by Ray Black
But Crippen’s promise was largely unfulfilled. Homeopathy fell from favour with the American public and his income suffered as a result. He had to take a job with a mail-order company, Munyon’s Homeopathic Remedies, and Belle became concerned that they would no longer be able to afford the acting and singing lessons she needed to achieve her dreams of being a star. Crippen fell on his feet, though, and his hard work impressed his superiors. Moreover, mail-order businesses were taking off in America and so he progressed. In 1895 he was promoted to general manager for the Philadelphia area and in 1897 he was given the responsibility of opening a Munyon office in London.
At first, Cora remained in Philadelphia, still enjoying numerous affairs, while Crippen set about organising their lives in London. She continued to collect diamonds and pink frilly clothes and Crippen had no choice but to put up with it. Scandal was, after all, unthinkable.
When she finally arrived in London, the couple lived in South Crescent, just off Tottenham Court Road, before decamping to Store Street, close to the British Museum. But Munyon’s business began to struggle and Crippen was finally fired in 1899. The Crippens had to sacrifice their standard of living, which did not please Belle/Cora, and they moved from fashionable Piccadilly to down-at-heel Bloomsbury.
While working for Munyon’s, Crippen had his fingers in several other pies and it was while working for a business called Yale Tooth Specialists that he took on a young typist called Ethel le Neve. It was not the first time he had met her; the pair had worked together before and were attracted to one another. It may have been because Ethel was the antithesis of the brash Belle. She was demure and quiet, and by 1903 there is no doubt that they were heavily involved with one another, although Crippen’s strict Protestant morality prohibited him from making their relationship a physical one.
The Crippens relocated to a house in Camden Town, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, and Belle continued to work as a music hall performer, achieving some success. She became Treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies Guild and was described as vivacious and well-dressed. Her hair was dyed auburn and her New York accent added an exotic touch. Crippen, on the other hand, was a small, mild-mannered individual, rather dapper with a high forehead and prominent eyes blinking behind gold-rimmed spectacles.
The two began to lead separate lives and supplemented their income by taking in lodgers at Hilldrop Crescent. One night, Crippen came home to find Belle in bed with one. It was probably around this time that his relationship with Ethel became a physical one.
By December 1909, Belle had just about had enough of her insipid little husband. She was aware that he was having an affair with le Neve; her friends had reported seeing the couple having dinner together. Then, when Ethel fell pregnant Belle again found out through her friends. However, before Crippen could demand a divorce, Ethel had a miscarriage.
The marriage was now beyond repair and life at Hilldrop Crescent was intolerable. Crippen and Belle argued constantly, with Belle threatening to ruin his good name by spreading gossip about his relationship with le Neve. When she announced that she was leaving him he should have been delighted, but Belle also let him know that she was planning to clean out their bank account and take all of their savings with her. She confirmed this by providing notice of withdrawal to the bank.
On the evening of January 31, the Crippens had dinner guests, a retired music hall performer called Martinetti and his wife. Following dinner, the two couples played several hands of whist and the Martinettis did not leave until around 1.30 a.m. on February 1. It would be the last time anyone would see Belle Elmore alive.
The exact events of that night have never been entirely clear, but at Crippen’s trial it was surmised that he had intended to poison Belle with an overdose of a sedative, hyoscine hydrobromide, that he had purchased some weeks previously. Instead of becoming sedated, however, it was thought that Belle became hyperactive and extremely noisy. Panicking, and desperate to keep her quiet, Crippen shot her. Neighbours heard the sound of the gun going off but merely thought it was a door slamming.
Crippen’s plan to pretend that Belle had suffered an overdose was in tatters. He decided to hide her corpse in the cellar of the house, but first he dissected her body, removing her long bones and ribs. These he burned in the kitchen fire. It is also thought that he removed her internal organs and dissolved them in a bath of acid. He removed her head and remaining organs and dumped these in a weighted sack in a nearby canal. What was left of Belle Elmore was buried beneath the brick floor in the cellar.
