FILE NO. 0187
Content warning: This case file describes the murder of a woman by poisoning, the discovery of human remains in a cellar (without graphic detail), a note threatening suicide, and an execution by hanging. The victim is named.
Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen
Legal status: Hawley Harvey Crippen was convicted of the wilful murder of his wife, Cora Crippen, at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) on October 22, 1910. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal on November 5, 1910, and he was hanged at Pentonville Prison on November 23, 1910. The conviction has never been quashed and no pardon has been granted. In December 2009 the Criminal Cases Review Commission declined to refer the case to the Court of Appeal because the relative who applied was not a “properly interested person”; it did not rule on the merits. DNA research published by a Michigan State University team in 2010 and 2011 disputes the identification of the remains as Cora Crippen’s. Those findings are themselves disputed and have never been tested in court. Ethel Le Neve was charged with being an accessory after the fact to the murder and was acquitted on October 25, 1910. Status checked against the trial record and later reporting on October 23, 2026.
On the night of January 31, 1910, Cora Crippen, a music hall singer known on the stage as Belle Elmore, stood at the top of the steps of 39 Hilldrop Crescent in north London and said goodnight to two friends who had come for dinner and cards. Clara Martinetti kissed her and told her not to come down the steps, because she would catch a cold. It was about half past one in the morning. No friend of Cora Crippen’s ever saw her again.
Her husband, an American medical man named Hawley Harvey Crippen, told her friends that she had gone to America, then that she had died there. Within weeks his typist, Ethel Le Neve, had moved into the house. Five months later, when a Scotland Yard inspector began asking questions, Crippen admitted that the death story was a lie and then disappeared with Le Neve. Police searching the house found human remains buried under the brick floor of the coal cellar.
What followed made Crippen one of the most notorious names in British criminal history. He was recognised at sea by the captain of a Canadian Pacific liner, who reported his suspicions by wireless; a detective crossed the Atlantic on a faster ship and arrested him in the St. Lawrence River; and an Old Bailey jury convicted him of murder in 27 minutes. A century later, DNA tests on a microscope slide from the trial led a team of American scientists to argue that the remains were not Cora Crippen’s at all.
From Coldwater, Michigan, to London
Hawley Harvey Crippen was born in Coldwater, Michigan, on September 11, 1862. In the long statement he gave to Chief Inspector Walter Dew on July 8, 1910, he said his father was Myron Augustus Crippen, a dry goods merchant, and his mother was Andresse Crippen, born Skinner. He said he was educated in Coldwater and in Indiana and California, attended the University of Michigan until he was about twenty, and finished at the Hospital College at Cleveland, “where I took the degree of M.D.”
Crippen told Dew he first came to England in 1883 to watch operations at various hospitals, then worked as an assistant to a Dr. Porter of Detroit and took a qualification in eye and ear work at the Ophthalmic Hospital in New York, which he dated to 1885. A surviving letterhead from 1910 describes him as “Consulting Specialist, H. H. Crippen, M.D.” and refers to the “N.Y. Ophthalmic Hospital College 1887.” He practised as an eye and ear specialist in San Diego and Salt Lake City. His American qualifications did not entitle him to practise as a doctor in Britain, and in London he worked mostly in the patent medicine trade.
His first wife was Charlotte Bell of New York. Their son, Otto, was born in San Diego; Crippen put the year at about 1887 or 1888. In his statement Crippen said Charlotte died “so far as I can remember, in 1890 or 1891” while they were living in Salt Lake City. Wikipedia gives her name as Charlotte Jane Bell and dates her death to 1892. The boy was sent to live with Crippen’s parents in California.
By his own account Crippen was working as an assistant to a Dr. Jeffery in Brooklyn around 1893 when he met a young patient who called herself Cora Turner. He told Dew she was “only about seventeen years of age” and that he was about thirty. He said she had been living under the protection of a stove manufacturer, and that when she told him the man wanted to take her away, he married her within days at a minister’s house in Jersey City. Only afterward, he said, did she tell him her real name, which appears in the transcript of his statement as Kunigunde Mackamotzki. The 2011 Journal of Forensic Sciences paper, which spells her first name Kunegunde, says she was born in Brooklyn in 1873, and that after her father’s death her mother married Frederick Mersinger. The year of the marriage differs by source: the prosecution put it “in 1892 or 1893,” the forensic paper says 1892, and Wikipedia says 1894.
