Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (14 page)

One resourceful journalist managed to gatecrash the funeral. Joseph Meaney, dressed entirely in black, was shoved into the last carriage just as it was pulling away. Meaney found himself among six female music hall artistes who supposed he was some relative of Cora’s. Despite the protests of the reporters, kept outside the cemetery gates by the police, Meaney gained admission to the chapel where he scribbled down notes in shorthand on a bound copy of the funeral service. He recorded ‘a very earnest and dignified appeal by the priest to the people in the chapel to behave with the utmost decorum at the graveside, and add their own prayers to his for the peace of the murdered woman’s soul’.
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We had so much evidence against Crippen, we didn’t use it all.

Cecil Mercer, counsel for the Crown

The trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen for the murder of his wife was held at the Central Criminal Court, popularly known as the Old Bailey. It lasted five days, from Tuesday 18 October to Saturday 22 October 1910. The presiding judge was Richard ‘Dicky’ Webster, the Right Honourable Lord Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice of England. It was said that it was unlikely that ‘in thirty-two years at the bar any man ever had more work to do, or earned more money’.
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Alverstone was described as being of ‘medium height, with an impressive cast of features, a kindly disposition, though stern and inflexible when the occasion demanded’. As well as being hard-working, he impressed the newspaper editor and politician T. P. O’Connor, who gushingly wrote, ‘Never was a man endowed with such a memory for detail; and never was there a man who could master in so short a space of time such a collection of facts. It was almost uncanny.’
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Alverstone’s view of the Crippen case was that it was ‘an extraordinary one’.
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He had apparently taken a great interest in the North London cellar murder from the time of the discovery of the remains.
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Representing the Crown were Richard Muir, Travers Humphreys and Samuel Ingleby Oddie, assisted by Cecil Mercer and acting under instruction from the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Charles Mathews.

The question of how much Le Neve knew would have to wait for her trial. Crippen and Le Neve were to be tried separately and on different charges. Muir and Humphreys were concerned that if they were tried together for the same crime, one of the jurymen might be ‘so influenced by the appeal on behalf of Le Neve that he might decline to convict Crippen’. Separate trials would also simplify the job of the prosecution.

When Crippen learned that he was to face the ferocious and daunting Richard Muir, he said despairingly, ‘It is most unfortunate that he is against me. I wish it had been anyone else but him. I fear the worst.’
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Thorough, grim and remorseless, Muir worked relentlessly in preparing his cases, leaving nothing to chance. Samuel Oddie worked in Muir’s chambers. He described Muir as

an indefatigable worker. His work was his life. He had no amusements and no relaxation. He always took work home every night, and after his evening meal and a short snooze over the paper, he drew up his chair to the table and set to work on his briefs at which he continued nightly up to one and two in the morning. Yet he was always the first to arrive in the chambers and the last to leave.
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Mercer had mixed feelings. He considered Muir the best at what he did, but too inflexible and limited. He was a hopeless defender, but

give him a dead case, and he’d screw the coffin down as could nobody else. But everything had to go according to plan. He couldn’t turn quickly, as counsel should be able to do. But, by God, he was a glutton for work. And he was safe as a house. A very admirable man. No sense of humour at all – he didn’t know what it meant.
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Not everybody was so impressed by Muir. Former chief clerk at Bow Street magistrates’ court Albert Lieck remembered Muir because he ‘was the only man who ever sent me to sleep, actual heavy slumber, in court. He was ponderous beyond belief, though thorough and dangerous enough. He had an unpleasant way of pressing his case too hard against the accused.’
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Muir had built up an impression of Crippen:

