Extracts from ‘Jack the Ripper, the 2002 Edition’ are copyright protected to the Author, 1997-2005. No part thereof may be copied, stored, or transmitted either electronically or mechanically without the prior written permission of the author.

Mr. Richard.A.Patterson.

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EXTRACTS

What if after his murders Jack the Ripper mingled with the highest circles in British society? Influencing the likes of Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and D.H. Lawrence. This book explains how the British Poet Francis Joseph Thompson was the culprit responsible for the terrible murders, in 1888, of at least five women prostitutes in London’s East End.

This book tells of Thompson’s violent childhood, his doomed medical school training, growing fascination with murder and his downward drug induced spiral into vagrancy. Thompson’s life and verse is given including Thompson’s secret affair with a prostitute and its tragic ending bringing him to a frenzied delirium. Here is recorded the events of the Whitechapel the murders and its sinister parallels to Thompson.

Who was the Ripper? What was his motive? How did he get away with murder? If never caught what horrific avenue did he take? This book promises to give readers an insight into the diabolical mind and ghastly purpose of the world’s most feared serial killer.

This books explains that the British poet, Francis Joseph Thompson, was Jack the Ripper and that in the autumn of 1888 he hunted down and killed at least five women in London’s Whitechapel district. This book will show that Thompson, like the Ripper, held a hatred of prostitutes, and had the motive and ability to kill in the East End. Thompson had the same skills said to be possessed by the Ripper. This includes the ability to handle a surgeon’s type knife, working knowledge of anatomy, and an intimate knowledge of London’s streetscape.

.....

In the year 1913 two seemingly unrelated volumes were published. The thriller The Lodger and the anthology the Works of Francis Thompson. The Lodger was the first novelisation of the infamous Jack the Ripper Murders, to have worldwide success. The suspect in The Lodger, written by Marie Belloc Lowndes, was a religious maniac believing he is predestined to kill prostitutes. In her novel an inquest is held to determine the identity of the killer. During the inquest a surprise eyewitness, named Mr. Cannot, gave the following description the suspect:

‘He was a grim, gaunt man, was this stranger, Mr. Coroner with a very odd-looking face, I should say an educated man in common parlance, a gentleman. What drew my special attention to him was that he was talking aloud to himself- in fact he seemed to be repeating poetry.’

The brother of Mrs. Lowndes was the writer Hilair Belloc who was close friend and neighbour of Wilfrid Meynell. It was Mr. Meynell who as well as publishing Hilair Belloc’s poetry produced the Works of Francis Thompson. Posthumously released in three volumes of green cloth and gold gilt the Works of Francis Thompson were what Viola Meynell, Wilfrid’s daughter, would come to call:

‘The bringing into existence of the complete counterpart of the man, the body of his mind made whole and perfect.’

.....

The English Catholic poet Francis Thompson is known chiefly for his 1888 poem, The Hound of Heaven, and his much longer 1895 work, Sister Songs. During the time of the Ripper murders Thompson was sheltering near Whitechapel in the West India docks and seeking a prostitute that he had become obsessed with. For the previous three years he had been homeless in London and struggling with an addiction to opium that had been constant the past decade. Thompson, who was suicidal, and prone to deliriums, was also an ex-medical student with six years training and in possession of a dissecting scalpel.

.....

In 1894, London Assistant Chief Constable of Scotland Yard, Sir Melville Macnaghten , wrote in his Days of My Years:

‘Suffice it at present to say that the Whitechapel murderer committed five murders and -to give the devil his due - no more. These being Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly.’

Francis Thompson wrote, in his essay Coleridge, of an earlier English poet and the legacies of fame:

'He did influence my development more than any other poet...necromancy is performed, so to speak...There remain of him his poems...striving to the last to fish up gigantic projects...over the wreck of that most piteous and terrible figure of the all five star of his glorious youth; those poor five resplendid poems, for which he paid the devil's price of desolate life and unthinkably blasted powers.'

J.C Reid’s, 1959 book, Francis Thompson Man and Poet records a chance remark by Thompson:

‘Every great poem is a human sacrifice.’

.....

Francis Joseph Thompson entered the dictionary in 1913 when the British novelist Thomas Hardy wrote: 'You may be sure I am a Thompsonian.’ Near the end of 1888 Wilfrid Meynell, an editor of a magazine named the Merry England, rescued the poet from destitution on the streets of London. Wilfrid’s son, Everard Meynell was a child when he was first introduced to Thompson. Everard would grow up to write a biography on the English poet; publishing his The Life of Francis Thompson, in 1913. Within Everard’s book is Thompson's praises of Hardy’s work:

‘I remember him to have often spoken with particular admiration- that in which Sergeant Troy thralls a woman by sword-play and the swinging of his flashing steel round and round her person.'

The scene noted comes from Hardy’s novel Far From a Maddening Crowd and in part reads:

'the next thing of which she was conscious was that the point and the blade of the sword were darting with a gleam towards her left side, just above the hip; then of their reappearance on her right side, emerging as it were from between her ribs, having apparently passed through her body. All was as quick as electricity. "Oh!" she cried with a fright, pressing her hand to her side. "Have you run me through? -- no you have not! Whatever have you done!" "I have not touched you." said Troy, quietly. "it was mere slight of hand."..."Is the sword very sharp?" "O no-- only stand as still as a statue..."That outer loose lock of hair wants tidying, he said, before she had moved or spoken. "Wait: I'll do it for you...It appeared that a caterpillar had come from the fern and chosen the front of her bodice as his resting place. She saw the point glistening towards her bosom, and seemingly enter it.'