The couple moved often. Crippen described practising in St. Louis, then joining the Munyon company, a large homeopathic patent medicine business, in New York, and being sent to Philadelphia and then to Toronto, where he managed the firm’s business for about six months before returning to Philadelphia. He told Dew he came to England alone in April 1900 to manage Munyon’s London office, and that Cora joined him that August after writing that she was giving up opera for music hall sketches. Wikipedia dates the move to London to 1897; The Guardian’s 2007 report gives 1900.
Belle Elmore and the house on Hilldrop Crescent
In London, Cora Crippen tried to build a stage career. According to her husband’s statement, she first performed under the name “Macamotzki,” gave a sketch at the Old Marylebone Music Hall that failed, and stopped performing for two or three years. Later she took the stage name Belle Elmore. Crippen listed engagements at the Town Hall in Teddington, the Oxford, Camberwell, a hall at Balham and the Empire in Northampton, but said she “used to earn very little.”
Crippen’s own work was unsteady. In his statement he described a run of jobs with patent medicine and ear cure companies, several of which failed: the Sovereign Remedy Company in Newman Street, the Drouet Institute, the Aural Clinic Company in New Oxford Street, and two spells with Munyon’s. By 1910 he was also running a dental business called the Yale Tooth Specialist Company with a partner, Dr. Rylance, and an ear cure business called the Aural Remedy at Craven House, Kingsway. His office was at Albion House, New Oxford Street. The prosecution later told the jury that Munyon’s had paid him a salary of £3 a week until November 1909, then put him on commission, and that his connection with the firm ended entirely on January 31, 1910, the day Cora was last seen.
About 1905, Crippen said, the couple moved to 39 Hilldrop Crescent, off Camden Road in Holloway, at a rent of £50 a year. Crippen told Dew that while he was away in Philadelphia for several months, an American music hall performer named Bruce Miller had been a frequent visitor, and that he had seen letters from Miller to Cora that ended “with love and kisses to Brown Eyes.” He said Cora had developed “a most ungovernable temper” and often threatened to leave him, and that he had stopped sleeping with her about four years earlier. These are Crippen’s claims, made to a police officer after he had already lied about his wife’s fate. When Miller gave evidence at the trial, the prosecution said he testified that he had not seen her since 1904.
Cora was an active member of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, a charity run by women in the variety business, and served as its honorary treasurer. Its meetings were held every Wednesday at Albion House, the same building where her husband had his office. Melinda May, the Guild’s secretary, testified that Cora had been treasurer for about two years and attended every Wednesday.
Ethel Le Neve was born Ethel Clara Neave in Diss, Norfolk, in January 1883, the eldest child of a railway clerk. Wikipedia says Crippen hired her as a typist in 1900 while he was working for the Drouet Institute, that they were having an affair by 1905, and that she was his mistress by 1908. At her own trial she was described as a typist of about 27. The prosecution’s case was that by early 1910 Crippen wanted to set up home with her, and that his wife and his lack of money stood in the way.
January 31, 1910: the last evening
The last people known to have seen Cora Crippen alive, other than her husband, were Paul and Clara Martinetti. Clara Martinetti told the court that Crippen called at their flat in Shaftesbury Avenue between four and five o’clock on Monday, January 31, and said Belle would like them to come to dinner that evening. Crippen replied, she said, “Make him come; it will cheer him up if we have a game of whist afterwards.” He came back around six, Paul Martinetti agreed, and the couple arrived at Hilldrop Crescent at about eight.
There were just the four of them. There was no servant; Cora cooked the dinner herself and Clara helped serve it in the breakfast room, which was on the same floor as the cellar. Afterward they went upstairs to the parlour and played whist. Clara Martinetti said she saw no quarrel and that “It was quite a nice evening.” They left at about half past one in the morning of February 1.
