Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (23 page)

Captain Kendall had read the serialised memoirs of Travers Humphreys in the previous week’s issue and wanted to give his account about the Crippen case. At the end ‘he revealed that Ethel Le Neve is still alive – in a town in the South of England. She married, he said, and is now a grandmother.’
²²
Michael Gilbert had heard similar rumours and wrote in his 1953 book on the Crippen case that

whether she is alive or not today is uncertain. She worked as a dressmaker for a while, in England, and then departed for Australia, living under an assumed name. Her death has been reported at various times, but without much confirmation of identity. Lately it has been rumoured that she is still alive and living in England, a respected grandmother, happily married and immune from public inquisitiveness since nobody, save her husband, knows her secret. The truth of that report is not something which we have any intention of pursuing.
²³

Perhaps he had found some of this information in Kendall’s article, but it is worrying that Bloom did not appear to have read the most recent book on Crippen, which was published just one year before she wrote her articles.

There was much more Bloom had missed over the years. The
Daily Express
revealed in 1950 that Le Neve was still living in England and ‘her husband is a good man who knows and keeps her secret, but her one fear is that her children will find out’.
²⁴
More importantly Le Neve had sold her story at least four times to national newspapers after her appearance in
Lloyd’s Weekly News
in 1910.

In 1920
Thomson’s Weekly News
, a popular Saturday tabloid based in Dundee, but having a London edition and a weekly circulation of 623,984, had a startling exclusive story to tell. ‘My Life Story by Ethel Le Neve’ was a huge series of lavishly illustrated articles running for twenty-three weeks.

Despite the sensational subject and billing as the ‘Most Poignant Human Document Ever Written’, the series was a little mundane and long-winded. It gave a reasonably straightforward account of the case: some of it is identical to the
Lloyd’s
confessions. It is not clear how responsible Ethel was for the contents or if she told her story to a journalist who wrote it up for her. In it Le Neve refers to the 1910 series, saying she had presented ‘the facts as I wanted them to be presented’.
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Le Neve spoke of her regret at having gone to live at Hilldrop Crescent, which she thought ‘a terrible place, and I never felt at home in it’.
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She seemed be very fond of Inspector Dew, whom she described as ‘one of the smartest men that ever passed along the corridors of Scotland Yard’
²⁷
and ‘a very nice man and a real friend to a poor girl in distress’.
²⁸

The 1920–1
Thomson’s
series is of some interest because it offers Le Neve’s account of her early life and what happened after her acquittal. However, as some of the story is provably false, the rest of it should be treated with caution. According to Le Neve, she left the Old Bailey with her sister and took a taxi to Fenchurch Street station. There they boarded a train for Southend where they stayed in a large hotel under false names. Against her sister’s advice, Le Neve wanted to return to London to be near Crippen. She took a small flat in Chelsea, again under a false name.
²⁹
Where she found the time to tell her story to the journalists Gibbs and Eddy, published in
Lloyd’s Weekly News
in November 1910, wasn’t explained.

Le Neve gave her opinion about how Cora Crippen died. It resembled Edward Marshall Hall’s, but pre-dated it by eight years:

And now I think I may make the statement here that I do not think Dr Crippen murdered his wife in cold blood.
    My own belief is that the murder may have been an accident. Cora Crippen, in a fit of pique, might easily have pretended to take poison in order to worry her husband, and unintentionally have taken a fatal dose.
    But I do not think that this happened in the case of Cora Crippen. She had other and stronger means of frightening poor Dr Crippen. These, as he frequently told me, were so effective that there was never any need for her to employ more dramatic methods.
    The only theory which appeals to me was that Dr Crippen killed his wife by accident, and afterwards was so terrified that he hid her body in the cellar … he was in the habit of taking small quantities [of hyoscine] from the office and administering them to his wife when he thought she was likely to break into one of her fits of passion.
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After Crippen’s execution Le Neve’s one desire was to leave England and start a new life in another country. Her choice of location was perhaps surprising:

Somehow or other I could not get it out of my head that if only I could get to Canada I would be able to throw off all the shackles of the past, all the fears that had beset me, and get what I never had got in England – a chance.
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So at the end of February 1911 she once again set sail for Canada. Passing Father Point and successfully disembarking at Quebec, Le Neve visited the prison she had been held in and was warmly greeted by the staff. Moving on to Montreal, she took various typing jobs, but living with the constant fear of recognition, she suffered a nervous breakdown and after nine months returned to England to stay with her sister in Tooting.
³²

After six months convalescing, Le Neve obtained an office job. One day when going to catch a train at Victoria station for Wandsworth she saw Inspector Dew walking towards her. Dew showed no signs of recognition and walked straight past her. Le Neve thought he must have known it was her, but Dew ‘besides being a great detective, was one of the kindest, courtliest gentlemen I have ever met, and it is just the sort of thing he would have done to pretend that he had obliterated me from the tablets of his memory’.
³³
Dew was working as a confidential enquiry agent at that time with an office near Victoria and had lived at Wandsworth until 1911 so the story may be true.

Another of Le Neve’s stories was corroborated by Melinda May. May wrote,

I saw her myself on Easter Monday, 1913. And I saw her in an extraordinary manner.
    I had been staying in Eastbourne and had entered a compartment in a train for London Bridge. A young woman was sitting opposite to me, and to my amazement I recognized her as Ethel Neave [May always disdainfully referred to Le Neve by her real name]. She saw me, too, and knew who I was, and she hung her head. I could not take my eyes off her all the time we were on the journey.
³⁴

Le Neve also recorded the confrontation and her description of May shows there was no love lost between the pair:

There was a middle-aged woman, hard featured and severe, with several valises and packages above her in the rack, and dressed in her unmistakable bizarre fashion of the touring music-hall woman. I was in a crowded compartment with the one woman who hated me most, who believed in my guilt, and who had given evidence against me at the Old Bailey.
    To my surprise the woman did nothing. She looked at me several times over her newspaper then averted her gaze. As the train sped on I began to take refuge in the thought that she had failed to recognize me or if she knew me she preferred to treat me with contempt.
    The woman rose from her seat, a big muscular woman, and towering above me she glared at me like a tigress. I shrank back into my corner, expecting a blow to fall. The other passengers looked at both of us in astonishment. There was going to be a scene.
    ‘You think I don’t know who you are, do you?’ shrieked the woman. ‘But I do!’
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With the outbreak of the First World War, Le Neve joined the VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) as a nurse. She was sent to a large old house in Kent that the owner had vacated to be used for the war effort. There Le Neve met an Australian soldier of Scottish descent who had been wounded at Gallipoli. He soon proposed and Le Neve confessed her true identity. To her surprise he had never heard of the Crippen case and his proposal stood.
³⁶

They married in the parish church in the village where they had met. A fellow soldier acted as best man while Le Neve’s sister, brother-in-law and two VAD nurses were witnesses. After honeymooning in Eastbourne they sailed to Australia and lived at her husband’s farm, where Ethel Le Neve’s past was never mentioned.
³⁷

In 1922 Le Neve was telling her story again, this time to
The Mascot
.
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It was billed as the ‘Greatest Series Ever Published’ and told the tale of ‘a wayward girl’s struggle to live and love’.

Five years later Le Neve was interviewed by the
Sunday News
, which said she was in London on a brief holiday. She revealed that on visiting London, the first place she went to see was 39 Hilldrop Crescent. Other locations connected to the Crippen case had an inescapable lure for her. She went to a restaurant where she and Crippen often met, the Old Bailey and Holloway Prison.

Again she gave her opinion that Cora Crippen’s death had been an accident:

To this day I hold that the man who was so much to me then was innocent of the crime of murder. It is not for me to attempt to explain how Belle Elmore came to her death. I am convinced that her husband had no hand in the death, and I am inclined to accept his suggestion that she died accidentally and that the worst that can be alleged against him is that he buried the body unlawfully.

There were great discrepancies with the earlier
Thomson’s
series. Le Neve said she was married and had met her husband ‘far from the scene of the tragedy’. Her husband knew nothing of her past and ‘had not the least idea that I was the tragic woman in the Crippen case’. She had married him under an assumed name and described him as ‘the man who has made me so happy’.
³⁹

It wasn’t long before Le Neve was telling her story again to
Thomson’s Weekly News
. Now she was known as Mrs Brown and was ‘the wife of one of the best men who ever drew breath, and the mother of two bonnie children – a girl and a boy’. Her husband ‘knew all about my past’ and she hoped her son would become ‘a clean-living, open-hearted Englishman like his father’. The theme of this set of memoirs was ‘How I Have Been Persecuted’.
⁴⁰

Her life in Canada was discussed, as was her return to England where she was recognised several times, forcing her to change jobs and addresses. Once she was tracked down by a representative of a film studio who were making a film about a girl who runs away dressed in boy’s clothes. He had employed a private detective agency to find her. Le Neve declined the role and moved again, taking a job as a typist for a large firm of solicitors. When she was offered a permanent position, a copy of her birth certificate was required to join the company pension scheme. Le Neve had to confess her identity and her sympathetic employer found another job for her with a friend of his.
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Then came a repeat of the story of joining the VAD under the name of Ethel Grey and meeting an Australian soldier who knew nothing of Ethel Le Neve and Dr Crippen. This time he was described as being of Northumbrian stock rather than Scottish. The country church wedding was now abandoned as it would have required banns to be read out in her real name, so they married by special licence at ‘an old fashioned church in the suburbs in which I had lived as a girl.’ They set sail to Australia from Southampton to live on his farm.
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A son was born some eighteen months after arriving in Australia and a daughter, Kathleen, followed in 1921. The daughter was diagnosed with a nervous disorder and a doctor recommended treatment in Perth. Le Neve decided to return to England for treatment and so that her son could get a public school education.
⁴³
Remaining in England, ‘both our children are now growing up. The girl is strong and well, the boy almost finished with his education and just about to enter a profession.’
⁴⁴

So what was the true story? Le Neve had told at least four versions of her life story since 1910, all of which contradicted the others in some way. Ironically she had expressed annoyance that Inspector Dew had doubted her word that Crippen was not in when he first visited Hilldrop Crescent (‘It annoyed me to think that this man should flatly contradict me, and practically accuse me of telling an untruth’).
⁴⁵
Can the conflicting memoirs be put down to unreliable tabloid sensationalism, or was Le Neve trying to create a smokescreen to protect her whereabouts? Perhaps it showed a streak of romantic imagination with her sailing off into the sunset to a new life in Australia.

Le Neve said ‘it is my prayer that my children will also remain in ignorance of what I have been through’.
⁴⁶
For decades they did. Then in 1985 crime historian Jonathan Goodman was finishing his book on Dr Crippen.
⁴⁷
He knew that Ethel Le Neve had married a man named Stanley Smith and had died in South London in 1967. This would have been common knowledge by then, as in 1974 the
Evening News
ran a story about Le Neve that included a photograph of her marital home, 10 Parkway Road, Addiscombe. It further revealed that she had died seven years earlier at Dulwich Hospital, aged eighty-four, and had been a ‘nice old dear … fond of a drink at the local. Always curious to learn more about world events. Always eager for a matey chat over a cup of tea. She was a tough old bird as well.’
⁴⁸
In 1980 the theatrical journal
The Call Boy
noted that Ethel had two children and died on 9 August 1967.
⁴⁹

Armed with this information, Goodman searched for the death certificate of an Ethel Smith whose death was registered in South London in 1967. There was an Ethel Clara Smith of 62 Burford Road, Lewisham who died on 9 August 1967 at Dulwich Hospital from heart failure aged eighty-four. She had moved from Parkway Road after the death of her husband in 1960.