Thomas Neill Cream: Surgeon and Jack the Ripper Suspect
Thomas Neill Cream
Thomas Neill Cream was born on the 27th of May 1850 in Glasgow. In 1854 his family moved to Quebec City.
He graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery and then moved to Great Britain to study in London, where he did his postgraduate training at St Thomas’s Hospital.
He then went to Edinburgh where he got further qualifications as a physician and surgeon. Then he went back across the Atlantic.
Life began to change for Cream in 1876 when he met Flora Brooks in Waterloo, Quebec.
Flora became pregnant. Cream attempted an abortion, which left her very ill.
Flora’s father caught Cream as he attempted to escape and forced him to marry Flora. The day after the wedding, Cream left for England, and that was the last the Brooks family ever saw of him. Flora died of Consumption the next year, in 1877.
In 1878, Cream was back in Canada. He was practising medicine in London, Ontario.
In 1879, a young woman was found dead in an outside lavatory right behind Cream’s office. Catherine Hutchinson Gardner was pregnant and had been murdered with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform.
Cream produced a letter that named a businessman as the father of the child she was carrying.
Cream said she poisoned herself because he refused to carry out an abortion. However family and friends were clear that neither the writing nor the signature had been written by Catherine.
No action was taken against Cream, and he moved to Chicago.
He offered abortions to local prostitutes. In August 1880, he was investigated when Mary Anne Faulkner died, but again, he escaped prosecution.
In December 1880, a second patient died. And in April 1881, a third woman was found dead in a rooming house close to Cream’s office. An abortion had been performed on her, but then she had been poisoned with strychnine.
The authorities decided this was a murder case, but it was a murder case that was never solved.
Tombstone of Daniel Stott
In 1881, a tombstone was erected in Boone County, Illinois. The inscription read: “Daniel Stott Died June 12, 1881. Aged 61 years, poisoned by his wife and Dr Cream”.
The death had been put down to natural causes, but then Cream wrote to the coroner, blaming a pharmacist.
It turned out that Cream had prescribed medicine for Daniel Stott’s epilepsy. The medicine was the strychnine which killed him.
It was alleged that Julia Stott had become the lover of Cream, and between them, they set out to murder Daniel and get his money.
Cream seems to have shot himself in the foot when he became greedy and decided to blackmail the pharmacist. When the pharmacist stood firm, Cream involved the coroner.
The coroner dug a little deeper, and the verdict of natural causes was overturned, and Cream was sent to Joliet Prison, Illinois. Cream entered the prison in 1881.
After ten years, he was released after his brother pleaded for clemency, and it is suggested that he offered up a bribe.
So between 1881 and 1891, Thomas Neill Cream was safely locked behind bars in Joliet Prison, Illinois, 4,000 miles west of Whitechapel, England.
For most reasonable people, Thomas Neill Cream, whilst he must be regarded as a particularly heartless killer of young women, cannot be guilty of the murders of the five homeless women who were killed in Whitechapel in 1888.
On his release, with money inherited from his father, he left for England landing in Liverpool on October 1st 1891. From there, he went to London and lodged at 103 Lambeth Place Road.
It seems his prison sentence had not changed him.
On October 13, less than two weeks after arriving in England, 19-year-old Ellen Donworth died after taking a drink from a bottle which Cream had handed to her.
Again, a financial reward may have been part of the motive. The Coroner received a letter from a man signing himself A. O’Brien. He claimed to be a detective and offered to name the killer of Ellen Donworth in return for £300,000.
A. O’Brien turned out to be Thomas Neill Cream. He tried to further increase his reward by threatening to accuse the owner of the W.H. Smith’s bookstalls of the murder unless he handed over some money.
Unabashed just a week later, on the 20th of October, he handed pills to 27-year-old Matilda Clover. Two hours after taking them, she died.
Death was assumed to have been caused by heart failure. Cream attempted to obtain £25,000 from Dr William Broadbent, claiming he had evidence that the doctor was responsible for the death of Matilda Clover.
When Dr. Broadbent informed the police they set a trap to catch the blackmailer. Nobody was caught.
In April 1892, Cream poisoned two more young women with strychnine. The police now realised that whoever had been writing the blackmail letters was the serial killer dubbed in the newspapers “The Lambeth Poisoner”.
Unbelievably, Cream met a New York police officer who was visiting London. The murders by the Lambeth Poisoner were discussed, and Cream took the police officer on a tour of the murder sites.
The New York police officer mentioned this to a London police officer, and suspicions were raised. Cream was put under surveillance, and enquiries were made in Canada and the USA.
Cream was arrested on June the 3rd 1892 and on July the 13th he was charged with the murders of four women and the attempted murder of another woman.
During the press coverage of the murders of 1888, much had been made of the fact that the killer may have been a doctor. So Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who was guilty of murdering a series of young women, became a name now talked about in connection with the Jack the Ripper murders.
On one occasion, the coroner announced to the court that the prisoner, Dr Thomas Neill Cream, was not, in fact, Jack the Ripper.
It was an announcement that was greeted with laughter including laughter from Dr. Thomas Neill Cream.
On November the 15th, Cream was hanged at Newgate Prison.
The hangman, James Billington, made something of a name for himself when he claimed that Thomas Neill Cream’s last words were: “I am Jack the . . .”
However, Billington was the only person present at the hanging who claimed to have heard these words.
And he was locked in Joliet Prison from 1881 to 1891, wasn’t he?
Well, once a ripperologist smells a possible suspect, ingenious explanations appear.
Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, the barrister known as “The Great Defender” suggested that Cream had not served a prison term at all.
The man in Joliet Prison from 1881 to 1891 was, in fact, just somebody who looked like Cream.
In 1974 Canadian writer, Donald Bell published an article titled Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution? It must be noted that Bell was modest enough to add a question mark after the title.
In the article, he said that in the gangland culture of Chicago in the 1880s, corruption was rife, and it would have been possible to bribe prison officials and even have someone serve your time in jail for you.
Perhaps it’s up to you to decide how likely it is that Dr Thomas Neill Cream was Jack the Ripper.
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