Thomas Neill Cream was a doctor who trained at McGill University in Montreal and later practiced in Ontario, Chicago and London. Two juries convicted him of murder by poison. In 1881 an Illinois jury found him guilty of killing Daniel Stott, a railroad stationmaster, and he was sentenced to life in the state penitentiary at Joliet. Paroled in 1891, he sailed for England and took a room in Lambeth, south London, under the name Dr. Thomas Neill. Over the next seven months young women in the district died of strychnine poisoning. In October 1892 an Old Bailey jury convicted him of murdering one of them, Matilda Clover, and on November 15, 1892, he was hanged at Newgate Prison.
His conviction rested on chemistry and on witnesses who placed him with the women; his capture owed much to letters he wrote himself. As in Illinois, he sent letters accusing other people of the deaths and demanding money, some of them about a death that the authorities had recorded as natural. The Canadian writer Dean Jobb, whose 2021 book on the case drew on primary records from Ontario, Quebec, Illinois and Britain, puts his toll at no fewer than ten people. Only two of those deaths, Stott's and Clover's, ended in a conviction.
Cream was born in Glasgow on May 27, 1850, according to the historian Jill Foran, writing in The Beaver, the magazine now published as Canada's History. He was the oldest of eight children. About four years after his birth the family emigrated to Quebec, where his father, William, managed a shipbuilding and lumber firm near Quebec City. As a young man Cream worked for a time in shipbuilding and helped in his father's wholesale lumber business. His father died in 1887.
A 2021 profile in McGill News, the university's alumni magazine, describes a family that was prosperous and well regarded in the English-speaking community of Quebec City. Neighbors and teachers at his boarding school remembered a hard worker who taught Sunday school and sang in a church choir.
Cream entered McGill's medical school in October 1872, at 22, and studied there for four years, Foran writes. His father paid his way, and he became known as a wild and extravagant student. A former instructor later said he had been "rather wild and fond of ostentatious display of clothing and jewelry," according to McGill News, and his professors and fellow students kept their distance. He received his medical degree (MDCM) on March 31, 1876. His graduating thesis was on the effects of chloroform.
Soon after he graduated, McGill News reports, the room he rented caught fire while he was said to be away. Firefighters suspected arson, and his insurers refused to pay his large claim.
Soon after graduating, Cream courted a young woman in Waterloo, Quebec, the daughter of a local hotel owner. When she became pregnant he performed an abortion on her, and she fell seriously ill. Her father, Foran writes, forced Cream to marry her at gunpoint. The day after the wedding he left for England.
His wife died later in Canada of what appeared to be consumption. Her doctor suspected a "medicine" that Cream had sent her by mail, Foran writes, but did nothing about it. McGill News, drawing on Jobb's research, says she died after taking pills her absent husband had mailed to her. No inquiry or charge followed, and her death remains a suspicion recorded by later writers, not a finding of any court.
In England Cream studied at St. Thomas's Hospital in London until 1878. He then qualified with the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons in Edinburgh and returned to Canada in May 1878.
Cream opened a practice in London, Ontario, and, according to Foran, began working there as an illegal abortionist. Jobb has noted that Cream's work in midwifery and abortion brought him desperate patients, and that most of his known or likely victims were working women, many of them servants or sex workers.
About a year after his arrival, a young woman named in Foran's account as Kate Gardener (McGill News spells her name Catharine Gardner) was found dead near his office. She had been one of his patients. At the inquest Cream said he had refused to give her drugs to end her pregnancy and that she had probably taken her own life. The coroner's jury found that she "died from chloroform, administered by some person unknown." Cream was never charged, but the case damaged his practice and his name in the town, and he left for Chicago. McGill News, following Jobb, treats her death as a killing by Cream, by chloroform, the subject of his thesis. No court ever made that finding.
In Chicago Cream set up a practice close to the West Side district where many sex workers lived and worked, and he soon came to police notice as a backstreet abortionist. Foran writes that he narrowly escaped prison after a young patient died following an abortion. McGill News says that deaths of young women in Chicago in this period were blamed on a midwife and on a pharmacist's error. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Jobb said the police "charged an innocent man" with the death of the first woman Cream killed; he did not say which case he meant in that interview.
In December 1880 a patient, Ellen Stack, died after taking medicine Cream had prescribed. In January 1881 he sent threatening letters to the pharmacist who had made up the prescription. The pharmacist reported the letters to the authorities, but no charge followed. That pattern, a death followed by a letter blaming a pharmacist and asking for money, would appear again.
Daniel Stott was 61, Foran writes, and he worked as a railroad stationmaster, according to Jobb, writing in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. His wife, who was 33, collected pills for him that Cream sold as a remedy for epilepsy. Cream began an affair with her, Foran writes, and persuaded her to take out life insurance on her husband. In 1881 Cream gave her pills for Stott that contained strychnine, and Stott died of strychnine poisoning.
Cream blamed the pharmacists who had filled the prescription. But the district attorney, as Foran puts it, had Stott's body exhumed, and the analysis found strychnine. Jobb, in the McGill News profile, compares the letters Cream later sent in London with the letter that convicted him in Illinois.
Cream and Stott's wife were both charged with murder. She was freed after agreeing to testify against him, and her evidence, Jobb writes, helped to convict him at trial. The jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet. Foran describes the verdict as one of second-degree murder; other accounts say only that he was convicted of murder.
Stott's grave in Garden Prairie carries an inscription that names both people it holds responsible. It reads, Jobb writes, that he was "Poisoned by his wife & Dr. Cream."
Cream spent about ten years in Joliet. McGill News reports that he used his family's money and connections to lobby for his freedom, and Foran writes that his life term was reduced to 17 years and that he was granted early parole. He left prison in 1891. Foran gives June 1891; other accounts give the year only. He was in Joliet throughout 1888, the year of the Whitechapel murders in London, a point that would matter to later theories about him.
After his release he returned briefly to Canada and then sailed for England.
On October 7, 1891, a man in a mackintosh and top hat took an upper back room in a lodging house in Lambeth and gave his name as Thomas Neill, according to Jobb's account in an excerpt of his book published by BuzzFeed News. He was back in the city where he had once studied at St. Thomas's Hospital.
Lambeth was then one of the poorest districts of London. Jobb describes it as one of the capital's main red-light districts, centered on the streets around Waterloo Station, where many young women who could find no other work earned money through prostitution. A local clergyman complained publicly about the number of brothels in the parish.
Ellen Donworth was 19 and the daughter of a laborer, Jobb writes. She had been pregnant at 16, and her baby died soon after birth. She had worked in a Lambeth factory pasting labels onto bottles, and by the autumn of 1891 she and the young man she lived with had both been out of work for months. She had begun to work as a prostitute.
In October 1891 she was taken ill in Lambeth. Before she was taken to hospital she told a woman who knew her that "a tall, dark, cross-eyed man" had given her something to drink from a bottle containing "some white stuff." She was dead when she reached the hospital. A medical assistant suspected strychnine.
The coroner, George Percival Wyatt, opened an inquest on October 15. The first examination found no clear cause of death, and the inquest was adjourned so that the stomach contents could be tested. Dr. Thomas Kelloch, house physician at St. Thomas's Hospital, found strychnine and traces of morphine. When the inquest resumed on October 22, the jury found that she "died from strychnine and morphia poisoning," but said there was no evidence to show how the poison had been given to her.
A friend told the inquest that Ellen had received two letters from the man and that both had since disappeared. The handwriting on the envelopes, she said, looked "more like a lady's than a gentleman's."
The police of L Division, which covered Lambeth, opened a file on October 19. Chief Inspector Colin Chisholm concluded that she had taken the poison herself, and Superintendent James Brannan agreed. At Scotland Yard the Assistant Commissioner, Robert Anderson, accepted that it was a case of suicide, but noted the obvious question: strychnine was sold only to physicians, so how had a young woman out of work obtained it?
While the inquest was still open, the coroner received a letter claiming that Ellen Donworth had been murdered. The writer, who signed himself "A. O'Brien, Detective," offered to name the killer in return for 300,000 pounds. Wyatt took it for a prank and filed it without mentioning it at the inquest. Jobb's research matched its handwriting to the writing on Ellen's missing envelopes.
Matilda Clover was 27. She was raising her two-year-old son on her own, she struggled with drinking, and she earned her living as a prostitute, Jobb writes. She shared her home with a young woman who worked for her as a maid, and the household's landlady lived in the same house.
In October 1891 Matilda was seeing a man she knew as Fred. The maid later described him as about 40, tall and broad, with a bushy mustache, a top hat and a caped overcoat. He had bought Matilda boots and offered her money each week to keep her off the streets. The maid had seen a letter signed "Yours, Fred" arranging to meet her; after Matilda's death it could not be found. One evening that month Fred visited the house and gave her pills that he said would protect her from disease. She told the maid that "Fred" had poisoned her, and she died on the morning of October 21, 1891.
