Thomas Neill Cream: The Doctor Who Couldn’t Keep His Mouth Shut

After a chaotic catch-up involving friendship break-ups, ignored WhatsApp messages, and the glamour of eating Super Noodles in the bath, we take a sharp turn into the gas-lit streets of Victorian Lambeth.

This week, we’re heading back to 1891 to meet Thomas Neill Cream – a doctor with a taste for power, poison, and blackmail. Known to history as The Lambeth Poisoner, Cream left a trail of women dead across three continents, fuelled by arrogance and strychnine. From letters to MPs and absurd ransom notes to his infamous final words on the gallows, this is the story of the man who thought he was cleverer than everyone else — and very nearly got away with it.

Grab a drink (preferably not from a stranger in Lambeth) and join us as we unravel one of South London’s most chilling Victorian murder sprees.

Sources include:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Neill_Cream 

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co179113/metropolitan-police-letter-and-photographs-of-dr-neill-cream-the-lambeth-poisoner-england-1890-1907

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/240221

https://web.archive.org/web/20130806111409/http://www.murderbygaslight.com/2010/08/lambeth-poisoner.html

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/92296172

https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/politics-law/the-evil-deeds-of-dr-cream

https://thejacktherippertour.com/casebook/suspects/dr-neill-cream/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/true-crime-case-of-murderous-dr-cream-review/2021/08/11/1fd00dc0-f93d-11eb-8a67-f14cd1d28e47_story.html

Transcript

EP 07 - Lambeth Poisoner

Hello. Hi. I'm Rachel.

I'm Hannah. And this is the Sinister South podcast, a podcast about all the terrible goings-on south of the river. Trevors, I have an announcement for you.

It's with great sadness that I'm having to do this, but I'm no longer Rachel's friend. This is news to me. On Friday, I messaged Rachel at 11.44am. Silence.

I messaged again at about 1. Silence. I messaged on multiple channels. Slack.

Google chat. WhatsApp. Silence.

By about 8pm, I became very, very concerned. I'd already sent my, uh, this is funny, ha ha, kind of, you better not be dead, it'll be very inconvenient for me message, and heard nothing. Silence.

About 10 past 8, I decided we have a shared husband. I'll reach out. Is she dead? No.

She's probably just too busy talking. Trevors, you can only imagine the levels of just complete, destitute sadness. I was in the pub with Richard.

All we were talking about is how codependent me and Rachel are, and why hasn't she messaged me back? We went through every example of anything I could possibly have done wrong. Obviously, we found none. I've never knowingly been wrong.

Not once. So, that was it. I resigned myself to one less friend.

God knows I'm good at that. And got on with my life. Got on with my life.

You did. I'm so sorry. That was until 2210.

After. Two memes. Two gifs.

Two memes. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine messages. Yep.

Ha ha ha. So sorry. And then a picture of a kid.

You've missed out the other part that I said, which was that my biggest had stolen my phone, and had been using it to record videos of her and her cousin. Too little. Too late.

Oh, I feel like I need to defend myself now to the Trevors. Because it was a complete and utter accident. The initial message at 11.44 in the morning, that was because my brain was exploding with workload.

That was wrong. I should have messaged after I'd finished work, and before I had got to my cousin's house. That is true.

That is on me. I own that. I can only apologize and promise that it shall never happen again.

Subsequent messages. So when the gifs came through, and the memes, and the, actually, are you dead? If you don't answer, I'm going to message our shared husband. All of that happened while my daughter had my phone.

And I was out of your mind. You weren't out of my mind. I was just busy trying to listen to what my cousin said.

Richard said, oh God, like, the way you're acting, it's almost like if you were trapped in Fritzl's basement, and Fritzl hadn't come to see you for a while. I mean, our levels of codependency are quite scary. I said, well, about a thousand messages, just chit-chatting with him.

He messaged me. He told me when I got back. So I'd been at my cousin's, and she's got two under 10 as well.

And so that's always a lot. And we just wanted to try and get a conversation out of each other that lasted more than 35 seconds before one of us had to go and do something for one of the other children. So it was very much a bribe of take my phone, go and make some videos, bye.

So I could have a chat. Anyway, when we got back, it was probably about 11 o'clock by the time I got home. And we straight away went, I've had our third child on the phone.

She is very upset with you. I think next time you need to make sure that you have informed her of your whereabouts before you go. Like, in all seriousness, there was a point where I was a bit like, hang on a minute.

I know, because I do always reply. You even messaged me before going, I need to make sure that like... I just send you randomly. I'll just send you the word test, because you will always reply to me.

So I'll know my phone isn't broken when I'm obsessing about someone else not replying to me. Like that weekend when none of my family responded. And I was like, oh good, they're all dead.

That's fabulous. I'm so sorry. I will never let it happen again.

The next time I hand my phone to my child, I will first go, hang on, message Hannah. The child has the phone. I will be back online at some point soon.

Fine. I did feel very bad about it. I did.

And then Will did go, yeah, we were chitchatting. Then she went, oh, I should probably go talk to Richard. We are in the pub.

I was just chatting on WhatsApp to Will. Yeah, Richard just sat in the pub with me. No, it was just the two of us out.

And we decided to sit inside because it was cold. So we were cigarette breaking one by one. Taking it in turns.

So I had some time to message. I wasn't just literally like, shut up Richard, you're busy. I'm talking to my shared husband.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, shh. I am very, very sorry. And I would like the Trevors to see this as well as you, as my genuine heartfelt apology.

Fine. There will be a comeuppance. It's me.

Oh, God. Oh, it's going to be bad. You don't know when it will be.

I know exactly. That's the worst. It's that age old question, right? Would you rather know when you're going to die or not? And it's like, I don't know if knowing is worse.

If I know it's going to happen on this day, is that worse than it could just be any time? I don't know. Oh, dear. Well, I'm genuinely very sorry.

Trevors, you guys are lucky there's still a podcast. I did wonder when you didn't come over at the weekend to record. I was like, oh, no.

Also hit you with the old okey-dokey. You did. You did do the okey-dokey.

She'll know. It was the okey-dokey and it was just the hearts to the pictures. Yep, sure, that's cute.

Like nothing else. Yep, well done. We can all have sex, Rachel.

But do you know what it takes to keep a friendship alive? I can't, honestly. From the bottom of my heart, I am very, very sorry. I'm so sorry.

Oh, dear. But did you have a nice time at the pub? Yeah, we had a nice time. Yeah, good.

It was a laugh. We went to test out the new Wetherspoons at London Bridge. Excellent.

It's actually all right. Yeah? I mean, it's like, I know Wetherspoons is cheap. That's the whole point.

