Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (31 page)

In 1914 Kendall was the captain of the
Empress of Ireland
when it collided with another vessel in the St Lawrence River, leading to the deaths of 1,012 people.

Kendall retired in 1939 and his autobiography,
Adventures on the High Seas
, was published the same year. Henry Kendall died in 1965, aged ninety-one, in a London nursing home. In 1974 the telegrams he sent during Crippen’s voyage on the
Montrose
were sold at auction for £1,600.
¹⁹

The
Montrose
was sold to the Admiralty in 1914. They intended to fill her holds with concrete and scupper her off the Dover coast as a block ship to deter German U-boats. The last man to ever leave the ship was named William Crippen.
²⁰
The
Montrose
broke free from her moorings, drifted and foundered on the Goodwin Sands where she remained, until breaking up in June 1963.
²¹

Lord Alverstone

During Dr Crippen’s trial a joke was doing the rounds that was attributed to Alverstone. ‘Oh, the Crippen case. Tried for the murder of his wife – and she was in court all the time.’ ‘Nonsense.’ ‘She was, indeed. But she was too cut up to say anything.’
²²
Alverstone, a regular member of the church choir of St Mary Abbotts, Kensington, and known to sing comic songs,
²³
retired in 1913 on account of ill health, and was made a viscount. His autobiography,
Recollections of
Bar and Bench
, was published in 1914. He died the following year and was buried at Norwood Cemetery.
²⁴

Richard Muir

Muir was appointed Recorder of Colchester in 1911 and knighted in 1918. In January 1924 he had a bout of influenza which developed into double pneumonia, from which he died at his London home aged sixty-seven. He was buried at Norwood Cemetery.
²⁵

Travers Humphreys

Humphreys worked on a number of other high-profile cases, including those of the poisoner Frederick Seddon, the Brides in the Bath murders and the prosecution of Roger Casement for treason. Knighted in 1925, he became a judge, and after the Second World War sat on the Court of Criminal Appeal. Humphreys penned two volumes of memoirs, published in 1946 and 1953, and died in 1956.
²⁶

Samuel Ingleby Oddie

Oddie was appointed coroner for Westminster in 1912, a position he held for twenty-seven years, retiring when he turned seventy. He lived at Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, and served on the Rickmansworth Urban District Council for thirty-two years, including a spell as chairman in 1918–21. Oddie wrote his memoir,
Inquest
, in 1941 and died in May 1945 aged seventy-six.
²⁷

Cecil Mercer

Not long after the Crippen case Mercer gave up practising law and became a writer, employing the pen name Dornford Yates. He served in Egypt and Greece during the First World War, where he contracted severe rheumatism, which blighted him for the rest of his life. Moving to the warmer climes of southern France, he was forced to move again in 1940 when the Germans invaded. Settling in southern Rhodesia, Mercer continued writing popular thrillers and two volumes of autobiography. He died in 1960 aged seventy-four, having sold over two million books.
²⁸

Arthur Newton

Newton was found guilty of professional misconduct by the Law Society, and struck off as a solicitor for twelve months after publishing false information in the newspaper
John Bull
in the form of a letter, allegedly written by Crippen.
²⁹
In 1913 he was permanently struck off and sentenced at the Old Bailey to three years in prison. This time he had fraudulently obtained £13,500 from an Austrian for some Canadian land.
³⁰
Upon his release, Newton worked as a private enquiry agent and died in 1930 aged seventy.

Alfred Tobin

Tobin was elected Member of Parliament for Preston in 1910 and held the seat until 1915. He was awarded a knighthood in 1919, the same year that his friend F. E. Smith arranged his appointment as judge of Westminster County Court. Tobin held that position until his retirement in 1935. He died in Switzerland in 1939 aged eighty-three.
³¹

F. E. Smith

Smith’s career flourished after Le Neve’s acquittal. In 1914 he became solicitor general and then attorney general. He was knighted the same year. Three years later Smith was created Baron Birkenhead, and made a life peer in 1918, sitting regularly as Speaker at the House of Lords. In October 1924 he accepted the office of Secretary of State for India. Lord Birkenhead died in 1930 aged fifty-eight.
³²

Dr Augustus Pepper

The Crippen case was Pepper’s last as Home Office Pathologist. He remained a popular teacher at St Mary’s Hospital until his retirement in 1919. Pepper spent much of his retirement gardening at his home in Sidcup, Kent. He died there on 18 December 1935, aged eighty-six, having been ‘largely responsible for the raising of medico-legal work to its present high level’.
³³

Dr William Willcox

Willcox continued working as a lecturer on chemical pathology and forensic medicine at St Mary’s Hospital until the 1930s. During the First World War he was given the rank of colonel and acted as a consultant to the British Army in Mesopotamia. In 1919 Willcox was made medical advisor to the Home Office. Known as ‘the King’s Poisoner’ among journalists, on account of his unrivalled knowledge of poisons, Willcox died aged seventy-one in 1941 and was cremated at Golders Green.
³⁴

Dr Bernard Spilsbury

Spilsbury succeeded Pepper as Home Office Pathologist, holding that position until 1934. He gave evidence at many famous murder trials, including those of Frederick Seddon, Herbert Rowse Armstrong and the Brides in the Bath murders.

Knighted in 1923, Spilsbury worked as a lecturer in morbid anatomy at St Bart’s until 1947, and in pathology at St Mary’s until 1919. He conducted an estimated 25,000 post-mortems during his career.

Spilsbury suffered a stroke in 1940, and arthritis made working increasingly difficult. Further depressed by the death of two sons, Spilsbury died in 1947, the day after Walter Dew, aged seventy, after gassing himself in his laboratory at University College, London.
³⁵
He never finished his book, which was to be the standard work on medical jurisprudence.

1. Hawley Harvey Crippen. (Author’s collection)

2. Cora Crippen. (Author’s collection)

3. Alias Belle Elmore. (Author’s collection)

4. Lil Hawthorne, who informed Scotland Yard of Cora Crippen’s disappearance. (Author’s collection)

5. Superintendent Frank Froest. (Author’s collection)

6. Chief Inspector Walter Dew. (Stewart P. Evans)

7. 39 Hilldrop Crescent. (Author’s collection)

8. The remains of Cora Crippen. (The National Archives)