The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream

Cast of Characters

THE LAMBETH POISONER

• » Thomas Neill Cream, doctor, abortionist, blackmailer, serial killer

KNOWN AND SUSPECTED VICTIMS

• » Flora Eliza Brooks, Cream's wife, Waterloo, QC
• » Matilda Clover, London, England
• » Ellen Donworth, London, England
• » Mary Anne Matilda Faulkner, Chicago
• » Catharine Hutchinson Gardner, London, ON
• » Alice Marsh, London, England
• » Sarah Alice Montgomery, Chicago
• » Emma Shrivell, London, England
• » Ellen Stack, Chicago
• » Daniel Stott, Garden Prairie, IL

TARGETS OF ATTEMPTED OR SUSPECTED POISONINGS

• » Violet Beverly, London, England
• » Louisa Harvey, also known as Louisa Harris, London, England
• » Matilda Nadeau, Quebec City
• » Louisa Mary Read, mother of Cream's sister-in-law, Jessie Read, Quebec City
• » Emily Turner, London, England

THE CREAM FAMILY

• » Daniel Cream, brother; husband of Jessie Read
• » Mary Cream, sister
• » Mary Elder Cream, mother
• » William Cream, father; timber merchant in Quebec City
• » Elizabeth Harbeson, stepmother

POLICE INVESTIGATORS

Chicago

• » John Rehm, sergeant
• » Edward Steele, lieutenant

Belvidere, IL

• » Albert T. Ames, sheriff of Boone County

London, England

• » Robert Anderson, assistant commissioner, Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard)
• » James Brannan, superintendent, L Division (Lambeth)
• » Colin Chisholm, chief inspector, L Division
• » George Comley, constable, L Division
• » George Harvey, inspector, L Division
• » Frederick Smith Jarvis, inspector, Metropolitan Police
• » George Lowe, inspector, L Division
• » Melville Macnaghten, chief constable, Metropolitan Police
• » Patrick McIntyre, sergeant, Metropolitan Police
• » John Mulvany, chief inspector, L Division
• » John Bennett Tunbridge, inspector, Metropolitan Police
• » Alfred Ward, sergeant, L Division

CORONERS AND FORENSIC INVESTIGATORS

London, ON

• » Dr. John R. Flock, coroner
• » Dr. James Niven, physician

Chicago

• » Dr. Theodore Bluthardt, Cook County physician
• » Dr. Walter Haines, professor of chemistry and toxicology, Rush Medical College
• » Canute Matson, Cook County coroner
• » Major W. E. Waite, Cook County deputy coroner

Belvidere, IL

• » Dr. Frank Whitman, Boone County coroner

London, England

• » A. Braxton Hicks, coroner for mid-Surrey
• » Dr. Thomas Kelloch, house physician, St. Thomas' Hospital
• » Dr. Thomas Stevenson, chemist and Home Office analyst
• » George Percival Wyatt, coroner for the counties of London and Surrey
• » Dr. Cuthbert Wyman, house physician, St. Thomas' Hospital

KEY WITNESSES

Canada

• » Lyman Brooks, hotel owner and father of Flora Brooks, Waterloo, QC
• » John Cantle, salesman, Toronto
• » Robert Caswell, prison chaplain, Toronto
• » Robert Gardner, brother of Catharine Gardner
• » David Lindsay, archdeacon and rector of St. Luke's Anglican Church, Waterloo, QC
• » Sarah Long, hotel maid, London, ON
• » John McCulloch, salesman, Toronto
• » Dr. Cornelius Phelan, Waterloo, QC
• » Dr. Herbert Reddy, Cream's McGill Medical School classmate, Montreal
• » William Sellar, salesman, Montreal
• » Leon Vohl, chief of police, Quebec City

United States

• » George Harvey, president, G. F. Harvey Company, drug manufacturer, Saratoga Springs, NY
• » Martin Kingman, salesman for G. F. Harvey Company
• » Joseph Martin, target of obscene postcards, Chicago
• » Robert McClaughry, warden, Illinois State Penitentiary, Joliet; later, chief of police, Chicago
• » Mary McClellan, Cream's landlady and mother of his fiancée, Lena, Chicago
• » Frank Murray, superintendent, Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, Chicago
• » Julia Stott, wife of Daniel Stott; Cream's mistress and co-accused, Garden Prairie

