Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (29 page)

So numerous men had repeatedly and extensively handled the remains over a period of nearly two months. They had been excavated with dirty shovels, placed by hand into a coffin, which may have been used before, and examined on mortuary slabs which were being used for other post-mortems. There is no evidence that the police officers, doctors or mortuary attendant wore gloves or masks when handling them. Spilsbury later wrote that Dr Pepper ‘occasionally stroked his moustache during an operation’.
¹⁷

An illustration of the care taken over medical evidence in 1910 is demonstrated by Cecil Mercer’s recollection of Crippen’s trial, where ‘the slab of flesh upon which the scar appeared, was exhibited in court. It was lying in a large meat dish – the kind of dish in which sirloins used to be served – soused in spirits of wine or some preservative. It was presented to counsel, and I inspected it.’
¹⁸
The flesh had arrived in court in a glass jar. Dr Willcox sent out for the dish and forceps. Dr Pepper removed the flesh from the jar and put it in the dish. Oddie remembered it was ‘preserved in formalin, was handed about in Court on a dish and was carefully inspected by the Jury. Finally it was taken into an adjoining empty Court where a series of microscopical slides prepared by Spilsbury from the supposed scar were set out and peered at through microscopes by the Jurymen.’
¹⁹
Presumably these were the same slides that ended up in the hospital’s archives.

Today such repeated handling of a piece of evidence would make the result of any DNA test inadmissible as evidence. However, there could be no question about Dr Foran’s exacting standards when examining the slide. He used ‘full personal protective equipment, and supplies were autoclaved, filter-sterilized, and UV-irradiated’. The cover slip of the slide was sealed tight and stuck fast so it was necessary to chip open the glass cover with a sterile scalpel to expose the tissue. Foran managed to extract enough tissue to create a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) reading.
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Living descendants of Cora Crippen had to be located to compare their DNA with the mtDNA from the slide. Cora had no children, thus no direct lineal descendants. As mtDNA passes down through the female line, it was necessary to find an unbroken chain of female descendants from one of Cora’s sisters or half-sisters.

Genealogical research was undertaken by Beth Wills at the behest of John Trestrail. Wills confessed, ‘I am a hobby genealogist that has taken a few courses in Family History Research.’ Initially she only presented ‘a synopsis of my research journey’ rather than a full pedigree of Cora’s family and descendants with the exact sources she obtained the information from. ‘I feel that if anyone needs more information, or doubts the results of my research that they are certainly fee [
sic
] to do any research that they want on their own dime,’ she said.
²¹

When Foran and Wills published their research in 2010 the scanty genealogical information sat incongruously alongside the detailed scientific explanations. Names of Cora’s relatives were restricted to one letter, images of genealogical documents had names blacked out and descriptions of sources consulted were as vague as ‘Baptismal/christening records’ and ‘Genealogical websites’.
²²
Wills was confident she had correctly traced Cora’s great niece, from whom a DNA sample was taken. When compared to the mtDNA sample from the slide, Dr Foran announced the samples did not match.

The genealogical findings were brought into question when it was independently discovered that on Cora’s marriage certificate her mother’s maiden name was given as Mary Wolff, while on her half half-sister Bertha’s (from whom it seems descendants were traced) it was Mary Smith.
²³
This seemed to explain why the slide’s mtDNA excluded the living descendants as being related, as they did not appear to have descended from the same female line.

Wills had calculated Cora’s birth date from her marriage licence and census returns. A look through the Crippen case files at the National Archives would have revealed that a birth certificate existed. Cora’s sister, Theresa Hunn, gave a statement in which she said, ‘She [Cora] was born on the 3 September, 1873. I produce her Birth Certificate.’ Cora’s birth certificate was later discovered by a poster on an internet message board and it gave Mary Schmidt as her mother, indicating that she had the same mother as Bertha.
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If the remains were not Cora’s, why were human remains in the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent? No explanation was offered other than Crippen may have worked as an illegal abortionist for extra income and an unknown woman died during a botched operation. Trestrail said that hyoscine was used in obstetrics and although ‘we don’t know that Crippen carried out abortions, but he dabbled in all sorts, so it is quite plausible’. He added that an abortion would have to be carried out on a patient with an empty stomach, so the remains couldn’t be Cora’s because she had dined on the night she disappeared.
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Dr Pepper’s report on his examination of the remains had concluded the stomach was ‘empty and intact’.

