Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England

by Honeycombe, Gordon

  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.

  FREDERICK DEEMING

  THE MURDER OF MISS MATHER, 1891

  Barristers defending persons accused of murder quite often claim that the defendant is insane. How else can the accused’s apparently normal behaviour before and after the horrible event be explained? Sometimes, indeed, more time is spent on discussing medical theories about mental states than on the actual circumstances of the murder. In these instances, the defence usually suffers from the difficulty that the defendant looks and sounds far from mad, and is on the contrary the very picture of an agreeable, sometimes good-looking person, wrongfully accused and naturally aggrieved at being so. Seventy years ago and more, juries appear not to have been too bothered with technicalities and took a simpler, black-and-white view of right and wrong. They were not too worried, it seems, whether the accused was mad or not, since oddness, eccentricity and even abnormal behaviour were perhaps more usual – and more tolerated – than they are now. The question then was whether or not the accused had been satisfactorily proved to have done the murderous deed – and if he had, then he deserved to hang.
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  Frederick Bailey Deeming was certainly an unusual man, an adventurer in every way, engaging, larger than life, dedicated to enjoying himself and avoiding work whenever possible. Other members of his family also seem to have been rather odd. According to Fred’s older brother Edward, their father, a tinsmith, ‘died an imbecile in Tranmere Workhouse, Birkenhead’ and before this had tried four times to commit suicide by cutting his throat. Fred himself, born on 30 July 1853 in Birkenhead, Cheshire, on the River Mersey opposite Liverpool, was the youngest of seven children and spoiled by his puritanical, Sunday School teacher mother. As a boy he was, according to Edward, ‘hysterical and peculiar in his habits’ and known as ‘Mad Fred’. It seems he was supported by his parents for many years, only doing enough in the way of work to pay for his pleasures in Liverpool. It is said that when he was eighteen he became a steward on a liner and disappeared for several years. On his return he was, it seems, transformed, full of tales of adventure in the South African gold fields, and flamboyantly attired. From then on he kept disappearing overseas and reappearing, bejewelled anew, with a new suit and a new lady-friend by his side. Women, it seems, were fascinated by him. But he never exploited them financially, acquiring his money instead through theft, extortion and fraud. He was a plumber by trade.

  When his mother died in 1875, her youngest son (according to brother Edward):

  … was greatly distressed and very ill, and subsequently went on several voyages, visiting, amongst other places, Calcutta, where he had a severe attack of brain-fever … Afterwards his mind appeared to be affected [and] he did the most extraordinary things … He represented himself as being a person of distinction and would dress in peculiar ways. Sometimes he insisted on going out of doors in the morning wearing an evening dress coat [and] on other occasions he would go out as if dressed for a funeral, wearing deep mourning. [He was] subject to delusions, and frequently, after his mother’s death, declared that he had seen her vision, and that she had directed him to do certain things.

  His travels took him not only into Europe but to America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. At some point he married an English girl, of whom little is known except that she bore him four children, was abandoned in Australia (where she sang in the streets of Sydney to earn money) and again at Cape Town in South Africa when she managed to follow him there. He was imprisoned for bankruptcy in Australia in 1887 and was apparently also in prison in Johannesburg in 1888.

  In 1890, Frederick Deeming was forty-seven, a large, muscular, hard-faced, handsome man with fair hair, a ginger moustache and light-blue eyes. Early in 1890, he was in Antwerp, posing as Lord Dunn, and was accepted as such by the town’s smart society. But some piece of embezzlement or other misdemeanour soon occasioned his departure and he returned to his home territory on Merseyside.

  He took up residence at the Railway Hotel, Rainhill, a few miles south of St Helens and east of Liverpool. He informed people that he worked for the government and was an Inspector of Regiments. Such was his ostentatious style of living that the hotel proprietor ventured to suggest that his hotel was too humble, even inadequate to cater for such a guest. Deeming was gracious. He said he was in Rainhill to look for a modest but comfortable little house within convenient distance of Liverpool on behalf of a friend, Baron Brook. The proprietor was pleased to recommend a charming villa near Rainhill, which an acquaintance, Mrs Mather, wished to let furnished to a good tenant.

  Supplied with a letter of introduction, Deeming visited Mrs Mather that afternoon and viewed the property, Dinham Villa, which he pronounced to be entirely suitable and satisfactory. He was shown over the house by Mrs Mather’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, Emily, a small brown-haired woman, five feet tall and slightly built.

  Captivated by Deeming’s personality, persiflage and protestations, Mrs Mather let him move into the villa without paying any rent in advance. Believing her handsome tenant to be a single man, she was intrigued to hear that Baron Brook had insisted on being Deeming’s best man when he married. To everyone’s satisfaction, the courtship of Emily Mather proceeded apace.

