Hawley Harvey Crippen
Hawley Harvey Crippen, colloquially known as Dr. Crippen, was an American homeopath, ear and eye specialist and medicine dispenser who was hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, for the murder of his second wife, Cora Henrietta Crippen. He was the first criminal to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy.
Early life and career
Hawley Crippen was born in Coldwater, Michigan, the only surviving child to Andresse Skinner and Myron Augustus Crippen, a merchant. He was educated first at the University of Michigan's homeopathy school, then graduated from the Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College in 1884. After his first wife, Charlotte Jane, died of a stroke in 1892, Crippen entrusted his parents, living in San Jose, California, with the care of his son, Hawley Otto.Having qualified as a homeopath, Crippen started to practice in New York City. In 1894 he married his second wife, Corrine "Cora" Turner, a music hall singer who performed under the stage name Belle Elmore. That same year, Crippen started working for prominent homeopath James M. Munyon, moving to London with his wife in 1897 in order to manage Munyon's branch office there.
Crippen's medical qualifications from the United States were not sufficient to allow him to practise as a doctor in the United Kingdom. He initially continued working as a distributor of patent medicines, while Cora embarked on a stage career and socialised with a number of variety players of the time.
After Crippen was sacked by Munyon in 1899, he worked for other patent medicine companies, ultimately being hired as the manager for the Drouet Institute for the Deaf - one of his prescriptions from there is now in the Wellcome Collection. There he hired Ethel Le Neve, a young typist, in 1900. By 1905, the two were having an affair. After living at various addresses around London, Crippen and his wife Cora finally moved to No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road, Holloway, where they took in lodgers to augment Crippen's meagre income. Cora had an affair with one of these lodgers and, in turn, Crippen took Le Neve as his mistress in 1908.
Murder and disappearance
On the evening of 31 January 1910, Cora disappeared following a party at the Crippen residence at Hilldrop Crescent. Crippen claimed that she had returned to the US and later added that she had died and had been cremated in California. Meanwhile, Le Neve moved into Hilldrop Crescent and began openly wearing Cora's clothes and jewellery.Police first heard of Cora's disappearance from her friend, the strongwoman Kate "Vulcana" Williams, but only began to take the matter seriously when asked to investigate by two other friends, the actress Lil Hawthorne and her husband John Nash, who pressed their acquaintance, Scotland Yard Superintendent Frank Froest.
During his first questioning by Chief Inspector Walter Dew on 8 July, Crippen admitted that he had fabricated the story about his wife having died, claiming that he did so to avoid personal embarrassment because she had in fact left him and fled to the US with one of her lovers, a music hall actor named Bruce Miller. Dew was satisfied with Crippen's story and searched the house, finding nothing.
However, Crippen and Le Neve assumed Dew had more evidence than he had and fled in panic to Brussels, where they spent the night at a hotel. The following day, they went to Antwerp and boarded the Canadian Pacific liner, bound for Canada. The couple's disappearance led police to perform further searches of the house. The fourth and final search was on 12-13 July, during which they found the torso of a human body buried under the brick floor of the basement. Senior scientific analyst to the Home Office William Willcox found traces of the toxic compound hyoscine hydrobromide in the torso. The remains were identified as Cora's by a piece of skin from the abdomen; the head, limbs and skeleton were never recovered. The remains were later interred at the St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, East Finchley.
Transatlantic arrest
The torso's discovery was enough for arrest warrants to be taken out on both Crippen and Le Neve on 16 July. They were already crossing the Atlantic aboard Montrose, with Le Neve disguised as a boy. Captain Henry George Kendall recognised the fugitives and, just before steaming beyond the range of his ship-board transmitter, had telegraphist Lawrence Ernest Hughes send a wireless telegram to the British authorities:Had Crippen travelled third class, he probably would have escaped Kendall's notice. Dew boarded a faster White Star liner,, from Liverpool, arrived in Quebec ahead of Crippen, and contacted the Canadian authorities.
As Montrose entered the St. Lawrence River, Dew came aboard on 31 July disguised as a pilot. Canada was then still a dominion within the British Empire. If Crippen, an American citizen, had sailed to the US instead, even if he had been recognised, it would have taken extradition proceedings to bring him to trial. Dew and a Canadian police officer quickly joined Kendall on the bridge and the latter then invited Crippen to meet the pilots. Dew removed his pilot's cap and said, "Good morning, Dr. Crippen. Do you know me? I'm Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard." After a pause, Crippen replied, "Thank God it's over. The suspense has been too great. I couldn't stand it any longer." The Canadian officer then arrested Crippen as he held out his wrists for the handcuffs, doing the same to Le Neve soon afterwards.
