Based on the title of the article, you may be wondering how it is possible for someone who penned beautiful stanzas to also be capable of committing grisly murders.
In an article written by the NY Daily News, Australian teacher Richard Patterson, 45, has concluded that English poet Francis Thompson (1859-1907) is the face behind the legendary killer who terrorized the streets of London in the late 1880s. Patterson has been conducting an extensive 20-year study that showed that Thompson is responsible for the killings of five London prostitutes in 1888 and others during a 10-week span.
Patterson revealed that Thompson had knowledge that would have assisted him for such acts and he suggested he may have had a double life in some of his writings where he would detail his wrongdoings.
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,” said Patterson. His knowledge of these tactics, along with shocking personal life exploits, may have led to his rampage.
Why? Patterson believes that Thompson snapped after a relationship with a local prostitute went awry as his writings started to detail these horrors shortly before or after this occurred.
In his 1889 short story, ““Finis Coronat Opus,” Thompson wrote:
“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.”
For centuries, the identity of Jack the Ripper had been attributed to several people including a 23-year-old Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski; the royal physician of Queen Victoria, Sir John Williams and Williams’ wife, Lizzie.