.....

The Prevailing opinion has it that Jack the Ripper was left handed – So too was Francis Thompson. Everard Meynell wrote, in his Life of Francis Thompson, of his subject who was commonly referred to as the ‘Necktie Poet’:

‘He would pretend to a certain acumen in the matter of dishes or of waitresses, adjusting his tie and his expression. But who can ever be deceived that there was anyone save a timorous defaulter in the matter of savoir-fair? Not certainly, an A.B.C girl or an observant tramp.’

.....

As he once did in Preston, in 1857, Dr. Charles Thompson, in 1864, re-opened his homeopathic surgery from the Thompson residence in Stamford Street, of Manchester’s Ashton. The move was, in part, precipitated by the death of Francis’ younger sister Helen who was aged fifteen months. Helen died on January 15 1864, when Francis Thompson was five years old. Helen, was had caught tuberculosis, then known as consumption. In 1868 when Thompson was almost nine years of age, and living in Ashton-under-Lyne, an anti-Catholic agitator named William Murphy arrived. He began a series of fiery speeches expounding his hatred for Catholicism. Murphy appealed for the Protestant crowd to riot against the Catholics. A large mob descended upon the two small churches of St. Mary and St. Anne. The interior of St. Anne was destroyed. The crowd then attempted to storm St. Mary while the parishioners, who included the Thompson family, mounted a guard inside. The rioters attacked with bottles and stones. Shots were fired and the Riot Act was read. After three days of continual fighting, the army was called in. By the end, of the rioting, the church of St. Anne’s school, and presbytery were broken into. They contained altars, paintings, and statues, which were incinerated. A further 111 houses of the Catholic congregation were gutted. For a month, the entire clergy was obliged to leave town. It was in this year that Thompson would first read the 'Apocalypse'. Francis Thompson wrote of it as:

‘An appalling dream; insurgent darkness, with wild lights flashing through it...on the earth hurryings to and fro, like insects at a sudden candle...Such is the Apocalypse as it inscribes itself on the verges of my childhood memories.’

Everard wrote upon Francis Thompson: 'fires he always haunted, and his clothes were burnt on sundry occasions, as they were before the class-room fire.’ The school, which was chosen, for young Francis, was in the northern county of Durham. It was a Seminary College, which prepared novice priests to take Holy Orders. At his first day of school his fellow students, to initiate Francis, had him whipped. Of this introduction Francis related his impressions of his fellows stating:

‘they who danced around me with mocking evil distortion of laughter...devilish apparitions of a hate now first known; hate for hate's sake, cruelty for cruelty's sake. And so such they live in my memory, testimonies to the murky aboriginal demon in man.'

The other children would recall Francis as appearing ‘frail and abnormal’. It was while Francis was at the seminary that he was disciplined for an attempted arson attack. Refusing to wear the proscribed church robes and demanding that he be allowed to wear one of purple, instead of regulation black, Francis responded to the priest’s rebuttal by stealing the church lighters job. The protest, in which he threatened to burn the church, proved a failure. In 1871 Francis tried again. Acting as an altar boy in St. Mary's Church, at the age of twelve, Francis, unexpectedly, seized another boy's thurible. Which is the device, on a chain, used to hold burning frankincense. Francis spun the thurible around, over his head, causing the charcoal embers to be scattered. He had previously unhinged the lid. In 1872, when Francis was aged thirteen, his writing ability was described, by his English master as: 'the best production from a lad his age I have ever seen in this seminary.' When Francis first entered the seminary, in 1870, the report of his studies told that: 'Frank gives the greatest satisfaction in every way.' While at the seminary Francis won 16 of 21 exam finals. In July 1877, as Francis entered his adult years, and his fellow scholars took their Holy Orders for a life in the priesthood, his parents received another report from the school. The letter was from the president of the college who wrote to Dr. Charles Thompson telling him:

'With regard to Frank...I have been most reluctantly compelled to concur in the opinion of his director and others that it is not the holy will of God that he should go on for the priesthood...he has the ability to succeed in any career.’

.....

In 1878, Francis Thompson returned to his Stamford Street home and Dr. Charles Thompson chose that Francis should become a surgeon. In the same month as his return Francis sat for his entrance examinations into the Owens Medical College, Manchester. He was accepted gaining honors in Greek and Latin with poor marks in mathematics and science. Francis was told to attend college come the end of the summer break. Inside the main hall of the infirmary patients were taxied in and out. There was a huge bell that tolled for surgeons to give medical aid. When not operating staff and students would sit to chat around a continual fire. The wooden tables, on which patients lay, had leather straps for binding those who struggled. At home Mary Thompson’s brother did little to commend himself for family responsibility. Bringing Mary to tell that:

'he required looking after almost like a child, though he was the eldest in the family.’

Francis’ sister wrote of childhood with her brother:

'we did not have any friends apart from the priests of four or five who would gather to dine and pass the evening...In our play-room he used to get Maggie and me to join him in mimic sieges...he could get into a temper when roused.'

In the autumn of 1878, Francis entered his name on the Manchester Royal Infirmary registrar. Lectures and practical experience divided studies. A high physical endurance was vital for the grueling workload. From the first semester the study of anatomy, with dissection classes, was a major course requirement.

In 1879, after falling ill with a lung infection, Francis was medicated with laudanum, being wine mixed with opium. To occupy his mind his mother gave him Thomas De’ Quincey’s, 1821 work, Confessions of an Opium Eater. Thompson would come to think of his relation to the dead writer as: 'that of a younger brother to an elder brother.' De’ Quincey was born in Manchester and died in 1859, the year of Thompson's birth. De’ Quincey became a vagrant in London where he fell in love with a prostitute called Ann. Thompson, in June of 1879, sat and failed the Oxford Local Examinations, in London. On December the 19th, 1880, after suffering a complaint of the liver, Mary Morton Thompson, Francis' mother died. Mary was aged fifty-eight. It was the day after Francis Thompson's twenty-first birthday. It was sometime in 1882 that James Thompson, uncle to Francis, told that his nephew suffered a mental and physical breakdown. The Owen's College register shows that from May 1882 Thompson was absent from the start of the summer session.

{Thompson’s Unpublished}

'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’

Near the end of 1882, Francis Thompson went to the city of Glasgow for his second attempt at the medical finals. Thompson failed the exam again and compensated his poor marks in theory with long hours and a scalpel in the college’s mortuary. A medical pastime which brought his sister, Mary, to remark:

'Many a time he asked my father for 3 pounds or 4 pounds for dissecting fees so often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.'

In the People in 1912 Whitechapel murder investigator Sir Robert Anderson related:

‘One thing is certain, namely, the elusive assassin whoever he was, possessed anatomical knowledge. This, therefore, leads one pretty surely to the conclusion that he was a medical man, or one who had formerly been a medical student.’

In 1988, on the centenary of the Ripper murders, Medical Examiner for Nueces County, Texas. Joseph C. Rupp, M.D., Ph.D. Published his article ‘Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper?’ in The Criminologist. Dr. Rupp, whose expertise was in forensic pathology, wrote of Thompson’s medical learning:

‘Francis Thompson spent six years in medical school: in effect, he went through medical school three times. It is unlikely, no matter how disinterested he was or how few lectures he attended, that he did not absorb a significant amount of medical knowledge. Indeed, we know that he learned enough medicine to deceive his father, a practising physician, for a matter of six years.’

.....

 {Thompson’s Unpublished, The Owl}

‘The owl is the witch of the cauldron of sleep:

And she stirs it and seeths it whooping deep;

And she thrusts the witch-bits into it deep

Gendering ghosts for the smoke of sleep.

She flings in toads from the money-dust,

And feeds it thick with the dead fat of lust;

Corpse-limbs of love, yet quivering new;

And blood of the thoughts that are writhing too,

Drawn from the place where the pang went through:

Adders of longing and fanged regrets;

Winged lizards of terror and monstrous threats!

Ah, horrible terrors, the withering threats!

And she sees with her eyes which the fires look through

Her deep sleep cauldron, reeking new;

And she laughs at sleep, tu-whit, tu-whoo!

And so murk is the sleep smoke of despair,

And so awful the spectres rising there,

And so fearful they throng on the calm night air,

That were not sleep as brief as deep,

It were better almost to die than sleep!’

.....

Everard Meynell wrote in his biography of Thompson's sleeping habits, and society while homeless:

'The murderer to whom he makes several allusions...In a common lodging-house he met and had talk with the man who was supposed by the group about the fire to be a murderer uncaught. And when it was not in a common lodging-house. It was a Shelter or Refuge that he would lie in one of the oblong boxes without lids, containing a mattress and a leather apron or coverlet, that are the fashion, he says, in all Refuges.'

Mary Ann Nichols, a victim of Jack the Ripper, who was also known as Leather Apron, spent time as an inmate of Lambeth Workhouse on several occasions for extended periods from 1881 to 1887. It was a Lambeth Workhouse laundry mark on her clothing that led to Nichol’s identification by Mary Ann Monk a fellow workhouse inmate. Sir Osbert Sitwell not only wrote on the Ripper but also on Francis Thompson. Sitwell gave time to mention in his introduction to the book Collected Poems of W.H Davies that:

‘One cold and wet evening Davies was sitting on a broken wooden box near a large brazier in a Lambeth doss-house. In spite of the suffocating fumes it emitted he was reading by the glow of it, for there was no light. The general noise and rowdiness were insupportable, for it was a Saturday night, and everyone who could, or could not afford it had got drunk. In the whole room he was the only quiet man, except for a mysterious stranger who sat opposite and talked to nobody. He, too, was trying to read, and something in the look of him made Davies wonder who he was. Indeed, he would have liked to enter into conversation, but the man seemed wrapped in his book, or else in melancholy thoughts, and a sort of shyness and restraint came over Davies. Many years later, however, when he consented to take part in the reading by famous modern poets, he saw again, on the platform, the stranger of the Lambeth doss-house. It was Francis Thompson.’

.....

In April of 1887, Dr. Charles Thompson married his second wife Anne Richardson. His son did not attend. On Sunday September 8 1888, at the rear of a Hanbury Street building, whose front sign read, ‘Mrs.A.Richardson. Rough Packing Case Maker,' Annie Chapman was strangled and repeatedly stabbed to death. Chapman’s body was discovered by John Davies, a Carman, who had just finished a cup of tea after being awoken by the bells of Spitafields Church chiming 4:45 a.m. Chapman was last sighted walking towards Spitafields Church at 1:50 a.m.. John alerted James Green, James Kent, and Henry John Holland and a police officer was sought. The body was brought to the Whitechapel mortuary and washed clean by two nurses before being examined by Dr. Phillips for clues. The results of Dr. Phillips post-mortem and all official records of the examination have vanished. Thus only contemporary press reports that Dr. Phillips believed that:

'No mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations it must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room.'

