‘A new kind of monster’
Doctor was a suspect in 10 murders in three countries, including Canada, before he was hanged in 1892,
When he was a student at McGill medical school, Thomas Neill Cream often heard an instructor say, “Be useful and Godlike.”
Cream appeared to be heeding those words as he set up practice in London, Ont., soon after his graduation. He quickly became a pillar of the local Presbyterian Church, teaching the gospel in Sunday school and using his fine singing voice to perform publicly on behalf of his new church.
Just 13 years later — on Nov. 15, 1892 — a crowd celebrated in the rain outside Newgate Prison in London, England as Cream was hanged for murder.
By this point, some of the British press compared the Canadian doctor to Jack the Ripper, the serial killer who mutilated women in London’s impoverished Whitechapel district.
They called Cream “Jack the Poisoner.”
How did a man trained to be useful and Godlike become a suspect in 10 murders in three countries, including Canada?
That’s at the core of “The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream” by Dean Jobb, a creative nonfiction professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax.
“My question was, ‘How did he get away with it?,’ ” Jobb said in an interview.
The answer is multi-layered. First, there was Cream’s personality.
“He seems to have delighted in deciding who would live and who would die,” said Jobb, who read through thick Scotland Yard files and records in Canada and the U.S. to reach his conclusions.
There is also Cream’s medical specialty of midwifery.
He practised it at a time when unwed mothers endured what one contemporary in the book called “a living death.”
Unlike Jack the Ripper, Cream didn’t stalk him victims. They came to him.
One of the earliest killings connected to Cream took place in London, Ont., near Cream’s medical office above a stable at 204 Dundas St.
The lifeless body of Catharine (Kitty) Hutchinson Gardner, a young pregnant maid, was found in a privy on May 1, 1879.
There were chemical burns to her nose and cheeks. By her body was a small handkerchief and a medicine bottle holding chloroform, with the label of a local drugstore.
She was one of Cream’s patients. She was also two months pregnant and unmarried. The London Free Press reported that she had likely committed suicide: “to hide her shame it is conjectured she took poison.”
A different conclusion was reached at an inquest by jury of at least a dozen “lawful and honest men” under age 60 who were literate enough to write their names.
Suicide just didn’t make sense. It was highly unlikely she could have held a handkerchief soaked in chloroform to her face long enough to kill her. The silk handkerchief by her body also wasn’t big enough to hold enough chloroform to kill her and there were no chloroform stains on her hands.
A woman who knew Gardner said that Gardner had sought an abortion from Cream, but he refused her medical treatment and then urged her to seduce a wealthy man and accuse him of being the baby’s father. Cream had promised to support the lie, the woman said.
Such blackmail plots and lies were a common thread throughout Cream’s career, Jobb writes.
In Gardner’s case, the Ontario inquest concluded she was murdered with chloroform “administered to her by some person or persons to us unknown.”
Soon Cream had moved on to Illinois, where he soon faced similar accusations of fatally poisoning another pregnant woman. His lawyer Alfred Trude helped him beat those charges.
When the verdict came in, Cream seemed more triumphant than relieved.
He couldn’t shut up about his desire to “rid the earth of these unfortunate beings,” in the words of his lawyer.
Prostitutes were perhaps the easiest of victims.
“They didn’t trust the police,” Jobb said. “The police didn’t trust them. That again made it easier for Cream to float above the crime.” Despite his hatred of prostitutes, Jobb noted that Cream was an enthusiastic and frequent customer of their services.
“Cream was a hypocrite in an age of hypocrisy,” Jobb writes. “A respectable facade could mask an appetite for drink, illicit sex, and other sins being denounced from the pulpit every Sunday …
“Within a few years, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson would explore what he saw as the ‘thorough and primitive duality of man’ in his classic story ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’ Physician Henry Jekyll, like Cream, enjoyed ‘the respect of the wise and good’ but concealed his guilty pleasures. Once out of the public eye, he ‘laid aside restraint and plunged in shame.’ Jekyll concocted a drug that released a debauched and murderous inner demon. Cream was releasing a Mr. Hyde of his own.”
After his time at McGill, Cream took certification exams at Edinburgh University, at the same time that Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, was a medical student there. “He (Cream) became very used to death and was also learning the tools of it,” Jobb said.
There’s no record of Cream and Conan Doyle ever meeting, although it’s possible.
Jobb notes that Conan Doyle later had his character Holmes say, in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” that, “When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.”
A doctor also has immense public trust. Asked why she took deadly pills from Cream, when she scarcely knew him, one of his victims said: “He is not a stranger. He was a doctor.”
Then she finished dying a horrible, painful death.
In the end, Cream’s greatest enemy was himself. He couldn’t refrain from bragging about his crimes. His arrogance and confidence eventually attracted sleuths from Scotland Yard.
“He never displayed any remorse,” Jobb said. “There’s no evidence of that …
“Arrogance is what brought him down.”