EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (7 page)

A third, and much more gruesome letter, was delivered to George Lusk, head of the Mile End Vigilance Committee on 16 October. Accompanying it was a piece of what turned out to be human kidney. It said, in different handwriting to the other letters:

‘
From hell. Mr Lusk Sor I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer. Signed Catch me when You can Mishter Lusk
.’

It is impossible to say whether the real Jack the Ripper sent these badly-spelled communications. The two ears were never sent and if the killer had had time to carry out his mutilations and organ removals it seemed likely that he could have found time to cut off a victim’s ears. But he failed to do so. Some have said that the letter forecast the double killing and must, therefore, be genuine. However, by the time it was sent, on the night of Sunday 31, news was already on the streets about the murders of Eddowes and Stride.

London was now in a state of unparalleled anxiety. The streets of Whitechapel emptied after dark and extra police were put on patrol. Handbills were posted seeking information, butchers and slaughterers were interviewed and bloodhounds were brought in. But still, there were no new developments.

Gradually, as autumn turned to winter, the streets returned to normal and streetwalkers were once

more to be seen plying their trade in the area’s thoroughfares.

On 9 November, a landlord sent one of his employees to try to get some overdue rent out of a prostitute, Mary Kelly, who rented a room from him at 13 Miller’s Court but John Bowyer was unable to obtain a reply to his knock at the door. He went to a window, reached in through its broken glass and pulled aside the curtain that was drawn across. What he saw would with him for the remainder of his life. The small room contained little in the way of furniture, apart from a table and a bed but on the bed lay the body of Mary Kelly, her face horrendously mutilated and her throat cut so viciously that the knife had gone right down to her spinal column. This murder was the most horrific of all the Ripper’s deeds. The top layer of her abdomen and thighs had been removed and the abdominal cavity had been ‘emptied of its viscera’ as the doctor’s report put it. The Ripper had cut off her breasts and placed one under her head, along with her uterus and kidney, and the other by her right foot. Her liver lay between her feet, her intestines by her side and her spleen by her left side. The flaps he had sliced off her abdomen and thighs lay on the table.

Her heart was missing. He had taken it away with him.

Panic broke out on the streets of Whitechapel with outbreaks of mob violence directed at any stranger or anyone who seemed at all suspicious. Queen Victoria railed about the lack of lighting in the area and the standard of policing in London.

A man called George Hutchinson claimed to have followed Mary and a man back to the house where she lived and several others had seen her with a man. She had been very drunk by all accounts. All agreed that her companion had been in his mid-thirties, but the rest of the descriptions conflicted with each other and the police were really no further forward.

Mary Kelly’s murder is believed to have been the last committed by Jack the Ripper and the file was closed in 1892. That, of course, has not prevented speculation about his identity.

Montagu John Druitt, was one suspect. A doctor, he disappeared around the same time that the murders stopped. Described as ‘sexually insane’ and believed by his own family to have been the Ripper, he was fished out of the Thames on 31 December.

A Polish Jew named Kosminski who lived in Whitechapel, also became a suspect when he was diagnosed as insane after many years of hating women, especially prostitutes. He had homicidal tendencies and was sent to an asylum in March 1889.

Another asylum inmate, Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor and a convicted criminal, was locked up because he was found to be a homicidal maniac and rose high on the list of suspects. Furthermore, his whereabouts at the times of the murders were never established.

Other high profile contenders were somewhat more surprising. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, known popularly as ‘Eddie’ was the grandson of Queen Victoria. Amongst a number of theories regarding him it was suggested that he had got a shop girl in Whitechapel pregnant and that she had been taken away to a hospital by the Queen’s doctor, Sir William Gull, who had her institutionalised for the remainder of her life. The prostitutes who had been killed had all been friends of the shop girl and knew what had happened. Sir William Gull, it is suggested, killed them and made it look like the work of a madman. The fact that Sir William was seventy years old at the time and Eddie’s sexual predilections were slanted more towards the male sex, seem to negate this theory.

More recently, the artist, Walter Sickert, has been put in the frame, mainly, it seems, because he painted prostitutes, although some say that some of his paintings chillingly replicate photographs of the Ripper’s victims and the Ripper’s letters contain phrases used by the American painter, James McNeill Whistler, who had been Sickert’s teacher.

It is unlikely that we will ever discover the true identity of the psychopathic killer known as Jack the Ripper, but, with more books written about him than about all the US Presidents combined, an entire industry carries on around the five murders he committed between the end of August and 8 November 1888.

Dr Thomas Neil Cream

He was a sadist, a monster who enjoyed a love-hate relationship with women, a beast who consigned seven of them to excruciatingly painful deaths in Canada, the United States and Britain. He did not even need to be present when they suffered the convulsions leading to their death. He would hand the fatal pills to them, telling them they were too pale or that these would prevent them from contracting a sexually transmitted disease, and walk off into the night. Like his contemporary, Jack the Ripper, the victims he chose to eliminate were prostitutes, although he did take care of a wife as well. In his head, he was cleaning up the streets as well as exercising his psychopathic urge to wield the ultimate power of life and death over women.

