Thomas Toughill

Thomas Toughill is a non-fiction author born in Glasgow, Scotland. His works include Oscar Slater: The Mystery Solved, World To Gain: The Battle For Global Domination And Why America Entered WWII and "The Ripper Code". He currently lives in Gibraltar with his wife.

Toughill's research into the Oscar Slater case, probably the most scandalous miscarriage of justice in modern British history, served as the basis for the 2005 BBC documentary, "Conan Doyle For The Defence", in which he featured. A new edition of his Oscar Slater book appeared in 2006 under the title, "Oscar Slater, The Immortal Case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" (Sutton Publishing).

Of the two most recent publications regarding the Oscar Slater case, (the other is by Richard Whittington-Egan) Toughill's arguments that the real person or persons responsible for the murder were nephews of Marion Gilchrist, not an unknown gang of thieves, is the more compelling. At the end of his book Toughill poses a question undermining Mr. Whittington-Egan's theory.

In the August 2012 edition of the "Journal Of The Whitechapel Society", Toughill wrote a seminal article on the Jack the Ripper case in which he showed that Montague John Druitt, the 'Great' Ripper suspect, studied at New College Oxford alongside Basil Thomson, the man who in 1913 became Head of CID at Scotland Yard.

In the June 2013 edition of the 'Journal of the Whitechapel Society', Toughill contributed an especially important article entitled, 'Reverend Robert Henry Hadden and Montague John Druitt, The East End Connection'. Here, Toughill builds on his earlier discovery that Montague Druitt, the 'sexually insane' prime police suspect in the Jack the Ripper case, was barred from the Oxford Union when he applied to join that prestigious body in the autumn of 1876. In this article, Toughill shows that the President of the Oxford Union at that time, Robert Henry Hadden, became in August 1888 Vicar of St. Botolph's Church, Aldgate, which stands just across the street from Mitre Square where the Ripper murdered Catherine Eddowes the following month. Toughill also shows that at the Oxford Union, Rev. Hadden formed a lifelong friendship with H. H. Asquith, the man who was Home Secretary in 1894 when Druitt was named as the prime suspect in a Scotland Yard document.

Before becoming an author, Toughill had a varied career after graduating from Glasgow University in History and German. He worked in a whisky distillery, spent time as an infantry officer in the British Army, became an intelligence officer based in Hong Kong and was a bodyguard for both Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.