THE ENDURING PROMINENCE of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen in the annals of British crime – second only to that of Jack the Ripper – is itself a mystery. At most, he only killed one person, while there were other more prolific killers from his era who few today could name. And it now seems that the human remains found in the basement of his home at 39 Hilldrop Crescent in the London district of Holloway were in fact not those of his wife, for whose murder he was hanged in 1910.
The title of ‘doctor’ is stretching things a bit as Crippen only studied homeopathy for a short while in 1884 before ‘graduating’ from the Cleveland Homeopathy Medical College. Moving to New York to set up a practice in 1894, he met and married Kunigunde Mackamotski, also known as Cora, a woman of unrealistic theatrical ambition and a voracious sexual appetite who quickly recognized the diminutive and mousey Crippen as a compliant meal-ticket she could wrap around her little finger. Determined to advance her career, she badgered Crippen into moving to London where, with his rather meaningless qualifications wholly unrecognized, he was left with no option but to take work as a distributor of patented medicines. By 1905 the couple were in residence at Hilldrop Crescent where they were obliged to take in lodgers to supplement Crippen’s meagre earnings, providing Cora with a string of lovers. In 1908, Crippen took the much younger Ethel Neave, who liked to be known as Ethel Le Neve, as his own lover. After a house party on 31 January 1910, Cora disappeared, her absence explained by Crippen as her having returned to the United States where she had died suddenly in California.
Their suspicions aroused by Neave moving into Hilldrop Crescent and disporting herself in Cora’s clothes and jewellery, the missing wife’s friends made representations to the police who, in the form of Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard, paid Crippen a visit. He was told that the story was in fact a lie invented to cover the shame of Cora having run away to the States with an actor called Bruce Miller. After a cursory search of the house the police left. Worried by the visit, the couple, fearing arrest for a murder they had not in fact committed, fled to Antwerp to board the SS Montrose, bound for Canada, under the name of Robinson, father and son, with Ethel disguised as a boy. Their disappearance from London prompted further and more diligent searches of Hilldrop Crescent and, this time, human remains were found under the brick floor of the basement. After a cable from the captain of the Montrose, by now very suspicious of the ‘boy’ Robinson, Dew boarded the faster SS Laurentic so he would reach Canada in time to arrest the pair as their ship docked.
Crippen was brought back to England and his trial began at the Old Bailey on 18 October 1910 with Bernard Spilsbury, pathologist and proto-forensic scientist, as the star witness for the prosecution. Of limited academic qualifications himself, Spilsbury was nevertheless a handsome and charismatic man with an imposing courtroom presence and an ability to assert his opinions with such authority that few dared challenge him. Indeed, it was said at the time that he only had to show his face in court for it to bode ill for any defendant. In his matter-of-fact way, Spilsbury asserted that the remains were those of Cora Crippen as a still-visible scar on one of the tissue samples matched her medical records, which listed an appendectomy. He further asserted that the remains showed high levels of hyoscine, a preparation Crippen is listed as having purchased shortly before Cora’s disappearance, and that curlers containing hair consistent with hers were also found with the remains, as was the cord from a pair of pyjamas found in Crippen’s bedroom. The brand of these pyjamas was not available on the UK market prior to 1908 and thus within the relevant timeframe. All very damning, to be sure. After Spilsbury had finished with them the jury retired for a mere twenty-seven minutes before returning with a guilty verdict, which resulted in Crippen hanging on 23 November. He was later buried within the confines of London’s Pentonville Prison.
Later examination of the seemingly damning evidence casts serious doubt on Crippen’s guilt. The hyoscine flagged by Spilsbury was in fact widely used for gastrointestinal ailments and to be found in most homes. And the pyjama cord is thought to have been planted by the beleaguered police, under a great deal of pressure to bring Crippen to book. On top of that, a letter, ostensibly from Cora in America, which taunted Crippen by saying that she had no intention of extricating him from his predicament by revealing her whereabouts, was ‘buried’ by the prosecution and never revealed to the defence during the trial. It would also later transpire that Spilsbury’s dogmatic assertions, which sent Crippen and many others to the gallows, were quite untenable or even deliberately ‘fudged’ to keep himself in the prosecutorial limelight or, even worse, because he had taken a personal dislike to the defendant.
SPILSBURY EXPOSED
By the 1920s cracks were appearing in Spilsbury’s celebrity facade, with many questioning the ‘spin’ he imparted to his forensic evidence to help secure guilty verdicts and his insistence on working alone behind locked mortuary doors.
In 1923, Spilsbury’s dogmatic evidence secured a guilty verdict against Corporal Albert Dearnley, accused of the murder of Corporal James Ellis. After a scant twenty-nine-minute jury deliberation, Spilsbury conclusively ‘proved’ Dearnley had bound and gagged his victim with the murderous intent required to ensure death by suffocation.
Actually, the two were lovers engaged in bondage suffocation games, a fact known to Spilsbury before he took the stand but one he suppressed due to his pronounced homophobia and reluctance to cause a scandal by revealing such practice in the armed forces. But the suppressed evidence was made public in time to save Dearnley from the rope, with Spilsbury dispassionately opining that he should have hanged anyway for being gay. In 1947, by which time his private life and reputation were in tatters, Spilsbury gassed himself in his laboratory at University College London.
Even at the time, others were puzzled. Spilsbury, obviously forgetting that Dr Crippen was not in fact a doctor of any kind, had also made much of the fact that the remains showed signs of having been dissected by someone with proficient surgical skills. There is also a question mark over why he would poison her and then chop her up; surely the claim of an accidentally self-administered overdose of hyoscine would have been the way to go? And, having successfully disposed of the head, the limbs and some of the torso, why bury what was left under the basement floor and in quicklime which, when as wet as it was in the basement, preserves human remains – something that Crippen would have known?
Bringing more modern forensic techniques to bear on the extant evidence, in 2007 David Foran PhD, Professor and Director of the Forensic Science Programme at Michigan State University, teamed up with American genealogist Beth Wills, who tracked down Cora’s living female descendants. Working with three of Cora’s great-nieces, it was established that neither the hair nor the remains were those of Cora Crippen and the ‘scar’ on the skin sample was just a fold in the skin – it still showed the presence of hair follicles, which are never found in scar tissue. Furthermore, the Y chromosome found in the tissue indicated beyond any doubt that the remains were those of a man, so why were curlers found with the remains? Most importantly, these revelations make the likelihood of the police having connived to ‘sweeten’ the pot of evidence against Crippen look more like a racing certainty.
So, if not Cora Crippen, then whose remains were disposed of in the basement of 39 Hilldrop Crescent? As Crippen and his defence had asserted all along, they must have been put there by some previous occupant of the house. Had he and Ethel just stayed put after the initial police visit to Hilldrop Crescent then it is likely that no further investigation would have taken place. As for Ethel, she of course fared better. Found not guilty of any involvement in the ‘murder’ of Cora, who in all likelihood had indeed decamped to the United States, she slipped into respectable obscurity. After the trial she hid in Canada and the States for a few years before returning to London to find work as a typist at Hampton’s Furniture Store near Trafalgar Square. There she met and married a clerk called Stanley Smith to settle in Croydon and raise two children. Aged eighty-four, she died in 1967 with none of her new family knowing anything of her infamous past.