England

• » Francis Coppin, physician's assistant, London
• » Robert Graham, doctor, London
• » John Haynes, ship's engineer and former British government agent, London
• » Elizabeth Masters, London
• » Elizabeth May, London
• » Emma Phillips, Matilda Clover's landlady, London
• » Lucy Rose, Emma Phillips's maid, London
• » Laura Sabbatini, Cream's fiancée; dressmaker, Berkhamsted
• » Emily Sleaper, daughter of Cream's landlady, London
• » Charlotte Vogt, landlady of Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell, London

TARGETS OF BLACKMAIL THREATS

• » Dr. William Broadbent, physician, London, England
• » Dr. Joseph Harper, physician, Barnstaple, England
• » Walter J. Harper, Joseph Harper's son; medical student, St. Thomas' Hospital, London, England
• » Frank Pyatt, druggist, Chicago
• » James Rayner, druggist, Chicago
• » Countess Mabel Russell, wife of Earl Russell, London, England
• » William Frederick Danvers Smith, bookseller and member of Parliament, London, England

PROSECUTORS

• » Amos Coon, lawyer, Belvidere, IL
• » Reuben Coon, state's attorney, Belvidere, IL
• » Charles Fuller, lawyer and state senator, Belvidere, IL
• » George Ingham, Cook County assistant state's attorney, Chicago
• » Sir Charles Russell, attorney general, London, England

CREAM'S LAWYERS

• » Gerald Geoghegan, barrister, London, England
• » John Jennison, Chicago
• » Daniel Munn, Chicago
• » Alfred Trude, Chicago
• » Henry Warburton, barrister, London, England
• » John Waters, lawyer, London, England
• » Omar Wright, Belvidere, IL

JUDGES AND MAGISTRATES

• » Sir John Bridge, magistrate, London, England
• » Joseph Eaton Gary, circuit court, Chicago
• » Sir Henry Hawkins, High Court of Justice, London, England
• » Horace Smith, magistrate, London, England

KEY FIGURES IN CREAM'S CLEMENCY APPEAL

• » Shelby Moore Cullom, US senator from Illinois
• » Thomas Davidson, executor of William Cream's will and family friend, Quebec City
• » John Dunn, vice consul, British consulate, Chicago
• » Joseph Fifer, governor of Illinois
• » Richard Oglesby, governor of Illinois
• » Frances Willard, president, Woman's Christian Temperance Union

A Note to Readers

This is the true story of a serial killer who preyed on women in London, Chicago, and Canada more than a century ago. None of the dialogue, scenes, or details have been invented or embellished. Every word enclosed in quotation marks is drawn from a court or police file; a newspaper report, memoir, or historical study; or a letter or other document preserved in an archive or museum. Wording and spellings within quotations have been preserved, uncorrected, so the past can speak directly to the present.

I

"The First of Criminals"

LONDON • 1891

1

"A Great Sin-Stricken City"

A MAN CLAD IN A MACKINTOSH TO OUTSMART THE DAY'S showers, a top hat covering his bald head, turned up at the door of a townhouse at 103 Lambeth Palace Road. His name was Thomas Neill, he told the landlady, and he was in search of lodgings. He took the upper-floor room at the back. It was October 7, 1891, and Cream was back in Lambeth, a downtrodden maze of grimy slums and smoky factories across the Thames from the Gothic splendor of the Houses of Parliament. It was a London neighborhood he knew well: his rooming house stood opposite St. Thomas' Hospital, where he had been a medical student more than a decade earlier. He could not help but notice that a new building, just downriver from the tower of Big Ben, had been erected since his last visit. Faced with bands of red brick and white stone and set on a foundation of granite quarried by inmates of Dartmoor and other prisons, it was the new headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, better known as Scotland Yard.

