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Jack the Ripper murdered five women in Whitechapel, London, between 1888 and 1890, with horrifying brutality and surgical precision. After police shortlisted 300 suspects at the time of the murders, many more researchers around the world have put forward a variety of names hoping to pin the killer down. BBC documentary, “Jack the Ripper – The Case Reopened”, aired last night and featured Silent Witness star Emilia Fox and Professor of Criminology David Wilson as they looked at the unsolved mystery which has riveted the public for 130 years.

However, one suspect could be one of the greatest Catholic poets of modern times. Francis Thompson is most well-known for his poem "The Hound of Heaven", which at one time was one of the most widely printed poems in the English language. He was an inspiration to such varied and influential figures as JRR Tolkien, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. However, author Richard Patterson, in his 2017 book "Jack the Ripper, The Works of Francis Thompson" posited his name as a Ripper suspect.

A portrait of Francis Thompson, who has been posited as a Ripper suspect

Some of the circumstantial details of Mr Thompson’s life point towards the theory. After training at a seminary in County Durham, Mr Thompson failed to become a priest and went on to medical college. Here, he learned the techniques of dissection that would be a key feature of the Ripper murders, and he was later known to keep a scalpel on his person at the time of the killings. A fellow student described Thompson as having “a vacant stare, weak lips, and a usually half-open mouth, the saliva trickling over his chin”.

Headlines from the time of the Ripper murders

Thompson refused to complete his medical training and instead ran away to London in 1885. By 1888, he had suffered a series of setbacks including mental ill-health and opium addiction that led to his becoming homeless on the streets of the capital. However, he began a relationship with a prostitute who took him off the streets – it was the breakdown of this relationship, Patterson argues, that was the motivation for the brutal killings that targeted London sex workers. Added to this, when the Ripper’s last victim Mary Kelly was murdered in 1890, Thompson was staying in Whitechapel lodgings just yards from the scene.

The infamous Jack the Ripper letters became a hallmark of the case

Some of Thompson’s poetry may also provide a clue to his murderous tendencies. His poem "The End Crowns the Work" describes a satanic pact in which the narrator murders a drugged girl, and in another of his works he describes slitting a girl’s stomach open. Author Richard Patterson said: ”I got to maybe the second last poem [of Thompson's anthology] and I thought 'this is a really evil poem, who's this guy?' "People said if he was famous he wouldn't go around killing people... but at the time of the murders most people thought he was dead; he'd been homeless for about three years and wasn't famous until about 50 years after he'd died.”

Furthermore, the letters sent to police signed with the name "Jack" at the time of the murders became key to the investigation. Some have suggested the letters mean the culprit was a well-educated man who appreciated literature, which could also strengthen the claim that Mr Thompson was the Ripper. Although Mr Thompson is taken seriously as a candidate by Ripperologists, his name is one of many that have been offered as the true identity of Jack the Ripper over the years. Author Bruce Robinson posits the name of music-hall songwriter Michael Maybrick as the culprit – who was subsequently embroiled in another sensational Victorian murder case.