JACK THE RIPPER IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS (1889)
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The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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The residents of Brooklyn Heights had always seemed to have much more to fear from one another than from the butcheresque stylings of London’s Jack The Ripper.
His fiendish work had been performed with the great learnedness of a doctor, but, comfortingly, it had been executed all the way across the Atlantic in the East End of London.
It was likely because of this distance that Brooklynites felt free to regale in the stories of the Ripper’s murders and to wonder at the identity of the modern-day butcher.
On 18 January in 1889, however, all of that may have changed, when a man using the “common, every day” name Smith stepped up to a Brooklyn Heights boarding house – with his bag and great trunks en tow – and quietly checked himself in for a long stay.
TWOMBLEY, THE INDIAN HERB DOCTOR
The former “Indian herb doctor,” who had, through “judicious and extensive advertising, managed to make a handsome income,” engaged Mrs. Lamb’s rooms, where he also took his meals.
Dr. Francis Twombley, also known as Tumblety, in his former life in the U.S. – for he was born and raised in the States – had, in the early 1860s, had an office and laboratory on Fulton Street, near Nassau. (According to the Rochester Daily Union, though, before coming to Brooklyn, he was selling books, which were possibly pornographic, along the Erie Canal between Rochester and Buffalo. He then found brief employment as a cleaner at the Lispenard Hospital, in Rochester, which had a dubious medical reputation for performing gynaecological operations and “cures” for sexual temptation.)
He had “believed in keeping himself constantly before the public in the literal sense of the word, and it was his custom to spend a great portion of each day in promenading up and down Fulton street accompanied by a fine greyhound.”
According to an attorney who had at one time opposed him in court, Twombley had a “seeming mania for the company of young men and grown-up youths” and was often to be seen “hovering about the old post-office building, where there were many clerks.”
He was “a coward physically, though he looked like a giant,” went on this attorney, but “once he had a young man under his control he seemed to be able to do anything with the victim.”
Regarding his attitude towards women, however, he “always disliked women very much,” according to a contemporary. He could not bear to have them near him, thinking they were all impostors, and he would often say that “all the trouble in this world was caused by women.”
But Twombley had actually had bigger problems to deal with than those that he perceived came from the fairer sex. He had left the U.S. because of accusations that he had concocted a plot to infect Union army blankets with yellow-fever during the Civil War and, worse, that he had been involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
After finally being cleared of both of these accusations, he found himself fleeing to London, England, staying in that country through to the point when the Ripper murders suddenly ended there. At this point he, once again, was fingered as one of the possible suspects. And so, having learned to flee his past in the U.S., Twombley, too, fled his host country, returning to New York City and the anonymity of Brooklyn.
And in the boarding house in Brooklyn Heights, Mrs. Lamb, engaging the “doctor” in conversation to inquire into his past, learned from him that he had “plenty of money which he had made years ago from a patent medicine.” This explanation seemed to have satisfied the landlady, for “Smith” paid in advance and was exceptionally tidy.
“HOWD’Y DO, MR. TWOMBLEY?”
The boarding house’s mystery man was discovered, however, a little more than a week after he had arrived when a “young man called at the house while a rain storm was in progress.”
The bell was answered by one of the boarders who was just going out. The young man asked for Dr. Twombley, but the boarder replied that there was no one with that name in the house.
The young man was about to leave, though, when the “gentleman known as Smith arrived.” The young man greeted Smith with a cordial “Howd’y do, Mr. Twombley?”
At this point, the two had a hasty, whispered conversation, at the end of which Twombley hurriedly called on his landlady, paid his bill from a big roll of bills, packed his trunks, had them put on a truck, which the young man had summoned. The two then drove off into the rain, disappearing as silently and as mysteriously as Twombley had appeared.
POSTSCRIPT
Where Dr. Twombley went that evening, what his trunks held, and what his intentions were would forever remain a mystery to his Brooklyn neighbors. Other than an arrest in Washington, D.C., the following year, not much was heard from him after this.
Thus, like the Ripper himself, “Dr. Twombley” slipped quietly and painlessly into the long pages of history.
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