The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream with Dean Jobb

Today I speak with Dean Jobb about his recent book The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer.

**If you would like to listen to Dean's previous appearances on Can't Make This Up, listen to Empire of Deception and Daring, Devious & Deadly.

"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. “He has nerve and he has knowledge.” In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered as many as ten people in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent. Poison was his weapon of choice. Largely forgotten today, this villain was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper.

Structured around the doctor’s London murder trial in 1892, when he was finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well as the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Dr. Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help.

Dean Jobb transports readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard traces Dr. Cream’s life through Canada and Chicago and finally to London, where new investigative tools called forensics were just coming into use, even as most police departments still scoffed at using science to solve crimes. But then, most investigators could hardly imagine that serial killers existed—the term was unknown. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, Dr. Cream’s crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer: one who operated without motive or remorse, who “murdered simply for the sake of murder.” For fans of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, all things Sherlock Holmes, or the podcast My Favorite Murder, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is an unforgettable true crime story from a master of the genre"

Dean Jobb is an author, journalist, and member of the faculty of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax. His latest book, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream (Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada) won the inaugural CrimeCon Clue Award for True Crime Book of the Year and was longlisted for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Empire of Deception, his previous book, the true story of a 1920s Chicago swindler, won the Crime Writers of Canada nonfiction award and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, Canada’s top award for nonfiction. He writes a monthly column on true crime for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and reviews books for The Irish Times and other publications.

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