Following the evidence

[C. F. Leon]

So three people think that

1. A hospital is the same thing as a lunatic asylum. Or that ordinary hospitals are sometimes called lunatic asylums.

2. Bilking prostitutes with polished farthings is comparable to a man finding two sovereigns in the street.



I genuinely despair.

- Sorry Herlock, but I have to disagree with your first point, at least in part. I have come across several instances of "Grandpa's in the 'hospital'" being used as a euphemism for "the looney bin", especially in the Victorian and Edwardian eras- and at least once in my presence. Of course, it's usually being used as a cover-up, rather than actual confusion as to hospital/asylum definitions.

- Not knowing the difference between 'farthings' and 'sovereigns' keeps me from getting the comparison.

[Herlock Sholmes]

But Thompson wasn’t in a lunatic asylum he was in a hospital for a physical illness not a mental one so there was no need for euphemisms

[Herlock Sholmes]

There are other subjects that I’m interested in as I’m sure is the case with everyone. I’ve been interested in this case for getting on for 40 years and I really do think I’m getting close to the end. Every day I pretty much lose more and more interest..not just on the case itself but the approach. I’m really tired of constantly coming up against brick walls of nonsense; of having to explain over and over and over again why one plus one never makes nine. If we have strayed, and constantly keep straying so far from reason and reality then what’s the point? What’s the point of discussing a subject when the ground rules appear to have been changed to ‘anything can mean absolutely anything.’ Evidence or the lack of it doesn’t matter…just make something up and certain people have no problem with this. The case is full of things which are a matter of interpretation which provide ample scope for discussion and yet we keep finding people defending lies and distortions without feeling the need to stand up and say “no, I’m not accepting your deceitful, misleading approach.” Doesn’t the truth matter anymore? Let me give you an example:

Richard claims, as a fact (not as a ‘maybe’ or a ‘possible’ but as a fact) that Thompson was living within 100 yards of the murder sites. So anyone reading that would think “wow, that’s intriguing.” But guess what? It’s a lie. That’s not my opinion, or my interpretation, I’m just telling you a fact. It’s a lie. Richard is talking about the Providence Row refuge. The only record we have..and i do mean ONLY…of Thompson mentioning that place is when he said that he’d seen men queueing there. He never mentions staying there. EVER. Now, he may have done so at some point. So MIGHT any number of men. But we have ZERO evidence of Thompson ever staying there. I hope that I’m being clear here….ZERO EVIDENCE. And yet here we are, people on here don’t seem to mind that this guy is just making things up. It doesn’t seem to bother some people.

Well, sadly it bothers me….a lot.

So what’s the point?

[John Wheat]

There are other subjects that I’m interested in as I’m sure is the case with everyone. I’ve been interested in this case for getting on for 40 years and I really do think I’m getting close to the end. Every day I pretty much lose more and more interest..not just on the case itself but the approach. I’m really tired of constantly coming up against brick walls of nonsense; of having to explain over and over and over again why one plus one never makes nine. If we have strayed, and constantly keep straying so far from reason and reality then what’s the point? What’s the point of discussing a subject when the ground rules appear to have been changed to ‘anything can mean absolutely anything.’ Evidence or the lack of it doesn’t matter…just make something up and certain people have no problem with this. The case is full of things which are a matter of interpretation which provide ample scope for discussion and yet we keep finding people defending lies and distortions without feeling the need to stand up and say “no, I’m not accepting your deceitful, misleading approach.” Doesn’t the truth matter anymore? Let me give you an example:

Richard claims, as a fact (not as a ‘maybe’ or a ‘possible’ but as a fact) that Thompson was living within 100 yards of the murder sites. So anyone reading that would think “wow, that’s intriguing.” But guess what? It’s a lie. That’s not my opinion, or my interpretation, I’m just telling you a fact. It’s a lie. Richard is talking about the Providence Row refuge. The only record we have..and i do mean ONLY…of Thompson mentioning that place is when he said that he’d seen men queueing there. He never mentions staying there. EVER. Now, he may have done so at some point. So MIGHT any number of men. But we have ZERO evidence of Thompson ever staying there. I hope that I’m being clear here….ZERO EVIDENCE. And yet here we are, people on here don’t seem to mind that this guy is just making things up. It doesn’t seem to bother some people.

