Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (21 page)

About my unhappy relations with Belle Elmore I will say nothing. We drifted apart in sympathy; she had her own friends and pleasures, and I was rather a lonely man and rather miserable. Then I obtained the affection and sympathy of Miss Le Neve. I confess that, according to the moral laws of Church and State, we were guilty, and I do not defend our position in that respect. But what I do say is that this love was not of a debased and degraded character. It was – if I may say so to people who will not perhaps understand or believe – a good love. She comforted me in my melancholy condition; her mind was beautiful to me; her loyalty and courage and self-sacrifice were of a high character. Whatever sin there was – and we broke the law – it was my sin, not hers…
    In this farewell letter to the world, written as I face eternity, I say that Ethel Le Neve has loved me as few women love men, and that her innocence of any crime, save that of yielding to the dictates of the heart, is absolute. To her I pay this last tribute. It is of her that my last thoughts have been. My last prayer will be that God may protect her and keep her safe from harm, and allow her to join me in eternity.

Crippen wrote to Le Neve every day. One letter read,

How can I find the strength and heart to struggle through this last letter? God indeed must hear our cry to Him for Divine help in this last farewell.
    How to control myself to write I hardly know, but pray God help us to be brave to help to face the end so near.
    The thoughts rush to my mind quicker than I can put them down. Time is so short now, and there is so much that I would say.
    There are less than two days left to us. Only one more letter after this can I write you, and only two more visits – one to-night before you read this letter, and one tomorrow.
    When I wrote to you on Saturday I had not heard any news of the petition, and though I never at any time had hope, yet deep down in my heart was just a glimmer of trust that God might give us yet a chance to put me right before the world and let me have the passionate longing of my soul.
    Your letter, written early Saturday, came to me last Saturday evening, and soon after the Governor brought me the dreadful news about ten o’clock.
    He was so kind and considerate in telling me, in breaking the shock as gently as he could. He was most kind, and left me at last with ‘God bless you! Good night,’ so that I know you will ever remember him most kindly.
    When he had gone I first kissed your face in the photo, my faithful, devoted companion in all this sorrow.
    Oh, how glad I am I had the photo. It was some consolation, although in spite of all my greatest efforts it was impossible to keep down a great sob and my heart’s agonised cry.
    How am I to endure to take my last look at your dear face? What agony must I go through at the last when you disappear for ever from my eyes? God help us to be brave then.
²⁰

Another letter written by Crippen to Le Neve, after he knew his appeal had failed, showed him in a feistier mood. With all hope of a reprieve gone, Crippen protested his innocence with far more gusto than he had done at his trial:

In spite of my fate there is one working for me now in collecting fresh evidence, and it is still possible that after my death the real truth may be revealed. Face to Face with God, in Whose presence my soul shall soon stand for final judgement, I still maintain that I was wrongly convicted, and my belief that facts will yet be forthcoming to prove my innocence.
    I solemnly state that I know nothing of the remains discovered at Hilldrop Crescent until I was told of their discovery by my solicitor, Mr Arthur Newton, on the next day after my arrival at Bow Street.
    My conviction was obtained on purely circumstantial evidence, and I am positive that if I had at my disposal a sum equal to that spent by the Crown on the prosecution the important points of that evidence would have been rebutted so decidedly that a conviction would have been impossible.

Le Neve thought that he had written this letter in the hope that she would get it published, not only to make some money for her, but for ‘justice in the future’.
²¹

Hope has completely gone, and your hub’s heart is broken. No more can he hold his wifie in his arms.

Dr Crippen to Ethel Le Neve

Arthur Newton paid his final visit to Dr Crippen shortly after noon on 21 November. They sat some 15 feet apart, separated by two tables. ‘Well I am sorry to say all our efforts have been in vain. I have received an unfavourable reply to the petition,’ said Newton. Crippen replied, ‘I have been informed there is no hope.’ He had known this for two days so Newton’s visit seems a bit tardy. If Crippen was annoyed that his solicitor had neglected him, he didn’t show it and his manners were as perfect as ever, thanking Newton for his efforts and saying he had been ‘more like a big brother’ than just a solicitor.

Their conversation centred mainly on Ethel Le Neve. When the time came for him to leave, Newton said, ‘Goodbye Doctor, I am sorry the Rules of the Prison won’t allow me to shake hands with you, but bear up as well as you can under the circumstances, and I will do all I can for Miss Le Neve, so – Goodbye – Goodbye – Goodbye.’

Newton waved as he said his departing words. Crippen replied, ‘Goodbye.’

Le Neve visited Crippen eleven times at Pentonville from 31 October to 22 November. The first visit was in her own name, the other ten as ‘Mrs Hawley’. She was accompanied to the prison on several occasions by journalist J. P. (John Percy) Eddy, who waited for her outside the great, green, studded door. On one occasion ‘she came away very subdued and clearly deeply anxious that he should, if possible, escape the gallows. There was no bitterness on her part that he had put her in a false position before the world; only a deep appreciation of the fact that her good friend was facing his extreme ordeal’.
¹

Ethel Le Neve paid her farewell visit less than twenty-four hours before Crippen’s execution. Crippen’s last words to her were ‘Good-bye and God bless you’. Then, ‘with a quick stride he made for the door, and, turning round, took a last, long farewell look upon my face and was gone’.
²

On the night before his execution Crippen received a final telegram from Le Neve. Major Mytton-Davies watched as Crippen read it and then raised it to his lips, kissing it again and again. His last request to Mytton-Davies was for Le Neve’s letters be buried with him.
³

Crippen’s executioner was John Ellis. As soon as the capital sentence was passed on Crippen, Ellis’ troubles began. In addition to carrying out executions Ellis ran a barber’s shop which was inundated with people coming in, not for haircuts, but to ask him about Crippen. People stopped in the street and pointed excitedly at him saying to their friends, ‘That’s him! That’s the man who is going to hang Crippen!’ To add to his woes, Ellis had to carry out an execution both the day before and after he hanged Crippen. Ellis said that the execution of Dr Crippen ‘was about the only time in my life that I really almost regretted the office I held’.

Ellis arrived at Pentonville Prison on the afternoon of 22 November:

I learned that the condemned murderer had been deeply disappointed when he found that all hope of a reprieve must be dismissed from his mind. He seemed to have convinced himself that he would never be hanged, and when the truth came home to him he was on the verge of total nervous collapse.
    Terrible though the shock was, he soon controlled his feelings once more and became his old cool, calculating self, a fact of which we were to have startling evidence that very night.
    The peephole in his cell door provided me with means of observing him, and as I gazed in at the man who had set the whole world by the ears I marvelled at his calmness. He sat there writing, and would occasionally break off to chat pleasantly and in most affable fashion with the warders whose duty it was to watch him night and day until the scaffold claimed him.
⁴

Like many people who came into contact with Crippen, Ellis was struck by his agreeable and helpful nature, which always came to the fore despite his awful predicament. He said that Crippen ‘had a natural amiability and innate gentlemanliness that seized the affections of even his warders’. There must have been some inner turmoil under the calm façade, for Crippen attempted to commit suicide on the eve of his execution:

Crippen undoubtedly committed a hideous crime which admits of no excuse but he had two sides of his nature, and it was the pleasant only that was uppermost during my contact with him.
    Yet that very night he showed that behind his suave graciousness lay power to make firm life and death decisions. Just before midnight one of the warders in that silent cell made a thrilling discovery.
    Crippen was in bed, and the men watching his progress through his last night on earth felt uneasy at Crippen’s restless motions. The strain on warders in such a position is a most intense one, and these men would have been superhuman if they had not felt overweighted with the responsibility that was resting upon their shoulders.
    At last one of them went to Crippen’s bedside to satisfy himself that the latter’s movements were nothing more than the usual restless tossings of a condemned man on his last night, but to his amazement found he was just in time to prevent the scaffold being cheated of its victim!
⁵

Prison warder Mr Fellows had Crippen under close observation and recorded,

Prisoner was crying for fully 10 minutes at 10.30 p.m. he undressed himself and went to the recess at 10.45, I heard something break while he was there and I asked him what was the matter, he said a button had burst off his pants, he then put his glasses on the cupboard and was getting into bed when I saw that his glasses were broken, I told him at once to give the other portion up to me & he then pulled the other part from under his pants, he had very little sleep during the night.

