Why Thompson might be Jack the Ripper. In 1,200 words.

[Roy Corduroy]

Our Lady of England Priory Storrington, Sussex where he stayed in 1889. Francis Thompson's room was on the third floor, extreme left.

Immediately after the murders, Thompson was confined in a single room on the top floor of a building in an isolated country monastery. High walls with one gate surrounded it. Attack dogs patrolled the grounds and attacked him when he tried to go outside.

Hi Richard, I didn't read about the attack dogs in John Walsh's bio. Where did you get that please.

Roy

[Richard Patterson]

If you hated prostitutes, would you go live where they proliferated?

• If I wanted to kill them.
• If wanted to get away with murder by choosing a place where there were so many, there was no lack of opportunity.
• If I were Catholic and my preferred homeless shelter was there.
• If I followed the classic pattern of serial killers and killed near to my area of habitation.
• If they were swarming through an area, that before the reformation, was a place considered sacred and holy to Catholics

.

[Wickerman]

If you hated prostitutes, would you go live where they proliferated?

[Richard Patterson]

Thanks for that synopsis, Richard.

My one crticism is this: you state things which are not fact, as if they are fact, and this is offputting. Example:

'Thompson lived at the Providence Row Night Refuge on 50 Crispin Street, Whitechapel.'

From reading your threads here, I have surmised that you don't actually know that he lived there. You think it's likely he did, and you may well be right. But as far as I know, you do not have any kind of real proof he did in fact live there.

I am happy to be wrong about this, if I am, mind you, Just, I recall you saying yourself that there's no proof. And then giving a lot of examples of why you think it's likely he was there, which is fine. But if you don't have proof, it'll irk me if that's been put across as a fact when it isn't.

I'd have to eyeball every other 'fact', you know?

Thank you for the response. Your opinion is most welcome. In my summary of Thompson, and the way I write it, I do portray my information on Thompson as facts. To be fair, I should preface all the information I gave with words such as - maybe, possibly, might, appears that, potentially etc. I should strictly use such modal verbs to preface most of what I write. For example, in my book, I state that Catherine Eddowes had returned to London from hop picking in Kent. The truth of the matter is that I have no proof that Eddowes did go hop picking yet I present it as fact. In reality, I’m just relying on other writers and hearsay from people who spoke with Eddowes. I have not looked at employment records or hotel registers, to find my proof.

This is the same also for my claim that Thompson was staying at Providence Row. This information was found, in the1967 book “Strange Harp, Strange Symphony The Life of Francis Thompson”. The biographer, John Evangelist Walsh, painstakingly compiled his information from original documents including notebooks, letters, and manuscripts.

To outline Walsh’s research. He had access to Thompson’s papers at Greatham cottage with permission granted by a daughter of Thompson’s publisher. Here he took notes from Thompson’s notebooks from his time on the streets, between the years 1886-1888. Walsh examined Thompson’s papers at Chichester kept by a granddaughter of Thompson’s publisher. In London he went through the papers on Thompson, which were held by another granddaughter. Walsh interviewed Sir Francis Meynell. This was Francis Thompson’s godson and son of Thompson’s publisher. Sir Francis gave Walsh access to further letters by Francis Thompson. Walsh was given complete access, by the director of libraries of Boston College, to the Francis Thompson collection. Walsh went to St. Mary’s priory in Storrington, and made an extensive search of their archives. Walsh interviewed Norbert Thompson, the half brother of Francis Thompson, who supplied him with much information. Amongst other people and organizations that supplied him with information included a host of people, who knew Thompson from where he lived. This included Newbuildings in Sussex, Ashton-upon-Lyne, Manchester, Pantasaph, Ushaw College, Crawley, Owens College Manchester, Preston, The Guildhall Library, and the British Reading Room.

Walsh is one of America's most distinguished historians. He is respected and award winning the author of dozens of books. These include Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allen Poe ; Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution ; and The Shadows Rise: Abraham Licoln and the Ann Rutledge Legend. He was also the senior editor at Reader’s Digest

In his book on Thompson, Walsh wrote on what biographers consider being the one of the most fascinating and important episodes in Thompson’s life,

‘When neither food nor bed was available, he would, along with the other derelicts, often gravitate to one of the recently established Salvation Army shelters, or the Catholic Refuge in Providence Row. It was the later place that Thompson supplied, evidently from his own experience, a harrowing picture’

Walsh then quoted Thompson’s description of the Providence Row shelter. Thompson spoke of the “nightly crowd of haggard men,” who with, “sickening suspense and fear” waited to be admitted. Thompson’s account, of his experiences in the Providence Row Night Refuge, was to be included in an essay, “Catholics in Darkest England,” but before it was published, his publisher removed all references to Providence Row. Considering all this, I do think that when Walsh stated that Thompson stayed at Providence Row, he was given an ascertained fact, rather than an uniformed remark.

[Ausgirl]

Thanks for that synopsis, Richard.

My one crticism is this: you state things which are not fact, as if they are fact, and this is offputting. Example:

Thompson lived at the Providence Row Night Refuge on 50 Crispin Street, Whitechapel.

From reading your threads here, I have surmised that you don't actually know that he lived there. You think it's likely he did, and you may well be right. But as far as I know, you do not have any kind of real proof he did in fact live there.

I am happy to be wrong about this, if I am, mind you, Just, I recall you saying yourself that there's no proof. And then giving a lot of examples of why you think it's likely he was there, which is fine. But if you don't have proof, it'll irk me if that's been put across as a fact when it isn't.

I'd have to eyeball every other 'fact', you know?

[Richard Patterson]

Why Thompson might be Jack the Ripper. In 1,200 words.

Francis Thompson is my suspect for the London, 1888, Jack the Ripper murders. He is the only one who had combined all four main traits that people look for in the Ripper - ability, opportunity, motive, and a weapon. Thompson carried a knife, had trained as a surgeon, hated prostitutes, and lived right where the murders occurred. Right after the murders ended, he was confined in the country where he under constant surveillance and guarded by attack dogs

Until the murders, Thompson was living as a drug addicted homeless vagrant. As to ability, this man trained as a surgeon for 6 years, at Owens Medical College in Manchester. Here he cut up hundreds of cadavers and was taught the very new and rare technique of heart removal called the Virchow method. This used the removal of the heart via its lining. The doctor, who performed Mary Kelly’s Autopsy, told the killer had used this method to remove her heart. In regard to opportunity, Thompson lived at the Providence Row Night Refuge on 50 Crispin Street, Whitechapel. This was opposite Dorset Street, less than 100 meters from where, Mary Kelly was killed. Thompson was able to walk the streets at all hours. Being homeless for 3 years in the East End, he was part of the landscape and could come and go without rousing suspicion. Of his motive, Thompson had a resentment of prostitutes. At the start of June 1888, his year-long relationship with a prostitute ended angrily and suddenly. After he told her his first poems were to be published, she said she did not want the attention and she threatened to leave him. She since disappeared without a trace. His weapon was a dissecting scalpel that always carried, concealed under his coat.

He fits the profile for serial murderers used by FBI and CID. They tell us these killers harmless looking and charming, drifters. They are intelligent, in their late twenties and feel intense isolation. They kill strangers; near to where they live. They show a history of arson and acts of mutilation.. Unlike any other suspect Thompson fits this profile perfectly. During the murders he was a homeless drifter living in Whitechapel. He was 27-years-old and had attracted a prostitute into a relationship. He had run away from home, and cut off all ties with his past and was living an isolated existence. When he was a child he twice set fire to churches and would steal his sisters dolls and return them mutilated. Thompson’s match to the profile is extraordinary.

Immediately after the murders, Thompson was confined in a single room on the top floor of a building in an isolated country monastery. High walls with one gate surrounded it. Attack dogs patrolled the grounds and attacked him when he tried to go outside. From here in the autumn of 1889, he wrote a story –It was the only one he would ever write. Called the “The End Crowning Work” his ‘story’ was about a man who stabs a woman to death for fame. Part of it goes like this,

‘If confession indeed give ease, I who am deprived of all other confession, may yet find some appeasement in confessing to this paper. With the scourge of inexorable recollection, I will tear open my scars. With the cuts of pitiless analysis, I make the post-mortem examine of my crime.’ [He wrote how he killed her] At that moment, with a deadly voice the accomplice-hour gave forth its sinister command. I swear I struck not the first blow. Some violence seized my hand and drove the poniard down. Whereat she cried; and I, frenzied, dreading detection, dreading above all her awakening, - I struck again and again…I know you and myself. I have what I have. I work for the present. Now, relief unspeakable! that vindictive sleuth-hound of my sin has at last lagged from the trail; I have had a year of respite,’.. What crime can be interred so cunningly, but it will toss in its grave, and tumble the sleeked earth above it.... I do not repent, it is a thing for inconsequent weaklings...’

Rumors and hints that Thompson was the Ripper, began soon after his death in 1907. Everard Meynell, the son of his publisher described, the final meeting between Thompson and his unnamed prostitute, in his 1913 biography on Thompson, using words we associate with the Ripper murders,

'After his first interview with my father he had taken her his news "They will not understand our friendship." She said, and then, "I always knew you were a genius." And so she strangled the opportunity; she killed again the child, the sister; the mother had come to life within her.'

In 1945, Terence Connolly, another Thompson biographer, hinted more of the same, when wrote of meeting one of Thompson’s seminary schoolteachers,

‘We found the aged priest, sitting before a blazing hearth fire, reading a detective story in Braille. He was then eighty years old.... "Just a minute, Fathers, please. I must not lose my place. Oh, my! They’re hot on the trail of the murderer." As he spoke, he marked the place in some mysterious way, placed the book on the mantel over the fire, and then extended his hand in welcome.’

In 1987 John Evangelist Walsh, in his book spoke Thompson’s correlation to the crimes,

‘During the very weeks he was searching for his prostitute friend, London was in an uproar over the ghastly deaths of five such women at the hands of Jack the Ripper...it is not beyond possibility that Thompson himself may have been questioned. He was, after all, a drug addict, acquainted with prostitutes, and, most alarming, a former medical student!'

It was not until 1988, the centenary of the Ripper murders, that Thompson was directly proposed by the forensic pathologist Joseph C. Rupp, in his article “Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper?” in “The Criminologist,”

‘Francis Thompson spent six years in medical school: in effect, he went through medical school three times…The Ripper was able to elude the police so many times in spite of the complete mobilization of many volunteer groups and the law enforcement agencies in London. If we look at Thompson’s background, having lived on the streets for three years prior to this series of crimes, there is no doubt that he knew the back streets of London intimately and that his attire and condition as a derelict and drug addict would not arouse suspicion as he moved by day and night through the East End of London ... Francis Thompson was at least as good and perhaps a far better candidate for the role of Jack the Ripper than was the Duke of Clarence or any number of suspects that have been put forward over the past one hundred years.’

In 1997, I independently came to the same conclusion. My novel, “Francis Thompson & the Ripper Paradox”, mixes biography and historical narrative to describe why and how Thompson was Jack the Ripper. It is a result of decades long investigations in Australia, the United States and England, involving examinations of the murder locations, access to sealed files, and searches through archival documents. Made into an accessible ‘story’, my book contains never before seen facts and information on Francis Thompson and the Whitechapel Murder Investigation.