Cream was in the heart of the world's largest city, the capital of an empire at its zenith. Swaths of scarlet on globes and maps staked Britain's claim to the far-flung colonies and territories—and tens of millions of people—under Queen Victoria's rule. London was a sprawling metropolis of more than five million, a glittering bastion of wealth and power built on a foundation of poverty, crime, and desperation. Church spires and the giant teapot dome of St. Paul's Cathedral pointed skyward from a sea of slate roofs and chimneys belching black coal smoke. A chaos of carriages, freight wagons, and horse-drawn omnibuses clogged the main streets. At night, the sidewalks became a sea of bowlers and wide-brimmed feathered hats as men and women passed like ghosts through a netherworld of flickering gaslight and sinister fog. Pickpockets shouldered their way into the crowds in search of watches and billfolds. Prostitutes scanned the audiences at West End theaters and music halls in search of customers or strolled the adjacent Strand, transforming the busy thoroughfare, one observer lamented, into "one of the scandals of London." Enclaves of the rich and privileged rubbed shoulders with foul, dangerous slums like Whitechapel where, just three years before, the notorious Jack the Ripper had brutally murdered five women. To an editor at the city's Daily Chronicle, London was a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, "a great sin-stricken city."

Lambeth rivaled Whitechapel as one of the city's poorest, dirtiest, and most crime-ridden neighborhoods. Not even the police were safe—one bobby, a rookie on one of his first patrols, confronted a group of Lambeth thugs and was thrown through a plate-glass window. When the journalist Henry Mayhew set out to expose London's nineteenth-century underworld, he headed for the "well-known rookery of young thieves in London." Children as young as five, he discovered, roamed the streets in ragged clothing, stealing to survive. "Fagin, Bill Sikes, and Oliver Twist would have all seemed quite at home in Victorian Lambeth," the celebrated author Simon Winchester has written. "This was Dickensian London writ large."

Lambeth's industries choked the air with smoke and soot. Maudslay's foundry forged parts for the steam engines, pumps, and other mechanical marvels that powered the Victorian Age. Earthenware jugs, chimney pots, and drainpipes were fired in Henry Doulton's famous pottery works. Overhead, trains puffed and clacked on elevated rail lines that sliced through the heart of the neighborhood. Their destination was Waterloo Station, one of the city's major terminals. Thousands of people—commuters who worked in the city, travelers bound for points in southern England, steamship passengers newly arrived from abroad via Southampton—passed through its doors every day. Even the dead disturbed the living. London's cemeteries were so overcrowded that a special railway, the Necropolis line, shunted corpses from a local station to graveyards south of the city. Lambeth, the London historian Peter Ackroyd would note, "was, in every sense, a dumping ground."

It was also considered the "most lurid and beastly" of the city's red-light districts. The neighborhood surrounding Waterloo Station, a magnet for streetwalkers, became known as Whoreterloo. Brickwork supports for the station's elevated tracks offered secluded spots where business could be transacted—the succession of "dark, damp arches," one resident complained, "encouraged the more disreputable of the population."

Prostitutes were described as "unfortunates" in the press, but some of the women working in the brothels, propositioning men on the street, or picking up clients at the Canterbury, Gatti's, and other Lambeth music halls considered themselves fortunate. Life was precarious for young women from poor, struggling families. A sudden misfortune—the death of a parent or husband, the breakup of a marriage or relationship, losing a low-paying job as a maid or toiling in a factory—could leave them to fend for themselves. Some working-class women turned to prostitution, the British academic Kathryn Hughes noted in an exploration of Victorian life and attitudes, when "the usual ways in which they got an income from their bodies—by working as a milliner, or a domestic or a factory hand—had come up short." Selling sex, even for a few weeks or months, might be their only option, and it offered something most women, regardless of their social standing, were denied in the Victorian world: income and independence. One Lambeth prostitute told Mayhew she earned as much as four pounds a week, far more than she had made "workin' and slavin'" as a servant in Birmingham.

Prostitutes seemed to be everywhere in Lambeth. There were "more women in the street than ever, and they are more brazen and persistent," complained Rev. G. E. Asker of St. Andrew's Church. Even he was being propositioned as he walked through the neighborhood. "The brothels are many of the perfect hells," Asker added. "Shrieks and cries, 'murder' and so on, frequently are heard."

For Lambeth's newest resident, it would be a perfect hunting ground.

