At nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning in November 1910, the noose was placed around the neck of 48-year-old Dr Hawley Crippen who had poisoned his wife Cora, then fled the country with his much younger lover in a bid to escape justice.
Protesting his innocence as he had done from the moment of his arrest, this little, balding, short-sighted, seemingly inoffensive man had eaten no breakfast that morning and had sat pensively while a Catholic priest administered the last rites.
On the gallows, the hangman at Pentonville prison in London pulled the lever. The slack rope snapped tight and one of the most notorious killers of the 20th century was dead.
In her lodgings just down the road, Ethel Le Neve, who worked for the doctor as his secretary, became his mistress and had aspired to be the next Mrs Crippen, put on mourning clothes and walked to Pentonville.
The prison governor handed over to her the dead man’s personal effects – his watch, watch chain, a ‘fox head pin’ and his wedding ring. She then left, hurrying past an excited crowd that had gathered to read the announcement of the execution posted outside the prison gates.
The news spread rapidly round London – indeed, the whole world. Obsessed for the past nine months with what was dubbed the ‘crime of the century’, readers of the burgeoning popular Press lapped up every lurid and salacious detail as hordes of journalists reported, exaggerated and invented, vying to be the first to bring them the inside story of the evil Dr Crippen.
Every aspect of his personality and his habits was pored over. Even the proprietor of the laundry company who washed his shirts was interviewed. Crippen and his fatal love triangle were box office like never before.
Dr Hawley Crippen poisoned his wife Cora, then fled the country with his much younger lover in a bid to escape justice
Those millions of readers learned how Crippen was not a practising doctor but a con man, a highly skilled snake-oil salesman who had come to England from the US.
Wearing a frock coat and sporting a diamond as big as a marble, he had made a handsome living selling quack medicines to the gullible – a one-size-fits-all remedy guaranteed, falsely, to fix every problem from a runny nose to profound deafness.
He was married to the flamboyant Cora, a music hall singer who went under the stage name of Belle Elmore. Cora was loving and loved, clever and brave, though some called her eccentric. When she mysteriously went missing in July 1910 and her friends in the music hall business came looking for her, Crippen claimed she had left him for another man and he had no idea where she was.
At 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Crippen’s rented home in Holloway, north London, there was every sign of a hurried departure. The bed was unmade, Crippen’s shirts and boots and Ethel’s new dresses were strewn about, toothbrushes and hairbrushes were left behind.
Crippen had left a note for his business partner that ‘in order to escape trouble I shall be obliged to absent myself for a time’.
Ethel – who had moved in with him after his wife’s disappearance, even wearing Cora’s clothes and jewellery, including a stunning rising sun diamond brooch – had also gone.
For the detective leading the investigation, Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard, their sudden flight was a sure sign of guilt. He began to itch with the sense that Crippen’s wife had been murdered.
The couple’s absence gave him the chance to thoroughly search the house without Crippen standing at his elbow, obstructing his path, spinning some implausible yarn, as he had done when he showed Dew round days earlier.
Now Dew and his colleague, Detective Sergeant Arthur Mitchell, had free run of the spacious, ten-room, three-storey, terraced house, to do a proper job, to search every crevice, every drainpipe, every pocket, for clues. They began in the bedrooms on the first floor, digging through the drawers and cupboards and finding a remarkable profusion of what Dew described as ‘ladies wearing apparel’, including a number of expensive furs. They searched through desks and found letters and postcards addressed to Ethel as ‘Mrs Crippen’. In one wardrobe was a little nickel-plated, five-chambered revolver.
Cora, a music hall singer who went under the stage name of Belle Elmore, mysteriously went missing in July 1910
That evening, Dew drew up a full description of Crippen and Ethel to send to ‘all ports, home and abroad’, with a request to report any sightings. He could not call for their arrest because, as yet, there was no firm evidence that a crime had been committed.
The next morning, the two policemen returned to the house and began their search again, starting from the top and working their way down. On reaching the ground floor, Dew navigated a dark passage and fumbled his way down the stairs into the coal cellar where, under the glow of an open flame, he peered at the brickwork and stamped on the floor.
That night Dew lay in bed unable to sleep, running back over the search, combing each room in his head. His mind kept stopping at the coal cellar. When they next went to the house, that was where they began.
It was a mess, the floor covered with coal, bits of rubbish, wood cut from garden trees, and an old chandelier. After pushing all this aside, they got down on their knees with a lantern beside them and prodded the chilled, damp brickwork, pressing the point of a poker against the floor, tapping at the hard surface.
Suddenly, it gave way. The poker sank into the dirt between two bricks, which came loose. Mitchell and Dew pulled at them with their bare hands, wiggling free one brick after another, revealing a smooth surface of flattened clay.
With a spade, Dew dug into the exposed earth, which fell away loosely. He shovelled again, and then a third time until a smell sprang out of the shallow hole, filling their nostrils with a nauseating, putrid foulness that was unmistakable.
Gasping for breath and fearing they would be sick, the men scrambled up the stairs. They knew what they had found – or rather, who they had found.
After standing outside for a while and filling their lungs with clean air, they went back down into the thick, poisoned atmosphere and this time the spade struck what Dew described as ‘a large mass of flesh’.
After fortifying themselves with brandy, they dug some more and the shovel turned up more flesh.
Before they began to toil away in the cramped confines of the cellar, Dew sent an officer out for disinfectant to try, in vain, to smother the stench. When the Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten arrived, summoned by Dew, he brought a box of cigars, hoping that heavy tobacco smoke would mask the smell.
Stripped down to their braces, the police constables dug away, deepening the hole to the length and breadth of a human body.
Pieces of flesh were found, some with fat, muscle and viscera still attached – in Dew’s mournful words, ‘all that now remained of the once charming and vivacious Belle Elmore’.
Revealingly, it was clear the body parts had been covered with quicklime, a substance known to increase decomposition.
As well as these ghastly human remains, they also unearthed articles that would be clues to what had happened here – the remnants of a man’s handkerchief with two ends tied in a reef knot, a piece of coarse string and a bit of brown paper stained with blood.
As the day drew to a close, a police photographer arrived to record the grisly scene.
Ethel Le Neve was Crippen’s secretary and mistress, and he eventually ran off with her
In the street outside the house stood a crowd of curious and excited local residents. Alerted by the arrival and departure of strange men and uniformed police at number 39, they had been gathering for hours. The loud popping of the photographer’s flash, followed by great bursts of light from behind the canvas-shaded ground-floor windows convinced the onlookers what they no doubt already suspected – that there had been a murder in this quiet green crescent of theirs.
The next day there were more arrivals at the scene. Dr Augustus Pepper was a pathologist and consultant surgeon at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. He was joined by an undertaker who had brought with him a crudely fashioned, coffin-shaped shell, designed for transporting the remains to the mortuary.
At the Islington Mortuary Chapel of Rest on Holloway Road, the contents of the coffin and the tray were laid out for Dr Pepper and Dr Thomas Marshall, the local police surgeon, to examine.
Calculating that the remains had been buried in the cellar for four to eight months, their job now was to confirm that these human fragments were female, whether or not they were Mrs Crippen, whether she had been murdered and, if so, whether it had been committed by her husband, Dr Crippen.
Dew felt pretty certain this was the case. Mrs Crippen had not been seen since February 1 and her husband had fled in the wake of an interview with the police, so ‘what other explanation could there be for the presence in Dr Crippen’s coal cellar of parts of a human body?’. The Chief Inspector felt confident enough to issue an arrest warrant for ‘Murder and Mutilation’, to be circulated internationally.
On the post-mortem table, each fragment of the body was laid out and scrutinised, sometimes deliberated over, for hours. There was so little of her.
Remarkably, all the bones were absent. So too were the head and every part of the sex organs. But the liver, stomach, gullet, part of the windpipe, both lungs, the heart, the diaphragm, the kidneys, the pancreas, the spleen, the small intestine and most of the large intestine were all intact.
There was enough here for Dr Pepper to conclude that, despite every effort clearly having been made to obliterate all indication of identity and sex, these were fragments of an adult female body.
Both he and Marshall agreed that the dissection and dismemberment must have been carried out by someone with considerable anatomical knowledge and probably professional training as a medic or a surgeon.
With the naked eye it was impossible to determine what act or instrument had ended the dead woman’s life, though Marshall had no doubt this was a homicide.
When the post-mortem was over, Cora’s organs, her strands of hair, as well as the assorted pieces of underclothing and a handkerchief, were placed in five jars. From this date, Cora Crippen ceased to be a person but just a collection of clues, body parts and other people’s memories.
Subsequently, the coroner’s inquest, covered extensively by the Press, would reveal to the public the true horror of what had been inflicted on the woman hidden beneath the cellar bricks. Even the coroner was shocked by the utter brutality of the killer, the ruthless and inhumane treatment meted out on her lifeless form.
He had been involved in roughly 40,000 inquests in his career, but he had, he said, never seen anything like it. ‘It must have been an awful business taking the flesh from the bones, then burying it in the cellar,’ he said.
A wanted poster appealing for information that would lead to the apprehension of Dr Crippen
The nature of the atrocity that had been committed stunned the public, not least because all this had taken place in tree-shaded, polite, middle-class suburbia.
But what was even more chilling was that a man could not only extinguish the life of his wife but then desecrate her body, a woman he had once loved and held in his arms. It was bestial, sub-human, a profanely evil violation of moral and social order.
How could a civilised, educated, professional man dismember his spouse’s body and then continue with his ordinary existence, catching the tram to his office the next day as if nothing had happened?
He had removed her breasts, her vagina and what remained of her reproductive organs. He had cut off and then destroyed her head. It was all inconceivable and soul-chilling.
