Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (2 page)

But,
res ipsa loquitur
. He was also an adulterer, a liar, a poisoner and a steel-nerved dismemberer – as well as a loyal, unselfish, warm, caring, heroically protective lover. A curious duality.

And what of Cora Crippen? How measures up the reality against the detrimental legend? In fairness, we have only the, surely biased, first-hand testimony of errant husband. And he can hardly be regarded as an impartial witness. Filson Young listened sympathetically to, accepted, and propagated Hawley Harvey’s account of uxorial unpleasantness. Future writers on the case, impressed by the standard of the Notable British Trials volume, simply accepted without question Filson Young’s Hawley Harvey-oriented version of Belle, and, passing down the subsequent literary chain, Cora’s card was duly marked, her character thus besmirched, her persona decided upon.

The adjective ‘blowzy’, routinely attached to her, is not justified. Rather she was plump, dumpy, loquacious and vivacious to the occasional verge of vulgarity, handsome, beautifully dressed, liberally bejewelled, a pocket battleship, or schooner in full sail.

Now for the third member of the ill-starred trio. Her given name was Ethel Neave. The name she gave herself was the novelettish Le Neve. A better, more appropriate cognomen would have been Le Naïve – for naïveté, much-vaunted innocence, was her customarily projected image. Before Mr Connell’s close research scrutiny, her
status sancta innocenta
dissolves. The revelation of her mulcting of money from the dissolved Cora’s Post Office savings account, and her quasi-professional forgery of Belle’s handwriting and signature on the withdrawal forms, is persuasive. These crude embezzlements – eight withdrawals, approaching cumulatively within a whisker of £200 – would seem to put to question, set one wondering as to, her guilty knowledge of her paramour’s guilt. Ethel’s fiscal acuity is later borne ample witness to by her shrewd marketing of her ‘exclusive’ life-story on at least four rewarding occasions.

Incidentally, the novelist Ursula Bloom is also detected in possible deceptive dissimulation. After her story
The Girl Who Loved Crippen
was serialised in the
Sunday Dispatch
in 1954, she laid claim to being the first to discover the erstwhile Miss Le Neve’s latter-day marital identity and whereabouts. Miss Bloom either wilfully ignored, or carelessly failed to ascertain, the fact that over the years several seekers had run to ground, but desisted from making public, the new name and address of the shrinking
ci-devant
Ethel Le Neve.

The Crippen story is very much a tale of its time. It somehow contrives to embrace to entire atmosphere of the vanished world in which it was played out. The sudden verdure of the respectable Holloway residential enclave. Crumpets for tea. The muffin man’s bell echoing through the afternoon streets.

Beyond Camden Town, Holloway, Islington, Pentonville, Scotland Yard – Norman Shaw’s distinctive building – still standing beside the river; the London thoroughfares more thinly seeded by a more scant populace. The shadow of Sherlock Holmes still – just – discernible in sundry sympathetic quarters. Pea-soupers no longer wrapping the city in yellow blinkers, but wispy fogs, deceptively purblinding, still curling and swirling less ostentatiously about.

Eschewing many of what have, on the dubious grounds of their serial repetition, hitherto been taken for facts, Mr Connell has industriously and conscientiously scanned the newspapers, periodicals, books and official files of ten decades and dredged up all manner of lost comment, observation, and significant contradiction. He has encompassed much of this newly resurrected information in this soundly researched, carefully considered, authoritative and clear book, which, while correcting error, encroaches not upon previous preserves.

Richard Whittington-Egan

When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

Sherlock Holmes,
The Adventure of the Speckled Band

Most people would imagine that it would be impossible to write anything about this personage that is not already known.

Detective Inspector David Goodwillie on
Dr Crippen in 1925,
Thomson’s Weekly News

There never was a story like it, and never will be again.

Arthur Newton, Dr Crippen’s solicitor,
Thomson’s Weekly News

Dr Crippen’s famous disposal of his wife came to light less because of her absence than because her jewelry was observed adorning another woman – a circumstance even an English woman could not resist calling attention to.

Alfred Hitchcock,
New York Times

Superintendent Frank Castle Froest was a man with a wide circle of friends and the door of his office at New Scotland Yard was always open to them. He was said to have possessed ‘a faculty for making friends in all ranks of life … He was naturally genial and good-natured.’ Beneath the bonhomie ‘he had most of the qualities of the perfect detective. He had resource, audacity, tenacity, a strength of purpose that carried him ruthlessly through obstacles if he could not go round them.’
²

Froest did not look like a typical police officer. He was short and stocky and some likened him in appearance to a Prussian field-marshal when in uniform. When out of uniform Froest dressed immaculately, wearing a silk hat, patent leather boots, and carrying a carefully rolled umbrella. Known as ‘the man with the iron hands’, on account of his incredible prehensile strength, Froest was able to tear packs of cards in two and snap a sixpence ‘like a biscuit’.
³

On 30 June 1910 Froest received a visit from two of his friends, John Nash, a theatrical manager, and his wife Lillian, a music hall artist, professionally known as Lil Hawthorne. After hearing their tale, Froest summoned Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew into his office. Dew and Froest went back a long way. They had hunted in vain for Jack the Ripper, enjoyed more success in capturing the notorious jewel thief Harry the Valet, and shared the disappointment two years previously when Florence Haskell was acquitted of the murder of her son Teddy at Salisbury, a crime of which they believed she was guilty.

At forty-seven years old and with twenty-eight years’ service behind him, Dew was seriously thinking about retiring from the Metropolitan Police to become a private detective. Like Froest, Dew could easily be mistaken for something other than a policeman and, as a journalist observed,

Mr Dew suggests the retired army officer rather than the detective. Imagine a man just above medium height, with a dark moustache, hair turning grey, a strong face tempered by a pair of kindly eyes, a clear-cut figure reminiscent of the barracks. A major in mufti is as good a description as any. You will find many like him in the famous military clubs in West End London.
⁴

There was nothing to indicate that Nash’s story was anything out of the ordinary. Dew later recalled, ‘I certainly had no suspicion of the bigness of the case when the name of Crippen was first mentioned at Scotland Yard’, but he would later describe the events which were to follow as ‘the most intriguing murder mystery of the century’.
⁵

The Nashes told Dew they had returned home to London from an American tour to hear that their American friend of Polish descent, Cora Crippen, was dead. Cora’s stage name had been Belle Elmore, but her career as a music hall artist had never been as successful as she hoped. Many cruel things have since been written about Cora’s singing talent, but she had been employed in various music halls, including appearing on the same bill as George Formby’s father, George, at the Dudley New Empire in 1902.
⁶
London appearances at the Old Marylebone Music Hall, Clapham Grand and Holborn theatres did nothing to further her career and Walter Dew was probably right when he described her as ‘a minor music-hall artist’.
⁷
Her act consisted of ‘a tuneful song with a catchy chorus’.
⁸
Theatrical producer Clarkson Rose had seen her perform and remarked, ‘She wasn’t a top-rank artist, but, in her way, not bad – a blowsy, florid type of serio.’
⁹

There must have been some truth in the stories of Cora’s professional failings. Cora’s friend Lottie Albert first met her at a small music hall in Oxford where ‘her appearance was an utter failure. I found her overwhelmed with grief. Her most cherished ambition, that of becoming a personality in the music-hall world, had been shattered at one fell blow.’ Belle Elmore looked like ‘one who is utterly incompetent and suddenly realises it’.
¹⁰

Cora was far more popular offstage and made friends easily. Realising her dreams of stardom would never materialise, but wishing to retain an association with the theatre, she joined the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, a charitable organisation founded in the autumn of 1906 to support women and children, members of their profession, who had fallen upon hard times. Cora became the Guild’s honorary treasurer. Lottie Albert believed that this fulfilled Cora’s ambitions to be connected with the theatre, and ‘the music-hall failure, while a disappointment to her, was easily overcome. The good-nature and sound common sense with which she was endowed helped her to forget it and finally to put any thought of it aside.’
¹¹
The Guild met every Wednesday at Albion House, a large block of flats in New Oxford Street.

John Nash believed Cora’s American husband of seventeen years, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, was a dentist with some kind of American medical qualification. For reasons that are not known, Dr Crippen’s friends called him Peter. The Crippens lived at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, a three-floored semi-detached house in Camden Town, North London.

Crippen was in partnership with Dr Gilbert Rylance, an American dentist with New Zealand qualifications. They worked together as the Yale Tooth Specialists and were also based in Albion House. Rylance and Crippen had gone into business together in 1908. In March 1910 they had entered a fresh arrangement whereby Crippen put £200 into the business and the pair would each take fifty percent of the profits.

Dr Crippen had also been engaged at £3 a week as manager of Munyon’s Remedies, a mail-order patent medicine company which he had previously worked for in America and Canada. He ceased working for Munyon’s on 31 January but carried on working in the same building. Crippen was also involved with other businesses – the Imperial Press Agency and Frankdel treatment for deafness. He had told the Nashes that Cora had left England for America on family business on 2 February and died there on 23 March, although several cheques had been presented during that period bearing her signature.

Inspector Dew was initially nonplussed. The cheques could have easily been signed by Cora before she left for America or been forged. The story he had heard was ‘a somewhat singular one, although,’ he mused, ‘having regard to the Bohemian character of the persons concerned, is capable of explanation.’ Nevertheless, Dew knew that the matter needed clearing up as ‘the whole circumstances, one must admit, are mysterious, and this being so the persons referred to, the others, have made various enquiries with a view to clear the matter up but without any good result, nor can they discover any trace of Mrs Crippen going by any ship’. Before approaching the police, the Guild had hired a private detective to investigate Cora’s whereabouts but he found nothing.
¹²

Dew set about making his enquiries. He first spoke to the members of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, taking a number of statements from Cora’s friends. The Guild members all told a similar story.

Paul Martinetti, a retired music hall artist, and his wife Clara had known the Crippens for some eighteen months. On 31 January Dr Crippen had called at their home in Shaftesbury Avenue to invite them to dinner that night. Despite Paul being unwell earlier that day they accepted the invitation, arriving at Hilldrop Crescent around eight o’clock. They dined on soup followed by beef salad and spent the remainder of the evening playing cards. At some time during the evening Paul went to the toilet. The toilet window was open and he consequently caught a chill from the draught.

Clara Martinetti saw nothing unusual in Cora’s behaviour that night. She described her friend as ‘very jolly’. It had been ‘the happiest party imaginable’. The Martinettis left Hilldrop Crescent around 1.30 in the morning. It was the last time they, or anyone else (besides Dr Crippen), would ever see Cora Crippen alive.

On the morning of 1 February Dr Crippen called at the Martinetti’s flat around midday to see how Paul was. Clara told him that her husband was still in bed. She then asked after Cora and was told, ‘Oh, she is all right.’ Crippen visited again about a week later. By now Clara Martinetti had heard from the Guild’s secretary, Melinda May, that Cora had apparently gone to America. Clara expected Cora to send her a card but nothing arrived either from the ship or from New York. When Clara told Crippen this he told her that his wife was not stopping at New York but heading straight to California.

At the Music Hall Ladies’ Benevolent Fund’s ball on 20 February, Clara saw Dr Crippen with his typist, twenty-seven-year-old Ethel Le Neve, who was wearing a brooch that looked very similar to one she knew Cora possessed. Clara and Lil Hawthorne thought Crippen was ‘livelier than they had ever known him to be’
¹³
and Paul Martinetti noticed that Crippen ‘looked very jolly’ as he drank ‘very freely of wine’. The theatrical newspaper
The Era
reported on the event, mistakenly describing Le Neve as Mrs Crippen.
¹⁴
Crippen visited the Martinettis once again after the ball. Clara repeated her concern that she had not heard from Cora, who was renowned as a good correspondent. He professed to be as surprised as she was. Crippen, however, had some worrying news. He said that he had heard from his American relatives that Cora was very ill and there was something the matter with one of her lungs, but he had also heard from Cora that she was ‘not as bad as they say’.