The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer

by Dean Jobb

Overview

A true crime page-turner about a Victorian doctor, a serial killer ahead of his time, using poison for an international murder spree that kept ahead of the burgeoning field of forensics. “A tour de force of storytelling.” —Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache series

Winner of the 2022 CrimeCon True Crime Book of the Year​ Award  
 
Longlisted for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

Don't miss Dean Jobb's A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, coming June 25, 2024!

”When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. “He has nerve and he has knowledge.” In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered as many as ten people in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent. Poison was his weapon of choice. Largely forgotten today, this villain was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper.
 
Structured around the doctor’s London murder trial in 1892, when he was finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well as the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Dr. Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help.
 
Dean Jobb transports readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard traces Dr. Cream’s life through Canada and Chicago and finally to London, where new investigative tools called forensics were just coming into use, even as most police departments still scoffed at using science to solve crimes. But then, most investigators could hardly imagine that serial killers existed—the term was unknown. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, Dr. Cream’s crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer: one who operated without motive or remorse, who “murdered simply for the sake of murder.” For fans of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, all things Sherlock Holmes, or the podcast My Favorite Murder, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is an unforgettable true crime story from a master of the genre.

“Jobb’s excellent storytelling makes the book a pleasure to read.” —The New York Times Book Review
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616206895
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	07/13/2021
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	628,642
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Dean Jobb is an award-winning author and journalist and a professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program. He is the author of eight previous books, including Empire of Deception, which the New York Times Book Review called “intoxicating and impressively researched” and the Chicago Writers Association named the Nonfiction Book of the Year. Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune, Toronto’s Globe and Mail, and the Irish Times. He writes a monthly true-crime column, “Stranger Than Fiction,” for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. His work as an investigative reporter has been nominated for Canada’s National Newspaper and National Magazine awards, and Jobb is a three-time winner of Atlantic Canada’s top journalism award.
 

Table of Contents

A Note to Readers xv

Prologue: Ghosts 1

I "The First of Criminals"

1 "A Great Sin-Stricken City" 11

2 "Detective-Fever" 20

3 Ellen Donworth 28

4 Matilda Clover 33

5 "A Human 'Were-Wolf"' 39

II The Lambeth Poisoner

6 Louisa Harvey 47

7 Blackmail 51

8 "A Bad Man with No Refinement" 59

9 Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell 66

10 Bitter Medicine 71

11 "A Strange Customer" 83

12 The Suspect 91

13 "You Have Got the Wrong Man" 98

III The Trusted Hand

14 Jarvis of the Yard 105

15 "A Young Man of Rare Ability" 109

16 "The Animal Spirits Within" 119

17 Flora Eliza Brooks 130

18 Student No. 2016 136

19 A Premature Death 143

20 The Licentiate 147

21 Catharine Hutchinson Gardner 152

22 By Some Person Unknown 161

IV Inquest

23 Missing Links 171

24 Resurrection 183

V Crimes and Punishment

25 Mary Anne Matilda Faulkner 193

26 "Pure Cream" 206

27 Ellen Stack and Sarah Alice Montgomery 213

28 A Despicable Scheme 223

29 Daniel Stott 226

30 "Crooked Cream" 235

31 Inmate No. 4374 244

32 "As Innocent as the Child Unborn" 257

33 Chasing Shadows 265

VI "Jack the Poisoner"

34 "A Systematic and Deliberate Course of Action" 273

35 "A Murder So Diabolical" 286

36 "Insane in No Legal Sense" 290

37 Dead Man's Walk 301

38 "I Am Jack …" 305

Epilogue: "An Elizabethan Tragedy of Horrors" 312

Cast of Characters 323

Acknowledgments 329

Sources 333

Index 402

Maps

Thomas Neill Cream's London, 1891-92 14

Cities/Towns Where Cream Lived or Killed 106

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/24/2021

Jobb (Empire of Deception) provides the definitive account of serial poisoner Thomas Neill Cream in this enthralling real-life thriller. Born in Scotland in 1850, Cream moved with his family to Montreal, Canada, where he earned his medical degree at McGill University. He became a respected member of his London, Ontario, community, while leading a murderous double life. After the body of a woman with whom Cream was alleged to have had an affair was found near his office in 1879, a victim of chloroform poisoning, he became a suspect and fled to the U.S. In Chicago, he became a person of interest in several deaths and was convicted in 1881 of poisoning a patient. When his life sentence was commuted in 1891, Cream immigrated to England, where his murder of several prostitutes in London with strychnine led to his arrest and execution in 1892. (It was also mooted that he could have been Jack the Ripper, though he was in prison in Illinois at the time of the Ripper killings.) Jobb nicely places this grim story in context, as Cream’s London trial created a precedent for the admission of similar uncharged crimes as evidence and exposed massive Scotland Yard failures that left Cream free to kill more people until he was finally apprehended. Jobb’s extensive research pays off in a true-crime masterpiece that will easily sit alongside The Devil in the White City. (July)

Publishers Weekly

One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021:
The New York Times Book Review * BuzzFeed * CNN * CrimeReads * Book Riot

One of IndieWire's 10 Best Gifts for True Crime Fans
One of  The Washington Post's "50 Notable Works of Nonfiction"
One of CrimeReads' "Best True Crime Books of 2021"

“Jobb recounts Cream’s life and evokes the societal attitudes that allowed him to kill: the blind faith placed in doctors, the power imbalance between Cream and the people who sought his care.”
—The New York Times

“A deeply absorbing account of the life and deeds of one of the Ripper’s earliest ‘successors’ . . . An admirable piece of work, a model for its kind.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“[Dr. Thomas Neill Cream] will hauntingly occupy a space in your nightmares after you read of his life and crimes in The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream. An extraordinarily well-researched and arrestingly written work . . . 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.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Jobb . . . re-creates Cream’s heartless life in short, highly dramatic chapters.” 
—The Washington Post

“If you've been hunting for your next true crime addiction this summer, Dean Jobb's The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream has it all: a serial-killer doctor, corrupt leaders, and a ground-breaking investigation by Scotland Yard, all within the spellbinding setting of London circa 1892.” 
—Elle

“True crime fans will want to pick up Dean Jobb’s engrossing account of Thomas Neill Cream . . . Jobb builds Cream’s world in vivid, transportive detail; I had a lot of fun being swept away.”
—BuzzFeed, “28 Summer Books to Get Excited About” 

“A must for true crime fans.”
—CNN

“A tour de force of storytelling. One of the best books I’ve read this year. Dean Jobb breathes new life into Cream's victims—who they were, where and how they lived—all the while blending in thorny issues of policing, of the fictional detectives being created, of the other serial killers on the loose. This book is both chilling and thrilling.” 
—Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache series

“The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is a macabre, utterly suspenseful true crime thriller about a forgotten madman every bit as cunning and evil as Jack the Ripper. Dean Jobb combines scholarship with a breakneck narrative so relentless it kept me up all night. Warning: Read with the lights on.”
—Abbott Kahler, New York Times bestselling author (as Karen Abbott) of The Ghosts of Eden Park 

“The story of the infamous poisoner Thomas Neill Cream is so many things—horrifying, fascinating, and insightful, a portrait of late 19th-century police work at a time when the idea of the professional detective was just starting to take shape. And in this vivid and compelling book, Dean Jobb does full justice to that story.”
—Deborah Blum, New York Times bestselling author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

“[Jobb] creates a nuanced portrait of Cream that’s much more chilling than Mr. Hyde.”
—BookPage

“Masterful . . . True crime doesn’t get any better than this.”
—Booklist

“[A] fascinating read.”
—Oxygen.com, July Book Club Selection

“Chilling and fascinating . . . Jobb’s true crime stories are not to be missed.”
—CrimeReads

“Jobb’s extensive research pays off in a true crime masterpiece that will easily sit alongside The Devil in the White City.” 
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Jobb richly embellishes his grim central tale with carefully researched setting, detail, and social mores of the late Victorian era, elegantly contrasted with his eponymous fiend, Thomas Neill Cream . . . A vivid, engaging revival of a forgotten Victorian villain.” 
—Kirkus Reviews

“An illuminating, if frightening, book . . . Jobb handles this hideous yet compelling story so well . . . An absorbing and grim account, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is a gripping addition to the true crime genre.”
—Bookreporter.com

“Jobb uses Cream’s spree to illuminate the era’s surgical and policing practices, and despite Cream’s monstrousness, Jobb’s storytelling ‘makes the book a pleasure to read.’”
—The Week
 
“[A] fascinating read.”
—Oxygen.com

“The graphically told tale of a notorious 19th-century slayer… Impressive.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

“Jobb does a masterful job of following the investigation, which ranged from England to the United States to Canada, and of presenting Dr. Cream not merely as a murderer, but as a complex, unstable, and deeply fascinating individual. True crime doesn’t get any better than this.”
—Booklist

“Jobb’s research is excellent . . . [His] compelling account of Cream’s reign of terror will appeal to readers interested in Jack the Ripper or Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.” 
—Library Journal

“Engrossing . . . An informative and entertaining true crime text.”
—Foreword Review

“Jobb captures the hypocrisy, class differences, and gender inequality of the times in an extensively researched non-fiction telling of the forgotten nineteenth century serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream . . . Both grim and hard to put down.”
—Southern Bookseller Review

“Dean Jobb’s meticulous research is evident on every page of his gripping study of the extraordinary serial killer Doctor Cream, a nineteenth century ‘monster of iniquity’ whose homicidal career was truly stranger than fiction.”
—Martin Edwards, author of Mortmain Hall and the Lake District Mysteries
 
“Dean Jobb has produced another mesmerizing feat of historical storytelling. The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream vividly recreates the career of one of the most audacious—and deadly—criminals in history.” 
—Gary Krist, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Sin and The Mirage Factory
 
“Tense, atmospheric, and effortlessly readable, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream has all the sinister elegance of a hansom cab emerging from a late Victorian London smog.”
—Paul Willetts, author of King Con 
 
“Deeply researched and rich in grisly detail, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream fuses the blow-by-blow efforts to catch a serial killer with the larger picture of crime and detection in the late nineteenth century. A fine piece of social history as well as an extraordinary story, it engrossed me right up to its deeply satisfying conclusion.”
—Charlotte Gray, author of eleven nonfiction bestsellers, including The Massey Murder and Murdered Midas

“A brilliant evocation of an age and a fascinating dissection of a serial killer's crimes. Dean Jobb is a first-rate storyteller and historical detective. A real page-turner.”
—Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“Corruption, madness, murder: Dr. Cream has it all. This is a spectacular and absorbing tale, meticulously reported and vividly told. An enthralling page-turner.”
—Jonathan Eig, author of  Get Capone: The Secret Plot that Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster

 “The definitive retelling of a story about a devious doctor, the dogged investigators who hunted him, and the murders that shocked the world. Dr. Cream’s story comes to life in Jobb’s spellbinding tale."
—Kate Winkler Dawson, author American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI

 “A tour de force of research, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream conjures an era when poisoners roamed the earth—and police seemed powerless to stop them.”
—Margalit Fox, author of Conan Doyle for the Defense 

“An exciting whodunit  . . . Jobb also does the unusual in true crime: he describes in detail the lives of Cream’s victims. The scholarship he employed to tell this story is staggering . . . the numbing regard and treatment of women in Victorian times — especially of unmarried pregnant, widowed and abandoned women — tugs at the heart.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
 
“A must-read... historically rich and shockingly poignant, Jobb’s text is not one to miss.”
—True Crime Index
 
“First-rate creative non-fiction [and] very hard to put down . . . Crime buffs are going to motor through this book.”
—Saltwire.com

From the Publisher

07/01/2021

Jobb (creative nonfiction, Univ. of King's Coll., Halifax, Nova Scotia; Empire of Deception) profiles the physician Thomas Neill Cream, a serial killer who was a contemporary of Jack the Ripper. Between 1877 and 1892, Cream poisoned victims in Canada, the United States, and England, using strychnine capsules that he created himself. Cream, known as the Lambeth Poisoner, targeted mostly sex workers or women in need of his abortion services, but he was not averse to killing closer to home—his young wife numbered among his victims. Jobb's research is excellent, though his frequent use of quotations can be jarring to the narrative flow. Even after Cream sent detailed blackmail letters trying to shift the blame for the murders to wealthy and influential public figures, and became overly friendly with officials at Scotland Yard, he nevertheless went undiscovered for years due to shoddy police work and misogyny, Jobb argues, because police often dismissed Cream's victims as undeserving of justice. Period photos and reproductions of Cream's letters round out the work. VERDICT Jobb's compelling account of Cream's reign of terror will appeal to readers interested in Jack the Ripper or Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.—Jessica Hilburn, Benson Memorial Lib., Titusville, PA

Library Journal

2021-05-12
A lively account of an early international serial killer’s crimes.

In his latest, journalist and creative nonfiction professor Jobb richly embellishes his grim central tale with carefully researched setting, detail, and social mores of the late Victorian era, elegantly contrasted with his eponymous fiend, Thomas Neill Cream (1852-1892), “a doctor from Canada” and “a new kind of killer, choosing victims at random and killing without remorse.” Many readers will make comparisons to H.H. Holmes from The Devil in the White City. However, writes Jobb, “by the time Holmes claimed his first victim in 1891, and long before the infamous Jack the Ripper terrorized London in 1888, Cream was suspected of killing as many as six people, most of them deliberately poisoned with tainted medicine.” Cream is an unsavory cipher, a foppish, dissolute sociopath masquerading behind the authority of a doctor. His well-to-do family perceived his dangerous tendencies, sending him to England after an 11-year prison sentence for poisoning his alleged mistress’s husband in small-town Illinois and following earlier killings in Canada and Chicago for which he’d evaded responsibility. Yet, once back in England, Cream continued his murderous ways, poisoning several prostitutes and sending blackmail letters impugning others for his crimes, a narcissistic tell that later provided evidence for his conviction. Though “the adventures of Holmes and Dr. Watson made detection look easy,” in reality, forensic detection was in its infancy. Jobb ably portrays the early investigators who used often derided scientific approaches to bring Cream to justice, including a Scotland Yard detective who traveled to America to piece together Cream’s past, “an investigation that would expose more crimes and furnish even more evidence of the doctor’s capacity for cruelty and murder.” Eventually, Cream was hanged following conviction in a highly publicized trial in London, leaving as his legacy dismay mingled with social reflection. “Four poisonings committed under Scotland Yard’s nose…suggested a shocking lack of vigilance.”

A vivid, engaging revival of a forgotten Victorian villain.

Kirkus Reviews