The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer

Written by Dean Jobb

Narrated by Steven Crossley

Winner of the CrimeCon Clue Award for True Crime Book of the Year

“When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most puzzling murder investigations. Incredibly, at the time the words of the world’s most famous fictional detective appeared in print in the Strand Magazine, a real-life Canadian doctor was stalking and murdering women in London’s downtrodden Lambeth neighbourhood. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream had been a suspect in the deaths of two women in Canada, and had killed as many as four people in Chicago before he arrived in London in 1891 and began using pills laced with strychnine to kill prostitutes. The Lambeth Poisoner, as he was dubbed in the press, became one of the most prolific serial killers in history.

In this fascinating book, Dean Jobb reveals how bungled investigations, corrupt officials and failed prosecutions allowed Cream to evade detection or freed him to kill, again and again. The first complete account of Dr. Cream’s crimes and his many victims explores how the stifling morality and hypocrisy of the Victorian era allowed this monster to poison vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help. It offers an inside account of Scotland Yard’s desperate search for a killer as brazen and efficient as Jack the Ripper.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781443463584

Dean Jobb

DEAN JOBB is the author of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, winner of the inaugural CrimeCon CLUE Award for true-crime book of the year and longlisted for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His previous books include Empire of Deception, which the New York Times Book Review called “intoxicating and impressively researched” and was named the Chicago Writers Association’s Nonfiction Book of the Year. Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines including the Chicago Tribune, the Globe and Mail and the Irish Times, and was hailed by Esquire magazine as “a master of narrative non-fiction.” Dean Jobb is a professor in the master of fine arts in creative non-fiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.