And I think there's probably some moral and ethical dilemma that I should have about Wetherspoons in general. But I also have moral and ethical dilemmas with my own bank balance. Exactly, 100%.

As an ex-Spoons employee, I'm just like, yeah, cool, mate. But it was like, I ordered, I was waiting for Rich to meet me there. I got to the bar and I ordered two pints of cider.

And it was £5.19 or something. What? It's two something a pint. I know! Oh, my God.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to go in there. Because I've seen it, I've walked past it a couple of times. But it weirded me out a bit because I was like, hang on, where is, because it's all seating at the front.

And you can't see, but then it's like, where's the bar? It's huge. Is it? And it goes, there's loads more seating. I mean, huge is, it's comparative to the fact it's under an arch in Tule Street.

But like, it's under the railway, and you can hear trains going over. Yeah. But I mean, obviously, it's brand new.

So it's very clean. Toilets were clean. Nice.

Staff were a bit like, I don't know, strange. At one point, Rich and I were sat there. We hadn't been there very long.

We'd managed to get a table. We were going to leave because there was nowhere to sit. And it was a bit awkward.

And it was busy. And we were like, oh, you know what I'm like about being bumped into as well. So I was like, oh, I don't like it.

And as we were thinking about leaving, a table came through. So I was just, sit down! Brilliant. We got it.

And we were sat there, pot of pints down, chatting away about whatever we were talking about. And two members of staff walked past. And one just went, well, yeah, because obviously I had a miscarriage in January.

Really loud. And we were like, oh. OK.

And it almost looked like when we saw the two staff walking around again, almost looked like she was training him. I was like, that's quite an intense way of... I mean, there's oversharing. But I mean, like, you know, if it was relevant to the rest, we didn't hear the rest of the story as she was walking past.

We were like, oh, just the snippets of conversations. Wow. And we were sat quite near.

So there's like a, you know, you can QR code order from the table. And we were sat quite near the hatch at one side. And there was a bloke that worked there who would just be like, all right, that's that table.

I'm just bring, it was two pints. I just bring them over in his hands. And there was this woman who insisted, bear in mind, it was like from as far away as I am from you now.

So let's call it what? Half a person. Yeah. Three foot away from each other.

So as you insisted putting them on the tray every time, bring the tray over. She was shit at carrying trays. Is this like a little test? Like you're trying to get better.

Yeah. Practice your tray carrying. For fuck's sake.

She's spilling the pints. Oh, bless. So yeah, then that was Friday.

It's good fun. Saturday, oh, we went to football in East Dulwich for a bit. Nice.

Then I went and met up with some friends. Richard went home. Cool.

Yeah. Yesterday didn't do a lot. Did a nice big walk.

Had a really long bath. Oh, that is what Sundays are made for. I mean, I was very hungover.

It was different. I wasn't like normally when I'm hungover, I'm sick. Yes.

It wasn't like that. It was just a headache and feeling groggy and tired. In a weird way.

Sometimes those are worse. I ate a bowl of super noodles in the bath. Excellent.

That is top tier. Oh, I'm so jealous. I will have no one tell me my life's not glamorous.

It really is glamorous. It really is. Oh, bless you.

Well, your weekend sounds like a lot more fun than mine. I had another child's birthday party. Okey-doke.

Yeah, another child's birthday party. It was fine. It was lovely.

I was slightly more sociable at this one. Well done. Because the people that I do know had turned up.

Fair. So I had some chit chats. But yeah, it's just a lot.

Bouncy castles and small children screaming. It's just a lot. But the kids had fun.

Oh, good. Some got to go. So that was nice.

Will had to go and do some last minute sound engineering on Saturday evening. Oh, right. So I was solo parenting for most of Saturday, which is exhausting, but lovely, obviously, she says.

And Sunday I did some work because I'm really exciting. Yeah, it's really exciting like that. That's been my weekend.

Yes, I've got some nice things coming up, though. Yeah. That will be coming up in the next couple of weeks.

So that'll be fun. It's quite good to have the downtime, I suppose, before all of that. And then it's terrifying because we're suddenly into November.

And then that means the dreaded C word is coming. And I don't know what to do. I've got a completely different Christmas plan this year.

You do. I know. It's very exciting.

Yeah. Are you looking forward to it? Yeah, I really am. Like just doing something completely different.

Don't know how much I'm going to say. No, that's fair. We'll just leave it the intrigue.

No one will know. I'm Father Christmas. Um, I've been nominated.

It's a bit like jury duty. Can you imagine if it was? That'd be awesome. Rachel, Father Christmas isn't real.

Shut up. Bug's sake. Every time you say it, a unicorn dies.

That is one thing that my youngest has started saying. You can't break a pinky promise. Because if you break a pinky promise, then a unicorn dies.

Okay. The stakes are really low for me, then. Breaking my promises all over the place.

Oh, dear. Shall we get into it? Yeah. Have you got a story for me? I do.

I'm excited for this one, because this one's, you don't usually do ones that go back this far. I'm excited. I can tell you exactly when it was.

Go on. October 1891. Oh, what date in October? Are we anywhere near? That's a very good point.

Do I have the actual date? Oh, it's today! Trevor, we are recording on the 13th of October. This will be published on the 15th. That's also what I was going to say before we get into the story.

Well, this will come out on the 15th. But happy birthday, Richard, for yesterday, the 14th. Happy birthday, Richard.

There we go. Yeah, that's exciting. Oh, one thing that I did want to do.

Here we go. Me now? No, I've got something else to say. And now what? No, I realized that we know how we do all the nice bits at the end.

Yeah. We should maybe start doing them at the beginning, because just in case, like, people just decide to turn it off. Yeah.

Or they turn it off. Like, this story sucks! No, they get to the point where we've started. I don't care if there's a TikTok! We start chatting about it.

And then they go, you know, they hear the phrase, let's do the nice bits. And then they go, oh, that's finished. No, actually, Trevor's.

Please, can you like and subscribe and all those nice things and do that? We're going to do that earlier on in the episode. She's a marketer! We're going to bookend it. You'll have it at the beginning and the end.

We have a Patreon. We have an email address. We have a website.

We have a TikTok. We have an Instagram. We have a Patreon.

There we go. Done. Jobs are good.

And at the end, I try and remember what all of those are. Yeah. So to be fair, you should come back because that's quite fun.

All the jeopardy! Right, I'll shut up now, sorry. October 1891, Lambeth. The streets on the south side of the Thames were busy with the usual mix of trade and survival.

Hawkers outside lodging houses, women calling for custom under the glow of gas lamps, the smell of river mud drifting in from the embankment. It was the kind of neighbourhood the respectable London largely preferred not to see, even though it was just across the water from Westminster. Which apparently I can't say.