Richard Muir, who led for the Crown, told the jury that Crippen had pressed the invitation so that there would be witnesses that the couple were on “their usual affectionate terms” on the early morning of February 1. That was an argument, not evidence, and the jury heard Crippen’s version too. His defence counsel, Alfred Tobin, said that after the Martinettis left there was a quarrel, and that Cora told her husband she was leaving him: “This time I mean to go. Cover up the scandal in the best way you can.” On that account, she walked out in the night and was never heard from again. Crippen gave a similar account to Dew in July. According to Muir’s summary of that statement, Crippen said his wife was angry over a lack of courtesy shown to Paul Martinetti at the dinner, said this was the finish of it, and told him to cover up the scandal with the Guild and their friends as best he could.
No one else saw what happened in the house that night. What the trial record does show is what Crippen did over the following days. According to the leading dates compiled for the 1920 trial volume, on February 1 he called on the Martinettis to ask after Paul’s health. On February 2 he pawned a ring and earrings for £80. On February 9 he pawned a brooch and rings for £115.
“Called me to America”: the story Crippen told
On Wednesday, February 2, the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild met at Albion House as usual. Melinda May testified that Cora did not come. Instead Ethel Le Neve came to the door at ten minutes to one with the Guild’s pass book, paying in book and cheque book, and two letters. The letter to May, dated February 2 from 39 Hilldrop Crescent, said: “Illness of a near relative has called me to America on only a few hours’ notice, so I must ask you to bring my resignation as treasurer before the meeting to-day.” It was signed “BELLE ELMORE, p.p. H. H. C.” A second letter, to the committee, resigned the treasurership and asked the Guild to elect a successor at once. May testified that the committee letter was not in Mrs. Crippen’s handwriting.
Her friends were puzzled that a woman so involved in the Guild would leave without a word. Crippen kept up the story. On February 20, according to the trial chronology, he and Le Neve attended the dinner and ball of the Benevolent Fund, a music hall charity event. Wikipedia says Le Neve began openly wearing Cora’s clothes and jewellery; when Dew met her on July 8 she was wearing a brooch that became exhibit 11 at the trial.
On March 12, Le Neve gave up her situation and moved into 39 Hilldrop Crescent. On March 16, Crippen gave his landlord three months’ notice. On March 23 he told Clara Martinetti that he had very bad news and was expecting worse, and that if anything happened to Belle he would go to France for a week. That Easter he and Le Neve went to Dieppe. Early on March 24 he sent Clara Martinetti a telegram from Victoria station saying that Belle had died the previous night at six o’clock, and he sent an announcement to The Era, the theatrical newspaper, saying she had died in California. When Cora’s friends wanted to send a wreath to her grave, Muir said, they were told she had been cremated and that her ashes would be brought home. On May 18 Crippen announced that he had the ashes at home. Asked under what name she had sailed for America, he was not at all sure.
The prosecution’s view of this sequence was blunt. Muir told the jury that Crippen “started a campaign of lies to account for her disappearance,” and that the death notice was meant to stop people asking questions. The defence argued that a man ashamed that his wife had left him for another man might tell such lies to avoid scandal, without having killed her.
Her friends go to Scotland Yard
Cora Crippen’s friends in the music hall world did not let the matter rest. According to Wikipedia, the police first heard of her disappearance from the strongwoman Kate Williams, who performed as “Vulcana,” but only took it seriously after the actress Lil Hawthorne and her husband and manager, John Nash, raised it with an acquaintance, Superintendent Frank Froest of Scotland Yard. The trial chronology records that on June 28 Nash questioned Crippen about his wife’s remains, and on June 30 Nash went to Scotland Yard.
The inquiry went to Chief Inspector Walter Dew, a veteran detective who had served in Whitechapel as a young detective constable during the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. Dew testified that he made inquiries between June 30 and July 8. On Friday, July 8, he went with Sergeant Arthur Mitchell to 39 Hilldrop Crescent, where a French servant let them in and Ethel Le Neve spoke to them. She took them to Albion House, where Dew met Crippen for the first time.
