Newton From ‘Dr.’ Crippen’s manner and from the details which he gave you at that time did you believe his statement?
Dew No, not altogether.
Newton Did you in substance believe it?
Dew No, otherwise I should not have searched his house.
Newton The search took place with his consent?
Dew It did. I could not have gone to the house without his consent.
Newton At any rate, after the statement he had given you and after the search did it then occur to you to arrest him?
Dew I could not arrest him.
Newton On the face of it, speaking generally, did you not at the time consider the statement a reasonable one?
Dew No, I could not say I did not absolutely think that any crime had been committed. I thought it my duty to continue my inquiries, and I did so because I was not satisfied with his statement. I wanted to keep a perfectly open mind and to satisfy everybody – both ‘Dr.’ Crippen and the public.17
The final hearing at Bow Street magistrates’ court took place on 21 September. The crowds still milled around, awaiting the appearance of the prisoners. On this day Le Neve was taken to court in a four-wheeled cab, accompanied by a warder. She was spotted by a group of women who ‘screamed out at the prisoner, and one of the knot pursued the cab to the gates of the station, shrieking opprobrious epithets. Miss Le Neve hid her face behind an open umbrella.’18
While that was going on an auction was being held, in Oxford Street, of nearly 100 lots of furniture from 39 Hilldrop Crescent, as Crippen was desperate for money to pay his legal fees and, remarkably, considering the position he was in, anxious to pay the landlord of 39 Hilldrop Crescent the back rent he owed. The sale-room was crowded, and all of the 1,000 catalogues had been snapped up an hour before the sale began. It was a good-natured sale, with much banter and flash-photography taking place. Some lots achieved higher prices than expected, thanks to their infamous association. The highest bid was 14 guineas for a cottage pianoforte.19
Dew took the stand for the last time in the magistrates’ court witness box to tell the court of some measurements he had made at the request of Dr Pepper, with regard to the dimensions of the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent. In summing up his decision the magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen (who had replaced Mr Marsham), concluded that there was no doubt whatsoever that Crippen should stand trial for the charge against him. The case of Le Neve was more difficult. However, he considered there was enough evidence of Le Neve’s complicity (which could have meant only that she knew of the murder, rather than having taken part in it) to allow a jury to decide her fate. They were, therefore, committed to trial. Arthur Newton said that both Crippen and Le Neve would plead not guilty when the time came.
Crippen’s decision to plead not guilty may have sealed his fate, for there was an alternative. As soon as Newton had been retained by Crippen, he had wanted to offer the brief to Edward Marshall Hall, a charismatic parliamentarian whose forays into the criminal courts often attracted publicity. He had a commanding presence and ‘a passion for showing off, tempered by an attractive simplicity … combined with a love of the marvellous, which made him on questions of fact somewhat of an impressionist. But there was about his personality something which even his most austere critics found hard to resist.’20
Marshall Hall was convinced he could prove Crippen’s innocence of the charge of murder if the accused man would only admit to everything except intent to murder, thus resulting in a conviction for manslaughter. Marshall Hall’s biographer set forth the potential defence:
Crippen, in order to spend the night with his paramour, whether at home or elsewhere, drugged his wife with a new and rare drug of which he knew little, and of which he had lately purchased five grains. To be on the safe side he gave her a large dose, which turned out to be an overdose; or perhaps his continual dosing of her necessitated a big dose to ensure unconsciousness. In the morning he found his wife dead, and in a panic he made away with the remainder of the hyoscine, and with all a surgeon’s skill cut up her body, rising above his inexperience with the inspiration of despair. Then, hurriedly wrapping the flesh in an old pyjama jacket of his own, he buried it in quicklime, thinking it would thus be destroyed; as a matter of fact the quicklime had the reverse effect, and preserved the remains. Then he proceeded to write to a number of his friends a transparent tissue of lies. Crippen admitted that Miss Le Neve had slept at Hilldrop Crescent on February 2nd. Might she not have slept there on one or both of the previous nights, and frequently before that, while his wife was drugged with hyoscine and unconscious?
