Murder & Crime
Page 5
He represented himself as a gentleman, sent to me by the Secretary of State, with an especial message to offer me 100 pounds if I could give him any information that would lead to the conviction of the parties concerned in the murder of Mr Templeman. I at once told him that I did not know anything about it. He then sat down, and began reasoning with me, telling me as I was a young man, and about leaving the country, how serviceable money would be to me, how much better it would be to go out with 200 pounds in my pocket than nothing at all, and as I had seen a great deal of trouble, I should be very foolish if I did not now make something of it, if I could … I made up my mind to tell a lie for the sake of a reward … Now, gentlemen, I will appeal to you whether, if it is not an unlawful proceeding, it is not, at least, a very unfair one?
This time the jury, after deliberating for fifteen minutes, returned a verdict of guilty. The judge sentenced him to transportation for life, remarking that, ‘there could be very little doubt in the minds of all those who heard the trial that he was the person by whom the murder was perpetrated’. Gould would be sent to a penal colony ‘to pass the remainder of his existence in hopeless slavery, poverty and misery of the worst description’. The audience in the public gallery clapped as Gould was led from the dock down to the cells. A month later, on 8 July 1840, Richard Gould left England on a ship to New South Wales with 270 other convicts, never to return.
Case Nine
No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent
1910
Suspect:
Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen
Age:
48
Charge:
Murder
Sentence:
Execution
The couple moving into the terraced house at No. 39 were an odd match. The husband, thin, angular, his eyes bulging behind his gold-rimmed spectacles and his moustache drooping mournfully over his lips, seemed the complete opposite to his full-figured wife, who positively vibrated with energy and enthusiasm as she directed him this way and that. It was 21 September 1905, and Hawley Harvey Crippen had been married to Cora Crippen for thirteen years, a union which had taken them from Jersey City in the United States of America to a quiet, shabby but respectable crescent of semi-detached houses a few hundred metres away from Holloway Prison. The rent was £50 a year and gave them full use of the basement and another ten or so rooms on the three floors above, which were soon occupied by a menagerie of canaries, two Persian cats, a bull terrier and the occasional lodger or two, as well as Cora’s extensive wardrobe. Her collection of silk dresses, rustling underskirts, fur coats, satin gowns, and high-heeled shoes filled two bedrooms by themselves.
Drawing of No. 39 at the time of the murder (Author)
At first they lived quietly together, Cora doing the domestic work and cooking the meals while her husband, a homeopathic doctor, sat in his office dispensing dubious remedies, with even more questionable names like ‘Special Nerve Remedy’ and ‘Blood Tonic’. In the evenings they played whist with the lodgers, or listened to the gramophone that Crippen had bought for his wife for Christmas. He appeared a quiet, polite and devoted husband with little taste for the usual vices of mankind, other than the occasional light ale or stout. He was not the kind to flirt, or make jokes. About the only thing that marked him out from the crowd was a slightly eccentric dress sense, but even that was dictated by his wife. They were virtually unknown to their neighbours, apart from the occasional sighting in the garden, with Cora watching on as Crippen tended to the plants. ‘Peter, the rose bushes need pruning,’ she would tell him, refusing to use his real name because she thought it sounded ridiculous.
Cora soon got bored of her life in the suburbs. She wanted to return to her old dream of being an entertainer, an opera singer and a music hall star, and after a series of quarrels (witnessed by one of the lodgers between December 1906 and April 1907), she persuaded her husband to pay for singing lessons. Her early performances as ‘Belle Elmore’ earned her a few kind reviews as ‘a clever comedienne’ but one of her idols, Marie Lloyd, cruelly remarked that her name on a bill would empty any theatre in the country. Eventually, she found her calling as an organiser and fundraiser for the Music Hall Ladies Guild, hustling people into buying tickets and programmes for their events. In 1908 she was elected treasurer. It was now Crippen’s job to fund her glamorous public appearances by buying extravagant clothing and expensive-looking diamond jewellery, which Cora kissed and baby-talked to as if they were the children she never had. She dyed her dark hair blonde, and turned their quiet home, now painted pink and decorated with vases, china dogs, watercolour pictures, photographs and velvet bows, into a setting for whirlwind socialising, cocktail parties and late-night soirées. Cora was also receiving the attentions of a ‘one-man band’ act called Bruce Miller, who sent her letters adorned with kisses.
