A thrilling reassessment of the Crippen case

On November 18, 1910, 300 women marched on the Houses of Parliament to demand the right to vote. Their protest was met with shameless brutality: punches, kicks, beatings and sexual assault from policemen and male bystanders. Three weeks earlier, a young woman named Ethel Le Neve had been tried for her part in the most sensational crime of the new century, the “London Cellar Murder.” The portrait of Le Neve presented by her barrister had been one of “perfect Edwardian feminine innocence,” docile, gentle, lacking in agency – a reassuring contrast to the strident, determined suffragettes, whose refusal to conform to societal expectations were to culminate in the attacks at Westminster. The suffragettes had their jaws broken; Le Neve walked free. Five days later, Le Neve’s lover, Hawley Harvey Crippen, was hanged at Pentonville prison for killing his wife, whose remains had been found at their home, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway.

The Crippen case was a worldwide phenomenon, played out breathlessly in real time across the Atlantic. As Hallie Rubenhold observes in this superlative new study, it also represented a watershed moment, a collision of the past with the future. While Crippen’s conviction was secured through the application of cutting-edge technologies (the telegraph, photography, toxicology), Le Neve’s release depended on a dated fiction of female helplessness, which proved more appealing to the jury than the facts of her involvement in the case.

In The Five, which won the Baillie Gifford prize in 2019, Rubenhold triumphantly reclaimed the life stories of Jack the Ripper’s victims. Story of a Murder similarly sets out to deprive Crippen of his starring role in a historical narrative which primarily concerns women but has been almost exclusively dominated by men. Polished, provocative and profound, this book is perhaps less angry and urgent, but it is a breathtaking demonstration of sheer historical skill. In challenging every assumption, and investigating every character connected with the murder, Rubenhold has produced not only a thrilling reassessment of a notorious crime but an impressive portrait of an age whose certainties were collapsing.

The unfortunate Mrs. Crippen, Cora, was American like her husband (though of Polish-German descent), born Kunegunde Mackamotzki in Brooklyn in 1873, but Rubenhold refers to her by the stage name she chose for herself, Belle Elmore. Belle was working as a maid when she met Crippen in 1892. She was pregnant by her employer and, horribly, it was this which drew the couple together. Crippen had trained as a homeopathic doctor, with a particular and increasingly sinister interest in gynecology. His first wife, Charlotte Bell, had died of a “stroke,” aged 33, after enduring years as Crippen’s guinea pig. “My husband is about to force the knife on me again,” she wrote pathetically to her brother, shortly before her death. Crippen then married Belle, after assisting with an abortion, and later persuaded her to submit to an unnecessary ovariotomy, a procedure which she deeply regretted and was the source of particularly horrific evidence at Crippen’s trial.

Crippen displayed considerable talent as a doctor, achieving a series of distinguished positions. But his peripatetic career followed a pattern of endless false starts, facilitated by the ease with which it was possible to disappear and begin again in the vastness of America. By 1897, when Crippen and Belle arrived in London, he had abandoned even the pretence of serious medical practice, devoting himself to lucrative quackery at the Drouet Institute – where he then began an affair with a young secretary, Ethel Le Neve.

While her husband flogged dubious cures for deafness, Belle was making a modest name for herself on the stage. A talented performer since childhood, she had dreamed of becoming an opera singer, but settled for the music hall, where she worked consistently for seven years. Despite ostensibly disapproving of her career, Crippen became her manager and, via the Ladies’ Music Hall Guild, a fundraising league of which Belle became treasurer in 1907, the Crippens found themselves members of what was then a theatrical establishment, mingling with celebrities such as Marie Lloyd and Dan Leno.

Meanwhile, Crippen had promised marriage to his mistress. Le Neve’s landlady was ominously skeptical, warning her that it was unwise to become engaged to a man whose wife was still alive. But Le Neve boasted blithely to friends about her forthcoming wedding. On January 19, 1910, Crippen purchased five grains of the sedative hyoscine hydrobromide and on February 20 he appeared with Le Neve at the glamorous Criterion ballroom for a charity gala. Belle’s friends were shocked and suspicious to see that Le Neve was wearing a diamond brooch they recognized as Belle’s. Crippen gave out that his wife had been suddenly called to the US, and later that she had died in California.

Without the efforts of the Ladies’ Music Hall Guild, Crippen would never have been apprehended. The ladies (gloriously cartwheel-hatted and feather boa’d), turned detectives, doggedly running Crippen’s lies to ground. Ignored by Scotland Yard and the American embassy, they inspected ships’ manifests, canvassed Crippen’s neighbors and demanded answers from Holloway to Los Angeles. A CID investigation was eventually launched in June, headed by Inspector Walter Dew, who, on searching the house in Hilldrop Crescent, discovered what was left of Belle bricked beneath the cellar floor. Her head and bones had been removed, but the remaining scraps of flesh were later displayed in “a large white pudding dish” at Crippen’s trial. The coroner in the case claimed that this was the most horrendous evidence he had witnessed in more than 40,000 inquests.

Less than 24 hours after the discovery of Belle’s remains, the story was emblazoned in headlines across the world. But Crippen and Le Neve had fled to Belgium, posing as Mr. and Master Robinson, father and son. On July 20 they succeeded in boarding the steamer Montrose, sailing from Antwerp to Quebec, but were soon identified by the captain, Henry George Kendall, who alerted the police via the astonishing new Marconi wireless. Dew set off in pursuit on the Laurentic on the July 23 and the race to Canada began. The Laurentic overtook the Montrose – though the arrests were almost compromised by members of the waiting press, who attempted to climb the ship’s ropes in pursuit of an exclusive.

Crippen mania continued as he and Le Neve were brought back to London and committed for trial. Despite numerous contradictions in Le Neve’s account, both accused maintained that she had been entirely ignorant of the killing, a helpless dupe, while Crippen’s defense presented the pair romantically, as doomed lovers thwarted by Belle’s vulgar, grasping existence. Mrs. Crippen, it was suggested, had deserved her fate, in the same manner as the suffragettes deserved a beating. Dorothy L. Sayers’s comment that Belle was a “noisy, over-vitalized animal” encapsulated a perception that women who overstepped their prescribed roles effectively had it coming. Above all, the public were fascinated by Crippen’s “neat, prim’”demeanor. Unassuming, bespectacled and softly spoken, here was the flip side of respectable, aspirational suburban gentility: a Holloway Mr. Hyde.

Rubenhold is a forensic archive researcher who has chiseled out crucial nuggets of fact from daunting masses of information. But it is her ability to move effortlessly between vital individual portraits and incisive social critique that makes Story of a Murder such an intellectual adventure. Tension builds slowly, as she draws the players together with the stately inevitability of a Greek tragedy, and the case she makes against Le Neve is as suspenseful and shocking as it is convincing.

As in The Five, Rubenhold is also sensitive to the ethics of the true-crime genre. Murder as entertainment is a disquieting subject, and the book insists throughout on the dignity of Belle as a victim and a human being. Story of a Murder is ingenious and utterly compelling. It concludes with a moving portrait of Belle as an effervescent, irrepressible woman whose life does not deserve to be overshadowed by the horror of its end.