Murder & Crime
Page 6
Back in England, the detectives and medical experts had been busy trying to prove that the remains in the cellar belonged to Cora Crippen and to establish a solid case against the now notorious Dr Crippen. At the beginning of August, detectives discovered that on 19 January Crippen had visited a chemist’s shop in Oxford Street to collect a batch of the sedative hyoscine, which if taken in large enough doses could cause loss of consciousness, paralysis and death. Alerted to the find, Dr William Willcox, the ‘senior scientific analyst to the Home Office’, examined the internal organs recovered from No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent and was able to detect traces of the same drug. Augustus Pepper, a consultant surgeon at St Mary’s Hospital, concluded that it was ‘quite impossible’ that the body parts had been buried in the cellar before Mr and Mrs Crippen moved there in September 1905. The internal organs had been removed from the body intact and were still connected to each other, demonstrating that the person responsible knew at least how to dissect an animal. ‘From the remains I examined I should say that the person in life was an adult, young or middle aged, and of stout figure.’
Dr Crippen and Le Neve appear in the dock at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court before their trial at the Old Bailey. (LC-DIG-ggbain-08612)
The crucial piece of evidence turned out to be a 4in-long mark found on one of the pieces of skin. Mrs Martinetti had told detectives that she saw ‘an old cut’ on the stomach of Cora Crippen the previous summer. Informed of this evidence, a young pathologist called Dr Bernard Spilsbury examined the skin under a microscope and concluded: ‘The mark is undoubtedly an old operation scar.’ Dr Spilsbury would go on to give a convincing performance at the Old Bailey trial in October 1910 – the first step in his career as a ‘celebrity pathologist’ and the ‘father of forensic medicine’.
Crippen was forty-eight years old when he entered the witness box in an attempt to clear his name. He told the story of a cuckolded husband, mistreated by his hot-headed wife and forced to seek solace in the arms of his devoted secretary. The marriage to Cora had become a sham – they may have kept up the pretence in front of their friends but at home they slept in separate rooms and quarrelled endlessly over trivial things. As for the fateful evening of 31 January, he had again been the victim of her foul temper. ‘While they were there she picked a quarrel with me upon a most trivial incident,’ he told the court.
During the evening Mr Martinetti wanted to go upstairs. As he had been to the house many times and knew the place perfectly well, I let him go up by himself. When he came down he seemed to have caught a chill. When the Martinettis had left, my wife got into a great rage about this. She abused me, and said some very strong things. She said that if I could not be a gentleman she had had enough of it and could not stand it any longer and she was going to leave. I came back the next day at my usual time, which would be about half-past seven or eight o’clock, and found that the house was vacant.
Believing she had had gone to Chicago to join Bruce Miller, he sought to cover up his shame with lies. As for his flight from London, he thought the suspicion was so great that he would be kept in prison for months until his wife was found. ‘The only idea I could think of was to take Le Neve away out of the country, where she would not have this scandal thrown upon her.’ Crippen made sure to exonerate his lover of any possible responsibility.
His barrister, Edward Marshall Hall, called his own medical evidence to cast doubt on the testimony of Spilsbury, Willcox and Pepper – it was claimed the ‘scar’ was simply a fold of skin – but the jury were not persuaded. They took just twenty-seven minutes to find Crippen guilty. Asked if he wanted to say anything, he replied: ‘I still protest my innocence.’
Crippen was not short of supporters – more than 15,000 people signed a petition calling for him to be spared the death sentence. Women seemed particularly sympathetic to his situation, a henpecked husband whose only thought was for the well-being of his true love, Ethel Le Neve. This remained true right up to his execution at Pentonville Prison on 23 November; it was at least some comfort for him that Le Neve was acquitted of being an accessory after the fact. His final letter, printed in a newspaper three days before his death, read:
I solemnly state that I knew nothing of the remains discovered at Hilldrop Crescent until I was told of their discovery by my solicitor … I desire the world to have pity on a woman who, however weak she may have seemed in their eyes, has been loyal in the midst of misery and to the very end of tragedy, and whose love has been self-sacrificing and strong.
