Francis Tumblety (c. 1833 – May 28, 1903) was an Irish-born American medical quack who earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada.

[6] 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.

[3] In 1858, Tumblety returned to Rochester apparently a rich man, making an ostentatious display of his wealth and new social standing, and claiming that it had been achieved through patenting of his medicinal cures.

[15] On May 5, 1865, Tumblety was arrested in St. Louis and taken to Washington, D.C., on orders of the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, for alleged complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, because the police believed that he was an associate of David Herold, who was captured with John Wilkes Booth.

[7][20] At an all-male dinner party in Washington, D.C., Tumblety allegedly displayed a collection of uteruses preserved in jars in his study, and proudly boasted that they came from "every class of woman".

[26] The Metropolitan Police arrested Tumblety on 7 November 1888 on unrelated charges of gross indecency, apparently for having been caught engaging in a homosexual encounter, which was illegal at the time.

[28] Already notorious in the United States for his self-promotion and previous brushes with the law, Tumblety's arrest in London was reported in The New York Times as being connected to the Ripper murders.

[29][30] An article in early December in the Democrat and Chronicle of his hometown of Rochester concluded with an acquaintance directly stating, "Knowing him as I do I should not be the least surprised if he turned out to be Jack the Ripper.

[34] Tumblety was mentioned as a Ripper suspect by former Detective Chief Inspector John Littlechild of the Metropolitan Police in a letter to journalist and author George R. Sims, dated 23 September 1913,[1][22] which was discovered by Evans and Gainey for sale in an antiquarian bookshop in Richmond-upon-Thames.

[7] Other Ripperologists have dismissed Tumblety as a plausible Ripper suspect, citing the fact that his appearance and age did not match the description of any of the men that were seen with the murder victims, and that his relatively tall height of at least 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) and enormous moustache would have made him particularly conspicuous.