The case of the murderous Dr. Cream : the hunt for a Victorian era serial killer /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A true crime page-turner about a Victorian doctor, a serial killer ahead of his time, using poison for an international murder spree that kept ahead of the burgeoning field of forensics. "A tour de force of storytelling." --Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache series



Winner of the 2022 CrimeCon True Crime Book of the Year​ Award



Longlisted for the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence



Don't miss Dean Jobb's A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, coming June 25, 2024!



"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals," Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. "He has nerve and he has knowledge." In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered as many as ten people in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent. Poison was his weapon of choice. Largely forgotten today, this villain was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper.



Structured around the doctor's London murder trial in 1892, when he was finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well as the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Dr. Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help.



Dean Jobb transports readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard traces Dr. Cream's life through Canada and Chicago and finally to London, where new investigative tools called forensics were just coming into use, even as most police departments still scoffed at using science to solve crimes. But then, most investigators could hardly imagine that serial killers existed--the term was unknown. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, Dr. Cream's crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer: one who operated without motive or remorse, who "murdered simply for the sake of murder." For fans of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City , all things Sherlock Holmes, or the podcast My Favorite Murder , The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is an unforgettable true crime story from a master of the genre.



"Jobb's excellent storytelling makes the book a pleasure to read." -- The New York Times Book Review

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• A Note to Readers (p. xiii)
• Prologue: Ghosts (p. 1)
• I "The First of Criminals"
• 1 "A Great Sin-Stricken City" (p. 11)
• 2 "Detective-Fever" (p. 20)
• 3 Ellen Donworth (p. 28)
• 4 Matilda Clover (p. 33)
• 5 "A Human 'Were-Wolf (p. 39)
• II The Lambeth Poisoner
• 6 Louisa Harvey (p. 47)
• 17 Blackmail (p. 51)
• 8 "A Bad Man with No Refinement" (p. 59)
• 9 Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivel! (p. 66)
• 10 Bitter Medicine (p. 71)
• 11 "A Strange Customer" (p. 83)
• 12 The Suspect (p. 91)
• 13 "You Have Got the Wrong Man" (p. 98)
• III The Trusted Hand
• 14 Jarvis of the Yard (p. 105)
• 15 "A Young Man of Rare Ability" (p. 109)
• 16 "The Animal Spirits Within" (p. 119)
• 17 Flora Eliza Brooks (p. 130)
• 18 Student No. 2016 (p. 136)
• 19 A Premature Death (p. 143)
• 20 The Licentiate (p. 147)
• 21 Catharine Hutchinson Gardner (p. 152)
• 22 By Some Person Unknown (p. 161)
• IV Inquest
• 23 Missing Links (p. 171)
• 24 Resurrection (p. 183)
• V Crimes and Punishment
• 25 Mary Anne Matilda Faulkner (p. 193)
• 26 "Pure Cream" (p. 206)
• 27 Ellen Stack and Sarah Alice Montgomery (p. 213)
• 28 A Despicable Scheme (p. 223)
• 29 Daniel Stott (p. 226)
• 30 "Crooked Cream" (p. 235)
• 31 Inmate No. 4374 (p. 244)
• 32 "As Innocent as the Child Unborn" (p. 257)
• 33 Chasing Shadows (p. 265)
• VI "Jack the Poisoner"
• 34 "A Systematic and Deliberate Course of Action" (p. 273)
• 35 "A Murder So Diabolical" (p. 286)
• 36 "Insane in No Legal Sense" (p. 290)
• 37 Dead Man's Walk (p. 301)
• 38 "I Am Jack..." (p. 305)
• Epilogue: An Elizabethan Tragedy of Horrors" (p. 312)
• Cast of Characters (p. 323)
• Acknowledgments (p. 329)
• Sources (p. 333)
• Index (p. 403)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Jobb (creative nonfiction, Univ. of King's Coll., Halifax, Nova Scotia; Empire of Deception) profiles the physician Thomas Neill Cream, a serial killer who was a contemporary of Jack the Ripper. Between 1877 and 1892, Cream poisoned victims in Canada, the United States, and England, using strychnine capsules that he created himself. Cream, known as the Lambeth Poisoner, targeted mostly sex workers or women in need of his abortion services, but he was not averse to killing closer to home--his young wife numbered among his victims. Jobb's research is excellent, though his frequent use of quotations can be jarring to the narrative flow. Even after Cream sent detailed blackmail letters trying to shift the blame for the murders to wealthy and influential public figures, and became overly friendly with officials at Scotland Yard, he nevertheless went undiscovered for years due to shoddy police work and misogyny, Jobb argues, because police often dismissed Cream's victims as undeserving of justice. Period photos and reproductions of Cream's letters round out the work. VERDICT Jobb's compelling account of Cream's reign of terror will appeal to readers interested in Jack the Ripper or Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.--Jessica Hilburn, Benson Memorial Lib., Titusville, PA

