Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper the works of Francis Thompson

Francis Thompson (1859-1907).

His own family who were closest, knew him as Jack the Ripper. They were Roman Catholics - once a minority social class in England used to harassment and vilification. The Thompson family had no friends, apart from the Catholic Priests. They kept their suspicions to themselves.

‘He could get into a temper when roused.’

His sister would volunteer if asked about him. About his medical studies, she said,

‘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.’

Francis Thompson, aged 24.

Francis Thompson Aged 9 with his sisters and their dolls.

There was always something wrong with Francis Thompson. He was a silent, brooding boy, who delighted in pulling the heads off dolls. He was an awkward, secretive teen with a habit of fire starting. His mother got him hooked on heroin before she died of a horrible illness.

In 1885, Thompson was 26 when, after a terrible argument with his father over his plans to remarry, he fled the Manchester family home for London. His people had already decided that Thompson was a lost cause and it didn't surprise them that within months of reaching the capital he spiralled out of control into drug-addiction, and became a homeless vagrant.

Francis Thompson Aged 17

Thompson was mentally disturbed. A Catholic priest said he showed, signs of schizophrenia. A psychiatrist said, by the age of 14, Thompson was exhibiting psychopathic tendencies. Another doctor put it more bluntly that Thompson's life was that of an overt psychopath who lived in a world of masochism, self-mutilation, and fanaticism.

In the spring of 1887, while wandering in a drug haze, he bumped into a prostitute. They lived at her place for a year. She plied her trade and he spent her money on drugs and tried to write poetry. She found out that he was writing about a sex fiend who is hunting down prostitutes so he can kill and gut them.

The prostitute told Thompson to leave but he refused. She fled her West End apartment to disappear, in the East End, among the thousands of other working girls.

Dorset Street where Mary Kelly was murdered.

Providence Row Night Refuge at 50 Crispin Street, Spitalfields in Whitechapel. Opposite Dorset Street. This is where Thompson was living at the time of the murder of Mary Kelly in Dorset Street.

He followed her and eventually found lodgings at a homeless shelter run by nuns. It was in the heart of Whitechapel. Thompson stayed there until the middle of November 1888, when he became exhausted from walking the streets. He was put into a private hospital. People only remarked later on the coincidence that when Thompson left London to recover in a monastery the Ripper murders stopped.

A charitable journalist, who stumbled onto Thompson, took pity on him and paid the hospital bill, hoping that he could get him a job. The journalist was very influential and was close friends with London’s rich and powerful. Prime Ministers and media moguls were among his closest friends. Thompson was kept in different forms of isolation and monitored.

The Journalist Wilfrid Meynell (1852-1948) His wife and son and friends.

He spent his remaining time writing poetry and essays until his early death of a drug overdose. It is a small coincidence that the age he was when he died was the same as the oldest Ripper victim. Two days before his death, Thompson signed over the rights to his written work to his journalist friend. There was no autopsy and his funeral was kept a secret.

Right after his death, the journalist destroyed most of Thompson’s papers and led a campaign to whitewash his life. He tried removing any suggestion that Thompson was even ever in the East End, let alone in Whitechapel, during the time of the murders or at any time. The truth was Thompson was hunting for his prostitute there in that autumn, as all around him, an unnamed knife murderer was killing prostitutes.

Francis Thompson. A depiction of him on the streets in 1888.

All the people involved were long dead when in 1967 a historian wrote a biography on Thompson that said that he was sought by the police for the Ripper murders. Thompson was already known to police for repeatedly causing trouble, but why he may have been of particular interest was not just that he was a drug addict. They did not know that kept a general medical use, dissecting scalpel in his coat pocket, which he would sharpen daily. The reason they may have questioned him was not even that he was acquainted with prostitutes. It was because of his highly specialized medical training and his many years of practising human organ removal which was the modus operandi of the killer.

1988 was the centenary of the murders. It sparked renewed worldwide interest and prompted a forensic pathologist to publish an article named ‘Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper?’ The Pathologist who perfumed 9,000 autopsies in his professional career and had been an expert medical witness in several high profile murder trials, said that Thompson should be considered a candidate for the murders.

