The Case of Dr. Crippen

A Story of the First Murderer to be Intercepted by Wireless in Mid-Ocean

EDMUND PEARSON

THE mysterious disappearance of their treasurer, in the late winter of 1910, gave the London Music Hall Ladies' Guild subject for wonder and gossip. On the last night in January, the treasurer, Miss Belle Elmore (and her docile husband) entertained at dinner, in her home at Hilldrop Crescent, a Mr. and Mrs. Martinetti. Mr. Martinetti was a retired music hall "artist". Dinner was cooked and served by Miss Elmore; and the four afterwards played whist until between one and two. The hostess was well, cheerful, loquacious and kind; she was probably rather noisy, as usual, and quite her own plump, flamboyant self. Her clothes were noticeable,—a little conspicuous, and so, also, was her jewelry. Altogether she was in usual form, and gave her husband a sound scolding for neglect—as she thought—of some point of courtesy toward her guests. He took the reproof meekly, as was his wont. Toward two o'clock in the morning, he ran out and searched the streets for a cab—Mr. Martinetti had a slight chill—and when the cab was found the Martincttis departed. The door of 39 Hilldrop Crescent closed,—and Miss Elmore vanished from human sight.

IT SHOULD be explained that Belle Elmore was not so called because of sympathy with the aims of the Lucy Stone League. She also would have described herself as a music hall "artiste", and Belle Elmore was her professional title. Prior to her marriage she had been known, at her home in New York, as Cora Turner, but this was also an alias. Her true maiden—or to be precise—her unmarried name, was Kunigunde Mackamotzki; her father was a Russian Pole, and her mother a German. She was a variety actress manque. Her adoring husband, in the early days of their marriage, had paid for music lessons in New York: she aspired to grand opera. When they moved to London her ambition declined to music halls of the first class, and finally to those of second and even third rate. Almost her only appearance was at a time of an actors' strike; the audience sympathized with the strike and hissed her off the stage. After that, writes her historian, Mr. Filson Young, she "had to content herself with frequenting music hall circles, reading the Era, retaining her 'stage' name of Belle Elmore, and adding to her already large stock of theatrical garments." Her election as treasurer of the Music Hall Guild had given her new interests, many congenial friends, and an opportunity for charitable work which she faithfully performed.

The little inoffensive husband, with whom the Martincttis left her that morning—and for whose benefit she continued the scolding—was a native of Coldwater, Michigan, a man approaching fifty years of age. His name was Hawley Harvey Crippen; he had the degree of M.D. from the Hospital College of Cleveland, and had practised medicine in four or five American cities, but had lived in London for ten years. In that city he had been employed by a number of "medical" companies; the mere recital of their names would make a respectable practitioner writhe in agony. Chiefly he had been with the redoubtable Munyon, whose portrait—in frock coat, La Follette hair, and with finger upraised, telling the world that "There is hope!" used to be as familiar in America as W. L. Douglas and Lydia Pinkham. He was now a dentist, and was also interested in an "ear-cure business".

A DAY or two after the Martinetti dinner, the Music Hall Ladies' Guild were surprised to receive Miss Elmore's resignation. She announced in a letter that she had been called in a great hurry to America, by the illness of a relative. The letter was signed "Belle Elmore, p.p.H.H.C." and Dr. Crippen affirmed that he wrote it himself, at his wife's request. She was packing in great haste, and unable to attend to correspondence. She was also in too great a hurry, it appeared, to take away some of her clothes, furs, jewels, money and other possessions. The Music Hall Ladies were somewhat puzzled at this, and when a few weeks later Dr. Crippen attended the dinner and ball of the Benevolent Fund, bringing another lady with him, and when it was observed that the other lady was wearing some of Mrs. Crippen's most conspicuous jewels, the bad taste of the incident caused more or less comment. "Peter" Crippen, as he was often known, had been well liked by his wife's friends; one of them called him "the nicest man I ever knew"; while ladies who believed that all husbands should be kept in abject submission looked upon the Crippen household as a model of perfect discipline.

None of them seems to have approved of the other lady. She was Miss Ethel Le Neve, a typist in the employ of Dr. Crippen's company. Her age was 27; her appearance and manner the exact opposites of the vanished Belle Elmore. Miss Le Neve was quiet, well-mannered and gentle; as biddable as Miss Elmore had been loud and assertive. Even the mild Dr. Crippen was able to command her fate; their relations had been intimate for a year or two. In March, following the disappearance of Mrs. Crippen, she openly took up her residence at 39 Hilldrop Crescent with the Doctor, and a week or two later they went together for a short trip to Dieppe.