Front cover of Ethel Le Neve, Her Life Story, with the true account of their flight and her friendship for Dr Crippen, told by herself. (Author)
Despite the strong circumstantial evidence, there remains some doubt as to whether Crippen did in fact murder his wife. In 2007, a forensic scientist from Michigan State University claimed that DNA testing on the 100-year-old tissue samples revealed they were in fact male and did not match the descendants of Cora Crippen. If this is the case, it would imply Crippen killed someone else. But there is still the problem of the missing wife – is it possible that Cora started a new life without contacting any of her friends or relatives, or died elsewhere, unknown and unrecognised? And what happened to the rest of the body? Did Crippen burn it in the kitchen grate, as stated in a supposed confession printed in the Evening Times, or did he throw it overboard during his trip to Dieppe? Why did he bury the skin and organs in his cellar? It is a strange mixture of evil cunning and blundering incompetence, a fiendish plan that never quite worked as intended.
As for No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent, its reputation as a cursed ‘House of Horrors’ lingered for another thirty years. Crippen’s furniture was sold off before the trial started, but raised less than £150 – including £14 for the ‘cottage piano’ that Cora Crippen sang along to when practising her act. There were apocryphal tales of shrieks and scraping noises coming from the house on winter nights. Its reputation put off many new tenants until a fifty-year-old Scottish comedian and ‘music hall artiste’ took up the lease on the cheap. His name was Adam Arthur but he performed as ‘Sandy McNab’, regularly touring the country with his act ‘The Egyptian Mummy.’ He was living at No. 39 by January 1911, when he put an advert in The Stage: ‘In a new version of Scotch Sketch “King Pharaoh” drawing record houses everywhere. Resting by doctor’s orders. Many thanks to all for the many letters and wires wishing speedy recovery.’ He is also recorded in the 1911 census as living at No. 39 with his wife, Bessie, forty-one, son, Willie, twenty-two, and daughter, Maud, eighteen. Later that year he set off on a tour of South Africa.
Sandy McNab standing at the doorway of No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent in 1911. (National Archives)
In 1912, back in England, he continued to happily advertise the fact that he was living in Crippen’s old house. In April, the Western Times reported:
An exciting python hunt has taken place at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, the house formerly occupied by Crippen. The python belongs to Mr Sandy McNab, the music hall artist, and only reached England from South Africa on Friday. It celebrated its arrival by breaking out of its cage the first night, and awakened Mr McNab by a terrific smash of crockery. Mr McNab said he found it after a long search, coiled up on a shelf under the hot water tank.
Then in August he appeared in The Times newspaper under the headline ‘Highway Robbery in North London’:
Mr Sandy McNab, a comedian, who occupies the house in Hilldrop-Crescent, formerly tenanted by Crippen, was knocked down outside his house early yesterday morning and robbed of a gold medal presented to him by the South African Amalgamated Theatres Limited. Mr McNab offers £50 reward for the recovery of the medal. It is the size of a five shilling piece, slightly oval in form and studded with 16 diamonds. Engraved on the medal is the inscription: ‘presented to Sandy McNab by the South African Amalgamated Theatres, January 1912.’
In his book Crippen: The Mild Murderer, the journalist Tom Cullen claimed that McNab’s lease was terminated after neighbours objected to his plans to tur
n the house into a ‘Crippen Museum’. This may be yet another Islington myth – a more likely explanation is that the house fell empty when Sandy McNab was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in June 1914 for seducing a thirteen-year-old girl who hoped that he would help her get into show business.
The curse of No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent struck for the last time on 8 September 1940 when a German bomb demolished the rear wall. Together with the adjoining No. 40, it was torn down and eventually replaced with a four-storey block of flats. The new building was named after Britain’s first female Cabinet minister, Margaret Bondfield, and remains there to this day.