Next day, he went to work as normal, by this time in a dental practice. He told le Neve that Belle had finally left him and, later that day, pawned some jewellery, receiving £80 for it. Ethel le Neve spent that night at 39 Hilldrop Crescent.
A couple of days later, on February 3, the Secretary of the Music Hall Ladies Guild was in receipt of a letter, signed ‘Belle Elmore’. In it, Belle resigned from her position as Honorary Treasurer, claiming that the illness of a family member back in the United States meant she had to return there. The handwriting, however, was not that of Belle Elmore.
Around this time, Crippen paid another visit to the pawnbroker, leaving with £115 this time. On February 20, 1910, he turned up at the ball of the Music Hall Ladies Benevolent Fund, accompanied by Ethel le Neve who was noticed to be wearing a brooch that belonged to Belle. The suspicions of the ladies of the Guild, already aroused, now went into overdrive.
On March 12, le Neve moved into the house in Hilldrop Crescent and around this time, Crippen gave his landlord three months’ notice of his intention to move out. Belle’s friend, Mrs Martinetti, was informed by Crippen that he had received news that his wife had become seriously ill in America and was not expected to live. He told her that he was going to take a holiday in France if she died. Unsurprisingly, she thought this was odd behaviour.
Thus, on March 24, 1910, Mrs Martinetti received a telegram sent from London’s Victoria Station announcing that ‘Belle died yesterday at 6.00 p.m.’. Crippen and le Neve had sent it shortly before boarding the boat train to Dieppe.
On his return, Crippen had to somehow deal with the fact that Belle’s friends wanted to send tokens of remembrance to her funeral. He got round this by telling them that her ashes were being returned to England and the tokens would arrive too late. Meanwhile, Ethel le Neve was swanning around in Belle’s furs and jewellery, something that was considered to be in very poor taste.
All of this proved too much for the ladies of the Guild and Belle’s friends. They took their suspicions to Chief Inspector Walter Dew at Scotland Yard, known as ‘the blue serge’ because of the blue suit he seemed to wear every day. However, he told them that there was not enough evidence to proceed with an inquiry. But this did not stop them from making their own enquiries and they turned up some useful information. Firstly, shipping records told them that there had been no sailing for America on the day Crippen had said Belle had left. Secondly, no one called Crippen had died in California at the time Crippen said she had.
Dew had no choice but to call on Crippen and question him. But the doctor had already prepared his story and admitted to Dew that, yes, he had lied about his wife’s death, but only to avoid scandal; his wife had actually left him for an American boxer called Bruce Miller. Dew believed him, but Crippen was, unaccountably, thrown into a blind panic. He immediately went to Ethel and told her about the policeman’s visit and the pair decided to leave the country until the scandal had died down. The next day they left for Antwerp, planning to take a boat from there to Quebec in Canada.
Dew called round to Crippen’s dental practice on July 11, to discover that Crippen and le Neve had disappeared. He immediately ordered a search of the house in Hilldrop Crescent. It uncovered the grisly remains of Belle Elmore in the cellar. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Hawley Harvey Crippen and Ethel le Neve.
The case immediately became a huge news story in the British press and pictures of the fugitive couple also appeared in the European pap
ers. Knowing the police were looking for them, Crippen and le Neve, in disguise, boarded the SS Montrose, bound for Canada, on July 20. He was not wearing his spectacles, he had shaved off his moustache, had grown a beard and was going by the name of Mr Robinson. She disguised herself, very badly, as his young son. In fact, the disguise was so bad that it drew the attention of fellow passengers and especially that of the ship’s captain, Captain Kendall, who recognised the pair from newspaper photos.