He was originally Scottish, born in Glasgow in 1850 but living there only four years before his parents, William and Mary upped sticks and moved to Quebec in Canada in search of a better life for themselves and their children. William worked in shipbuilding and the family prospered. He started his own lumber wholesale business and, apart from Thomas, his sons all joined him there. Thomas was more studious and left to attend McGill University where he studied to become a doctor.

His first real problem occurred shortly after he graduated in 1876. He had made a teenage girl, Flora Brooks, pregnant and her family insisted that he do the decent thing and marry her. The morning after the wedding, however, he was gone, having boarded a ship bound for London where he planned to make a new start without the encumbrance of a young, pregnant wife.

London’s medical schools were some of the best there were at the time and doctors were needed to help deal with the appalling disease and sickness that had arisen from the terrible social conditions in areas of the capital such as the poverty-stricken East End. Neil registered at St. Thomas’s Hospital in Lambeth, in October 1876, and started the training that he hoped would lead to him becoming a surgeon. Six months later, however, he was disappointed to learn that he had failed the entrance exams for the Royal College of Surgeons. After returning to St. Thomas’s for more training, supporting himself by working as an obstetrics clerk, he applied to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Edinburgh and was accepted. He obtained a licence in midwifery.

A good-looking young man with excellent prospects, Cream had been having a good time in London, going out with a number of well-bred and wealthy women from the better parts of town. But he also saw the seamier side of the city. It was hard to avoid, as women and children put themselves up for sale in places like Waterloo Bridge. He developed a loathing for them, believing them to be the embodiment of evil.

Meanwhile, back in Canada his wife, Flora, died. The death certificate listed cause of death as ‘consumption’, but it seems likely that Cream may have killed her from several thousands of miles away. Her doctor ascertained that she had been taking medicine that Cream had been sending her. When, on his orders, she stopped taking it, the symptoms from which she had been suffering seemed to dissipate.

In 1878, Cream suddenly returned to Canada, setting up his surgery where he practiced as a physician and surgeon. A year after his arrival, he found himself in trouble when a woman patient, Kate Gardener, was found dead, stinking of chloroform in a woodshed behind the building in which he practiced. She was found to have been pregnant when she died and it seemed obvious that she had gone to Cream seeking an abortion. He confirmed this but claimed that he had refused to help her. He said she had killed herself with chloroform she had bought over the counter from a pharmacist. The examining board thought otherwise as there was no empty bottle beside her body and her face was badly scratched, as if the drug had been administered forcibly. They ruled that her death was murder, but, amazingly, Cream was not indicted. Nonetheless, his career in Canada was over.

In August 1879, he moved to Chicago where he set up shop after passing the Illinois Board of Health Exam. His surgery was located conveniently close to Chicago’s red light district, making him handily placed to work as an abortionist outside office hours. He took on an intermediary, a ‘midwife’, who took a cut of his earnings for putting women in touch with him. He was a bit more proficient than the quacks who operated in these areas but his distaste for women grew, as his need to have sex with them also did. One associate told later of the pornographic photographs he carried around with him and another described his habit of taking drugs – pills made of strychnine, morphia and cocaine. He claimed that they worked as an aphrodisiac.

In early 1880, one of his patients, a prostitute named Mary Anne Faulkner, died and it took a good lawyer to get him off with claims that he had been summoned only after the woman had got into difficulty following an abortion that had gone wrong. Another woman, Ellen Stack, had died after consuming some pills he had given her, anti-pregnancy pills, he had called them. They had contained strychnine. Once again he escaped justice when the authorities could not positively prove that he had given them to her.

It would, ironically, be the murder of a man that would be his undoing. Daniel Stott had sent his wife, Julia, to Cream’s surgery to pick up medicine. She had begun an affair with Cream and when Stott became suspicious, Cream had added strychnine to the medicine. It helped that Stott was a wealthy man and Mrs Stott would inherit his money when he died which he duly did in June 1881. Cream seemed to have literally got away with murder, but for some reason created unnecessary interest in the case when he wrote to the coroner accusing the pharmacist of adding too much strychnine to the medicine. Perhaps he was concerned about his reputation, losing a patient in this way, but Stott was exhumed and, sure enough, they found large amounts of strychnine in his body. Cream was immediately suspected and, fearing arrest, he fled to Canada. Unfortunately, Mrs Stott decided to save her own neck by becoming a witness for the prosecution. Cream was arrested in Ontario and sent back to Chicago where he was tried, found guilty and sent to Joliet prison.

He remained locked up for ten years, but his brother succeeded in getting him paroled by judiciously bribing prison and state officials. He was freed in July 1891.

He returned to Canada to stay with his brother and collect an inheritance left to him by his late father. By now, the years of harsh 19th century prison life had taken their toll on Thomas Cream – his face looked older than his years and his hair was thinning. His drug use had also taken its toll and his eyes, watery and yellow, were a manifestation of this. But, once again, he resolved to start again and boarded a ship for Liverpool where he arrived on 1 October.

He travelled to London and was soon established in a first-floor apartment at 103 Lambeth Palace Road in south London, close to St Thomas’s Hospital. It was a rough area, teeming with poor children and their mothers clad in dirty dresses and shawls. Death and disease were everywhere and no one worked.