Case Ten
No. 63 Tollington Park
1911
Suspect:
Frederick Seddon
Age:
40
Charge:
Murder by Poisoning
Sentence:
Execution
Shortly after midnight the cry of a woman echoed out from the top-floor window: ‘I’m dying.’ The voice belonged to Eliza Barrow, a forty-nine-year-old partially deaf spinster lying helpless upon a bed stained with vomit and diarrhoea. Hordes of fat, black flies buzzed randomly about the room, gliding on the warm, fetid air rising from the sheets. The foul smell easily overpowered the antiseptic fumes emanating from carbolic-acid-soaked sheets hanging by the doorway, which was noticeable throughout the entire house. Ms Barrow had been like this for two weeks, rolling about the soiled mattress, clutching her stomach in pain and complaining of chills in her feet. Morphine only briefly dulled the sharp ache in her belly and the bismuth prescribed by the doctor did little to restrain her bowel movements. But it was not long – only six hours – until she found peace in death while her killer watched coolly from the bedroom doorway.
The setting for the murder of Eliza Barrow was No. 63 Tollington Park in Upper Holloway. A journalist later described Tollington Park as ‘a road with pretentions to more than mere respectability’. The houses suggest not what buildings of similar capacity in other districts so often suggest – a decayed and fallen gentility – but rather a crescent and gratified prosperity. You feel that the people who live there have come not from a better neighbourhood, but from one not so good, and that they are proud to live in Tollington Park.
The house at No. 63 Tollington Park, scene of the murder of Eliza Barrow on 14 September 1911. (Author)
Frederick Seddon bought the house at No. 63 as an investment rather than as a family home. His original plan was to rent it out as flats, but in January 1910 he changed his mind. With fourteen rooms over four storeys there was more than enough space for his wife, father, five children and the servant, meaning that he could rent out the whole of the top floor as a flat at 12s 6d a week. To maximise his earnings further, he set up his office in the basement and charged 5s a week in rent to his employers, the London and Manchester Industrial Assurance Co. He even extracted 6s a week from his sons for board and lodging.
Postcard of The Marlborough Theatre in Holloway Road, where Frederick Seddon spent the evening while his lodger lay dying. (Author)
This insatiable hunger for money – or even better, solid gold– affected Frederick Seddon’s whole life. He entered the insurance business at the age of nineteen and became district superintendent at twenty-six. He boasted that he had sold his first property for a profit of more than £400 and had gone on to acquire seventeen other properties in addition to Tollington Park. His conversation was dominated by money and the famously rich, and his wit extended to bemoaning his ill fortune in having no rich aunt or uncle to leave him a fortune. He was in the habit of carrying around £50 in his pockets, possibly just so he could impress his friends and acquaintances, and always kept between £100 and £200 in gold sovereigns in his safe, ‘in order to pick up any cheap stocks for cash’. In fact, Seddon had two safes – one in his basement office and one in his bedroom, so that he could more easily count his money like an Edwardian Scrooge.
By the autumn of 1911, Seddon was forty years old and moving relentlessly up in the world, while his thirty-four-year-old wife, Margaret, dutifully reared their offspring. She had only given birth to the youngest, a baby girl called Lily, that January, but Frederick wasn’t about to waste money on more servants – she continued to do the housework and look after the lodgers with the help of one maid and a part-time charwoman. If she resented her husband’s authoritarian attitude, she was either unwilling or too afraid to show it.
On 13 September, Frederick Seddon left his wife at home while he enjoyed the evening at the Marlborough Theatre, No. 383 Holloway Road, which was, that week, staging a performance of The Whip, a melodramatic play featuring a real-life horse race on stage, a train crash and a mock-up of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.
Any other man might have found himself entertained and amused, but Seddon spent the entire performance brooding over a dispute with the cashier, who had mistakenly given him change for a florin instead of half a crown. Frederick Seddon wasn’t the kind to suffer the loss of 6d in silence, so he made sure his wife had to suffer as well by griping about it at length on his return home. When he was told that Ms Barrow claimed she was dying, he asked his wife, ‘Is she?’
Mrs Seddon smiled and replied, ‘No.’ While she attempted to relieve Ms Barrow’s suffering with hot flannels, Seddon appeared annoyed by the inconvenience.