I was reading this one out loud as a practice and I went, Westminster? Westminster? Well, you did all right then. That's fine. Among those streets that evening was Ellen Nellie Donworth, a 19-year-old sex worker.

By all accounts, Nellie was lively, trying to make a living the only way available to her. She met a man who offered her a drink, something casual enough in the course of her work. But almost immediately afterwards, Nellie was violently ill.

Within hours, she was gripped by spasms so severe that neighbours described her screams carrying out into the night. The next day, Nellie was dead. The doctors who examined her body noted symptoms that didn't fit with alcohol or with disease.

Strychnine poison was suspected. A substance rare in ordinary London life, but familiar to anyone with medical training. But there were no witnesses, no obvious suspects that the police could identify, and nothing that linked her death to anything more than grim chance.

And then something odd happened. The coroner received a letter from a man calling himself A. O'Brien Detective. In it, the writer claimed to know who had poisoned Nellie and offered to reveal the killer's identity for the staggering sum of £300,000, which in today's money is somewhere around £33 million.

It was outrageous, laughable, but hidden in the arrogance of that letter was the first real sign that London had a poisoner at large. And that Nellie's death was only the beginning. And this won't be the only letter of note in this case.

Because around the time the letter was sent to the coroner, one was also sent to MP and bookseller extraordinaire W. H. Smith. The letter to Smith accused him of the crime and demanded money for silence. It was proven to be complete nonsense, of course, but pivotal nonetheless later on.

Oh, I'm excited for a W. H. Smith side quest. So I want to jump back ever so slightly just to give Nellie as much background as I can, which to be, spoiler alert, it's not a lot. Yeah, fair.

So Ellen Nellie Donworth was born in 1872 and was the first known victim of the murderer later referred to as the Lambeth Poisoner. Ellen was known locally as Nellie and she was a young woman making her way on the margins of South London life. The records of her short life are sparse.

Most of what we know comes from newspaper reports at the time of her death. They tell us that she worked the streets around Westminster Bridge Road and the lodging houses near the Thames. Like many women in Lambeth then, sex work was not a choice made lightly, but a means of survival in an area marked by poverty, overcrowding and limited opportunities for working class women.

So on the evening of the 13th of October 1891, Nellie was seen with a well-dressed man who offered her a drink. Shortly afterwards, she collapsed in the street, convulsing and crying out in pain. Witnesses described her spasms as terrible to see.

She lingered in agony overnight and died the following day at St Thomas' Hospital, just across the river from Parliament. Yeah. At the inquest, doctors noted signs of strychnine, which I think I'm saying right.

I've heard strychnine and strychnine and I'm not sure which one is, I think they're both right. Okay. Strychnine poisoning.

That's the one I've got in my head. I think let's just go with that mate. A poison that attacks the muscles and nervous system, leaving its victims rigid, gasping and fully conscious of their fate until the end.

Oh no. Horrible. Rigid.

Can't imagine that, oh no. Nellie's death shocked her neighbours and was briefly a front page story. But as with so many working class women who died violently in Victorian London, her name quickly slipped from the headlines, overshadowed by the mystery of the killer himself.

Just a week after the death of Nellie Donworth, another young woman living in Lambeth was dead in strikingly similar circumstances. Matilda Clover, 27 years old, living in lodgings off of Westminster Bridge Road. The press at the time described her as a, quote, habitual drunkard.

But that shorthand obscures the truth of her situation. She was a widow. She had children that she was struggling to care for.

And like many women in the district, she fell back on casual sex work to keep herself afloat. Alcohol was part of the survival economy too, a way to dull hunger, cold or fear. So on the night of the 20th of October, 1891, Matilda spent time with a man who called himself Dr Neil.

He gave her a small packet of pills, telling her that they would do her good. She took four before bed. In the early hours, she was seized by violent spasms.

Witnesses later described her muscles contracting so hard that her body completely arched backwards. Within two hours, she was dead. Oh my God.

Yet at the inquest, her death was written off as natural causes. The coroner concluded that alcohol withdrawal, what Victorians used to call delirium tremens, had brought on heart failure. The presence of strychnine went undetected.

And so poor Matilda's murder was quietly closed as a case of drink taking another poor woman's life. Wow. Delirium tremens is the name of a beer.

There you go. It's one of Will's favourites. Has it got an elephant on it? Pink elephant on it.

Yeah, I didn't even make that connection. It's alcohol withdrawal, basically. Or like the madness of drying out.

That's quite clever marketing, that is. Sorry. Only if you make the connection.

She's always looking for it. And this week, we're sponsored by Delirium Tremens. I mean, I would be happy to be sponsored by Delirium Tremens.

We have to go through the beer 52 years first. Yeah, true. And HelloFresh.

Then we know we've made it. Yeah. Only months later, when investigators revisited the case in the light of other poisonings, her body was exhumed.

Tests revealed that what had really killed her was strychnine. And there was another telltale clue in all of this. A letter had been sent to the prominent physician Sir William Broadbent accusing him of Clover's murder and demanding £25,000 for silence.

Like the Donworth letter and the WH Smith letter, it was arrogant and implausible. But it showed that the anonymous writer knew the truth. Matilda Clover hadn't died of alcohol-related issues.

She'd been poisoned. This is an interesting MO. It's mad.

By April of 1892, the killings had moved from isolated suspicion to undeniable horror. Alice Marsh, 21, and Emma Shrivell, 18, shared a modest lodging in Lambeth. They were close friends, scraping a living together, much like Nellie and Matilda before them.

Part-time sex work, occasional casual labour, whatever kept the rent collector from the door. On the evening of the 11th of April, 1892, they were joined by a man who introduced himself as Dr Nill. He brought with him, into their home, a tin of salmon and some pills that he said would protect them from disease.

Two women with little reason to doubt a man in a doctor's coat and with a doctor's manner. It sounded like care rather than cruelty. They ate, they swallowed the pills, and then after he left the room, the convulsions began.

Neighbours were later haunted by the sounds that followed, banging, thuds and terrible screams. By the time any help reached them, both women were beyond help. They had died within minutes of each other, their bodies contorted in the unmistakable grip of strychnine poisoning.

Unlike Matilda, there was no way to dismiss these deaths as natural. The sheer violence of the symptoms, the fact that the two women had died side by side, made it obvious something deliberate had happened. The newspapers quickly connected the dots.

This was not misadventure or drink, it was murder. And with three women now dead in the same district within six months of each other, the press found a name that stuck. The Lambeth Poisoner.

