Authors: Bryan Lightbody
Around 1850, he left Rochester still an uneducated and under achieving young man to travel the USA and ultimately make his fortune. He set himself up within a couple of years in Detroit as an ‘Herb Doctor of international repute’. He had gained education and articulation over the time since he had left Rochester and created falsified qualifications to back his exclusive practice. His potions and tonics succeeded in making him a very wealthy man and from 1854 he lived on a lavish basis. He returned to Rochester in a blaze or publicity and glory hailing himself as a ‘Miracle Doctor’ and either riding through town on a handsome white horse or walking in a cavalry uniform, to which he had no entitlement, with two greyhounds. The community seemed to have forgotten the un-ambitious and sexually frustrated youth that had left many years before.
He practised his brand of medicine all around the United States and Canada finding himself in Toronto in 1858 where his loathing of women took hold, in a bitter and complete contrast to his earlier and younger obsession with the opposite sex. He met a local woman at his practice some years older than himself but exquisitely attractive and seemingly very cultured and honest. They began courting happily and after around six months they decided to marry having a civil ceremony at a district registry office with just the requisite number of witnesses in attendance.
Now living together, there were some nights of the week when she would go out and Tumblety would stay curiously at home, idolising her so much he dared not ask for fear of harming their seemingly idealic relationship. He was becoming possessive about her in the wake of the romantic and passionate sex life he found them having, something he had lusted for as a young man and with her knowing how to pleasure him at every turn. He felt sexually fulfilled for the first time in his life.
He was so happy in his married status but frightened about losing his wife that he constantly showered her with gifts to express his love for her, culminating in the expensive purchase of a diamond and emerald jewellery set for her. The diamonds being a symbol of eternity and his eternal love for her, and the emeralds to complement her beautiful green eyes.
His paranoia about her movements twice a week with ‘friends’ pained him so much that he followed her one night, and for once not in his garish uniform to avoid bringing attention to himself and allow him to blend in with the townsfolk, away from their marital home. A walk of ten minutes later found her entering to his shock, disbelief and despair a known brothel, where through a well lit downstairs window he could see her plying her trade and leading clients seductively up stairs.
Emotionally destroyed he ran back to the house sobbing all the way and vowing to distance himself from all woman kind forever, having had his heart broken by his first and only love, a common whore. When she returned in the early hours, Tumblety, his dogs, his horse and all possessions were gone, except for his wedding ring which she found on their dining table. He shut all memories of her from his mind including her name. The wonderful jewellery set, however, remained permanently in his possession as it was his way of maintaining his fortune without depositing in a bank’s vaults.
He moved on to St John, New Brunswick to set up a new practice. His bad luck followed him there when within months a patient called Podmore, a locomotive engineer he was treating with ‘medicine,’ died from poisoning. Tumblety was forced to flee to avoid facing a manslaughter charge and took himself off to Boston, again to set himself up in new surgery but being far more careful with the type of medicine he practised. He specialised in pimple cures and took a real interest in his female patients, secretly now beginning to plot his revenge against whore-kind by getting to know women anatomically. His surgery flourished and he soon had branches across the USA in New York, New Jersey, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. This kept his lifestyle fully funded and he travelled to other US cities such as Chicago, Niagara and Philadelphia as well venturing to Liverpool and London and on to mainland Europe.
It was then that he first began to hear the voices. The emotional trauma he had suffered over the proceeding period had set off a chemical imbalance in his brain causing him to begin to suffer with paranoid schizophrenia. Tumblety would be frequently invaded by loud and disturbing male voices calling for him to distance himself from ‘all whores’ and to ‘wreak revenge amongst them and take trophies to signify his triumphs.’ The first initial months he managed to suppress these strange and unknown voices in is mind but as time moved on they became more vociferous and called for him to take action. There was a familiarity in the voice that blindly he could not place. Feeling that the affections of others which had once made him so happy could help him, he decided to take drastic action.
He felt it appropriate to distance himself from women to prevent the voices forcing him to take action, so he now sought sexual satisfaction amongst the company of men, a matter that he kept secret from the American high society within which he mixed. All that some within this peer group knew was that he had developed ‘a deep hated and distrust of women’. Despite this hatred, he did not find the company of men brought him any sexual satisfaction merely making him at times feel dominated, so he developed a thought process to a different end. He would indulge in intercourse with common whores bringing about a sense of power and domination, one class over another. However, on occasions he had the habit of disturbing those with whom he discussed the matter, like the New Jersey lawyer Colonel C.A. Dunham.
Dunham a close friend of Tumblety’s found it strange when he lost contact with the doctor over a few months. He had felt he had seen a change in his friend after the episode with his wife but put it down very naively to the emotional distress the discovery must have caused. Little did he know how Tumblety’s mind had begun to twist or the new obsessions the doctor had developed.
Beginning to kow-tow to the voices, Tumblety lacked the courage to go and kill and physically take trophies, but he felt if he gained a collection of medical specimens and continued to try to sexually dominate women it may suppress their demands. Paying visits to hospitals and medical colleges around the state, Tumblety initiated and expanded his collection of female anatomical specimens. But to his bitter disappointment it merely fuelled the voices to implore him to share their beliefs.
The months had passed and out of the blue Dunham received correspondence from Tumblety requesting him to come for dinner to discuss important matters. Concerned about his friend’s absence he agreed and arrived at the Doctor’s house one winters evening for dinner. The Colonel was visibly shaken when over dinner that night the matter of his wife’s deceit had come up for discussion with Tumblety who had then taken Dunham to his office where in a cupboard he had a large collection on specimen jars in which Tumblety claimed to be collecting examples of the ‘uterus of all classes of women’. When Dunham inquired as to why, Tumblety simply answered ‘so I can have reference to an object of desire’. Clearly shocked the Colonel decided to cut short his dinner engagement and left Tumblety’s house never to see him again. The most disturbing aspect had been the request from Tumblety for him to join him in ‘the blood letting of whores’.
In 1887 on his first trip to England whilst being driven by the voices, staying in Liverpool and then before moving on to London, Tumblety met a beautiful young Irish girl called Mary who was very shy and quite defenceless it seemed with her having been widowed at an early age. Amazingly to him, he was so taken with her loveliness that the voices seemed to begin to fade and he now believed that his best therapy was to once again try to forge a relationship and a trust in female kind. If he could achieve this he felt confident from the voices suppression that he could live a calm and fruitful life again.
With her background and her own seemingly emotional frailty, Tumblety got chatting with her on a regular basis in the hotel bar where she worked and he was staying and they eventually had dinner together. He felt she was vindicating womankind to him and his dark ambitions on women definitely began to subside and they started to see each other on a regular basis. There were many years between them but it allowed them to build a protective bond with each other especially when they both discussed their varying emotional pasts, although Tumblety was far from fully truthful.
But for Tumblety the emotional darkness within him began to trouble him after the first time they made love. Coming in to contact with a woman intimately had been a brave new step for him and a fascination to take ‘specimens’ himself for his collection began to grow within him from the dark subliminal programming the voices had given him, even with this beautiful young Irish girl. He had told her that his profession was that of a physician but he had also taken up art as a relaxing pastime and Mary frequently became his subject set amongst a landscape of the Liverpool coast or Lancastrian hills.
But his stay in Liverpool was interspersed with trips to London where he would stay in the grandest hotels and then skulk off to the East End. There he would engage in filthy street sex with the local whores to satisfy the overwhelming sense of female domination that the voices drove him to achieve. So strong were the demands of the voices, they drove him to consider lodgings in the Spitalfields district to indulge in longer periods of depravation with these women in private. He got to know the geography of the district very well, and it was not uncommon to see men in military uniform there, either on leave or out drinking and debauching, so Tumblety blended in well. As far as Mary was concerned he was always on business. He had also put the word discreetly out amongst the medical fraternity in East London that he wished to purchase particular female specimens to add to his collection.
Months passed with this outrageous and depraved behaviour on one hand and then emotional stability with Mary on the other. He must do something to try to resolve the two halves of his life. Short of Victorian electrotherapy, what could he do? He decided he would go to Paris for some thinking time and see if he could suppress his emotions. But on breaking the news to Mary she insisted on going with him. He tried to talk her out of the idea but with the tears flowing and the stories of her past spilling forth once more, he agreed to take the young Mary Kelly with him. They travelled first class together all the way to Paris settling in a hotel in the fashionable and famously bohemian Monmartre district known for it’s artists. They had a suite which consisted of a main living room, a bathroom and two bedrooms as Tumblety respected a lady’s privacy and felt that Mary deserved it with the short time they had known each other, despite their intimacy.
Walking the streets of an evening together Tumblety found himself distracted by the sight of dogs being walked, owning his own in the USA much to the annoyance of Mary. For him and his ownership of dogs he understood his deep interest in them; they always offered him unconditional love. Both were fascinated by the portraits they saw of naked models in oils and water colour on the streets and on returning to the hotel Mary made a suggestion to Tumblety.
“Francis, would you like me to pose like the models we’ve seen?” Thinking cautiously about the matter Tumblety agreed as he felt it might help his delicate emotional state by attacking his obsessions head on and therefore be good therapy.
The next night he opened his art materials bag to get his sketching items out as Mary readied herself. The voices had returned to him slowly but surely since leaving England, to the extent they had driven him to leave the hotel early in the mornings to seek ‘trophies from a new continent.’ He removed the false bottom he had made just to take a look at the specimen bottles he had recently got from the local hospital to see if he could kick the unhealthy obsession. He had slipped out on a couple of occasions early in the mornings to avoid Mary’s curiosity to go one of the local hospitals to buy some foreign examples for his collection. These ‘trophies,’ and the desire for them, were fuelled by the voices that dominated his actions over them and prevented him from discarding them or trying to resist collecting more. He felt sure in few days with the relaxed Paris atmosphere and the seeming love of a good woman his paranoia and the voices would once and for all die and he could throw all this bizarre collection away and make a new start.
Only that very day at 6.a.m he had made his way to the Pasteur Memorial Hospital to visit the pathology department to collect a specimen for which he had negotiated with the mortuary attendant. Having made a request for uterus of an African prostitute, something which he knew he would not get readily in London, the rather dubious mortuary attendant even by Tumblety’s standards had obliged very quickly and willingly.
The mortuary attendant was a twenty-two year old Polish fellow who had claimed to have served surgeons apprenticeship in his home town of Nagornak before leaving for the brighter lights of Western Europe. He had told Tumblety of his intention to move to London to settle amongst the Polish community in the East End and was merely passing through Paris. He didn’t admit to having been there before and having to leave following an allegation of a serious assault. He felt that a year on the dust would have settled there and he could return, but not to the West India Dock area where he had previously worked as a barber. Young Severin Klosowski had a violent streak within him and an unhealthily high sexual drive and unbeknown to Tumblety he had made for the Bois de Boulogne the notorious forest within the city known for its use by night of women of the prostitute class. With this knowledge he concluded that he could satisfy his sexual and violent desires and receive a fee from the curious Dr Tumblety at the same time.
At 11.40.p.m the night before, he had been scouring the area for his victim when he had come across a black woman who had just finished with a client and spotting Klosowski sealed her own fate by making her way towards him. She smiled revealing a row of even white teeth a legacy of her healthy diet whilst still a native of the French Colonies in Africa and spoke to him in French which he understood to a degree.