{From Francis Thompson’s, The House of Sorrows.}

‘The life-gashed heart, the assassin’s healing poinard [knife] draw...

The remedy of steel has gone home to her sick heart.

Her breast, dishabited,

Revealed her heart above,

A little blot of red.’

.....

In mid-January 1887 Thompson was dismissed from his London job as a shoemaker’s assistant after he dropped a wooden window shutter onto a customer’s foot. On February 23, five weeks after becoming unemployed by Mac Master, Thompson let fall a crumpled parcel into the Merry England’s Kensington letter box in Essex Street. The parcel held some torn pages from McMaster’s ledger books that made up a letter, an essay, and three poems. The essay was called Paganism old and New, the poems were The Passion of Mary, Dream Tryst, and the Nightmare of the Witch Babies. Thompson's letter to Wilfrid Meynell explained away the laudanum stains and the torn pages:

'Dear Sir...I must ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is due...to the strange places and circumstances under which it has been written...on the principle of "yet will I try the last," I have added a few specimens...Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross post office.'

Everard, then just a child wrote of his mother’s Alice Meynell’s opinion:

‘Told by A.M at 21 Philimore Place, Mother read in bed the dirty ms of Paganism and along with it some witch-opium poems she detested.’

The poem referred to by Everard Nightmare of the Witch Babies was withheld from publication. It was about a knight who hunts down women. A portion reads:

Two witch-babies,

Ha! Ha!

Two witch-babies,

Ho! Ho!

A bedemon-ridden hag,

With the devil pigged alone

Begat [birthed] them, laid at night

On the bloody-rusted stone;

And they dwell within the Land

Of the Bare Shank-Bone,

Where the Evil goes to and fro,

Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!...

A lusty knight,

Ha! Ha!

On a swart steed,

Ho! Ho!

Rode upon the land

Where the silence feels alone,

Rode upon the Land

Of the Bare Shank – Bone,

Rode upon the Strand

Of the Dead Mens 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,

Clung a tether to the wood

Of the wicked looking trees,

Was a scurf [dead skin] upon the flood;

And the reeds they were pulpy

With blood, blood, blood!

And the clouds were a-looming low.

Two with babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!

No one life there,

Ha! Ha!

No sweet life there,

Ho! Ho!

What is it sees he?

Ha! Ha!

There in the frightfulness?

Ho! Ho!

There he saw a maiden

Fairest fair:

Sad where her dreaming eyes,

Misty her hair;

And strange was her garment’s flow.

Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!...

'Swiftly he followed her

Ha! Ha!

Eagerly he followed her

Ho! Ho!

From the rank, the greasy soil,

Red bubbles oozed and stood;

Till it grew a putrid slime,

And where his horse had trod,

The ground plash plashes,

With a wet like blood;

And chill terrors like fungus grow,

Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!...

Into the fogginess

Ha! Ha!

Lo, she corrupted

Ho! Ho!

Comes there a Death

With the looks like a witch,

And joins that creak

Like a night-bird’s scritch,

And a breath that smokes

Like a smoking pitch,

And eyeless sockets a glow.

Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!

And its paunch [stomach] was rent

Like a brasted [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

To tell a maid her widowhead!

It was a stream ran bloodily

Under the wall.

With a sickening ooze-Hell made it so!

Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!...

Francis Thompson's parcel was pigeonholed and would not be opened for over a year. Thompson claimed that it was in the spring of 1888 that he attempted to commit suicide. He planned it to be by an overdose of enough laudanum to kill two men. Thompson took half when he claims the ghost of the writer Thomas Chatterton saved him. In 1770 Chatterton, finding himself unable to find a publisher, committed suicide by arsenic poisoning. Some months later Thompson was still homeless and walking along a crowded street when he saw a coin rolling in the gutter. He picked it up and seeing that no one claimed it, he kept it. Believing that the coin was a halfpenny Thompson put it in his waistcoat pocket and walked on. Then he decided to turn back the way that he had come. When Thompson reached the same spot where he had found the first coin he saw another coin glittering on the road. Thompson, thinking that it was another halfpenny, picked it up as well. He looked at the coin in his hand and saw a golden sovereign. Francis took the first coin from his pocket and when he held both coins together he saw that they were both gold. Everard recorded, in his Life of Francis Thompson, the poet’s reaction to the finding of the equivalent of two pounds:

'"That was a sovereign too, Evi; I looked and saw that it was a sovereign too!" he ended with a rising voice and tremulous laughter.'

On Monday September 9, the day after the murder of Chapman, and with fourteen suspects residing in the Commercial Street police station, the Daily Telegraph, reported that with the body of Chapman:

'There were also found two farthings brightly polished, and according to some, these coins had been passed off as half-sovereigns upon the deceased by her murderer.'

The Deputy Head of the City Force, Major Henry Smith's boast, in his memoirs, From Constable to Commissioner, published in 1910, is that: 'There is no man living who knows as much about these murders as I do.' Major Henry Smith’s memoirs, gave an account of his unsuccessful attempt, with two officers, in September, to trace the killer of Mary Ann Nichols and Chapman:

'After the second crime I sent to Sir-Charles Warren that I had discovered a man very likely to be the man we wanted. He certainly had all the qualifications requisite. He had been a medical student, he had been in a lunatic asylum; he had spent all his time with women of loose character, whom he bilked by giving them polished farthings, two of these farthings having been found in the pocket of the murdered woman. Sir Charles failed to find him. I thought that he was likely to be in Rupert Street, Haymarket. I sent up two men, and there he was; but polished farthings and all, he proved an alibi without the shadow of doubt'

.....

