Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (15 page)

There was a great certainty about the Crown’s case. Mercer later said ‘we had no doubt’ that Cora died on the night of the dinner party. When pressed, he refused to elaborate how they knew. ‘We just did’ was his blunt reply.
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It nearly wasn’t that night. When Paul Martinetti fell ill, Cora asked Clara, ‘Will you stay here tonight dear?’ How would Crippen have reacted if the Martinettis had stayed? Might he have changed his mind about killing Cora, or just done it on a later date?

Muir was unhappy that the police had allowed Crippen to flee England in the first place, and felt that since Dew had brought his prisoners back he had been less than energetic in helping to put together the case against them. He went so far as to suggest Dew ‘must be suffering from sleepy sickness’.
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This view was echoed by Travers Humphreys, who recalled, ‘We made more than one attempt through Dew to obtain further information, but without success’,
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but few detectives could sustain Muir’s twelve-hour shifts, which Humphreys described as his colleague’s idea of ‘a reasonable working day’.
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Humphreys explained his grievances with Dew’s investigations. He began by complimenting Dew on his inquiries before Crippen’s arrest. The initial statement he had taken from Crippen was admirably done, and was ‘thorough and complete; in fact, it took the form of a very effective cross-examination. Moreover, it was probably the fear that further investigation by this highly inquisitive officer would lead to a thorough search of the premises that caused Crippen to lose his nerve and flee the country.’ However, Dew’s ‘subsequent lack of energy must be animadverted upon’.
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Humphreys visited 39 Hilldrop Crescent and was surprised to see that Cora Crippen’s furs had remained at the house, rather than being removed as evidence and made exhibits for the trial. He was dissatisfied with Dew’s explanation of why he had left the furs at the house and instructed him to take them away, as he was convinced that the jury would see them as evidence that Cora would not have left for America in the middle of winter without them.
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The accusations of Dew’s tardiness were disputed by the Director of Public Prosecutions, whose office sent Macnaghten a letter on 26 October thanking Dew and Mitchell ‘for the unfailing and valuable services which they rendered to my staff, and to my Counsel, both in the investigation of these cases before the Magistrate, and at the trial of them at the Central Criminal Court’.

Acting for Crippen’s defence were Alfred Tobin, Huntley Jenkins and Henry Delacombe Roome, who were instructed by Arthur Newton. Tobin had allegedly been chosen by Newton after he had left Marshall Hall’s chambers in a bad temper after failing to secure the services of ‘The Great Defender’. Three doors up the lane he saw Tobin’s name on a door and hired him.
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Another account had it that Tobin was recommended to Newton by F. E. Smith, who would later defend Ethel Le Neve.
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Tobin was not a bad choice. He was clever, industrious and experienced and possessed ‘the most ecclesiastical voice of any member of the Bar’.
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Tobin’s ‘cheerful and plausible manner made him an effective defender of prisoners’,
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but he was now facing an unenviable task in arguing that Crippen was not guilty of murdering his wife.

The first and second days of the Crippen trial were gruesome beyond words.

The American Law School Review

The case is not a pleasant one: on the contrary, this case is painful from beginning to end.

Lord Chief Justice Alverstone

Dr Crippen stood trial first. An American lawyer was watching the proceedings and observed as

the wiry little Dr Crippen was led to the front of the dock, and boldly faced the Lord Chief Justice. The accused gazed about the crowded court with evident satisfaction. He appreciated that he was the centre of attraction, and returned the curious stares of the brilliant assemblage with a faint smile. Monocles and opera glasses were directed at him, to his apparent gratification.
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Day one of the trial began with the clerk of the court reading out the charge. ‘Hawley Harvey Crippen, you are indicted and also charged on the coroner’s inquisition with the wilful murder of Cora Crippen on the 1st February last. Are you guilty or not guilty?’ Crippen replied, ‘Not guilty, my lord.’

