Francis Tumblety (1830 – 28 May 1903) was an Irish-American who earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada.[1] He was a notorious self-promoter and was often in trouble with the law. He was put forward as a suspect in the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders.
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According to the 1850 census, Tumblety was born in Ireland.[2] His parents, James and Margaret Tumuelty (so spelled on their tombstone),[2] along with his 10 brothers and sisters, emigrated to Rochester, New York, a few years after his birth.[3] By the age of 17 he was selling books, which were possibly pornographic, along the Erie Canal between Rochester and Buffalo. He left home at 17, and did not return for 10 years.[4]
Tumblety set himself up in business, initially in Detroit.[3] He claimed to be a "great physician", but was commonly perceived as a quack.[5] He sold patent medicines such as "Tumblety's Pimple Destroyer" and "Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills", and gained a reputation for his eccentric, ostentatious clothes, which were frequently of a military nature.[6] According to Tumblety, by 1857 he was practicing medicine in Canada,[7] before moving to New York and Washington, D.C., where he claims to have first been introduced to Abraham Lincoln.[8] Tumblety's medicinal approach was based on herbal remedies over mineral "poisons" (mercury) or surgical techniques.[9][10] He was connected to the death of one of his patients in Boston,[11] but escaped prosecution.[3] Federal tax records show he was in Maryland in early 1863,[12] but he soon moved to St. Louis, Missouri, living at 50 Olive Street.[13]
On May 5, 1865, he was arrested in St. Louis and taken to Washington on orders of the Secretary of War for alleged complicity in the Abraham Lincoln assassination, simply because he was an acquaintance, which he denied, of David Herold, who was captured with John Wilkes Booth. There was nothing to tie him to the plot, however, and Tumblety was released without charge on May 30.[14][15][16]
Tumblety appeared to revel in denouncing all women, but reserved a special hatred for prostitutes; he blamed his misogyny on a failed marriage to a prostitute.[6] In Washington, D.C., he displayed a collection of preserved female reproductive organs to his guests at an all-male dinner party, and proudly boasted that they came from "every class of woman".[6]
Tumblety visited Europe several times, including Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, and France where he claims to have been introduced to Charles Dickens and King William and to have provided treatment to Louis Napoleon, for which he was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.[17] During one visit he became closely acquainted with Victorian writer Hall Caine, with whom it has been suggested he had an affair.[18] Authors Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey speculated in their 1996 book Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer that Tumblety lived in Whitechapel in London during the infamous 1888 Whitechapel murders that were blamed on Jack the Ripper, and he even may have been the murderer.[19] London police arrested Tumblety on 7 November 1888 on charges of "gross indecency", apparently for engaging in homosexuality, which was illegal at the time.[20] Awaiting trial, and on bail of £300 (equivalent to £25,000 today), he instead fled the country for France on 20 November using a false name – Frank Townsend.[3] On 24 November, he left Europe for the United States.[21] Already notorious for his self-promotion and previous criminal charges, Tumblety's arrest was reported in The New York Times as being connected to the Ripper murders.[22][23] American newspaper reports that Scotland Yard tried to extradite him were not confirmed by the British press or the London police.[24] However, English police inspector Walter Andrews travelled to America, perhaps partly to trace Tumblety.[3] The New York City Police, who had him under surveillance, said "there is no proof of his complicity in the Whitechapel murders, and the crime for which he is under bond in London is not extraditable".[25] Tumblety published a self-aggrandising pamphlet titled Dr. Francis Tumblety – Sketch of the Life of the Gifted, Eccentric and World Famed Physician, in which he attacked the rumours in the press but omitted any mention of his criminal charges and arrest.[26]
Tumblety was mentioned as a Ripper suspect by former Detective Chief Inspector John George Littlechild of the Metropolitan Police Service in a letter to journalist and author George R. Sims, dated 23 September 1913.[1][18] Littlechild suspected Tumblety because of his extreme misogyny and his previous criminal record.[6] However, most authorities now dismiss him as a suspect since his appearance and age did not match any description of men seen with the murder victims, and his relatively tall height of at least 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) and enormous moustache would have made him particularly conspicuous.[27] On the other hand, a contemporary interview describes Tumblety as wearing a much smaller moustache than is seen in the well known photograph of him.[28]
Tumblety returned to Rochester and moved in with an elderly female relative, whose house also served as his office.[29] He was living in Baltimore, Maryland, during the 1900 census,[30] but returned to St Louis, where he died in 1903 of heart disease[18] at the age of 73. He was buried in the family plot in Rochester's Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.[2]