Now, not every woman who crossed paths with the Lambeth Poisoner died. On the 2nd of April, 1892, just days before Alice and Emma's double murder, a man calling himself Dr Neil met Louise Harris. Louise is sometimes referred to as Lou Harvey.

By the way, but they are the same person as far as I could tell. Fine. She was a sex worker in the Sam, in the Sam? In the Sam.

Good. She was a sex worker in the same Lambeth circuit, used to men who came with smooth words and strange requests. That night, Dr Neil pressed two capsules into Lou's hand and urged her to swallow them on the spot.

Lou hesitated. Maybe it was instinct, maybe it was the memory of other women who had fallen suddenly ill, but Lou didn't swallow the capsules. She pretended to, then when he wasn't looking, she slipped them into her pocket and later threw them away.

By doing so, she became the only confirmed survivor of the Lambeth Poisoner. Her testimony, spoiler alert, months later would be crucial in court. Proof that the Lambeth Poisoner was still handing out strychnine right up until his arrest.

Wow, okay. In the days that followed, the newspapers went into overdrive. Headlines spoke of the Lambeth Poisoner printing lurid sketches of young women in their final agonies and speculating about what kind of man could be responsible.

The echo of Jack the Ripper was unmistakable. Another faceless murderer preying on women at the margins. Another case where the east and south of London were cast as breeding grounds for horror and what mattered to the public was the speculation that a new monster stalked London streets and that the police needed to desperately find him and give the public his name.

Now time for a side quest and it's only a brief one. So side quest one, Jack the Ripper. Oh, I'm going to do a brief one.

I'm joking. I'm joking, of course. But I do think it's important to do a little scene setting.

Fine, fine, fine. To suddenly launch into a whole episode on Jack the Ripper, don't panic. To understand why these murders struck a chord, you have to picture Lambeth in the 1890s.

So this was a district of contradictions. On one side of Westminster Bridge sat Parliament, law courts and gentlemen's clubs. On the other side, narrow lanes, cheap lodging houses, gin shops and the endless churn of people trying to survive.

The smell of the Thames carried through the streets mixed with coal smoke and sewage. It was London's shadow side hiding in plain sight. For women like Nellie, Matilda, Alice and Emma, Lambeth offered little security.

Work for poor women was precarious. Laundry, something called charring, sewing, they all paid pennies. Sex work was often the only way to keep a bed for the night.

That meant the streets around Westminster Bridge Road and the embankment were busy after dark with women calling for trade, watched constantly by police officers who were as likely to arrest them for soliciting as they were to protect them from danger or use their services. And looming over all of it was the memory of Jack the Ripper. So just three years earlier, the Whitechapel murders had paralysed London with fear.

Newspapers had printed every grisly detail and turned the faceless killer into a legend. By 1891, the killings had stopped, but the fear hadn't gone away. The idea that another figure might be stalking women, this time south of the river, meant every unexplained death was read through that lens.

So when four women died in convulsions, the press coined the phrase the Lambeth Poisoner. It felt to many Londoners like the nightmare was repeating itself. The Ripper had struck with knives, this man used poison, but the victims were the same.

Poor women, already judged for how they survived, left to die violently in the shadows of a city that prided itself on empire and progress. So it is with that context that I move us on to the next section. The Investigation.

Letters, boasts and a name. By spring of 1892, the pressure on police was intense. Four women dead, one more narrowly surviving, and a public still haunted by the Ripper demanding answers.

Scotland Yard could not afford another faceless killer haunting London streets. The breakthrough came not from the victims, but from the killer himself. Those strange, arrogant letters, first to the coroner in the Nellie Dunworth case, to WH Smith, and to Sir William Broadbent, well they were riddled with a fatal mistake.

The writer claimed insider knowledge that only the murderer would know. In particular, he insisted Matilda Clover had been poisoned, but at the time of sending the letter, Matilda's death had been recorded as alcohol related. No one outside of the killer, or those that eventually re-examined her body, should or could have known.

Scotland Yard realised the letter writer and poisoner were one and the same. And at around the same time, the mysterious Dr Neil tripped himself up with his own ego. Neil had struck up an acquaintance with an American tourist, John Haynes, a former New York policeman.

Over drinks, Dr Neil boasted of his knowledge of the Lambeth murders, and even pointed out the houses where the women had lived. Haynes, unsettled by the level of detail, passed all of this onto the London authorities. Oh, good for him! The net tightened, police began watching the man who called himself Dr Neil, at his rooms on Lambeth Palace Road.

They saw him frequent the same streets as the victims, loitering in the company of women at risk. Quiet checks of his background turned up something astonishing. Dr Neil was, in fact, Thomas Neil Cream, a doctor with a prison record in America.

And that record, well of course, it was for poisoning. Oh, okay. Dr Cream.

Oh, I know. On the 3rd of June, 1892, detectives moved in. Cream was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Matilda Clover.

A search of his rooms turned up a small medicine kit containing poisons, the sort of equipment that would later go on display in Scotland Yard's Black Museum. For the newspapers, the arrest was a relief. For detectives, it was only the beginning.

They had their suspect. Now they needed to prove that he was the Lambeth poisoner. Sidequest time! I love it! Real one this time! So, I just wanted to talk about what was then called Scotland Yard's Black Museum, which is now called the Crime Museum.

Yes. So, the Black Museum or Crime Museum started quietly in 1874, tucked away inside a room at Scotland Yard. Its official purpose was training.

Young detectives were brought in to see the physical traces of crime, to study how murder looked when stripped down to its objects. But it soon acquired a reputation of its own. Behind locked doors were shelves of pistols, knives, ropes, disguises and poison bottles.

The sort of things the newspapers called ghastly relics. Among its holdings, the noose that hanged Charles Pierce, the notorious burglar and killer, death masks of executed men, the battered remains of weapons from the Whitechapel murders. It was a cabinet of curiosities, only that the curiosities were evidence of human cruelty.

For the public, it became legend. Admission was never open to just anyone. You had to be a police officer, a magistrate, or occasionally a very well-connected visitor who could wangle a pass.

Yeah. Journalists wrote breathless pieces about the terrible room, where murder was catalogued like butterflies. Conan Doyle was allowed to visit, as was Charles Dickens' son.

Oh, wow. Creams, poisons, the tiny bottles and powders found at Lambeth, sat among those exhibits. They weren't dramatic to look at.

No blood, no spectacle, just glass vials and labels. But in a way, that was kind of the most chilling part, how ordinary medicine could be twisted into a weapon. For trainee detectives, staring at those bottles under gaslight, it was a lesson in how evil often hides in plain sight.

So the Crime Museum still exists today, though it has changed names and moved sites with Scotland Yard itself. It remains closed to the general public, but its reputation lingers. For generations of Londoners, it stood as the place where the city's darkest stories were kept under lock and key, and the Lambeth poisoners' tools were part of that story.