He is not the ordinary type of man one would expect to commit a murder and then to cut up the body of his victim and dispose of it. Rather is he the sort of man I would expect to find running a successful swindle. He has a certain amount of craftiness and cunning, as well as considerable self-assurance.
    There is no doubt that his life with his wife had been one of unending misery, and apparently he found a good deal of relief and a certain stolen happiness with Ethel Le Neve.
    I suppose one cannot look upon the cutting up of his wife’s body as being such an outrageous or aggravating feature as it might have been with anyone else. He had more than a passing knowledge of medicine and surgery and to such a person, no doubt, the dissecting of a body would not create such a revolting impression as it would in an ordinary individual.
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Travers Humphreys was on holiday in Filey with his wife and two sons when he was summoned back to London by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Humphreys was certain that Crippen had murdered his wife. He believed that Le Neve might have ‘had an inkling that something serious had happened’ when she was asked to disguise herself as a boy but thought that had she known the full facts she would have immediately left Crippen.
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Despite the incredible public interest the case was creating, Humphreys thought that the evidence against Crippen was so overwhelming that from a legal point of view it would be ‘of little interest for the lawyer’.
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Oddie was given the junior brief for the Crown. He was chosen over Humphreys’ junior, Cecil Mercer, because of his medical experience. As it was a poisoning case Oddie did not rate Crippen’s chances for his attitude was that the ‘average Englishman is a decent sort of fellow who does not like homicide and looks upon secret poisoning as a low-down dirty game, and indeed it is’.
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Cecil Mercer was constructing the case against Crippen. He wasn’t remotely impressed by Crippen. ‘“He had such charming manners,” they used to say. Perhaps he had. To my mind, he was repulsive: but most women seemed to like him, and that’s the truth.’
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He was struck by Crippen’s eyes, ‘since he had protruding eyes, the effect, when he looked at you, was really most repulsive, for the glass being thick and the eyes very close to the glass, some trick of magnification lent them a horrible look. His gaze was most disconcerting.’
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The prosecution team were sure Crippen had killed his wife, but no one besides Crippen knew exactly how it had happened. Cora might have realised her terrible fate when it was too late to save herself. Mercer made the interesting point that ‘until the poison was found, we had no reason to think Crippen had poisoned his wife’.
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Dr Marshall had initially admitted, ‘I came to the conclusion that it was a homicide and have no doubt a murder was committed, but there was nothing to tell me how she met her death.’ When Dew discovered some pieces of string measuring fifteen and eleven inches and a handkerchief among the remains, he wondered if they might have been used for strangulation.

Mercer made the following reconstruction of Cora’s murder from the evidence:

