Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (27 page)

Claims that the outcome of the trial was ever in doubt were scoffed at by those involved. Such stories had been around for years. Mercer called them ‘utter rubbish’, peddled ‘by men who knew no more of that case than did the butlers of Mayfair’.
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They then moved on to Cora’s alleged lover Bruce Miller. Believing the lone word of Dr Crippen, who had only said they were fond of each other, it was stated that Cora was definitely having an affair with Miller and was also sleeping with her German lodgers. The programme makers thought it suspicious that Miller and Cora’s sister Theresa Hunn had been paid expenses to travel from America to give evidence at the Old Bailey. And why were Pinkerton’s detective agency, not the American police, used to track Bruce Miller down? The answer is in the Crippen files held at the National Archives, which clearly state,

The Director of Public Prosecutions considered it important that Bruce Miller should be found, and communications were made to the American Police asking them to make enquiries.
    No very satisfactory result came of this, and so the Director decided to instruct Messrs Pinkerton’s to make enquiries, and requested us [the Metropolitan Police] to communicate with them in respect of Bruce Miller, and also to see the deceased woman’s friends to ascertain what they knew of an operation performed upon her which would leave a scar on the lower part of her abdomen, and also make enquiries at hospitals etc to ascertain if any operation had been performed on her.

Bruce Miller was obviously a vital witness for the trial as Dr Crippen had said Cora had run off to be with him. The American police could only find one Bruce Miller in Chicago, who knew nothing about Crippen, so Pinkerton’s were engaged and they succeeded in finding Miller. Knowing the potential importance of the scar on the remains, the Director of Public Prosecutions wanted to investigate the matter fully.

Miller was not, as the programme said, ‘paid richly’ for denying that he had been Cora’s lover and that she had run away to live with him. They said Miller had been paid ‘a staggering $450 to give his evidence’. If Miller had been making $10,000 a year and expecting a $25,000 commission on a deal, as he told Pinkerton’s, then $450 was hardly a great inducement to cross the Atlantic and have his private life laid bare at the Old Bailey. He did not have to come to England to give evidence. In doing so he lost earnings and accepted less money than the Director of Public Prosecutions’ original offer of $25 a day for a minimum of thirty days, plus $5 a day while in England.

Theresa Hunn and Cora’s stepfather, Frederick Mersinger, were also tracked down by Pinkerton’s. They agreed to testify at the Old Bailey that Cora had an operation scar. All they asked for was that ‘their travelling expenses and subsistence are paid, and receive compensation for their loss of time’. Mersinger would have had to sell his horses as there would be no one to look after them and purchase new ones upon his return. He asked for some compensation for this but was not called as a witness. Theresa Hunn received just $100 for her troubles.

Nor was there anything mysterious about Miller returning home after the first day of the trial. The documentary had it that ‘Miller was skilfully whisked out of the court and returned to America on the first day of the trial’. Day one of the trial was taken up by prosecution witnesses. Miller had given his evidence, Tobin was asked if he had any objection to Miller going and he had none. There was no reason for him to stay any longer.

Inspector Dew’s evidence at the trial was called into question, especially the pyjama top he had found among remains. The programme declared, ‘It’s questionable whether the pyjamas were indeed found in the cellar, and whether Dew had discovered them the way he told the court.’ Why was it questionable? No evidence was presented to support this assertion. Sergeant Mitchell had been with Dew when the remains and pyjamas were discovered. Does this make him part of a conspiracy?

The inference was obvious. It suggested the police had planted evidence to help convict Crippen. But Dew hadn’t even bothered establishing the fact that the pyjama top was manufactured after the Crippens had moved into Hilldrop Crescent. Richard Muir and Travers Humphreys had to chivvy Sergeant Mitchell into finding out the pyjamas were first delivered to Jones Brothers’ shop on 7 December 1908. Mitchell only found this out one day before the Old Bailey trial started. Cecil Mercer and Samuel Oddie both thought Crippen had used the pyjama top to transport slippery remains,
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which is a far more prosaic explanation as to how they ended up in the cellar. If Dew had planted the pyjama top it would have been in July 1910 and it would still have looked fresh, unlike the putrid state it was found in.

The ‘new evidence’ offered by the documentary was a letter in the Home Office’s Crippen records held at the National Archives, which have been open to the public for decades. The reason nobody had mentioned it before is because it was a hoax and has no bearing on the case. Allegedly from Cora Crippen, it read,

Chicago, Ill.
Oct 22 – 1910.

Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen.

Brixton Prison
London
England

Doctor:-
As I saw your conviction
coupled with the death
penalty, I come from
seclusion long enough
to try and save your
worthless life at least; as
I don’t want to be responsible
for your demise, if I can
save you in this way,
but I will never come
forward personally, as
I am happy now.
I informed the judge;
now save yourself.

Belle Elmore Crippen

The Chicago letter was sent to the Home Office by the governor of Pentonville Prison (it had been wrongly addressed to Brixton Prison). A Home Office official wrote on the file cover that ‘this is certainly a hoax but to be on the safe side it should be compared with the late Cora Crippen’s writing of which no doubt the Police have specimens’. Indeed they did, and after examining the letter they soon replied, ‘The handwriting is
not
that of Mrs Crippen, alias Belle Elmore.’

Julian Duffus, described in the programme as a historian, believed the letter was authentic. In a later interview for a student film maker he stated ‘this letter at the time was suppressed’. He added that he had compared the writing of the Chicago letter with samples of Cora’s handwriting ‘and of course it [the Chicago letter] was legitimate’.
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There is a sample of Cora’s very distinctive handwriting in the National Archives in the form of a letter she wrote to a former German lodger in 1906.
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It is in a different hand to that which wrote the Chicago letter (see picture section). ‘I can only assume charitably that people imagined it to be a hoax,’ added Duffus.
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But the letter had been carefully examined at the time by the Home Office and Scotland Yard and quickly discovered to be a hoax.

Another letter, supposedly from Cora, was mentioned in the programme. A tiny extract was shown of a document in the Prison Commission papers held at the National Archives. It was a note from the governor of Brixton Prison to the Home Office about a letter he had received and forwarded to them on 19 September ‘purporting to come from Mrs Crippen’. He wrote again on 22 October, the day Crippen was sentenced to death, reminding them of it as he had received no acknowledgement. The programme alleged that the letter was sent to the Home Office, who informed the governor of Brixton Prison it that it had been forwarded to Winston Churchill who put it into his pocket and forgot about it. Thus Dr Crippen’s defence team was deprived of two important pieces of evidence that Cora was alive. What the document actually said was that the ‘letter was sent on to the Secretary of State as soon as it was received’.

Clearly this is not evidence that Churchill ignored the letter. It does not appear to have survived, which makes it impossible to know whether it needed to be taken seriously, or was just another hoax. It is extremely unlikely that Churchill would have forgotten or ignored any genuine evidence pointing to Crippen’s innocence. Furthermore, there is documentary proof that when a prison governor sent a supposed letter from Cora to the Home Office they examined it before forwarding it to Scotland Yard to double-check it.

It is a mystery why the programme makers should have presented the Chicago letter as evidence of Cora being alive when it is described as a hoax in the file that contained it. There are several other hoax Cora letters in the Home Office records, no doubt written in response to Munyon’s offer of a reward for proving Dr Crippen had not killed his wife. An obvious way of doing this was to prove Cora was still alive.

The programme pointed out that Cora had tried to empty her bank account before her disappearance. This was true. She had written to the Charing Cross Bank on 15 December 1909 requesting that an account containing £600 be closed. However, the terms of the account meant that one year’s notice of closure had to be given, meaning she could not have obtained the money until 15 December 1910. Cora had access to the more readily available and considerable funds in her Post Office savings account but does not seem to have used it. As Le Neve demonstrated, this money could be quickly withdrawn.

John Trestrail, an American forensic toxicologist, is a leading advocate of Crippen’s innocence. He was bemused that hyoscine had been used as a poison as it had never been used before for murder and Crippen would have had access to more effective poisons. However, there was no denying Crippen had bought large quantity of hyoscine before Cora disappeared that he could not account for and the remains in the cellar contained it.

Other ‘evidence’ was given of Crippen’s innocence: the scar on the remains was not really a scar, but this was used by Crippen’s defence team in 1910 and not believed either at the Old Bailey or the Court of Appeal.

The 2004 documentary offered no genuine evidence whatsoever of Dr Crippen’s innocence and was about as convincing as the story of the Syrian vine from the
World’s Pictorial News
. It attracted little attention in comparison to what was to follow.

Public opinion as to the guilt of Dr Crippen was not by any means unanimous.

Ethel Le Neve,
Thomson’s Weekly News

One swallow does not make a summer, nor yet, presumably, does one Hinde’s curler make an absent lady.

Harold Dearden,
Death Under the Microscope

In 2007, newspapers worldwide ran a story about Dr Crippen having been proved innocent by new DNA evidence. The following year John Trestrail made a more elaborate case for Crippen’s innocence in the Channel 5 documentary
Revealed: Was Crippen Innocent?
Announcing that ‘no one has seriously questioned Crippen’s guilt … until now’, it left viewers wondering if the 2004 documentary had been serious, and indeed there had been several questions about his guilt since 1910.

‘Previously confidential documents’ were consulted, but they were just the files on the Crippen case held at the National Archives that had been open to the public since 1985. They had at one time been confidential and subject to a closure period, but so had every other official file concerning murder. Trestrail had ‘been given access to the original Crippen case files … confidential until recently’. Calling the twenty-three-year-old declassification recent was a stretch of the imagination. Furthermore, anybody who visits the National Archives can get access to the files, but these grandiose claims can probably be dismissed as hyperbolic television publicity.

Incidentally, between 2005 and 2007, four new books on the Crippen case had been published.
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In each instance the authors had carefully been through all of these so-called confidential files at the National Archives and many more sources besides and their conclusions were identical. Crippen was guilty. There is nothing in the files to suggest he was innocent, therefore it is necessary to examine the modern arguments for Crippen’s innocence.

The programme cited a Metropolitan Police telegram dated 12 July 1910 from Inspector Thomas Davis:

Re A. S. message this morning asking for Special Enquiry to trace a carman who collected boxes from No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Town and telegram sent to you at 2.45 to-day, Sergt. Yard has since accompanied the carman, John Mc’Crindle, to Hilldrop Crescent, and he is now sure that it is No. 39 he went to. He says that about five months ago, he thinks, he collected five boxes from that address and delivered them in the forenoon at the ground floor at No 10, Nottingham Terrace, Marylebone Road. to a woman age 35 to 40, 5ft 7 or 8, dark, appearance of a prostitute,. She complained to the carman, as to the length of time he took to collect the boxes. The exact date cannot be given until Mc Crindle’s employer returns on Thursday next.

This was just one of several documents concerning McCrindle, but it was the only one quoted, albeit incompletely. It had been written in response to a telegram sent earlier that day by Melville Macnaghten, that was not mentioned, requesting ‘Careful and Special enquiry to be made by experienced C. I. D. officers at Passenger & Goods Stations, Railway & other carriers, Carmen, Greengrocers, etc, to ascertain if they have collected boxes or other luggage from 39 Hilldrop Crescent on or since the 31st of January last’. Macnaghten’s missive appears to show how diligently the police were searching for Cora Crippen before her remains were discovered.

The telegram sent by Davis on 12 July was presented in isolation as proof that Cora Crippen had cleared her possessions from Hilldrop Crescent shortly before her disappearance and it was suggested that the police ignored an important piece of evidence. Barrister Andrew Rose commented ‘the police in effect suppressed that piece of evidence because it didn’t support their interpretation of the facts’.

Far from being suppressed, McCrindle’s story was fully investigated when McCrindle’s employer Mr Frost returned, and it proved to be a false lead. In the same file, dated 20 July, was the sequel that demolished McCrindle’s tale and the suggestion that the police had suppressed evidence: