Jack The Ripper In America. Did Jack The Ripper Visit The United States?

Cream then began marketing a special elixir that he had created and which he claimed would cure epilepsy. Amazingly, he acquired a considerable following of patients who swore by the medicine. Then, into his office one day walked Julia Stott, an attractive young woman who was looking for Cream’s epilepsy cure. Her husband, Daniel Stott, was a station agent on the Northeastern Railway and suffered from epilepsy. Cream began making advances toward Julia and found the woman receptive. She said that her husband’s illness and his advanced age had ruined her sex life.

It’s hard to imagine what could have attracted the beautiful woman to Cream. The doctor was a slight and scrawny man with thinning hair and gold-rimmed glasses through which he constantly squinted. He often gave off an appearance of being from the upper crust though with upscale dress and a bushy mustache that he kept waxed and turned up at the ends. Likely though, Julia’s attraction to him went beyond just looks as she spoke of the doctor as being “insatiable” and stated later that he “ravished” her several times during their first meeting.

Daniel Stott began to grow suspicious of his wife’s frequent trips to Cream’s office and suspected that he was giving Julia more than just medicine on these visits. Not surprisingly, Cream repaid the man’s suspicions by adding strychnine to his medicine and Stott died on June 14, 1881.

Originally, Stott’s death was attributed to epilepsy but for some bizarre reason, Cream wrote to the coroner and stated that a pharmacist was responsible, having given Stott some bad medicine. He suggested that Stott’s body be exhumed. The coroner dismissed the letter, not knowing that Cream was trying to collect on Stott’s life insurance for he and Julia or that Cream has also sent a letter to the district attorney. The prosecutor decided to check into the letter and had the body exhumed. An exam discovered that there was poison in Stott’s stomach, something that would have never been found if not for Cream’s letter!

Cream may have realized his blunder once the letters were sent and he soon fled the city with the widow Stott. They were quickly apprehended by the police. Cream insisted at his trial that Stott’s death had been the pharmacist’s fault but Julia turned state’s evidence against him and testified that she had seen Cream “put some white powder” into her husband’s medicine bottle. This time, Cream’s luck didn’t hold and he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Joliet Prison. He was admitted in 1881 and was regarded as a model prisoner who spoke little to the other inmates and always did as he was told by the officers. Over the years, the only complaints ever filed about him came from other prisoners who claimed to be awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of low, hissing laughter coming from his cell. At such times, he could be found sitting on his bunk, speaking to phantom women that appeared in his cell and promising them slow and agonizing deaths. He created detailed plans of revenge and of what sexual savagery he would wreak should be ever be released.

And then fate reared its ugly head in Thomas Neill Cream’s life again. In 1887, his father died and left his son a sizable sum of money. His accountant and bookkeeper, Thomas Davidson, wrote to Illinois authorities and requested the complete records of Cream’s trial. After studying the case, he became convinced that Cream was innocent of the charges that had sent him to Joliet. He began petitioning for Cream’s release and a number of family friends in Canada took up the cause, perhaps never realizing what sort of man their friend’s son had become. The petitions and letters arrived in Illinois by the bagful and finally, Governor Joseph W. Fifer relented and he commuted Cream’s sentence. He was released from Joliet on July 31, 1891.

Cream immediately went to Quebec and collected his inheritance. It’s likely that the accountant finally realized his mistake. He later wrote: “In my first interview with him, I concluded that he was unmistakably insane.”

Of course by that time, it was too late for the victims that still lay ahead.

Wealthy and free to do what he wished, Cream returned to England. He arrived in October 1891 and took rooms in a boarding house on Lambeth Palace Road, back in the slums that he had once reveled in. He told his landlady that he was at work on his postgraduate studies at St. Thomas’ Hospital but when he failed to see any patients or to keep any sort of office hours, he had to tell her that he had been ill and was no recovering from a strange disease. His eyes bothered him constantly, he explained, forcing him to take large doses of morphine and ****. His landlady replied that she hoped his health would improve.

A short time after his arrival, Cream went to work. He began visiting the local prostitutes and began killing them too. He met one such woman, Matilda Clover, just two days after he arrived and she later died from nux vomica poisoning, a liquid that caused vomiting and which was often prescribed by doctors as a tonic. The same fate also befell a woman named Ellen Donworth but as in the past, Cream was not charged with anything.

After a short break from murder, and an even shorter attempt at a love affair with a woman named Laura Sabbatini, Cream poisoned two other women, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell. He would have escaped detection in these crimes too but, as he did in Chicago, he inexplicably tried to place blame for the crimes on someone else. This time, he accused his neighbor of the murders and tried to blackmail him. He told a Walter J. Harper, a medical student who lived in the same boarding house, that he had incriminating evidence against him but that for a large sum of money, he would not notify the police. He wrote a letter to Harper’s father also and told him that his son was a murderer. The elder Harper did not respond, but he held onto the letter. Cream then wrote to the coroner and told him that Harper had committed the murders and that he had proof. He also wrote to John Haynes, a photographer who lived in his building, and told him the same thing. He constantly talked of the two dead women, often shocking his landlady with his vile descriptions of Harper’s alleged crimes