Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (26 page)

One of their German lodgers, Karl Reinisch, told a German newspaper years later that Crippen was

extremely quiet, gentlemanly, not only in thought but also in behaviour, not only towards his wife but also to me and everyone else. He idolised his wife, and sensed her every wish which he hastened to fulfil.
    In contrast to the extremely placid nature of Dr Crippen, his wife was very high-spirited. Blonde, with a pretty face, of large, full, may I say of opulent figure, very ambitious, in spite of her former artistic career, of which she often spoke to me a great deal in the presence of her husband.
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Adelene Harrison remembered ‘they appeared always on the best of terms, she got a bit excited at times, but he was patient’. In a 1910 newspaper interview Harrison said, ‘In fact, no one ever knew them to be otherwise than loveable and affectionate to each other. There was no indication that it was for “appearances sake” for he showed his love for her in every action in his life.’
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Actress Louise Smythson had been introduced the Crippens at the 1909 Music Hall Ladies’ Guild dinner, where ‘they seemed very happy, and pleasant to each other’. Melinda May said Cora ‘always appeared to be devoted to Dr Crippen’. Clara Martinetti thought Cora seemed ‘to get on very well with Dr Crippen’, adding that the pair ‘seemed always alike’. Her husband Paul ‘had no idea he had any ill feelings towards her’. Dr Burroughs said ‘they appeared to live very comfortably together. I never heard any quarrels’, and his wife Maud agreed they ‘appeared very happy together’. They considered Dr Crippen to be ‘a model husband, he always seemed anxious to do his wife some little service and show her some attention,’ although ‘Mrs Crippen was at times somewhat hasty in her manner towards Dr Crippen, but not more so than one ordinarily meets in life. As far as I was able to judge she appeared to be fond of him.’

It was not only friends who thought the Crippens were a devoted couple. Their milkman, Thomas Brown, said ‘they always seemed to be as happy as sandboys’ when he saw them on his round. Cora, he added, ‘was a well-built, handsome woman, and always was very chatty’.
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Is it possible that the Crippens were able to portray such a united front if Cora was really making her husband’s life so unbearably miserable and knowing that he was sleeping with his secretary? Even on the night of the murder, Clara Martinetti described them as being ‘on affectionate terms while I was there’.

But there were people who said they quarrelled and Dew was told as much during his early enquiries, and isolated reports of a less than happy domestic life appeared in the 1910 newspapers. Their former servant Rhoda Ray remembered that ‘Mr and Mrs Crippen were not altogether friendly to each other, and they spoke very little together’. Another German Lodger, Richard Ehrlich, was interviewed by the
Petit Parisien
:

The Crippens had then been married about six years, and the young man gathered from Mrs Crippen that her sole desire in life was to return to the stage. She admitted that she was bored to death at the routine of housekeeping, and bitterly regretted having abandoned the footlights. She explained that on her marriage the doctor made her promise never to return to the boards.
    Ehrlich says that Mrs Crippen delighted to live in an atmosphere of adulation. The doctor was a calm, industrious type of business man. At the house in Hilldrop Crescent they received very few visitors. Mrs Crippen’s friends were all theatrical folks, and the husband had no love for these.
    ‘So you can imagine,’ says Erlich, ‘what were the sentiments of the wife towards her husband. She often lost her temper, and there were frequent bickerings and open quarrels. On the other hand, the doctor never lost his temper, though the wife’s reproaches were frequently unjustified. He always answered in a gentle tone, and was never rude to her.’
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Cora had trodden the boards after her marriage to Crippen and her friend Lottie Albert stated that Cora had come to terms with her theatrical failings. So what was the truth? As with so many elements of the Crippen case, there are unanswerable contradictions.