On August 1886, a Protestant Churchwarden named John McMaster aided Francis Thompson. The Churchwarden for St. Martins of the Fields also ran a Bootmaker shop and workrooms located in nearby Panton Street Haymarket. Thompson had been homeless a fortnight in London when he was sighted by McMaster. Thompson was wandering the Strand when he was found attempting to sell a box of matches to those passing. He had sold all his other goods and the matches were his only possession. From the crowded street’s din McMaster called out to him: ‘Is your soul saved?’ Thompson gave a curt reply: ‘What right have you to ask me that question?’ McMaster was brought to ask: ‘If you won't let me save your soul, let me save your body.’ Thompson was hired by McMaster to work at his bootmakers shop. The store was well known for serving famed writers and publishers. In the front room Thompson wrote poems on the shop's account books. In the rear workshop, he distracted the other shoemakers with conversation. McMaster remembered that Thompson would shout in medical and other arguments and told that:

'There was something wrong between him and the priests...A damp rag of humanity...He was the very personification of ruin, a tumble-down, dilapidated opium-haunted wreck...I confess that my first impulse and a strong one was to give him a few shillings and get rid of him.’

Panton Street in Haymarket where Francis Thompson had resided with his shoemaking tools, is less than two-hundred yards from Rupert Street where Major Smith’s men had questioned their suspect.  

{Thompson’s Unpublished 'Tom-o'-Bedlam'}

'As a burst and blood-blown insect

Cleaves to the wall it dies on,

The smeared sun

Doth clot upon

A heaven without horizon

I dare not but be dreadless,

Because all things to dread are,

With a trumpet blown

Through the mists alone

From a land where the lists of the dead are'

Everard Meynell, wrote in his 1913 biography, upon Francis Thompson’s mailing habits:

'He sitting in gray lodgings, who crowded into the chilly ten minutes before 3 a.m. the writing of a long letter to be posted, after anxieties over address and gum of which we know nothing, and a stumbling-journey down dark stairs, in a pillar-box still black with threatening dawn.'

The Ripper communicated his motive in his letters sent to the press. One note received on Thursday September 27, by Fleet Street's Central News Agency, was to become known as the ‘Dear Boss’ Letter:

‘Dear Boss,

I keep on hearing that the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger bear bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope Ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get the chance. Good Luck.

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper

Dont mind me giving the trade name

PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha ha'

In Thompson’s essay on the Nibelungen Lied, a German Epic Poem, he writes:

‘It is in battle that this truly great Unknown finds himself, and sayeth 'Ha! Ha!' among the trumpets. Unique in all literature is the culmination of this epic of Death.’

A central maxim of the Dear Boss letter was:

‘I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.’

In a top ten favorites list Thompson had filled out his choice of motto as:

‘Every scope by immoderate use turns to restraint.’

.....

Thompson gave his fear of the sight of flowing blood as his reason for leaving medical school. Perhaps bringing Thompson to blush or grow pale when he wrote in his essay Paganism Old and New:

‘Red has come to be a colour feared; it ought rather to be the colour loved. For it is ours. The colour is ours, and what it symbolises is ours. Red in all its grades...to that imperial colour we call purple, the tinge of clotted blood,...proudly lineal; a prince of the Blood indeed.’

Assistant Commissioner Dr. Robert Anderson was placed in charge of the Whitechapel murder investigation from October 6 1888 until the case was closed in 1892. Anderson wrote:

‘the "Jack the Ripper" letter is the creation of an enterprising London journalist...I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer and the pressman who wrote the letter.’

Author Michael Harrison in his 1972 book Clarence on his suspect Prince Albert Victor examined the Ripper letters and concluded:

‘The Ripper was a poet, although as with his handwriting, he falsified his poetic skill to conceal his real identity. But then there are tricks of versification which are so natural to a poet that he is unaware of them, and so reappear no matter how fundamentally he thinks that he is changing his style.’

Everard Meynell wrote of Thompson:

‘The streets, somehow, had nurtured a poet and trained a journalist.’

.....

On October 2, two private detectives, named Grand and Batchelor, claimed to have found a grape stalk in the drain near the spot where Elizabeth Stride's body was found. They interviewed an East End fruiterer, named Mathew Packer, who identified Stride’s body for them. Mathew Packer, told the detectives, of how an hour before the double murder, he had sold grapes to a man, with Stride, who treated him with a sharply commanding manner. He also said that together they both ate the half a pound of black grapes in the rain opposite him. Mathew Packer's statement was later be taken down by Detective Stephen White. On October 6, Packer was sent a letter:

'You though yourself very clever I reckon when you informed the police But you made a mistake if you though I dident see you Now I know you know me and I see your little game, and I mean to finish you and send your ears to your wife if you show this to the police or help them if you do I will finish you. It is no use your trying to get out of my way Because I have you when you dont expect it and I keep my word as you can see and rip you up.

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper...You see I know your adress'

Matthew Packer handed the letter to the police and was interviewed by Sir Charles Warren. Of the East End fruiterer’s statement Inspector Walter Dew wrote:

‘I am puzzled. Frankly, I cannot reconcile the buying of those grapes in the company of the woman he was about to kill, and his reappearance a few days later in the same street...I used to feel at times that the fates were conspiring against us and doing everything to assist the man behind the problem which was daily deepening in mystery.’

