Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (11 page)

Dew obtained a bottle of champagne that restored Le Neve immediately. Crippen ‘was like a dog in his gratitude. He could scarcely have expressed greater pleasure had I told him that he could go free.’
⁸
Le Neve would later reveal that Dew also became seasick during some rough weather near Ireland. She found Dew’s manner very paternal and she and Crippen referred to him as ‘father’.
⁹

Crippen never showed the slightest indication that he might lose his nerve as the ship neared England. Dew did not even notice any sign of depression, which might have been expected:

His nerves must have been made of iron. Except that he was under constant supervision and was handcuffed when he was taken out for exercise, he lived the life of a normal passenger.
    He mystified me. He seemed quite happy. He gave no trouble, and never once tried the patience of Sergeant Mitchell or myself.
    The impression he gave me was that of a man with a mind completely at rest. Most of his time he spent reading. I used to fetch his books myself from the ship’s library, being careful, of course, never to get him one with a crime or murder plot. He loved novels, especially those with a strong love interest.
¹⁰

Sergeant Mitchell also found Crippen an easy prisoner to deal with. ‘He chatted with me from time to time on various matters,’ Mitchell recalled, adding that throughout the voyage Crippen ‘seemed quite bright + jolly’.

Inspector Dew kept a close watch on Crippen during the return voyage, and several times saw his prisoner stripped. To his surprise the diminutive Crippen was strongly built, and Dew was relieved that his prisoner was so well behaved. He later told barrister Cecil Mercer, ‘Well, I’m a much heavier man, but I should have been very sorry to have had to take Crippen on.’
¹¹

Crippen never mentioned his wife, and never showed any animosity towards his captor. Dew was often asked in later years why he treated Crippen with such kindness after his arrest. He did not consider that he had shown Crippen any more consideration than he had hundreds of other prisoners throughout his career. He thought that it was his duty to consider a prisoner innocent until they appeared before the proper tribunal and were found guilty. Despite this, Dew had ‘never entertained a doubt as to his guilt’.
¹²

Dew also spent a lot of time during the return voyage with Ethel Le Neve, who had fully recovered after the initial shock of her arrest. He made frequent daily visits to her cabin to see if there was anything she wanted. Dew found her almost as calm and collected as Crippen. Le Neve showed great composure throughout the journey. Dew thought this was because she had a clear conscience and ‘her fortitude was born of the knowledge of her own innocence and her faith in the integrity of the British Justice to which she was being surrendered’.
¹³

Le Neve allegedly caused Dew a few problems on the return voyage. The detective told Cecil Mercer that, while Crippen was pining for her in his cabin on the opposite side of the ship, she was enjoying herself, joking and flirting with the ship’s crew. In the end Dew had to move Le Neve to a less accessible cabin.
¹⁴

Bernard Grant, a
Daily Mirror
photographer who had managed to obtain a berth on the
Megantic
, observed that the security around Crippen and Le Neve was very tight. Although both prisoners were allowed to choose their meals from the first-class saloon menu, the food arrived cut up. Steel knives were forbidden and the cords and tapes from the nearby lifeboats were removed, as was the wire on the electric ventilating fans, to prevent suicide attempts.

Each evening after dinner Crippen and Le Neve were taken separately to the top deck for exercise. This only took place once the deck had been cleared and all doors leading to it locked. A steward remained on duty outside the cabins at all times, while Sergeant Mitchell slept in Crippen’s cabin and the junior wardress slept in Le Neve’s. Dew would padlock the cabins at night.
¹⁵

Grant, who had no luck when trying to interview Dew in Canada, hoped his resolve might weaken on the return voyage, but to no avail. Dew ‘shut up like an oyster’ whenever Grant mentioned the prisoners, and the journalist contented himself with convivial walks and deck games with the tight-lipped sleuth.
¹⁶

On 24 August Dew took a handcuffed Crippen on to the deck to allow him some exercise. The prisoner asked Dew for ‘a favour but I will leave it for Friday’. Dew told Crippen that he could give an answer then and there as well as he could on Friday so Crippen explained his request. ‘When you took me off the ship I did not see Miss Le Neve. I don’t know how things will go, they may go all right or they may go all wrong with me. I may never see her again and I want to ask you if you will let me see her – but I won’t speak to her. She has been my only comfort for the last three years.’ Dew considered the request to be a ‘delicate matter’, but did allow him to see, but not talk to her, on a train from Liverpool to London after the boat had docked.

