Thomas Neill Cream

Thomas Neill Cream was born in Glasgow on 27 May 1850. He left the city as a small child and never lived in it again, yet he remains one of the most notorious people Glasgow ever produced. A qualified doctor, he poisoned patients and strangers on two continents, wrote blackmail letters accusing innocent men of his own crimes, and was finally hanged at Newgate in London in November 1892 as the Lambeth Poisoner. A rumour started on the scaffold has tied his name to Jack the Ripper ever since, even though the facts rule it out completely.

From Glasgow to Canada

Cream’s family emigrated from Glasgow to Canada in 1854, when he was four. He grew up near Quebec City, went to school at Lachute Academy and studied medicine at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1876.

The pattern of his life was set almost at once. In 1876 a young woman named Flora Brooks became pregnant by him and was left gravely ill after he tried to end the pregnancy himself. Her family forced him into marriage. The day after the wedding he sailed for Britain, and the Brooks family never saw him again. Flora died the following year.

A doctor with a trail of deaths

Cream continued his training at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and in 1878 took further medical qualifications in Edinburgh, so that Scotland gave him his licence to practise as well as his birth. He then returned to North America. In London, Ontario, a pregnant young woman, Catharine Gardner, was found dead behind his surgery in 1879, poisoned with chloroform. Cream produced a letter, almost certainly forged, blaming a local businessman. No one was charged.

He moved to Chicago, where he offered illegal abortions near the city’s red-light district. Several patients died in suspicious circumstances. In 1881 a man named Daniel Stott died of strychnine poisoning after taking a remedy for epilepsy that Cream had supplied. Cream then wrote to the coroner blaming the pharmacist, and the letter led investigators straight back to him. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in Joliet Prison in Illinois.

The Lambeth poisonings

In 1891, after ten years in prison, his sentence was commuted and he was released. He sailed for Liverpool and took lodgings at 103 Lambeth Palace Road in south London, an area of deep poverty. Within weeks the killing began again. In October 1891 Ellen Donworth, aged 19, and Matilda Clover, aged 27, died in agony after he gave them drink or pills laced with strychnine. In April 1892 he poisoned Alice Marsh, aged 21, and Emma Shrivell, aged 18, in the room they shared. A fifth woman, Louise Harvey, survived only because she distrusted him, pretended to swallow his pills and threw them away.

The women he chose were poor and many of them earned their living on the streets. That was not an accident. He assumed that their deaths would be put down to drink or natural causes, and at first Matilda Clover’s death was.

Caught by his own letters

What undid Cream was his compulsion to write. Under false names he sent letters to a coroner, to a celebrated physician, Sir William Broadbent, and to the bookseller W. F. D. Smith, accusing them or others of the murders and demanding money for his silence. One letter mentioned the murder of Matilda Clover at a time when her death was still officially recorded as natural. Only the killer could have known it was murder.

He also could not resist talking. He gave a visiting New York policeman a guided tour of the places where the victims had lived, and the American mentioned it to a London officer. Scotland Yard put Cream under watch, traced his history across the Atlantic, and learned of his conviction for poisoning in Illinois. He was arrested on 3 June 1892, insisting throughout that he was simply "Dr Thomas Neill". His medicine case, full of poisons, is still held in the Metropolitan Police’s Crime Museum.

Trial and execution

Cream was tried at the Old Bailey from 17 to 21 October 1892 for the murder of Matilda Clover. The jury took about twelve minutes to find him guilty, and he was sentenced to death. He was hanged at Newgate Prison on 15 November 1892 by the executioner James Billington.

"I am Jack the..."

Billington later claimed that Cream’s last words, cut off by the drop, were "I am Jack the...", and the story has followed Cream ever since. It is almost certainly untrue. No one else present reported it, and Cream could not have been the Whitechapel murderer: in the autumn of 1888, when the Ripper killings took place, he was serving his life sentence in Joliet Prison in Illinois. The tale says more about the Victorian appetite for the Ripper than about Cream.

Why remember him in Glasgow?

Cream’s crimes were committed far from the city of his birth, but he belongs to a striking group of Victorian poisoners with Glasgow connections, alongside Dr Edward Pritchard, hanged in 1865, and the accused poisoner Madeleine Smith. His case also helped to show how far forensic toxicology had advanced: the strychnine in the bodies of his London victims was detected and proved in court. The wider story of the city’s notorious cases is told in Glasgow’s famous crimes.

Timeline