Well, sadly it bothers me….a lot.

So what’s the point?

I feel the same Herlock. It bothers me that the evidence just isn't there and that a lot of things are being made up. But of course Thompson could have been the Ripper because he had anatomical knowledge.

[Richard Patterson]

There are other subjects that I’m interested in as I’m sure is the case with everyone. I’ve been interested in this case for getting on for 40 years and I really do think I’m getting close to the end. Every day I pretty much lose more and more interest..not just on the case itself but the approach. I’m really tired of constantly coming up against brick walls of nonsense; of having to explain over and over and over again why one plus one never makes nine. If we have strayed, and constantly keep straying so far from reason and reality then what’s the point? What’s the point of discussing a subject when the ground rules appear to have been changed to ‘anything can mean absolutely anything.’ Evidence or the lack of it doesn’t matter…just make something up and certain people have no problem with this. The case is full of things which are a matter of interpretation which provide ample scope for discussion and yet we keep finding people defending lies and distortions without feeling the need to stand up and say “no, I’m not accepting your deceitful, misleading approach.” Doesn’t the truth matter anymore? Let me give you an example:

Richard claims, as a fact (not as a ‘maybe’ or a ‘possible’ but as a fact) that Thompson was living within 100 yards of the murder sites. So anyone reading that would think “wow, that’s intriguing.” But guess what? It’s a lie. That’s not my opinion, or my interpretation, I’m just telling you a fact. It’s a lie. Richard is talking about the Providence Row refuge. The only record we have..and i do mean ONLY…of Thompson mentioning that place is when he said that he’d seen men queueing there. He never mentions staying there. EVER. Now, he may have done so at some point. So MIGHT any number of men. But we have ZERO evidence of Thompson ever staying there. I hope that I’m being clear here….ZERO EVIDENCE. And yet here we are, people on here don’t seem to mind that this guy is just making things up. It doesn’t seem to bother some people.

Well, sadly it bothers me….a lot.

So what’s the point?

Herlock, I hear the weariness in your words. Forty years of trudging through smoke and fog, and now you find yourself tired of brick walls and distortions. You ask: doesn’t the truth matter anymore?

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: truth does matter, but truth often wears the mask of circumstantial evidence, not the shining badge of direct confession. In courts of law, men and women are convicted every single day on circumstantial chains—because when you add enough independent links, the chain is unbreakable. The judge will tell the jury: “Direct evidence can lie; circumstantial evidence rarely conspires.”

You accuse me of deceit, of saying Thompson lived within a hundred yards of the murder sites. Yet what I have always maintained is that he was moored in the Haymarket–Whitechapel axis, and that Providence Row sits precisely where Mary Kelly herself sought shelter. John Walsh, Thompson’s own biographer, quietly slipped that fact into a footnote, calling it “the most bizarre coincidence.” Do you really think a man who wrote The Nightmare of the Witch-Babies in 1886—a poem rehearsing the very disembowelments to come—had no reason to pass through the same refuge used by the women who would soon die?

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: you demand ZERO EVIDENCE of Thompson staying there, but you will not apply the same knife to other suspects whose alibis crumble under light. The City CID trailed Puckridge to Rupert Street and cleared him; Major Henry Smith then wrote of a suspect with five traits—ex-medical student, asylum patient, coin trickster, whore-haunter, Rupert Street man. You dismiss that too. If you cut away every testimony, every memoir, every record that isn’t notarised in triplicate, then you are not solving a crime—you are performing its burial.

You say you are losing interest because the ground rules have changed. But the only rules that have changed are yours: once upon a time you weighed probabilities, now you discard them as “nonsense.” Yet the arithmetic remains: the odds of a random Londoner matching those five traits is less than one in 20 quadrillion. That is not invention. That is the cold hand of mathematics.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: when the murders ceased on the very week Thompson was admitted to private care, history drew its own full stop. You may turn your back in exhaustion, but the record remains. The frail poet who carved cadavers for six years at Owen’s College, who wrote of women’s wombs as corrupted tombs, who carried a surgeon’s knife while sleeping in doorways, and who was bathed and clothed by the Meynells just before the killing spree—that man did not float through Whitechapel as a ghost of coincidence. He was there. He had the means, the obsession, and the opportunity.

So you ask, “what’s the point?” The point is this: if you insist that absence of a stamped lodging slip cancels the convergence of medical skill, prostitute obsession, asylum history, coin motif, and the murders ceasing upon institutionalisation—then you are not defending truth. You are defending your fatigue.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Herlock, I hear the weariness in your words. Forty years of trudging through smoke and fog, and now you find yourself tired of brick walls and distortions. You ask: doesn’t the truth matter anymore?

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: truth does matter, but truth often wears the mask of circumstantial evidence, not the shining badge of direct confession. In courts of law, men and women are convicted every single day on circumstantial chains—because when you add enough independent links, the chain is unbreakable. The judge will tell the jury: “Direct evidence can lie; circumstantial evidence rarely conspires.”

You accuse me of deceit, of saying Thompson lived within a hundred yards of the murder sites. Yet what I have always maintained is that he was moored in the Haymarket–Whitechapel axis, and that Providence Row sits precisely where Mary Kelly herself sought shelter. John Walsh, Thompson’s own biographer, quietly slipped that fact into a footnote, calling it “the most bizarre coincidence.” Do you really think a man who wrote The Nightmare of the Witch-Babies in 1886—a poem rehearsing the very disembowelments to come—had no reason to pass through the same refuge used by the women who would soon die?

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: you demand ZERO EVIDENCE of Thompson staying there, but you will not apply the same knife to other suspects whose alibis crumble under light. The City CID trailed Puckridge to Rupert Street and cleared him; Major Henry Smith then wrote of a suspect with five traits—ex-medical student, asylum patient, coin trickster, whore-haunter, Rupert Street man. You dismiss that too. If you cut away every testimony, every memoir, every record that isn’t notarised in triplicate, then you are not solving a crime—you are performing its burial.

You say you are losing interest because the ground rules have changed. But the only rules that have changed are yours: once upon a time you weighed probabilities, now you discard them as “nonsense.” Yet the arithmetic remains: the odds of a random Londoner matching those five traits is less than one in 20 quadrillion. That is not invention. That is the cold hand of mathematics.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: when the murders ceased on the very week Thompson was admitted to private care, history drew its own full stop. You may turn your back in exhaustion, but the record remains. The frail poet who carved cadavers for six years at Owen’s College, who wrote of women’s wombs as corrupted tombs, who carried a surgeon’s knife while sleeping in doorways, and who was bathed and clothed by the Meynells just before the killing spree—that man did not float through Whitechapel as a ghost of coincidence. He was there. He had the means, the obsession, and the opportunity.

So you ask, “what’s the point?” The point is this: if you insist that absence of a stamped lodging slip cancels the convergence of medical skill, prostitute obsession, asylum history, coin motif, and the murders ceasing upon institutionalisation—then you are not defending truth. You are defending your fatigue.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you.

People do get convicted on an accumulation of circumstantial evidence but thankfully they don't usually get convicted on totally invented evidence which is what you are reliant upon. The suggestion "well he might have done x" isn't valid evidence but it appears to be your kind of evidence. If someone says "the suspect was 6'5" tall, 20 stone and with red hair," and there is someone that is 5'7", 13 stone and with black hair, the correct approach isn't to say "well, he was a man and he had hair...that's a good enough match." But this is what you do. It's not a case of not being too prescriptive it's a case of not widening out the criteria to such a ridiculous extent that almost anything or anyone will fit. This is exactly what you do time and time again.


.....


But you haven't always claimed that he was based in a Whitechapel-Haymarket axis. You stated, and we have it in black and white, that Thompson was living within 100 yards of the murder sites at the time of the murders. You stated that Richard..no one else. And you've also stated as a fact that he stayed at the Providence Row Refuge and yet you know full well that there is no evidence that he had. Again, you stretch the criteria. Thompson saw the Refuge so that's enough for you..if he saw it he must have stayed there. Evidence doesn't work like that and this kind of thinking has no place in any valid look at the case.


The fact that Walsh mentioned the coincidence in a footnote is because he placed zero significance in it and yet you hint at something that isn't there. As if Walsh somehow suspect Thompson..which he obviously didn't


....


I don't demand zero evidence of him staying there...I demand evidence of him staying there because you make the false positive claim that he did.


....


The five traits are beneath contempt Richard. This isn't interpretation it's wilful manipulation. Rupert Street wasn't mentioned by Smith as an area or a rough approximation or a nexus. Smith obviously knew that he had good reason to find his man in Rupert Street. He could have had no reason to suspect that he would find Thompson there because, as you well know, Thompson had no connection whatsoever to Rupert Street.


And as far as the traits go arithmetic doesn't come into because 3 out of the 5 are inventions on your part and 1 of the remaining 2 is gross exaggeration.


...


The reason for my 'fatigue' as you call it is you. After the Cross nonsense here we get another suspect proposer who cares nothing for truth or evidence. You will simply do anything, try anything and stoop to anything to promote your suspect and book.


Thompson is a very weak suspect with nothing to lead us to suspect him of these murders. And if we believe his biographer Walsh, which you do when it suits you, there is a very serious chance that he was in hospital (which definitely wasn't a lunatic asylum) at the time of the Kelly murder.

[Richard Patterson]

People do get convicted on an accumulation of circumstantial evidence but thankfully they don't usually get convicted on totally invented evidence which is what you are reliant upon. The suggestion "well he might have done x" isn't valid evidence but it appears to be your kind of evidence. If someone says "the suspect was 6'5" tall, 20 stone and with red hair," and there is someone that is 5'7", 13 stone and with black hair, the correct approach isn't to say "well, he was a man and he had hair...that's a good enough match." But this is what you do. It's not a case of not being too prescriptive it's a case of not widening out the criteria to such a ridiculous extent that almost anything or anyone will fit. This is exactly what you do time and time again.


.....


But you haven't always claimed that he was based in a Whitechapel-Haymarket axis. You stated, and we have it in black and white, that Thompson was living within 100 yards of the murder sites at the time of the murders. You stated that Richard..no one else. And you've also stated as a fact that he stayed at the Providence Row Refuge and yet you know full well that there is no evidence that he had. Again, you stretch the criteria. Thompson saw the Refuge so that's enough for you..if he saw it he must have stayed there. Evidence doesn't work like that and this kind of thinking has no place in any valid look at the case.


The fact that Walsh mentioned the coincidence in a footnote is because he placed zero significance in it and yet you hint at something that isn't there. As if Walsh somehow suspect Thompson..which he obviously didn't


....


I don't demand zero evidence of him staying there...I demand evidence of him staying there because you make the false positive claim that he did.


....


The five traits are beneath contempt Richard. This isn't interpretation it's wilful manipulation. Rupert Street wasn't mentioned by Smith as an area or a rough approximation or a nexus. Smith obviously knew that he had good reason to find his man in Rupert Street. He could have had no reason to suspect that he would find Thompson there because, as you well know, Thompson had no connection whatsoever to Rupert Street.


And as far as the traits go arithmetic doesn't come into because 3 out of the 5 are inventions on your part and 1 of the remaining 2 is gross exaggeration.


...


The reason for my 'fatigue' as you call it is you. After the Cross nonsense here we get another suspect proposer who cares nothing for truth or evidence. You will simply do anything, try anything and stoop to anything to promote your suspect and book.


Thompson is a very weak suspect with nothing to lead us to suspect him of these murders. And if we believe his biographer Walsh, which you do when it suits you, there is a very serious chance that he was in hospital (which definitely wasn't a lunatic asylum) at the time of the Kelly murder.

Herlock, you say you are weary of nonsense and deceit. Don’t say I didn’t tell you: what you are actually weary of is the moment when the old scaffolding collapses and new evidence forces a reckoning.

Mistake #1 — Denial of new data (-50%)

You dismiss probability arithmetic as “beneath contempt.” Yet the convergence of five traits from Major Smith is new data compared to Druitt or Kosminski. You wave it away because it threatens your model. That halves your cognitive function before we’ve even begun.

You accuse me of “inventing evidence.” But I did not invent that Thompson lived in the Whitechapel–Haymarket axis. John Walsh himself called it a “most bizarre coincidence” that Thompson was there with his prostitute just as the killings began. If you deny Walsh’s record, you deny Thompson’s own biographer.

Mistake #2 — Unrealistic burden of proof (-45%)

You insist that unless I produce a receipt signed by the Providence Row refuge, it is a “lie” to connect Thompson to it. No 1888 vagrant came with a boarding slip. By demanding nuclear DNA standards from a Victorian lodging house, you cripple your reasoning by another half.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: in courtrooms, probability chains convict men every week. They do not wait for perfect photographs or DNA in order to act.