Ellis considered that ‘this act was about the only one Crippen ever did that caused his custodians any trouble, for he was a most considerate prisoner, never making unnecessary trouble, and always doing exactly as he was told’.
⁶

William Willis, Ellis’ assistant, confirmed the story. Willis thought that Crippen had planned to puncture an artery and slowly bleed to death while he slept.
⁷
Willis was in the minority of people altogether less sympathetic towards the prisoner. In his reminiscences he wrote, ‘Never was a man less deserving of sympathy than the monster who murdered Belle Elmore. He was a man unfit for the society of his fellow creatures.’
⁸

Hawley Harvey Crippen barely touched his final breakfast, which consisted of a pot of tea, bread and butter and two eggs.
⁹
Being a Roman Catholic, Crippen was attended by Canon Thomas Carey. He changed from his prison uniform into the clothes he wore at his trial. Dr Crippen was hanged at nine o’clock on the dark, cold and foggy morning of 23 November. Ellis had determined that a drop of 7 feet and 9 inches would be sufficient to instantly dispatch Crippen, who stood 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 142 pounds clothed the day before the execution. The character of Crippen’s neck was recorded as being ‘normal’. Ellis described Crippen’s last moments:

As I stood on the scaffold I could see the procession come into view twelve yards distant. Behind the praying priest came the notorious Dr Crippen, no longer a murderer to fear but rather a man to be pitied. Yet his attitude was not that of one who asks for sympathy. If he had ever shown cowardice or collapse he displayed none now.
    I could see him smiling as he approached, and the smile never left his face up to the moment when I threw the white cap over it and blotted out God’s light from his eyes for ever.
    In a trice he was on the trap-doors with his legs strapped together and a rope round his neck. One swift glance round to be assured that all was right and my hand shot to the lever.
    Thud! The fatal doors had fallen. The slack rope tightened, and in an instant was still. Dr Crippen was dead.
¹⁰

Willis said that Crippen, polite to the end, ‘employed his last breath to thank the Governor for his kindness and courtesy’.
¹¹
All rumours of a last-minute confession made by Crippen were flatly denied. As with all executed criminals, a coroner’s inquest was held to establish the cause of Crippen’s death. Walter Schröder, who was the coroner at Cora Crippen’s inquest, oversaw this formality. Hawley Harvey Crippen was then buried within the walls of Pentonville Prison in grave number sixteen.
¹²
A Home Office circular giving instructions for burying executed prisoners listed as its third point that ‘lime will not be used’
¹³
The irony would surely have not been wasted on Crippen.

While reliable sources stated that Crippen made no confession to the murder of his wife, the possibility that a confession did exist led to dramatic scenes the day before his execution. On 22 November a young man entered the offices of the London
Evening Times
, a newspaper that had only been in existence for twenty days. He told the editor that Arthur Newton had a confession from Crippen and was prepared to sell it.

The
Evening Times
’ crime reporter, Arthur Findon, hurried to Marlborough Street magistrates’ court, where he found Newton. After much bartering, Newton settled on a price of £500 in cash for the confession, and an assurance that his name would not be mentioned. They agreed to meet at 8 p.m. at the Langham Hotel, where Newton would hand the confession over. Findon took Newton at his word and told his editor that it would be safe to announce in that evening’s stop-press column that the next day’s issue would contain the confession.

Findon, along with reporter James Little, met Newton at the Langham but the solicitor said he was reneging on the deal, fearing that he would be struck off the rolls by the Law Society if they ever found out what he had done. Findon threatened to print a story of how Newton tried to sell the confession. Newton backed down and said that an associate of his named Low would bring the confession to Findon’s house at 2 a.m. on 23 November (the day of Crippen’s execution). Low would show Findon the confession and then burn it. That way Newton could say that he had not given it to Findon.