* * *

MARY Cream was only fourteen when her oldest brother left home to attend medical school. She remembered fragments of his troubled life—mentions of his stints as a doctor in Ontario and Chicago, his conviction for murder. When she saw him again in Quebec City in the summer of 1891, for the first time in close to two decades, she could scarcely believe what he had become. "He was most wild and excitable," she remembered. "Not right in his mind."

Cream had arrived in Quebec City on August 2, shortly after his release from Joliet. His family had emigrated from Scotland to Canada when he was four and settled in the capital of the province of Quebec. His father, William Cream, had managed a major timber exporting firm, amassing a fortune by the time of his death in 1887. Cream spent almost six weeks in the city, staying at the home of his brother Daniel. Relatives began calling him Thomas Neill. "He wished and decided to drop the Cream," noted Thomas Davidson, a Quebec businessman and family friend, "on account of his unfortunate troubles." No one seemed to suspect he might have other motives for changing his name.

"His actions at times were that of an unsound mind," Jessie Read, Daniel Cream's wife, would recall. "He would change countenance and appear as another man," excited and manic at one moment, quiet and vacant-eyed the next. Davidson, who attributed Cream's "mental derangement" and "unbalanced" mind to his long imprisonment, was appalled when Thomas lashed out "in a most scandalous manner" at one of his sisters, possibly Mary Cream, calling her a streetwalker and a liar. These "atrocious slanders," Davidson later noted, were repeated in a letter Thomas fired off to his sister's friends.

Davidson and Daniel Cream devised a plan to send him abroad. A fresh start, they reasoned, might improve Thomas's mental as well as physical health. It would, at least, free them from the strain of dealing with his erratic and abusive behavior. As executors of William Cream's will, Daniel and Davidson withdrew a sum from the estate—the equivalent of twenty-three thousand US dollars today—that would help get Thomas back on his feet. Daniel considered sending him to Glasgow, near his birthplace in Barony, perhaps to visit relatives there. They settled on London, a city Cream knew from his days at St. Thomas' Hospital in the late 1870s. A transatlantic steamer could deliver him to Liverpool in just over a week, but they opted to dispatch him on a slower, sail-powered ship. "We believed," Davidson explained later, "that the long sea voyage and the complete change of scene would restore him to both mental and bodily health."

On September 9, the night before he was to sail to England, Cream wrote a will. He claimed to be "of sound mind" and, oddly, named his sister-in-law, Jessie Read, as his executor and sole heir. In the event of his death, she would inherit all his property as well as anything he might be owed from the estates of his deceased parents. Did Cream feel a sense of imminent doom, that he would not be returning from England? The two-paragraph will, written in the neat, upright lettering that would soon be familiar to Scotland Yard detectives, offered no insights into his motives.

He left Quebec City the next morning. On October 1, after a twenty-day voyage, he scribbled a note to Daniel Cream, announcing his arrival in England.

* * *

CREAM became a regular at Gatti's Adelaide Gallery Restaurant on the Strand. The restaurant's decor was elegant—vaulted ceilings, stained glass, ornate plasterwork, a palette of blue and gold—and it was a favorite of the theater crowd. Actors and playwrights from nearby playhouses claimed many of its marble-top tables. One day, when most of the seats were taken, he shared a table with another man.

He introduced himself as Thomas Neill. He was educated, tastefully dressed, and "well informed and travelled, as men go," the other diner recalled. They shared meals many times, with Cream preferring bread and cheese, washed down with beer or gin, to the plovers' eggs and other delicacies on the menu. He spoke about how much he enjoyed attending the city's music halls. He talked about money and seemed obsessed with poisons. But most of the time, he talked about women.

"His language about them was far from tolerable or agreeable," his dining companion had to admit. Cream carried around a collection of pornographic photographs, which he delighted in showing to his new friend and to other diners. He was restless and fidgety and could not stand still, even when drinking at the restaurant's bar. And he was always chewing something—gum, tobacco, or the end of a cigar, his jaws "moving mechanically like a cow chewing the cud." He seemed wary of every patron and waiter who approached his table. He rarely smiled, and his laugh sounded forced and fake, as if he were the villain in a melodrama. And people could not help but notice that his left eye turned inward, giving him a crazed, sinister look. Cream later claimed he had come to London to consult an eye specialist, and one of his first stops after his arrival had been the office of a Fleet Street optician. James Aitchison diagnosed his condition as hypermetropia, or farsightedness—his eyes focused improperly, blurring his vision and causing severe headaches. Cream had been suffering from the condition since childhood, Aitchison concluded, and had needed glasses for years. He supplied two pairs of spectacles to correct his vision.

