The idea that Jack the Ripper could have been LGBT seems far fetched. But there is overwhelming evidence from contemporary accounts pointing to Jack the Ripper being an LGBT Irish-American. This raises a whole host of questions about motive, backstory, and methodology. Luckily for you – I have a new book out in May 2024 that explains everything.
To be clear, I’m LGBT myself and like the man I suspect was Jack the Ripper – have an Irish heritage. There, mercifully, the similarity ends. I believe that the reason this individual was not apprehended and convicted of a string of crimes from the 1850s onwards were the networks he cultivated – in large part based on his ethnicity and sexuality. This is uncomfortable to address – but as a former journalist, I’m not going to avoid issues that might trigger me.
It’s critical to say at the outset that I’m fully in agreement with a victim-centred approach to the Ripper killings but equally feel it’s not my place to comment in any great detail on the women who fell victim to this maniac. That has been done far better elsewhere – especially by the author and historian, Halle Rubenhold in her book: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.
But I have noticed a reticence on the part of some in the Ripperologist community and elsewhere to address Tumblety’s sexuality. The question is brushed aside in a way that frankly, I find offensive. Because failure to incorporate his sexuality into the picture means you don’t get the full picture of the world he operated in and what unleashed his inner psychopath.
FIND OUT MORE: What did Victorians think of Jack the Ripper
Francis Tumblety – LGBT Jack the Ripper suspect
In 2022, I appeared on History’s TV documentary series William Shatner’s The UnXplained and was asked to discuss Francis Tumblety, an Irish-American long suspected of being a possible Jack the Ripper. I recalled that in the 1990s, Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey had revealed the so-called Littlechild Letter from a former Scotland Yard detective to a retired crime journalist revealing the firm belief among London police that Tumblety was indeed the Ripper.
As I researched and investigated further, Tumblety became ever more fascinating. Only a small portion of what I discovered featured in the documentary that aired in 2023. Firstly, the incredible revelation that Tumblety was arrested a quarter of a century before in connection with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Secondly – and ultimately more compelling – were the contemporary accounts of his sexuality.
Because Tumblety was what I can only describe as stridently homosexual. And to those sceptics who seem to think homosexuals didn’t exist before the word was coined in the late 19th century – well, they most certainly did. And Tumblety provides ample proof.
Celebrity doctor turns serial killer
Dublin-born Francis Tumblety emigrated as a teenager with his family to the United States becoming part of a huge Irish diaspora living and working on both sides of the border between the United States and what would become Canada – a string of cities from Detroit to Saint John, New Brunswick.
Tumblety became a celebrity herb doctor with a PT Barnum-style knack for self-promotion. I chart his rise in the book showing how business ethics and personal morals were thrown to the four winds in the process. He was one of thousands who crafted dazzling personas to mask their poverty-stricken past and take advantage of the emerging mass circulation newspapers. In many ways, he reminds me of today’s social media influencers, setting out to become famous at all costs.
However, one thing in his life dragged him down time and again. Tumblety was gay – and his cruising was the subject of ribald gossip and nudge-nudge/wink-wink asides in the press. In case any know-nothing cynics doubt his sexuality, I document the evidence with ample footnotes in the book. And no – it doesn’t all rest on over-extending the meaning of words like “intimate”. The descriptions from journalists, police, private detectives, the courts, and other sources leave little doubt.
Tumblety was locked into a cycle with his young male conquests that I show repeated over and over again:
- Tumblety seduces a young man and then employs him in his pharmacy
- The young man helps himself to some of Tumblety’s property
- Tumblety reports the young man to the police and sometimes it even ends up in the courts
- The young man defends himself by countering that the older Tumblety has assaulted him sexually
- The newspapers gleefully report the allegations with coded language and the case collapses – though Tumblety invariably avoids prosecution for indecency and assault
Far from learning from this experience – Tumblety went through this process many times – in several American cities and in London, UK. Why was he never prosecuted? Networks were key. What these networks were and how they worked, I describe fully in the book. They not only saved Tumblety from imprisonment but even getting his neck stretched on at least two occasions.
Contemporary references to homosexuality in relation to Tumblety
The late 19th century saw a growing understanding of different sexualities as the science of psychology – and psychoanalysis – emerged as well as an awareness of the need to address the horrific levels of sexual abuse against women and children during this period. Commentaries on Tumblety in the press, especially with regard to his arrest over the Jack the Ripper killings, referenced these developments.
After his arrest in London in 1888 as a Ripper suspect, the private detective Billy Pinkerton mentioned in a press interview the work of William Alexander Hammond, the Surgeon-General of the US Army under President Lincoln who, in the 1880s, wrote extensively about homosexuality. Like most psychologists, until well into the 20th century, he framed homosexuality as a mental disease with gay men seen as more prone to narcissism, Machiavellian tendencies, and psychotic behaviour.
Pinkerton believed that Tumblety’s sexuality made him more – not less – likely to be Jack the Ripper despite the lack of any obvious sexual motive. This was a line repeated in the Littlechild Letter with regards to Tumblety, mixed with references to Oscar Wilde and the notorious Harry Thaw legal case. Read the book for full details!
Spoiler alert – after fleeing back to the United States, having jumped bail on the Ripper charges in London, Tumblety grumbled to a local journalist about being initially arrested by Scotland Yard on obscenity charges with four men. He was never “mixed up in a scandal implicating certain lords”. This was a very clear reference to the Cleveland Street affair of 1889.
In short, several teenage boys working as messengers for the post office had been supplementing their meagre income through sex work in a gay brothel on Cleveland Street. When this was exposed, the boys were lined up by police outside the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and asked to identify the aristocrats who had been paying for their services.
This was an astonishing development for the time. A willingness on the part of Victorian society to publicise sexual abuse – no matter how salaciously – and a breakdown in deference towards the upper classes. Tumblety was eager to distance himself from that scandal.
To buy your copy of Jack the Ripper and Abraham Lincoln (Troubador) – click on the following links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jack-Ripper-Abraham-Lincoln-greatest/dp/1805143646/
Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/jack-the-ripper-and-abraham-lincoln/tony-mcmahon/9781805143642
And your honest reviews – positive or negative – genuinely appreciated.
