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In an era when police investigations were often cursory and forensic science was in its infancy, detectives lacked the tools and expertise needed to track down such a formidable foe. Few could imagine such monsters existed. But this only partly explains how Cream had gotten away with murder in two countries before he finally had been locked up in Joliet. Cream's credentials and professional status, bungled investigations, corrupt police and justice officials, failed prosecutions, and missed opportunities allowed him to kill, again and again.
The thin paper trail documenting Cream's shocking crimes was scattered from small-town Canada to Illinois, with only fading memories, forgotten court files, and yellowing newspaper clippings to connect the dots. The Bertillon identification system, cutting-edge technology for its time, was powerless to prevent a convicted criminal from vanishing like a ghost. If a former inmate wanted to disappear after his release, to hide his past?as Cream most certainly did?all he had to do was change his name.
London, Fall 1891
A man clad in a mackintosh to outsmart the day's showers, a top hat covering his bald head, turned up at the door of a townhouse at 103 Lambeth Palace Road. His name was Thomas Neill, he told the landlady, and he was in search of lodgings. He took the upper-floor room at the back. It was October 7 and Cream was back in Lambeth, a downtrodden maze of grimy slums and smoky factories across the Thames from the gothic splendor of the Houses of Parliament. It was a London neighborhood he knew well: his rooming house stood opposite St. Thomas' Hospital, where he had been a medical student more than a decade earlier. He could not help but notice that a new building, just downriver from the tower of Big Ben, had been erected since his last visit. Faced with bands of red brick and white stone and set on a foundation of granite quarried by inmates of Dartmoor and other prisons, it was the new headquarters of Scotland Yard.
Cream was in the heart of the world's largest city, the capital of an empire at its zenith. Swaths of scarlet on globes and maps staked Britain's claim to the far-flung colonies and territories?and tens of millions of people?under Queen Victoria's rule. London was a sprawling metropolis of more than five million, a glittering bastion of wealth and power built on a foundation of poverty, crime, and desperation. Church spires and the giant teapot dome of St. Paul's Cathedral pointed skyward from a sea of slate roofs and chimneys belching black coal smoke. A chaos of carriages, freight wagons, and horse-drawn omnibuses clogged the main streets. At night, the sidewalks became a sea of bowlers and wide-brimmed, feathered hats as men and women passed like ghosts through a netherworld of flickering gaslight and sinister fog. Pickpockets shouldered their way into the crowds in search of watches and billfolds. Prostitutes scanned the audiences at West End theaters and music halls in search of customers or strolled adjacent the Strand, transforming the busy thoroughfare, one observer lamented, into ?one of the scandals of London.? Enclaves of the rich and privileged rubbed shoulders with foul, dangerous slums like Whitechapel where, just three years before, the notorious Jack the Ripper had brutally murdered five women. To an editor at the city's Daily Chronicle, London was a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, ?a great sin-stricken city.?
Lambeth rivaled Whitechapel as one of the city's poorest, dirtiest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods. Not even the police were safe?one bobby, a rookie on one of his first patrols, confronted a group of Lambeth thugs and was thrown through a plate-glass window. When the journalist Henry Mayhew set out to expose London's nineteenth-century underworld, he headed for the ?well-known rookery of young thieves in London.? Children as young as five, he discovered, roamed the streets in ragged clothing, stealing to survive. ?Fagin, Bill Sikes, and Oliver Twist would have all seemed quite at home in Victorian Lambeth,? the celebrated author Simon Winchester has written. ?This was Dickensian London writ large.?