Her death was not investigated. A local doctor who had not come when he was called signed the death certificate, giving delirium tremens and a fainting attack as the causes, as if he had attended her himself; Jobb writes that he had not, and that his conclusions rested on secondhand information. With a certificate of natural death, no coroner was told and no inquest was held. Her death was registered as a natural one, and she was buried on October 27.
Over the following months a series of letters reached prominent people in London. Written under false names, they threatened to accuse the recipients of poisoning young women in Lambeth unless money was paid. According to McGill News, the targets included a society woman, a member of Parliament and a physician to the royal family; Foran writes that two London physicians received extortion letters. Most of the recipients took the letters to Scotland Yard, and the police largely set them aside, without checking whether the women they named existed or how they had died.
Jobb does not believe Cream meant to collect. In his view the letters were a way of claiming credit: "Somewhere in his psyche, he wanted people to know what an efficient and ruthless killer he was," he told McGill News. They were also, in the end, evidence against him.
Jobb said he found Cream's letters in his Scotland Yard file at Britain's National Archives, and described that discovery as the moment in his research he would never forget.
In April 1892 two young women in Lambeth, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell, died of strychnine poisoning. Foran counts them among four Lambeth women, all prostitutes, poisoned over seven months. Their deaths, which McGill News calls Cream's first apparent double murder, finally drew a full police investigation. Little was reported about their lives.
One woman who met Cream survived because she did not take what he offered. Foran writes that she declined his pills and avoided his attempts on her life in October 1891; she later gave evidence against him at his trial.
The police finally connected the letters to the deaths. McGill News reports that detectives linked Cream to the crimes through his handwriting. He had also drawn attention to himself. Foran writes that he boasted of what he knew about the deaths and took a former New York detective, John Haynes, on a tour of the places where the women had lived.
Cream was arrested in London in 1892, and he was charged with four murders, one attempted murder and sending letters demanding money.
In his interview with Publishers Weekly, Jobb laid much of the blame for the slow progress on the police themselves: "poor communication, misplaced evidence, and overlooked clues allowed Cream to poison four women and try to kill a fifth."
Cream was tried at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in October 1892, before Mr. Justice Hawkins. The trial lasted five days, Foran writes. Although four deaths had been charged, the case put to the jury concerned one: the death of Matilda Clover, the woman whose death had been recorded as natural a year earlier.
The prosecution was led by the Attorney General, Sir Charles Russell. Mr. Geoghegan appeared for the defense. The central scientific witness was Dr. Thomas Stevenson, whose chemical tests the judge and jury accepted, according to an unsigned commentary on the case published in the Journal of Mental Science in January 1893. Stevenson had trained at Guy's Hospital and in 1872 had taken up the new Home Office post of scientific analyst, the Southwark News writes; it counts his evidence against Cream, "otherwise known as the Lambeth poisoner," among the cases that made his name.
The defense attacked both the science and the identification. It argued that Clover's symptoms might not have been caused by strychnine at all, while also arguing, about Ellen Donworth's death, that Stevenson could not have been mistaken in finding strychnine there. The Journal's writer called the two arguments "mutually destructive." He conceded the weak points of the prosecution: "No direct evidence of administration, indeed, was forthcoming," he wrote, and "the evidence of identity was so weak." Even so, he concluded, "the circumstantial evidence was strong enough to justify the verdict of guilty which the jury unhesitatingly returned," and "There can be no doubt that Neill was properly convicted."
The jury took about ten minutes to find him guilty, Foran writes. Justice Hawkins sentenced him to death, telling him that his crimes could be "expiated only by your death."
The Journal also took up the claim that Cream's motive was too slight to explain the crimes. The writer rejected the idea that the motive was too slight to be believed, arguing that in "persons like Neill, the slightest and most obscure motive may operate with even more power." Jobb, more than a century later, described a man who "had a God-like ability to preserve life, or take it," through his medical training, and who "seems to have delighted in knowing his victims would die agonizing deaths."
Thomas Neill Cream was hanged at Newgate Prison on November 15, 1892. The executioner was James Billington. Before his death, Foran writes, he was reported to have admitted to killing other women; no such admission was tested in any court.