The SS Montrose was one of the few liners of the time fitted with a wireless telegraph and on July 22, Captain Kendall sent a telegram to the White Star Line in Liverpool informing them that he believed the fugitives were on board his ship. His message read: ‘Have strong suspicions that Crippen – London cellar murderer and accomplice are among Saloon passengers. Moustache taken off – growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Voice manner and build undoubtedly a girl.’ This was the first time that this new technology had been used to catch a criminal. Chief Inspector Dew was informed immediately and boarded the SS Laurentic, a faster ship than the Montrose, leaving Liverpool for Quebec the next day.
The newspapers went into a frenzy, page after page filled with the story of Belle, le Neve and Crippen. They avidly followed the chase across the Atlantic.
The Laurentic arrived in Quebec a day before the Montrose and as the Montrose approached Father Point, where pilots were to be taken on board, Dew boarded the vessel, disguised as a pilot. On approaching Crippen and removing his pilot’s hat, he said: ‘Good afternoon Dr. Crippen, remember me? I’m Inspector Dew with Scotland Yard.’
Shocked, Crippen could only reply: ‘Thank God it’s over’, holding out his wrists for the handcuffs.
In October 1910, at the Old Bailey, Crippen and Ethel were tried separately. Crippen immediately scuppered his chances by refusing to allow Ethel to be called as a witness for the defence, seeking to protect her reputation. He might also have avoided the death penalty if he had pleaded guilty and had used Belle’s serial adultery in his defence. The prosecuting counsel, R.C. Muir QC, relied on the lies Crippen told to Belle’s friends and the police.
Thus, on October 22, it took the jury a mere twenty-two minutes to return a guilty verdict. Crippen was sentenced to death by hanging.
Things went better for Ethel le Neve. She was charged with being an accessory to murder but it took the jury only twelve minutes to find her not guilty.
Crippen was to be hung on November 23, 1910 and, until that day, Ethel visited him every day in his cell, without fail. On the day of his execution he asked that the letters she had written to him while he had been incarcerated and a photograph of her, be buried with him.
She left the country that day, by ship for New York. She settled in Toronto for five years before returning to the UK where she married and lived quietly in Croydon. She died in 1967, aged eighty-four.
The house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent remained unoccupied for thirty years and was destroyed in a bombing raid during World War II.
Andrei Chikatilo
Only bones remained. A few pieces of skin clung here and there and patches of matted black hair hung from the skull. It lay amidst the spindly trees of a lespolosa, a forested strip of land, not far from the village of Novocherkassk in the Rostov-on-Don area of the USSR. The corpse lay on its back, the head turned to one side. The victim was a female. She had been stabbed many times in an apparently frenzied attack, and had been gouged with a knife in the pelvic area. Disturbingly, she had also been stabbed in the eyes.
Major Mikhail Fetisov, the region’s chief detective, determined that the victim was a missing thirteen-year-old girl, Lyubov Biryuk. Unfortunately, that was about as much as could be gleaned from the scene. It looked like that most difficult of cases – a random attack.
The police started to look for suspects amongst the usual groupings – people suffering from mental illness and known sex offenders. One man, learning that he was a suspect, promptly hung himself and the police breathed a sigh of relief, believing they had their man.
Two months later, however, another pile of bones was discovered. It was near the railway station at Shakhty. The victim, a woman, had received multiple stab wounds and, once again, the killer had attacked the eyes.
A month passed before a soldier, gathering firewood, stumbled across the body of yet another woman. She had been mutilated in the same way.
There was little doubt that a serial killer was on the loose. But this was the Soviet Union and such things did not happen there. Serial killers were a manifestation of Western decadence, after all. Consequently, the press were not briefed and no warning was given to people to take precautions. Instead, a special task force was assembled. It included a second lieutenant from the criminology lab, thirty-seven-year-old Viktor Burakov, an expert in the analysis of crime scenes and physical evidence. This case would consume him for the next few years.
Victim number four turned up that same month, although she had been killed about six months previously. The body, a woman again, bore the same wounds as the others.
What was the issue with the eyes, Burakov and the team wondered? What it did suggest is that the ‘Maniac’, as they had started to call him, did not just kill and run; he spent time with the victims after they were dead. He was sexually motivated and his hunger for the kill seemed to be increasing. Still only a very few in the police force and high-ranking officials were aware of what was really happening.
Ten-year-old Olga Stalmachenok had gone missing in the town of Novoshakhtinsk, on her way to piano lessons. Now when someone went missing, everyone feared the worst and sure enough it happened, although it took four months for her body to turn up. This attack had been particularly frenetic, the knife having been pushed into the girl’s body countless times, to the extent that it moved her internal organs around inside the body. The heart, lungs and sexual organs had received particular attention and, as usual, the eyes were gouged. Olga’s parents had been sent a card while she was missing, signed ‘the Black Cat Sadist’, and police began to check the handwriting against everyone in the town, a thankless and, ultimately, pointless task. They looked yet again at sex offenders and the mentally ill.
Nothing happened for four months, but a group of boys playing in a lespolosa close to Rostov, found the remains of a thirteen-year-old girl who had suffered from Down’s Syndrome, in a gully. As if things had not been bad enough, to harm a child with such a condition seemed to take this killer’s cruelty to a new level of degradation.
Suddenly, however, someone was arrested. Nineteen-year-old Yuri Kalenik had spent years in a home for children with special needs, but now worked in the construction industry. He was arrested on the basis of an accusation by an inhabitant of the home, but everyone was convinced they had the Maniac. Kalenik, at first, denied the charges. Then, in order to stop the beating he was taking, he confessed to all the murders, even adding some others that had been carried out locally.
Burakov interrogated Kalenik. He seemed a likely candidate. After all, he had a history of mental problems and also used public transport, just like the Maniac. He also led the team to the sites of several of the murders, but as far as Burakov could make out he was almost being guided to them by a team of policemen willing him to be their murderer. Burakov was convinced Kalenik was responding to coercion.
In the meantime, the body of another young woman was discovered. The mutilation of the body and the eyes were similar, but this time her nipples had been bitten off. She had been there for several months. So, Kalenik could have murdered this girl, but, unfortunately for the police, not the one found on October 20. She had been killed three days earlier, while the boy had been in custody.
This woman had been disembowelled, but, strangely, the organs were nowhere to be found. He had taken them away with him. Unusually the eyes had not been attacked. Was it the same killer?
A few weeks later another body was found. She had been killed months before and the killing bore the hallmarks of the Maniac. Number ten was
a fourteen-year-old boy, found near railway lines. He had been stabbed no fewer than seventy times and he had been castrated and raped. During it all, the killer had gone to a place nearby and had a bowel movement. Kalenik was in the clear.
Another boy, another former pupil of a home for children with special needs, had apparently taken the same train as the dead boy. Mikhail Tyapin was a big and powerful young man who could barely speak. Nonetheless, the police got him to talk and obtained yet another confession. Tyapin, like Kalenik, had a violent fantasy life and, like him, claimed responsibility for other murders in the area. What he failed to mention, though, was the damage to the eyes.
Semen found in the murdered boy’s anus provided them with a break. They could find the killer’s blood type from it. Now they were able to eliminate all the suspects they had had so far; their blood did not match. The lab, however, announced that it had mixed up the sample and that it did, indeed, match Mikhail Tyapin. Now they were convinced they had their killer. Or at least, they would have been, if the killer had not carried on killing.
Throughout 1984, woods in the region disgorged bodies, lots of them. And they all bore similar wounds. One of them was an eighteen-year-old and on her clothing were semen and blood, left, presumably, by the killer who it seems had masturbated over her dead body. A forensics expert from Moscow confirmed that two semen specimens found on different bodies were type AB and that immediately eliminated every suspect to date. He was still out there.
In March he struck again, killing ten-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov. He cut off the tip of his tongue and his penis. Close to the body was a large footprint, the same size thirteen that had been found at an earlier scene. For the first time, however, he was seen. A tall, hollow-cheeked man with a stiff-kneed gait and wearing glasses had followed the boy.