The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases (5 page)

Some Ripperologists suspect Joseph Barnett, once the live-in lover of Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s last victim. The thinking in this theory goes that Barnett committed the first four murders as a way of scaring Kelly into giving up prostituting herself to other men. When this proved ineffective, he flew into a rage and murdered his girlfriend. Thus, Barnett’s link with Kelly would explain why the Ripper ceased killing after her murder.

Among the more fanciful theories is one claiming that Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
confessed his crimes through a series of anagrams found throughout his work...

DOCTOR THOMAS NEILL CREAM

Doctor Thomas Neill Cream is thought to have been responsible for the deaths of at least eight women and one man, yet it is for something that may have happened during his last second of life that he is best remembered. Sentenced to hang for the murder of a 27-year-old prostitute, on 16 November 1892 Cream stood silent and calm at the gallows at Newgate Prison. Then, quite suddenly, he is said to have uttered: ‘I am Jack...’

His final words were cut short when the trapdoor opened and the hangman’s noose broke his neck. To some, Cream’s statement was a confession that he was the murderer known as Jack the Ripper.

Cream’s journey to justice appears long, twisted, and peculiar – even when compared to those of other serial killers. He was born in Glasgow on 27 May 1850, the eldest of eight children. Four years later, the growing family migrated to Wolfe’s Cove, a small community not far from Quebec City, Canada. There, his father, William Cream, worked at a shipbuilding and lumber company before establishing the Cream Lumber Mill.

As the years passed, all the Cream boys would work in the mill. But Thomas was different from his brothers. A handsome young man, more interested in books than business, he left the mill in September 1872, enrolling in medicine at Montreal’s McGill University. Montreal was then the largest, wealthiest and most powerful city in the country. McGill held a position of similar stature within the world of academe. It was considered Canada’s foremost institution of learning, with a faculty of medicine that ranked among the most respected in North America.

A studious, if unexceptional student, within four years Cream graduated with a degree in medicine from McGill. At his convocation, he sat and listened as the dean delivered an address entitled ‘The Evils of Malpractice in the Medical Profession’. Immediately after the ceremony, Cream was confronted by the family of Flora Brooks, a teenage girl he had been courting. Flora had been taken ill shortly after Cream’s last visit to the family’s hotel in the rural Quebec town of Waterford. She was then examined by a local physician named Phelan, who determined that she had recently undergone an abortion. Confronted, Flora confessed that it was Cream who had performed the operation.

Unwillingly, Cream was taken back to Waterford, where a hasty wedding ceremony was performed. Flora’s honeymoon, however, was brief. She awoke the next morning to find her groom gone. Cream left nothing but a letter in which he promised to keep in touch.

The doctor made for London, England, where he registered at St Thomas’s Hospital. Cream hoped to gain the training and experience required to become a surgeon, but failed to pass the entrance requirements for the Royal College of Surgeons. He achieved greater success at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, where he earned a licence in midwifery.

It had been over a year since Cream had left his bride. While he had broken his marriage vows, the doctor had kept his promise to keep in touch. More than simple letters, he had been sending Flora medicine – which she dutifully took. After becoming ill, she was again examined by Dr Phelan who, upon learning of the mysterious prescription, advised her to ignore Cream’s instructions. Although she rallied briefly, in August 1877, Flora Cream died of what was officially described as ‘consumption’.

One year after the death of his wife, Cream returned to Canada. He set up practice in London, Ontario, over 700 kilometres away from Montreal. But it wasn’t long before he was again involved in a scandal. In May 1879, the body of one of his patients, a waitress named Kate Gardener, was discovered in a woodshed behind the building in which he had his office. Upon investigation, it was discovered that the unmarried woman had gone to the doctor in the hope of obtaining an abortion.

Cream stated that this was true, adding that he had refused her request. He argued that her death, the result of an overdose of chloroform, was a suicide. A subsequent inquest disproved the doctor’s theory – no bottle containing the chemical was found on the scene, and Gardener’s face had been badly scratched, indicating a struggle. Although there appeared to be no evidence that he had committed the crime, suspicion fell on Cream, leaving his practice in ruins.