Unfortunately for Crippen, Marshall Hall was on holiday abroad throughout the magistrates’ hearings, and Crippen had firmly instructed his solicitor that his plea would be not guilty. Marshall Hall knew that this ‘would be disastrous’. He thought that Crippen would not have agreed to his line of defence anyway, as it could have made Le Neve an accomplice if she had been in the house with him as Cora Crippen lay dying or dead. Crippen would never allow any suggestion of guilt on the part of Le
Neve.21 Newton would have to find a defence team who were willing to try to convince a jury that Crippen knew nothing of the remains found at 39 Hilldrop Crescent.
At another sitting of the coroner’s court, on 19 September, Dr Willcox repeated his evidence concerning hyoscine. After Dew had been cross-examined by Newton about his initial search of Hilldrop Crescent, a juror rose and said he would like to ask Dew why it was that he did not have any means to stop Crippen fleeing. The coroner said that was not a question for the jury. Dew responded by saying that he was quite happy to answer it for ‘many attacks have been made on me. I shall only be too willing to answer.’ The coroner reiterated that the question was not appropriate. Dew said that he had a perfect answer to the juryman’s question. There was no question of a crime having been committed at that time. However, the coroner quashed the enquiry and dismissed Dew from the witness box.22
Dew was interviewed by the Penny Illustrated Paper after the abortive question from the juror. Dew explained that he ‘wished to give the information to a juror who was evidently unacquainted with the whole facts of the case. It was with no desire to offer an explanation to the public in answer to the scurrilous attacks – personal attacks – that have been made upon me in various sections of the Press. The police can afford to take no notice of such attacks.’23
On 23 September Dew visited Bath to conduct a lengthy interview with a Mrs Jackson, who lived in Great Stanhope Street. Mrs Jackson kept a lodging house for music hall artists, and Cora Crippen had stayed there in 1900 and 1902. During her 1902 visit Cora had told Jackson that she had undergone an operation in America on her womb. Dew was not impressed with Jackson, whose husband had served a three-month prison sentence fourteen years previously for keeping a brothel in Oxford Street. He had been defended by none other than Arthur Newton. Immediately after being seen by Dew, Jackson ran to the papers to tell them about her interview.
Meanwhile, at Brixton prison Arthur Newton’s young clerk let slip to the chief warder that Newton had brought an agreement for Crippen to sign, which sold the rights for the story of his life to an American newspaper. This was the means by which Crippen was going to pay his legal fees (it has also been suggested that it would have helped Newton pay off his horse-racing debts). There was more chicanery involved. Newton had held several interviews with Crippen, supposedly in order to prepare his defence, but one of Newton’s clerks had also been present and taken down Crippen’s life story in shorthand. The interviews took place within sight, but out of hearing, of the prison staff.
The matter was put before Winston Churchill. The Home Secretary considered that there had already been such immense publicity and sensationalism surrounding the case that the publication of Crippen’s memoirs could hardly add to it. Therefore, with regard to the publication of Crippen’s life story he ordered that they should ‘not fetter the accused on grounds of taste’, and that, as the money would be u
sed for his defence, the story could be sold. Newton’s misuse of his position was a different matter altogether. Churchill advised that Newton must be censured for his improper conduct in using the interviews granted for legal business covertly to obtain a narrative for publication.
Another of Newton’s clerks had interviewed Crippen, and was struck by the man’s character:
And yet, feeling convinced that he was a liar and a murderer, I could not help feeling sorry for him. Looking at him and listening to his slow, hesitating, nervous speech I simply could not visualise him as a cold-blooded assassin.
There he was, a little sandy man with drooping moustache and gold-rimmed glasses, blinking at us and stammering with thin fingers playing at his upper lip.
You would have taken him for a timid, kindly little shop-walker, ready to serve you with the utmost politeness, but always, in the back of his mind, thinking of his neat little suburban home and the neat little wife waiting to greet him there.