It's one of the places that I've always, always wanted to go to. And just, yeah, no, no. Maybe we could ask our new mate.

Yeah, I thought you were going to ask me to get back in touch. I wouldn't do that to you. I promise I wouldn't do that to you.

So who was Dr Neil, or Dr Cream, as we now know him? When police put handcuffs on the man calling himself Dr Neil in 1892, they thought they had solved a series of murders in Lambeth. What they didn't yet realise was this was not his first time in the dock, nor were his actions in Lambeth unique or individual. So the suspect's real name was Thomas Neil Cream.

He was born in 1850 in Glasgow, Scotland. He was the eldest son of William and Mary Cream. When Thomas was just four, his family emigrated to Canada and settled in Quebec, where William became a prosperous manager in the timber trade.

The Creams were comfortable, even respectable, and a young Thomas grew up with the privileges of education and opportunity. There was a brief moment when Thomas apprenticed in his father's business, but out of all the Cream children, it would appear Thomas just wasn't the best fit for any of the roles. Yeah, this was fine with Thomas as he had a dream that he was keen to start living.

Thomas wanted to be a doctor. He studied medicine at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1876 with a thesis on the use of chloroform in obstetrics. An irony not lost on later investigators.

By then, though, his personal life was already in scandal. So the same year, 1876, Thomas courted a young woman named Flora Brooks, the daughter of a hotel keeper in Waterloo, Quebec. He left her pregnant and when he attempted an abortion himself, Flora nearly died.

Oh my God. Her furious father forced Thomas to marry Flora at gunpoint. A literal shotgun wedding.

Good. But the day after their wedding, Thomas abandoned Flora and vanished to England to pursue further medical training. Oh, brilliant.

Within a year of being married to Thomas, Flora was dead. Officially, her cause of death was recorded as consumption, or what we'd probably call tuberculosis these days. But rumours swirled.

Thomas Neil Cream had been sending medication to Flora through the post and insisted that she take nothing else. Oh. So between 1876 and 1878, Thomas obtained credentials at St Thomas' Hospital, where he undertook lectures and clinical practice in London, and then from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Edinburgh, where he obtained a licence in surgery and midwifery.

By the summer of 1878, Cream was back in Canada, armed with new British credentials and a dangerous confidence. He set up a practice in London, Ontario, a town growing fast on the back of railways and trade. It was a growing town with plenty of respectable families and no shortage of vulnerable young women.

On paper, he was the ideal addition to the community. Scottish-born, Canadian-raised, educated and polished. But beneath that veneer, Cream had already left behind a victim and a trail of whispers.

And it wasn't too long before trouble followed. On the 3rd of May, 1879, the body of Catherine Kate Gardner was discovered in an outhouse behind Cream's surgery. She was unmarried, pregnant and known to have visited Cream for help.

Beside her was a bottle of chloroform. Cream told police that she had to have taken her own life, overcome with shame. He then produced a letter which he claimed to have found when he discovered her body.

In the letter, she supposedly named a local businessman as the father of her unborn child. But when the letter was read out at an inquest, her family and friends immediately challenged it. The handwriting was proven not to be the same as Kate's and the language used was far from her usual style.

They dismissed it as an outright forgery, crafted simply to deflect suspicion. No one believed the letter was genuine and the coroner's jury ruled that Kate had died from chloroform administered by some person unknown. Which was seemingly as close as they could come to naming Cream as the murderer because they didn't see that they had any hard proof.

It was a verdict that should really have ended his career, but there was no charge, no prison sentence and no justice for Kate. Cream slipped away, just as he had after Flora and by the following year he had crossed the border into the United States. It's 1880 by now and Cream pops up in Chicago.

The city was booming, railroads, factories and stockyards drew thousands of workers while the vice districts around Madison Street and the south side thrived in the shadows. Brothels, boarding houses and backstreet abortionists did a brisk trade. Watched by police who were often more interested in payoffs than prosecutions.

It was a city of opportunity for a man like Cream, respectable enough in appearance with medical letters after his name and yet willing to exploit the most vulnerable. Cream opened a medical practice on the west side, not far from the red light quarter and quickly built a reputation as someone that would help women in trouble. But behind the consulting room door his patients often never left alive.

In August of 1880 Mary Ann Faulkner went to Cream seeking an abortion. She never returned home. Days later her body was discovered crammed into a trunk in a Madison Street apartment.

The smell of decomposition led neighbours to call the police. A midwife who had worked with Cream testified that Faulkner had died under his care. In court she gave a clear account of what had happened.

But the midwife was a black woman and in 1880 Chicago that meant an all-white jury quite easily refused to take her word over that of a white male doctor. I mean why would you? Why would you? Cream walked free. Of course he did.

Fucking hell. Okay. Only a few months later, in December 1880, another young woman named Ellen Stack died after taking medicine that Cream had prescribed.

Instead of laying low or fleeing he tried to turn her death into profit. Cream wrote letters to the pharmacist who had filled the prescription threatening to accuse him of negligence unless money was paid. The pharmacist refused to be blackmailed and went straight to the police.

Again Cream was in the dock but again he walked away scot-free. It's inexplicable. And that was it.

So we know that he wrote the letter. The pharmacist goes to the police and says he said that it's blackmail. At least do him for blackmail.

No. No? Okay good. Bye.

Good. In April of 1881 another young woman Alice Montgomery died suddenly after visiting Cream. Witnesses described her agonizing convulsions and the coroner's jury concluded that she'd been poisoned with strychnine.

The verdict was homicide but the case went nowhere. Without witnesses or direct evidence, I suppose, to tie Cream to the crime, easy for you to say, he wasn't even charged. What? The only real information about this case that I could find in terms of why there wasn't enough evidence was simply a quote that suspicion alone wasn't enough.

Oh my god. Okay. Cream's name was whispered in connection with dead women across Chicago but he still carried himself as a respectable man and a dependable doctor, confident that the courts and system would never pin him down.

And for the most part he was bloody right. Yeah. But it would of course take the death of a man to finally break that pattern.

Yes yes yes. Here we go. By the spring of 1881, Cream had quite the string of ghosts behind him but none of those deaths had put him behind bars.

So far every inquest and jury had let him slip away. That pattern ended in rural Illinois with the death of a farmer named Daniel Stott. Daniel lived with his wife Julia in Boone County, Illinois.

