Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (19 page)

Oddie had a high opinion of his opponent, describing him as ‘a human phenomenon. His vitality was only equalled by his extraordinary brain-power.’
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Arthur Newton had wished to brief Smith for Crippen’s defence, but F. E., who would later have the reputation of being ‘the cleverest man in the kingdom’, had enough foresight to see the inevitable outcome of that trial. He pointed out that as Crippen and Le Neve would be tried separately, it would be necessary to employ separate counsel and shrewdly opted to defend Le Neve, preferring the likelihood of a small victory to a great defeat.
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Smith viewed Le Neve as ‘an easy victim. She came from the lower middle classes; Crippen was her superior, and in her eyes a man of great education and position. She was young, a gentle, affectionate girl, not unattractive, though anaemic and liable to neuralgia. Sent out into the world at a tender age, condemned to earn her living in a monotonous avocation and to spend her leisure in drab, uninteresting lodgings, it is not surprising that the opportunity offered by Crippen to this soft and ductile young woman proved a temptation which she could not resist.’
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Richard Muir opened the trial by explaining that Le Neve was charged ‘in effect, with assisting Hawley Harvey Crippen to escape from justice at a time when she knew that he had been guilty of the murder of his wife’. There was no question on either side that Crippen had been rightly convicted of the murder. Muir elaborated what the prosecution aimed to prove:

What was the state of knowledge that prisoner had, and what was her intention with regard to the acts which she undoubtedly committed. Guilty knowledge and guilty intention are issues in this case, and upon such issues a jury can rarely have direct evidence at all. It hardly ever happens that the state of a person’s mind can be judged by anything but that person’s actions, and, therefore, you will look at the facts in this case with a view to discovering what was the knowledge of the prisoner at the time that the acts in question were done, and what was her intention with regard to the acts which she herself did.

According to Muir, a vital point in the case was Le Neve’s behaviour around the time of Cora Crippen’s death. Le Neve had been lodging with Emily Jackson in Camden Town since September 1908 and the pair enjoyed a close relationship. In correspondence Le Neve called Jackson ‘My dearest Mum’ and ‘My dear Ma’.

In an earlier statement, Jackson had given some details about her life with Le Neve. About two weeks after Le Neve had moved in she had suffered a fourth-month miscarriage. Jackson ‘never saw the baby’ but heard Le Neve tell the doctor present she had been to the lavatory and ‘felt something come from her’. She refused to say who the father had been.

Around the end of January or the beginning of February 1910, Le Neve was in a depressed state. She pulled and clawed at her hair, ‘looked straight ahead into a recess in the corner of the room and shuddered violently’. Soon afterwards ‘she came home one night more pleasant than I have ever seen her, and said “Somebody has gone to America”.’ Le Neve started to spend nights at Hilldrop Crescent and in late February she told Jackson that she had married Crippen. On 12 March Dr Crippen picked her up in a cab and they first went to a pub with Emily and her husband where they drank a quart bottle of champagne that Crippen bought. She then moved in permanently with Crippen.

Muir presented his case:

Mrs Jackson says that about January last prisoner began to look ill and troubled, and that one night towards the end of January, or in the beginning of February – she did not fix any date – prisoner came home very ill. She would take no supper, and went to bed. Her appearance, according to Mrs Jackson’s description, was the appearance of somebody who had suffered a great shock, who was stricken with horror at something that had happened. Prisoner was asked for an explanation, but little or none was forthcoming that night. The next morning, again, this young woman was in the same condition. She was practically unable to eat her breakfast, and her condition was such that Mrs Jackson saw she was quite unfit to go to her work as a typist, and persuaded her to remain at home.
    That was no ordinary illness. It was something which seemed to strike the prisoner with horror. Whatever it may have been, it was contemporaneous, or nearly contemporaneous, with the murder of Mrs Crippen. This is a fact which cannot be disputed.

