HAWLEY CRIPPEN’S HOMEOPATHY
Read till the end and let me know what you think
Dr Hawley Crippen and Cora Turner were
an unlikely couple. She was an aspiring singer and dancer, loud, large and blowsy. Crippen, by contrast, was small, well-spoken and unassuming.
However, 18 years after the pair married in 1892, Crippen stood accused of poisoning Cora and burying her dismembered body beneath the cellar floor. What had led to this extraordinary turn of events?
Crippen and Turner met in New York, married in Philadelphia and moved to London in 1897 so Crippen could pursue his career in the homeopathic mail order business.
However, Crippen lost his job after too many absences from trying to launch Cora’s stage career, for which she showed little aptitude. Crippen then took a job as a consulting doctor at a London clinic, where he met and fell in love with a demure
18-year-old assistant, Ethel “Le Neve” Neave.
Cora, meanwhile, busied herself socializing with the London theatre crowd, working as a fundraiser for the local Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, and entertaining friends at the salubrious Crippen home at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway. Cora’s affairs were common knowledge, but Crippen seemed unaware of their existence until he walked in on Cora in bed with one of their lodgers.
From that point on, Cora and Crippen stayed under the same roof as man and wife in name only: Cora carried on with her dalliances, as Grippen did with Le Neve.
However, by 1910 life at Hilldrop Crescent had become unbearable. After Cora threatened to expose Crippen and Le Neve’s affair, Crippen decided to take matters into his own hands. He acquired five grains of the poison hyoscine hydrobromide, a sedative, and set his plan into action. No one saw Cora alive again. A few days later the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild received a letter allegedly from Cora, offering her resignation, as she was travelling back to America to tend to a sick relative. Meanwhile, Le Neve moved into Hilldrop Crescent and began behaving as Crippen’s wife.
It was the appearance of Le Neve in Cora’s jewellery and clothes that set off alarm bells at the Ladies’ Guild. Something seemed amiss, and they badgered Crippen relentlessly for news about Cora, who seemed to have dropped off the edge of the world. That is, until Crippen sent the Guild a telegram saying that Cora had died suddenly in the United States. The guild was astonished by this news, especially as it said Cora would be cremated, which did not tally with her Catholic background. Sensing something was afoot, the Guild called the police at London’s Scotland Yard.
When Scotland Yard Inspector Walter Dew visited Hilldrop Crescent, Crippen confessed he had told some lies. But these, he said, were to cover up the embarrassing fact that Cora had left him for a new life in America with one of her lovers.
Crippen seemed believable, and Dew was willing to accept his story. However, when he returned to Hilldrop Crescent with some routine follow-up questions he found Crippen and Le Neve had fled the country.
This was enough for Dew to order for Hilldrop Crescent to be thoroughly searched.
The results were grisly. All that remained of the body buried under the cellar floor was a torso, without a head, arms, legs or genitals, and with all of its bones removed. There was, however, an abdominal surgical scar that apparently matched a scar of Cora’s. There were also traces of hyoscine in the body; this was the smoking gun that led directly to Crippen. A warrant went out for the couple’s arrest.
Crippen, meanwhile, was aboard the liner SS Montrose sailing for Canada, posing as a Mr Robinson and Le Neve as his teenaged son. Le Neve, however, made a less than believable boy; the couple’s amorous embraces also indicated something other than a filial relationship. The captain of the Montrose was certainly not taken in; he used the telegraph, a brand-new technology, to wire Scotland Yard: “Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Moustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.
Dew was on the next fast boat for Canada and met Crippen and Le Neve as they docked. Dew said: “Good morning, Dr Crippen. Do you know me? I’m Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard. Crippen replied: “I am not sorry; the anxiety has been too much.” Crippen’s subsequent trial in London lasted four days and revealed what remains of Cora had been found: part of her liver and kidney, a curler with her hair, and a fragment of Crippen’s pyjamas. Crippen pleaded not guilty, but the jury was clearly swayed by the series of lies that he had fed the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. It took the jury under half an hour to find Crippen guilty; he was executed by hanging at Pentonville Prison on 23 November 1910.
Before he perished, Crippen did manage to convince the court that Ethel Le Neve had played no part in Cora’s disappearance. After 12 minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Le Neve. She sailed to Toronto on the day of Crippen’s execution and later returned to London under the name Ethel Harvey. She remarried and died in 1967. The Crippen house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent was destroyed by German bombs during World War II.
DID CRIPPEN DO IT?
In 2007, toxicologist John Trestrail decided to re-examine the evidence connecting Crippen to Cora’s death. Crippen had always maintained his innocence, and certain aspects of the murder, including the mutilation of the body, did not fit the profile of other poisoners, who often used poison to avoid unnecessary butchery.
Forensic examiners from America’s Michigan University compared
DNA from the torso skin found in the cellar of Hilldrop Crescent with that of Cora’s descendants. The results were conclusive: Cora’s family’s mitochondrial DNA, which remains unchanged through the generations, did not match that taken from the torso. Even more astoundingly, the team found that the DNA contained a Y chromosome, which meant the torso had belonged to a male. Many argue that the findings do not prove Crippen’s innocence, but one thing is sure: he did not murdar and dismember his wife and bury her torso under his cellar floor.
Source ~ ‘Poison: The History of Potions, Powders and Murderous Practitioners’
Book by Ben Hubbard