There was never any evidence of Crippen carrying out abortions at Hilldrop Crescent and this theory was created to fit a particular hypothesis. Surely if Crippen had used hyoscine during an abortion, he would not have administered such a large and lethal dose. This was all forgotten when a new type of test was carried out at the laboratory to determine the sex of the tissue sample the slide contained. It was declared to be male.

Trestrail abandoned his abortion hypothesis and wondered how male remains could have ended up in the cellar. ‘I’m running scenarios through my mind of planted evidence’. A different and arguably better scenario would be that the tissue sample had become contaminated with male DNA. After being discovered, the remains were in the presence of at least seventeen men, at least half of whom had handled the remains before the slide was made. They were Inspector Dew; Sergeant Mitchell; Assistant Commissioner Melville Macnaghten; Superintendent Frank Froest; PC Gooch; PC Martin; PC Pitts; PC Thompson; Albert Leverton, the undertaker; Arthur Robinson, the mortuary keeper; Dr Marshall; Dr Pepper; Dr Wall; Dr Turnbull; Dr Spilsbury; Arthur Newton; and Dr Willcox.

On the day that the slide was made, the remains were examined for three hours by Drs Willcox, Pepper, Spilsbury, Marshall, Wall and Turnbull. Other contamination could obviously have come from Dr Crippen, any male cadavers who shared the mortuary slabs and unsterilised instruments used to cut the tissue when preparing the slide.

Instead of this, the programme declared it was Dew and Mitchell who had planted the pyjama top and possibly the remains because they ‘had the opportunity to plant evidence in the cellar’. The viewer was not enlightened on how this could have been achieved. For it to be true, Dew and Mitchell would have needed to be impossibly lucky:

They would have had to been sure that Cora Crippen would never turn up alive anywhere in the world.
    They would have had to have known that the pyjama top they had thrown into the remains could not have existed before the Crippens moved into 39 Hilldrop Crescent.
    They must have magically made the pyjama top appear that it had been buried for months rather than a couple of hours.

And if they had planted the remains, they would have had to dig the grave and dispose of the soil unobserved.

they would have had to obtain a corpse for themselves. But rather than use a female corpse as a substitute for the missing woman, they decided a male cadaver would do just as well. They would then need the anatomical and surgical knowledge to dismember it, eliminating any evidence of sex and make sure their remains had an old surgical scar in the same place as Cora Crippen, which neither of them knew about at that time.
    They would have had to make sure that when the remains were under the scrutiny of a post-mortem examination they would have the appearance of being buried shortly after death and buried for several months.
    They would have had to dispose of the unwanted body parts without being discovered.
    They would have had to obtain a large quantity of hyoscine from a chemist (larger than Crippen’s chemist usually stocked), signed the poisons register then distributed it through the remains as if it had been taken orally, without knowing Crippen had recently bought a large quantity of hyoscine.
    Then they would have had to obtain a sack of lime and covered the remains, mixing it with water, without knowing Crippen had bought a quantity of lime.
    This would all have to have been done on either 12 July (Flora Long and Valentine Lecocq were still in the house on 11 July), or within a few hours on 13 July. That day Dew had spent the morning making various enquiries and digging up more of Crippen’s garden. PC Gooch arrived at about 4 p.m., although Sergeant Mitchell estimated the time of the discovery at about 5 p.m.

Dew had rushed to fortify himself with brandy after uncovering the Hilldrop Crescent remains.
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Surely the discovery would not have come as a shock if he had just planted them. The suggestion is particularly unpleasant as it implies that Dew and Mitchell lied under oath at the magistrates’, coroner’s and Central Criminal Court and watched while Crippen was sentenced to death, knowing that they had planted the evidence that resulted in his execution.

Even the planted evidence myth is an old one. The
New York Times
suggested it in 1910 when they asked ‘whether this was a clever police “plant” formulated in deference to the criticism of the police after Crippen’s disappearance’.
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It had been ninety-eight years since this fantasy was first proposed, and in all those years not a shred of evidence has been found to support it. Neither was an explanation forthcoming about how the remains could be male. It seems highly unlikely that the long, dyed hair (the longest strand being 8 inches long) found with the curlers (which were the same brand that Cora used) would have proved male in origin if it had been tested.