Muir told the jury that they would have to decide what caused Le Neve’s distressed state. He obviously wanted them to think that it was the knowledge of Cora’s murder. Le Neve’s troubled state was soon replaced with cheerfulness:

She says that ‘the doctor’ has promised to marry her. She comes home wearing Mrs Crippen’s clothes and jewels, and makes presents to Mrs Jackson of enormous quantities of clothing that Mrs Crippen had left behind her. She says that Mrs Crippen has gone to America, and she and Crippen visit Mrs Jackson on more than one occasion. She also had the knowledge that Crippen for a large sum of money had been pawning some of Mrs Crippen’s jewellery. You must ask yourselves, ‘What is the explanation of this?’ Is it likely that any woman would suppose that the wife was going away from the husband leaving behind her furs, jewels, and everything practically that she had in the world, to be worn by any woman to whom Crippen liked to give them?
    According to the prisoner, Crippen never told her, so far as she could remember, whether Mrs Crippen was coming back or not. But immediately she began to wear Mrs Crippen’s jewels and go out in public in them – wearing the brooch at a dinner and ball of the Music Hall Artistes’ Benevolent Fund, a place where all Mrs Crippen’s friends would be gathered together. You will have to ask yourselves whether there was not in her mind such knowledge that Mrs Crippen would never come back as this indictment imputes to her, otherwise she never would have gone about with Mrs Crippen’s husband, wear Mrs Crippen’s clothes and jewels, and give away some of Mrs Crippen’s clothing to friends.

When it came to the Atlantic flight,

What was it the prisoner knew which induced her to cut off her hair and masquerade as a boy, and condemn herself practically to perpetual silence, because she dare not speak in public in the hearing of any person lest her voice should betray her? The explanation which lies on the surface of those facts is that the prisoner knew that Crippen was flying from justice for the murder of his wife. What other explanation is there? Absolutely none.

Emily Jackson was called to the witness box where she gave her account of Le Neve’s strange behaviour around the end of January 1910:

During the latter part of January I observed that there was something strange about Miss Le Neve’s manner. She became very miserable and depressed. Upon one occasion in the latter part of January Miss Le Neve came home looking very tired and strange. She was greatly agitated and went to bed without supper. I went into the bedroom after her. I could see that her whole body was trembling, and that she was in a terrible state. I asked her what was the matter, but she did not seem to have the strength to speak. I asked her again, and she said she would be all right in the morning.
    I said to her that I was sure there was something dreadful on her mind, and that if she did not relieve her mind she would go absolutely mad. She said, ‘I will tell you the whole story presently.’ A little while afterwards she said, ‘Would you be surprised if I told you it is the doctor?’ I said, ‘What do you mean; do you mean he was the cause of your trouble when I first saw you?’ [i.e. the miscarriage]. She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Why worry about that; it is past and gone?’ She burst into tears again, and said, ‘It is Miss Elmore.’ Up to that time I had never heard the name of Miss Elmore in my life. I wondered what she meant, and asked her, and she said, ‘She is his wife, you know. When I see them go away together it makes me realise what my position is.’ I said, ‘My dear girl, what is the use of worrying about another woman’s husband?’ and she said, ‘She has been threatening to go away with another man, and that is all we are waiting for, and when she does that the doctor is going to divorce her and marry me.’

Crippen was telling Le Neve the same story he told Dew; that Cora was going to run off with Bruce Miller. Le Neve repeated it to her sister, Adine Brock, who recounted that Cora ‘was always nagging him and some man in America wanted her (Mrs Crippen) and if she went away from him he would get a divorce and would marry my sister’. It is another contentious assertion for which Crippen is the only source. Had Crippen genuinely believed it, or was it a yarn he was spinning to appease Le Neve, who clearly wanted marriage, as she had been wearing a ring and telling people she was married? Could it be that Le Neve was tired of waiting for Cora to leave and had given Crippen an ultimatum that led him to kill Cora?

F. E. was so confident that the Crown’s case against Le Neve was groundless he announced to the Court that he did not propose to call any evidence for the defence. He knew that it was up to Muir to prove that Le Neve was guilty and not for him to argue her innocence. Smith undermined the prosecution’s case when he cross-examined Emily Jackson. He established that Le Neve was frequently ill, and that the illness Muir had referred to actually took place at the beginning of January 1910, well before Cora Crippen’s disappearance.

Muir proceeded with the Crown’s closing speech. He reminded the jury of Le Neve’s behaviour at Emily Jackson’s house and her flight under a false name. Then he said, ‘Le Neve was arrested on 31st July. She was told of the charge made against her – the charge of murder, and the charge of being accessory after the fact. She made no reply. On 21st August on her way home she was told the charge, and made no reply. On 27th August, at Bow Street police station she was told of the charge, and made no reply; and when committed for trial, with every opportunity for making a statement she made none.’

Then Smith made the closing speech for Le Neve’s defence. He put forward the suggestion that Le Neve was a naïve innocent who fell under Crippen’s spell: ‘What was the misfortune of this girl, little more than a child, when it became necessary for her to earn her living? She had the extreme misfortune to come across the path, at the age of seventeen, of one of the most dangerous and remarkable men who have lived in this century; a man to whom in the whole history of psychology of crime a high place must be given as a compelling and masterful personality.’

Smith attributed the Atlantic flight to the fact that ‘Crippen had acquired this enormous power over her, and she was utterly ignorant of the laws of England. She was confronted with the problem as to whether she would stay in England or go with him.’

He criticised Muir’s suggestion that Le Neve knew of the murder:

My learned friend’s case is really this – that Crippen would say to Le Neve, ‘This is how I treated the woman who last shared my home, and I invite you to come and share it with me now.’ Does any one believe that the girl went back to live at Hilldrop Crescent towards the end of February, the month that this murder was committed – went to live in this house knowing that its last tenant had been murdered by the man she was going to live with?

Lord Alverstone was again the presiding judge. In his summing up he told the jury, ‘The only matter upon which you have to concentrate your attention is, “Did Ethel Le Neve know when she fled with Crippen that Crippen was a murderer and had murdered his wife?”’ Among the things that they had to consider were

what is the probability of this scoundrel having told her. So far as the evidence is concerned, it stands this way. When he was arrested he said, ‘It is only fair to say she knows nothing about it. I never told her anything.’ It is perfectly plain that that was a most serious statement so far as he was concerned. There is no secret about it. Crippen was most seriously cross-examined upon it, and he was asked to what it could refer except his wicked deed towards his wife.
    The fact of this woman living with him and going with him to Dieppe, wicked and immoral as it is, is not evidence that he told her he committed the murder.
    Upon that part of the case you are entitled to take into consideration what Mr Smith has said to you about her being gentle, sympathetic, and loving and affectionate towards Crippen. If he had told her, not only might it have been dangerous to himself, but do you not think that it might have changed her feelings towards him?

The jury took twenty minutes to find Ethel Le Neve not guilty. She was immediately liberated. Cecil Mercer said F. E.’s summing up was ‘a lovely speech’ but added, a little ungraciously, ‘Any one could have got her off.’
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Dew thought the outcome was correct and ‘felt satisfied that justice had been done. Poor Miss Le Neve had suffered enough. Her association with Crippen had cost her many weeks of mental torture and doubt.’
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After the trial Lord Alverstone said to Smith, ‘I think you ought to have put her in the box.’ Smith enigmatically replied, ‘No. I knew what she would say. You did not.’
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Smith had been convinced throughout of Le Neve’s innocence. ‘Frail she was, and of submissive temperament, but not an accomplice in murder, or an ally in its concealment.’
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Smith never changed his view of Le Neve’s innocence. In his account of her trial, written years later, he wrote,

I am convinced that she was innocent in every sense of the word. I had the advantage of a close study of the case, including a great deal that was never in evidence.
    She was a girl whose character for truthfulness had never been questioned. She denied all knowledge of the crime, and I am convinced that she told the truth … I was told that after the trial she left for America. But I never heard of her again.
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Smith’s assessment of Crippen was that he had been guilty of ‘a murder callous, calculated, cold-blooded, a murder which I say, in the whole annals of crime it would be hard to match for cold-blooded deliberation,’ but ‘he was at least a brave man and a true lover’.
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Dew agreed, saying, ‘Whatever may be said and thought about Crippen, one can only admire his attitude towards the girl who had shared his great adventure.’
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