Crippen’s objective was to eradicate any trace of his wife, to make it seem as if she had vanished into the breeze. When he committed his callous deed, he saw only the elimination of a problem. Without this obstacle in his path there would be freedom for him and space for Ethel and his new life with her. And he very nearly got away with it.
There can never be absolute certainty about what happened at 39 Hilldrop Crescent the night Cora died, but one of the prosecution lawyers, Samuel Ingleby Oddie, a barrister who was also a coroner, put together a most plausible scenario.
Crippen, he suggested, had originally planned to make Cora’s death appear as if it were a natural one, a heart attack in her sleep.
A fortnight earlier he had obtained the drug hyoscine hydrobromide from the chemist’s across the road from his office. He was a regular customer there and, in the past, had ordered mercury, morphia and cocaine for his medicines business.
He wanted five grains of it, which the chemist thought was an unusually large amount. The chemist knew that hyoscine was often used as a sedative, but only in infinitesimally small doses. Large measures – anything above a quarter of a grain – could incite delirium, followed by unconsciousness, paralysis and slow death.
Crippen had deliberately chosen hyoscine to poison his wife because it would work silently, slowly shutting down the victim until her heart stopped. He would also have known there was little chance of anyone raising the alarm because, with hyoscine poisoning, there were no signs visible to the naked eye.
After her death, he would no doubt have called in a friendly doctor to issue a death certificate, giving heart disease as the cause.
For at least a month, Crippen had been strategising, laying the groundwork for his wife’s murder.
Cora was generally in good health but that January she had two strange ‘turns’. In the first, she woke up unable to breathe and believed she was dying. On the second occasion, a week or so later, her head hurt and she became so dizzy that she fell.
She told friends about these episodes, which were probably brought on by Crippen slipping something in her drink with the intention of giving the impression her health had been faltering, so her death would not be totally unexpected.
When it came to the actual killing, he would have counted on everything happening seamlessly, but that was not how it unfolded. The murder of his wife was a poisoning that went wrong.
Prosecuting lawyer Oddie believed that Crippen was inexperienced with hyoscine and gave her too large a dose.
Instead of drifting into a stupor, followed by a coma and death, she probably grew agitated and violent. She may have even realised that her husband was attempting to kill her. She may have fought back. There was most likely a struggle of some description, or an accident in her disorientated state.
Neighbours reported hearing disturbances at around 2am. One said she heard ‘one long scream’ which ‘ceased suddenly’. A Miss Isaacs, who lived in the house that backed on to the Crippens’, also remembered ‘a loud scream’. Another neighbour was woken by a shriek and opened the window to hear a woman cry, ‘Oh, don’t! Oh, don’t!’
Others described ‘two shots’ coming from the direction of number 39 just before dawn, and Oddie believed that, in a panic, Crippen had taken his gun and finished her off.
Oddie’s theory is a logical one. From what remained of Cora’s body, it was clear she had sustained some sort of injury, whether marks of a physical assault, a tumble down the stairs resulting in broken bones, a bump on the head or a gunshot wound.
Whichever, the effect would have been that Crippen could no longer pass off her death as natural. Suddenly, in the early hours of the morning, Crippen had to rethink his plan. He now had to dispose of a body.
The night was a cold one, with the temperature in London roughly one degree centigrade. In the coal cellar, it would have been colder still. He left her there. The next morning he went to work as usual.
Not until that evening did her husband begin the horrific task of taking apart her body, of utterly obliterating the woman with whom he’d shared his life.
The disorder, the blood, the hideous mess would have been indescribable, unimaginable, inhuman.
According to a modern forensic pathologist, it would have taken just an hour for an experienced pathologist to cut up the body. But Crippen did not possess this degree of expertise so for him it would have been much, much longer. The stripping out of the bones would have been particularly time-consuming.
Then would have come the problem of disposing of the remains discreetly, followed by cleaning away the evidence of the crime, not something that could have been accomplished overnight.
It’s likely that the whole operation went on over several days.
How he discarded his wife’s bones and head has never been agreed upon. Chief Inspector Dew thought Crippen might have wrapped them in brown paper, a fragment of which was found in the cellar, and thrown them into the nearby Regent’s Canal – then a polluted, industrial waterway filled with rubbish.
Another possibility was that he managed to lose them in the vast slaughterhouses of the Metropolitan Cattle Market, not far from Hilldrop Crescent, carrying his gruesome bundle up the road under cover of darkness.
The hue and cry for Crippen and Ethel that now began was unprecedented. The whole world was desperate to find the runaway lovers. Speculation filled even more newspaper columns and it was the one big topic of conversation on trains and buses, in pubs and on street corners.
Like modern-day reality television viewers, the public felt they were active players in this real-time, high-stakes drama.
Everyone was a vigilante – even, as we will see in tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
- Adapted from Story Of A Murder, by Hallie Rubenhold (Doubleday, £25), to be published March 27. © Hallie Rubenhold 2025. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to April 5, 2025; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
