Source: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
An Australian educator claims to have finally found the true identity of the century-old mystery of England’s most notorious serial killer, London’s
Mirror reports.
Richard Patterson, an English teacher from Australia, has spent nearly 20 years studying the infamous London slayings and has now concluded he believes “Jack the Ripper” was renowned poet Francis Thompson.
According to Patterson, Thompson “kept a dissecting knife under his coat, and he was taught a rare surgical procedure that was found in the mutilations of more than one of the Ripper victims.”
Source: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Francis Thompson was from Preston, Lancashire. He had surgical experience and hinted at his double life and killing people in some of his poems, Patterson found.
“He helped with surgery and is known to have cut up heaps and heaps of cadavers while a student,” Patterson told the
Mirror.
According to Patterson, Thompson was addicted to opium and “lived rough in the city until a local prostitute is believed to have offered him a place to stay,” the
Mirror reported. This friendship would turn into Thompson’s only romantic relationship.
But soon after, Thompson would finally be published and things took an allegedly dramatic course.
“The moment he told her he was finally published, she said she was leaving him because the public would not understand their relationship,” Patterson said. “This was after Thompson’s year long romance with the woman.”
“Soon before and soon after the murders, he wrote about killing female prostitutes with knives,” Patterson added.
For instance, in Thompson’s short story,
Finis Coronat Opus, he detailed the murder of a young woman stabbed to death at a pagan temple by a young poet.
“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 wakening, I struck again, and again she cried ; and yet again, and yet again she cried,” reads an excerpt from the 1889 piece.
Patterson believes the mentally unstable poet then took his anger out on several other victims.
“Motionless with horror they were fixed on mine, motionless with horror mine were fixed on them, as she wakened into death,” reads one of the author’s poems.
Over the years, many have theorized the exact identity of the man (or woman) responsible for the murders, including a 23-year-old Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski, an artist named Walter Sickert, and Lizzie Williams, the wife of royal physician Sir John Williams, but no theory has come close to being confirmed.
Jack the Ripper is believed to have committed a series of five gruesome murders over a 10-week span in Fall of 1888 that became known as the Whitechapel Murders.