Always apologetic, always deferential, he contrived to remain aloof from the actual drama and terror of the case. To all outward appearance he might have been a client slightly perturbed at the prospect of a summons for riding a bicycle without a light.24
The coroner’s inquest to establish what caused the death associated with the remains finally concluded on 26 September. In his summing up, the coroner addressed several questions that the case had raised. Were the remains human? Yes. What was the sex of the remains? The medical evidence could give no decisive opinion. What was the identity of the remains? Unknown, but the fact that they were found at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, combined with Cora Crippen’s disappearance and Dr Crippen’s subsequent actions, was very suggestive that they were those of Cora Crippen. The jury left to consider their verdict at 4.37 p.m. They returned at 5.20, and returned a verdict of murder against Dr Crippen. They were of the opinion that the remains were those of Cora Crippen, and that she had died as a result of poisoning by hyoscine.25 This meant he could now be committed for trial.
The name of Bruce Miller had been raised at the very outset of the investigation, when Crippen had told Dew that he believed his wife had left him for Miller. Now residing in East Chicago, Miller appeared to be a little anxious that the impending trial of Dr Crippen would lead to his relationship with Cora Crippen being publicly examined. Miller had already been interviewed in America by the Pinkerton detective agency, at the request of Superintendent Froest. In a personal letter to Walter Dew the retired music hall performer seemed very reluctant to get any more involved than he had to:
Yesterday I made a short statement to the Pinkerton Agcy, and while I do not wish to ignore them in any way, under the circumstances I do not think a personal letter will do any harm.
Miss Elmore and I were the best of friends and I have watched the case with the most intense interest, never suspecting that I would be mentioned in it in any way, until the newspaper men came to see me and then I said as little as possible. However there has been little discression [sic] used in quoting my statements, though they have said nothing that will really do any harm.
If Dr Crippen has only made the charge that Miss Elmore eloped with me, I do not see that I would be of any service in the case, as I have not seen her for six years, and as I have been in this place during the past four years, proof of this could be had without my presence.
If on the other hand he makes any attempt to defame her character on my account, there is nothing he can say that I am not willing to face him in, but I do not think he will make any further charges because he well knew of our friendship, and, while he never took the pains to meet me even when he was in the house, and has delivered some of my letters to her in person, and that I have always written to her at their residence and have often recd a reply, from the provences [sic], some one must have forwarded them to her, and they were undoubtedly in his possession first.
Besides I have photographs of Miss Elmore that he took of her with a kodak, and according to her statements, he knew that I have them. Again while I was playing in the provinces, I was taken ill, and wrote to her and mentioned what the trouble was and in her reply she told me that the Doctor told her to tell me to take certain remedies.
Now, while I will acknowledge that I thought a great deal of her, and we were the very best of friends, she was always a lady to me in every respect and I always treated her as a gentleman should.
As you no doubt was one of the first to go through the house, you no doubt found my little cards, candy boxes &c. with my name on, and when I left there were two of my photos enlarged and hanging on the wall in her parlor [sic]. Now that Dr. Crippen knows all this I do not think that when his trial comes up that he will mention my name again, and I do not think that you will want me in the case either.
If I am wanted, I regret that on account of a big real estate deal that I have on, that my thirty days option will not be up till October 14th and it will perhaps take a few days to close up after that, it looks to me at the present time, impossible to get away before about the 20th of October, but if things progress favourably and I can leave before, I will do so.
Financially, I can hardly afford to leave, as I will have to drop my fall work in the way of building and wait until Spring, and I am making about $10,000.00 a year, you can see what that means to me. However I am willing and ready to stand up and defend the character of a most honourable woman, and a good friend.
Now, if I should come I would like to come into the country incog. And have a consultation with yourself and the prosecuting Attorney before anyone is aware that I am there, then I will act strictly to your advice.
You have won my admiration in this case to such an extent that I trust [you] as a friend, and know that you will protect me in this to the best of your ability.
Before the trial of Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve took place, the issue of the reward for his capture had to be resolved. Captain Kendall of the Montrose had made a claim for the £250 that was offered. Dew thought that Kendall’s claim could not be disputed, as he was the first person to recognise Crippen and Le Neve as the fugitives, and he had immediately reported his suspicions. Dew had carefully questioned others on board the Montrose and was satisfied that Kendall was entitled to the bounty. Indeed, no one else aboard the Montrose had claimed the reward for themselves, despite it being well known that it was on offer.
There was an element of doubt, as the deputy coroner had received a letter, signed ‘One of the Public’, which said that a steward on the Montrose who had formerly been a barman at the Brecknock Tavern, Camden Road, which it was suggested Crippen had frequented, had been the first to realise that ‘Mr Robinson’ was none other than Dr Crippen. Dew had noticed this story appear in a couple of periodicals ‘of no particular standing’, and dismissed the story. As far as he was concerned the money rightfully belonged to Captain Kendall, who duly collected a cheque at Scotland Yard from Mr Mann of the Scotland Yard Receiver’s office.
Dew was also the recipient of a reward. He was commended for ‘his conduct of the arrest & subsequent proceedings in Canada, when his work was I know done under trying conditions. The discovery of the remains in the cellar was also an example of this most careful investigation.’ Dew received a £4 reward (his wages at the time were £6 14s a week).
Now, at long last, the remains found at Hilldrop Crescent could be laid to rest. At the final hearing of the coroner’s inquest the jury had concluded that the remains were those of Cora Crippen, otherwise Belle Elmore. It was now late September, and the remains were causing concern to the Public Health Department of Islington, who held them in their mortuary. They soon wrote to Melville Macnaghten explaining that the disjecta membra ‘are likely to cause a serious nuisance’.
It was up to Dew to sort the matter out. He had received the order for burial from the deputy coroner, and first checked with Dr Pepper, Dr Marshall and the Director of Public Prosecutions, to make sure they had no further need of the remains. They did not. Crippen’s solicitor Art
hur Newton also had no objection to the burial, but perhaps unsurprisingly ‘demurred somewhat to their being buried in the name of Belle Elmore or Cora Crippen’. No doubt it might have helped his cause if the remains had not been positively identified, but the coroner’s burial order clearly stated: ‘[I do] hereby authorise the burial of the remains of the body of Cora Crippen alias Belle Elmore late of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Islington, age 34 years.’
Cora Crippen’s old friends of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild took charge of the funeral. They desired a private ceremony and did not want the press to find out their plans; so they arranged a cortege consisting of a hearse and two mourning coaches, which would leave the undertaker’s in Camden Road at 2.45 p.m. on 11 October and take a direct route to St Pancras Roman Catholic Cemetery in Finchley.
15
Rex v. Crippen
The defendant is an extraordinary man.
Lord Alverstone
The trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen was held at the Old Bailey, and lasted five days, from Tuesday 18 October to Saturday 22 October 1910. The presiding judge was Richard ‘Dicky’ Webster, the Right Honourable Lord Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice of England. Alverstone had been made Queen’s Counsel in 1878, and then became Attorney General in 1885 under Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, a position he held three times. Alverstone had also been the Member of Parliament for the Isle of Wight, until he became a judge. It was said that it was unlikely that ‘in thirty-two years at the bar any man ever had more work to do, or earned more money’. In 1900 he was appointed Master of the Rolls and made a Privy Councillor, before being created Baron Alverstone, and then made Lord Chief Justice of England.1 He was, according to Dew, ‘one of the kindliest of men’. Alverstone’s view of the Crippen case was that it was ‘an extraordinary one’.2 Representing the Crown were Richard Muir, Travers Humphreys and Samuel Ingleby Oddie, all acting under instruction from the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Charles Mathews.
Walter Dew: The Man Who Caught Crippen Page 15
