Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (7 page)

There was immediate concern that Crippen and Le Neve might have fled the country. Cablegrams were quickly sent out to various countries. The one sent to Ottawa, Canada, gave full physical descriptions of the pair:

Wanted for murder and mutilation of a woman Hawley Harvey Crippen alias Peter Crippen alias Francke, an American age fifty, 5 feet three or four, complexion fresh, hair light brown inclined sandy, thin bald on top, scanty straggling moustache, eyes grey, bridge of nose flat, false teeth, wears gold rim spectacles, may be wearing brown jacket suit marked Baker and Grey, round flat hat, Horne Bros. inside, wears hat back of head, rather slovenly appearance, throws his feet out when walking, slight American accent, very plausible and quiet spoken, speaks French and shows his teeth when speaking; and Ethel Clara Leneve[
sic
] travelling as his wife, age 27, height five feet five, complexion pale, hair light brown, large grey eyes, good teeth, good looking, medium build, pleasing appearance, quiet subdued manner, looks interested when in conversation, is reticent, walks slowly, probably dressed blue serge skirt, ditto three quarter jacket suit, large hat or may be dressed in boys dark brown jacket suit, grey hard felt hat, native of London, shorthand writer and typist.

The description of Le Neve was later amended when it was discovered that far from having good teeth, Le Neve had about twenty false teeth.
²⁸
Further descriptions of the wanted couple appeared in newspapers in Spain, Sweden and Grand Canary, where large numbers of British steamers called. The descriptions also appeared in the British press, leading to numerous false sightings from all over England and Scotland.

Having alerted foreign police forces about the missing couple, Dew ‘took on the almost equally big task of searching for evidence that would satisfy a jury that the woman who had met her fate in that gloomy looking house in Hilldrop Crescent was indeed Crippen’s wife’.
²⁹
He felt certain the remains were Cora Crippen’s because she was missing, and her husband had lied about her disappearance and had subsequently fled. On 16 July Dew appeared at Bow Street police court to apply for a warrant against

HAWLEY HARVEY CRIPPEN, and ETHEL CLARA LE NEVE, alias, NEAVE, for having on or about the 2nd day of February 1910, at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road, in the said County and district, wilfully murdered one CORA CRIPPEN otherwise BELLE ELMORE, supposed to be the wife of HAWLEY HARVEY CRIPPEN, and that they did mutilate and bury some of the remains in the coal cellar at the above address.

We sought him here, we sought him there,
Detectives sought him everywhere.
Is he in heaven, or hell, maybe,
The dem’d elusive Dr C.

Sir Melville Macnaghten,
Days of My Years

I verily believe that they have both fled the Country together.

Chief Inspector Walter Dew

A coroner’s inquest on the remains from 39 Hilldrop Crescent was held on 18 July at the chapel of ease, Holloway Road, Islington, but this location proved to be too small for the occasion and subsequent resumed inquests were held at the Central Library in Holloway Road. Frequent heavy showers failed to deter large numbers of curious onlookers who lined the approach to the coroner’s court and mortuary. Among those attending the hearing were Ethel Le Neve’s mother and a number of actresses who were connected to the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild.

Coroner Dr George Danford Thomas swore in a jury to consider the cause of death of ‘some human remains now lying dead’, which they had viewed through a glass screen. Dr Thomas explained that the remains were believed to be those of Cora Crippen, adding that an adjournment would be necessary as there was not a great deal of evidence to be put before them at this time; but the police had the matter of finding Dr Crippen in hand, and the analysis of the remains was in progress.

Walter Dew gave his evidence. He outlined the extent of his investigations, including the discovery of the remains, and ended by saying that the police ‘had not lost one minute, and search was being made everywhere for Crippen’. Dr Thomas heaped praise on Dew for making the find, saying, ‘Many a man might have gone into that cellar and made no discovery. It had to remain for a detective with a genius for his work to go a step further, and it is due to the keenness of the inspector that this ghastly affair is brought to light.’ Describing Dew as a genius was an overstatement. He had been tenacious, but there had been an element of luck in his discovery. If Crippen had not aroused suspicion by fleeing, or if he had filled the cellar with coal, Dew might not have been so diligent in his search. Dew admitted, ‘If Crippen had taken the trouble to order a ton of coal, he’d be a free man to-day.’
¹
Things might also have been different if Crippen had left Hilldrop Crescent on 24 June as he originally agreed with his landlord.

Dr Marshall detailed the preliminary findings of the post-mortem. He thought that the remains were female, but could not prove it because ‘the perpetrator of the outrage had tried to obliterate not only all evidences of identity but all traces of sex’. Marshall thought that the cadaver was dissected in the cellar where it was found, ‘and whoever did it must have taken his time about it, for it was a most deliberate and long process’.

As promised, Dr Thomas adjourned the inquest until Monday 15 August. The main difficulty faced at this stage was establishing that the pile of flesh had once been Cora Crippen. Here Dew had a lucky break. Outside the coroner’s court he overheard Clara Martinetti say that Cora had undergone a serious operation and had quite a large scar on the lower part of her body which she had seen.
²
Among the remains there was a piece of skin bearing the mark of what could have been an operational scar.

Inevitably rumours began circulating about the crime and Dr Crippen. W. R. Bell, the brother of Crippen’s first wife, Charlotte, said he had never been satisfied with what Crippen had told him about her death, which had been attributed to apoplexy and paralysis. His story of their life together suggests that Crippen’s charm and respectability was all a façade:

Crippen set himself up as a dentist, but he got in some kind of trouble and they moved to 30th St., near Lexington-av. Again the authorities got after him and this time he moved – this was about 1890 – to some town out in California. I didn’t hear from my sister much previous to this time; but I know that they moved once more from California to Salt Lake City, Ut.
    Here the mystery began. Charlotte wrote to me that her husband was taking advantage of his medical and surgical knowledge and was compelling her – because of certain ordinary and to-be-expected circumstances, to undergo operations by the knife. She had undergone, she said, two dangerous operations. Her husband, she wrote, was then playing the part of an optician as well as a dentist, although he was really neither. Meanwhile, I should say, they had one little son, born in the first year of their marriage.
    I was furious when I got these letters, and it was in my mind to go west and kill this man who was maltreating my sister. But I restrained myself. Then came the worst letter of all. Charlotte wrote something to this effect: ‘My husband is about to force me to the knife again, and I feel that this will be the last time. I want my relatives to know that if I die it will be his fault.’
³

Bell forwarded this letter to his brother, D. H. Bell, who lived in Dublin. He still had the letter and it was reported that the Irish police were enquiring into Charlotte’s death, as were the police in Salt Lake City. Another story emerged in the American press that Scotland Yard were looking into the death of Charlotte.
⁴
None of these investigations were mentioned again, so it is difficult to know whether any police activity did take place or if the reports were groundless press speculation.

Melinda May remembered attending a New Year’s Eve party at 39 Hilldrop Crescent on 31 December 1909, when Cora had told the guests, ‘I’m so glad that we’re together now, and I do hope that we shall all be together again this time next year.’
⁵
About a fortnight later Cora visited Albion House and complained of feeling so ill that she had told her husband the night before, ‘Get up and fetch the priest. I’m going to die!’ May was convinced that ‘it was the result of an attempt which Crippen had then made to murder her by administering poison’.
⁶
Whether these suspicions were held before Crippen became a murder suspect, or if they only began after the remains were discovered, is a matter of conjecture.

Dew considered it was ‘more than probable’ that sooner or later Le Neve would try to communicate with her parents, who also lived in Camden Town, or her sister in Tottenham. He thought that Crippen might try to write to his employee William Long, who Dew discovered had withheld the information from him that he had bought a suit of boy’s clothes at Crippen’s request.
⁷
With this in mind he asked the Home Office to direct the postal authorities to look out for letters going to their addresses and forwarding them on to him under a Home Office warrant, later adding telegrams to his request. Scotland Yard had by now offered a reward of £250 for information leading to the arrest of Crippen and Le Neve.

It was at this time Dew’s conduct in the case was brought into question. A question was put to the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, by another Member of Parliament, William Thorne, who wanted to know, ‘If he can state who is responsible for allowing Dr Crippen to get out of the hands of the police … and it was in consequence of the pressing inquiries that caused Dr Crippen to vanish.’ It was not until a fortnight later that Churchill responded to the question, which he dismissed as being an unfair one as Dew was engaged on special duty at the time and was therefore unable to defend himself.

Scotland Yard gave their answer, saying that until the discovery of the remains it had simply been a missing person case, the sort of which numbered around a hundred a week in London alone. It was not until there was evidence of foul play that the house could be searched more thoroughly.
⁸

Dew later responded angrily to the criticism:

I came in for criticism. Certain people with no knowledge of police procedure and less of the law blamed me for allowing Crippen to go. I ought to have arrested him, they said. Ridiculous!
    There was up to this time no shred of evidence against Crippen upon which he could have been arrested or even detained. Futile to talk of arresting a man until you know there has been a crime.
⁹

On the face of things it had been Dew and Mitchell’s surprise visit that had resulted in Crippen losing his nerve and fleeing, but his nerves may have been stretched to breaking point before the police called. During the week ending 24 June Crippen’s landlord had arranged for some work to be done at the house. Three lengths of stack pipe were replaced and on the week ending 8 July a new door knocker was put on the front door. While Crippen could rest assured that neither Le Neve or Lecocq would disturb the fabric of the house, he must have been terrified that the builders might notice something about the cellar, or suggest work that needed doing near where the remains were buried. In addition, he had been visited by John Nash and Lil Hawthorne on 28 June. They had been out of the country since 23 March. Once back in England they went to see Crippen to offer their condolences and found him in an anxious state. After living in domestic bliss with Ethel for several months, having cut himself off from Cora’s friends, it must have come as a very unwelcome shock to have builders traipsing through the house and old friends of Cora’s turning up asking questions about her.

The Crippen case was now dominating the newspapers. Dew observed,

There has never been a hue and cry like that which went up throughout the country for Crippen and Miss Le Neve. The newspapers were full of the case. It was the one big topic of conversation. On the trains and buses one heard members of the public speculating and theorizing as to where they were likely to be.
    All the elements to fire the public imagination were present. They were intrigued by the relationship between the doctor and his former secretary; repelled by the gruesome find in the coal cellar, and mystified as to how the victim had met her death. Every day that passed increased the fevered interest in the hunt.
¹⁰

Now the events at Hilldrop Crescent were publicly known, rumours spread like wildfire and false sightings of the fugitives poured in from all over Europe. When a German named John Evert committed suicide at a Finsbury boarding house, word spread that he had in fact been Dr Crippen.
¹¹
When a young woman committed suicide at Bourges on 13 July, a theory emerged from Paris that she had been Ethel Le Neve.
¹²
One joker signed the visitors’ book at Salle Church in Norfolk on 14 July as ‘H. H. Crippen of Hilldrop Crescent, London’.
¹³

Remembering that, to his annoyance, his superiors had not asked for press help during the Whitechapel murders, Dew determined to follow his instincts and do the opposite, making an appeal to the French newspaper
Le Matin
for ‘the Press to give us its assistance’
¹⁴
but this only led to more false sightings.

Mr Newton, a costumier with premises at Great Portland Street, reported that a man answering Dr Crippen’s description had entered his shop ‘and said he wanted to purchase a lady’s costume and under clothes which he said was for himself’. A man fitting Crippen’s description had been spotted in the south of France before crossing the frontier to Spain (provisional arrest and extradition orders had already been issued in France, Spain and Portugal). He was also ‘seen’ in Cardiganshire and Willesden.
¹⁵
Perhaps the strangest sighting was of Crippen and Le Neve in a small town on the South Coast getting into a hot air balloon.
¹⁶

Journalist Philip Gibbs offered an explanation for the mass sightings. Crippen ‘looked a respectable little man, with weak, watery eyes and a drooping moustache, so ordinary a type of middle-class business man in London that quite a number of people, including one of my own friends, were arrested by mistake for him when the hue and cry went forth’.
¹⁷