Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (24 page)

The death certificate bore the name and address of Ethel Smith’s son Robert, so Goodman checked the telephone directory and found Robert Smith was still at the same West Country address and wrote to him, enclosing a stamped, addressed envelope for a reply. Robert Smith was a retired joiner aged seventy and his sister Nina Campbell, a retired secretary, was sixty-four. Robert opened Goodman’s carefully worded letter:

Dear Mr Smith
    I have learned your address from your mother’s death certificate. I am at present completing a book which I trust will put an end to some of the many legends associated with the case of the death of Mrs Cora Crippen in 1910. I should be most grateful if you could assist me.
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Robert said to his wife, ‘Some loony has written to me.’ However, he replied the same day and invited Goodman to visit.
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Goodman took with him a letter written by Le Neve and the handwriting matched that of a recipe for chocolate roll in her recipe book that Robert now owned.
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Further proof came in the form of a photograph of their grandfather.

The mystery of Robert and Nina’s parent’s marriage certificate was now solved. It gave her name as Ethel Clara Harvey (Crippen’s middle name).
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She had married Stanley William Smith at Wandsworth Registry Office on 2 January 1915. His occupation was given as ‘Household Furnishing Clerk’, not Australian soldier. The validity of this certificate is proved by naming Ethel’s sister Adine Brock as a witness and her father as Walter William Harvey, a coal merchant’s commercial traveller. The Christian names and occupation matched Walter Neave. Stanley Smith had worked at Hampton’s furnishing store when he met Ethel and their children were both born in London, not Australia.

Robert and Nina accepted their late mother had been Ethel Le Neve and were surprised that so many of her family members managed to keep her secret from them for so long. Ethel’s father had lived with them for some time (apparently forgiven for selling her story to
Answers
in 1910). It is not certain whether their father knew her secret. Robert said, ‘I would say that dad knew’, while his sister said, ‘I don’t think she would have kept dad in the dark about it.’
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It seems likely that he did know, for in 1920 and 1928 her story was published in a mass-circulation newspaper containing up-to-date photographs of Ethel. If Stanley hadn’t known, surely somebody would have seen them and commented on the likeness of his wife to Ethel Le Neve. Presumably she would have been paid reasonably well for her stories. Had she sold her memoirs purely for financial gain? In 1910 she would have needed the money from
Lloyd’s
to start a new life. The first edition of the Notable British Trials
volume on Dr Crippen had been published in 1920, which would have returned the case to the fore and made it a logical time to cash in.

Robert and Nina thought she had done the right thing by not telling them.
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Nina later said in a documentary, ‘I’m sure she must have known something about it [the murder].’
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Robert said ‘you could never discuss anything personal with her’. Even on her deathbed she refused to speak to them and kept her lips clenched tight.
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Nina added, ‘I can’t honestly believe that she didn’t know something. I would find that very very hard to believe.’ Robert agreed, ‘Yes, she did know something about it although she didn’t take part. For that to happen and know nothing about it would be rather hard to accept.’
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Goodman had his suspicions about Le Neve. He claimed that a Professor William Wright noticed she had spent several weeks shortly before the murder in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons ‘poring over toxicological tomes’. Goodman also noted a book called
A Wingless Angel
by J. E. Muddock, ‘just the sort of purple pennyworth that Crippen’s lady-love might have borrowed from a lending library’. The book, published in 1875, bore remarkable similarities to the Crippen story. It contains a character called Mrs Belmore, a murder by hyoscine, a murderer who disguises himself as a woman and a failed escape by boat.
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Ethel Le Neve always denied any knowledge of Cora Crippen’s murder. She stood by Crippen until the end and would never say a negative word against him. From unwillingly being one of the most famous women in the world, she became a virtually anonymous ‘cantankerous old lady, sitting there in a smock, and most of the time with her dentures out’.
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With the passing of Ethel Smith in 1967, the last major player in the great Crippen drama had gone. It would be pure conjecture to guess at her true involvement and the extent of her knowledge. It is an old cliché, but in Le Neve’s case an appropriate one. She took her secrets to the grave.
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Reading about the Crippen case sometimes makes one feel like setting up a Cora Crippen Defence Society.

