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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 him a letter that had allegedly been received by the Stamford Street victims of the Lambeth Poisoner, warning them about a Dr Harper, who would serve them, it was alleged, as he had served Matilda Clover and a woman called Louise Harvey.

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.