The more his dining companion learned about Cream, the more troubled he became. "He was exceedingly vicious, and seemed to live for nothing but the gratification of his passions," he remembered. "His tastes and habits were of the most depraved order." And he made no secret of his drug use. Cream was constantly taking pills, three or four at a time, that he said contained cocaine and morphine as well as strychnine, a deadly poison used in minute quantities as a stimulant in medicines. The pills relieved his headaches, he said. They were also, he seemed delighted to add, an aphrodisiac.

Getting narcotics and poisons in London, Cream had discovered, was easy. He called at a chemist's shop on Parliament Street—just around the corner from Scotland Yard's new headquarters—and identified himself as a doctor from America, visiting the city to take courses at St. Thomas' Hospital. The clerk, John Kirkby, could not find the name Thomas Neill in the shop's register of licensed physicians. "I am not in the habit of selling poisons to persons whose names I cannot find in the register," he would say later. Access to poisons was restricted by law, and if Cream could not prove he was a doctor, he should have been required to produce someone known to the pharmacist to vouch for him. But Kirkby made an exception and took this new customer at his word. He filled Cream's orders for opium and strychnine several times that fall. When Cream asked for empty gelatin capsules of a size not in general use in Britain, Kirkby helpfully tracked them down from a supplier. Doctors and druggists filled them with medicine too bitter tasting to be taken on its own.

Cream did not say how he intended to use the strychnine or the hard-to-find capsules. Kirkby did not ask.

2

"Detective-Fever"

DO YOU FEEL AN UNCOMFORTABLE HEAT AT THE PIT OF your stomach, Sir? and a nasty thumping at the top of your head? . . ." Gabriel Betteredge, the head servant in the household of Lady Verinder, asks another character in the 1868 novel The Moonstone. "You're certain to catch it. . . . I call it the detective-fever."

Wilkie Collins's story of intrigue and a priceless stolen diamond (the Moonstone of the title) introduced one of the earliest professional detectives in English literature, Sergeant Cuff of the London police. "When it comes to unraveling a mystery there isn't the equal in England," readers are assured, and his first order of business in The Moonstone is a meticulous examination of the room where the gem had been stored. "In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world," he snaps when a colleague doubts the value of a piece of evidence, "I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet." "I don't suspect," he states with confidence at another point in his investigation. "I know." Betteredge, who observes Cuff as he makes his inquiries, is soon infected with the mystery-solving bug.

So was the Victorian public. Crime and murder were obsessions in the nineteenth century. "Nothing," proclaimed one London news dealer, "beats a stunning good murder." Readers craved "sensations" and the vicarious thrill of peering into an abyss of wickedness and scandal at a safe distance. One British social historian has likened it to a form of pornography—a guilty pleasure that could be indulged in newspapers, books, and plays. Writers scrambled to produce novels based on the latest outrage, while London's theater promoters sometimes brought crimes to the stage before the real-life offender had stood trial. Souvenir hunters could buy ceramic figurines depicting killers and victims. The mainstream press, taking its cue from the Illustrated Police News and other lucrative crime-filled publications, offered lurid accounts of brutal deaths and the trials that followed. Apologies might be offered if readers had to make do with disappointing accounts of "commonplace murders." In 1861 one London publication, The Spectator, surveyed the previous week's highlights in the British courts: accounts of two women poisoning their children; a lodger who murdered his landlady; a doctor who performed a fatal abortion; and a man accused of trying to kill his son in a dispute over an inheritance. Otherwise, the paper noted, "the week has been a dull one."

Murder was a spectacle that could be enjoyed in person as well. People flocked to crime scenes, hoping to catch a glimpse of the house or alley where a murder had been committed. They descended on London's Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, jostling for seats so they could witness the ritual of trial and conviction. The satirical magazine Punch