Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (20 page)

Le Neve visited Inspector Dew at Scotland Yard shortly after her trial to thank him for his ‘kindness and consideration to her through her ordeal’, adding that Crippen wished to add his thanks too. While Dew was pleased that they bore him no animosity, despite the fact that he had tracked them down and arrested them, he did not consider that he had done anything out of the ordinary in his dealings with them even though he had, like many other people, found Crippen an agreeable character. Dew admitted that ‘detached from the crime, there was something almost likeable about the mild little fellow’.
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Though in court you hear all sorts of lies told, in the end truth always prevails.

Richard Muir to Dr William Willcox,
The Detective Physician

Immediately after being sentenced to death, Crippen’s steely composure gave way. Arthur Newton saw him after he had been taken down from the dock, and found his client had ‘completely collapsed, and sat there in a huddled heap, crying with his head between his hands, utterly broken and dejected’. ‘We shall appeal,’ Newton assured him, but Crippen’s reply was, ‘When is Ethel to be tried?’
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As with so many elements of the Crippen case, there are alternative and often quite opposite accounts of events in different sources. Oddie wrote that ‘it was said in the Press that he broke down directly after he left the Court, I have good reason to know that the report was quite untrue’.
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Joseph Meaney, who had attended Cora Crippen’s funeral and Crippen’s trial, did report that Crippen collapsed in the
Daily Express
:

He collapsed at the foot of the staircase leading down to the cells. No one, apart from the warders who had to carry him along the passage to his cell, and the prison doctor who rushed to his aid, saw the pitiful drama behind the death sentence which closed the great Crippen trial.
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Crippen was transferred from Brixton to Pentonville Prison. Upon admission he was strip-searched. He held up his arms, then had his mouth, ears and beneath his private parts checked for concealed items. He was given a prison flannel shirt to put on before his feet were checked. Nothing was found between his toes or underneath his arches so he was given the remainder of his prison garb.

On 5 November Crippen appealed against his death sentence at the Court of Criminal Appeal before Mr Justice Darling, Mr Justice Channell and Mr Justice Pickford.

The grounds of his appeal rested upon the following points:

1. That one of the Jurymen, after I had been given in charge of the Jury absented himself from the rest of the Jury without either he or the rest of the Jury being given in charge of the proper Officer of the court.
   
2. That the identity of the remains found at 39 Hilldrop Crescent was not established.
   
3. That the Judge did not sufficiently place before the Jury the question of there being no navel upon the piece of skin measuring seven inches by six inches.
   
4. That the Judge misdirected the Jury in telling them that the onus of proof that the mark upon the piece of skin, measuring seven inches by six inches was not a scar, rested upon me.
   
5. I desire to be supplied free of charge with a shorthand note of the proceedings at the Central Criminal Court to be forwarded forthwith to my solicitor.
   

The member of the jury who absented himself during the trial was George Craig, who had fainted around midday on 19 October, the second day of Crippen’s trial. He was taken from the court by an usher and two doctors while the case was adjourned. Craig had sufficiently recovered within fifteen minutes to be reunited with the eleven other jurors in their private room. During his absence Craig did not see anyone other than the doctors and court usher.

Ensuring the jury did not come into contact from any outside influences was taken very seriously. At the end of each day Crippen’s jury were taken to the Manchester Hotel in Aldersgate Street. Their bedrooms were divided from the rest of the hotel by a corridor which could only be accessed by a private staircase. The door to the corridor was locked at night by the hotel manager. Several court staff stayed with the jury at the hotel to ensure their isolation.
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Crippen’s appeal failed on every point. The judges were convinced the remains were Cora’s as ‘it is inconceivable that this woman, if she had left her husband as described by him, should, during all these months, have failed to communicate with any relative or friend: and further that she should have gone off in the depth of winter leaving her furs and clothing, as well as her jewels behind her’. Crippen’s story about buying hyoscine for homoeopathic purposes was ‘beyond belief’. In short, his trial had established his guilt ‘beyond any doubt’.

The appeal judges concluded,

Crippen’s motive for the murder was probably a mixed one – desire to establish closer relations with Le Neve and to possess himself of the jewels and money.
    It was a cold blooded and deliberate crime carried out and concealed with horrible ingenuity. There can be no question of a reprieve.
    Let the law take its course.

Upon hearing this Crippen ‘turned round like an automaton and walked quickly out of the dock’.
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Undeterred, Newton drafted a petition for mercy in the hope that Crippen’s death sentence would be commuted to one of life imprisonment. He made several hundred copies of the petition and sent them to cities and major towns throughout England to collect signatures from sympathetic members of the public. Newton quickly raised 150 signatures for the copy of the petition in his office alone. Many of those signing it were women.
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The petitions raised over 15,000 signatures by the time they were submitted to the Home Secretary. This might have been more a reflection of a general opposition to the death penalty than a show of support for Crippen, who may not have been optimistic about his chances of a reprieve. On 8 November he wrote his will, witnessed by the chief warder and a warder at Pentonville. It left his entire estate to Ethel Le Neve.
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Madame Tussaud’s waxworks had been prohibited from exhibiting an effigy of Dr Crippen, despite public demand, until his appeal had failed. Now they could unveil their creation. The waxen Dr Crippen bore a striking resemblance to the condemned murderer and stood in a dock, alongside the real Dr Crippen’s armchair, purchased by Tussaud’s at the recent auction.
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The high profile of the Crippen case was attracting the attention of cranks. Winston Churchill received several abusive letters. ‘You are a dam waster,’ wrote one. ‘If Mr H. H. Crippen is Hung on Wednesday you and the Judge and jury will be in danger of your lives So take Heed.’ It was signed ‘The Black Hand Gang’. Another called him ‘a Dam rotten liar … a fine liberal you are’. Churchill rejected a request from the British Phrenological Society for several of their members to take measurements of Crippen’s head after his execution.

During his spell as Home Secretary, Churchill oversaw forty-three capital sentences. He granted reprieves in twenty-one of them, but not in Crippen’s case. Churchill took the matter of deciding the fate of condemned prisoners very seriously and personally studied each case in great detail before making his burdensome decision. He would leave his verdict until the last possible moment should any new evidence come to light. Despite being a supporter of the death penalty, Churchill found such decisions very painful to make.
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On 19 November Churchill announced that he had ‘failed to discover any sufficient ground to justify him in advising His Majesty to interfere with the due course of law’, (the prerogative of commuting death sentences belonged to the monarch but in practice the Home Secretary dealt with the matter). Crippen was informed of the decision at 9.15 that morning.

Churchill did make one concession in Crippen’s favour. He had received a memo from his assistant under-secretary at the Home Office Ernley Blackwell, and Home Office advisor Sir Edward Troup, indicating that if Le Neve and Crippen wanted to kiss at their final meeting at Pentonville they should be kept apart to prevent a weapon or poison being passed, as they thought ‘it is kinder to the parties themselves to keep such interviews as formal and unemotional as possible’. Churchill disagreed. He would not instruct the prison governor to keep Le Neve and Crippen apart as long as every precaution was taken to prevent Crippen obtaining any poison.

Ethel Le Neve’s reaction to the news of Crippen’s appeal failing was muted. The actor/manager Seymour Hicks was visiting a detective at Bow Street police station. Hicks was told that Le Neve was in the building to ask if she could borrow the pair of boy’s trousers that she had worn on the
Montrose
because she had been offered money by a newspaper to pose as a boy for a photograph. The news of Crippen’s failed appeal came through while Le Neve was still there. When she heard all she said was ‘Oh!’

Coincidentally, Seymour Hicks was a cousin of Alfred Tobin and had previously met Dr Crippen. The pair enjoyed a ‘long and pleasant chat together’. Hicks found Crippen to be of a gentle nature and whose most striking feature was his strong spectacles, which gave the impression that he had bulging eyes and, like many others, he admitted, ‘I don’t know why, I always had a sneaking pity for the wretched man Crippen.’
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Now that the normal courses of action had failed to save Crippen, desperate measures were being taken. His former employer Dr Munyon offered a £10,000 reward for the reappearance of Cora Crippen or for anyone who could prove that she was still alive.
¹¹
Francis Tobin, a Philadelphia lawyer, claimed to have proof that Cora Crippen was alive and in hiding in Chicago ‘in order to carry out the most diabolical plan of revenge in the annals of crime’. However, Tobin failed to produce any evidence to support his story. In Cambridge an old soldier applied to the borough justices offering himself to be hanged in Crippen’s place as a doctor should not be executed.
¹²

While Crippen was languishing in Pentonville Prison awaiting his fate, the prison’s governor, Major Owen Mytton-Davies, was paying close attention to his infamous charge:

Crippen was another prisoner who remains impressed on my mind, chiefly, I must admit, owing to the notoriety surrounding his case, as there was nothing heroic about him. He was a sordid, mean, avaricious little man, whose one redeeming feature was his extraordinary devotion to Ethel Le Neve.
    My first glimpse of him in prison garb was in the central hall at Pentonville; in his drab convict clothes, stamped with a broad arrow and ill-fitting, he looked more than unprepossessing.
    I was very suspicious concerning Crippen, and even had the rims and ear-pieces of his spectacles examined for concealed poison.
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The prison’s chief warder, Mr H. T. Boreham, had a more sympathetic attitude towards the prisoner. He recalled Crippen being ‘a very pleasant little man’.
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Another warder, J. Alan Shields, was similarly impressed by Crippen’s demeanour. Upon his arrival at Pentonville, Crippen asked for the prison’s regulations to be explained to him so that he could conform to them and be as little trouble as possible. Shields said that it was rare for a murderer to elicit any sympathy from the warders, but ‘there was about Crippen something that made it possible to forget for the time being of the crime he was accused of’.

Shields noticed that Crippen was not sleeping at night. Crippen explained that he was seeing visions of the scaffold and of Cora passing through his cell. Crippen told Shields that this was not the first time he had figured in an execution: ‘Years ago when I was living in Cleveland, Ohio, my wife and I both took part in private theatricals for the benefit of a local charity, and I played the part of a man falsely accused of murder and cut down from the gallows at the last moment on the arrival of the heroine, my wife, with proof of my innocence.’
¹⁵

Crippen was visited in prison by a confidence trickster who masqueraded as Lady Mercia Somerset. Born Ada Alice Fricker, she had worked as an actress and was a client of Arthur Newton. Lady Mercia had no claim to a title and had served several prison terms. Somerset had initially become interested in the case as she thought there was a remote chance Crippen could be found not guilty, and if she could meet him first and get him to tell her his story ‘it would be read with interest all over the world’ and, no doubt, be profitable for her.
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Somerset wrote to Crippen and secured a visit. She promised to take him and Le Neve to live at her country house when they were released. Crippen and Somerset began a correspondence and were on friendly terms, although Le Neve did not appear to trust her. Le Neve later wrote in a series of reminiscences that after her acquittal ‘a young man approached me and informed me that he had been sent by a person of title to take me away to a place of comfort and security’. This had to be Somerset because Le Neve described her as ‘no titled person at all, but someone who has since served several sentences in prison for serious offences’. Le Neve made the disturbing allegation that Somerset ‘planned to get me in the toils and use me to do things that a person with a chance in life would never dream of doing’.
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Neither did Major Mytton-Davies trust the bogus aristocrat. He read one of her letters which ‘appears peculiar and it looks as if there were a hidden meaning in portions of it – viz the remarks regarding Miss Le Neve’. The last meeting between Somerset and Crippen took place at Pentonville on 27 October when ‘he could talk of nothing else but the woman he adored’.
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Somerset soon published a number of letters that Crippen had sent her, so she made some money for her efforts.
¹⁹

Accepting that his days were numbered, Crippen published a statement that appeared in the
Daily Mail
and clearly showed the depth of his feelings towards Ethel Le Neve as well as emphasising her total innocence in the whole affair. Crippen took full responsibility for her plight, but not for the murder of Cora: