Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (6 page)

Ethel once told her parents, ‘I think if I ever marry, it will be with an old man – a man much older than myself.’
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One day their daughter told them the shocking news that she had married Crippen at a registry office in West London and the ceremony had been witnessed by two of Crippen’s friends. When Walter Neave asked to see the marriage certificate, Ethel ‘turned pale, and trembled, and in a faltering voice she told me that she had handed it to Dr Crippen’.
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She told her father that Crippen ‘did not want any fuss made about the wedding; that he wanted it kept secret’,
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but there had never been any wedding.

Dew circulated descriptions of Crippen and Le Neve to domestic and foreign ports, requesting that they keep a look-out for the pair but not to arrest them. He then sent out enquiries throughout London to find out if any cabmen or carmen had removed boxes or packages from 39 Hilldrop Crescent since 31 January. On 12 July Dew and Mitchell carried out a further search of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, but again without result.

On 13 July, a breakthrough was made which turned Dew’s investigation from one of trying to establish the whereabouts of Cora Crippen to what would turn out to be one of the most sensational murder cases of the twentieth century. With Crippen absent, Dew and Mitchell now had the house to themselves and the opportunity to search 39 Hilldrop Crescent without ‘Crippen at my elbow to hamper me and perhaps throw me off the scent’.
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Dew was beginning to consider the possibility that Cora had been murdered, but the house had yet to yield any clues other than the discovery of the advertisement Crippen had written on 8 July but had not sent to any newspaper.

Dew and Mitchell were ‘completely fagged out’ and Dew wanted to go home and sleep for twenty-four hours, but could not give up the search for Cora Crippen until the mystery was solved.
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Dew decided to make a more thorough search of the cellar, which held a ‘peculiar fascination’ for him. Dew fancifully recalled, ‘That house in Holloway had a strange attraction for me: always I had a reluctance to leave it: that sinister cellar seemed to draw me to it. A loose board near the door each time it was stepped upon seemed to creak out “Stop, stop”.’
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‘Maybe it was my sixth sense’ was the only explanation he could offer.
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Dew takes up the tale:

‘Let us go along to the house and have another go at the cellar,’ I said to my companion, and a short time later we were on our hands and knees probing once more at the bricks which formed the cellar floor. I was armed with a poker, and with this worked away too tired to say a word.
    Presently a little thrill of excitement went through me. The sharp point of the poker had found its way between two of the bricks, and one of them showed signs of lifting.
    I toiled away more hopefully now, all sense of fatigue vanishing in the excitement of hope. The brick came out. Then another and another. After this my work became easy.
    Mitchell ran to get a spade from the garden. With this I worked steadily for a few minutes. Then came evidence nauseatingly unmistakeable. The stench was unbearable, driving us both into the garden for fresh air.
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Dew and Mitchell fortified themselves with brandy and returned to their grim task. They had uncovered what appeared to be human remains. These were covered in a large quantity of lime, some of which was coarsely granular while some had set in hard lumps like concrete. Whoever had placed the remains there had made an elementary blunder. The lime had been mixed with water, making it a preservative rather than a destroyer of the flesh.

It is not entirely clear who made the breakthrough in the cellar. The passage above is taken from Dew’s autobiography. He made several other statements about the incident at various times. When giving evidence at the Old Bailey, Dew took full credit for the find:

I went down with Mitchell on to my knees and probed about with a small poker which I had got out of the kitchen. I found that the poker went in somewhat easily between the crevices of the bricks, and I managed to get one or two up, and then several others came up pretty easily. I then produced a spade from the garden and dug the clay that was immediately underneath the bricks.

In another statement, Dew gives joint credit:

We went down on our hands and knees and carefully examined the brick flooring again, but everything appeared to be in order.
    We then got a small poker and tested various parts of the flooring of the basement and probed about the brickwork of the cellar, and in doing so the poker, which has a thin point, went in between two of the bricks, which became loosened and Sergeant Mitchell and I then removed several bricks and found underneath a flat surface of clay.

In his report, Sergeant Mitchell said, ‘I dug the poker between two of the bricks in the centre of the floor. I loosened and removed them, and Chief Inspector Dew then dug the floor up.’ In a further statement, dated one day later, Mitchell said, ‘I was present when the Chief Inspector found the human remains.’

Dr Crippen’s disappearance was now explained. Among the remains were a Hinde’s hair-curling pin with light and dark dyed hair attached, portions of ladies’ undergarments, a portion of a man’s pyjama shirt, a rotted man-size handkerchief knotted at two ends and a piece of coarse string. It was that which was not found that made the discovery all the more shocking. The head, limbs, bones and sexual organs were missing; everything that might help to identify the remains. Dew had ‘that strange hunch … that what we had found represented all that remained of the once charming and vivacious Belle Elmore’.
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Dew immediately sent for the local divisional police surgeon, Dr Thomas Marshall, and informed Sir Melville Macnaghten, the Assistant Commissioner of the CID at Scotland Yard, of the find. Macnaghten filled his pockets with cigars, grabbed Superintendent Froest, jumped into a car and sped to Hilldrop Crescent, where he handed the cigars out. ‘I thought they might be needed by the officers – and they were!’
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Dew occasionally smoked cigars and Froest continuously smoked strong cigars when working on murder cases as they helped him to think.
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Dr Marshall arrived at around 5.40 p.m. when the remains were partly exposed. He thought they were human but did not make a full examination that day. He returned at 9 p.m. when the remains were uncovered and just touched the surface of them, observing that ‘they were emptied in like refuse of dustmen’. Dew ordered the photographing of the remains before covering them up.

Macnaghten and Froest explored the premises. Macnaghten was surprised to see bottles of whisky, claret, sherry and yellow chartreuse on the dining room sideboard. He observed Crippen’s chair at the head of the table was only some fifteen or twenty yards away from where the remains lay and commented, ‘How, for five long months, good digestion could have waited upon appetite in such circumstances has always been a marvel to me!’
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The house was locked up for the night and guarded by the police, but the outside world was beginning to hear about what had transpired. The following morning,
The
Times
reported,

Some persons who were passing the house last night were attracted by several slight explosions, and it then became known that the police were taking flashlight photographs of a body which is said to have been in the cellar for some months.
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As the crowds began to gather, the local newspaper sent its reporter to investigate ‘The Green Crescent of the Crime’, which was thus described:

Hilldrop-crescent is a quiet suburban place although in the inner ring of the Metropolis; and, reasoning superficially, it would be the last spot one would have dreamt of for the stage of a sordid murder. The exterior aspect of the quiet residential streets speaks of respectability: and in the placid atmosphere of well-to-do Suburbia the tokens of the grim deed seized the heart with a greater shock than they would have done in the denser and darker neighbourhood that lies not far away.
    For this secluded crescent is situated just off the bustle and roar of several busy thoroughfares, and a stone thrown in any direction would fall in the thick of clustering human hives. It is no more than five minutes from Holloway-road with its ceaseless traffic; it is close to Caledonian-road with its constant goings-to-and-fro; on the other side the huge glass palaces rattle on their way to Tottenham Court-road. In a word, it nestles serenely in a back-wash of the whirling waters of the modern Babylon.
    It is this strange contrast of peacefulness and quietude with the hurrying stretch of main thoroughfares that bound it and the network of mean and squalid streets that surround it, that seems to intensify the horror of the crime committed in its smug and snug precincts.
    The crescent, then, is hidden away in the district which abounds in leafiness, and although not far off is a very different world of bricks and mortar, so cosily shut in is the essentially middle-class part that one can almost forget the grime and the encircling gloom.
    Here it was – in this unlikely quarter – that the corpse of a beautiful woman was dug up.
    Here it was that last night, as indeed all through the day, a knot of people stood shuddering, and conversing almost in whispers.
    Here it was, in this green and salubrious road, that a garden gate was guarded by two stalwart men in blue – the guardians of a terrible interior that no prying eyes were permitted to look upon.
    Here it was that detectives silently came and went; here came eminent professors and official photographers; and here came a coffin to bear away a woman’s mangled remains.
    It stands up, does that ill-fated house, behind large, spreading trees that almost conceal its frontage. In the sunshine of a summer day the green foliage gave almost a gay appearance to the scene.
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The remains were removed the next day under the supervision of Dr Marshall and Dr Augustus Pepper, a consulting surgeon from St Mary’s Hospital and Home Office pathologist. They were placed in a coffin and taken to the mortuary. Two local police constables, Frederick Martin and Daniel Gooch, had helped Dew unearth the remains and place them in the coffin.
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In recognition of their conduct during this unpleasant task, Dew spoke to Macnaghten, who promised them a 10
s
bonus.

Dew made a further discovery that would later prove to be vital. In a box under the bed in the first-floor bedroom there were two suits of pyjamas and one odd pair of pyjama trousers. The jackets bore the label of ‘Shirt-makers, Jones Brothers (Holloway), Limited, Holloway, N.’

The news of the discovery of the remains was met with disbelief by the Crippens’ friends and neighbours, who had perceived Hawley and Cora to be a devoted couple. Crippen had told Dr Rylance the story that Cora had gone to America on family business, and later that she had died. The press interviewed Rylance, who told them,

A more humble, unassuming little man I have never met, and to me it seems unthinkable that he would have committed so dastardly a crime.
    In my judgement he was a smart man and a wonderful organizer, very exact, with fine business methods; in fact, one could not have desired a straighter representative.
    Of late, I had observed that he looked worried. He had, of course, his bright moments, but generally he appeared to be distressed and perturbed by something or other, and I came to the conclusion that it was due to financial troubles.
    His wife was a woman of charming manners. I frequently saw her here. What passes my understanding is how Crippen could have thrown her over in favour of his typist. It was a strange infatuation. She had little to recommend her so far as I noticed. The typist was a delicate woman. She was always ailing, and was jocularly known in this building as the woman who always answered inquiries with the same remark, ‘Not very well, thank you.’
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A neighbour, Millicent Gillatt, who lived at 40 Hilldrop Crescent, revealed,

We first missed Mrs Crippen some time last February. My sister met Mr Crippen about that time, and he told her she had gone to America and that he intended to give up the house.
    Both Mr and Mrs Crippen used to spend a great part of their time in the garden. He always seemed exceedingly fond of her, and used to follow her round in quite an adoring way.
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Another acquaintance stated that Crippen’s devotion to Cora ‘was remarkable’.
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But Dew had already learned that after seventeen years of marriage, ‘quarrels between them, I gathered, were not infrequent’.
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These rows had been going on for some time. A German lodger had stayed at 39 Hilldrop Crescent from December 1906 to April 1907. He said that Cora ‘frequently gave way to ill-temper, which led to painful discussions. Her husband, however, rarely lost his temper, even when he was the object of unjust remarks. He minimised the troubles, spoke gently, and allowed the storm to pass. He appeared to be exerting great self-control – his lips would go white and his hands involuntarily clench.’
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The Crippens’ nationality ensured that the American press were following developments with interest and making their own enquiries. Crippen’s former employer, Dr J. M. Munyon, told a journalist that he did not believe Crippen was capable of such a crime. Crippen ‘was one of the most intelligent men I ever knew and was so proficient that I gave him a position readily, nor have I ever regretted it’. Munyon’s son Duke gave his opinion on the Crippens, saying that Crippen ‘was extremely jealous of her, and they often quarrelled. She was pretty and attractive and had many male friends. When Dr Crippen took her out, if she looked at other men he seemed to go insane.’
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In a somewhat surprising interview with the
Los Angeles Herald
, Crippen’s son Otto calmly ‘declared that his father no doubt committed the crime because of his infatuation for another woman. It is too bad to think that a man of his age would do such a thing. I am not a bit surprised, because I understood he passed most of his time in the company of various women who accepted his advances.’
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