(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Thomas Neill Cream may not be remembered today like his contemporary, Jack the Ripper, but he certainly commanded attention in Chicago and London in the late-1800s.
Decades before the term “serial killer” was minted, the depraved physician poisoned several people, mostly women, in three different countries.
“It was intriguing to go back to Victorian times and see the press, the public and even the police struggling to get their minds around the idea that someone would kill, apparently for no real motive,” journalist Dean Jobb says. “There's certainly madness in what he did, but mixed up with so much method, so much calculation.”
Jobb’s compulsive new page-turner The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer (Algonquin Books, $27.95) follows the psychopath’s trail in Canada, Illinois and England while showing the early forensics procedures and shoe-leather detective work that helped bring him to justice. If you’re interested in the excruciating details of death by ingesting strychnine, this book is for you.
The author’s nearly five years of research included poring over Scotland Yard’s case file, as well as scouring Cook County Circuit Court records and newspaper microfilm at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago.
"I went old-school. I went through reel after reel of microfilm over a couple of days,” Jobb said in a telephone interview from Nova Scotia, where he teaches creative nonfiction writing at King’s College. “I wanted to be definitive, so I had to go the extra mile."
Technically, the author’s quarry was convicted of only two murders, including one near Rockford in 1881. But Cream’s tally of victims was a much bigger number.
"I'm comfortable with ten,” Jobb said.
Cream was born in Scotland in 1850 and raised in relative comfort in Quebec City. After a series false starts in his medical career, he landed in Chicago in 1879 as the city was still recovering from the Great Fire. He preceded Chicago serial killer H.H. Holmes by nearly a decade.
Setting up shop on the vice-ridden West Side, Cream is believed to have performed illegal abortions. When one of the procedures went fatally wrong, Chicago authorities charged him with murder. His prominent defense attorney won an acquittal in 1880; bribing jury members may have helped, too, the book suggests.
No such luck the following year. Dr. Cream was linked to the poisoning death of a rail station agent in Boone County, Daniel Stott, whom he had been treating for epilepsy. The man’s much younger wife was making the trips to Chicago to fetch her spouse’s prescriptions and likely was having an affair with Cream.
The good doctor presumably tampered with the medicine, perhaps in hopes of blackmailing the pharmacist who filled the order. Cream tipped off a coroner about his "suspicions" — one of the many times the killer wrote incriminating messages that defy explanation.
“He almost needed to show off his cleverness,” Jobb said.
Whatever the scheme may have been, it imploded. Cream was convicted of Stott’s murder and sentenced to life in prison. But he spent only a decade behind bars at the state prison in Joliet. Illinois Gov. Joseph Fifer commuted Cream’s sentence.
He walked out of the penitentiary a free man -- not a rehabilitated one. When his family shunted him off to London, Cream used the moniker Thomas Neill to embark on the last leg of his criminal career. Without centralized crime records, the sometimes bumbling police across the pond had their work cut out for them.
“There had been an explosion in the speed of communication in the Victorian era — the telegraph, the transatlantic cable — but there wasn't the good information to share that could keep up with someone like Cream,” Jobb says. “No one would realize who he was."
Prostitutes in London’s Lambeth district soon began dying of poison administered to them by a mysterious gentleman. Jobb says police were somewhat skeptical of these marginalized victims.
"The sex workers of Lambeth were not necessarily at the top of the list for police protection,” he said.
Authorities eventually zeroed in on Cream and jailed him for murder. A Scotland Yard inspector traveled to North America to investigate the suspect’s history, in hopes of bolstering the prosecution’s case.
Witnesses, including a prostitute who had outwitted Cream, brought damning testimony against him at his widely observed trial in 1892. And yet Cream seemed confident he would eventually walk away, Jobb notes.
"That spoke of an arrogance or a bravado,” he said.
Cream's sensational story faded from the public consciousness. He resurfaced in crime anthologies from time to time, Jobb notes, but like many rogues of the period, he ended up overshadowed by Saucy Jack.
"There's a resolution to Cream's case,” the author said. “And Jack the Ripper, because of endless speculation about who it might be, has given that story a ghoulish afterlife."
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