Dr Crippen. Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. You couldn’t make up a better name for a murderous medic if you tried. “Hannibal Lecter” is stylish and memorable, but perhaps just that little bit too knowingly baroque: “Harold Shipman” goes too far the other way, all dowdy suburbanite. But Hawley Harvey Crippen is perfect, exactly the right mix of unusual and menacing, the sing-song cadence of the near-twin given names eliding seamlessly into the hard consonant surname.
You couldn’t make up a better name for a murderous medic if you tried
It’s not just Crippen’s name which is perfect, it’s his case too. At the heart of it is that ageless dramatic device, the love triangle. In one corner is Crippen himself: a homeopath (as the T-shirt says: “Homeopathy – making fuck-all difference since 1796”) who in the words of Daily Express crime correspondent E Spencer Shew had “bulbous eyes, straggling moustache, choker collar, mild manners, indestructible air of respectability, florid wife, and mouse-like mistress.” In the second corner is that florid wife Cora, who wasn’t in fact Cora at all: born Kunigunde Mackamotski to a German mother and a Polish-Russian father, she sang in music halls under the stage name Belle Elmore. And in the third is the mouse-like mistress, Crippen’s typist-turned-lover Ethel Le Neve, the French surname an ersatz sophisticated affectation for a woman born plain Ethel Neave.
In January 1910 Cora disappeared from the marital home in Hilldrop Crescent, Camden. Ethel soon began walking around wearing her rival’s jewellery, and Crippen changed his story several times (first claiming that Cora had died, then that she had hightailed to California with one of her lovers). While police inspector Walter Dew sniffed around and eventually found a torso in the basement, Crippen and Ethel fled to Canada on the steamship SS Montrose.
If pseudonyms are one way to mask identities, disguise is another. Ethel dressed as a boy and the pair disguised themselves as father and son, a ruse which might have been more successful had they not been so affectionate in public as to arouse the suspicions not just of other passengers but also of the ship’s captain Henry Kendall. Kendall sent a Marconi telegraph message back to Liverpool:
“3PM GMT Friday 130 miles West Lizard have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are amongst saloon passengers moustache taken off growing beard accomplice dressed as boy voice manner and build undoubtedly a girl both travelling as Mr and master Robinson.”
The message, sent just before the Montrose sailed beyond range of the transmitter, prompted Inspector Dew to get himself on a faster ship, the SS Laurentic, which arrived in Canada first, allowing him to arrest both Crippen and Ethel. Cross-dressing and a race against time: As You Like It meets The Fugitive. In modern-day Hollywood, that’s an elevator pitch and a half.
After Act One (the affair) and Act Two (escape and capture) came Act Three, the trial. More than 4,000 people applied for public gallery tickets. Crippen was offered £1,000 a week for a live tour if acquitted, while Ethel was promised a fifth of that for a music-hall sketch called “Caught by Wireless”. Crippen pleaded not guilty on the grounds the torso in the basement was not Cora’s and had not been put there by him. Experts in what we now consider very basic forensic pathology stated otherwise. Dew, who as a Whitechapel detective more than twenty years before had been one of those forever flummoxed by Jack the Ripper, was determined to make this one stick.
Crippen’s bloodless demeanour and apparent lack of remorse for his wife (whom he called only “the woman”) convinced most people that he was guilty – particularly the jury, who needed only five days of trial and 27 minutes of deliberation to reach a unanimous verdict. Crippen was hanged at Pentonville in November 1910. According to a contemporary report in the Manchester Guardian, “he had spent the previous hour with the Roman Catholic prison chaplain and two warders.” His plan to commit suicide with broken glass from his spectacles had been forestalled and now, though unable to finish his breakfast, he seemed perfectly calm. The hangman, a Yorkshire barber named John Ellis, who had spent time with him the day before, recalled that “Crippen came across to me as a most pleasant fellow.” He was smiling as the cap was put over his head on the scaffold.
The case has had a long and apparently inexhaustible legacy. Agatha Christie’s Mrs McGinty’s Dead leaned heavily on thinly-fictionalised versions of Crippen and Ethel; Crippen’s waxwork was a centrepiece in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors for many decades; Donald Pleasence played the doctor in a 1963 movie before going on to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld four years later; and the story has been told and retold by at least three novelists in the past twenty years alone. James Patrick Crippen of Ohio, second cousin three times removed, recently said that “every time I have come through customs to England, someone has made a comment on my name, linking me to a murderer.”
The Crippen case touches on what makes humans such flawed and interesting specimens
This resonance is not just because it’s a great story. The Crippen case endures as much for its undercurrents as for its surface tension: it touches on what makes humans such flawed and interesting specimens; it has something for everyone. Even though Crippen was American by birth the murder was very British, all repressed sexuality and keeping up appearances. Henpecked and unhappy husbands can sympathise with Crippen; mistresses can pin their hopes on the love story of finally being with their man; betrayed wives can see it as a warning as to how far husbands and lovers could go; those whose lives are full of deceit in any way can identify with any number of the duplicities being practised; and scientists relish the fact that expert testimony was vital in proving the torso was indeed Cora’s.
That said, there is still some ambiguity about Crippen’s guilt. DNA tests carried out on flesh from the torso found in Crippen’s cellar have shown no match with that of three of Cora’s living relatives, though this is by no means conclusive: the original sample is small, old and largely degraded, and Cora’s family tree is so convoluted that those relatives may not in fact share blood ties with her. John Cooper KC has sought, unsuccessfully, to gain an official reopening and review of the case.
There is always something both fascinating and repulsive about doctors and nurses who kill. Medical professionals are among those whom society exalts as the best of us: we lined the streets to applaud them during the pandemic, they take an oath at the start of their career which involves holding themselves to the highest personal and professional standards. But by the same token those who save lives can also take them, something recognised in the Hippocratic oath: “it may be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.” It is this last stipulation that men like Crippen and Shipman, and women like Beverley Allitt, break. It’s not just murder, but the deviance of using their skills in malicious ways, and of arrogating deific privileges to their mortal selves.
The Crippen case speaks to the ways in which society treated men and women differently, and to a large degree still does. Cora was lambasted as an unfaithful wife who took many lovers – it was Crippen catching her in bed with one of their lodgers that apparently prompted him to begin his affair with Ethel – and her lack of music-hall success came from an almost total absence of talent, but do either of these justify the trashing her reputation has received? Conventional wisdom had him as the respectable decent man cuckolded by a wild slattern, but it was surely far more likely that Cora was at heart an unhappy woman married to the wrong man, who tried only to find her pleasure where she could. Crippen passed her over in favour of a more docile and pliable replacement, but why should that have been all Cora’s fault?
Finally, being Britain, there’s a class element. Crippen and Ethel took first-class berths, and of course first-class passengers were often invited to meet and talk to the captain. It was these conversations that sealed their fate. Had they gone third-class, surely the most sensible thing for anyone fearful of being caught, they’d never have encountered Kendall and would have arrived in Canada undetected, to begin their new lives together. Undone by their own snobbery: what a British failing. Basil Fawlty would have been proud.
Boris Starling is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. His latest novel, “The Law Of The Heart”, is out now