Mistake #3 — Misplaced loyalty (-40%)

You say Macnaghten preferred Druitt, so the matter is closed. Yet Macnaghten never heard of Thompson. To freeze knowledge at 1894 is to ignore the evidence that came later. That locks your reasoning in the past.

You accuse me of stretching criteria—when in fact I am tightening them. Smith listed five traits. Thompson matches them uniquely. Puckridge fits only fragments and was cleared with an alibi. This is not dilution. This is concentration.

Mistake #4 — Appeal to tradition (-35%)

You write: “Smith obviously knew he had good reason to find his man in Rupert Street.” And then: “Thompson had no connection whatsoever.” That is an appeal to tradition—“because we’ve always thought otherwise, it cannot be Thompson.” Yet Thompson’s Haymarket lodgings and night-walking placed him at Rupert Street’s edge. To pretend he was nowhere near is to blind yourself.

Mistake #5 — Authority bias (-35%)

You lean on Walsh to say: “Walsh didn’t suspect Thompson, therefore his footnote means nothing.” That is authority bias. Walsh was cautious; he was not a forensic pathologist. He gave us the fact. We, with new mathematics, are allowed to draw its consequence.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: one generation records data, the next generation interprets.

Mistake #6 — Cherry-picking (-30%)

You seize on the one refuge anecdote, strip it of context, and declare: “zero evidence.” Yet you ignore Thompson’s biographical collapse, his desperate search for his prostitute, his knife-carrying, his cadaver training, his coincidence with the murders’ start and stop. To pluck one leaf and call the forest absent is cherry-picking.

Mistake #7 — Moving the goalposts (-45%)

When Thompson matches Smith’s five traits, you declare three “inventions.” When those inventions are shown as Victorian terminology overlaps (asylum vs. priory, coin trick vs. coin anecdote, Rupert Street axis vs. tenancy), you shift the goalposts again: now only notarised tenancy counts, or direct admission slips. This ensures no suspect could ever pass. It is an impossible standard.

Mistake #8 — Ad hominem (-25%)

You accuse me of “stooping to anything” to sell a book. That is attack on me, not the data. When you descend to that, your reasoning loses a quarter of its strength.

Mistake #9 — False equivalence (-50%)

You write: “If someone says the suspect was 6’5” with red hair, and I pick a 5’7” man with black hair, that is no match. That is what you do.” But Smith did not describe height or hair. He described five rare life traits. Thompson matches them in full. To equate that with hair colour is a false equivalence.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: this is precisely why the maths matters. Five rare traits converging in one man in the right place and time is not guesswork. It is probability science.

Mistake #10 — Argument from ignorance (-60%)

You end by saying: “Thompson is a very weak suspect with nothing to lead us to suspect him.” That is not evidence; that is ignorance. If you truly had nothing, you would not write twenty paragraphs of denial. The truth is that Thompson frightens you, because he fits too well.

Professional mistakes — ego and sunk cost

You call my five traits “beneath contempt.” That is loss aversion (-65%): four decades invested in other suspects. To change now would mean your books, your years, your loyalty—all wasted. You cannot allow it.

You lean on old police files saying “Thompson was not named.” That is failure to update (-55%). The files did not contain Walsh’s biography, Boardman’s notes, Rupp’s pathology. But we do. To refuse to update is to fossilize.

So here we stand:

• You say zero evidence; Walsh gave us the footnote.
• You say Providence Row means nothing; Mary Kelly herself queued there.
• You say Rupert Street excludes him; his lodgings and night-walking put him at its fringe.
• You say asylum is false; Thompson’s uncle testified to his breakdown and institutional care.
• You say three traits are inventions; but only by narrowing definitions until no Victorian suspect could fit.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you: each time you write “lie,” you fall into one of these traps. And each time, the mathematics still stands—one man in twenty quadrillion.

Not a ghost of coincidence.

Not an invention.

Francis Thompson.

[Doctored Whatsit]

I still don't understand how a claim that Thompson matches five traits mentioned by Major Smith proves scientifically that Thompson was the Ripper. Case closed!

Where is the absolute proof that Smith's five traits are categorically those of JtR and not just Thompson, even if it were accepted that all five traits do apply to Thompson?