Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (22 page)

Low duly arrived and read the confession to Findon and Little, who took notes. He then threw the papers on the fire but as soon as his back was turned Little plucked the half-burned confession from the grate. From this and their notes the two journalists pieced together Crippen’s confession. By five o’clock in the morning on the day of publication the notes were being scrutinised by editorial staff, including Edgar Wallace, who had some affection for Crippen after learning that the fugitive had read his book
The Four Just Men
on the
Montrose
, which had resulted in a surge of sales of the title. The confession itself lacked the excitement they hoped for, but it was a definite statement that Crippen had deliberately poisoned Cora with hyoscine concealed in indigestion tablets. He then dismembered her with a surgeon’s knife, which he later hid in the garden of an empty Hilldrop Crescent house.
¹⁴

The
Evening Times
ran the story of Crippen’s confession on 23 November, and the paper sold close to a million copies that evening.
¹⁵
The newspaper’s problems started when another London evening paper ran a story the same day that they had interviewed officials at the prison and the Home Office who denied that there had been a confession. They had also interviewed Newton, who refused to comment. These denials were circulated by press agencies and appeared in the final editions of the evening papers.

At an
Evening Times
staff meeting the next day they discussed what to do to protect their reputation. According to Findon they decided to say nothing and save Newton’s reputation. Furthermore, Findon did not reveal any of this until immediately after Newton’s death in 1930. This remarkable altruism is surprising as Newton had pocketed £500 of the
Times
’ money and humiliated them in front of their Fleet Street rivals. Findon said that he went to see Newton for an explanation and a statement. An unrepentant Newton told him, ‘I can say nothing about the confession. I personally know of no confession, but beyond this I cannot discuss the matter except to say that it is not within the right of any man to throw doubt on the confession.’ It was too little too late. By 26 November the
Evening Times
’ sales had fallen from 1 million to 30,000, and it went out of business after just over a year.
¹⁶

If Findon’s story is to be believed, then that was not the only occasion that Newton profited from an alleged Crippen confession. In 1922 he sold his memoirs to
Thomson’s Weekly News
. They included the claim that Crippen had signed a confession in Brixton Prison before his trial.

According to Newton, Crippen explained that he had been driven to murder by Cora’s infidelity, nagging, drinking and jealousy. The murder was premeditated, for Crippen had bought a dissecting knife for the purpose of dismembering Cora. He had hidden the knife under his mattress, safe in the knowledge that Cora would not find it ‘for she never even bothered to make my bed’. He burned the missing remains in the kitchen stove but could not finish the job as the fumes were overpowering and he did not want to arouse the suspicions of his neighbours. Newton added that the confession was either lost or destroyed by the time he gave up his practice.
¹⁷

I’ve always wondered if Ethel Le Neve was in it with him or not.

Agatha Christie,
The Lernean Hydra

The world-wide attention which the case has aroused has certainly made my future a very difficult problem.

Ethel Le Neve,
My Life Story

Belief in Ethel Le Neve’s innocence of any involvement in the murder of Cora Crippen was almost universal. Frank Dilnot, a journalist who attended the Bow Street committal hearings, was fairly typical in his assessment: ‘Of course, Miss Le Neve knew nothing of the murder, and it is inconceivable that she should have had anything to do with Crippen if she had known him to be the murderer he was afterwards proved to be.’
¹

Captain Kendall shared Dilnot’s view and ‘no sort of doubt as to her innocence of crime remained in my mind. This was emphatically not the kind of girl who for weeks could spend all day alone in the Camden Town house knowing that below were the remains of the murdered Belle Elmore.’
²

Very soon after Le Neve’s acquittal she was ‘captured at a price’ by the
Daily Chronicle
.
³
That paper was affiliated with the popular Sunday tabloid
Lloyd’s Weekly News
, which eventually published her story. Philip (later Sir Philip) Gibbs and J. P. Eddy, a future barrister and judge, were the two journalists assigned to interview Le Neve.

The Fleet Street duo spent several weeks with Le Neve at a furnished flat paid for by the newspaper and they both formed a favourable impression of her. Eddy described Le Neve as ‘a brunette, with a slight figure, a finely-chiselled nose and expressive eyes’.
⁴
‘She was,’ he thought, ‘an understanding person who would be likely to give Crippen the affection and sympathy which he lacked. I had no shadow of doubt as to her innocence … my faith in her innocence never faltered.’
⁵

Gibbs gave a slightly different account. He wrote that Eddy ‘cross-examined her artfully and persistently, with the firm belief that she knew all about the murder. Never once, however, did he trap her into any admission.’ Gibbs described Le Neve as ‘quite a pretty and attractive little creature’ with ‘astonishing and unusual qualities’. After Crippen’s arrest ‘she had no doubt now of his guilt’. But, as she also admitted, that made no difference to her love for him. ‘He was mad when he did it,’ she said, ‘and he was mad for me.’ Gibbs was struck by Crippen and Le Neve’s affair, comparing them to ‘mediaeval lovers in Italy of Boccaccio’s time, when the murder for love’s sake was lightly done’.
⁶

On the morning of Crippen’s execution Gibbs was with Le Neve, who dressed in black for the occasion ‘and wished she might have died with him on the scaffold’. However, her ordeal had not appeared to affect her and ‘many times she was so gay that it was impossible to believe that she had escaped the hangman’s rope by no great distance’. She possessed ‘a quick and childish sense of humour which had not been killed by the frightful thing that overshadowed her’.
⁷
Le Neve’s own account of the day of execution was completely different. She said she had been at home in her flat; ‘too ill to move out of bed, I lay there from dawn till the dread hour’.
⁸

Gibbs was convinced of her innocence, but was ‘glad to see the last of her’ because he ‘sickened at the squalor of the whole story of love and murder’.
⁹
When published in
Lloyd’s Weekly News
over a four-week period, Le Neve’s story proved somewhat disappointing. It offered no sensational revelations and served more as an advert for her innocence in the whole affair. The series was quickly reprinted in a booklet called
Ethel Le Neve Her Life Story
by a London publisher and soon afterwards as a facsimile by Daisy Bank publishing.

F. E. Smith never explained what he meant by his comment after Le Neve’s trial, ‘I knew what she would say’. Despite F. E.’s public support of Le Neve’s innocence, could there have been some doubts lurking at the back of the sagacious barrister’s mind? There was much more to her than met the eye and she would prove to be as enigmatic as Dr Crippen. One biographer of Bernard Spilsbury noted that ‘Ethel Le Neve moves through the tragedy like a ghost. She is a completely baffling character, who glides from the scene without leaving trace or impression. Only this can be said: either there was nothing in her or there was a great deal.’
¹⁰

In September 1911 a Post Office employee was making a routine examination of Post Office Savings Bank documents prior to their destruction. On one of them he noticed the name Belle Elmore and the address 39 Hilldrop Crescent. Remembering the names from the previous year’s
cause célèbre
, he took a closer look.

The document related to a withdrawal of money from Cora Crippen’s Post Office savings account. When cross-referenced with her account records it was discovered that between 5 April and 17 June 1910, eight withdrawals had been made totalling £196 11
s
4
d
. All the withdrawals had been made from the Western Central District post office in London. The writing on the forged withdrawal papers was carefully examined and compared to Ethel Le Neve’s. The Post Office concluded that Le Neve had forged Cora’s writing and that the forgeries were ‘very good’.

Details of the findings were handed to the Director of Public Prosecutions. He consulted with the Attorney General, who decided not to prosecute Le Neve because

whatever the opinion an expert might form on the question of handwriting, it would be extremely harsh, after so great a lapse in time, to rearrest this woman, who had already stood her trial on a grave charge, and who had already been acquitted under a defence that what she had done was under the domination of a will stronger than her own, and under the domination of which she certainly was at the time of the occurrences upon which any fresh prosecution must be founded.

Eventually the embezzled money was refunded to the Post Office by the Treasury and given to the administrators of Cora Crippen’s will.
¹¹

It is commonly believed that the journalist and prolific author Ursula Bloom was the first person to find Ethel Le Neve after she faded into obscurity at the end of 1910. One day in the early 1950s Bloom was discussing the Crippen case with Charles Eade, the editor of the
Sunday Dispatch
. Eade said that Ethel had ‘disappeared into the limbo of lost things, and without a doubt she will never turn up again. Would you like to do the story? I propose to call it The Girl Who Loved Crippen.’
¹²
Bloom did want to do the story and would dine off it for the rest of her life.

The first instalment of
The Girl Who Loved Crippen
was published in the
Sunday Dispatch
on 4 April 1954. Two days after publication, a male relative of Le Neve turned up at the
Dispatch
’s
office, ostensibly to complain about the article, but possibly hoping to profit from his connection to its subject. It may have been his grievance that led to subsequent instalments of the series including the disclaimer that ‘this is a novel based on fact. The principal characters figured in the most famous crime of the century; some of the other characters are entirely fictitious.’

Bloom claimed not to have known Le Neve was alive and sent a letter of apology to her via the relative. Le Neve replied, saying that she had left England on the day of Crippen’s execution, worked in Canada before returning to England in 1916 to nurse her dying sister. She stayed in England and married a co-worker with whom she had two children and one grandson, none of whom knew anything of her past and association with the Crippen case.
¹³

Ursula and Ethel continued corresponding and eventually met. Le Neve told her she thought that Crippen was innocent and said that ‘the nasty smell which haunted his house had been there during Belle Elmore’s life. This was never taken up and there was never any inquiry into previous tenants.’
¹⁴

After the series of
Sunday Dispatch
articles ended, Bloom added an appendix in which she described their meeting. In appearance Ethel ‘could easily be anyone’s next-door neighbour. Smally built, she is still pretty, with grey hair, and intelligent eyes out of which a strong personality looks. For 44 years she has remained unidentified, when there were hundreds who were curious about her.’
¹⁵

The newspaper series had been completed before Bloom had met Le Neve
¹⁶
and was published in a book of the same title in 1955. It was virtually identical to the newspaper version. Bloom’s meeting with Le Neve had not led to any new disclosures that would help sell the book, suggesting that Le Neve did not cooperate with the author.

Moving forward to 1961, and a new musical based on the Crippen story was about to open in London.
¹⁷
Ursula Bloom had stayed in contact with Le Neve and kept her promise never to divulge her whereabouts. Of the play ‘she [Ethel] would not discuss it. She was not interested. She would not visit the theatre – for that would hurt her too much. All she seeks now is to retire into the background and be forgotten.’
¹⁸
Ursula Bloom kept in touch with Le Neve until the end. Shortly before Ethel died, Bloom allegedly accompanied her to Pentonville Prison at Le Neve’s request.
¹⁹

Bloom was famed for her association with Le Neve and occasionally recounted her story. In 1965, Bloom quoted from a notebook that she had filled in on the day she met Le Neve for the first time:

She said she still loved Crippen. Recalled that remains of Belle Elmore were unearthed and handed to the jury on a soup plate. Said they showed an intensive hernia scar for removal of navel. But there was evidence that Belle had retained her navel after her op. This was not pressed in court.
    The pyjama sleeve unearthed was one of half a million sold in neighbourhood by Jones of Holloway.
    Hyoscine traces were found. But Le Neve said ‘We seldom used hyoscine, it was new, and he had never liked it.’
    Then summed up: ‘He did not die for any of those things. It was just that he loved me.’ Her face was very white.
    I asked her if Crippen could have come back again, would she marry him now? Her eyes almost pierced me. Then she nodded. ‘Yes I would,’ she said.
²⁰

It is true that Ursula Bloom had tracked down Ethel Le Neve in the 1950s, but it is far from the truth to suggest that she was the first person to do so since 1910.

In her youth, Bloom was an avid reader of the
News of the World
, saying ‘it was my relaxation from the classics, and nothing could have enchanted me more’.
²¹
It was in the
News of the World
that she had first read of the Crippen case in 1910. Maybe she had stopped reading the paper, because in 1952 the front-page headline read, ‘The Captain Who Captured Crippen Tells His Story’.