During the six years, Thompson attended medical school; he took the 2-year human anatomy course three times in a row. The pathologist said that Thompson would have gained significant medical knowledge and because he had been homeless for three years, he knew the London streets like the back of his hand. The pathologist shared the prevailing view that Thompson was mentally disturbed, sexually depraved, and had a hatred of women.

He was off roaming London at night, high on drugs and delusional when the Ripper murders occurred. His lodging was no more than a 15 minute walk from all the murders with the most gruesome, and the final, occurring nearest to him, down the street, one hundred yards away.

Francis Thompson Aged 45

In 1998 Dr. Joseph Rupp published the article 'Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper' in a journal named the Criminologist. Dr. Rupp was the forensic pathologist for Nueces County in Texas.

Dr Rupp's premise was strengthened by Patterson's 2016 Non-Fiction book, Jack the Ripper, The Works of Francis Thompson. The following is what Dr. Rupp said in Patterson's 2016 book.

‘As a forensic pathologist for over fifty years I have personally with my own two hands performed approximately one autopsy a day, that is a total of about 9,000 autopsies performed during my working life. Performing an autopsy is a skilled task.

If someone came to me and offered a king’s ransom to perform a partial autopsy (evisceration) in the dark, on the ground, bare handed with only a surgical knife and no assistance plus a time constraint of a few minutes, my answer would be, “Certainly not, are you crazy?”’

And yet such a feat was accomplished not once but at least four times. It is almost impossible to even contemplate such a feat of daring and dexterity. How could such a thing be possible in the near darkness with slippery blood all over the scene from the slashed arteries in the neck, …Yet, Jack did lt.

Now take look at Francis Thompson, our suspect, with six years in medical school, three times through the medical curriculum which meant that he may have taken the anatomy course three time…a poetic genius possessing all the elements fitting him for the role of a serial killer and driven by his drug addiction and the resulting delusions, to commit these crimes regardless of the risks and possible consequences…

As the result of my article, there was not one single letter of praise or criticism. I was paid for the article but was so disappointed l never even cashed the check; it still resides in my filing cabinet. There the matter rested for twenty-eight years. Then in 2016 I received a call from Richard Patterson in Australia who had come to the same conclusion about Francis Thompson independently only to find that my article had secured for me bragging rights and I was still alive and kicking.’

More on Jack the Ripper & The Francis Thompson. From my book.

The Jack the Ripper story began in London, the largest and most powerful city in the world. It was on a very dark night, well over a century ago that the body of a woman was found. Although there were murders before, and after – what became known as the canonical five – this one was the first that saw a spike the public’s outcry for law and order. The area that these murders were taking place was rather small, less than a square kilometre.

It was August 31, 1888 that Mary Ann Nichols was found on a footpath. Her throat had been cut and although they could not find the knife, the police first thought that it was simply a case of suicide. The woman was obviously very poor and there was no reason to rob and kill her.

Then the police realised, from wounding to the abdomen, that the woman had been murdered. About a week later, the killer struck again.

This second woman was found in the backyard of some flats and, like the first, her throat had been cut. The police stepped up their patrols and paid more attention to anyone acting suspiciously or appearing unusual, but they could not find the murderer.

By now, all three murders were recognised as the work of one man.

During that year there happened to be an extraordinary outbreak of crime and the first two murders passed almost unnoticed among the many that were daily reported in the press.

The victims were all middle-aged woman, widowed or separated from their husband, barely subsisting on her earning as a prostitute. On the night of the crime, they were drunk and penniless.

The murderer was a stranger them until a few minutes before he seized and killed noiselessly, within earshot of at least half a dozen people. Then, careless of detection, he proceeded to mutilate the body.

London. The centre of the Victorian empire on whose colonies the sun never sets. The home of kings and queens, of magnificent monuments only a thousand years of royalty could build, but it was also a city of cruel paradoxes. What a romantic epoch it is that unfolds itself? The world could not be changed, as each generation trusted it would be, by a few years of gaslight and steam engines or telegraph and electric light.

A thousand false messiahs were born into this arid, sure, and religious 19th century. The same period that was the first, perhaps, to organise an efficient police and detective force, watched the noiseless and remorseless operations of Jack the Ripper.