Criminologist Nigel Morland offered the following assessment of the Crippens that seems reasonable:

A lot of people are still very sorry for Crippen, and, probably, an equal number are just as sorry for Cora Crippen. He was a nice little man, there is no doubt of it, and I do not think she was by any means a bad woman. Indeed, had Belle Elmore succeeded on the stage she might have gone off to a different life, perhaps a happier ending. Alternatively, had Crippen’s chemical reactions been uninfluenced by Ethel Le Neve, he, too, might have gone on as he had always been.
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Morland also suggested that had Charlotte Crippen not died young, Dr Crippen ‘would have been a decent and law-abiding citizen for the rest of his days’.
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With all the contradictions, Cecil Mercer’s blunt assessment of the pair may be as close to the truth as it is possible to know:

I can honestly say that more rubbish has been written and published about the Crippen Case than ever has been written and published about any case in the world. Attempts have actually been made to palliate the crime. What is the truth? It was the sordid and barbarous murder by her husband of the Honorary Secretary (or Treasurer) of the Ladies’ Music Hall Guild, to whom her many women-friends were deeply attached. Crippen had fallen for his typist: but, because a man falls for his typist he doesn’t have to murder his wife. I have read that Mrs. Crippen led him a dog’s life. Of that, there is not a tittle of evidence. She certainly had her interests, and he had his. What was their private relation, nobody ever knew.
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While Cora Crippen was a more brash and flamboyant character than her husband, she was, during her lifetime, generally perceived as a generous, friendly and vivacious woman who certainly did not deserve the posthumous reputation that she has been burdened with for nearly a century.

There is no denying that there were several positive aspects to Crippen’s character. He was exceptionally courteous and thoughtful and his love for Ethel Le Neve cannot be doubted (though he also appeared to have been devoted to Cora before and since he met his mistress). Filson Young dryly observed that Crippen was ‘always considerate – even in the weapon he used to kill his wife’,
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assuming that it had been the hyoscine that killed her, not a bullet, and that Crippen’s real reason for using that drug was not because he hoped it would be difficult to detect.

In an interview with the
Daily Express
, Walter Dew said, ‘Compared with Jack the Ripper, Crippen was an angel!’
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But that was a very backhanded compliment. Even if he was likeable, Crippen was a faithless husband, seller of fraudulent medical cures, perjurer and murderer who lived quite happily with his mistress at 39 Hilldrop Crescent for months, knowing that the dismembered remains of his unfortunate wife lay buried in the cellar beneath their feet. His place in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors was hard earned and richly deserved.

…the Crippen case has been responsible for more weird and often nonsensical opinions than one would suspect.

Nigel Morland,
Hangman’s Clutch

After I am gone, thoughtful people will probably admit that the evidence was far too slender to send me to the scaffold.

Dr Crippen to Ethel Le Neve,
Thomson’s Weekly News

Ever since the discovery of human remains in the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, there have been some people who believed that Dr Crippen was innocent of murdering Cora Crippen. In recent years the case for Crippen’s innocence has been revived with promises of new evidence. So what is the likelihood that Dr Crippen was wrongly hanged?

As early as August 1910, the
San Francisco Chronicle
asked, ‘Is the Belle Elmore murder a fake for theatrical advertising purposes?’ While dining with friends Inspector Dew allegedly hinted that the murder might have been a hoax. After all, he said, the remains at that date had not even been proved to be human and if Cora reappeared she could name her price for vaudeville and music hall appearances.
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Since Dew never spoke publicly about the case until he gave evidence in court this story can easily be dismissed. It was reminiscent of the ‘wild story’ published in
The
Times
the same day that Dew’s wife Kate had a similar theory.
²

Another American newspaper, the
New York Times
, also raised doubts over the remains that were merely ‘a corrupt mass of mortality, indistinguishable by feature or by sex’. True, there was circumstantial evidence of Crippen’s guilt, but ‘conceivably the body is that of some other person or of an animal, placed there by someone else than Crippen’.
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They failed to say who that other person might have been and how they could have concealed the remains. The previous day the same paper had made the peculiar suggestion that the remains could have been ‘a person whom he had inadvertently killed in the course of his practice. It might be merely a body which Crippen, in the desire to perfect himself in his studies, had procured for the purpose of dissection’.
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In November 1910 a Reuters news agency story appeared in a number of newspapers, stating that a woman answering Cora Crippen’s description was being watched by Canadian police. She fainted when overhearing a remark that Crippen would hang and swooned again in a shop after reading an account of his trial. Coincidentally, Ethel Le Neve encountered a Cora double while living in Montreal. The woman was ‘Belle Elmore come to life again’ but ‘she spoke in French, with the accent of a Canadian Frenchwoman. The resemblance was striking, but the eyes were not the same.’
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A cutting of the Reuters report was sent to Winston Churchill, along with a letter published in
The Standard
on 12 November. It read,