That certain things happened we know: exactly how they happened, we cannot be sure. Though much of what I tell you must be assumed, every conclusion was most carefully drawn, and myself I have no doubt that the very gruesome picture which I shall present differs hardly at all from the tale which would have been told, had someone been there to see.
    Belle Elmore was partial to stout. Whilst she was in her bedroom, getting undressed, Crippen brought her a glass of stout. But into the stout, he had put some hyoscine. It is a deadly poison, inducing convulsions and coma, preceding death. It is very slightly bitter, but stout would conceal the taste.
    Belle Elmore drank the stout, and Crippen undressed. By the time the coma had supervened, Crippen was in his pyjamas. He seized his wife’s hair and dragged her out of the room and down the stairs. She was still in her underclothes.
    All this was according to plan, for the crime was premeditated. The grave he had dug was waiting, under the coal-cellar’s floor.
    Well, he dragged the body downstairs and into the kitchen. He got it on to the table, above which was burning a lamp. This must have meant a great effort for the body was a dead weight and Belle Elmore was not a small woman by any means. That done, he stripped the body, in which, as like as not, there was still some life. His knives and scalpels were ready, and so he cut her throat. That blood he caught in a bucket and poured away. When the veins had been drained, he cut off her head.
    How he disposed of her head, no one will ever know. And a human head is a difficult thing to destroy. And nobody had any theories. The head was gone.
    He then dissected his wife from A to Z. Only a man who had some surgical training could have done this: and only a very strong man could have completed her dissection within a very few hours. But Crippen, though he was small, was immensely strong.
    When the dissection was done, Crippen proceeded to remove the flesh from the bones. This, too, was a formidable task. But he undertook it because he proposed to bury the flesh, but burn the bones. He could not trust his lime to destroy the bones: and he could not trust the fire to destroy the flesh. By now the monster was working stripped to the waist, for the labour was very heavy, and he was up against time.
    As he removed the flesh, he took the pieces and laid them in the grave. They were difficult to handle – they slipped: so he used the top of his pyjamas, to carry them in. But one piece of flesh, he laid aside. For he dared not trust that piece even to lime.
    Years before, Belle Elmore had had an operation which women sometimes have. It was a major operation. And the scar which it left ran right up the middle of the abdomen. When the operation was performed, she may have been slim. But as she grew stout, the scar stretched, until it became a thin, isosceles triangle – I should say, eight inches in length. Such a scar may fairly be termed ‘a distinguishing mark’. So Crippen had to make sure that the scar was destroyed. Accordingly, from the abdomen, he cut out a slab of flesh some ten inches square. And this, as I have said, he laid to one side.
    For hours the work went on. At six o’clock in the morning, he’d very nearly done. And then something – no one will ever know what – something occurred, to make Crippen lose his nerve. I always think it likely that it was some sound – a milkman’s cry, perhaps … which showed that the world was stirring … that people were waking up. Be that as it may, panic was Crippen’s portion for half an hour. And his one idea was to get what was left away and out of sight. Almost all the flesh was gone, except the slab which was bearing the tell-tale scar. In his frenzy, he snatched this up and thrust it into the grave. It was, in fact, the very last piece of flesh which he put in. In went his pyjama-top, too, and Belle Elmore’s underclothes, and tufts of hair, some false as well as real. But never a bone.
    And each time he laid a portion of flesh in the grave, he sprinkled it lavishly with lime. He also had a bucket of water. And so often as he sprinkled his lime, he soused that lime with water – he slaked his lime.
    Well, the last slab of flesh went in, with the other bits and pieces as I have said. Then he threw in lime by the handful, covering everything thick and thrusting lime down by the sides of the shocking heap. And then he slaked the lime, drenching it all with water, as fast as he could. He had some earth ready, some earth he had taken out, when he dug the grave. In this went, on top and down the sides: and when all was tight and level, back went the bricks with which the cellar was floored. He laid these roughly in lime, for the lime was there. Then he smeared the coal-dust over the top of the grave. Where he hid the bones for the moment, I’ve no idea. But during the days that followed he burned them into the back-garden, bit by bit.
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The reports of gunshots from Crippen’s neighbours led Oddie to formulate his own theory about Cora’s death, which would account for the use of a gun:

It must be remembered that he was a doctor and that his wife was very fat. Fat people are more prone to fainting attacks caused by indigestion and flatulence than other people. I believe he intended to poison her with hyoscine, and to say that she had often had attacks of heart failure before, owing to her weak heart, and particularly after heavy meals, and that she had had such an attack on the night of the 31st January, 1910, which had unfortunately proved fatal. My theory is that after her death he intended to send for a doctor in the early hours of the morning and to tell him this story of her death, at the same time explaining that he was a medical man himself. My long experience of the facile way in which some general practitioners issue certificates of death leads me to think that in all probability Crippen could in this way have got a death certificate showing syncope and fatty disease of the heart as the cause of his wife’s death.
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Oddie reasoned that as the body would show no visible sign of hyoscine poisoning a doctor would accept that her heart had failed because a post-mortem would inevitably reveal a fatty heart. The final dinner party was contrived to provide witnesses to say how much Cora ate and drank and on what friendly terms the Crippens were on that night. However, Crippen gave Cora too much hyoscine in a whisky nightcap. This led to Cora becoming hysterical, shouting and shrieking.

This was not at all according to plan, and as it was extremely likely to result in his being hanged, I believe Crippen shot his wife in the head with the revolver to stifle her cries … there now being a gunshot wound in his wife’s head, it is easy to understand why he had to dispose of the remains and inform enquirers that his wife had gone to America.
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