Dew told Crippen that some of his wife’s friends were not satisfied with the stories he had told about her death, and that neither was he. According to Dew’s evidence, Crippen answered, “I suppose I had better tell the truth,” and then said, “The stories I have told them about her death are untrue. As far as I know, she is still alive.” He then dictated the long statement, taken down by Mitchell, in which he described his life, his marriages and his version of the night of January 31: that Cora had left him after a quarrel, that he had come home on February 1 to find her gone, and that he had invented the story of her death to avoid scandal.
That evening Crippen took the two officers through the house, room by room, including the coal cellar. Dew testified that Crippen “did not attempt to conceal anything” and was “perfectly cool,” and that they spent about a couple of minutes in the dark cellar. Dew told him he would have to find his wife. Crippen said he would do all he could, and suggested an advertisement in American newspapers. Together, Dew said, they composed one. The draft, in Crippen’s handwriting, read in part: “Will Belle Elmore communicate with H. H. C. or authorities at once. Serious trouble through your absence.” Dew left at about eight o’clock.
Flight, and the search of the cellar
The next day, Saturday, July 9, Dew circulated a description of Cora Crippen as a missing person. He did not tell Crippen. The same day, according to the trial chronology, Crippen and Le Neve left London. Filson Young, who edited the trial volume, wrote in his introduction that they made their way to Rotterdam and Antwerp. Wikipedia says they spent a night at a hotel in Brussels; under cross examination Crippen agreed that they had stayed at the Hotel des Ardennes there. Le Neve was dressed as a boy, and they travelled as father and son.
On Monday, July 11, Dew went back to Albion House with more questions and found that Crippen was gone. Two men there, Dr. Rylance and a Mr. Long, showed him letters Crippen had left. Dew went on to Hilldrop Crescent and searched the house. He dug parts of the garden and looked at the coal cellar, pressing the bricks with the heel of his boot, but found nothing that aroused his suspicion. That day he circulated descriptions of Crippen and Le Neve to ports in England and abroad. He searched again on Tuesday, July 12.
On Wednesday, July 13, Dew and Mitchell went down on their knees in the cellar and probed the brick floor with a small poker from the kitchen. Dew testified that at one spot the poker “went in somewhat easily between the crevices of the bricks,” that several bricks came up easily, and that when he dug the clay underneath with a spade from the garden, he found human remains. The police covered the hole at about midnight, locked the cellar and left two officers on guard.
The next day, July 14, the surgeon Augustus Pepper and the police surgeon Dr. Marshall examined the remains where they lay before they were removed to the mortuary. The remains had no head, limbs or bones, and the sex could not be determined from them. This file does not describe them further. Found with them were several items that became central to the trial: Hinde’s hair curlers holding bleached hair, pieces of women’s underclothing, a large handkerchief, and pieces of a man’s pyjama jacket.
On July 16 a warrant was issued for the arrest of both Crippen and Le Neve. Filson Young notes that the Daily Mail had offered a reward of £100. By then the fugitives were waiting to sail.
The Montrose and the wireless message
On July 20 the Canadian Pacific liner Montrose sailed from Antwerp for Quebec. Among the passengers were a “Mr. John Robinson” and his son, “Master Robinson.” The Montrose had been built in 1897 as a cargo liner; the Canadian Pacific Railway bought her in 1903 and refitted her with berths for 70 second class and 1,800 third class passengers. By 1910 she carried a Marconi wireless set, operated under contract by the Marconi Company, with a normal range of only about 150 nautical miles.
Her master, Captain Henry George Kendall, had read the police descriptions. His account, published in the Daily Mail on July 31 and reprinted in the 1920 trial volume, said he discovered the pair two hours after leaving Antwerp. They had booked in Brussels as Mr. John Robinson and Master Robinson, came aboard in brown suits, soft grey hats and white canvas shoes, and had no luggage except a small handbag. On deck, Kendall wrote, “Le Neve squeezed Crippen’s hand immoderately. It seemed to me unnatural for two males.” The father kept shaving his upper lip, and the mark left on his nose by spectacles had not faded. Kendall quietly collected every English newspaper on board that mentioned the murder, and kept the pair under observation for the rest of the voyage. He chose not to confront them, he wrote, because “if they smelt a rat, he might do something rash.”
