Doc’
Crippen sails the ocean blue,
Seasickness not his store,
But
he’ll be land-sick – I’ll be blowed,
When once he gets ashore.
c.
July 27, ‘10
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| 'Doc' Crippen |
Hawley Harvey ‘Doc’ Crippen was a small man,
5ft 3 or 4in tall, bespectacled and mustachioed, an American who had trained
originally as a homeopathic doctor. Quiet, mild and polite, a docile husband
and apparently entirely unremarkable person, he had a wife who is always
described as a blowsy, heavy-drinking nightmare, vain, bullying and
promiscuous. She came from a Polish family in New York city, called herself
Cora (her original name was Kunigunde Mackamotzki) and tried without much
success for a career as a music hall singer under the stage name of Belle
Elmore.
The Crippens moved to London in 1897 and he
worked at a centre for treating the deaf, where one of the typists was an
attractive girl called Ethel Le Neve. They fell in love, but the relationship
was at first platonic. In 1905 the Crippens moved to a house in the Holloway
area of north London, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, where they took lodgers. Crippen
came home one day and found Cora in bed with one of them. She had been
unfaithful to him before and he and Ethel now began an affair. Ethel was his
‘wifie’ and he was her ‘hub’.
On February 1st, 1910 Cora Crippen vanished.
Her husband said she had gone back to the United States for a few months. In
March Ethel moved into the Hilldrop Crescent house with Crippen, who now gave
out that Cora had died in America. Cora’s friends grew suspicious, Scotland
Yard was alerted and Detective Inspector Walter Dew talked to Crippen in July.
Crippen took fright and fled to Brussels with Ethel, who was dressed as a boy.
The police searched the Hilldrop Crescent house and found the gruesome remains
of a body beneath the coal cellar. Wrapped in a male pyjama jacket, which was
later identified as Crippen’s, it had no head, no limbs, no bones and no
genitals, but there were traces of a poison that Crippen was discovered to have
bought not long before Cora’s disappearance. A hue and cry began, followed
excitedly by the press. Ports and stations were watched and police forces
abroad were alerted.
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| Belle Elmore |
On July 20th Crippen and
Ethel sailed from Antwerp for Canada on the liner Montrose. He called
himself Robinson and Ethel posed as his teenage son, but they behaved too
lovingly and the captain grew suspicious and informed the ship’s owners by
telegraph. They passed the word to Scotland Yard and Dew pursued the fugitives
across the Atlantic in a faster liner, the Laurentic, which reached Father
Point in the Gulf of St Lawrence ahead of the Montrose. Dew was waiting,
went aboard with the pilot vessel and arrested Crippen and Ethel. He afterwards
said that he had never in his life felt such a sense of triumph and
achievement. The Montrose took all of them on to Quebec, accompanied
by reporters who had swarmed on board. Dew regarded the latter as an infernal
nuisance, but the dramatic story that George Orwell said no novelist would have
dared to make up created a frenzy of excitement in the press.
So did the trial at the Old Bailey in October,
which made the name of the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, who had examined a
piece of flesh and confirmed that a scar on it corresponded to an operation
that Cora Crippen was known to have had for the removal of her ovaries. This
has since been challenged, but it helped to demolish Crippen’s claim that the
corpse must have been there all along, unknown to him and Cora. However, he did
succeed in his heroic effort to persuade everyone of Ethel’s innocence. Tried
as Crippen’s accomplice, she was acquitted.
(portraits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawley_Harvey_Crippen)
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