by Erik Larson
Coldwater was wealthy, and its residents built houses to reflect the fact, studding the town’s core with graceful homes of wood, brick, and stone, many destined to survive into the twenty-first century and transform Coldwater into a mecca for students of Victorian architecture. One early edition of the Coldwater city directory observed, “The pleasant drives and parks shaded perfectly by magnanimous maples, the many miles of well kept walks, the brilliantly lighted streets, the neat and substantial residences, the urban appearing business places all in part go to make up this city so fortunately inhabited with well educated, intelligent and thoughtful people whose actions both publicly and privately are devotedly American.”
Philo Crippen and his wife soon had a son, Myron, who in turn married a woman named Andresse Skinner and eventually took over the family’s dry goods empire, while also serving as tax assessor for the city’s first ward and an agent for a sewing machine company. In 1862 Myron and Andresse had their first child, Hawley Harvey, who arrived in the midst of national tumult. Every day the Coldwater newspapers reported the ebb and flow of shed blood, as the country’s breeders shipped off horses to support the Union effort, in all three thousand horses by the war’s end. The Coldwater Union Sentinel of Friday, April 29, 1864, when Hawley Harvey was two years old, cast gloom over the town. “The spring campaign seems to have a bad send off,” the newspaper reported: “—disaster, defeat or retreat has attended thus far every effort of our armies.” Branch County’s young men came back with foreshortened limbs and grotesque scars and told stories of heroic maneuvers and bounding cannonballs. In these times conversation at Philo’s dry goods store did not lack for exuberance and gore.
DESPITE THE WAR HAWLEY enjoyed a childhood of privilege. He grew up in a house at 66 North Monroe, one block north of Chicago Street, at the edge of an avenue columned with straight-trunked trees having canopies as dense and green as broccoli. In summer sunlight filtered to the ground and left a paisley of blue shadow that cooled the mind as well as the air.
Sundays were days of quiet. There was no Sunday newspaper. Townspeople crossed paths as they headed for their favored churches. In the heat of summer cicadas clicked off a rhythm of somnolence and piety. Hawley’s grandfather, Philo, was a man of austere mien, which was not unusual in Coldwater among the town’s older set. A photograph taken sometime after 1870 shows a gathering of about twenty of Coldwater’s earliest residents, including Philo himself. It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better part of a century. The women seem suspended in a state somewhere between melancholy and fury and are surrounded by old men in strange beards that look as if someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, then hurled buckets of white hair in their direction. The day on which this photograph was taken must have been breezy because the longest and strangest beard, stuck on the oldest living citizen, Allen Tibbits, is a white blur resembling a cataract. Grandfather Philo stands in the back row, tall and bald at his summit, with tufts of white hair along the sides of his head and the ridge of his jaw. He has prominent ears, which fate and blood passed downward to Hawley.
A man of strong opinion and Methodist belief, Grandfather Philo exerted on the Crippen clan a force like gravity, suppressing passion and whim whenever he entered the room. He hunted evil in every corner. Once he asked the Methodist council to “prevent the ringing of bells for auctions.” In those days members of the congregation paid the pastor for their seats, with the highest-priced pews in front selling for forty dollars a year. It was an impressive sum—over $400 today—but Philo paid it and made Hawley and other members of the family join him every Sunday. In matters involving the Lord, no expense was too great.
Worship did not end with the pastor’s amen. At home Grandfather Philo read the Bible aloud, with special emphasis on the gloomy fates that awaited sinners, in particular female sinners. Years later Hawley would tell an associate, “The devil took up residence in our household when I was a child, and never left it.”
Somewhere in these three generations a weakening occurred. Grandfather Philo and his brother, Lorenzo, had faces that expressed strength and endurance and over time came to resemble dynamited rock more than human flesh. Two generations later Hawley emerged, pale, small, and myopic, harried now and then by bullies but himself gentle in manner and unscarred by hard work. His childhood progressed at a saunter, his days routine save for widely spaced moments of community excitement, such as the installation in 1866 of a toboggan slide and the fire in 1881 that destroyed Coldwater’s Armory Hall, the town’s only theater. The disaster prompted one of the town’s leading cigar-makers, Barton S. Tibbits, to build a striking new opera house, and soon Coldwater began drawing the likes of James Whitcomb Riley, who read his poetry from the stage, and an array of less high-brow entertainers, including the Haverly’s Minstrels with their “$10,000 Acting Dogs,” various traveling companies hell-bent on performing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, innumerable mind readers and mediums, and most memorably Duncan Clark’s Lady Minstrels and New Arabian Nights, described by the Coldwater Republican as “eight females, scantily dressed”; the Courier called it “the vilest show that ever appeared in Coldwater.”
CRIPPEN ENROLLED IN THE UNIVERSITY of Michigan’s School of Homeopathy in 1882, when homeopathy was a mode of medicine that enjoyed great popularity among doctors and the public. The founder of homeopathy was a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann, whose name subsequently became applied to many hospitals around the United States. His treatise, Organon of Rational Therapeutics, first published in 1810, became the bible of homeopathy, positing that a doctor could cure a patient’s ills by using various medicines and techniques to conjure the same symptoms as those evoked by whatever disease or condition had assailed the patient. He distilled his beliefs to three words, similia similibus currentur: Like cures like.
Crippen left the school in 1883 without graduating and sailed for London in hopes of continuing his medical education there. The English medical establishment greeted him with skepticism and disdain but did allow him to attend lectures and work as a kind of apprentice at certain hospitals, among them the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem. An asylum for the insane, its name had shrunk through popular usage to Bedlam, which eventually entered dictionaries as a lowercase word used to describe scenes of chaos and confusion. It was here that Crippen felt most welcome, for the treatment of the insane was a realm in which few doctors cared to practice. Nothing cured madness. The most doctors could do was sedate resident lunatics to keep them from hurting themselves and others. In an environment where nothing worked, anything new that offered hope had to be considered.
Crippen brought with him an array of skills and a knowledge of compounds that asylum officials saw as useful. As a homeopath, he knew the powers not just of ordinary opiates but also of poisons such as aconite, from the root of the plant monkshood; atropine, from belladonna (or deadly nightshade); and rhus toxin from poison ivy. In large doses each could prove fatal, but when administered in tiny amounts, typically in combination with other agents, such compounds could produce a useful palette of physical reactions that mimicked the symptoms of known diseases.
At Bethlehem Hospital Crippen added a new drug to his basket, hydrobromide of hyoscine, derived from an herb of the nightshade family, Hyoscyamus niger, known more commonly as henbane. He used it there for the first time, though he long had known of the drug from his studies back home in America, where it was employed in asylums as a sedative to quell patients suffering delirium and mania, and to treat alcoholics suffering delirium tremens. Doctors injected the drug in tiny amounts of one-hundredth of a grain or less (a grain being a unit of measure based historically on the average weight of a single grain of wheat but subsequently set more precisely at 0.0648 grams or 0.002285 ounces). Crippen also knew that henbane was used commonly in ophthalmic treatments because of its power to dilate th
e pupils of the eye both in humans and animals, including cats, a property that would prove particularly important to Crippen’s future. Any miscalculation would have been dangerous. Just a quarter-grain—that is, 0.0162 grams or 0.0005712 ounces—was likely to prove fatal.
Crippen did not stay long in London. Overall he had found his reception to be as chilly as the city’s climate. He returned to the United States and enrolled in medical school at Cleveland Homeopathic Hospital. He studied surgery but said, later, that his training was purely theoretical—that he had never really operated on patients, alive or dead. Later he had occasion to insist, “I have never performed a postmortem examination in my life.”
THE CITY OF COLDWATER expected much from Crippen. He was not a man’s man, like his uncles Lorenzo and General Fisk, but rather the cerebral sort, and medicine seemed a good career for him to pursue. The local papers tracked his travels; on March 21, 1884, the Coldwater Courier noted “Hawley Crippen, son of Myron Crippen, is in the city.” He had returned for the funeral of his grandmother, Mrs. Philo Crippen, who had died a few days earlier. Supposedly, if improbably, her last words had been, “Blessed hope of a glorious immortality.” An item in the next day’s paper noted that Hawley Crippen “graduates at the Medical College of Cleveland next week.”
After graduation Crippen opened a homeopathic practice in Detroit, but two years later he moved to New York to study ocular medicine at the New York Ophthalmic Hospital, a homeopathic institution at Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street. A few decades earlier the hospital had undergone a traumatic shift from allopathic medicine—where doctors sought to cure disease by conjuring symptoms opposite to those suffered by patients—to homeopathy, in the process jettisoning all its surgeons by giving them “permanent leave of absence.” Under the new protocol and guided by a new cadre of physicians, “the success of the institution was as remarkable as its previous failure had been,” according to History of Homeopathy, published in 1905 by a devotee, Dr. William Harvey King. One of the most important of the school’s new leaders had the unfortunate surname Deady. School records show that Crippen graduated in 1887, one of the few students to do so each year. Wrote King, “The real worth of the hospital is measured by the good accomplished in the relief of suffering humanity rather than by the number of graduates who receive its coveted diploma.”
Now in his mid-twenties, Crippen began an internship at the Hahnemann Hospital in New York, and there he met a student nurse named Charlotte Jane Bell, who had come to America from Dublin. Soon the Coldwater Courier had some exciting news: Shortly before Christmas 1887, Hawley Harvey Crippen had gotten married.
He and Charlotte left New York for San Diego, where Crippen opened an office. The two reveled in the absence of winter and in the blue clarity of the coast. Crippen’s parents, Myron and Andresse, by now had moved from Coldwater to Los Angeles, a day’s train ride north. Charlotte became pregnant and on August 19, 1889, gave birth to a son, Otto. Crippen and family moved again, this time to Salt Lake City, where Charlotte again became pregnant. In January 1892, shortly before this baby’s expected arrival, Charlotte died suddenly, the cause attributed to apoplexy. Crippen sent Otto, now a toddler, to Los Angeles to live with his grandfather and grandmother, then himself fled back to New York. It was then that he joined the practice of Dr. Jeffrey, and took lodging in the doctor’s house, and met the woman who was to alter the course and character of his life.
THEIR MARRIAGE BARELY UNDER WAY, Crippen and Cora moved from New York to St. Louis, where Crippen became an eye doctor in the office of an optician. They did not stay long in St. Louis. The city lacked the boisterous glory of New York and had little to offer a woman intent on a life in the world’s embrace. No doubt at Cora’s urging, the couple moved back to New York.
Cora’s “female complaint” now worsened. There was pain and bleeding. She saw a doctor, who told her the problem lay in her ovaries. He recommended removal by surgery: an ovariectomy. Crippen had misgivings. He had seen enough surgeries and their results to know that while surgical skills had advanced greatly since the barbaric practices of the Civil War, an operation was not something to be done on a whim. Though progress with disinfectants had reduced the incidence of catastrophic infection and though improvements in anesthetics had made the whole process endurable, surgery remained a dangerous undertaking. But Cora’s discomfort was too great. She agreed to have the operation.
Soon afterward Cora paid a visit to her sister, Mrs. Teresa Hunn, at her home on Long Island, and showed her the scar. It was still “fresh,” a seam of angry red skin. During a subsequent visit Mrs. Hunn saw the scar again. It was still sufficiently impressive to score itself into Mrs. Hunn’s memory, so that even years later she was able to detail its appearance: “it was healed much better than it was the first time I saw it. It would be about 4 or 5 inches long and about 1 inch wide, but I could not quite exactly say. It was more a cream colour than the rest of her skin, and paler looking. The outside, near the flesh, was paler than the centre of the scar.” One detail Mrs. Hunn failed to note was whether the operation had required the removal of Cora’s navel, a procedure that commonly accompanied such surgery.
The operation meant that Cora would never bear children, which became for her a source of grief. A close friend, Mrs. Adeline Harrison, later would say, “There was only one little shadow in their lives of which I was aware. They both were passionately fond of children, and she was childless.” Whether Crippen truly shared his wife’s longing is open to debate, however, given that he had sent his own son to live in Los Angeles and did not now bring him back.
One of Cora’s half-sisters, Mrs. Louise Mills, said that her sister “craved motherhood” and that the lack of children cast a shadow over their marriage. “When I visited them four years ago they appeared to be perfectly happy,” she reported, except that Cora “would bemoan the fact that she had no child. I fear that in the latter part of her married life she became more and more lonesome.”
In a letter to another of her half-sisters, Cora wrote, “I love babies. I am certain that a baby makes a great deal of difference in a family. In fact, it is not complete without a baby. So I envy you. Oh, I tell you, it makes a great deal of difference when it is your own.”
PRESSURES ACCUMULATED. AFTER RECOVERING from her surgery, Cora threw herself into her singing lessons, which Crippen was glad to pay for. He liked seeing his young wife happy. In May 1893 the nation slid into a deep depression—the Panic of ’93—and the demand for Crippen’s medical expertise plummeted. He paid for Cora’s music lessons as long as he could but soon was compelled to tell her the lessons had to cease, at least for a while. They moved to less expensive rooms. As their income dwindled, they moved again, and again, until at last they found themselves forced to make a decision that Cora at the time of her marriage to the young and prosperous-seeming Dr. Crippen never imagined she would have to face. She should have been on stage by now, living well in an apartment in Manhattan or for that matter in London, Paris, or Rome. Instead she and the doctor found themselves not just back in Brooklyn, a discouraging condition in itself, but having to surrender to an even more humiliating state of affairs. They moved in with Fritz Mersinger, Cora’s stepfather.
For Cora this was a turning point. First there had been St. Louis, little more than a smoke-grimed outpost. Then came a steady rung-by-rung decline as the panic deepened and people lost jobs, and parents struggled to provide their families with food and heat.
Cora pushed Crippen to find work that would yield a better standard of life and get them out of Mersinger’s house and out of Brooklyn, closer to the world she had glimpsed in that first opera of her life, the men in their black suits and capes and tall hats, the women whose diamonds gleamed from the opera house boxes like constellations in a winter sky. Legitimate medicine—and homeopathy still was considered legitimate, though its appeal was fading—had failed to generate the required level of income.
It is likely, given Crippen’s temperament, th
at he would have preferred simply to wait for better times, when once again a visit to the doctor would be perceived as necessary and affordable, not as a luxury to be done without.
Cora, however, could not wait. To do so, to be patient and accept what fate had to offer, would have been out of character. Filson Young—his full name was Alexander Bell Filson Young—a prominent journalist and author at the start of the twentieth century, described Cora as “robust and animal. Her vitality was of that loud, aggressive, and physical kind that seems to exhaust the atmosphere round it, and is undoubtedly exhausting to live with.”
When Crippen first met her in Dr. Jeffrey’s office, what immediately had drawn his attention besides her beauty and lush proportions was her impulsive, buoyant nature, her energy, and her determination not to let herself be crushed by the exigencies of late-nineteenth-century urban life. But increasingly what had seemed impulsive and charming began to appear volatile and wearing, even alarming.
Years later, referring to Cora in this first phase of their marriage, Crippen said that “she was always rather hasty in her temper.” He knew, however, that others rarely saw this aspect of her personality: “to the outside world,” he said, “she was extremely amiable and pleasant.”
The tension in their marriage increased.