In the summer of 1879, he moved to the United States, settling in Chicago, where he was obliged to take the state board of health exam. The day after receiving his passing grade, Cream set up practice in an area just outside the city’s red-light district. As his practice focused almost exclusively on providing abortions, it was a most convenient location. Most of the illegal operations were performed in rooms rented specifically for the purpose by a series of midwives he had recruited. When one of his patients, a prostitute named Mary Anne Faulkner, died, Cream’s lawyer managed to convince a jury that the good doctor had arrived on the scene in an attempt to save the victim of a botched abortion.

Within months, Cream again attracted the attention of the authorities when another patient, Ellen Stack, died after being prescribed anti-pregnancy pills. The medicine, assumed to have been of the doctor’s own design, included strychnine among its ingredients. This poison also played a role in the death of his first male victim, a railway agent named Daniel Stott, with whose wife Cream was having an affair. When the husband came to suspect the infidelity, Cream added strychnine to the medicine he had prescribed for the man’s epilepsy.

Cream might have again escaped justice were it not for his fear that the man’s death could somehow rebound on him. Intent on avoiding this possibility, he wrote a letter to the coroner in which he accused a local pharmacist of having added strychnine to Stott’s medicine. However, after the railway agent’s body was exhumed, and the presence of the poison discovered, it was upon Cream that suspicion fell. He fled, only to be caught in the town of Bell River, Ontario, 30 kilometres within the Canadian border.

Betrayed by Mrs Stott, who testified against her former lover in November 1881, Cream was sentenced to life in Joliet State Penitentiary. As the years passed, his brother Daniel worked for Cream’s release, a job made easier by a rather sizeable inheritance left to both men upon the passing of their father. Daniel Cream used Thomas’s share of the money to ingratiate himself with a number of senior Illinois politicians. The ploy worked and on 21 July 1891, Cream received a pardon from the governor of Illinois, Joseph W. Fifer.

It was an aged, weakened Cream who travelled back to Quebec in order to collect the balance of his inheritance. In September, he set sail for Liverpool. Cream arrived in London, very much a changed man from the handsome young doctor who had once walked its streets. He suffered from poor eyesight and persistent headaches, which he attempted to alleviate through the ingestion of low-grade morphine. As ‘Thomas Neill, MD’, he passed himself off as a resident doctor from St Thomas’s, the very same hospital at which he had practised some 14 years earlier. It was under this cover that his greatest string of murders began.

The first victim was Nellie Donworth, a 19-year-old prostitute who was seen with a man matching Cream’s description in the early evening of 13 October 1891. Before the night was out she would die an agonizing death from strychnine poisoning. Seven days later, Cream poisoned another prostitute, 27-year-old Matilda Clover, using gelatine pills containing strychnine. She endured a night of great pain before dying the following morning. However, her death was not recorded as murder; rather her physician believed she had died from a lethal mixture of liquor and a sedative he had prescribed to help combat her alcoholism.

In late 1891, Cream began a courtship with Laura Sabbatini, an attractive would-be designer of dresses. Their relationship endured a four-month separation, during which Cream was obligated to return to Canada in order to finally settle his father’s estate. Whether his murder spree continued in the Dominion has always been a matter of speculation. What is known is that upon his return he attempted to poison a prostitute, Lou Harvey, with the claim that his gelatine pills of strychnine prevented pregnancy. However, she grew suspicious of the doctor and only pretended to take the pills. Two other prostitutes, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell, were less fortunate. On 11 April 1892, both suffered painful deaths in the hours after Cream left their shared flat.

Hate mail

Given that his only murder conviction came after he had attempted to pin the crime on another, it seems rather extraordinary that during this time Cream embarked on a similar campaign. Shortly after the murder of Nellie Donworth, he mailed two pseudonymous letters in which he accused Frederick Smith of W. H. Smith and Son of the murder. During his brief return to Canada he had printed a circular, warning patrons of London’s Metropole Hotel that the murderer was employed at the hotel. Four weeks after the deaths of Marsh and Shrivell, the Deputy Coroner George Percival received a letter from a ‘William H. Murray’ in which it was claimed that Dr Walter Harper of St Thomas’s Hospital was responsible for the murders. That same day, Walter Harper’s father, Dr Joseph Harper, received an extortion letter in which the same claim was repeated. Detectives at Scotland Yard were quick to recognize that the same hand was behind all these documents, but were unable to determine the writer’s identity. Their curiosity was raised further after two prominent Londoners received extortion letters in which one ‘M. Malone’ claimed to have evidence that each had carried out the murder of Matilda Clover – the victim whose death had been ruled accidental.

The beginning of the end for Cream came in April 1892 when, quite by chance, he befriended an expatriate American named John Haynes. As a former New York City detective, Haynes had taken an interest in Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell, whose murders had occurred only a few nights earlier. As he discussed the case with Cream, Haynes was taken aback by the depth of information the doctor possessed. It seemed to the former detective that the doctor knew details that had not been reported. What was more, Cream linked the murders with those of two other women, Matilda Clover and Lou Harvey, whose names meant nothing to Haynes. After he had passed on this information to a friend at Scotland Yard, the body of Matilda Clover was exhumed. While they were still gathering evidence, on 3 June 1892, the London constabulary arrested Cream on suspicion of blackmail. Cream appeared at the inquest into Matilda Clover’s death, obliged to listen to the damning testimony. Among the witnesses was Lou Harvey, who, until the moment she entered the courtroom, Cream had thought he’d killed. The inquest concluded that Cream had intentionally administered a lethal dose of strychnine to Matilda Clover. The same witnesses were called by the prosecution during the subsequent criminal trial. No one spoke in Cream’s defence. It took the jury only ten minutes to deliver their verdict.

But what of Cream’s final words: ‘I am Jack...’? It must first be said that there is some debate as to whether they were ever actually uttered, though his executioner, James Billington, swore it as fact. Assuming Cream did make the statement – and that what he had meant to say is ‘I am Jack the Ripper’ – is it at all possible that the Canadian doctor was the Ripper? At first glance, the answer must be negative. During the latter half of 1888, at which time Jack the Ripper committed his murders, Cream was serving the seventh year of his life sentence at Joliet State Penitentiary, across the Atlantic. Supporters of the theory that Cream was Jack the Ripper claim that corruption was such that the doctor left the institution years before receiving his official pardon. Another more complicated theory argues that Cream had a double who sat in the prison while Cream roamed the streets of London’s East End.

Perhaps the best explanation for Cream’s words can be found in his considerable ego. Might it have been such that Cream desired to claim the most notorious crimes of the day as his own?

JOSEPH VACHER

Joseph Vacher murdered and mutilated a total of 11 people, more than twice the number butchered by Jack the Ripper. Yet Vacher appears condemned to spend eternity standing in the shadow of his English contemporary. Even his nickname, the French Ripper, owes its existence to the Whitechapel killer and in his native France, he is known as ‘
Jack l’éventreur français’.

Joseph Vacher explained his crimes by arguing that they were all the result of a crazed dog that had bitten him at the age of 8. His madness, he claimed, stemmed from rabies. Vacher added that medicine given to him by the village herbalist had had no effect other than to make him irritable and brutal, forever changing his character. Assuming Vacher’s account of the dog to be true, it adds to a very small body of knowledge concerning the serial killer’s childhood. We do know that he was born on 16 November 1869, in Isère, a department in the Rhône-Alpes region of France. He was the last of 15 children in a family of peasant farmers. His twin brother, the 14th in the family, choked to death when he was just one month old.

It is has been put forth that at 15 years of age Vacher may have committed his first murder. The victim, a 10-year-old boy, was raped and killed. In 1878, Vacher began studies with the Marist Brothers, but was returned home when it was discovered that he was having sexual relations with some of his fellow students. The following year, Vacher was convicted of having attempted to rape a young male farmhand. Whatever the sentence, it could not have been great – by that autumn he’d found employment as a server at a brewery in Grenoble. One account says that it was during this time that Vacher caught venereal disease from a prostitute. According to the story, the resulting infection forced the removal of a testicle.