Photograph of Belle Elmore, otherwise known as Cora Crippen. (LC-DIG-ggbain-05164)
Perhaps Crippen didn’t mind his wife’s newfound vigour at first – he had already begun an affair with a younger woman, his private secretary Ethel Le Neve. They had first met in 1901 at the Drouet Institute for the Deaf, where he was a thirty-nine-year-old physician and she an eighteen-year-old shorthand typist. A lonely young woman with few friends or family in London, she came to depend on Crippen’s friendship, perhaps even idolising him. He listened to her problems and impressed her with talk of his expertise in valuing diamonds. An unlikely, surprisingly passionate relationship developed, with illicit meetings at hotels after work, before Crippen returned home for the night. But Le Neve wasn’t happy sharing her older lover with his larger-than-life wife and sought his assurances that he would seek a divorce. Crippen, harried from all sides, was struggling with the emotional, physical and material costs of keeping two women satisfied with expensive gifts. He was overdrawn at the bank and his £600 savings would not be available for another year. Then, suddenly, at the beginning of February 1910, Cora Crippen disappeared.
She had last been seen alive on 31 January when the Crippens invited their friends Paul and Clara Martinetti to dinner at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent. Cora prepared a plain meal of soup, a joint of beef with salad, a choice of dessert and coffee and liqueurs to finish. Crippen nursed a glass of stout throughout, while Cora indulged herself with a cigarette. Afterwards they went upstairs to play whist in the living room. ‘We spent a pleasant evening and there was no quarrel of any sort,’ recalled Mrs Martinetti. They left at half one in the morning. ‘Mrs Crippen came to the top of the steps and wished me goodbye. She was in quite good health.’
Later that morning, Crippen arrived at work at his office in New Oxford Street as usual. The following day, according to Le Neve, he told her that his wife had gone to America. ‘I found her gone when I got home last night,’ she remembered him saying. ‘She always said that the things I gave her were not good enough, so I suppose she thinks she can get better elsewhere.’ Crippen gave her some of his wife’s jewellery, including a small diamond brooch designed to resemble the rising sun. The rest he pawned for £175 at a shop just down the road from his workplace. Crippen also got Le Neve to take a letter to the committee of the Music Hall Ladies Guild. It purported to come from Belle Elmore, but was not in her writing:
Please forgive me a hasty letter and any inconvenience I may cause you, but I have just had news of the illness of a near relative, and at only a few hours’ notice I am obliged to go to America. Under the circumstances I cannot return for several months, and I therefore beg you to accept this as a formal resignation from this date of the honorary treasurership … I ask my good friends and pals to accept my sincere and loving wishes for their own personal welfare. Believe me, yours faithfully, Belle Elmore.
Three weeks later, Crippen made his first public appearance with Le Neve at the Music Hall Benevolent Fund Dinner and Ball. To the dismay of Cora’s friends, Le Neve was wearing the diamond ‘rising sun’ brooch openly, as if trying to emulate Mrs Crippen, or perhaps replace her entirely. Le Neve also proudly showed
off a diamond solitaire ring, claiming that it was her engagement ring, and started giving her friends any of Cora’s belongings that she did not want for herself – coats, feather boas, blouses, skirts, stockings, shoes, hats and even nightgowns. On 12 March she moved out of her flat permanently and into Crippen’s bed.
The following week Crippen sent a letter to his friends the Martinettis saying that his wife was dangerously ill with pneumonia, shortly followed by a telegram announcing that Belle had passed away. He placed a short death notice in the Era newspaper: ‘ELMORE – March 23, in California, USA, Miss Belle Elmore (Mrs H.H. Crippen).’
The news came as a shock to her friends at the guild, but they were unable to ask Crippen more about it because he and Le Neve had already left for a week’s holiday across the Channel in Dieppe. When they finally managed to see him at his office, Crippen told them that there was no need for them to contact Belle’s friends or family in America and that her ashes would be sent over to England.
It was past Easter when he found the time to send a letter to Cora’s sister, then living in New York:
I hardly know how to write to you my dreadful loss. The shock to me has been so dreadful that I am hardly able to control myself. My poor Cora has gone, and to make the shock to me more dreadful I did not even see her at the last. A few weeks ago we had news that an old relative of mine in California was dying, and to secure important property for ourselves it was necessary for one of us to go and put the matter in the lawyer’s hands at once. As I was very busy, Cora proposed she should go, and, as it was necessary for someone to go there at once, she would go straight through from here to California without stopping at all, and then return by way of Brooklyn, when she would pay all of you a long visit. Unfortunately, on the way out my poor Cora caught a severe cold, and, not having a chance to take proper care of herself while travelling, it settled on her lungs, and later developed into pleuro-pneumonia. She wished not to frighten me, and said it was a slight matter, and the next I heard was she was dangerously ill, and two days later, after I had cabled to know should I go to her, the dreadful news came that she had passed away. Imagine, if you can, the dreadful shock to me; never more to see my Cora alive, nor hear her voice again. She is being sent back to me, and I shall soon have what is left of her here. Of course, I am giving up the house. In fact, it drives me mad to be in it alone. I don’t know what I shall do; probably find some business to take me travelling for a few months until I can recover from the shock a little. It is so terrible to me to have to write this dreadful news. Will you please tell the others of our loss? Love to all …
Meanwhile the ladies of the Music Hall Guild pursued their suspicions about the disappearance of Belle Elmore, even going to the trouble of writing to Crippen’s son in Los Angeles to seek confirmation. On 30 June, John Nash, the husband of music hall entertainer Lil Hawthorne, went to the police.
The investigation was handed to Chief Inspector Walter Dew, a forty-seven-year-old detective who had served in the Whitechapel Division at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. His investigation proceeded at a leisurely pace, and it was not until the morning of 8 July that he saw Crippen at his office in Oxford Street. Almost immediately, Crippen confessed that he had completely fabricated the story of his wife’s death. ‘As far as I know she is still alive,’ he added, claiming that she had announced that she was leaving him during a row after dinner with the Martinettis. Crippen agreed to show Inspector Dew around No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent and suggested that he should place an advertisement in the newspapers in an attempt to locate his wife. Impressed by Crippen’s cool, unflustered demeanour, and seeing nothing suspicious at the house, Inspector Dew left to continue his enquiries. The next day Crippen and Le Neve fled the country.
The disguises were Crippen’s idea. He shaved off his moustache, while Le Neve cut her hair short and dressed up as a boy in a brown tweed suit, shirt, collar and tie, braces, black boots and a bowler hat. The final touch was a cigarette dangling from her lips. ‘You will do famously,’ he told her on completing the costume. ‘No one will recognise you. You are a perfect boy!’ Crippen appeared to be enjoying himself immensely as they set off by tube to Liverpool Street, exhilarated by the success of the deception and the novelty of having a ‘pretty boy’ as a companion. Even the realisation that they had missed the train did not dampen his enthusiasm. They spent the three-hour wait taking a tour of Hackney by bus, before catching the train to Harwich and the night boat to Holland. On 9 July they booked into a hotel in Brussels, secure in their new identities of John Robinson, a fifty-five-year-old merchant from Quebec, and his sixteen-year-old deaf and mute son.
Back in England, the oblivious Chief Inspector Dew circulated a description of Cora Crippen as a missing person. It was another two days before he discovered that Crippen had also disappeared. This time he carried out a thorough search of No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent and uncovered a loaded revolver in a wardrobe in the front bedroom on the first floor, together with a box containing forty-five bullets. He established the circumstances of their flight, circulated their descriptions at the ports and began digging up the garden. Then on 13 July, Dew examined the cellar:
It had a brick floor. I probed about with a poker; at one place I found that the poker went rather easily in between the crevices and I got a few bricks up. I then got a spade and dug the clay immediately beneath the bricks. About nine inches below, I came across what appeared to be human remains.