Side note, not a quest, but if you, if like me, Boone County rings a true crime bell in your head, there are several cases that originate or are linked including the 2021 triple homicide of Andrew Hint and his two sons, the 1998 murder of Bernina Matter, which involved a controversial trial focused on sexuality, and the recent 2022 identification of a Jane Doe from decades-old case as Margaret Ann Sengowski, I believe. Okay. And the county also saw charges against elected officials such as county board member Marion Thornberry and county clerk Julie Bliss for theft and misconduct in 2022 and 2025.

Interesting. So Daniel Stott was an older man suffering from epilepsy and in 19, in 1890, oh good god. Daniel Stott was an older man suffering from epilepsy and in 1881, he sought treatment from Dr. Cream, who was by then running his Chicago practice with the swagger of someone who had already bested the authorities several times over.

Cream prescribed Stott medicine and added strychnine to the mix. Of course he did. On the 12th of June, 1881, Stott died in traumatic and agonizing convulsions.

His body twisting with the same violent spasms that would later come to characterize Cream's murders. The local coroner was suspicious and ordered a full post-mortem. When investigators dug deeper, they discovered something very dark.

Cream had been paying Julia Stott far more attention than usual, than would usually be bestowed upon the wife of a patient. They called Julia in and Julia immediately broke and admitted to having an affair with Cream and confessed that Cream had urged her to give Daniel the medicine in the knowledge that it was laced with poison. Oh, it was damning.

And for once, Cream's arrogance had tipped him too far. He was arrested and charged with Daniel Stott's murder. In court, the affair with Julia was laid bare.

The strickening was traced directly to Cream's prescription and the motive, lust and potential financial gain, was exposed. In November of 1881, Thomas Neil Cream was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment at Joliet prison. After years of slipping through the fingers of justice, he was finally behind bars.

Yeah. But it wasn't the end. What can I say? But this is the States.

This is life. Life actually does mean life over there. What's going on? Reports from the time described Cream as aloof and unrepentant inside Joliet, telling fellow prisoners that despite his sentence, his life would not end inside the prison's walls.

And incredibly, he was right. Okay. In 1887, Cream's father died in Canada, leaving him a substantial inheritance.

Okay. With money came influence. And by July of 1891, after just 10 years, Cream was released suddenly.

Officially, it was parole for good behaviour. Unofficially, few doubted that bribes and family connections paved the way for Cream's release. Yeah, exactly.

Sidequest! Yay! Joliet prison. It's hard to picture how a man like Cream could still imagine himself untouchable after a life sentence. It becomes even more unbelievable when you picture where he was sentenced to serve his time.

The place that was meant to hold him forever. Joliet rose out of its own stone. In 1858, Illinois opened the New State Penitentiary on the edge of town, building it with limestone quarried on site with convict labour.

The place soon became notorious. A vast Gothic pile of walls and razor wire. A city within a city, which was already heaving with men packed into small cells.

The regime was meant to be reforming. In reality, it was punishing. Work contracts with local businesses kept prisoners labouring long hours.

Sanitation and heat were basic at best. Discipline was harsh. And the place had a reputation for being both overcrowded and unsanitary well into the 20th century.

So even in 1910, there was no running water or toilets in the cells. Just a kind of measure of how primitive things remained. Joliet also cultivated mythology.

In later decades, it would hold famous names. Leopold and Loeb, the wealthy Chicago students who kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 in what is dubbed the crime of the century. Babyface Nelson, real name Lester Gillis, a Prohibition-era gangster and bank robber who ran with John Dillinger's crew.

Richard Speck, the drifter who brutally murdered eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966 in a crime that shocked the world. John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer and sexual predator executed in 1994 after the murders of at least 33 young men and boys, many of whom he buried beneath his suburban Chicago home. And James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968, was later transferred through Joliet during his prison years.

Fucking hell, those are some big names. All of them passed through Joliet's cells, adding to its dark reputation. And there was also a cultural afterlife.

So from the Blues Brothers movie to the series Prison Break, its looming limestone walls became an icon of American punishment. But in Cream's day, it was simpler and bleaker. Stone, iron, labour and the long, empty stretch of a life sentence.

The fact that he could talk about not dying there and then actually walk out only deepened the prison's grim legend. Today, the old Joliet prison is preserved as a historic site. Its crumbling limestone and echoing cell houses opened to tours that confront visitors with the state's carceral past.

It is a rare intact 19th century penitentiary. Again, easy for you to say. And you can still step inside, a place where the architecture itself tells you what punishment once looked like.

Now, back to Cream. Within weeks of leaving prison, Cream left the States altogether, booking a passage back across the Atlantic. He arrived in England in the autumn of 1891.

Just as a series of deaths began on the streets of Lambeth. Fucking hell, he's not mucking about with his timing, is he? So, there you go. We're back now in 1892.

It's October, again. And we're at the Old Bailey in London. So when Thomas Neil Cream finally faced justice, it was in the grand old theatre of the Old Bailey.

Londoners queued for places in the gallery. This was a city still haunted by the memory of Jack the Ripper, and now another nameless terror, the Lambeth Poisoner, was finally on trial. The newspapers promised a spectacle.

A doctor in the dock, women dead in their beds, letters that taunted the great and good. The indictment was stark. Four murders, Ellen Donworth, Matilda Clover, Alice Marsh, Alice March, sorry, and Emma Shrivell.

One attempted murder, Louise or Lou Harvey, and around those names was woven a web of these anonymous letters, chemical bottles, and neighbours' testimony. The prosecution opened with the letters. Those arrogant notes sent to the coroner, to MPs, to physicians, all dripping with threats and self-importance.

In one, the writer claimed that Clover had been poisoned, although officially her death had been recorded as natural causes. How could any outsider have known that unless they were the killer? That was the Crown's argument. The pen that wrote those words was the same hand that tipped out strychnine into tiny white capsules.

Then came Lou Harvey, the one that escaped. She told the jury how a man calling himself Dr Neil pressed two capsules into her hand and urged her to swallow them on the spot. She pretended to, pocketed them instead, and later threw them away.

Her quiet confidence in the witness box gave the court something it rarely had in a poisoning case, a living voice describing exactly how death had been offered to her. Neighbours and doctors followed, describing the agonies of Alice and Emma, two women dead side by side in their lodging house, their bodies locked in the unmistakable spasms of strychnine poisoning. It was impossible to dismiss as natural causes or misadventure.

Medical men explained the limits of Victorian toxicology, but still the pattern was plain. The bodies showed traces consistent with strychnine. Witnesses placed cream in their company.

Chemists' records showed he had obtained the drug. When police searched his rooms, they found bottles and powders that matched everything together. And then, perhaps really, although it should be Lou, but perhaps most damning of all, came the American tourist John Haynes.

Over drinks, cream had pointed out the very houses where the victims had lived. He had spoken of the murders with the confidence of an insider. Haynes, who had once been a New York policeman, had recognised boasting from a criminal when he heard it, and he carried those suspicions straight to Scotland Yard and reiterated them loudly in the Old Bailey.

The defence tried to chip away at the case. They suggested mistaken identity. After all, London streets were crowded and gaslight could play tricks.

They argued that toxicology was not an exact science. They claimed the letters could have been written by anyone with a cruel imagination. But the weight of it all, the survivor, the science, the letters, the boasts, they pressed down hard.

When Mr Justice Hawkins summed up, his words were sharp and final. Circumstances, yes, but circumstances that fitted together with the precision of a lock and key. The jury retired, but it didn't take them long to return.

Guilty, the verdict rang out. And for once, the headlines that rushed through Fleet Street carried something more than speculation. The Lambeth poisoner had been unmasked, tried and convicted.

Sentence of death was passed. For the families of Donworth, Clover, Marsh and Shrivell, there was at least the recognition that their daughters and sisters had been murdered, not forgotten as victims of drink or misfortune. For Lou Harvey, the one who lived, there was the grim vindication of knowing her refusal to swallow those capsules had helped to bring a killer to the gallows.

And for Thomas Neil Cream, there was only one journey left, to the scaffold. On the morning of the 15th of November, 1892, the crowd gathered outside the Newgate prison. Executions had long since ceased to be public, but the ritual still grew a restless audience to the prison gates.

Reporters jostled for position, eager to carry every last detail of the Lambeth poisoner's final moments into the evening editions. Inside, the hangman James Billington prepared the trap. Cream had spent his last days in the condemned cell, aloof as ever, seemingly still convinced of his own cleverness.

He had spoken little of repentance and had said nothing at all of guilt. When the chaplain came to him, he brushed him aside. At a little after nine o'clock, the doors opened and Cream was led out.

A black hood was pulled over his head. Billington adjusted the noose, checked the rope and gave the signal. What happened in those final seconds is the part that kept his name alive.

As the bolt was drawn and the trap cave way, Cream's last words were interrupted by the drop. Several witnesses swore they heard him say, I am Jack. And then his voice was cut short by the rope.

For the press, it was just too tantalising to resist. Had he been about to confess that he was Jack the Ripper? The idea surged through the newspapers within hours. London, still obsessed with the Whitechapel murders, suddenly had a crossover between two of its most notorious killers.

Some swore that Billington himself confirmed it, claiming that Cream's final words were exactly that. I am Jack, but others dismissed it as fantasy. Cream had been in Joliet prison in the United States during the Ripper's murders.

Unless he had a double walking the gas-lit alleys of Whitechapel, he could not have been the knife-wielding phantom of 1888. More likely, said the sceptics, the witnesses heard what they wanted to hear, or the newspapers had embroidered the truth for the sake of a sensational headline. Or he just decided, this is my final parting gift to you.

Yeah, exactly. Either way, it cemented the myth. Cream was hanged as the Lambeth Poisoner, but in death, his name was forever tied to the spectre of Jack the Ripper.

And he is mentioned all the time. So many references I got about this case are from Jack the Ripper sites. Oh, really? It cannot have been him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. So, as the rope snapped taut, one of London's strangest murder stories came to an end.

The man who slipped across continents, whose poison had left a trail of women from Quebec to Chicago to Lambeth, finally ran out of luck. His body was cut down and buried in the prison yard unmarked. The Ripper connection would echo for decades, but for the families of Nellie, Matilda, Alice and Emma, the headlines mattered less than the fact the man who poisoned their loved ones had been stopped.

For Lambeth, it was the end of a nightmare. Though like all nightmares, it left shadows behind. The end.

Mate, that was brilliant. It's quite epic as a story. Yeah, it's like I was gripped the whole conversation.

Mate, that was genuinely an awesome episode. I was on tenterhooks. I was sitting there being like, I don't know this.

What happens now? How has he ended up in Chicago? What's happening? It's absolutely insane, isn't it? It's a proper, like, that's one of the ones that I'm like, oh, enduring his like, you know, crimes of the century. A hundred percent. That's one of them.

No, mate, that was really... Nasty bastard. Yeah. What an arrogant bastard.

I'm like, I'm going to write to WH Smith and be like, you did it actually. That's what I don't get. Like, so he's blackmailing other people.

He's trying to. Yeah, to be like, oh, I'm going to say that you did this. But you've had absolutely nothing to do with any of it.

Like, I kind of get the letter to the pharmacist. Yeah, that's pure blackmail, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And it's also, there's probably like linkage.

But it's still like, where things are so new, like where toxicology isn't like as robust and stuff. I think if you just kept the mouth shut. Yeah.

A lot of suspicion would have just gone past him anyway. Yeah, true. But I think, yeah, because it's fascinating because you think... The fact you couldn't shut up about it.

Oh, well, I mean, that's part of the thing with serial killers, isn't it? Like, they have to be, there's some part of them that wants that notoriety, even if they're trying to hide it. But yeah, like, so with the pharmacist, you can kind of go, oh, OK, well, she will have had a prescription filled. And the pharmacy is where she got that from.

So yeah, that could be a potential good other suspect. Yeah, I could see that. Mr. WH Smiths.

Like, oh, by the way, could you just for a moment stop with your stationary business? Go and find a sex worker and give her some strychnine. Like, what? Yeah, also strychnine, not pleasant drug. No, awful.

No, awful, awful. And like some of the etchings from the newspaper reports, like, horrific. Oh, God.

Absolutely horrific. So we've done, how many poisons have we done on this podcast now? We've done some, we've done strychnine. We've done arsenic.

Who did arsenic? I feel like we must have done arsenic. I can't remember. You know, once I've done a case, it leaves my brain and I've never heard of it.

It's true. I'm trying to think, I can't remember what. Um, yeah, there's lots of poisons.

I'll figure it out. But we've done a few. I feel like there should be a little tally.

See if we can, what's the next poison we can get? There you go. Into the, so if any South London criminals are listening, there's a few poisons we don't have on our bingo card. Also, what I found quite interesting was when you were talking about the lady in, was it in Quebec? The lady who was found in the outhouse.

Yeah. So very similar to the case. I'm still waiting on Kew Gardens to come back to Harriet Monkton.

So she was, spoiler alert, because I don't know that I'm ever going to actually find some real info on this case. I'm, as I say, waiting for the archives to get back to me. They've taken my money and haven't bloody given me any of their searches yet.

But yeah, Harriet Monkton was a Victorian lady in Bromley who was found in an outhouse. Also with child. Poisoned by strychnine.

And was it in the AT? Nineties. So poisoned. No, I don't think she was poisoned.