Kendall also recorded small details of Crippen’s behaviour. He was reading “The Four Just Men,” a novel which, Kendall noted, “is all about a murder in London and £1000 reward.” He would sit on deck, look up at the wireless aerial and listen to the crackling spark of messages sent by the Marconi operator. “What a wonderful invention it is!” he said. He counted the days left on the ship’s track chart, and one day remarked that at the present rate of steaming he ought to be in Detroit on Tuesday, August 2.
On July 22 Scotland Yard received Kendall’s wireless message. Wikipedia gives its text as: “Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Mustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.” Filson Young wrote that “Wireless telegraphy, then in its early commercial stages, was used for the first time in the science of criminal detection.” Wikipedia describes Crippen as the first criminal to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy.
The next day, July 23, Dew and Mitchell sailed from Liverpool on the White Star liner Laurentic, a faster ship that would overtake the Montrose and reach the St. Lawrence first. Young wrote that for nine days Kendall kept the pair “all unsuspicious” of what the wireless had done.
Arrest at Father Point
The Laurentic was the faster ship. In his 1938 memoirs, quoted by Wikipedia, Dew said he landed on July 29, two days before the Montrose arrived. On the morning of July 31, as the Montrose entered the St. Lawrence River, Dew boarded her at Father Point (Pointe au Père), on the south shore of the river in Quebec. Canada was then a dominion within the British Empire, which meant that, as Wikipedia notes, Crippen could be arrested and returned to England without the extradition proceedings an arrest in the United States would have required.
There are two versions of what was said. The popular account, given by Wikipedia from later sources, has Dew coming aboard disguised as a pilot, removing his cap and saying, “Good morning, Dr. Crippen. Do you know me? I’m Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard.” After a pause, Crippen is supposed to have answered, “Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great. I couldn’t stand it any longer,” and held out his wrists for the handcuffs.
Dew’s sworn evidence at the Old Bailey was plainer. He said Crippen, now clean shaven, was brought into the captain’s cabin. “I said, ‘Good morning, Dr. Crippen; I am Chief Inspector Dew.’ He said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Dew.'” Dew told him he would be arrested for the murder and mutilation of his wife. Chief Inspector McCarthy of the Canadian provincial police cautioned him, and Crippen made no reply. When he was searched, jewellery that he had earlier shown Dew as things his wife had left behind was found sewn and pinned to his undervest. As he was moved to another cabin he said, according to Dew, “I am not sorry; the anxiety has been too much.”
Dew found Le Neve in cabin No. 5, still in a boy’s brown suit, her hair cut short. Asked whether she was Miss Le Neve, she said yes, and was told she would be arrested. Crippen replied, “It is only fair to say that she knows nothing about it; I never told her anything.”
Among the things found on Crippen were two cards. One, a printed card in the name of “E. Robinson & Co., Detroit,” had a note in his handwriting on the back that, Dew said, showed he intended to jump overboard: “I cannot stand the horror I go through every night any longer, as I see nothing bright ahead.” Dew handcuffed him for that reason. Crippen said, “I won’t. I am more than satisfied, because the anxiety has been too awful.” At the trial his counsel offered a different explanation: that the card was part of a plan, arranged with a quartermaster on the ship, to make it look as though he had gone overboard while he was hidden and smuggled ashore at Quebec.
If you or someone you know is struggling or thinking about suicide, help is available. In the United States and Canada, call or text 988. In the UK and Ireland, call Samaritans free on 116 123. Elsewhere, contact your local emergency number or crisis service.
The trial at the Old Bailey
Crippen and Le Neve did not contest their return. They sailed from Quebec on the Megantic on August 20 and reached Liverpool on August 28. On August 29 Crippen was formally charged at Bow Street Police Court, and on September 26 a coroner’s jury returned a verdict of wilful murder. On October 10 the remains from the cellar were buried at the St. Pancras and Islington Cemetery in East Finchley under Cora Crippen’s name.
