Serial Killer Doctors by Patrick Turner Read Free Book Online Page B

alcohol with a sedative that he had prescribed to her. No one worried too much about how prostitutes met their maker in those days.
    As he had done in Canada, Cream launched an odd correspondence about the murders. Using pseudonyms, he wrote letters to Lord Russell and a Dr William Broadbent in which he accused them of committing the murders and in which he demanded money for his silence. Dr Broadbent immediately took his letter to the police but when they waited for the blackmailer to come and collect his money, no one turned up.
    Cream followed up these letters with one to the coroner who was working on the Ellen Donworth case in which he claimed to possess vital information. He demanded £300,000 for it but investigators put it down to the work of a madman and filed it.
     
    Cream was by now in a relationship with a Hertfordshire woman, Laura Sabbatini but was required to go back to Canada so that his father’s property could be divided up amongst the family. He remained there for four months and on his return in April 1892, became engaged to Miss Sabbatini.
    But his engagement did not deter him from his nighttime pursuits in the dark streets of London’s less salubrious neighbourhoods. One night, he encountered Louise ‘Lou’ Harvey who worked the streets around Piccadilly. She did not believe his story that he was a doctor visiting from America but she spent the night with him, nonetheless. They agreed to meet again that night at Charing Cross.
    Walking along the Embankment beside the Thames, Cream handed her a couple of pills and told her to swallow them. A cautious woman, Lou pretended to put the pills in her mouth, managing to toss them surreptitiously into the river when her companion briefly looked away. Cream made his excuses, saying that he had an appointment at the hospital, but arranged to meet her later, believing that she would, of course, be dead by then.
    Cream resolved to kill two women in one night and after enjoying a three-in-a-bed romp with 18 year-old Emma Shrivell and 21 year-old Alice Marsh on April 11 in a dingy room in Stamford Street, he paid them, gave them each pills for their complexion and vanished into the night. Several hours later, the girls were dying, gasping that they had swallowed pills given to them by a man named ‘Fred’.
    The newspapers went into overdrive, headlines screaming about the so-called ‘Lambeth Poisoner’ and going into lurid details about the murders and the victims. They wondered if Jack the Ripper had returned with a different modus operandi. Meanwhile, the police searched for ‘Fred’ but made little progress.
    Cream now became the architect of his own demise, writing a bizarre letter to a Dr Harper in which he accused his son, Walter, of murdering the two prostitutes and demanded £1,500 for his silence. Harper took the letter to the police who compared the handwriting with one that Cream had given them, purportedly warning Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell against Dr Harper who, he claimed, had also killed Matilda Clover and Lou Harvey – he still did not know that Lou had survived. Cream’s mistake was to say that Matilda Clover had been murdered, because it had been stated that she had died of natural causes related to her alcoholism and not murder. Furthermore, the two prostitutes who had seen him with Matilda had come forward and were prepared to identify him.
    Thomas Neill Cream was arrested on June 3 and charged with murder.
    Police were baffled by the mention in the letter to the two dead prostitutes, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell, of the murder of Lou Harvey. They had no record of anyone by that name having been murdered. Eventually, they found Lou Harvey in Brighton and her story became another vital piece of the evidence that would finally send Cream to the gallows.
    At his trial that began on October 17, he was unable to provide any kind of defence against the overwhelming body of evidence that was stacked up against him. Four days later, the jury