Soon, Cream, now calling himself ‘Dr Thomas Neil’, and claiming to work at St Thomas’s, had resumed his interest in poison. Ellen ‘Nelly’ Donworth was the daughter of a labourer and had become a prostitute to escape the hard work involved in being a bottle-capper in Vauxhall. She lived in Commercial Street with Ernest Linnell, a private in the army. On 13 October, she went out early in the evening telling a friend that she was going to see a man she had met. Later, she was seen by another acquaintance with a well-dressed man emerging from a pub and then much later she had to be helped home by yet another friend after being seen in an incapable condition in Morpeth Place. The friend, James Styles, put her to bed in her boarding house but by this time she was suffering from agonising pain that seemed to make her body convulse. She claimed, between gasps of pain, that her gentleman friend had given her a couple of drinks from a bottle containing a white liquid. Styles called a doctor who had her taken to St Thomas’s but she was dead before she arrived.

The post mortem discovered large doses of strychnine in her stomach.

It was not surprising as poisonous chemicals were relatively easy to obtain in those days. Cream had got it from a chemist on Parliament Street and all he had to do was sign a register. He had lied, saying that he was a doctor attending a series of lectures at St Thomas’s. He had bought the strychnine in the first week of October, in the form of
nux vomica
that contained two alkoloids, brocine and strychnine. He must have mixed the poison into the liquid he fed to Nelly Donworth.

Around 10 October, he ordered gelatin capsules that he intended to use on his next victim.

Matilda Clover lived at 27 Lambeth Road with her two-year-old son. An alcoholic, she had been abandoned by the boy’s father and had been forced to earn her living on the streets ever since. On 20 October, she left the house to meet a man she called ‘Fred’ outside the Canterbury Theatre. She returned to her room at around nine that evening in the company of the man who later left. Some hours later, the other occupants of the house heard screams coming from her room. They found her in agony, thrashing about on her bed and unable to breathe. She gasped that ‘Fred’ had given her some pills and she was sure that they had contained poison. A few hours later, she was dead.

Strangely, her death was not found to be murder, her claims about Fred’s pills being ignored. Her doctor stated instead that her death was a result of mixing alcohol with a sedative he had prescribed for her. No one linked Matilda Clover’s death with that of Nelly Donworth just a week earlier. The truth was that they were prostitutes and nobody really cared one way or another how they had died.

In November, Dr Cream was summoned back to Canada so that his father’s property could be divided up amongst his family. He was sorry to go as he had by now formed a relationship with a Hertfordshire woman, Laura Sabbatini. He escorted Ms Sabbatini with a view to making her his wife on his return. It was an odd facet of his character that while he was intent on killing prostitutes, he was still keen to have a respectable pretty wife. He set her up in a dress-making business and sailed to Canada in the first week of January 1892, returning four months later and taking up residence once more at 103 Lambeth Palace Road. He immediately contacted Laura and asked her to marry him. They became engaged.

Meanwhile, he was stalking the dark and dingy streets of London’s less salubrious districts. One night he introduced himself to Lou Harvey, a prostitute who was walking her beat in Piccadilly. He told he was a doctor from America, currently working at St Thomas’s.

Lou Harvey was a careful and intelligent woman. Her real name was Louise Harris, for instance, and she gave also gave Cream a false address. She was suspicious of his claim to be a doctor from America and decided to be cautious. Nonetheless, she spent the night with him at a hotel in Covent Garden.

They agreed to meet that night at Charing Cross underground station from where they would go for a drink and a visit to the theatre. They met and went for a drink at the Northumberland public house. As they walked back down to the Embankment beside the river, he told her she looked pale and handed her two capsules, telling her to take them. Louise only pretended to put them in her mouth, however, and when he looked away from her for a moment, she tossed them over the wall into the river. Cream told her he was expected at the hospital and that he would see her later at the theatre. Needless, to say, he did not turn up at the theatre and he would have been surprised to see her there. She was supposed to be dead by then.

He now decided to kill two women in one night, an opportunity that arose when he introduced himself to a couple of prostitutes strolling together. Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell lived in adjoining rooms at 118 Stamford Street, a dreary thoroughfare close to Waterloo Station. Cream accompanied them to one of their rooms, had his fun with them and left. Several hours later, the two girls were dying in agony.

The newspapers were now in a frenzy, headlines screaming about the ‘Lambeth Poisoner’. The police, meanwhile, were nowhere.

Once again, Cream behaved very strangely. He tried to blackmail well-respected men, accusing them of killing the prostitutes. Two famous surgeons received letters and a Member of Parliament and a peer of the realm were also the recipients of blackmail letters. Police immediately recognised that the handwriting on the letters was similar although they were purportedly written by the same man.

His next big mistake was to describe the murders in some detail to a former New York detective that he had become friendly with. He claimed to be only surmising what had happened, but seemed to know more about the killings than had been announced in the media. He also mentioned the names of two women – Matilda Clover and Lou Harvey – one of whom the police did not know had been murdered and the other who was still alive.