The week I read The Case of the Murderous Dr Cream, I was at a crime writing festival in Harrogate, listening to fellow writers attempting to pin down the nature of evil.
The discussion moved from the philosophical through nature versus nurture to arrive at specifics: “Hitler,” someone offered, inarguably. Another mentioned England’s homegrown horrors, Brady and Hindley, who carried out their unspeakable crimes not far from where we sat. Inevitably, a panellist suggested Jack the Ripper, the darkest of the great Victorian mysteries.
Jack inhabits our imagination, but he wasn’t the only Victorian serial killer. The Whitechapel murders were followed soon after by the Lambeth poisoner, one Dr Thomas Neill Cream, who also targeted impoverished women. He has faded from view in recent years but the repercussions of his crimes, and their investigation, still echo through the criminal justice system.
Dean Jobb’s intensively researched and vivid account begins with Cream arriving in London in 1891, fresh from prison in the US. He takes lodgings in a grimy area near the hospital where he once trained. This places him squarely in the slums, where the living conditions force women into poorly paid menial labour, destroying their health, or into prostitution, which earn them substantially more – at a terrible cost.
There is an awful inevitability about Cream’s progress through the narrow streets, armed with strychnine capsules he made up himself, promising health or protection to the women who trusted him. After all, he was a doctor. He didn’t only kill women, he loved to kill women.
His victims died slowly, in great pain, and Jobb traces the missed opportunities to stop Cream in tenacious and frustrated detail – the doctor who failed to attend, the letter that wasn’t passed on, the witness who wasn’t believed. Cream seems to have revelled in the attention surrounding the murders, scouring the papers for news of his latest victim’s death and sending incoherent blackmail letters to disguise his involvement.
At the time, Jobb points out, women died for all sorts of reasons – dysentery, poor health, infections and diseases – and Cream’s method ensured that he was far away when the poison took effect. His victims often administered it themselves. He didn’t need to see his victims die; he simply needed to know that they were dead.
A heavy drinker, a drug-taker, a woman-hater, a qualified doctor, a swindler, a murderer – Cream barely attempted to disguise himself. He owed his freedom to blind luck and the fact that police investigation was still a developing field.
Like Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, this book brings to life the early years of Scotland Yard. The means by which a murderer might be identified were varied but haphazard. Analysing stomach contents was a science in its infancy, particularly with a poison such as strychnine. Jobb does a superb job of evoking a world of gaslight and suspicious landladies, stationery watermarks and grave-robbing medical students. It’s pleasantly digressive to hear about Conan Doyle’s inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, or the examination requirements for a qualified surgeon, or the infancy of forensic analysis.
The police officers working on Cream’s case went to extraordinary lengths to trace their man and collect evidence against him, even travelling to North America, where his career in crime began. It’s a thrilling hunt, one echoed by Jobb’s exhaustive trawl through newspaper archives and historical documents. Every detail is backed up by a contemporary source. Cream’s fondness for having his photographic portrait taken speaks of the ego and arrogance that allowed him to carry out murder after murder with audacity and insouciance.
Police investigation
The book is structured like the police investigation, moving from London back through time to Canada and Chicago. The raw new cities of North America don’t have quite the same atmosphere as foggy London and I suspect the newspaper reporting isn’t as detailed, despite the fact that Cream engaged in a variety of extremely lurid crimes. One problem with sticking resolutely to source material is that imagination must fill in the gaps. Here the gaps sometimes remain.
In London, Cream was a sensation. In Chicago, he was another backstreet doctor caught up in a conspiracy to carry out illegal abortions. Contemporary accounts are more mocking than horrified, which robs his crimes there of some of their impact.
Jobb does a creditable job of establishing the victims as people, though sometimes the bare facts seem too sparse; for instance, there is surely a story behind Ellen Stack, the young Irish servant of a Chicago businessman who lied about consulting Dr Cream, even on her deathbed. Why did her mistress tell her not to visit Cream? Why did she nevertheless feel the need to consult him? What took her to Chicago in the first place? Jobb is resolute about not speculating but the effect is that Stack comes to life on the page only to die, and her death is overshadowed by the hamfisted blackmail attempt that followed.
Clever and clear
Nonetheless, this is a clever, clear-eyed look at one of the first known serial killers and his historical context, one that will be enthralling for fans of crime fiction, history and true crime. Jobb presents the facts of the case with real compassion for the victims, and this book is valuable because it lets us remember them and their bravery, bearing witness against their killer even as they knew they were dying.
There was a time when Thomas Neill Cream was as famous as Jack the Ripper. The book suggests that his choice of victims plays into our lack of interest, though many notorious killers preyed on similar women. But it’s fascinating to see how a murderer can be identified in a world without CCTV or DNA or even fingerprints, how society operated in a very different time, how small a world it proves to be when murder is your way of life, how rough the hangman’s rope is, how cold the grave.
Jane Casey’s latest book is The Killing Kind (HarperCollins)