Publishers Weekly Review

Jobb (Empire of Deception) provides the definitive account of serial poisoner Thomas Neill Cream in this enthralling real-life thriller. Born in Scotland in 1850, Cream moved with his family to Montreal, Canada, where he earned his medical degree at McGill University. He became a respected member of his London, Ontario, community, while leading a murderous double life. After the body of a woman with whom Cream was alleged to have had an affair was found near his office in 1879, a victim of chloroform poisoning, he became a suspect and fled to the U.S. In Chicago, he became a person of interest in several deaths and was convicted in 1881 of poisoning a patient. When his life sentence was commuted in 1891, Cream immigrated to England, where his murder of several prostitutes in London with strychnine led to his arrest and execution in 1892. (It was also mooted that he could have been Jack the Ripper, though he was in prison in Illinois at the time of the Ripper killings.) Jobb nicely places this grim story in context, as Cream's London trial created a precedent for the admission of similar uncharged crimes as evidence and exposed massive Scotland Yard failures that left Cream free to kill more people until he was finally apprehended. Jobb's extensive research pays off in a true-crime masterpiece that will easily sit alongside The Devil in the White City. (July)

Kirkus Book Review

A lively account of an early international serial killer's crimes. In his latest, journalist and creative nonfiction professor Jobb richly embellishes his grim central tale with carefully researched setting, detail, and social mores of the late Victorian era, elegantly contrasted with his eponymous fiend, Thomas Neill Cream (1852-1892), "a doctor from Canada" and "a new kind of killer, choosing victims at random and killing without remorse." Many readers will make comparisons to H.H. Holmes from The Devil in the White City. However, writes Jobb, "by the time Holmes claimed his first victim in 1891, and long before the infamous Jack the Ripper terrorized London in 1888, Cream was suspected of killing as many as six people, most of them deliberately poisoned with tainted medicine." Cream is an unsavory cipher, a foppish, dissolute sociopath masquerading behind the authority of a doctor. His well-to-do family perceived his dangerous tendencies, sending him to England after an 11-year prison sentence for poisoning his alleged mistress's husband in small-town Illinois and following earlier killings in Canada and Chicago for which he'd evaded responsibility. Yet, once back in England, Cream continued his murderous ways, poisoning several prostitutes and sending blackmail letters impugning others for his crimes, a narcissistic tell that later provided evidence for his conviction. Though "the adventures of Holmes and Dr. Watson made detection look easy," in reality, forensic detection was in its infancy. Jobb ably portrays the early investigators who used often derided scientific approaches to bring Cream to justice, including a Scotland Yard detective who traveled to America to piece together Cream's past, "an investigation that would expose more crimes and furnish even more evidence of the doctor's capacity for cruelty and murder." Eventually, Cream was hanged following conviction in a highly publicized trial in London, leaving as his legacy dismay mingled with social reflection. "Four poisonings committed under Scotland Yard's nose…suggested a shocking lack of vigilance." A vivid, engaging revival of a forgotten Victorian villain. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Dean Jobb is an award-winning author and journalist and a professor at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program. He is the author of eight previous books, including Empire of Deception , which the New York Times Book Review called "intoxicating and impressively researched" and the Chicago Writers Association named the Nonfiction Book of the Year. Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune , Toronto's Globe and Mail , and the Irish Times . He writes a monthly true-crime column, "Stranger Than Fiction," for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine . His work as an investigative reporter has been nominated for Canada's National Newspaper and National Magazine awards, and Jobb is a three-time winner of Atlantic Canada's top journalism award.