Crippen was tried alone, charged with the wilful murder of his wife. The trial opened at the Central Criminal Court on Tuesday, October 18, 1910, before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Alverstone. Richard Muir led for the Crown with Travers Humphreys and Ingleby Oddie. Alfred Tobin KC defended, with Huntly Jenkins and Mr. Roome, instructed by the firm of Arthur Newton.
The Crown’s case rested on three points. The first was the poison. The Home Office analyst William Willcox testified that the remains contained hyoscine, a narcotic poison rarely used in medicine, in an amount showing that the body had held more than half a grain of hyoscine hydrobromide. The chemists Lewis and Burrows of New Oxford Street testified that Crippen had ordered five grains of the drug around January 17 and collected it on January 19, signing the poisons register “Munyons, per H. H. Crippen” and giving the purpose as homoeopathic preparations.
The second was identity. The pathologist Bernard Spilsbury and the surgeon Augustus Pepper testified that a piece of skin from the remains carried an old abdominal scar, consistent with an operation Cora was known to have had in the early 1890s. The third was the pyjamas. Part of a pyjama jacket found with the remains carried the label of Jones Brothers (Holloway), Limited. The Crown called evidence that the company was not registered under that name until 1906, after the Crippens moved to Hilldrop Crescent, and that pyjamas of that pattern were sold to the house in early 1909. Pyjama suits bearing the same label were found in the house.
The defence suggested that the remains could have been buried before the Crippens moved in, which Pepper called “absolutely impossible,” and argued that the mark on the skin was a fold, not a scar. Crippen went into the witness box. He said he had first heard of hyoscine when he came to England in 1885, had learned its use at the Royal Bethlem Hospital, and used it “as a nerve remedy in a homoeopathic preparation.” He maintained that Cora had left him and that he knew nothing of the remains. But he could not produce any of the preparations he said he had made. Under cross examination by Muir, the defence’s own medical witnesses gave way on key points about the skin.
Verdict, sentence and Ethel Le Neve’s acquittal
On Saturday, October 22, after Tobin’s closing speech, Muir’s reply and the Lord Chief Justice’s summing up, the jury retired. They were out for 27 minutes. The foreman announced: “We find the prisoner guilty of wilful murder.” Asked whether he had anything to say, Crippen replied, “I am innocent,” and then, “I still protest my innocence.” Lord Alverstone told him he had been convicted “upon evidence, which could leave no doubt on the minds of any reasonable man, that you cruelly poisoned your wife,” and sentenced him to death.
Ethel Le Neve was tried separately at the Old Bailey on October 25, charged not with murder but as an accessory after the fact: in effect, with helping Crippen to escape justice knowing that he had killed his wife. She was defended by F. E. Smith KC, then a member of Parliament. Her only account was a short statement to Dew at Quebec, in which she described herself as “a single woman, twenty-seven years of age” who had lived at Hilldrop Crescent “with Dr. Crippen as his wife” since the end of February. Summing up, Lord Alverstone cautioned the jury that they were not to judge her “upon a standard of morality,” and that to convict they had to be satisfied “that Crippen told her he had murdered his wife.” At twelve minutes past four the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, and she was released immediately.
Ethel Le Neve was acquitted. No court ever found that she knew about or took part in Cora Crippen’s death, and she should not be described as if one had.
Appeal and execution
Crippen appealed on grounds of fact and law. The Court of Criminal Appeal heard the case on Saturday, November 5, 1910, before Mr. Justice Darling, Mr. Justice Channell and Mr. Justice Pickford. Tobin raised a point about a juror who had been taken ill during the trial, then argued that the Lord Chief Justice had wrongly allowed the prosecution to call rebutting evidence after the defence had closed its case. The court dismissed the appeal. On the medical evidence, Darling said the judges were not surprised the jury had preferred the Crown’s doctors, because the doctors called for the defence, “when cross-examined had been obliged to abandon an opinion they had expressed with confidence and had expressed in writing.”
In the condemned cell at Pentonville, Filson Young wrote, Crippen showed no concern except for Le Neve. On November 20 the Daily Mail published a statement in his name, reprinted in the trial volume, which said: “Facing my Maker, very close to the hour of my death, I give my testimony to the absolute innocence of Ethel Le Neve.” Young wrote that the only time Crippen broke down was late on the night before his execution, when the prison governor brought him a farewell telegram from her. His one request was that her letters and her photograph be buried with him. “This promise was given and kept.”
Crippen also wrote to Le Neve before he died. Wikipedia quotes the letter as saying, “Face to face with God, I believe that facts will be forthcoming to prove my innocence.” The toxicologist John Trestrail, quoted by The Guardian in 2007, gave the wording of a line written two weeks before the hanging as “I am innocent and some day evidence will be found to prove it.” Both are attributed here as reported; the original letter has not been seen for this file.
Hawley Harvey Crippen was hanged by John Ellis at Pentonville Prison at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, November 23, 1910. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison grounds.
Theories that never went away
Crippen never gave any reason for killing his wife, and he never admitted that he had. That silence has left room for theories, none of them tested in court.
The barrister Edward Marshall Hall, according to Wikipedia, believed Crippen had been giving his wife hyoscine as a depressant or anaphrodisiac and accidentally gave her an overdose, then panicked. It is said that Marshall Hall declined to lead the defence because a different line was to be taken.
Dornford Yates, the novelist, was a junior barrister at the trial. In his memoirs he wrote that Lord Alverstone, at the prosecution’s request, refused to give the defence a copy of the sworn statement used to obtain the arrest warrant. Yates said he knew why the prosecution wanted it withheld, but never revealed the reason. The crime novelist Raymond Chandler, in a 1948 letter, found it unbelievable that Crippen would dispose of the head and limbs successfully and then bury the rest under his own cellar floor. Another theory, noted by Wikipedia, holds that Crippen was performing illegal abortions and that the remains were those of a patient. In 1981 several British newspapers reported a claim by Sir Hugh Rhys Rankin that Le Neve had told him in Australia that Crippen killed his wife because she had syphilis. None of these accounts has been proved.
The DNA findings and the bid to clear his name
In October 2007, a team led by David Foran, head of the forensic science programme at Michigan State University, announced that the tissue used to convict Crippen did not come from Cora. The project began with the toxicologist John Trestrail, who told The Guardian that in his database of 1,100 poisoning cases, Crippen’s was the only one involving dismemberment. Working with the genealogist Beth Wills, who spent about seven years on the search, the team traced three living relatives on Cora’s maternal line, in California and Puerto Rico.
The team obtained one of the microscope slides of the scarred skin, held in the archives of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and compared its mitochondrial DNA with samples from the relatives. In their paper in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, published in 2011, they reported that the slide’s sequence differed from the relatives’ “at five nucleotides at a minimum,” and that a test specific to the Y chromosome showed the tissue was male. “That body cannot be Cora Crippen, we’re certain of that,” Foran told The Guardian. Trestrail went further and said he believed Crippen was innocent.
The findings are disputed. In The Times in 2008, the journalist David Aaronovitch noted that the sex test was a new technique, used only by that team, on a single century old slide that the team leader himself had called a “less than optimal sample.” Foran replied that the tests “showed unequivocally that the remains were male.” No court has examined the evidence.
In 2009 a distant American relative, James Patrick Crippen, 73, of Dayton, Ohio, asked the Criminal Cases Review Commission to send the case back to the Court of Appeal. In June that year The Guardian reported his lawyers’ claim that a referral was coming; a commission spokesman said he had not been informed of one. In December 2009 the commission refused, ruling that as a second cousin three times removed he was not a “properly interested person,” and that without such a person there could be no court hearing. In 2011 The Guardian reported that the barrister John Cooper QC was seeking a judicial review of that decision. No outcome of that review was found for this file. The conviction stands; it has never been quashed, and Crippen has never been pardoned.
What became of them
Ethel Le Neve left England after her acquittal. According to Wikipedia, she worked as a typist in Toronto for three years, then returned to London under the name Ethel Harvey. While working at Hampton’s furniture store near Trafalgar Square she met Stanley Smith, whom she married in January 1915. They had two children and lived in Croydon. She died on August 9, 1967, aged 84.
Captain Henry Kendall took command of the Canadian Pacific liner Empress of Ireland in May 1914. Within a month she collided with the Norwegian collier Storstad in fog on the St. Lawrence, not far from where he had trapped Crippen, and sank in 14 minutes with the loss of 1,012 people. Kendall was thrown from the bridge and survived, and was cleared of responsibility. He died in 1965, aged 91. The Montrose was requisitioned by the Admiralty in 1914, broke her moorings in a gale that December and was wrecked on the Goodwin Sands.
Walter Dew resigned from the police soon after the case and set up as a “confidential agent”. His memoir, I Caught Crippen, appeared in 1938. He died in Worthing in 1947.
Cora Crippen, born Kunigunde Mackamotzki in Brooklyn in 1873, was 36 or 37 when she was last seen, by the reckoning of the forensic paper. Her friends’ refusal to accept her husband’s story is what sent Scotland Yard to Hilldrop Crescent.
Frequently asked questions
What was Hawley Harvey Crippen convicted of?
Crippen was convicted of the wilful murder of his wife, Cora Crippen, at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) on October 22, 1910, after the jury was out for 27 minutes. The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal on November 5, 1910, and he was hanged at Pentonville Prison on November 23, 1910. He never admitted that he had killed her. The conviction has never been quashed and no pardon has been granted.
Was Ethel Le Neve found guilty?
No. Ethel Le Neve, Crippen’s typist, was charged not with murder but with being an accessory after the fact, and was tried separately at the Old Bailey on October 25, 1910. She was defended by F. E. Smith KC and was acquitted. When Dew arrested them, Crippen said: “It is only fair to say that she knows nothing about it; I never told her anything.” No court ever found that she knew about or took part in Cora Crippen’s death.
How was Crippen caught?
Crippen and Le Neve left London on July 9, and on July 20 they sailed from Antwerp for Quebec on the Canadian Pacific liner Montrose as “Mr. John Robinson” and his son. Captain Henry George Kendall had read the police descriptions and reported his suspicions by wireless. Chief Inspector Walter Dew crossed on the faster Laurentic and arrested Crippen aboard the Montrose at Father Point on July 31. Wikipedia describes Crippen as the first criminal to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy.
Did DNA tests prove the remains were not Cora Crippen’s?
No court has examined that evidence. In 2011 a Michigan State University team led by David Foran reported in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that mitochondrial DNA from a slide of the scarred skin differed from that of living relatives on Cora’s maternal line, and that a Y chromosome test showed the tissue was male. The findings are disputed: in The Times in 2008, David Aaronovitch noted that the sex test was a new technique, used only by that team, on a single century old slide. The conviction stands.
Citations & Sources
Sources
- Filson Young, ed., The Trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen, Notable English Trials (William Hodge, 1920), including the trial transcript, Crippen’s statement of July 8, 1910, Captain Kendall’s message, the trial of Ethel Le Neve and the Court of Criminal Appeal judgment
- David R. Foran, Beth E. Wills, Brianne M. Kiley, Carrie B. Jackson and John H. Trestrail III, The Conviction of Dr. Crippen: New Forensic Findings in a Century-Old Murder, Journal of Forensic Sciences 56(1), 2011
- Michigan State University: CSI: East Lansing special report (archived)
- PBS, Secrets of the Dead: David Foran essay
- The Guardian: 100 years on, DNA casts doubt on Crippen case (October 17, 2007); referral report (June 7, 2009); miscarriages of justice watchdog report (May 29, 2011)
- BBC News: Dr Crippen’s relative fails in bid to secure pardon (December 7, 2009)
- Wikipedia: Hawley Harvey Crippen, Ethel Le Neve, Walter Dew, Henry George Kendall, SS Montrose (1897), Bernard Spilsbury, William Willcox, Richard Muir, John Ellis
- Wikimedia Commons: image files credited in each caption
Image credits
- Photo: Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.
- Photo: Maggie Jones, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
- Photo: Dennis G. Jarvis, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
- Photo: Stephen Richards, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
- Photo: David Howard, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
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