That series of anonymous and sequent murders that is the most frightening in the annals of English crime. Indeed, as this dim, jaunty figure of vengeance slinks down the crooked, rat-ridden alleys and through the rather beautiful courts of an older London, his murders seem to transcend crime, and to be attended by something of the monstrous and diabolic.

Jack the Ripper displayed an anatomical knowledge that could not have gained in any other epoch. This fact, indeed, while it narrows down the field for inquiry, only makes the figure of the murderer more mysterious.

Did he belong to the professional classes, this terrible, quiet monster; was he a doctor, a medical-student, or a student at a veterinary college. and, if so, for what purpose did he write the horrifying letters?

The police who investigated what was formally named the Whitechapel Murders were at a loss as to what to do when they had what was thought to be a stroke of luck. Someone claiming to be the killer wrote a letter for the police to read. He called himself Jack the Ripper and he told them that he loved his work and his knife was nice and sharp. In another letter, the Ripper also let the authorities know what night he was going to kill again. He promised that he would slaughter two women this time, writing, ‘Just for jolly wouldn’t you.’

Soon after the police found the body of a woman with her throat cut and another body a seven-minute walk away. The other woman had been cut up so badly that, as well removing parts of body and taking them away, he had cut small shapes under her eyelids. Beneath all this slaughter, it was discovered that the killer had such knowledge of anatomy to have caused in her instant death with little more than a nick in her neck. One surgeon, who had years of experience, said he could only have made the same injuries in just under half an hour in a brightly lit operating theatre. The killer had done this in less than fifteen minutes, in almost total darkness. It was then that people began to panic.

The newspapers told of rumours that the killer was possibly not human. Some of the most destitute and depressed prostitutes were overheard begging and praying that the murderer would take them next and end their horrible existences. Some men secretly dressed as women, pretending to be prostitutes, in the hope that they could lure and capture the killer.

All through London people grew fearful. Citizens banded together in mobs and searched the streets at night. In a city of five million people, almost every woman felt unsafe to be alone outside. Even if she were to live across the road, many asked to be escorted when walking home at night. Families fled the city.

The Queen grew concerned and urged that the killer be stopped. Radicals and extremists used the murders to justify the failure of authorities to protect the people and they called for revolution. The highest officials in the land warned that these murders might topple the government.

During all this commotion, people at least felt safe in their homes. The killer had struck on the streets – in alleyways, backyards and courtyards – but it was thought that as long as you stayed indoors, you were going to be all right.

The last, and the most horrible murder, happened in a bedroom. The woman had been cut up so badly that some of the people who saw her remains later killed themselves. It has been reported that bits of her flesh were found hanging from nails on the walls. Her breasts had been cut off and her hand pushed into her stomach. Her heart had been removed and her womb had been taken. Her face had been so badly cut that her partner could only identify her ears and eyeballs.

The Queen called the head of the police, only to be told that he had quit. Then the murders inexplicably stopped and the killer escaped capture.

Speculation Relative to Facts on the Life of Francis Thompson.

Before any of the Jack the Ripper murders Francis Thompson wrote a poem about a lusty knight who wanders through london hunting down unclean woman and killing them with a knife, It was intended to include a modern styled twist that paid homage to the days of knights and chivalry. In Chapter 3, The Gutters of Humanity, of his 1988 book Francis Thompson, Strange Harp Strange Symphony, John Walsh wrote,

‘The most painful of these poems was The Nightmare of the Witch Babies, never revived in a fair copy. But in the last of the notebook drafts, he added a reminder, rare for him, of the date of its completion: “Finished before October 1886” – that is within a year of his departure from home.’

The poem begins with the protagonist, a ‘lusty knight’ on a hunt, but he hunts in London, after dark, and his game is women.

‘A lusty knight,
Ha! Ha!
On a swart [black] steed,
Ho! Ho!
Rode upon the land
Where the silence feels alone,
Rode upon the Land
Rode upon the Strand
Of the Dead Men’s Groan,
Where the Evil goes to and fro
Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!
A rotten mist,
Ha! Ha!
Like a dead man’s flesh,
Ho! Ho!
Was abhorrent in the air,’

As he rides through a desolate landscape of the metropolis, the knight catches sight of a suitable prey.

