Story of serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream takes you on a grand, gruesome, historical journey, with his time in Chicago
Chicago has long been a hospitable clime for those with murder on their minds. Our city’s history is punctuated by the names and dirty deeds of men who haunt our dreams. For all the seemingly random violence and homicidal tragedy that pepper the daily headlines, we tend to remember those who “worked” alone: H.H. Holmes, Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy.
One name that, until now, has not been well-known is Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who lived and killed across two continents, poisoning people in London, Chicago and Belvidere. His victims numbered 10 and perhaps more, and he will hauntingly occupy a space in your nightmares after you read of his life and crimes in “The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer” (Algonquin Books, $27.95).
An extraordinarily well-researched and arrestingly written work by Canadian university professor and former newspaper reporter Dean Jobb, this is a book that grabs you from its first sentence, weaving a suspenseful tale and taking readers on a grand, if gruesome, historical journey.
Cream was, Jobb writes, “a new kind of killer, choosing victims at random and killing without remorse. A cold-blooded fiend who murdered, the Chicago Daily Tribune would later declare in disbelief, ‘simply for the sake of murder’.”
The phrase “serial killer” had not yet been coined but a case could be made that Cream was the first, having killed in the years before that character known as Jack the Ripper did his work.
Little in Cream’s background, his early years, would have indicated future infamy. Born into a well-to-do family in Scotland, he grew up in the shipbuilding town of Quebec City in Canada. In medical school, he impressed some fellow students though others sensed a creepiness. One of his teachers remembered him as “rather wild and fond of ostentatious display of clothing and jewelry.”
He seems to have gone off the rails shortly after graduating, when he became engaged to a woman named Flora Brooks. He performed an abortion and was forced by her family to marry her which, Jobb asserts, “precipitated in him what became this burning hatred of women.”
He fled to England to complete his studies and, after faltering in starting his medical practice in Canada, landed in Chicago in that frenetic decade following the Chicago Fire of 1871.
He opened offices on the West Side, a mile from downtown, “his office surrounded by shabby tenements and rooming houses crammed with new arrivals. ... Broken plumbing filled basements with sewage. Garbage was heaped in backyards.”
There he found a supply of victims in the form of women desperate to end pregnancies. Some, but not all, were prostitutes, but he referred to them collectively as “a menace to society.” As Jobb writes, “In the desperation of pregnant women and prostitutes, Cream — cash strapped and struggling to build a medical practice — saw opportunity. He promoted himself as an expert in ‘diseases on the womb.’”
In 1881, he was convicted of killing the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair in Belvidere, and was sentenced to life in the in Illinois State Penitentiary, “one of the country’s toughest and most notorious prisons.” After enduring “years at hard labor and stints in the mind-crushing hell of solitary confinement,” he was pardoned thanks to connection and family money in 1891 and returned to England to renew his murderous ways.
Jobb does an admirably agile job giving us insights into the times (and the places) in which Cream lived, offering sharp profiles of some of his pursuers from Scotland Yard, fascinating takes on the environments and chilling evocations of the brutality of medical practices at the time, and the halting natures of investigative techniques.
But his focus remains firmly on the man.
As Jobb writes, “There were two Thomas Neill Creams. The respectable, churchgoing, community-minded young doctor with a fine singing voice seemed to vanish with the setting sun. A shadowy figure took his place, drawn to the temptations the YMCA urged young men to avoid.”
One of the reasons Cream was able to, for so long, avoid the law was that, Jobb told me in a telephone interview, “He played on his status as a doctor, giving him the ability, at least for a time, to evade suspicion.”
When he was brought to trial for killing four women in London in 1892, he became an “international sensation,” with many newspapers covering the trial in detail, often devoting entire pages to illustrations of Cream’s misdeeds. Madame Tussauds’ famous London museum had a wax likeness of Cream on display in its Chamber of Horrors within four days of his conviction. (It remains a fixture at the museum until, believe it or not, 1968).
He was later hung and even though people would not be able to see that — public executions had been banned in the 1860s — a crowd “swelled to as many as five thousand” outside the high walls of his prison. Most were “drink-sodden men” and “repulsive females,” as one reporter noted.
“A black flag was hoisted above the prison, signaling that the executioner’s work was done,” Jobb writes. “The crowd erupted in cheers, applause and laughter. ‘Now, ‘ee’s a danglin,’ someone shouted.”
But Cream lived on. For more than a century after his death, there was speculation that Cream might have been his contemporary killer Jack the Ripper, sparked by reports that he had spoken his last words to his executioner James Billington, saying “I am Jack.”
The book has impressed a pack of other writers, including Chicago’s Jonathan Eig, author of “Get Capone,” “Ali” and other fine books, who wrote of it: “Corruption, madness, murder: This is a spectacular and absorbing tale, meticulously reported and vividly told. An enthralling page turner.”
The New York Times Book Review concurred, with a favorable review in last Sunday’s paper. And Karen Abbott, who wrote about Chicago’s sordid past in her wonderful “Sin in the Second City,” has called the book “A macabre, utterly suspenseful true-crime thriller.”
She also gives a warning: “Read with the lights on.”
Good advice, that.
