Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (13 page)

In summing up his decision, the magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen (who had replaced Robert Marsham), concluded that there was no doubt whatsoever that Crippen should stand trial for the charge against him. The case of Le Neve was more difficult, but de Rutzen considered there was enough evidence of Le Neve’s complicity (which could have meant she just knew of the murder rather than having taken part in it) to allow a jury to decide her fate. They were, therefore, committed to trial at the Old Bailey. Arthur Newton said that both Crippen and Le Neve would plead not guilty when the time came.

While that was going on an auction was being held in Oxford Street of nearly 100 lots of furniture from 39 Hilldrop Crescent as Crippen was desperate for money to pay Newton’s legal fees and, remarkably, considering the position he was in, anxious to pay the landlord of 39 Hilldrop Crescent the back rent he owed. The sale-room was crowded and all of the 1,000 catalogues had been snapped up an hour before the auction began. It was a good-natured sale, with much banter and flash photography taking place. Some lots met with higher prices than expected thanks to their infamous association. The highest bid was fourteen guineas for a cottage pianoforte.
²³

How dull the murders are getting nowadays. Not a patch on the old domestic poisoning dramas. Crippen, Seddon, Mrs Maybrick; the truth being, I suppose, that you can’t do a good murder unless you believe you’re going to roast in hell for it.

George Orwell,
Coming Up For Air

Crippen’s decision to plead not guilty could have sealed his fate, for there may have been an alternative. As soon as Arthur Newton had been retained by Crippen, he wanted to offer the brief to Edward Marshall Hall, a charismatic parliamentarian whose forays into the criminal courts often attracted publicity. He had a commanding presence and ‘a passion for showing off, tempered by an attractive simplicity and combined with a love of the marvellous, which made him on questions of fact somewhat of an impressionist. But there was about his personality something which even his most austere critics found hard to resist.’
¹

Unfortunately for Newton, Marshall Hall was on holiday abroad. When he called in at Marshall Hall’s rooms in Temple Gardens he was met by the senior clerk, Archibald Bowker. Despite being very keen to accept the defence brief on behalf of Marshall Hall, who he knew would rise to the occasion, Bowker was wary because ‘I knew Newton to be utterly unscrupulous … he was not prepared to pay any of the fees until after the case was over, I became suspicious and insisted on a cheque with the brief’. Newton stormed out of the chambers when Bowker was forced to turn him down.
²

Marshall Hall was convinced he could have proved Crippen’s innocence of the charge of murder if the accused man would only admit to everything except intent to murder, thus resulting in a conviction for manslaughter. Marshall Hall’s biographer set forth the potential defence:

Crippen, in order to spend the night with his paramour, whether at home or elsewhere, drugged his wife with a new and rare drug of which he knew little, and of which he had lately purchased five grains. To be on the safe side he gave her a large dose, which turned out to be an overdose; or perhaps his continual dosing of her necessitated a big dose to ensure unconsciousness. In the morning he found his wife dead, and in a panic he made away with the remainder of the hyoscine, and with all a surgeon’s skill cut up her body, rising above his inexperience with the inspiration of despair. Then, hurriedly wrapping the flesh in an old pyjama jacket of his own, he buried it in quicklime, thinking it would thus be destroyed; as a matter of fact the quicklime had the reverse effect, and preserved the remains. Then he proceeded to write to a number of his friends a transparent tissue of lies. Crippen admitted that Miss Le Neve had slept at Hilldrop Crescent on February 2nd. Might she not have slept there on one or both of the previous nights, and frequently before that, while his wife was drugged with hyoscine and unconscious?
³

Marshall Hall knew that Crippen’s not guilty plea would be disastrous. He thought that Crippen would not have agreed to his line of defence anyway as it could have made Le Neve an accomplice if she had been in the house with him as Cora Crippen lay dying or dead. Crippen would never allow any suggestion of guilt towards Le Neve.
⁴
Newton would have to find a defence team who were willing to try to convince a jury that Crippen knew nothing of the human remains found in his house.