On 4 August Detective Sergeant Arthur Mitchell began his journey to join Dew in Canada by taking a train from Euston station to Liverpool - with him he took Sarah Foster and Julia Stone, two wardresses from Holloway Prison who would have charge of Le Neve. The prisoners, officers and wardresses landed at Liverpool from the on 27 August and then travelled to London on the London and North Western Railway, which the Met thanked for its assistance during that journey.
Trial
Crippen was tried at the Old Bailey before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Alverstone, on 18 October 1910. The proceedings lasted four days.The first prosecution witnesses were pathologists. One of them, Bernard Spilsbury, testified they could not identify the torso remains or even discern whether they were male or female. However, Spilsbury found a piece of skin with what he claimed to be an abdominal scar consistent with Cora's medical history. Large quantities of scopolamine were found in the remains, and Crippen had purchased the drug from a local chemist before Cora's disappearance.
Crippen's defence, led by Alfred Tobin, maintained that Cora had fled to the US with Bruce Miller and that Cora and Hawley had been living at the house only since 1905, suggesting a previous owner of the house was responsible for the placement of the remains. The defence asserted that the abdominal scar identified by Spilsbury was really just folded tissue, for, among other things, it had hair follicles growing from it, something scar tissue could not have; Spilsbury observed that the sebaceous glands appeared at the ends but not in the middle of the scar.
Other evidence presented by the prosecution included a piece of a man's pyjama top, supposedly from a pair Cora had given Crippen a year earlier. The pyjama bottoms were found in Crippen's bedroom, but not the top. The fragment included the manufacturer's label, Jones Bros. Testimony from a Jones Bros. representative stated that the product was not sold prior to 1908, thus placing the date of manufacture well within the time period of when the Crippens occupied the house and when Cora gave the garment to Hawley the year before in 1909. Curlers, and bleached hair consistent with Cora's, were also found with the remains.
Throughout the proceedings and at his sentencing, Crippen showed no remorse for his wife, only concern for his lover's reputation. The jury found Crippen guilty of murder after just twenty-seven minutes of deliberations. Le Neve was charged only with being an accessory after the fact and acquitted.
Although Crippen never gave any reason for killing his wife, several theories have been propounded. One was by the late Victorian and Edwardian barrister Edward Marshall Hall, who believed that Crippen was using scopolamine on his wife as a depressant or anaphrodisiac but accidentally gave her an overdose and then panicked when she died. It is said that Hall declined to lead Crippen's defence because another theory was to be propounded.
In 1981, several British newspapers reported that Sir Hugh Rhys Rankin claimed to have encountered Le Neve in Australia, where she told him that Crippen murdered his wife because she had syphilis.
Execution
Crippen was hanged by John Ellis at Pentonville Prison, London, at 9 am on Wednesday 23 November 1910.Le Neve sailed to the US before settling in Canada and finding work as a typist. She returned to Britain in 1915 and died in 1967. At Crippen's request, a photograph of Le Neve was placed in his coffin and buried with him.
Although Crippen's grave in Pentonville's grounds is not marked by a stone, tradition has it that soon after his burial, a rose bush was planted over it.
Before he was executed, Crippen wrote a letter to Ethel Le Neve. In it, he said, "Face to face with God, I believe that facts will be forthcoming to prove my innocence." It is claimed that modern forensic science has now fulfilled his prophecy.
Crippen's guilt
Questions have arisen about the investigation, trial and evidence that convicted Crippen in 1910. Dornford Yates, a junior barrister at the original trial, wrote in his memoirs, As Berry and I Were Saying, that Lord Alverstone took the very unusual step, at the request of the prosecution, of refusing to give a copy of the sworn affidavit used to issue the arrest warrant to Crippen's defence counsel. The judge without challenge accepted the prosecution's argument that the withholding of the document would not prejudice the accused's case. Yates said he knew why the prosecution did this but – despite the passage of years – refused to disclose why. Yates noted that although Crippen placed the torso in dry quicklime to be destroyed, he did not realise that when it became wet it turned into slaked lime, which is a preservative, a fact that Yates used in the plot of his novel The House That Berry Built.The American-British crime novelist Raymond Chandler thought it unbelievable that Crippen could be so stupid as to bury his wife's torso under the cellar floor of his home while successfully disposing of her head and limbs.
Another theory is that Crippen was carrying out illegal abortions and the torso was that of one of his patients who died and not his wife.