The Strychnine Poisoner

The crime

In the true 1891 story investigated in Crime Team, a young woman collapses, writhing in agony in a Waterloo street in south London. Her death leads to a dramatic year-long manhunt.

Ellen Donworth, 19, works in a bottle factory but when she becomes pregnant she is sacked and turns for her living to prostitution. On the evening of 13 October 1891, Ellen makes her way to Morpeth Place in Waterloo to keep an unusual appointment with a stranger.

Afterwards she becomes very ill, twitching and trembling. By 9pm, she is so violently ill that it takes three people to hold her down. She is only just conscious and tells a witness that she met a man who offered her a bottle containing some white stuff, a portion of which she drank. She describes the man as a tall stranger with dark whiskers.

Nine days later, the coroner rules the cause of death to be strychnine poisoning but despite Ellen’s dying words, the police are keen to write off her death as probably suicide.

Eventually the murderer is found to be Thomas Neil Cream, known to his Waterloo victims as Fred. Born in Scotland in 1850, but moving to Canada as a small child, Cream qualifies as a doctor’s surgeon. He sets up practice in Chicago and begins his murderous odyssey.

Cream is soon performing illegal abortions for prostitutes and young women in trouble, and becomes obsessed with the power of life and death he wields over his patients. His overdoses of chloroform go undetected for years and he is only caught when he writes a menacing blackmail letter. Cream receives a life sentence but his family buys out the remainder of his sentence after he has served just 10 years in jail.

He arrives in England sometime in 1891, nursing a pathological hatred of prostitutes. He plans his next murder spree with care and his profession offers the perfect cover to buy strychnine. It also allows him to identify prostitutes who need medical help and to win their trust. Ellen Donworth is the first victim. She fears she is pregnant, and accepts Cream's offer of a special potion. Matilda Clover is next. Cream’s ruse is probably to offer medicine to help her fight the demon drink.

Cream leaves for America in December 1891 and when he returns four months later, he gets an opportunity to commit a double murder. Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell take Cream's pills to settle their stomachs from probable food poisoning. The pills are strychnine.

Cream's notes fail to extort any money but add considerably to the confusion and the compulsive letter writing leads in part to his undoing.

After a four day trial in a packed Old Bailey court, Cream is convicted and sentenced to death. He is hanged on 15 November 1892. Just as the trap opens, he shrieks ‘I’m Jack.’ No one is ever likely to know whether this is the dying confession of the real Jack the Ripper or a macabre joke by a manipulative sinister psychopath.

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