I need to double check it again because the story says one thing and I don't know if that was real or not. But, but yeah, definitely pregnant lady in an outhouse. Just sort of flashed into my brain when you were saying that.

It's quite interesting. And yeah, the Jack the Ripper style. I know, it's hilarious.

Your face when I was like, side quest, Jack the Ripper. I was like, ah. As if.

I mean, like, it's. I look, OK, I get that Jack the Ripper is boring, right? Everyone's done Jack the Ripper. Everyone like, you know, it's been done to death.

I agree. There is still a part of me that is a bit like, sensational. And I don't know if that is.

Because it is sensational. It's gory. It's got so much folklore around it.

It's got so much like, you know, do we know who it was? Will we ever know who it was? I mean, they think they know now, don't they? Yeah, I think so. I never know. I still kind of am one of those where I'm like, well, actually give me the knife in his hand and then I'll believe you.

Like, but yeah, it is quite interesting. The whole like. He's just he's just a Victorian troll.

That's what I think it is. I reckon he did say it. I reckon that.

But I reckon it was entirely planned. Oh God, yeah, I think he was just like, fuck it. I mean, why not? Keep my name alive.

Exactly, right? That's it. Yeah. The arrogance of the man.

Like, it doesn't surprise me in any way. Yeah, it's going to be. I know how to keep my name in the papers.

Yeah, but it's a bit like with the whole. It's like the reverse H.H. Holmes. So H.H. Holmes came to London and possibly may have been in London around similar times to Jack the Ripper, but he definitely wasn't and he wasn't an American.

I feel very strongly about this. Like, you've got enough of your own. Leave our notorious ones to us, please.

Thank you. But yeah, I do love the fact that it's like, no, you were incarcerated. Yeah, you were literally in prison across the Atlantic, mate.

I know that our police forces can make some wild jumps sometimes and you're like, how the fuck did that end up happening? But that one is far fetched even for. Yeah, yeah. By anyone's book.

Yeah, we'll kind of. You're sorry, mate. I mean, it was a good last attempt at being infamous.

A last hurrah. I mean, although I do think that's a little bit sad that it's like, you know. What he did was horrific.

Awful. And yet, yeah, it's like, oh. And there's still no justice for the fact that he was hanged.

Yeah. But there's the family of women across America and Canada. Yeah.

That didn't get convictions. Yeah, and it is mad that he didn't like, I know circumstantial evidence is circumstantial evidence, but surely in the Victorian times, that's all you bloody well had. Like, what else are we expecting? And it was like that poor midwife who was literally there being like, I bloody watched him kill her.

Yeah. By the way. Yeah, but we can't trust.

He poisoned her, by the way. I was there. Yeah, but we can't trust her because she's a woman and she's black.

So, I mean, this is a white man telling us that he didn't. So, oops. Fucking hell.

Oh, well, honestly, mate, well done. That was a really well told, very well researched case. Thank you, yeah.

And it was very much like my little geeky historian was sitting and going like. I thought you might like it. And then what? And then what? And then what? And also, as much as it was horrific, everything that he did, there's something slightly, but by having the passage of time.

Yes. You can kind of. I think I needed that after the last few.

I was going to say, you've had some dark ones. I always feel quite guilty when I take a historical one from the list because I'm like, she's, she's the historical one. She owns them.

I do the dead baby. It's nice to have one told to you. I always then feel the need to make them pretty.

Like, I try and make all of them good, but like to really like how I know it'll entertain you. And to be fair, it's done exactly that. And it's one of those ones.

You're just lucky I didn't put a side question about Thames River mud from the embankment. Well, but I know you've got another one coming up that maybe you could do. Guys, I'm going to be talking about slag again.

But you know what? The numbers have dipped. We need it. I'm re-recording The Martianess.

Although I'm not going to lie. That is, it's very serendipitous. Like, how is it? I know, but I didn't even clock until you said it.

And I was like, oh yeah. Oh dear. Right.

Well, after all that, I know we've already done the nice bits, but we'll do them again. Time for the nice bits. We have a website that you can go and find out a bit more info on some of these cases.

If Rachel's got her arse in gear and put the info up. That is SinisterSouthPod.co.uk. Then we've got the Instagram and the TikTok, which are Sinister South Pod. Floating heads will come back at some point when life is less busy.

I love the look you just gave me then. Put that sad music bed back in. And then we've got the... She was too busy for me.

She was even too busy for you, Trevors. Boycott her episodes. Please don't.

I've got a fun one. I've got a fun one coming up. She needs to learn her lesson.

But that won't just impact me. I know, I'm joking. Please don't do this.

You want to be a famous podcaster. I really need to quit some of these jobs that I've got. Please, please, please, please.

We've got an email address, which is SinisterSouthPodcast at gmail.com, where you can go drop us a line. We haven't had any little things through on that recently, have we? Only the big thing. Only the big thing.

Yeah, we've had the big thing. We'll talk about at some point when we've figured that one out. Can we be any more cryptic? Probably.

What else have we got? We've got the Patreon, which we'll get to in a second. We've got the Facebook group by the Temperamental Lou, where you can go and have a chin wag. Hannah is now on there.

I am. If anyone wants to go and actually chat to Hannah. I'm actually there.

I occasionally even look at it. Yeah, you loitered for a while. I did some big loitering.

Yeah. And then I was like, right, I don't have to loiter for a while again now. I will loiter again in a minute.

And then, yes, we have the Patreon, which is SinisterSouthPod again. And for £5 and up, you get your extra mini episode, which the October one will be going live today, Monday the 13th. I'm going to get it done this evening.

So it will be there. Wow. And then we will also, if you're £10 and up, you're going to have a special new episode that will be landing in your ear holes.

Feed at some point, which we have. I've started writing a couple of episodes for, which is Sinister Stories. So if you fancy hearing more from us that may not be, more than likely won't be.

They definitely aren't. Based in South East London. Mine aren't anyway.

I don't know if I've missed a memo. No. Well, I think that's going to be where we talk about just stuff that we find that's interesting.

Yeah. So if anyone wants that, it's £10 and up over on Patreon. So you'll get that coming to you very, very soon.

And we will backdate a few episodes so you get a nice little back catalogue because a few of you have been paying £10 a month and you haven't had that second episode. Getting sweeter from us. So we apologise and we will give you multiple.

Is there anything else? Don't think so. Don't think so. I think that's about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, on that note, once again, happy birthday to Mr Richard. Happy birthday.

For yesterday. And I suppose that'll be it. That'll do you.

Until next week. See you next week, kids. Perfect.

We love you lots and we'll speak to you soon. I love you. Goodbye.

Bye bye.