At Brixton Prison, Arthur Newton’s young clerk let slip to the chief warder that Newton had brought an agreement for Crippen to sign which sold the rights for the story of his life to an American newspaper. This was yet another means by which Crippen was going to pay his legal fees. There was more chicanery involved. Newton had held several interviews with Crippen, supposedly to prepare his defence, but one of his clerks had also been present and taken down Crippen’s life story in shorthand.
⁵
The interviews took place within sight, but out of hearing, of the prison staff.

The matter was put before Winston Churchill. The Home Secretary considered that there had already been such immense publicity and sensationalism surrounding the case that the publication of Crippen’s memoirs could hardly add to it. Therefore he ordered that they should ‘not fetter the accused on grounds of taste’, and as the money would be used for his defence the story could be sold. Newton’s misuse of his position was a different matter. Churchill advised that Newton must be censured for his improper conduct.

Another of Newton’s clerks had interviewed Crippen and was struck by the man’s character:

And yet, feeling convinced that he was a liar and a murderer, I could not help feeling sorry for him. Looking at him and listening to his slow, hesitating, nervous speech I simply could not visualise him as a cold-blooded assassin.
    There he was, a little sandy man with drooping moustache and gold-rimmed glasses, blinking at us and stammering with thin fingers playing at his upper lip.
    You would have taken him for a timid, kindly little shop-walker, ready to serve you with the utmost politeness, but always, in the back of his mind, thinking of his neat little suburban home and the neat little wife waiting to greet him there.
    Always apologetic, always deferential, he contrived to remain aloof from the actual drama and terror of the case. To all outward appearance he might have been a client slightly perturbed at the prospect of a summons for riding a bicycle without a light.
⁶

The coroner’s inquest finally concluded on 26 September. In his summing up the coroner addressed several questions that the case had raised. Were the remains human? Yes. What was the sex of the remains? The medical evidence could give no decisive opinion. What was the identity of the remains? Unknown, but the fact that they were found at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, along with the disappearance of Cora Crippen and Dr Crippen’s subsequent actions, heavily suggested that they were those of Cora Crippen. The jury left to consider their verdict at 4.37 p.m. They returned at 5.20 p.m. and returned a verdict of murder against Dr Crippen, being of the opinion that the remains were those of Cora Crippen and that she had died as a result of poisoning by hyoscine.
⁷

Bruce Miller’s name had been raised at the very outset of the investigation when Crippen told Inspector Dew that he believed his wife had left him for Miller. Miller had been tracked down in Chicago by Pinkerton’s detective agency after the American police failed to locate him. Now working in real estate and with a wife and two children, Miller, though friendly towards the Pinkerton agent, appeared reluctant to return to London to give evidence at Crippen’s trial. Not only did he not want any scandalous publicity, he was currently involved in a large land deal that could result in a significant commission. He ‘does not want to go unless absolutely necessary’ but if he had to ‘he will give full testimony and says he certainly can defend the character of Belle Elmore’. Miller was offered $15 per day, along with his passage and expenses, but this would represent too great a loss of earnings. He insisted on $25 per day plus all expenses both ways.

Miller gave a statement to Pinkerton’s about Cora saying that ‘her character was of the very best, far beyond reproach’. They had continued to correspond after he returned to America. He had last heard from her in a Christmas card in 1909. Miller’s birthday was 14 April and he was surprised not to receive a card from Cora, as she had been in the habit of sending them. In a personal letter to Inspector Dew the former music hall performer explained his relationship with Cora:

Miss Elmore and I were the best of friends and I have watched the case with the most intense interest, never suspecting that I would be mentioned in it in any way, until the newspaper men came to see me and then I said as little as possible. However there has been little discression [
sic
] used in quoting my statements, though they have said nothing that will really do any harm.
    If Dr Crippen has only made the charge that Miss Elmore eloped with me, I do not see that I would be of any service in the case, as I have not seen her for six years, and as I have been in this place during the past four years, proof of this could be had without my presence.
    If on the other hand he makes any attempt to defame her character on my account, there is nothing he can say that I am not willing to face him in, but I do not think he will make any further charges because he well knew of our friendship, and, while he never took the pains to meet me even when he was in the house, and has delivered some of my letters to her in person, and that I have always written to her at their residence and have often recd a reply, from the provences, some one must have forwarded them to her, and they were undoubtedly in his possession first.
    Besides I have photographs of Miss Elmore that he took of her with a kodak, and according to her statements, he knew that I have them. Again while I was playing in the provinces, I was taken ill, and wrote to her and mentioned what the trouble was and in her reply she told me that the Doctor told her to tell me to take certain remedies.
    Now, while I will acknowledge that I thought a great deal of her, and we were the very best of friends, she was always a lady to me in every respect and I always treated her as a gentleman should.
    As you no doubt was one of the first to go through the house, you no doubt found my little cards, candy boxes &c. with my name on, and when I left there were two of my photos enlarged and hanging on the wall in her parlor. Now that Dr Crippen knows all this I do not think that when his trial comes up that he will mention my name again, and I do not think that you will want me in the case either.
    If I am wanted, I regret that on account of a big real estate deal that I have on, that my thirty days option will not be up till October 14th and it will perhaps take a few days to close up after that, it looks to me at the present time, impossible to get away before about the 20th of October, but if things progress favourably and I can leave before, I will do so.
    Financially, I can hardly afford to leave, as I will have to drop my fall work in the way of building and wait until Spring, and as I am making about $10,000.00 a year, you can see what that means to me. However I am willing and ready to stand up and defend the character of a most honourable woman, and a good friend.
    Now, if I should come I would like to come into the country incog. and have a consultation with yourself and the prosecuting Attorney before anyone is aware that I am there, then I will act strictly to your advice.
    You have won my admiration in this case to such an extent that I trust as a friend, and know that you will protect me in this to the best of your ability.

Before the trials of Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve took place, the issue of the reward for his capture had to be resolved. Captain Kendall of the
Montrose
had made a claim for the £250 that was offered. Dew thought that Kendall’s claim could not be disputed, as he was the first person to recognise Crippen and Le Neve as the fugitives and he had immediately reported his suspicions. Dew had carefully questioned others on board the
Montrose
and was satisfied that Kendall was entitled to the bounty.

There was an element of doubt, as the deputy coroner had received a letter, signed ‘One of the Public’, saying that a steward on the
Montrose
had been the first to realise that Mr Robinson was Dr Crippen. This steward had formerly been a barman at the Brecknock Tavern, Camden Road, where he had seen Crippen drinking. Dew had noticed this story in a couple of periodicals ‘of no particular standing’, and dismissed it. As far as he was concerned, the money rightfully belonged to Captain Kendall, who duly collected a cheque at Scotland Yard. The cheque, however, was never cashed. Kendall framed it and hung it on his stateroom bulkhead.
⁸

At long last the remains found at Hilldrop Crescent could be laid to rest. It was now late September and the remains were causing concern to the Islington Public Health Department, who held them in their mortuary. They wrote to Melville Macnaghten explaining that the
disjecta membra
‘are likely to cause a serious nuisance’.

Inspector Dew checked with Dr Pepper, Dr Marshall and the Director of Public Prosecutions to make sure they had no further need of them. They did not, and Arthur Newton had no objection towards the burial, but unsurprisingly ‘demurred somewhat to their being buried in the name of Belle Elmore or Cora Crippen’. No doubt it might have helped his cause if the remains had not been positively identified, but the coroner’s burial order clearly stated, ‘Do hereby authorise the burial of the remains of the body of Cora Crippen alias Belle Elmore late of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Islington, age 34 years’ (she had really been thirty-six).

Cora Crippen’s old friends of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild took charge of the funeral arrangements. Dr Burroughs had written to Mrs Ginnett, saying, ‘I feel that a fitting funeral should be given to her … the Police are anxious, if possible to trace other parts of her body … the awfulness of the crime does not bear thinking of. The man must indeed be a fiend.’
⁹
They desired a private ceremony and did not want the press to intrude. A cortège consisting of a hearse and two mourning coaches left the undertaker’s in Camden Road at 2.45 p.m. on 11 October and took a direct route to St Pancras Roman Catholic Cemetery in Finchley.