She weighed 9 stone and was given a 6 ft drop. Reporters, who had been excluded from the execution by special order of the sheriff, were also refused permission to see the body, which was, however, viewed by the coroner’s jury.
Her final message duly appeared in the papers. It was: ‘Have not betrayed – Eleanor.’ After her death, Frank Hogg sold several items and furnishings connected with the murder, including the poker and the pram, to Madame Tussauds for a large fee, and for many years these items and a tableau containing a waxwork of Mrs Pearcey was a popular attraction there.
THE MURDER OF MATILDA CLOVER, 1891
There is a kind of crazy vanity in murderers that prompts some of them to put their heads in the lion’s mouth. They go out of their way to meet and talk to the investigating police, and often pose as conscientious citizens eager to assist police enquiries. In addition, such murderers sometimes cannot resist writing taunting letters to the police or notes containing useless information. One man who pushed this literary bent to extremes was Neill Cream.
At about 7.30 pm on 13 October 1891, a young prostitute, Ellen Donworth, aged nineteen, was plying her trade along Waterloo Road when she staggered and collapsed on the pavement. A man called James Styles ran to her and half-carried her to her nearby lodgings in Duke Street, off Westminster Bridge Road. She was in agony, but she was able to gasp that a tall gentleman with cross-eyes and a silk hat had given her some ‘white stuff’ to drink from a bottle when she met him earlier that evening in the York Hotel in Waterloo Road. She died on the way to hospital. A post mortem revealed strychnine in her stomach. A jeweller’s traveller was later arrested in connection with her death but soon released.
The coroner officiating at her inquest, Mr GP Wyatt, received a letter on 19 October from ‘G O’Brian, Detective’. It said: ‘I am writing to say that if you and your satellites fail to bring the murderer of Ellen Donworth, alias Linell … to justice, I am willing to give you such assistance as will bring the murderer to justice, provided your government is willing to pay me £300,000 for my services. No pay if not successful.’ Another letter, from ‘H Bayne, Barrister’ was sent to Mr WFD Smith, MP, a member of the newsagent family, WH Smith and Son Limited. The letter said that two incriminating letters from Ellen Donworth had been found in her possession and the writer offered his services as ‘counsellor and legal adviser’.
A week after her death, on 20 October, the cries of another prostitute, twenty-six-year-old Matilda Clover, aroused the house of ill-fame in Lambeth Road run by Mother Phillips, in which she had a room. Matilda was also mother of a two-year-old boy. Writhing and screaming in agony she managed, before she died, to say that a man called Fred had given her some white pills. A servant-girl, Lucy Rose, recalled seeing this Fred, who was tall and moustached, aged about forty, and wore a tall silk hat and a cape. Matilda’s death was attributed to DTs caused by alcoholic poisoning – not unreasonably, as she drank heavily, morning, noon and night. She was buried in a pauper’s grave in Tooting in southwest London.
A month later, a distinguished doctor in Portman Square, Dr William Broadbent, was astonished to get a letter on 28 November 1891 from ‘M Malone’ accusing him of the murder of Matilda Clover, who had been ‘poisoned with strychnine’, and threatening him with exposure unless he paid £2,500. In December, Countess Russell, a guest at the Savoy Hotel, received a blackmail note naming her husband as Matilda’s murderer. Then the poisoner’s epistles and murderous activities suddenly ceased. He had fallen in love and had become engaged.
But several months later, on 12 April 1892, two more young prostitutes died in agony. They were Emma Shrivell and Alice Marsh, who both lived in second-floor rooms in 118 Stamford Street, a brothel run by a woman called Vogt. Before they died, the girls told a policeman that a doctor called Fred had visited them that night and after a meal of bottled beer and tinned salmon he had given each of them three long thin pills. He was stoutish, dark, bald on top of his head, wore glasses, and was about 5 ft 8 in or 9 in. The policeman, PC Cumley, recalled seeing such a man leave the building at 1.45 am. It was established later that both prostitutes had been poisoned with strychnine, and the newspapers speculated wildly about the identity of the Lambeth Poisoner. Could he be Jack the Ripper, whose activities had suddenly ceased in 1888?
‘What a cold-blooded murder!’ exclaimed Dr Neill (as Thomas Neill Cream called himself) when he read about the inquest on the two girls in a newspaper on Easter Sunday, 17 April. He told his landlady’s daughter, Miss Sleaper, that he was determined to bring the miscreant to justice. A tall, bald, cross-eyed, broad-shouldered man, who wore tall hats and glasses specially made for him in Fleet Street, Dr Cream had rented a second-floor room in 103 Lambeth Palace Road since 9 April, after returning to London from Canada. He had stayed there before, between 7 October the previous year and January, when he took a trip to America. In December, he had become engaged to a girl called Laura Sabbatini, who lived with her mother in Berkhamsted. He made out a will in her favour. On Christmas day he dined with the Sleapers in his lodgings, joining in their family entertainments, singing hymns in the evening and playing the zither. He was no trouble, going out at night alone to places of entertainment and debauchery.
In those days, that area south of the River Thames between Westminster and Waterloo bridges was thronged with bars, theatres, prostitutes and other amusements. There was Astley’s circus and playhouse; the Surrey, with its rowdy melodramas (gallery, 6d; pit, 1s); the Canterbury music-hall, with its picture gallery; and the Old Vic – which had, however, become respectable, with blameless programmes and temperance bars, since Emma Cons became director in 1880.
Cream was ready, it seems, to converse with any man about plays or music, but his favourite topic was women, about whom he spoke quite crudely. He would describe his tastes and pleasures and exhibit a collection of indecent pictures that he carried about with him.
An article published later in the St James’s Gazette said he dressed with taste and care and was well informed. It continued: ‘His very strong and protruding under jaw was always at work chewing gum, tobacco or cigars … He never laughed or even smiled … He occasionally said “Ha-ha!” in a hard, stage-villain-like fashion, but no amount of good nature could construe it into an expression of gentility.’ The article also referred to his ‘never-ending talk about women’ and referred to the fact that he swallowed pills that he said had aphrodisiac properties.
In the same lodging house as Dr Cream was Walter Harper, a young medical student from St Thomas’s Hospital. Cream told Miss Sleaper most forcibly that it was Harper who had killed the girls. The police had proof, he said, and the girls had been warned by letter. Miss Sleaper, a girl of spirit, replied that he must be mad. Unabashed, Cream wrote to young Harper’s father, a doctor in Barnstaple, accusing his son of the murders and offering to exchange such evidence as he had for £1,500. He wrote: ‘The publication of the evidence will ruin you and your family for ever, so that when you read it you will need no one to tell you that it will convict your son … If you do not answer at once, I am going to give evidence to the coroner at once.’
Cream was just as outspoken with a drinking acquaintance, an engineer named Haynes, who also happened to be a private enquiry agent. Haynes showed great interest in what Cream had to say, and in due course disclosed all he had discovered to Police Sergeant McIntyre of the CID. Sergeant McIntyre arranged a meeting with Cream and Cream confidentially showed