Unknown to Le Neve at the time, she had now become the subject of a series of articles in the newspaper
Answers
, which began to appear as the
Megantic
neared Liverpool. The author was none other than her father Walter Neave. He believed his daughter was innocent, but wanted to give a more in-depth account of her life in order to finance any legal bills that were bound to start accumulating.
¹⁷

As the
Megantic
approached the Liverpool landing stage, the waiting crowds spotted Dew on the deck, smoking a cigar and chatting with Inspector Duckworth of the Liverpool police, who had gone out in a boat to meet him. The sight of Dew indicated that Crippen and Le Neve were still aboard and they had not been surreptitiously landed already. The crowd thought that Dew would not emerge with his prisoners until late in the afternoon, but when a military and civic reception began to welcome the disembarking Canadian passengers and members of the Queen’s Own Rifles, Dew rushed Crippen and Le Neve down the gangway, surrounded by police officers. One newspaper described it as, ‘a very neatly contrived manoeuvre’.
¹⁸
The representative of the
Liverpool Courier
managed to get close enough to observe Crippen’s pale, thin face and the stubbly growth of a sandy moustache.
¹⁹

Dew was happy to be back in England. Not only had he dramatically captured Crippen and Le Neve, he had left behind the American journalists and was reunited with the English media, who reported,

His [Dew’s] comments on the methods of the American journalists with whom he came in contact were highly amusing, and there was no little feeling in his tone when he remarked, ‘It is quite a pleasure to meet English Pressmen, for they are gentlemen.’
²⁰

The train carrying Crippen and Le Neve from Liverpool arrived at London’s Euston station, where Crippen was greeted by boos and jeers from a waiting crowd who loathed him as much as the Canadian public. He and Le Neve were whisked off to Bow Street police court for two nights, until the Monday sitting of the court, when they were to appear before magistrate Robert Marsham, whom Dew described as ‘a giant of a man with a ruddy face and an old-fashioned style of dress which gave him the appearance of a prosperous farmer. One of the finest gentlemen I have ever met.’
²¹

Melville Macnaghten was hugely relieved. He later admitted to the journalist and crime writer Hargrave Adam how close Crippen had come to getting away with murder:

We had practically ‘pigeonholed’ the case. Officers had twice or three times been through Crippen’s house without finding the slightest clue to go upon. There was nothing really in the attitude of Crippen himself to arouse suspicion. He placed no obstacles in the way of the police, in fact he actually helped them in their search of the house. Then when the thing was beginning to be regarded by us as ‘disposed of’ the man suddenly decamps! Well, of course that did it! It reopened the case, and at once gave us the impression that there really was something in that house. But if he’d had the pluck to have taken a long lease of his house instead of decamping, he would probably be alive to-day and the mystery of the disappearance of Belle Elmore an unsolved one!
²²

Macnaghten added that fleeing with Le Neve had been his downfall because ‘if he had gone away alone he might have baffled the police, for he was a man of the world and knew his way about it’.
²³
Had Crippen done that, it would then have been the fate of another criminal to become the first murderer to be captured thanks to wireless telegraph and gain the lasting notoriety associated with it.

…when she thought of the dreadful wickedness of that little American doctor who dismembered his wife the tears actually came into her eyes.

George Orwell,
Coming Up For Air

Arthur Newton was a well-known figure in legal circles. Barrister Travers Humphreys described him as ‘a public school boy, very good-looking, with a charming manner and considerable gifts of advocacy based upon an extensive knowledge of the world rather than a knowledge of law’.
¹
He added that Newton possessed a ‘scheming brain’, and usually got what he wanted ‘by fair means or otherwise’.
²

Newton had been avidly following the story of the North London cellar murder in the newspapers when he realised that the missing suspect was a former client. Crippen had failed to make much of an impression on Newton back in 1906. Newton remembered him as a, ‘short, insignificant figure, with weak, goggly eyes, protected by gold-rimmed glasses, and a rather hesitating manner’.
³

As a lawyer Newton was naturally familiar with the Bow Street police court where he was reunited with his client. Being a somewhat unscrupulous character, he had a more intimate knowledge of that establishment than most. In 1890 he had been tried there on charges of conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. Newton had attempted to prevent three telegraph boys from testifying that Lord Arthur Somerset had committed acts of gross indecency with them at a male brothel in Cleveland Street, London. He was ultimately sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment.
⁴
‘God knows what he was paid to do it,’ said Cecil Mercer, who marvelled that Newton had avoided being struck off as a solicitor. ‘But he was a gentleman, and you couldn’t help liking him,’ conceded Mercer, who hinted that Newton was not above blackmailing police officers to get his way.
⁵

One of Newton’s clerks later explained how Newton had secured Crippen as a client, his less-than-pure motives for doing so and how he raised the money to pay for Crippen’s defence:

Quite simply he ‘captured’ Crippen as a professional speculation. It would have been worth taking on a case of this kind for its publicity value alone. Newton saw his way to get the publicity and the money, too.
    Newton arranged with a friend to cable Crippen to the effect that one who believed in his innocence was prepared if necessary to finance his defence.

Once Crippen had been snared, Newton set about raising money. He first obtained Crippen’s permission to dispose of the contents of his house. Then he took a number of newspapers to court for statements they had made about the case that Newton could construe as contempt of court. Newton was paid costs in the successful prosecutions as he had bought the matter before the court. This still wasn’t enough, so he took advantage of the great interest the case was attracting in America and accepted a payment of £1,000 from an American consortium. In return for their investment Crippen would undertake a two-month long lecture tour in America, if he was acquitted.
⁶

Newton’s client had aged markedly. The first words Crippen said to him were, ‘I want you thoroughly to understand, Mr Newton, that my first anxiety is for Miss Le Neve. She is dearer to me than anything in the world, and, if it becomes necessary, I would sacrifice myself to save her. She knew nothing whatever about the matter.’ Newton replied, ‘I am assuming, Dr Crippen, that you are quite innocent.’ Crippen responded, ‘Certainly. But don’t forget, whatever happens, your first thought is to be for Miss Le Neve.’ Newton went to see Le Neve, whose appearance came as a disappointment, for ‘she was not a beautiful woman, and I could see nothing in her to account for her strong hold on the affections of Crippen. She completely convinced me that she knew nothing, and that she believed that Belle Elmore had gone to America, as Crippen had told her.’
⁷

A crowd numbering hundreds had gathered outside the court, many of them women and young girls. Only a handful managed to gain entrance, as the court was small and lacked a public gallery. The spectators had to stand behind a barrier at the back of the courtroom. Dew was amazed at the crowds the case attracted everywhere, commenting, ‘No other murderer’s personality has been quite so magnetic as that of Dr Crippen.’
⁸

The prisoners entered. A journalist observed,

There emerged a graceful, erect girl in dark-blue costume, with spreading dark-blue hat, her face half hidden in a motor veil of lighter hue. Behind her walked a plump-faced little man in a grey frock-coat rather too large for him. The man’s big protuberant eyes were emphasised by an almost total lack of brows; and a very little nose and half-grown moustache, a fleshy little chin, a wide, upright forehead, and only sufficient hair to indicate a parting in the middle … it was the vivacity of his face that made up his personality. The portraits of him which had been printed in the papers with his spectacles and severe aspect made him somewhat wooden. In real life, he carried the message of thoughtfulness, apprehension, sensitiveness. One would never have thought that he was a cold-blooded murderer. You could see the innate gentleness of the man as you looked at him.
⁹

This initial hearing was a formality in order to have Crippen and Le Neve remanded until a later date. Travers Humphreys, representing the Director of Public Prosecutions, asked Mr Marsham if he would adjourn the hearing for eight days, to which he readily consented. Humphreys also pointed out that the likelihood was that Ethel Le Neve would only be charged as being an accessory after the fact.