When Ms Barrow asked for brandy he was unable to restrain himself from exclaiming, ‘My good woman, don’t you know it is after one o’clock in the morning? We can’t get brandy now.’
Mrs Seddon, a little more sympathetic to her plight, checked the bottle and found that there was a swig left which could be mixed with soda. It was gone two when they returned downstairs to sleep.
They hadn’t been in bed long when Ernie Grant, a ten-year-old orphan boy living with Ms Barrow, knocked on the door to say that Chickie, as he called her, had got out of bed and was bent double in pain on the floor. Ernie recalled:
Eliza Barrow, who died at the age of forty-nine. (Author)
She sent me down for Mrs Seddon more than twice that night … I cannot remember how many times. She only told me to go down and call her as she felt so ill. She told me to tell her that she had pains in her stomach. During that part of the night she was badly sick more than once. She got out of bed and sat on the floor. She said ‘I am going’ – she seemed in great pain.
Ernie, who slept in the same bed as Ms Barrow, claimed not to notice any ‘nasty smell’ but perhaps he was just being polite. ‘She was always an affectionate and loving woman to me,’ he said.
After yet another bout of sickness at around four o’clock in the morning, Mrs Seddon decided to stay at the bedside in a basket chair, while Mr Seddon remained at the door smoking and reading. Eventually, Ms Barrow fell asleep. ‘She was snoring for an hour or an hour and a half after that – a kind of breathing through the mouth. My wife was dozing when this snoring did not seem quite so heavy and all of a sudden it stopped.’ Seddon woke up his wife and told her, ‘Good God, she’s dead.’
The body of Ms Barrow had barely gone cold when Frederick Seddon set about obtaining the death certificate and arranging the funeral. He had got the first by eight o’clock in the morning – the doctor didn’t even bother to see the body before signing off the cause of death as ‘epidemic diarrhoea and exhaustion’. For the funeral he needed money, and he wasn’t about to waste his own. And so, when he returned to Tollington Park, he began rooting through Ms Barrow’s belongings. Seddon would later claim that he was only able to find £4 10s in a brown paper bag in her trunk, two silver watches, brooches, a bracelet and some clothing. By half eleven that morning, he was haggling with the undertaker at No. 78 Stroud Green Road for the cheapest funeral possible, finally agreeing a figure of £3 7s 6d, meaning he could cover the other expenses with the remaining money. Two days later, Ms Barrow was buried in a public grave in Finchley.
The story of Eliza Barrow might have ended there had it not been for her cousin Frank Vonder
ahe, who lived a few streets north in Corbyn Street. Unaware that she was now six feet under, he and his wife called at No. 63 Tollington Park on 20 September. The servant girl, Mary Chater, responded to his request to see Ms Barrow with startled surprise. ‘Don’t you know she is dead and buried?’
‘No, when did she die?’ replied Vonderahe.
‘Last Saturday, but if you will call about nine o’clock, you will be able to see Mr Seddon and he will tell you all about it.’ Yet when they returned at the requested time Seddon was not available. Mr Vonderahe’s wife, Julia, managed to speak to him briefly the next day, but came away with little more than a copy of the will and a memorial card. Seddon even dared to tell her he had ‘wasted enough time’ on the matter and that he would not be able to speak to them again for another two weeks. He and his family were off for a pleasant seaside holiday in Southend.
When Mr Vonderahe finally managed to catch up with him on 9 October, Seddon was dismissive. ‘I do not know why I should give you any information. You are not the eldest of the family.’ Further questioning revealed that the majority of Ms Barrow’s fortune – valued at around £4,000 – had been signed over to Seddon. In October 1910 he had persuaded her to give him her India stock, valued at £1,600, in return for an annuity of £103 for the rest of her life. Three months later he sold the stock and bought the leases on fourteen houses in Stepney. He also negotiated with Ms Barrow to buy a property she owned in Camden (the Buck’s Head pub and the shop next door) in return for a further annuity of £52, in addition to staying at Tollington Park rent free. When Ms Barrow fell ill in September 1911 he persuaded her to make a will naming Seddon as the executor and Ernie Grant as the beneficiary.