For Wilfrid Meynell’s daughter Monica, Thompson wrote The Poppy - To Monica.

'With burnt mouth, red like a lion's, it drank

The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank,

And dipped its cup in purpurate [crimson] shine

When the Eastern conduits ran with wine...

I hang 'mid men my needless head

And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:

The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper

Time shall reap, but after the reaper

The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper.'

At about 11:45, previous to her murder, Elizabeth Stride was seen with a stranger, described as 5ft 6in tall, stout, and dressed in a small black coat. The stranger, described as a clerk in appearance, was heard to tell Elizabeth: 'You would say anything but your prayers'. At 12:45 p.m., East End resident and father of two, Israel Schwartz, reported seeing Stride spurn another man at the entrance to 'Dutfields Yard'. The stranger was described by Schwartz, a Jewish immigrant, who knew only a little English, as being of a stout build, with a small brown mustache, and being 5ft 5in tall. Schwartz saw the stranger handle Stride roughly. Previously, in July 1887, a twenty-three year old Polish Jew named Israel Lipski had been found guilty of the murder of Miriam Angel by pouring nitric acid down her throat and was condemned to hang. The name of 'Lipski' thereafter, became a slang term for any men, particularly those of Jewish descent, who were of suspicious character. Schwartz noticed that on other side of the street another man was also watching. This other man was wearing an old black hard felt hat, dark overcoat, and was smoking a clay pipe. As the rejected stranger crossed the road he walked passed and yelled at the man with the overcoat and pipe; 'Lipski!' The man with the pipe looked up and spotted Schwartz, who was beginning to walk away. Schwartz then heard footsteps behind him. The man with the pipe, whom Schwartz recognised as a Gentile, had begun to chase him. Later Schwartz recalled that as he was being chased he felt for a moment that the man might also have been running away. Schwartz was tempted to stop and wait for his pursuer to catch up yet he continued to run. The man gave up the chase when Schwartz passed under the nearest railway arch.

In 1897 Francis Thompson was living with the Meynell’s at their Palace Court residence when he set fire to the cupboard with his clay pipe kept lit in the pocket of his overcoat. Thompson’s habit of using around fourteen matches to light his pipe brought Viola, a daughter of the Meynell’s, to remark: 'he misspent his powers and wasted his minutes as he wasted matches.’ On the night of the double murders, at 02:55 a.m., in Ghoulston Street, PC Long's lantern illuminated a piece of bloodied white apron which was found to match the apron of Catharine Eddowes. Written, with white chalk, on a nearby stucco covered wall was the slogan.

'The Juwes are

the men that

will not

be blamed

for nothing'

In 1993 Gary Roylands, theorist, wrote upon the Ripper murders in The Criminologist, summer edition. Royland’s article, Jack the Ripper the Writing on the Wall, concluded that the slogan, found on the night of the murders, would indicate that the suspect was a Gentile, angry at Jewish witnesses, who had prevented him from further mutilating Elizabeth Stride. Sir Charles Warren arrived, at 05:00 a.m., and copied the graffiti down. At 05:30 a.m., Sir Warren fearing the writing would incite a riot against the Jews erased the message with a wet sponge. In Francis Thompson’s poem, From the Night of Forebeing Thompson references Daniel a Jewish wise man from the Old Testament’s The Book of Daniel. One story in this book is known as The Writing on the Wall and relates of how Daniel was asked by King Balshazzar to assist in interpreting a message. It had been scrawled by an anonymous hand with a candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the King’s palace. The King was afraid it may be seditious and none of his men had so far been able to understand it. Daniel interpretation pleased Balshazzar bringing Daniel to prominence in the royal court. Thompson’s poem the Night of Forebeing has these lines:

‘The struggling wall will scantily grow:

And through with the dread rite of sacrifice

Ordained for during edifice,

How long, how long ago!

Into that wall which will not thrive

I build myself alive,

Ah who shall tell me, will the wall uprise?

Thou wilt not tell me, who dost only know!..

The stars still write their golden purposes

On heavens high palimpsest [A surface on which writing can be erased.]

Nor any therein Daniel; I do hear.’

Dr Robert Anderson was in 1888 Junior Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. In 1907 after his retirement Anderson spoke to the Daily Chronicle of evidence attained on the Ripper crimes:

‘In two cases of that terrible series there were distinct clues destroyed…In one case it was a clay pipe. Before we could get to the scene of the murder the doctor had taken it up, thrown it into the fire-place and smashed it beyond recognition. In another case there was writing on the wall- a most valuable clue; handwriting that might have been at once recognised as belonging to a certain individual. But before we could get a copy, or get it protected, it had been entirely obliterated.’

.....

Mr. Wilfrid Whitten, of the Academy, described Thompson:

'when he opened his lips he spoke as a gentleman and a scholar...His great brown cape...nondescript garb...a basket slung over his shoulder on a strap a strange object his fish - basket, we called it...the bulky cape...His low voice had a peculiar quaver, a slight wobble in tone, that empathized its curiously measured cadence.'

Thompson’s sister Mary described her brother. Starting and ending with appearance of his eyes:

‘A dark gray with a bluish shade in them - something like the shade one sees in mountain lakes. Full of intelligence and light. His hair was very dark brown, so dark as to appear almost black at first sight. His complexion was sallow rather than pale, drawing further attention to his eyes.’

Soon after the death of Detective Sergeant Stephen White, (warrant number 59442), an article, in the Peoples Journal, which appeared, on September 26 1919, by someone known only as a 'Scotland Yard man', told of a meeting between Detective Sergeant White and the Assitant Commissioner of the CID, Dr. Robert Anderson, who was in charge of the Ripper murder investigation. The Peoples Journal recorded that Sergeant White asserted to Anderson that he had spoken to the murderer moments before the discovery of the body of Catharine Eddowes. Detective Sergeant White is said to have told:

'For five nights we had been watching a certain alley way just behind the Whitechapel road...I was turning away when I saw a man coming out of the alley. He was walking quickly but noiselessly, apparently wearing rubber shoes, which were rather rare in those days. I stood aside to let the man pass, and as he came under the wall lamp I got a good look at him. He was about 5 feet 10 inches in height and was dressed rather shabbily though it was obvious that the material of his clothes was good...His face was long and thin, nostrils rather delicate and his hair was jet black. His complexion was inclined to be sallow...The most striking thing about him, however, was the extraordinary appearance of his eyes. They looked like two luminous glow worms coming through the darkness. The man was slightly bent at the shoulders, though he was obviously quite young - about 33 at the most - and gave one the idea of having been a student or professional man. His hands were snow white, and the fingers long and tapering...The man stumbled a few feet away from me and I made that an excuse for engaging him in conversation. He turned sharply at the sound of my voice, and scowled at me in a surly fashion, but he said "Goodnight" and agreed with me that it was cold. His voice was a surprise to me. It was soft and musical, with just a tinge of melancholy in it, and it was the voice of a man of culture - voice altogether out of keeping with the squalid surroundings of the East End. As he turned away one of the police officers came...there was the body of a woman...It was clearly another of those terrible murders. I remembered the man I had seen and started after him as fast as I could run, but he was lost to sight in the dark labyrinth of East End mean streets.'

Dr. Rupp, in his 1988 The Criminologist article Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper?, wrote of the Ripper’s powers of elusion and Thompson’s knowledge of London’s backstreets:

‘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 backstreets 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.’

.....

The murder of Mary Kelly, occurred on Friday November 9 1888. This was the feast day for Saint Theodore the patron saint of soldiers. Mary Kelly, born in Limerick, in 1863, was killed, and terribly mutilated, at number thirteen Millers Court, Whitechapel. Kelly’s face was slashed repeatedly, her ears, nose, and breasts were sliced off. Her stomach was ripped open and her heart, kidney's, liver & uterus were severed. These pieces were laid about her bed and nearby furniture. The November 1888 edition of the Merry England contained Thompson’s Bunyan in the Light of Modern Criticism. In his small essay Thompson gave advice to his readers:

‘He had better seek some critic who will lay his subject on the table, nick out every muscle of expression with light, cool, fastidious scalpel, and then call on him to admire the "neat dissection"’

.....

George Hutchinson, a witness to Mary Kelly’s inquest, gave an account of her last moments. Hutchinson, who had already given details at a Commercial Street police station interview, confirmed that at 02:00 a.m.:

'A man coming in the opposite direction to Kelly tapped her on her shoulder and said something to her. They both burst out laughing. I heard her say all right to him and the man said "You will be all right for what I have told you" he then placed his right hand around her shoulders. He also had a kind of small parcel in his left hand with a kind of strap around it...They both went up the court together...She said she had lost her handkerchief. He then pulled out his handkerchief a red one and gave it to her.’

Lewis Hind, an associate of the Merry England, described Thompson:

‘on his back was slung the weather worn satchel.'

Sarath Kumar Ghosh a one time fellow lodger of Francis Thompson gave a description of him:

'He was of medium height, but very slight of frame, which made him taller than he really was. His cheeks were so sunken as to give undue prominence to a little grey beard that was pointed at the end but otherwise untrimmed. It was his garb that was against him, and in violent contrast to the traditional smartness of City men. His trousers were dark far too dark for summer, frayed at the ends, spotted with tallow [candle wax] marks. His coat was grey - and did not match his trousers-stained with tea leaves. The greatest incongongruity was that he wore an ulster though the heat was great. It had been originally brown in colour, but was of several different hues in patches.'

On November 10 1888 Dr. Phillips, who had performed Mary Kelly’s post-mortem, wrote in his inquest report:

‘I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were visible...He is possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he isn’t quite right in his mind at times. Such persons would probably be unwilling to communicate suspicions to the Police for fear of trouble or notoriety.’

.....

The prevailing profile upon the serial killer is that he is an apparently harmless, yet alluring, drifter. Of noted intelligence he is in his twenties and feels intense isolation. Preferring to kill relative strangers, near to their current area of habitation. The formative years are considered important to making of an adult of sound mind and so when criminal psychologists ascertain the mental state of a homicide suspect they often look to the client's childhood. One method is the establishment of the ‘Triad’. Many convicted serial killers, when questioned, have divulged three attributes; bed-wetting, torture of animals, or other mutilation themes, and arson. The founding of a ‘Triad’, although not seen as conclusive proof of a suspect's guilt, can give strong indications of latent aggressive behavior. The United States serial killer Edmund Kemper III, who killed ten people, told:

'it is more or less making a doll out of a human being...Taking life away from them, a living human being, and then having possession of everything that used to be theirs. All that would be mine. Everything.'

During one Christmas, when Edmund Kemper III was a child, his grandparents gave his sister a doll. It vanished only to be found by the sister decapitated and handless. When Francis Thompson was a child he complained the right to own a doll. Of one doll in particular Thompson would write:

'With another doll of much personal attraction, I was on the terms of intimate affection, till a murderous impulse of scientific curiosity incited me to open her head, that I might investigate what her brains were like. The shock which I then sustained has been a fruitful warning to me, I have never since looked for a beautiful girl's brains.’

.....

Thompson wrote of his father and stepmother in his unpublished poem, The Ballad of Fair Weather in the following verses:

'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.’

.....

Everard Meynell detailed the final conversation between Thompson and the Prostitute and her growing resemblance to both his dead mother and his sister:

'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 Footnote 27 of the Appendix to John Evangelist Walsh’s, 1968 book, Strange Harp, Strange Symphony the Life of Francis Thompson, Walsh writes:

'At this time occurred the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson's life. 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!'

....

Thompson again visited Wilfrid Meynell 'many days later'. Thompson claimed that in December 1888 he accepted that the unnamed prostitute he had searched for could not be found. In January 1889, the Meynells sent Thompson to a Franciscan priory in Storrington. A Saint Bernard, that patrolled the yard, attacked the poet who was given a room on the top floor. Here he began to write discussions on poetry and verse and once more take up opium. In February 1889, Thompson wrote to Wilfrid Meynell with a request:

'Dear Mr. Meynell...Can you send me a razor?...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.'

....

Francis Thompson’s only published tale was written in Autumn 1889. His short story, which is called Finis Coronat Opus, or the 'End Crowning Work', is set in a once upon future kingdom during Autumn. It is narrated by a poet who, for the sake of being crowned the city’s chief poet, sacrifices a woman. Part of Thompson’s story tells:

'The opposite side of the chamber had but one object to arrest attention : a curous head upon a pedestal, a head of copper with a silver beard, the features not unlike those of Pan, and the tongue protruded as in derision. This, with a large antique clock, completed the noticeable garniture of the room. Up and down this apartment Florentian paced for long, his countenance expressive of inward struggle,... His face grew hard; wih an air of sudden decision he began to act. Taking from its place the crucifix he threw it on the ground; taking from its pedestal the head he set it on the altar, and it seemed to Florentian as if he reared therewith a demon on the altar of his heart, round which also coiled burning serpents. He sprinkled in the flame that burned before the head, some drops from a vial; he wounded his arm, and moistened from the wound the idol's tongue, and stepping back he set foot upon the prostrate cross...A darkness rose like a fountain from the altar, and curled down-ward through the room as wine through water, until every light was obliterated.…

[Entity]:

"Knowest thou me; what I am?"

[Florentian]

"My deity and my slave!"

[Entity]

"Scarce high enough for thy deity, too high for thy slave, I am pain exceeding great and the desolation that is the heart of all things...I am terror without beauty, and force without strength, and sin without delight, I beat my wings against the cope of Eternity...Thou knowest me not but I know thee, Florentine...thou must be baptised in blood not thine own!"

[Florentian]

"Any way but one way!"

[Entity]

"One way: no other way...Thou must renounce her or me...Render me her body for my temple, and I render thee my spirit to inhabit it."...

[Florentian]

"I consent!"...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 examen of my crime...I reared my arm; I shook; I faltered. 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 she cried; and yet again, and yet again she cried. Then her eyes opened. I saw them open, through the gloom I saw them; through the gloom they were revealed to me, that I might see them to my hour of death. An awful recognition, an unspeakable consciousness grew slowly into them. Motionless with horror they were fixed on mine, motionless with horror mine were fixed on them. How long had I seen them? I saw them still. There was a buzzing in my brain as if a bell had ceased to toll...I know you, and myself. I have what I have. I work for the present...I do not repent, it is a thing for inconsequent weaklings...To shake a tree, and then not gather fruit- a fools act…What a slave of fancy was I! Excellent fool…Of course it is nothing; a mere coincidence that is all. Yes.; a mere coincidence, perhaps if it had been one coincidence. But when it is seven coincidences! Three stabs, three cries, three tolls, three lines, three hairs, three years, three days; and on the very date these coincidence meet…It may be a coincidence; but it is a coincidence at my marrow sets. I will write no further till the day comes.’

.....

After Thompson’s death his executors went through his meager possessions. They found that his contained 30 pages of notes and symbols. Thompson’s notes detailed the planets, Jewish Kabbala, Anima Mundi, bird and animal imagery, Hindu and Egyptian gods and the symbolic meaning of gases, jewels, precious stones and the Tau Cross. It was also found that he had begun to keep newspaper clippings. One was a cutting from the Daily Mail an article titled Maria Blume’s Will. Maria Louisa Blume was murdered in 1907 by a carpenter named Richard Brinkley. Mrs. Blume was seventy-seven years old when she and Brinkley met. Mrs. Blume had a house in Fulham and Brinkley wanted it. Brinkley drew up a will leaving him Mrs. Blume’s house and her money. He gained her signature by saying he was seeking names for those wishing to attend a seaside holiday. Two days after Mrs. Blume had signed Brinkley poisoned her by lacing her drink with cyanide. Relatives became suspicious and went to the police. Brinkley’s trial at Guilford Assize was amongst the first to introduce forensic evidence. The inks used for the will’s signature were compared and the handwriting was examined. It was on the handwriting evidence that Brinkley was found guilty. On August 31 1907, nineteen years since the Ripper wrote ‘Red ink is fit enough I hope Ha ha.’ and on the anniversary of the Ripper’s first murder, Brinkley was hung in Wandsworth prison. Why Francis Thompson would consider the subject of the Brinkley case worth his while is anybody’s guess. Surely, it was not to compose a poem on her murder.

.....

Last Update: February 22, 2004