Joan Lock,
Scotland Yard Casebook

Mrs Crippen seemed a very charming woman, but as for him, I did not like the look of him at all.

Anonymous local tradesman,
Holborn and Finsbury Guardian

A very pertinent observation was made by Michael Gilbert in his 1953 book about Dr Crippen:

By an odd romantic quirk the figure of Dr Crippen seems to become gentler and more sympathetic as the years pass. By contrast, the blowsy figure of Belle Elmore becomes blowsier with the passage of time and she appears as a slut who almost invited herself to a lethal dose of hyoscin. I fear that neither impression bears the bold stamp of truth.
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It certainly was not that simple. Broadly speaking, it appears that nearly everyone who knew Cora during her lifetime thought highly of her and held her in great affection. Since her death a great many writers and commentators have denigrated her name and reputation by accepting and embellishing later stereotypes. In the case of Dr Crippen, he was widely liked before his trial. The sympathy and regard for him continued unabated, even after his conviction for murder and execution. His abiding reputation led Tom Cullen to call his influential 1977 study of the case
Crippen: The Mild Murderer
.
²

Perhaps it was his love for Le Neve and the romantic aspect of the story that evoked sympathy for Dr Crippen. Arthur Newton looked upon his client ‘as the greatest lover I have ever met’.
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One early writer on the case said, ‘Sometimes great love goes hand in hand with a horrible and barbarous crime.’
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The love story of Crippen and Le Neve was an integral part of the case for Inspector Dew, who said that the ‘most extraordinary case in my career was that of the notorious Dr Crippen, in which cold, calculated murder and great love and devotion were mingled’.
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It is easy to find favourable post-1910 comments about Dr Crippen. One early account of the case neatly pointed out that Crippen ‘would seem to have been a man of many minor virtues and of one monstrous crime’.
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‘Quite apart from the sympathy everyone feels for a man who murders his wife, it was difficult not to admire Crippen for his courage and chivalry’
⁷
was the view of George Orwell, who made several references to Dr Crippen in his writings. Raymond Chandler, the author of hard-boiled American detective stories, commented in 1948 that ‘you can’t help liking this guy somehow. He was one murderer who died like a gentleman.’
⁸

Ursula Bloom, whose sympathies were clearly on the side of Crippen and Le Neve, went further than most. ‘The deeper one went into the life of Belle Elmore, the more disgusted one was with her, and the more sympathetic one became with poor little Dr Crippen who had been foolish enough to marry her.’ Bloom may have been correct when she said, ‘I never met anyone who did not like him … everyone said that he was the kindest man alive.’
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There were some who were not so convinced of Crippen’s virtues. Barrister and author Helena Normanton considered that ‘criminology has its own grim form of monarchy; and if criminals selected Murder Kings as they do Cat Burglar Kings and so on, Dr Crippen would easily rank among the first half-dozen candidates for the throne’. Normanton would compare Crippen to King Henry VIII, describing both of them as victims of ‘a hunger for domesticity’. She thought that Crippen’s ‘elimination of his wife Cora Crippen is an imperishable classic’.
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Cora Crippen was very popular too during her lifetime. One newspaper reported, ‘Nobody has an ill word to say concerning the dead woman, whom many affectionately remember, and who was often referred to in America as “Handsome Belle Elmore”.’
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She ‘was at all times kindness and generosity itself; she was a large-hearted woman’ according to Melinda May,
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while Adelene Harrison remembered Cora as ‘vivacious, full of the joy of life, and very kind hearted’.
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It is worth considering when this change of opinion about Cora took place. All of Cora’s friends and family testified to her likeable character and popular standing among them. Why was it that after her death she became the complete opposite to most writers?

