Free EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Page B

tendencies and was sent to an asylum in March 1889.
    Another asylum inmate, Michael Ostrog, a Russian doctor and a convicted criminal, was locked up because he was found to be a homicidal maniac and rose high on the list of suspects. Furthermore, his whereabouts at the times of the murders were never established.
    Other high profile contenders were somewhat more surprising. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, known popularly as ‘Eddie’ was the grandson of Queen Victoria. Amongst a number of theories regarding him it was suggested that he had got a shop girl in Whitechapel pregnant and that she had been taken away to a hospital by the Queen’s doctor, Sir William Gull, who had her institutionalised for the remainder of her life. The prostitutes who had been killed had all been friends of the shop girl and knew what had happened. Sir William Gull, it is suggested, killed them and made it look like the work of a madman. The fact that Sir William was seventy years old at the time and Eddie’s sexual predilections were slanted more towards the male sex, seem to negate this theory.
    More recently, the artist, Walter Sickert, has been put in the frame, mainly, it seems, because he painted prostitutes, although some say that some of his paintings chillingly replicate photographs of the Ripper’s victims and the Ripper’s letters contain phrases used by the American painter, James McNeill Whistler, who had been Sickert’s teacher.
    It is unlikely that we will ever discover the true identity of the psychopathic killer known as Jack the Ripper, but, with more books written about him than about all the US Presidents combined, an entire industry carries on around the five murders he committed between the end of August and 8 November 1888.

Dr Thomas Neil Cream

     
    He was a sadist, a monster who enjoyed a love-hate relationship with women, a beast who consigned seven of them to excruciatingly painful deaths in Canada, the United States and Britain. He did not even need to be present when they suffered the convulsions leading to their death. He would hand the fatal pills to them, telling them they were too pale or that these would prevent them from contracting a sexually transmitted disease, and walk off into the night. Like his contemporary, Jack the Ripper, the victims he chose to eliminate were prostitutes, although he did take care of a wife as well. In his head, he was cleaning up the streets as well as exercising his psychopathic urge to wield the ultimate power of life and death over women.
    He was originally Scottish, born in Glasgow in 1850 but living there only four years before his parents, William and Mary upped sticks and moved to Quebec in Canada in search of a better life for themselves and their children. William worked in shipbuilding and the family prospered. He started his own lumber wholesale business and, apart from Thomas, his sons all joined him there. Thomas was more studious and left to attend McGill University where he studied to become a doctor.
    His first real problem occurred shortly after he graduated in 1876. He had made a teenage girl, Flora Brooks, pregnant and her family insisted that he do the decent thing and marry her. The morning after the wedding, however, he was gone, having boarded a ship bound for London where he planned to make a new start without the encumbrance of a young, pregnant wife.
    London’s medical schools were some of the best there were at the time and doctors were needed to help deal with the appalling disease and sickness that had arisen from the terrible social conditions in areas of the capital such as the poverty-stricken East End. Neil registered at St. Thomas’s Hospital in Lambeth, in October 1876, and started the training that he hoped would lead to him becoming a surgeon. Six months later, however, he was disappointed to learn that he had failed the entrance exams for the Royal College of Surgeons. After returning to St. Thomas’s for more training,