An attempt was made by the programme to show Cora was still alive in New York in 1920, living with her sister and using the name Belle Rose. Belle Rose appeared on the 1920 New York census living with Bertha Mersinger. The census page was not shown, but had it been it would have been obvious that Belle Rose was not Belle Elmore. The census enumerator’s head of household number (forty-eight) had been mistaken with Cora’s possible age. Belle Rose’s occupation was designer, not singer, which would have fitted Cora and Belle was described as Bertha’s cousin, not her sister. John Trestrail was not deterred. He told the
Guardian
, ‘Are Belle Rose and Cora Crippen one and the same? We can’t prove any of that – that is another investigation.’
²⁸

The documentary was broadcast in America on the PBS channel under the title
Secrets of the Dead: Executed in Error
. It contained additional footage including an examination of the Chicago letter, but this time the 1910 file cover denouncing it as a hoax was shown, as was a photocopy of a postcard written by Cora, which they admitted was written in a different handwriting. Still the letter was given credence and the impossible-to-prove suggestion was made that Cora had dictated it, or even that Bruce Miller was the author.
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The 2008 documentary repeatedly compared the Crippen case to the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, as if this was Scotland Yard’s chance to redeem itself, especially Inspector Dew, who had failed to catch Jack the Ripper as a detective constable in Whitechapel. Dew was quite open about the police’s failure to catch Jack the Ripper. He was reconciled to the dreadful events of the autumn of terror, admitting that ‘failure it certainly was, but I have never regarded it other than an honourable failure’.
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His name barely appeared in the press coverage at the time and his reputation had not suffered. Indeed, he was promoted to the rank of detective sergeant in December 1889.

A dubious claim was made that Dew’s 1938 autobiography,
I Caught Crippen
, had been a bestseller and Dew had exploited his involvement in Crippen case to make it so. Far from being a bestseller, the book was remaindered and never reprinted.
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If Dew had planted evidence it would have been in his interest to stay quiet about the case rather than continually laud it in public as his greatest achievement.

More aspersions were placed on Dew in a 2011 interview with Julian Duffus. He said that when Dew retired from Scotland Yard ‘he gave up his pension and took on other work. Why?’
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There is nothing in Dew’s pension papers to support this unsubstantiated claim
³³
and printed Metropolitan Police orders refer to Dew as ‘Pensioned’ after his retirement.
³⁴
He worked as a confidential enquiry agent for many years, but that was a common career choice for officers who were entitled to retire at a relatively young age with a decent pension after a lengthy service.

The historical claims made by the 2004 and 2008 documentaries are disproved by the same documents that were used to present them and the modern scientific findings are overwhelmingly contradicted by the historical evidence. Headline-grabbing DNA results do not explain why nobody seriously believed in Crippen’s innocence in 1910:

After Cora’s disappearance nobody ever saw or heard from her again, despite there being a large reward for finding her.
    Cora disappeared without taking her beloved jewellery and furs with her.
    Human remains found in Crippen’s cellar were wrapped in his pyjamas which could not have existed before 1908, well after the Crippens had moved in.
    Hair and curlers identified by friends as resembling Cora’s were among the remains.
    The remains were laced with hyoscine. Crippen had bought a large quantity of hyoscine shortly before Cora’s disappearance, none of which could be accounted for.
    The remains were covered in lime. Crippen had bought a quantity of lime.
    Dr Crippen was found guilty of Cora’s murder by a coroner’s jury.
    Dr Crippen was found guilty of Cora’s murder at the magistrates’ court.
    Dr Crippen was found guilty of Cora’s murder by an Old Bailey jury.
    Dr Crippen was found guilty of Cora’s murder by the Court of Criminal Appeal.
    No contemporary police officer or legal figure involved in the case believed that Crippen had not killed his wife.
    Crippen’s solicitor Arthur Newton thought his client was guilty.
    Even Ethel Le Neve believed Crippen had killed Cora, albeit accidentally.