It was not a recognisable body. There was no skeleton, no head, no limbs or genitals, merely a lumpy puddle of skin, flesh and internal organs. Identifying a gender was impossible, although several items suggested that it was a woman – a section of a cotton undervest, a hair curler, and part of a pyjama jacket bearing the label of a shirt maker from Holloway. Whoever had buried the remains had added lime in a failed attempt to destroy them – the lime was wet and had in fact preserved the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach and pancreas in perfect condition. One thing was certain – this was now a murder enquiry, as well as a sensational newspaper story.
The Islington Gazette led the way with a description of the scene, now thronged with ‘the usual morbid crowd’, under the headline, ‘The Green Crescent of the Crime’:
Hilldrop Crescent is a quiet suburban place although in the inner ring of the metropolis; and reasoning superficially, it would be the last spot one would have dreamt of for the stage of a sordid murder. The exterior aspect of the quiet residential streets speaks of respectability; and in the placid atmosphere of well-to-do Suburbia the tokens of the grim deed seized the heart with a greater shock than they would have done in the denser and darker neighbourhood that lies not far away.
Reporters now swarmed about the area asking neighbours, shopkeepers and local busybodies for juicy gossip. Lena Lyons, whose garden at No. 46 Brecknock Road backed on to the Crippen house, claimed to have heard two shots one morning in January or February. Another resident heard a scream, ‘which terminated with a long dragging whine’ but dismissed it as the screech of a prostitute plying her trade in nearby Parmetes Row. Louisa Glackner thought she heard cries of ‘Oh don’t, oh don’t’ coming from the direction of No. 39 Hilldrop. There were also dim memories of the burning of rubbish in the garden at around the time of Cora’s disappearance.
While detectives scrambled to trace their prime suspect, Crippen and Le Neve spent a leisurely ten days sightseeing in Brussels before making their way to Antwerp. On 20 July, they boarded the SS Montrose and set off across the Atlantic Ocean for Quebec.
John Robinson and his son soon attracted the attention of the ship’s captain, Commander Henry George Kendall. They had no baggage and stood out among the mainly non-English immigrants hoping to start a new life in the New World. ‘We had taken a second-class cabin, which was quite cosy, and to me the whole ship was wonderful,’ remembered Le Neve.
I found plenty to amuse me, for Captain Kendall supplied me with plenty of literature in the shape of novels and magazines,
not forgetting some detective stories. I spent many hours on deck with Dr Crippen, but naturally I kept rather aloof from the other passengers and did not speak very much. On the other hand, when any of the officers spoke to me I did not hesitate to reply and did not feel in the least embarrassed. I felt so sure of myself. I remember there was one nice English boy with whom I got rather chummy. We used to talk football together!
Dr Crippen spent most of his time reading Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.
Unbeknownst to the fugitives, Captain Kendall had already used a relatively new invention to alert Scotland Yard about his suspicious passengers – the wireless telegraph. As the ship passed 130 miles west of Cornwall, he sent the message: ‘Have strong suspicion that Crippen London Cellar murderer and accomplice are amongst saloon passengers. Moustache shaved off, growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy, voice, manner and build undoubtedly a girl.’ This crucial tip-off allowed Chief Inspector Dew to race to Liverpool to catch a faster ship to Quebec, the Laurentic, on 23 July. Eight days later, after boarding the SS Montrose at Father Point, Dew had his prey brought up to the captain’s cabin.
‘Good morning Dr Crippen,’ he said.
‘Good morning,’ replied Crippen calmly, apparently unsurprised at this turn of events. After being informed that he would be arrested for the murder and mutilation of his wife, one of his first thoughts appears to have been for Le Neve. ‘It is only fair to say she knows nothing about it. I never told her anything.’ He is also said to have blurted out: ‘I am not sorry; the anxiety has been too much.’ At all other times he remained polite, even cheerful, and happy to indulge in small talk with the police officers watching his every move as he was taken first to Quebec and then back across the ocean to Liverpool. On 27 August, Dew was able to parade his prisoners in triumph before a large crowd eager to see the monster that they had read about almost every day for the last two months.