  Before long, however, Deeming’s wooing of Miss Mather was interrupted by the unexpected arrival – by cab and with little luggage – of his incorrigible wife and her four children. She had found her way back to England, to his brothers’ families in Liverpool, and thence to Rainhill. She was determined to live with him as his wife.

  Miss Mather heard about the new arrivals and wondered who they were. Deeming teased her, mocking her casual curiosity and revealing at last that the woman was not his wife but his sister. Her husband, he said, had recently obtained a lucrative position abroad, and she had come to holiday briefly with her brother to discuss some private financial matters that had to be settled before she left England.

  From Deeming’s point of view, the sooner she went the better. Her presence and that of the children was inconvenient. When he quarrelled with her, the children cried – it was intolerable. People would soon find out who she really was and then his flourishing romance with Miss Mather would be ruined. As Mrs Deeming refused to leave him – and he was reluctant this time to abandon her yet again (he was planning to marry Miss Mather) something had to be done.

  After some thought, he went to Mrs Mather and said that, with her permission, he proposed to make one or two alterations to the villa, which would render the house more desirable to Baron Brook, who possessed a number of valuable carpets acquired in his travels. The floorboards at the villa were poorly laid, uneven, and let in the damp, and Deeming proposed at his own expense to cement the ground beneath the floorboards and then to re-lay them, so that they were flat and formed suitable surfaces for the Baron’s carpets. Mrs Mather agreed.

  Deeming then called on a local builder, buying a pickaxe and a large quantity of cement. He said his sister and her family had just left, and so, with the house to himself, he proposed to begin the alterations at once.

  Over the next few days he cemented the ground-floor rooms himself, with a local carpenter re-laying the floorboards. As soon as this was done he celebrated by giving a little party in the villa. There was dancing in the kitchen, light refreshments being served in other rooms. The culmination of the party was the announcement of the engagement of Miss Mather and Mr Deeming – he had proposed that night and she had accepted. The healths of the happy couple were drunk and the merry guests danced happily over the now even floors – under which, encased in cement, lay the bodies of Mrs Deeming and all four children.

  The Inspector of Regiments then suddenly announced that his duties required him to visit Australia. The wedding must therefore take place before he left. At the same time he revealed that Baron Brook had abandoned the idea of acquiring a house near Liverpool, and Mrs Mather was obliged to agree that it would be convenient if Deeming vacated the villa and stayed with her until he married her daughter. For some reason the marriage took place, on 22 September 1891, at Beverley in East Yorkshire.

  Weeks later the couple, now known as Mr and Mrs Williams, set sail on the Kaiser Wilhelm II. They arrived in Australia, at Melbourne, in December 1891, and rented a small furnished house in Andrew Street, Windsor. Within a few days, on or about 20 December, Emily Mather was cemented in under the dining-room hearth and Mr Williams had disappeared.

  The carelessness of a hurried repeat performance meant that, without the benefit of professional assistance, the floorboards were badly re-laid. The owner of the house was compelled to put right the poor workmanship, and in doing so uncovered part of a trussed and naked body. The police were sent for. They eventually dug out the remains of Miss Mather, who had been hit on the head six times before her throat was cut.

  Deeming was not traced until March 1892, by which time his real identity had been established. He was found in Western Australia, in Perth, where he had been making plans to marry yet again, in this case a certain Miss Rounsevell. Arrested by Detective Cawsey, Deeming was brought in the last week of March by train to Albany, a sea port on th
e state’s south coast. On the way to Albany the train stopped at York and a large, hostile crowd demonstrated at the railway station. When the train pulled out Deeming had a fit – whether real or faked is not clear – writhing and kicking for about an hour. At Albany, where Deeming and his captors embarked on a steamer for the 1,500-mile voyage to Melbourne, the prisoner shaved off his moustache. He subsequently denied that he had ever had one. Nonetheless, he was identified by several people when he was paraded before them in the yard of Melbourne jail.

  He appeared at Melbourne’s criminal court in the last week of April 1892, charged with the murder of Emily Mather. The judge was Mr Justice Hodges; the prosecutor was Mr Walsh; and the accused was defended by Mr Deakin. Meanwhile in England, Mrs Mather, informed of the method of her daughter’s burial, had been horribly reminded of the cementing of the floors of Dinham Villa. When they were dug up, the remains of Deeming’s wife and four children were found where he had laid them. Their throats too had been cut.

  In Melbourne, Deeming’s trial aroused a great deal of local interest, and crowds mobbed the court house every day. His defence was that he was insane. It was suggested that he suffered from epileptic fits. He was certainly infected with VD, and this may have impaired his mind, for he was moody and loquacious and fantasised about his past. He claimed that his dead mother had told him to kill Miss Mather, and that he had sometimes been overwhelmed by an irresistible impulse to slaughter the current lady in his life. He was thoroughly examined by at least six doctors, who were interested in the criminal mentality, and was even examined by an eye specialist, Dr Ruddal – who said the prisoner’s eyes were perfectly normal.