In November 1888, he lost his post at the school for reasons that remain unclear. One month later his body was discovered drowned in the River Thames. His death, which was found to be a suicide, roughly coincided with the end of the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper. Private suggestions in the 1890s that he could have committed the crimes became public knowledge in the 1960s and led to the publication of books that proposed him as the murderer. The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, however, and many writers from the 1970s onwards have rejected him as a likely suspect.