Lambeth's industries choked the air with smoke and soot. Maudslay's foundry forged parts for the steam engines, pumps and other mechanical marvels that powered the Victorian Age. Earthenware jugs, chimney pots, and drainpipes were fired in Henry Doulton's famous pottery works. Overhead, trains puffed and clacked on elevated tracks that sliced through the heart of the neighborhood. Their destination was Waterloo Station, one of the city's major terminals. Thousands of people?commuters who worked in the city, travelers bound for points in southern England, steamship passengers newly arrived from abroad via Southampton?passed through its doors every day. Even the dead disturbed the living. London's cemeteries were so overcrowded that a special railway, the Necropolis line, shunted corpses from a local station to graveyards south of the city. Lambeth, the London historian Peter Ackroyd would note, ?was, in every sense, a dumping ground.?
It was also considered the ?most lurid and beastly? of the city's red-light districts. The neighborhood surrounding Waterloo Station, a magnet for streetwalkers, became known as Whoreterloo. Brickwork supports for the station's elevated tracks offered secluded spots where business could be transacted?the succession of ?dark, damp arches,? one resident complained, ?encouraged the more disreputable of the population.?
Prostitutes were described as ?unfortunates? in the press, but some of the women working in the brothels, propositioning men on the street, or picking up clients at the Canterbury, Gatti's, and other Lambeth music halls considered themselves fortunate. Life was precarious for young women from poor, struggling families. A sudden misfortune?the death of a parent or husband, the breakup of a marriage or relationship, losing a low-paying job as a maid or toiling in a factory?could leave them to fend for themselves. Some working-class women turned to prostitution, the British academic Kathryn Hughes noted in an exploration of Victorian life and attitudes, when ?the usual ways in which they got an income from their bodies?by working as a milliner, or a domestic or a factory hand?had come up short.? Selling sex, even for a few weeks or months, might be their only option, and it offered something most women, regardless of their social standing, were denied in the Victorian world: income and independence. One Lambeth prostitute told Mayhew she earned as much as four pounds a week, far more than she had made ?workin' and slavin'? as a servant in Birmingham.
Prostitutes seemed to be everywhere in Lambeth. There were ?more women in the street than ever, and they are more brazen and persistent,? complained Rev. G. E. Asker of St. Andrew's Church. Even he was being propositioned as he walked through the neighborhood. ?The brothels are many of the perfect hells,? Asker added. ?Shrieks and cries, ?murder' and so on, frequently are heard.?
For Lambeth's newest resident, it would be a perfect hunting ground.
* * *
Cream became a regular at Gatti's Adelaide Gallery Restaurant on the Strand. The restaurant's decor was elegant?vaulted ceilings, stained glass, ornate plasterwork, a palate of blue and gold?and it was a favorite of the theater crowd. Actors and playwrights from nearby playhouses claimed many of its marble-top tables. One day, when most of the seats were taken, he shared a table with another man.
He introduced himself as Thomas Neill. He was educated, tastefully dressed, and ?well informed and travelled, as men go,? the other diner recalled. They shared meals many times, with Cream preferring bread and cheese, washed down with beer or gin, to the plovers' eggs and other delicacies on the menu. He spoke about how much he enjoyed attending the city's music halls. He talked about money and seemed obsessed with poisons. But most of time, he talked about women.
?His language about them was far from tolerable or agreeable,? his dining companion had to admit. Cream carried around a collection of pornographic photographs, which he delighted in showing to his new friend and to other diners. He was restless and fidgety and could not stand still, even when drinking at the restaurant's bar. And he was always chewing something?gum, tobacco, or the end of a cigar, his jaws ?moving mechanically like a cow chewing the cud.? He seemed wary of every patron and waiter who approached his table. He rarely smiled, and his laugh sounded forced and fake, as if he were the villain in a melodrama. And people could not help but notice that his left eye turned inward, giving him a crazed, sinister look. Cream later claimed he had come to London to consult an eye specialist, and one of his first stops after his arrival had been the office of a Fleet Street optician. James Aitchison diagnosed his condition as hypermetropia, or farsightedness?his eyes focused improperly, blurring his vision and causing severe headaches. Cream had been suffering from the condition since childhood, Aitchison concluded, and had needed glasses for years. He supplied two pairs of spectacles to correct his vision.
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