The friends of Belle Elmore continued to ask about her sudden flight, and at last the Doctor broke to them the sad news. Belle had gone to California—where his son, by his first marriage lived—and there, "up in the high mountains" she had perished from pneumonia. The Music Hall Ladies were inexpressibly shocked, but they desired to do what was proper by their old pal. If the address could be given them, they would forward a wreath for the grave. This, said Dr. Crippen, with due solemnity, was impracticable. The body had been cremated, and the ashes were being forwarded to London. When the urn arrived, the ladies might then lay their wreath. Again they withdrew, baffled, puzzled, and most properly incensed against "that Le Neve woman". For nearly six months the riddle was without solution. Dr. Crippen's business and professional associates knew nothing of his domestic affairs; the circumstances of his life at home, both before and after Mrs. Crippen's disappearance, were known to very few. Yet the Music Hall Ladies, and their allied and associated gentlemen, were curious, disturbed, and suspicious.

In June, at last, one of them went to Scotland Yard, and told a story which sent Chief Inspector Dew to the dental office. Dr. Crippen received him pleasantly and frankly, and said that he realized that the time had come for him to tell the truth. The Inspector admitted that such a course would be perfectly agreeable, as far as he was concerned. Mr. Dew thereupon spent the entire day in the office, the dentist dictating an extensive account of his entire career, and going into another room from time to time, to pull a tooth. The important part of the statement was that Dr. Crippen declared that out of regard for his wife's reputation, he had been deliberately deceiving her friends. He knew well that she had gone away, and, he feared, it was with another man. (There would have been nothing unexpected in this; Mrs. Crippen had more than once expressed—theoretically and practically—her preference for other men.)

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The detective and the Doctor lunched together, amicably, and at the end of the long summer afternoon, spent in dentistry and dictation, the officer accepted his host's invitation to make a thorough inspection of the house at Hilldrop Crescent. Miss Le Neve was still in residence. Together the two men went upstairs, downstairs, into the garden, and all over the place. They visited the coal-cellar; I wonder if either of them had read, and if either of them remembered then or later, the similar situation in Poe's story of The Black Cat. (The Crippens had had two cats, by the way, but I do not know where they were at the time of Inspector Dew's visit. They disappeared, and one of the bitterest of the Music Hall Ladies has uttered her dark suspicions concerning them.)

The detective was almost completely satisfied; the statement was plausible; nothing at the house gave any indication that it was other than perfectly true. Dr. Crippen was composed and affable. The investigation seemed to be at an end. Three days later, however, Inspector Dew decided to return to the office to ask a few more questions; he learned then that Dr. Crippen and Miss Le Neve had left London. The flight caused the detective to renew his suspicions; he returned, day after day, to the empty house; he set his constables probing, digging, searching everywhere. On the third day he discovered that one of the bricks under a wood-pile in the cellar floor could be raised. He lifted it, moved a few more, and commenced to excavate in the earth beneath. Very soon he came upon what the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department called "something very unpleasant". There were portions of a human body. The head, the entire skeleton, and all four limbs were missing,—and they have never been found. There were not even means of determining the sex of the person who had been buried, and it seemed impossible to make any identification whatever.

Meanwhile, all over the world, the hue and cry was raised for Dr. Crippen and Ethel Le Neve. Their names were famous in a week; the subject for songs in variety theatres, and for ribald jest elsewhere. Many will remember that hot July, sixteen years ago, and the gossip about the fugitive Doctor. Inspector Dew was derided, as a badly fooled policeman who had let his man slip through his fingers. Ladies grew pale with rage in denunciation of "that beast of a doctor", not so much because he was supposed to have murdered his wife— that did not seem to annoy them— but because "he had cut her to pieces afterwards". For a week and a day Scotland Yard was bombarded with letters and telegrams as never before:

the fugitives were seen and recognized in every city in Great Britain, in all European capitals and most provincial towns. Finally, late one night there arrived at the Yard a curious wireless message from the Captain of a ship at sea. If Inspector Dew left instantly, he could catch a faster ship, the Laurentic from Liverpool, and arrive at Quebec in time to intercept two very interesting passengers who were already on the ocean, bound for Canada. Here was a problem. The officers had followed up so many false clues! There were promising reports to investigate from both Spain and Switzerland; should Dew, the only detective who knew the case thoroughly, and had met Dr. Crippen face to face, be sent 3000 miles away on what might be another useless chase? The decision was made, and the Inspector sailed next morning on the Laurentic.