The series of Notable British Trials (NBT) volumes were, and remain, a hugely influential source of information for crime historians. Filson Young, who edited the 1920 Crippen volume, is partly responsible for Cora’s posthumous reputation. Young was not particularly complimentary about Cora in his introduction, writing of her ‘inordinate vanity … It is distasteful to speak of Mrs Crippen’s relations with other men, but it is obvious that the avenue to her affections was not very narrow or difficult to access.’ Cora was noted for ‘her vanity, her extravagance, her shrewishness’ and her character was a ‘loud, aggressive and physical kind that seems to exhaust the atmosphere round it, and is undoubtedly exhausting to live with’. Had Young been influenced by Crippen’s lengthy statement to Dew that was reproduced in his book? He certainly repeated some of Crippen’s unsupported claims about Cora as fact.

Filson Young’s descriptions of Cora caused distress and outrage for some who had known her. When the 1950 reprint of the NBT was released it provoked Cora’s sister Louise Mills to write to the publisher from her home in New York to refute Young’s comments:

Unless you retract these lies, I shall be obliged to see my lawyer. She [Belle] was not the gay little peacock as you described her – she was a wonderful housekeeper, wife, cook and seamstress, making practically all of her clothes. I lived in Hilldrop Crescent with her for a while. She wanted me to live there permanently, but I did not stay because Crippen always bothered me as soon as his wife was out of sight – he also molested my other sisters when he came over and visited us in Brooklyn. He wasn’t the little abused husband – he never, as you claim, cleaned the lodgers’ boots, neither did he work in the kitchen – his wife always cooked our breakfast, and his dinner was always served regular.
    They did not occupy separate rooms – I know because I occupied the room next to theirs. He was intimate with his typist, Le Neve, for a much longer period than he told. In 1906, five years before he did away with my sister, she told me she was afraid to stay alone with him, he often threatened her, she kept her jewellery in a safety deposit box because she did not trust him. He was a drug addict, and most of the drugs he bought as a doctor were consumed by himself.
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Obviously Louise Mills would have been supportive of her late sister and despised Crippen, but there are echoes of other people’s views in her letter. Crippen’s son Otto hinted that his father was a sexual predator when interviewed by the
Los Angeles Herald
, while the brother of his first wife believed he had threatened Charlotte. The image of a henpecked Dr Crippen cleaning the lodgers’ boots is a common one in the literature on the case, but it may have been Cora who had to look after them. Maud Burroughs said ‘Mrs Crippen got rid of them because they were too much work’.

Mills was not the only person who refuted later suggestions that Cora was a slatternly housewife. Neighbour Millicent Gillatt of 40 Hilldrop Crescent saw the charlady sweeping the carpet at No. 39, only for Cora to take the broom off her and do it herself.
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German lodger Karl Reinisch remembered her as ‘a good housewife, unlike many other English women. She cooked herself, quite excellently.’
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Adelene Harrison contradicted this, saying that Cora ‘had a horror of servants or domestic help’ that was only equalled by her love of fine clothes and jewellery.
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She later gave a lengthy ‘character study’ to the newspaper
John Bull
in December 1910 when she described Cora’s housekeeping skills:

They lived practically in the kitchen, which was always in a state of dirt and disorder. On the dresser was a heterogeneous mass, consisting of dirty crockery, edibles, collars of the Doctor’s, false curls of her own, hair-pins, brushes, letters, a gold jewelled purse and other articles. The kitchener and gas stove were brown with rust and cooking stains. The table was littered with packages, saucepans, dirty knives, plates, flat-irons, a washing basin and a coffee pot. Thrown carelessly across a chair was a lovely white chiffon gown, embroidered with silk flowers and mounted over white glace.
    But when she received her friends the whole scene changed. The table in one of the reception rooms was elegantly laid with a lace-bordered table cloth, dainty serviettes, gleaming silver and expensive flowers.
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Harrison made similar claims to Filson Young for the NBT but she did have some affection for Cora, whom she described as ‘a brilliant chattering bird of gorgeous plumage. She seemed to overflow the room with her personality. Her bright, dark eyes were twinkling with the joy of life. Her vivacious rounded face, Slavonic in type, was radiant with smiles.’
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