in a lunatic asylum as Smith’s suspect was. Believe me, absolutely nowhere in the rd order is it said, suggested or hinted at that Thompson was ever in an asylum. He was in a normal hospital suffering from a near total collapse but that wasn’t until October. Yet Smith told Warren about this former lunatic asylum patient immediately after the Chapman murder. Richard then tries a bit of wriggling of the most embarrassing kind to say that hospitals were sometimes referred to as lunatic asylums. Have you ever heard such abject nonsense? It might have been the case that when a family member was sent to an asylum his relatives might euphemistically have termed it a hospital but certainly not the other way around! No normal hospital has ever been known as a lunatic asylum. The idea is preposterous by a good example of Richard’s methodology. Defend Thompson as a suspect at all costs.

Then of course we get the Rupert Street nonsense with Richard inventing this idea of a ‘nexus. As if a vague area was being suggested and an area wide enough to suggest that Thompson may at some time have been through there. It’s vital to remember that Smith didn’t send his men to an area (or indeed a nexus) to catch his man. He sent his men very specifically to Rupert Street and this could only have meant one or two things. Either that his man lived or worked there (categorically neither of which applied to Thompson) or that he went there every day or most days (again, this doesn’t apply to Thompson. Not a single thing connects Thompson specifically to Rupert Street. Certainly he wasn’t a thousand miles away but he still couldn’t possibly have been the man that Smith expected his men to find in Rupert Street so no matter how hard Richard tries with his meaningless, ‘nexus’ tactic it just won’t wash. It’s a complete nonstarter.

So from looking at the actual evidence and without trying to either narrow it down or widen it out it’s is patently obvious and beyond any doubt that Smith’s man just wasn’t Thompson.

Finally, we can talk about the hospital that Thompson most certainly was in. We have no exact dates and we cannot claim to the contrary but all that we can do is to go with the trustworthy Walsh (unless you’re Richard of course, because he then becomes only selectively trustworthy)

Walsh said that Thompson searched for his prostitute friend through August and September of 1888. Remember… the reliable Walsh. Then, around the beginning of October Meynell got Thompson to see a doctor because he was clearly unwell. The doctor said that he was near total physical collapse so he was admitted to a hospital (decidedly not a lunatic asylum) around the middle of October and he was in there for around 6 weeks. This would place him in hospital when Kelly was killed according to the reliable (selectively so in Richard’s case) Walsh.


Don’t be taken in by Richard’s sleight of hand. His smoke and mirrors. His attempts to sound scientific and academic. This is a case built on clear and obvious fabrications. On laughable ‘matches.’ On baseless assumptions stated as facts. By now it should be clear to all that despite Richard’s trickery Francis Thompson is a very poor suspect with nothing to commend him as the ripper. A totally non-violent and yet troubled man with a drug problem. Clearly innocent.