On October 13, 1891, Ellen Donworth, nineteen, a prostitute in Lambeth, south London, received two letters and agreed to meet the man who had written them. He offered her a drink from a bottle. That night she fell violently ill, and she died of what was later found to be strychnine poisoning. During the inquest the coroner received a letter from an "A. O'Brien, Detective" offering to name the murderer for a reward of £300,000, and W. F. D. Smith, owner of the W H Smith bookstalls, received one accusing him of the killing and demanding money for silence. On October 20 Matilda Clover, twenty-seven, took four pills a customer had given her to swallow before bed; she died in convulsions two hours later, and her death was put down to heart failure brought on by drink. A letter signed M. Malone accused the prominent physician William Broadbent of her death and demanded £25,000. Broadbent went to Scotland Yard, which set a trap for the blackmailer, but no one came.
The letter writer was Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, lodging at 103 Lambeth Palace Road. He was born in Glasgow on May 27, 1850, and his family moved to Canada in 1854; he grew up outside Quebec City, attended Lachute Academy and graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a medical degree in 1876. That year, in Waterloo, Quebec, he courted Flora Brooks, and when she became pregnant he tried and failed to perform an abortion, leaving her gravely ill. Her father caught him fleeing to Montreal and made him marry her. The day after the wedding he left for England to continue his training, at St Thomas's Hospital in London and then in Edinburgh, where he qualified as a physician and surgeon in 1878. The Brookses never saw him again. Flora died of consumption in 1877.
He set up in practice in London, Ontario, where he was charged with practicing without a license. In 1879 Catharine Hutchinson Gardner, who was pregnant, was found dead in the privy behind his office at 204 Dundas Street, killed with a chloroform-soaked handkerchief. Cream had refused her an abortion and urged her to name a local businessman as the father, and he produced a letter in which she supposedly did so; her family and roommate said the handwriting was not hers, and it was dismissed as a forgery. No one was charged. He moved to Chicago and practiced near the red-light district, performing illegal abortions. He was investigated in August 1880 after the death of Mary Anne Faulkner, on whom he had allegedly operated, and escaped for lack of evidence. In December a patient named Stack died after his treatment, and he tried to blackmail the pharmacist who had filled the prescription. In April 1881 Alice Montgomery died of strychnine poisoning after an abortion in a rooming house a block from his office, a murder never solved.
On July 14, 1881, Daniel Stott died of strychnine poisoning at his home in Boone County, Illinois, after Cream supplied him with a supposed remedy for epilepsy. The death was taken as natural until Cream wrote to the coroner blaming the pharmacist, again as part of a blackmail attempt. He was arrested with Stott's wife, Julia, who was said to have become his mistress and to have got the poison from him to kill her husband. She turned state's evidence and put the blame on Cream, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in Joliet Prison. Stott's friends put up a gravestone that reads, with a different date, that he was poisoned by his wife and Dr. Cream. In July 1891, after ten years, Cream was released: Governor Joseph W. Fifer had commuted the sentence after his brother pleaded for leniency and, it was alleged, bribed officials. With money inherited from his father, who had died in 1887, he sailed for England and landed at Liverpool on October 1, 1891.
After a trip to Canada he returned to London on April 2, 1892, and gave two pills to Louise Harvey, a prostitute, insisting she take them at once; she was suspicious, pretended to swallow them and threw them away. On April 11 he spent the night with Alice Marsh, twenty-one, and Emma Shrivell, eighteen, in their flat and, leaving, gave each of them three pills and a can of salmon. Both died that night of strychnine poisoning.
The letters undid him. The police quickly cleared the men he had accused, and they noticed that the anonymous writer referred to the murder of Matilda Clover, whose death was still registered as natural. Then Cream gave a visiting New York policeman a tour of the places where the victims had lived, and the American mentioned it to a British officer, who found such detailed knowledge suspicious. Scotland Yard put Cream under watch, saw him visiting prostitutes, and learned from inquiries in the United States and Canada of his poisoning conviction in 1881. He was arrested for Clover's murder on June 3, 1892, and on July 13 was charged with the murders of Clover, Donworth, Marsh and Shrivell, the attempted murder of Harvey, and extortion. He insisted he was simply Dr. Thomas Neill. At the Clover inquest that July the coroner, Athelstan Braxton Hicks, read out a letter signed Jack the Ripper declaring Dr. Neill innocent, and the room, Cream included, laughed. The jury found that Clover died of strychnine given her by Thomas Neill. His medicine case, taken in evidence, is now in the Crime Museum.
His trial at the Old Bailey ran from October 17 to 21, 1892. The jury deliberated for twelve minutes and found him guilty, and Justice Henry Hawkins sentenced him to death. The day before his execution he made a new will leaving his estate to his solicitors, revoking one that had named Laura Sabatini of Berkhamsted, to whom he had become engaged on December 23, 1891. He was hanged at Newgate on November 15, 1892, by James Billington and buried the same day under the prison flagstones; in 1902 his remains were moved to an unmarked grave in the City of London Cemetery. Billington later claimed that Cream's last words were "I am Jack the...", but no one else at the execution reported it, and Cream was in prison in Illinois throughout the Whitechapel murders of 1888.