Crowds gathered outside the prison walls. Foran quotes the Toronto Globe: "Probably no criminal was ever executed in London who had a less pitying mob awaiting his execution." Mark Sanderson, reviewing Jobb's book in Airmail, gives the crowd as about 5,000, although there was nothing for them to see.
The News of the World called him the worst man of his century, in words that Sanderson quotes. A wax likeness of him stood in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds in London until 1968, Sanderson writes.
For Jobb, the case is above all a story of missed chances. In the McGill News profile he compared Cream with Jack the Ripper, active about three years earlier, and with Bruce McArthur, who preyed on vulnerable members of Toronto's gay community, arguing that serial killers remain hard to catch when investigators fail to connect deaths that happen in different places by different means, and when the people targeted are vulnerable and unlikely to go to the police.
The case also fed a debate about expert evidence. The Journal of Mental Science used it to argue about how scientific evidence should be handled in court. A Bristol doctor, Dr. Cook, had proposed that such questions be decided by a commission of experts; the Journal rejected that idea and argued instead for expert assessors who would advise the court without deciding the case.
Jack the Ripper. A story has long circulated that Cream, on the scaffold, began to say "I am Jack," as if confessing to the Whitechapel murders of 1888. Foran writes that other witnesses at the execution never mentioned it, and that most students of the Ripper case doubt it. Cream was in the Illinois penitentiary at Joliet in 1888, when most of the Whitechapel murders took place, so he could not have committed them, as Foran and Edward Butts in The Canadian Encyclopedia both note. Foran records that a Montreal writer, Donald Bell, argued for the theory in The Criminologist in 1974 and in the Toronto Star in 1979, suggesting that Cream might have escaped or bribed his jailers; that the handwriting analyst Derek Davies reported similarities between Cream's writing and letters sent in the Ripper's name; and that a witness description of a Whitechapel suspect loosely matched Cream. None of this is accepted as evidence, and Cream is not generally regarded as a likely suspect. The "last words" story is a legend, not a recorded fact.
The total count. Jobb counts at least ten people killed, nine women and one man, across Canada, the United States and Britain between 1877 and 1892; he calls Stott the sixth. That count includes deaths that were never tried. Butts describes "a string of murders in Canada, the US and Britain." Courts convicted Cream of two murders.
The Canadian deaths. Cream's wife and the young woman found dead near his office in London, Ontario, are treated by later writers as possible or likely victims. The Ontario inquest found that the chloroform was "administered by some person unknown," and no proceedings followed his wife's death. Neither death was ever charged.
The Chicago deaths. Foran writes of a young patient who died after an abortion and of Ellen Stack, who died after taking his prescription. None of these deaths was proven against him in court.
Ellen Donworth, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell. These three deaths were charged against Cream in 1892, together with the attempted murder count, but they were not the subject of the trial that convicted him. The Donworth inquest found that she died of strychnine and morphia poisoning without being able to say how the poison was given.
May 27, 1850: born in Glasgow, Scotland.
About four years later: family emigrates to Quebec.
October 1872: enters the medical school of McGill University, Montreal.
March 31, 1876: graduates MDCM, with a thesis on chloroform.
Soon after graduating: marries in Waterloo, Quebec, and leaves for England the next day; studies at St. Thomas's Hospital, London.
1878: qualifies in Edinburgh; returns to Canada in May and opens a practice in London, Ontario.
About a year later: a young woman, a patient, is found dead near his office; the inquest finds she died of chloroform "administered by some person unknown." He moves to Chicago.
December 1880: Ellen Stack dies after taking medicine he prescribed; in January 1881 he sends threatening letters to the pharmacist.
1881: Daniel Stott dies of strychnine poisoning in Illinois. Cream is convicted of his murder and sentenced to life in Joliet.
1887: his father dies.
1891: released on parole after about ten years (June 1891, according to Foran).
October 7, 1891: takes a room in Lambeth, London, as Thomas Neill.
October 1891: Ellen Donworth, 19, dies of strychnine and morphia poisoning; the inquest, resumed October 22, cannot say how the poison was given.
October 21, 1891: Matilda Clover, 27, dies; her death is certified as natural.
April 1892: Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell die of strychnine poisoning.
1892: arrested in London; charged with four murders, one attempted murder and extortion.
October 1892: five-day trial at the Old Bailey; convicted of the murder of Matilda Clover; sentenced to death by Mr. Justice Hawkins.
November 15, 1892: hanged at Newgate Prison by James Billington.
1968: his waxwork is removed from the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.