It was a fatal error. Dr Cream had indeed given Louise Harvey some pills to take the previous October. But she had only pretended to swallow them. She was very much alive, and was able to be interviewed by the police.
She told the police how, on 25 or 26 October, she had met Cream in Regent Street about 12.30 at night, having seen him earlier that evening in the Alhambra Theatre at the back of the dress circle. She spent the night with him in a Soho hotel and met him again the following night on the Embankment, opposite Charing Cross underground station. ‘Good evening. I’m late!’ he said, giving her some roses and inviting her to take a glass of wine with him in a nearby pub, the Northumberland. The night before he had commented on some spots on her forehead and promised to provide her with a remedy for them. After they left the Northumberland, they walked along the Embankment and then he produced some pills that he said would effect a cure. Something in his manner put Harvey on her guard, though. He insisted she took the pills and she pretended to swallow them, putting her hand to her mouth. But when he happened to look away, she threw them over the Embankment wall into the River Thames. The solicitous doctor then bade her farewell. But before he left he gave her five shillings to go to a music hall.
Oddly enough, she saw him again about three weeks later, in Piccadilly Circus. He failed to recognise her, and when she approached him he invited her to a bar in Air Street, to join him for a glass of wine. ‘Don’t you know me? Don’t you remember?’ she asked. ‘You promised to meet me one night outside the Oxford.’ ‘I don’t remember you. Who are you?’ ‘Have you forgotten Lou Harvey?’ she asked. He hurried away.
As described by Lou Harvey, Dr Cream was a ‘bald and very hairy man; he had a dark ginger moustache, wore gold-rimmed glasses, was well-dressed, cross-eyed, and spoke with an odd accent.’ It was what would now be called a transatlantic accent. In fact, Thomas Neill Cream was Scottish, having been born in Glasgow on 27 May 1850, although he and his parents emigrated to Canada when he was thirteen. His father was the prosperous manager of a shipbuilding and lumber firm. Young Cream graduated as a doctor at McGill University, Montreal, in 1876. But thereafter he led an obsessional life of crime that included arson, abortion, blackmail, fraud, extortion, theft and attempted murder – each crime being often followed up by a demand for some kind of payment. Three women died under his care as a doctor. A fourth, whom he had tried to abort, he was forced by her father to marry. She died of consumption when he was completing his medical studies in Edinburgh, where he qualified as a physician and surgeon. While practising as a doctor of the ‘quack’ variety in Chicago – he performed illegal abortions for prostitutes, at least one of whom died – he had an affair with a young woman, Mrs Julia Stott, and poisoned her elderly and epileptic husband. Daniel Stott had been taking Dr Cream’s medicinal cures, and Cream had thoughtfully tried to insure his life. Mr Stott died on 14 July 1881 after imbibing one of Cream’s remedies, given to him by his wife. Before absconding with Mrs Stott, Cream wrote to the coroner and the District Attorney accusing a chemist of malpractice and implying that Mr Stott had not died of natural causes and should be exhumed. He was, and was found to have been poisoned with strychnine.
The couple were apprehended and Mrs Stott turned state’s evidence. Cream was sentenced to life imprisonment in Joliet prison, Illinois. He was released, unexpectedly early, in July 1891. In the meantime, his father had died, leaving him $116,000.
Cream left America, arriving in England on 1 October 1891, the month in which Ellen Donworth and Matilda Clover died and Louise Harvey escaped death. In December, he became engaged to Miss Sabbatini. In January, he returned to America and also visited Canada, where, in Quebec, he had 500 hand-outs printed (but never distributed) notifying the guests of the Metropole Hotel in London that one of the employees there had poisoned Ellen Donworth. Then, on 9 April, he returned to London. Emma Shrivell and Alice Marsh died three days later.
After Cream’s conversation with Sergeant McIntyre, the police began a cautious investigation. Louise Harvey was found and interviewed. Cream’s lodgings were watched, and he himself shadowed. He told an acquaintance who pointed this out to him that the police were keeping an eye on young Harper. On 17 May, another woman escaped poisoning when, in her room off Kennington Road, she wisely refused ‘an American drink’ that Cream prepared for her.
On 26 May, Inspector Tunbridge of the CID called on Cream in his rooms in Lambeth Palace Road. Cream complained about being followed by the police and showed Tunbridge a leather case containing, among other drugs, a bottle of strychnine pills, which he said could only be sold to chemists or doctors. The police toiled on. Next, on 27 May, Inspector Tunbridge went to Barnstaple and saw Dr Harper, who showed him the threatening letter that was clearly in Cream’s handwriting. But it was not until 3 June that Cream was arrested at his lodgings, having already booked a passage on a ship to America. ‘You have got the wrong man!’ he exclaimed. ‘Fire away!’
He was first charged at Bow Street with attempting to extort money from Dr Joseph Harper. The inquest on Matilda Clover (exhumed on 5 May) began on 22 June. Its conclusion was that Thomas Neill, as he was still being called, had administered poison to her with intent to destroy life. Now charged with her murder, he was put on trial at the Old Bailey before Mr Justice Hawkins on 17 October 1892. The Attorney-General, Sir Charles Russell, led for the Crown, and Mr Gerald Geoghegan appeared for the accused. Insolent and overbearing in court, Cream was convinced he would be acquitted. But the evidence was conclusive. After sentence of death was pronounced, he muttered: ‘They will never hang me.’
He never slept the night before his execution, pacing up and down his cell or lying awake on his bed. White as a sheet and shaking, he was hanged at Newgate Prison on 15 November 1892 at the age of forty-two. Madame Tussauds bought his clothes and belongings for £200.
Although he made no confession, it is alleged that on the scaffold he said: ‘I am Jack the –’ moments before he fell; that claim is clearly an impossibility, as at the time of the Whitechapel murders Cream was very definitely under lock and key in Joliet prison, Illinois. The executioner, James Billington, who had taken over from James Berry as chief hangman in August 1891, was, it seems, a bit of a joker, and may have invented Cream’s last words. Another version of them is that Cream exclaimed: ‘I am ejaculating!’ before plummeting to his death.
THE MURDER OF MISS MATHER, 1891
Barristers defending persons accused of murder quite often claim that the defendant is insane. How else can the accused’s apparently normal behaviour before and after the horrible event be explained? Sometimes, indeed, more time is spent on discussing medical theories about mental states than on the actual circumstances of the murder. In these instances, the defence usually suffers from the difficulty that the defendant looks and sounds far from mad, and is on the contrary the very picture of an agreeable, sometimes good-looking person, wrongfully accused and naturally aggrieved at being so. Seventy years ago and more, juries appear not to have been too bothered with technicalities and took a simpler, black-and-white view of right and wrong. They were not too worried, it seems, whether the accused was mad or not, since oddness, eccentricity and even abnormal behaviour were perhaps more usual – and more tolerated – than they are now. The question then was whether or not the accused had been satisfactorily proved to have done the murderous deed – and if he had, then he deserved to hang.
Frederick Bailey Deeming was certainly an unusual man, an adventurer in every way, engaging, larger than life, dedicated to enjoying himself and avoiding work whenever possible. Other members of his family also seem to have been rather odd. According to Fred’s older brother Edward, their father, a tinsmith, ‘died an imbecile in Tranmere Workhouse, Birkenhead’ and before this had tried four times to commit suicide by cutting his throat. Fred himself, born on 30 July 1853 in Birkenhead, Cheshire, on the River Mersey opposite Liverpool, was the youngest of seven children