It is difficult to understand why he should have left so much incriminating material within easy reach of detectives (and for so many months), whilst being at the enormous trouble, as is assumed, of disposing of the rest elsewhere. As to the head, all the bones and a large proportion of the flesh, there is no evidence whatever. Let us hope they still form part of a living body to be yet forthcoming. It will then be clear that the so-called ‘remains’ were placed beneath the cellar floor, not for concealment, but to be found. I consider this by far the most reasonable inference from the evidence at our disposal, especially when it is stated that the stomach, though unwounded, was empty, notwithstanding the sumptuous repast that preceded the supposed murder.

Several letters survive in the Home Office files on the case that argue Crippen’s innocence. One theorised that

some rival or enemy of Crippen had wished, on the disappearance of Crippen’s wife, and having Crippen’s account, to form ground for a suspicion, it would have been material in finding ‘human remains’ as the groundwork of a plot … The ‘remains found’ might with ease have been selected and removed from a newly buried body, exhumed for the purpose.

A correspondent signing himself ‘X’ asked, ‘Has not Dr Crippen been the
victim
of a plot? The
unidentifiable
character of the remains found in the cellar points – if this feature of the remains affords any
points
– to a
plot
.’

Another story appeared in the
New York Times
in which lawyer Francis Tobin claimed to have evidence Cora was alive in America, but nothing came of this.
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Back in England, the
News of the World
made mysterious hints in January 1911 that new evidence ‘of a scientific character would soon be announced that would throw a new light on the Crippen case.
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There was no follow-up to this tantalising rumour.

In 1926 a popular weekly tabloid, the
World’s Pictorial News
, published a far-fetched story told by a former convict who had been recently released from Pentonville Prison. He remembered a Syrian vine that had mysteriously embedded its roots in Crippen’s grave. When three years had passed ‘the officials were amazed to see fruit growing upon the vine, and it was argued among the prisoners that this was a token of Crippen’s innocence’. However, when the vine failed to bear fruit years later it was seen as a sign that Frederick Bywaters, who had been executed three years previously, was innocent.
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The next example of evidence of Crippen’s innocence was almost as feeble. In 1943 Walter Dew received a letter from Colin Bennett of Devon suggesting that ‘while Crippen did unquestionably cut up and bury his wife’s body he did not kill her’. He made a vague suggestion that an assistant might have stolen poison from Crippen’s office and committed the deed. Bennett claimed to have been in the crowd that gathered outside Madame Tussaud’s waxworks when it burned down in 1925. When they heard Crippen’s effigy had been saved ‘a lusty cheer went up. The subconscious mind often knows more than the conscious mind.’ After presenting his case, Bennett asked Dew, ‘Are you still as sure as ever that in Crippen you hanged a murderer?’ Dew was unimpressed and tersely replied ‘my conscience is quite at rest as [to] the result of the case’.
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Moving on to the twenty-first century, and in 2004 Channel 4 broadcast
The Last Secret of Dr Crippen
. It promised that ‘new evidence makes it clear that the most infamous murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen should never have hanged’ and suggested that Crippen was hastily condemned under pressure from the Director of Public Prosecutions and the media.

The programme claimed it was significant that Lord Chief Justice Alverstone had been the judge at Crippen’s trial, having been hand picked by the Director of Public Prosecutions, who was worried about the outcome. This was ‘against regular practice’ and he ‘virtually directed the jury to convict’ Crippen. Alverstone was still an assize circuit judge and presided over many cases. Cecil Mercer did recall that Alverstone was not initially scheduled to appear, but he insisted, allegedly saying, ‘This man deserves to hang, and I’m not going to see him get off on a point of law.’ However, Mercer added that ‘I never remember a case more beautifully tried.’
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