A man died in St. Louis in 1903 under an assumed name, leaving behind a fortune, a trail of legal trouble, and the faint smell of patent medicine. Years later, one retired Scotland Yard official would say he had been a “very likely” suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders. St. Louis does this sometimes. It lets a person drift in, go strange, and become someone else’s nightmare.

His name was Francis Tumblety, though he also used aliases like Frank Townsend. He was an Irish-born American quack doctor who made money selling “Indian Herb” remedies, which is the kind of phrase that tells you almost everything you need to know about nineteenth-century medical ethics. He spent years reinventing himself in public and in print.

Tumblety had a gift for self-invention and an obvious allergy to humility. He wore military-style uniforms and decorations he had not earned, promoted himself as a world-famous physician, and collected arrests the way other men collected calling cards. One account of his life notes that during his St. Louis years he was arrested locally for the fake-uniform business, which feels less like a biography detail and more like a warning label.

Then London happened. In November 1888, while the Whitechapel murders were terrifying the city, Tumblety was arrested on unrelated charges of gross indecency. He was released on bail, fled to France, and then returned to the United States under an alias. That alone does not make a Ripper. It does, however, make a person look extremely bad in a gaslight mirror.

The reason his name still clings to the case came later. In a 1913 letter, former Metropolitan Police Chief Inspector John Littlechild wrote that among the suspects, “a very likely one” was “an American quack named Tumblety.” That letter mattered because it was one of the first known instances of a senior police official naming him directly. It dragged him out of rumor and into the colder part of the file cabinet.

That said, the case against him is still mostly atmosphere, timing, and personal creepiness. Even contemporary American police said there was no proof of his complicity in the murders, and later researchers have pointed out that his height, age, and giant mustache did not fit especially well with witness descriptions. Suspicion is not evidence. Victorian panic was not exactly a precision instrument either.

And yet St. Louis gets the ending. Tumblety died here on May 28, 1903, at St. John’s Hospital, reportedly using the name Townsend. Newspaper accounts said he left an estate of more than $100,000, with no close companion at his bedside and a will complicated enough to trigger a fight over the money. He arrived in the hospital half-hidden and died famous only in the wrong ways.

So no, St. Louis cannot honestly claim it housed Jack the Ripper. It can claim something more irritating and maybe more interesting: that one of the case’s enduring suspects ended his strange American career here, carrying his aliases, his frauds, and his bad legend into a city already crowded with men who wanted to be larger than life and ended up merely odd. Some cities get monuments. We got Francis Tumblety.