‘What is it sees he?
Ha! Ha!
There in the frightfulness?
Ho! Ho!
There he saw a maiden
Fairest fair:
Sad were her dusk eyes,
Long was her hair;
Sad were her dreaming eyes,
Misty her hair,
And strange was her garments’
Soon he begins to stalk her.
‘Swiftly he followed her.
Ha! Ha! 
Eagerly he followed her.
Ho! Ho!’

Then she disappoints him. He discovers she is unclean.

‘Lo, she corrupted!
Ho! Ho!’

The knight captures her and decides to kill her. He slices her open and drags out the contents of her stomach. He guts her like an animal in order to find and kill any unborn offspring she may have. The poem ends with a macabre twist and his rapture at finding, not just a single foetus, but two.

‘And its paunch was rent
Like a brasten [bursting] drum;
And the blubbered fat
From its belly doth come
It was a stream ran bloodily under the wall.
O Stream, you cannot run too red!
Under the wall.
With a sickening ooze –
Hell made it so!
Two witch-babies,
ho! ho! ho!’

Thompson explained that his poetry was always more fact than fiction, ‘The poems were, in fact, a kind of poetic diary; or rather a poetic substitute for letters.’ {Poems p436]

From Providence Row, in mid November 188, Thompson was placed in a private hospital, for six-week, and four days after his release, he was shipped off to the country priory in Storrington.
This religious retreat was surrounded by high walls. The grounds were patrolled by a guard dog that attacked him when he tried to set foot on the grounds. In his first letter to his editor, Thompson expressed his needs and was straight to the point,

‘And I want to make a request which looks rather a luxury, but which I believe to be a necessity in my present position. Can you send me a razor? I shall have to shave myself here, I think; & it would of course be saving of expense in the long run. Any kind of razor would do for me, I have shaved with a dissecting scalpel before now. I would solve the difficulty by not shaving at all, if it were possible for me to grow a beard, but repeated experiment has convinced me that the only result of such action is to make me look like an escaped convict … I know this is a very perfunctory letter … there is no cause for uneasiness on that account.’ {Letters p25}

Here is a description of life at college for Thompson from 1878 onwards. It is from the writer Bridget Boardman’s 1988 biography on Thompson, called ‘Between Heaven & Charing Cross’, she described the curriculum and working conditions of the lecture theatre, autopsy rooms and the busy Manchester Royal Infirmary where he worked as a student surgeon.

‘Anatomy had always occupied a central place in training and the dissecting of cadavers was accompanied by far more practical experience in assisting at operations ... his time was almost equally divided between the college and the hospital.’

On 19th December, 1880, after suffering a complaint of the liver, Mary Morton Thompson, Francis’ mother died.

Thompson’s un-published This is my Beloved,

‘Died; and horribly
Saw the mystery
Saw the grime of it- ...
Saw the sear of it,
Saw the fear of it,
Saw the slime of it,
Saw it whole!
Son of the womb of her,
Loved till the doom of her
Thought of the brain of her.
Heart of her side,
Joyed in him, grieved in him-
God grew fain [pleased] of her,
And she died.’

Click the image to listen to a narration of the murder scene in Francis Thompson's story, 'The End Crowns the Work'.' It is the story about a man who secretly kills the woman he loves with a knife in a devil's bargain to become crowned the city's best poet.

In April of 1887, Francis Thompson's father, Dr Charles Thompson married his second wife, Anne Richardson. His son did not attend the wedding. Thompson’s anger at his father’s seeming ease of shedding his devotion to the departed wife and mother, Mary, gnawed at him.

Francis Thompson, Unpublished.
The Ballad of Fair Weather

‘My father, too cruel,
Would scorn me and beat me;
My wicked stepmother
Would take me and eat me,
They looked in the deep grass
Where it was deepest;
They looked down the steep bank
Where it was steepest;
But under the bruised fern
Crushed in its feather
The head and the body
Were lying together, -
Ah, death of fair weather!
Tell me, thou perished head,
What hand could sever thee? ...
My evil stepmother,
So witch-like in wish,
She caught all my pretty blood
Up in a dish,
She took out my heart
For a ghoul-meal together,
But peaceful my body lies
In the fern-feather,
For now is fair weather.’