Tweet
Modern criminal profiling has evolved dramatically since 1888, yet it is remarkable how precisely the most authoritative modern analysis of Jack the Ripper’s psychology and habits aligns with the known life and character of Francis Thompson.
In 1988, former FBI Special Agent John Douglas—co-founder of the Behavioural Science Unit and one of the world’s leading criminal profilers—presented his conclusions in the documentary The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper. A panel of experts examined several suspects, though notably Francis Thompson was not among them, his candidacy having only just been proposed that same year. Douglas’s independent behavioural profile, however, reads as though written with Thompson in mind.
Douglas predicted that the Ripper would:
- Possess a physical abnormality or frailty. Thompson himself recorded being rejected from military service for his undersized chest and described his arms and legs as thin and wasted from years of morphine addiction.
- Be unmarried and socially isolated. Thompson lived alone, maintaining no steady friendships and avoiding ordinary social contact.
- Have a revulsion toward blood despite anatomical knowledge. Thompson gave “aversion to blood” as his reason for abandoning medicine after six years of surgical training—a combination identical to Douglas’s forecast.
- Have his only intimate contact with a prostitute. Thompson’s single known relationship was with a prostitute who vanished during his time in Whitechapel.
- Be a local resident who blended into the district. Thompson was living rough in Spitalfields, within walking distance of every murder site.
- Have likely been questioned by police yet released. Thompson’s biographer John Walsh later suggested precisely that scenario.
- Exhibit ritualistic behaviour. Douglas defined ritual as “the acting out of fantasy—something he must do.” Thompson’s biographers describe him as obsessed with Catholic ceremony and personal rites, treating ritual itself as sacred theatre. J. C. Reid observed, “Ritual was for him poetry addressed to the eye—an end in itself.”
Douglas also said the killer would be a nocturnal wanderer of dishevelled appearance, in his mid- to late-twenties. Thompson was 28 during the murders, frequently walked the streets until dawn, and was famously unable to keep his clothing neat—“dingy, picturesque, and untidy,” as contemporaries described him.
Finally, Douglas believed the murders ceased not through death or repentance but because the killer was confined. Within days of Mary Kelly’s murder, Thompson was committed first to a private hospital and then to an isolated all-male monastery, where he remained under supervision. He lived another twenty years.
Taken together, Douglas’s forensic profile—formulated without any knowledge of Thompson—matches him point for point. The odds of that occurring by chance are vanishingly small. If the FBI’s leading behavioural model of the Ripper is accurate, Francis Thompson is not merely a plausible suspect—he is its living embodiment.