If today’s true-crime podcasters are guilty of leering at sinister case files, the Edwardians were no better. In September 1910, when Hawley Harvey Crippen stood trial for murder at the Old Bailey, Londoners showed up in their hundreds to hear the sickening details. Fine ladies and gents, a playwright, a member of parliament and as many other rubber-neckers as possible crammed into the courtroom. Those who were turned away climbed on to the roof to peer through a skylight, Hallie Rubenhold writes in Story of a Murder. Journalists and paparazzi waited outside from dawn.
“Like the theatre,” Rubenhold notes, “the courtroom was open to the public and offered a similar form of amusement.” The so-called “North London Cellar Murder” was a hit sensation, splashed in headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Doctor Crippen”, a weedy homeopathic quack from San Francisco, was found guilty of murdering his wife Belle Elmore, an aspiring music hall artist from Brooklyn with enough friends who had, crucially, mistrusted Crippen’s claim that she’d gone back to America. He had in fact buried her in the coal cellar at their home, on a quiet street in Holloway, north London. His lover, Ethel Le Neve, was acquitted of being party to the crime. He was hanged months later at Pentonville Prison.
A murder takes a snapshot of a society at a moment in time, often inadvertently preserving a knot of personal histories through violence that would have been more happily lost to history. For social historian Rubenhold, this is an “opportunity” to unpick the context of the crime. But she also has a specific agenda, to “remove” Crippen from his “usual role as the story’s star”.
After the Old Bailey spectacle, she writes, a “corps of male narrators” of detectives, barristers and scientists involved with the case produced memoirs about the “crime of the century”. Like her bestselling (and Baillie Gifford Prize-winning) The Five, which rewrote the Jack the Ripper murders by focusing on the female victims, she reinstates the women into the story, and tells it across a vast canvas, animating every scrap of the societal fabric in which Crippen operated, so that his evil is simply part of a complete picture, rather than the only burden the book sets out to carry.
The case came to light in the summer of 1910, when the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent revealed its secret. Detectives from Scotland Yard, searching for the missing lady of the house, spotted some loose bricks in the floor, and began to dig. It was a grim business — one that Rubenhold vividly recounts, as the detectives strike human remains and flee upstairs for fresh air and brandy, returning with fumigating cigars. Belle had been found, but she was reduced to putrefying scraps of flesh and viscera, which had been meticulously stripped from the bone some months prior.
Investigations revealed that “Doctor Crippen” had killed her with a fatal dose of hyoscine hydrobromide sedative laced into her bedtime drink. He then cut off her head, which was never found, and removed her bones and some of her organs. They were presumed to have been boiled, burnt or sunk in water, Rubenhold notes. Mercifully, Crippen made mistakes: he sealed pieces of Belle’s flesh in damp quicklime that preserved the evidence, where he intended it to be destroyed.
In the long, transatlantic arcs of the Crippens’ tragedy, money is a nagging theme, from Elmore’s scrappy beginnings as daughter of a Prussian immigrant, to the cynical Dr Crippen’s swindling of patients’ hope in his pseudo-homeopathic clinics, and all the façades and petty jealousies of Edwardian London, where the couple settled for work in 1897. (Crippen had a job selling “cures” for deafness.)
Belle’s murder was a grotesquely selfish bid by Crippen to enable — and fund — marriage to his young mistress-typist, Ethel Le Neve, “sandwiched between the working and the middle classes”. He may have already had “practice”, Rubenhold writes: Crippen’s unhappy first marriage to Charlotte Bell in America ended conveniently early when she died suddenly, age 33, buried lovelessly by him in an unmarked grave. Their son, Otto, was fobbed off on to a relative.
But while Rubenhold is at pains to demote Crippen’s creepiness in the tale — and she succeeds by portraying him as an abject professional failure — it is undeniable that the book’s greatest momentum comes from the murder itself. The first half has a slow start, tracing the restless beginnings of the doctor’s career in the US, before bristling with the details of the murder’s cover-up, its detection and its transatlantic denouement as Crippen flees by steamer ship with Ethel disguised as a boy.
Story of a Murder’s finely layered portrait of a hypocritical Edwardian society, where concealments lay behind every door, is the greater achievement. Rubenhold shows how respectability was prized but always paper-thin, and usually won by compromise. Even the Crippens’ house was uncomfortably close to the “reeking, bloody filth of the Metropolitan Cattle Market”. It was a delicate situation that Crippen was able to exploit. He treated women as dolls, forcing Belle to undergo a needless ovariectomy in her twenties, and at various points either forcing lovers, like Ethel, into risky terminations, or swooping in to prey on those who, like Belle, had been abused and “ruined” by other men before him.
As the lies unravel, Crippen and Ethel come off as blundering deceivers, too greedy for others’ envy to think through their plotting. No sooner has the doctor carelessly buried his wife than he turns all eyes in the street to his back garden by burning Belle’s furniture, clothes and belongings in a big guilty bonfire. Ethel couldn’t help but wear her dead rival’s sparkliest brooch in front of Belle’s friends at a music hall ball, and hastily showed off her new home to her former landlady, who noticed a “musty smell” coming from the basement. (The rallying of Belle’s spirited friends, pressing police to investigate, is one of the book’s rare consolations.)
Until this point, only one person — the deaf journalist Evan Yellon, in a consultation at Crippen’s clinic — is recorded to have seen through Crippen’s intentions with immediate revulsion: “his face [was] a warning to all observant beholders. The flabby gills, the shifty eyes . . . ”
It is a miserable mirror of Crippen’s only instinctive talent, in which the economic and social handicaps of the women he met were instantly visible and attractive to his ends. What did the women see in return? Perhaps not the truth at first, but here at least Rubenhold has recorded in their stead what they came to know, and at the greatest possible cost.
Story of a Murder: The Wives, The Mistress and Dr Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold, Doubleday £25, 512 pages
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