This was what had happened. Eleven days after Dr. Crippen left London, the ship Montrose sailed from Antwerp for Quebec. Captain Kendall had seen and read the circular advertising the desire of the London police for Dr. Crippen, and the Captain was no mean detective. Within two hours of sailing he noticed that two passengers called Mr. John Robinson and his son were unusually affectionate when they thought they were alone together. Master Robinson's trousers were very tight over the hips; they had been slit a little in the back, and were kept up, not with belt or suspenders, but with safety pins! Poor Miss Le Neve, her masquerade as a boy was hardly more deceptive than that of Huck Finn as a girl. Her enemies, the Music Hall Ladies, might have been no more naturally gifted for this disguise than she was —but at least they would not have made that error of the safety pins. Captain Kendall tried other schemes to test the disguises, and sent his wireless message crackling back; he even recorded the titles of the books which Mr. Robinson was reading,—a touch which strongly appeals to me. It wras the first employment of wireless in such a chase. At Father Point, in the St. Lawrence, Inspector Dew climbed aboard, with his warrant, his hand-cuffs, and the prescribed remark of the Englishman ivho must live up to the national reputation for imperturbability: "Dr. Crippen, I believer"

The trial at the Old Bailey was not an easy matter. The circumstances, of course, were black against the Doctor. When he went upon the witness stand, and endured a long crossexamination by the Crown counsel, he had to begin by admitting that he could not tell where his wife was; and that he had not heard of anybody who knew where she was. He had pawned some of her jewels and given others to Miss Le Neve. Finally, there was the crowning blunder of the flight from London in disguise, as soon as the police had begun to investigate. Had he not made that mistake he might be living today; Inspector Dew was practically ready to abandon the search after the first investigation at the house. These things were hard to explain, and might have established a "moral certainty" of his guilt. But that is not legal proof; the Crown had to show that the remains found in the cellar were those of Belle Elmore, and to connect her husband with her death. As the teeth found in the furnace proved the fact of the death of Dr. Parkman, so the proof of identity in this case rested upon one bit of evidence. It was shown that Miss Elmore, in life, bore the long scar of an abdominal operation, and such a scar was found on one of the fragments of flesh in the cellar. Moreover, Dr. Crippen, two weeks before the disappearance of his wife, had bought, for no satisfactory reason which he could supply, five grains of the deadly poison hyoscin; traces of this poison were found in the body in the cellar. Expert testimony was produced in his behalf, to dispute these conclusions, but on the whole, his witnesses broke down. A portion of a pyjama jacket was found with the remains; it was pretty conclusively shown that this garment was Dr. Crippen's. The jury were out less than half an hour; they brought him in guilty, and he suffered the extreme penalty of the law on November 23, at Pentonville prison. A month before his execution, Miss Le Neve was tried, as an accessory after the fact, and was acquitted.

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There remains the mystery of Crippen's conduct and character. To the public, he was a brutal and heartless wretch; but nobody who came in contact with him for one minute thought him anything but a quiet, mild and courteous man. No act or word of unkindliness to any living person could be produced against him. In Court he was a marvel of composure; in prison he touched everyone by his unselfish devotion to the woman he loved. His concern for her safety was his sole thought after his arrest. It takes a very stern moralist indeed not to find a genuine pathos in the letters which passed between them. Beerbohm-Tree drove about London, the day of the hanging, murmuring from time to time, "Poor old Crippen!" and this sentiment was shared by many persons who were never mawkishly sentimental about a commonplace murderer.

To the jury the motive for the crime seemed simple enough. To criminologists and to some lawyers it has been more difficult to discover, and various explanations have been suggested,—some of them fantastic. Mrs. Crippen, if she died by hvoscin, died painlessly. Why, if her husband plotted her murder, did he not try to pass off her death as an accident, the result of poison unintentionally taken by herself? So far as it has ever appeared, there was absolutely nothing in the character of Dr. Crippen, either before or after that night of the 31st of January, to indicate sufficient malevolence to allow him to harm a mouse. In the gallery of extraordinary murderers he is one of the greatest puzzles of them all.