Richard Muir made the opening statement for the Crown. Muir’s biographer described him as ‘essentially a logician: he had no patience with high-flown rhetorics, and he made it an invariable practice to open his cases so that a man of the meanest intelligence could easily understand what they were about’.
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In his opening speech the plain-speaking Muir suggested a financial motive for the murder in addition to a romantic one:

The position, therefore, was this – his affection fixed upon Ethel Le Neve, and himself desirous of establishing closer relations with that young woman; the physical presence of his wife an obstacle to those relations; the fact that he had no money another obstacle. If Belle Elmore died both those obstacles would be removed, because Belle Elmore’s money, and property which could be converted into money, would enable him to keep Ethel Le Neve, which at that time he was unable to do.

Muir continued,

Her friends said she was a good correspondent; but from the moment that Mr and Mrs Martinetti left the house in the early morning of 1st February she passed out of the world which knew her as completely as if she were dead. She left behind her everything she would have left if she had died – money, jewels, furs, clothes, home, and husband. The prisoner made up his mind that she had left never to return. He at once began to convert her property, and on 12th March Ethel Le Neve, who had been seen wearing a brooch and furs belonging to Belle Elmore, went permanently to live with him at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. Crippen was therefore quite certain that his wife would never return.

Muir then raised the question of why Crippen felt the need to flee the country if his statement to Dew had been correct, and his wife was still alive. Crippen had not offered any explanation. Then there was the question of who, other than Crippen, had the opportunity to bury the remains in the cellar, and why would they have been buried there if the death had been a natural one?

Most of the first three days of the trial consisted of evidence for the prosecution. An uncomfortable Bruce Miller had been given a first-class passage from America to England aboard the
Deutschland
, on which he travelled under the pseudonym of ‘C. C. Brown’ (‘Cora Crippen Brown’ eyes perhaps?). His appearance on the first day of the trial would have been the first time he had ever been in the same room as Dr Crippen. Miller testified that he had not seen Cora Crippen since April 1904, but they corresponded occasionally. Tobin hoped to establish that Cora and Miller had been lovers, therefore making it seem more feasible that she would have left Crippen to join Miller in America:

Tobin: Did you ever tell her that you loved her?
Miller: Well, I do not know that I ever put it in that way.
Tobin: Did you indicate to her that you did love her?
Miller: She always understood it that way, I suppose.
Tobin: Then you did love her, I presume?
Miller: I do not mean to say that. I did not exactly love her; I thought a great deal of her as far as friendship was concerned. She was a married lady, and we will let it end at that. It was a platonic friendship.
Tobin: Do you know the difference between friendship and love?
Miller: Yes.
Tobin: Were you more than a friend?
Miller: I could not be more than a friend. She was a married lady and I was a married man.

Miller did admit to having kissed Cora, but said, ‘I always treated her as a gentleman, and never went any further.’ He further denied having ‘improper relations’ with Cora when asked directly by Muir and Alverstone. Was Miller’s affectionate behaviour towards Cora, both in correspondence and in person, just an example of theatrical familiarity or was there more to it? There is no evidence that Cora and Bruce Miller had an affair, nor is there explicit proof of the true nature of their relationship. One early writer on the Crippen case neatly explained the relationship, ‘which, if not proved guilty, at least never was proved to be innocent’.
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But if the association had been so significant, it seems strange that not one of Cora’s friends mentioned it. In Crippen’s statement to Dew he had merely said that his wife and Miller were fond of each other. The defence and subsequent writers on the case interpreted this as proof of an affair. There was, of course, no question about Dr Crippen’s relationship with Le Neve, which they both described as ‘intimate’ to Dew.

Walter Dew had been the first of the witnesses to arrive at the Old Bailey on the second day of the trial, when he was called to give evidence. Dew spent more than two hours in the witness box and began by detailing the visit to Scotland Yard of the Nashes and continued up to his interviews with Crippen and Le Neve on 8 July. At this point Travers Humphreys read out to the court the lengthy statements that Crippen and Le Neve had given to Dew and Mitchell.

As Dew’s testimony continued, he explained how he had searched 39 Hilldrop Crescent in the presence of Crippen, and later, in his absence, how further searching had lead to the discovery of the
corpus delicti
in the cellar. A press observer described Dew’s performance as ‘very suave, perfectly cool, and self-possessed. Mr Dew is scrupulously fair to the prisoner. He not only assents to Mr Tobin’s suggestion that he was not anxious to conceal anything, but he adds to it the perfectly voluntary statement that he did not attempt to.’
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Dew concluded by briefly mentioning his chase and arrest of Crippen and Le Neve. Travers Humphreys had been gentle with him despite the fact that he thought Dew had been resting on his laurels too much on his return to London. He was not about to say anything in court that disparaged the police or Dew.

Much of the trial was taken up by the detailed discussion of medical evidence, primarily whether a piece of skin found upon the remains bore the mark of a scar or otherwise. This was a vital point because it could go towards identifying the corpse as being Cora Crippen, who had an operational scar on her abdomen.

The first doctor to give evidence was Dr Pepper. The Home Office pathologist had given evidence at many important trials over the years. A colleague said that as a witness, Pepper had ‘an absolute certainty of his facts and a quiet competence in the witness-box, which, whilst it made a great impression upon the jury, was the despair of opposing counsel’.
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He thought that the remains had been buried in the cellar shortly after death and that they had lain there for between four and eight months. When asked whether they could have been there prior to 21 September 1905, Pepper emphatically replied, ‘Oh, no, absolutely impossible.’ That was the date when the Crippens had moved into 39 Hilldrop Crescent and would prove to be crucial later on in the trial.

Pepper thought that the piece of skin in question was from the lower front part of the abdomen. He was convinced that the mark upon it was a scar, and a microscopic examination of it had reinforced his view. ‘Even I could see it was a scar – a scar which had stretched,’ Cecil Mercer asserted. He asked Pepper if there were any doubts. ‘How can there be?’ the pathologist replied. ‘As she grew stouter, it stretched. I’ve seen them again and again.’
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Tobin cross-examined Dr Pepper and tried to establish that whoever dismembered the body possessed great anatomical and medical skill. By this he was suggesting that Crippen would not have had the requisite skill to have undertaken such a task. Pepper was too experienced to allow himself to be led:

Tobin: As to the great dexterity you have already told us that was required to remove these organs in the way they were removed, it would require a really practised hand and eye, would it not?
Pepper: Certainly.
Tobin: A man frequently accustomed to dissect bodies or to conduct post-mortem examinations, or matters of that kind?
Pepper: No, a person who had previously done it, but not necessarily continuously. If a person had once learned how to do it he could do it.
Tobin: Suppose a student in the hospitals learnt it, and then there was a long lapse of time afterwards – fifteen years or so – surely the hand and eye have to be pretty well accustomed?
Pepper: I think he could do it quite as well after ten years as he could at the time. It is not a minute dissection; it is a particular kind of work.

On the third day of the trial Dr Bernard Spilsbury, a pathologist from St Mary’s Hospital, gave evidence. Like Travers Humphreys, Spilsbury had his holiday interrupted by the Crippen case. He remained in London while his wife and baby went to Minehead without him.

Even in this early court appearance Dew gained the impression that Spilsbury ‘was a man who knew what he was talking about’.
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He was ‘a new, dominating voice in the courts of justice … Tall, handsome, well-dressed, a red carnation in his buttonhole, his bearing in his first capital case was as detached, imperturbable, and confident as it was when he was at the height of his fame.’
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Spilsbury had made notes on the case and concluded that Crippen had ‘skill in evisceration – acquisition of hyoscine – access to textbooks’. Cora Crippen was ‘American. 35. Vivacious – good company – attractive – dressed well – jewellery – fast life. Private: very overbearing – bad temper.’ As well as being the case that made his name, the Crippen case would be the one which made the most lasting impression on Spilsbury. Years after the trial he read, reread and annotated his copy of the Notable British Trials Crippen volume until the spine broke and the pages became loose.
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Spilsbury had been a student of Dr Pepper, and would succeed him as Home Office pathologist. Pepper’s conclusion about the mark on the skin had been ‘an old scar. Probably more than a year old. It might be many years old.’ Spilsbury also thought the skin was from the lower abdomen and he clearly stated ‘that mark is undoubtedly an old operation scar’. Spilsbury’s opinions did differ from those of Pepper on the matter of the killer’s anatomical skill. He answered Tobin’s questions coldly and unemotionally: