Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (28 page)

According to the carman McCrindle, he moved 6 trunks from 39 Hilldrop Crescent on the 15th of January last.
    McCrindle describes the woman he met at Hilldrop Crescent, as being about 34 or 35 years of age complexion fresh, thin build, appearance of a prostitute.
    She requested him to take the 6 trunks to Paddington station, where she said she would be met by another woman who would take charge of them, but if she was not there, he was to take them to 10 Nottingham Terrace, Marylebone Road.
    McCrindle says he visited the Railway Station, for about twenty minutes, and as no one turned up to take possession of the trunks, he then took them to 10 Nottingham Terrace, where he found the same woman, that he saw at Hilldrop Crescent. She was waiting and took the trunks into the house, which at the time was unoccupied, paid the account and signed her names in the attached counterfoil from the carman’s book.
    I have also made enquiry at No. 5 Nottingham Terrace, Marylebone Road, and was informed by Miss Hamilton that in January last she had the letting of No. 10 Nottingham Terrace, and that she was quite sure no one could have taken trunks into the house as described by the carman, because the keys were never out of her possession for more than a few minutes at a time, and she generally when anyone was viewing the house, waited on the steps for the keys to be returned.
    I beg to suggest that if there is any truth in McCrindle’s statement it can have no bearing on the murder, as the murdered woman was seen alive at least a fortnight after he moved the trunks.

None of this was mentioned, and the woman at Hilldrop Crescent was described as thin, which would rule out Cora. The 2004 documentary had also stated as fact that Cora had hired a removal company to remove the crates. If she had, why were all her clothes and jewellery left behind? Dew said there were enough women’s clothes at 39 Hilldrop Crescent to fill a large van and ‘enough ostrich feathers to stock a milliner’s shop’.
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Trestrail was still puzzled by the dismemberment of the corpse as ‘it is so unusual that a poisoner should dismember the victim, because a poisoner attempts to get away with murder without leaving any trace. In my database of 1,100 poisoning cases, this is the only one which involves dismemberment.’
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While it was improbable, it was not impossible, and if it is looked upon as a murderer dismembering his victim to dispose of the body then there are many examples. Trestrail thought a poisoner would have tried to obtain a ‘natural causes’ death certificate. However, Crippen is remembered for his many mistakes, and if Cora had died and not been dismembered there probably would still have been a coroner’s inquest to establish why a woman in the prime of life and known to enjoy good health had suddenly died. That could lead to a post-mortem which might have revealed hyoscine.

Why wouldn’t Dr Crippen dismember the corpse? He had the skill to do it and had to get rid of the body somehow, especially if Samuel Oddie’s hypothesis was correct and there were gunshot wounds. Cora’s corpse would have been too substantial to get rid of in one piece, so it had to be dismembered. The only real mystery is why he left some behind and this can only be speculated about. Cecil Mercer thought Crippen lost his nerve. Perhaps, having removed all the bones, he believed that the lime would have destroyed the remaining soft tissue. Trestrail’s assertion that Crippen had ‘disposed of 99% of her body’ was a disingenuous exaggeration.

Trestrail raised the interesting issue of Dr Crippen’s dog, who would surely have noticed the smell of a cadaver. This theory suggests that the remains were not in the house during Crippen’s residence there and thus planted by the police after Crippen had fled. Clara Martinetti remembered that, at the last supper on 31 January, Cora ‘had a funny little Bull terrier and she tried to show us how funny he was, but complained he was not clean being only a puppy, but she said she liked him and made a fuss of him’. Le Neve said that in early February 1910 Crippen owned a bull terrier ‘of which he was very fond’.
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She also claimed to have fed the dog one day.
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Of course a dog would be infinitely more sensitive to smells, but other than these fleeting mentions, there do not appear to be any other references to the dog.

Cora had two cats, a white Persian and an ordinary black cat. Crippen told Melinda May that the Persian had disappeared a few days before Cora had ‘gone to America’. May later suggested that Crippen had done away with the felines as well.
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Millicent Gillatt remembered that she had once kept fowls in the garden and also kept birds.
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Seven canaries were given to William Long, which accounts for the birds. Another neighbour spoke of a covered fresh-water aquarium in the back garden that Cora tended to.
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If Crippen did have a dog that he was so fond of, what became of it? Like Dr Watson’s bull pup, mentioned in the first Sherlock Holmes story, it was never heard of again.

There is some contention over whether there was a smell in the house. The remains were buried under soil and bricks. At the request of Dr Pepper, Dew had measured the distance between the top of the remains to the surface of the floor as 8 inches, so they were substantially covered. Dew and Mitchell didn’t notice any smell when they visited the house. It was only when the remains were uncovered that the stench became obvious. Dr Pepper suggested the lime had acted as a disinfectant that absorbed any gasses given off by the decomposing body.

Emily Jackson visited 39 Hilldrop Crescent in February 1910 and ‘noticed a very strange smell all over the house, particularly downstairs, and I spoke to Ethel about it, she said “Yes” the place is very damp, and in a filthy condition’. Jackson described the smell as ‘a damp frowsy one, and might have resulted from the damp and dirt. It was a stuffy sort of smell.’ There had been a leaking pipe and the dining room wallpaper was damp. Adelene Harrison thought the basement smelled ‘earthy and unpleasant’ but she attributed this to a lack of ventilation.
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Le Neve told Ursula Bloom that there had been a nasty smell in the house when Cora lived there, and the police never investigated the previous tenants.
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By now Trestrail did not believe the remains could be those of Cora Crippen and wanted a DNA test carried out. Besides Cora’s remains buried at St Pancras Cemetery, there were two other options for obtaining a DNA sample. The first was the hair discovered with the remains in the cellar, which is now on display at Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum (popularly known as the Black Museum). According to one newspaper, Scotland Yard agreed to test two strands of the hair for £17,500.
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However, the DNA testing was to be done in America at Michigan State University and ‘owing to concerns about transport via commercial carriers and chain of custody, a hair was not offered for testing’.
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The alternative was one of the microscope slides of tissue from the remains that are held at the archives of the Royal London Hospital. But what were the chances that the tissue had not been contaminated in the time between its discovery and being encapsulated in the slide used for the twenty-first-century DNA test? The 2004 programme had expressed concerns that the police had ‘contaminated the murder scene and cast doubt over the validity of the forensics’. This appears to have been a reference to the fact that on 13 July Inspector Dew had told PC Charles Pitts to buy a bottle of disinfectant fluid, which he diluted with water and poured on the soil around the remains. Pitts reported that ‘some might have gone on to the remains’.

Unlike today, keeping the remains pristine was not the primary concern of the police at the time, who did not know of the existence of DNA. Their priority was to find Dr Crippen as quickly as possible. As Melville Macnaghten colourfully put it, ‘we had to catch our hare before we need bother our heads about the subsequent culinary operations’.
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Dr David Foran, who conducted the DNA tests, was sure the sample from the slide would not be contaminated by being touched by a pathologist creating the slide in 1910. But who else had come into contact with the remains and how had they been handled since the moment of discovery? Fortunately the case files are detailed enough to answer this question.

13 July 1910

Dew digs up the cellar floor ‘with a spade and other things’. Once he and Mitchell had uncovered part of the remains, they sent for help from the nearest police station and called for Dr Marshall and Macnaghten. PCs Daniel Gooch and Frederick Martin arrive and complete the excavations, which were done between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. PC Martin deposed that ‘in scraping the clay off the top of the remains we also scraped off some of the bits of flesh’. Macnaghten recalled that two police constables used pickaxes to excavate the cellar.

Dr Marshall arrives, stays and hour and returns at 9.15 p.m., by which time most of the remains were visible. He ‘touched the remains slightly then’. PC Pitts sloshes disinfectant around the cellar. Macnaghten and Froest were also present in the house that day along with coroner’s officer PC Robert Thompson.

14 July 1910

Drs Marshall and Pepper inspect the house with Dew and ‘other members of the Police’. The doctors ‘spent some considerable time in making what examination was possible’. PC Thompson asks local undertaker Albert Leverton to bring two large shells (coarse coffin-like boxes used to transport corpses) to 39 Hilldrop Crescent. Leverton returns with one shell and one large coffin. There is no indication whether they were new or had been used for conveying corpses before. The remains were placed in the large coffin by PCs Gooch and Martin. Leverton was ‘unable to see if the remains were put in coffin by hands being used or a spade’. Gooch explained, ‘I used my hands for the purpose of removing them. Police Constable Martin was with me, and helped to remove them. He used his hands.’

Pepper asked that the uppermost portions of the remains be placed at the bottom of the coffin ‘so that on taking the remains out of the coffin one could reconstruct the heap if thought necessary’.

The coffin was taken outside and the remains were again examined by Pepper and another man (no doubt Marshall). Dew asked Leverton to screw down the coffin and take it to the mortuary in Holloway Road. Leverton loaded the coffin onto his undertaker’s van and ‘I also took some remains on a tray’. These were the hair, a curler, coarse string, paper, cloth and a piece of buttock and thigh.

Mortuary keeper Arthur Robinson received the coffin and placed it on two trestles. The coffin was unscrewed and the remains taken to the post-mortem room for Pepper and Marshall to examine. Afterwards Robinson put them back in the coffin.

15 July 1910

The remains were removed from the coffin and a post-mortem examination was carried out at the mortuary by Dr Pepper and Dr Marshall. Sergeant Mitchell and Arthur Robinson were also present along with Inspector Dew, who would never forget the many hours he spent with Dr Pepper and Dr Marshall ‘examining again and again every portion of those terrible remains’.
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Pepper finds the skin with the scar on it ‘which attracted my attention, and I afterwards examined it with particularity. I spent several hours examining it.’ Some internal organs, hair and clothing were placed in five glass jars. The jars were sealed with stoppers, tied with white tape and kept on a mortuary slab until 22 July.

18 July 1910

The coroner and his jury view the remains. Several newspapers say this took place at the coroner’s court, where the remains were behind glass. Afterwards, or possibly on the next day, Arthur Robinson, on his own initiative, sprinkles carbolic powder on the remains ‘to prevent smell arising’.

18–22 July 1910

Three other post-mortems are carried out at the mortuary by five different doctors. The jars remained in the same room during these visits. It is not known if the post-mortems were carried out on the bodies of men or women, how many slabs there were at the mortuary, or what method was used to clean the slabs between post-mortems. Dr Pepper thought that ‘it would have been better for the jars not to remain in a room where post-mortems were carried on,’ but ‘it would certainly not be possible for the remains, secured as these were, to become impregnated from germs from their being kept in a room where post-mortems were carried on’.

22 July 1910

PC Thompson takes the five jars to St Mary’s Hospital and gives them to Dr Willcox.

25 July 1910

Dr Marshall makes a further examination of the remains left at the mortuary, lasting between two and three hours. He finds another curler with hair on it which he places in a jar along with some of the liver and intestines and takes it to St Mary’s Hospital.

8 August 1910

Drs Pepper and Marshall examine the piece of skin with a scar on it at the mortuary. Pepper hands the skin to Dr Willcox who preserves it ‘by a special process to prevent putrification’ (the Kaiserling process using formalin, water, potassium nitrate and potassium acetate). By September it ‘had the exact appearance that it had on delivery and is preserved in a solution of glycerine’. Between 8 August and 15 September Willcox examined the skin four or five times.

Arthur Newton is granted permission by the Home Office to view the remains along with an analyst and a pathologist working on behalf of the defence.
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14 August 1910

Dr Marshall makes yet another examination of the remains at the mortuary. He finds another curler, which he puts in a jar, adding the lungs, some more intestines ‘and one or two other matters’. Marshall gives the jar to Dr Willcox at St Mary’s Hospital.

9 September 1910

The piece of skin bearing the scar was shown by Dr Pepper to Dr Marshall, Dr Willcox, Dr Wall and Dr Turnbull, who ‘made a complete examination of the remains’. After their examination, which lasted for three hours, Dr Pepper cut off a piece of the scar, leaving a piece of skin on either side. This he handed to Dr Willcox. Dr Spilsbury then examined the skin for the first time, firstly with his naked eye, before preparing a section for a slide and looking at it under a microscope. This was the tissue that was sealed on the microscope slide.