Walter Dew: The Man Who Caught Crippen

by Connell, Nicholas

  That was no ordinary illness. It was something which seemed to strike the prisoner with horror. Whatever it may have been, it was contemporaneous, or nearly contemporaneous, with the murder of Mrs. Crippen. This is a fact which cannot be disputed.

  Muir told the jury that they would have to decide what caused Le Neve’s state of horror. He obviously wanted them to think that it was the knowledge of Cora’s murder. Le Neve’s state of horror was soon replaced with cheerfulness:

  She says that ‘the doctor’ has promised to marry her. She comes home wearing Mrs. Crippen’s clothes and jewels, and makes presents to Mrs. Jackson of enormous quantities of clothing that Mrs. Crippen had left behind her. She says that Mrs. Crippen has gone to America, and she and Crippen visit Mrs. Jackson on more than one occasion. She also had the knowledge that Crippen for a large sum of money had been pawning some of Mrs. Crippen’s jewellery. You must ask yourselves, ‘What is the explanation of this?’ Is it likely that any woman would suppose that the wife was going away from the husband leaving behind her furs, jewels, and everything practically that she had in the world, to be worn by any woman to whom Crippen liked to give them?

  According to the prisoner, Crippen never told her, so far as she could remember, whether Mrs. Crippen was coming back or not. But immediately she began to wear Mrs. Crippen’s jewels and go out in public in them – wearing the brooch at a dinner and ball of the Music Hall Artiste’s Benevolent Fund, a place where all Mrs. Crippen’s friends would be gathered together. You will have to ask yourselves whether there was not in her mind such knowledge that Mrs. Crippen would never come back as this indictment imputes to her, otherwise she never would have gone about with Mrs. Crippen’s husband, [worn] Mrs. Crippen’s clothes and jewels, and give[n] away some of Mrs. Crippen’s clothing to friends.

  Muir then discussed the Atlantic flight:

  What was it the prisoner knew which induced her to cut off her hair and masquerade as a boy, and condemn herself practically to perpetual silence, because she dare not speak in public in the hearing of any person lest her voice should betray her? The explanation which lies on the surface of those facts is that the prisoner knew that Crippen was flying from justice for the murder of his wife. What other explanation is there? Absolutely none.

  Walter Dew appeared at the trial and was examined by the prosecution, for whom he repeated yet again the story of the Crippen case from the Nashes’ statement at Scotland Yard until the arrest of Crippen and Le Neve. He was then cross-examined by Smith:

  Smith Have you enquired about her past life?

  Dew Yes. For ten years she has been a shorthand typist. I understand that she has not been living with her father and mother for some years.

  Smith What is her father’s position in life?

  Dew He is of the lower middle class. He is a canvasser for coal orders.

  Smith You know he wrote some articles for a paper called Answers?

  Dew He did, but I did not read them.

  Then Emily Jackson was called to the stand, where she gave her account of Le Neve’s strange behaviour around the end of January:

  During the latter part of January I observed that there was something strange about Miss Le Neve’s manner. She became very miserable and depressed. Upon one occasion in the latter part of January Miss Le Neve came home looking very tired and strange. She was greatly agitated and went to bed without supper. I went into the bedroom after her. I could see that her whole body was trembling, and that she was in a terrible state. I asked her what was the matter, but she did not seem to have the strength to speak. I asked her again, and she said she would be all right in the morning.

  I said to her that I was sure there was something dreadful on her mind, and that if she did not relieve her mind she would go absolutely mad. She said, ‘I will tell you the whole story presently.’ A little while afterwards she said, ‘Would you be surprised if I told you it is the doctor?’ I said, ‘What do you mean; do you mean he was the cause of your trouble when I first saw you?’ She said ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Why worry about that; it is past and gone?’ She burst into tears again, and said, ‘It is Miss Elmore.’ Up to that time I had never heard the name of Miss Elmore in my life. I wondered what she meant, and asked her, and she said, ‘She is his wife, you know. When I see them go away together it makes me realise what my position is.’ I said, ‘My dear girl, what is the use of worrying about another woman’s husband?’ and she said, ‘She has been threatening to go away with another man, and that is all we are waiting for, and when she does that the doctor is going to divorce her and marry me.’

  F.E. Smith was so confident that the Crown’s case against Le Neve was groundless that he announced to the court that he did not propose to call any evidence for the defence. He knew that it was up to Muir to prove that Le Neve was guilty and not for him to argue her innocence. Smith undermined the prosecution’s case when he cross-examined Emily Jackson. He established that Le Neve was frequently ill, and that the illness Muir had referred to actually took place at the beginning of January 1910, well before Cora Crippen’s disappearance. It also emerged that Le Neve had suffered a miscarriage shortly after she moved in with Jackson.2

  Muir proceeded with the prosecution’s closing speech. He reminded the jury of Le Neve’s behaviour at Emily Jackson’s house and her flight under a false name. Then he said:

  Le Neve was arrested on 31st July. She was told of the charge made against her – the charge of murder, and the charge of being accessory after the fact. She made no reply. On 21st August on her way home she was told the charge, and made no reply. On 27th August, at Bow Street Police Station she was told of the charge, and made no reply; and when committed for trial, with every opportunity for making a statement she made none.

  Then Smith made the closing speech for Le Neve’s defence, which was all the evidence he would present. Dew described it as ‘an eloquent and feeling speech’. He put forward the suggestion that Le Neve was a naive innocent who fell under Crippen’s spell:

  What was the misfortune of this girl, little more than a child, when it became necessary for her to earn her living? She had the extreme misfortune to come across the path, at the age of seventeen, of one of the most dangerous and remarkable men who have lived in this century; a man to whom in the whole history of psychology of crime a high place must be given as a compelling and masterful personality.

  Smith attributed the Atlantic flight to the fact that ‘Crippen had acquired this enormous power over her, and she was utterly ignorant of the laws of England. She was confronted with the problem as to whether she would stay in England or go with him.’

  He criticised Muir’s suggestion that Le Neve knew of the murder. ‘Does any one believe’, Smith asked, ‘that the girl went back to live at Hilldrop Crescent towards the end of February, the month that this murder was committed – went to live in this house knowing that its last tenant had been murdered by the man she was going to live with?’

  Lord Alverstone was again the presiding judge. In his summing up he told the jury, ‘The only matter upon which you have to concentrate your attention is, “Did Ethel Le Neve know when she fled with Crippen that Crippen was a murderer and had murdered his wife?”’ Among the things that they had to consider were:

  what is the probability of this scoundrel having told her. So far as the evidence is concerned, it stands this way. When he was arrested he said, ‘It is only fair to say she knows nothing about it. I never told her anything.’ It is perfectly plain that that was a most serious statement so far as he was concerned. There is no secret about it. Crippen was most seriously cross-examined upon it, and he was asked to what it could refer except his wicked deed towards his wife.

  The fact of this woman living with him and going with him to Dieppe, wicked and immoral as it is, is not evidence that he told her he committed the murder.

  Upon that part of the case you are entitled to take into consideration what Mr. Smith has said to you about her being gentle, sympathetic,
and loving and affectionate towards Crippen. If he had told her, not only might it have been dangerous to himself, but do you not think that it might have changed her feelings towards him?

  Dew thought that Smith’s closing speech would have relieved Le Neve of any anxieties she would have had about the outcome of her trial. It came as no surprise to Dew that the jury found Ethel Le Neve not guilty. She was immediately liberated. Dew felt the outcome was correct and felt ‘satisfied that justice had been done. Poor Miss Le Neve had suffered enough. Her association with Crippen had cost her many weeks of mental torture and doubt.’

  After the trial Lord Alverstone said to Smith, ‘I think you ought to have put her in the box.’ Smith replied, enigmatically, ‘No. I knew what she would say. You did not.’ Smith had been convinced throughout of Le Neve’s innocence. ‘Frail she was, and of submissive temperament, but not an accomplice in murder, or an ally in its concealment.’3

  Smith never changed his view of Le Neve’s innocence. In his account of her trial, years later, he wrote:

  I am convinced that she was innocent in every sense of the word. I had the advantage of a close study of the case, including a great deal that was never in evidence.

  She was a girl whose character for truthfulness had never been questioned. She denied all knowledge of the crime, and I am convinced that she told the truth … I was told that after the trial she left for America. But I never heard of her again.

  Smith’s assessment of Crippen was that he had been guilty of ‘a murder callous, calculated, cold-blooded, a murder which I say, in the whole annals of crime it would be hard to match for cold-blooded deliberation’, but ‘he was at least a brave man and a true lover’.4 Dew agreed, saying, ‘Whatever may be said and thought about Crippen, one can only admire his attitude towards the girl who had shared his great adventure.’

  Ethel Le Neve always convincingly denied any knowledge of Cora Crippen’s murder. She stood by Crippen until the end, and would never say a word against him. Le Neve eventually concluded that Crippen had killed Cora accidentally, and could not be considered to be a murderer. In her opinion the only viable theory as to what happened on the night Cora died was that Crippen had mistakenly given her an overdose of hyoscine to calm her down when she was in a fit of rage.5 This overlooked the fact that Crippen had purchased such an enormous quantity of hyoscine soon before Cora’s disappearance, making it almost inconceivable that he just wanted it to sedate her.

  Le Neve visited Dew at Scotland Yard shortly after her trial to thank him for his ‘kindness and consideration to her through her ordeal’, adding that Crippen, whom she had visited at Pentonville Prison where he had been sent awaiting execution, wished to add his thanks too. While Dew was pleased that they bore him no animosity despite the fact that he had tracked them down and arrested them, he did not consider that he had done anything out of the ordinary in his dealings with them, even though he had, like many other people, found Crippen an agreeable character. Dew admitted that ‘detached from the crime, there was something almost likeable about the mild little fellow’.

  It appeared that Le Neve was genuinely grateful to Dew, and in a series of newspaper articles published in 1920 she told the story of her involvement in the Crippen case. In them she recalled Dew’s first visit to Hilldrop Crescent:

  The visit of Detective-Inspector Dew, of Scotland Yard, was no shock to me. On the contrary it rather amused me. At first he must either have thought me terribly stupid or a very guilty person. What I thought about him was that he was very hard to convince and very persistent in his manner.

  Walter Dew turned out to be a very nice man and a real friend to a poor girl in distress, but when he first came to Hilldrop Crescent I was not greatly impressed with him.6

  As Le Neve told her story to the readers of the tabloid she paid further tribute to Dew, saying:

  Mr Walter Dew is a detective with a sixth sense.

  After he arrested me on board the s.s. Montrose I saw a great deal of him. In course of time I grew to like him. He is one of the straightest, kindliest men I ever met, but if you saw him you would never dream for a moment that he was a detective.

  Tall and quiet-looking, there is nothing out of the common about his appearance, and, looking into the kindly brown eyes [in fact Dew had grey eyes], you would never dream that behind them the brain of the man pulsates with human voltage.

  I think that Walter Dew gave Dr Crippen the idea that he was not worth a great deal of powder and shot.

  Walter Dew, however, never loosened his grip on the case from the moment he left our house at Hilldrop Crescent.7

  She also recalled another example of Dew’s kindness when in Quebec:

  I was longing to get out of my boy’s clothes and be a girl again. Mr Walter Dew came to see me and when I told him how miserable I felt he said there was no reason in the world why I should not purchase anything I wanted. He was very kind, and not only advised me what to get, but went out himself and saw that they were purchased.

  It was his idea that I should buy a black bonnet and veil so that I could easily cover up my face from the gaze of the crowd.8

  After the excitement and magnitude of the trials of Crippen and Le Neve, Dew had to deal with more mundane matters. Crippen’s former landlord, Mr Lown, was trying to extract one quarter’s rent for 39 Hilldrop Crescent from the police for the period from 29 September to 25 December. Dew protested that he had returned the house keys to Lowns on 29 October, and Lown’s claim was an unreasonable one. After some parley Lown agreed to the payment of one quarter’s rent, to cover both the cost of the rent and compensation for the damage done to the property when the police searched it. Dew was secretly pleased with the outcome of the negotiations, knowing that Lown was perfectly entitled to claim for one quarter’s rent, and quite likely to put in an inflated estimate for damages.

  18

  Appeal and Execution

  You can’t help liking this guy somehow. He was one murderer who died like a gentleman …

  Raymond Chandler

  Immediately after he was sentenced to death, Crippen’s steely composure gave way. Arthur Newton saw him after he had been taken down from the dock, and found that his client had ‘completely collapsed [though the more reliable Oddie said Crippen did not break down], and sat there in a huddled heap, crying with his head between his hands, utterly broken and dejected.’ ‘We shall appeal’, Newton assured him, but Crippen’s thoughts were only with Ethel Le Neve.1

  On 5 November 1910 Crippen did appeal against his death sentence, at the Court of Criminal Appeal before Mr Justice Darling, Mr Justice Channell and Mr Justice Pickford. The grounds of appeal rested upon the following points, signed by Crippen:

  1. That one of the Jurymen, after I had been given in charge of the Jury absented himself from the rest of the Jury without either he or the rest of the Jury being given in charge of the proper Officer of the court.

  2. That the identity of the remains found at 39 Hilldrop Crescent was not established.

  3. That the Judge did not sufficiently place before the Jury the question of there being no navel upon the piece of skin measuring seven inches by six inches.

  4. That the Judge misdirected the Jury in telling them that the onus of proof that the mark upon the piece of skin, measuring seven inches by six inches was not a scar, rested upon me.

  5. I desire to be supplied free of charge with a shorthand note of the proceedings at the Central Criminal Court to be forwarded forthwith to my solicitor.

  The member of the jury who absented himself during the trial was George Craig, who had fainted around midday on 19 October, the second day of Crippen’s trial. He was taken from the court by an usher and two doctors, while the judge adjourned the case until 2 p.m. Craig had sufficiently recovered within fifteen minutes to be reunited with the eleven other jurors in their private room. During his fifteen minutes’ absence, Craig did not see anyone other than the doctors and court usher.

  Crippen attended t
he court looking ‘little the worse’ for his recent ordeal. Crippen’s appeal failed on every point, and the judges considered that ‘there was ample evidence to support the verdict of the jury’. Crippen ‘turned round like an automaton and walked quickly out of the dock’.2

  Undeterred, Newton drafted a petition for mercy, in the hope that Crippen’s death sentence would be commuted to one of life imprisonment. He made several hundred copies of the petition and sent them to cities and major towns throughout England to collect signatures from sympathetic members of the public. Newton quickly raised 150 signatures for the copy of the petition in his office alone; many of those signing it were women.3 The petitions raised over 15,000 signatures by the time they were submitted to the Home Secretary.

  During his spell as Home Secretary Winston Churchill oversaw forty-three capital sentences. He granted reprieves in twenty-one of them, but not in Crippen’s case. Churchill took the matter of deciding the fate of condemned prisoners very seriously, and personally studied each case in great detail before making his burdensome decision. He would leave his verdict until the last possible moment, lest any new evidence came to light. Despite being a supporter of the death penalty, Churchill found such decisions very painful to make.4 On 19 November he announced that he had ‘failed to discover any sufficient ground to justify him in advising His Majesty to interfere with the due course of law’ (the prerogative of commuting death sentences belonged to the monarch, but in practice the Home Secretary dealt with the matter). Crippen was informed of the decision at 9.15 a.m. that day.

  Churchill did make one concession in Crippen’s favour. He had received a memo from his assistant under-secretary at the Home Office, Ernley Blackwell, and Home Office adviser Sir Edward Troup, indicating that if Le Neve and Crippen wanted to kiss each other at their final meeting at Pentonville they should be kept apart to prevent a weapon or poison being passed, and they thought ‘it is kinder to the parties themselves to keep such interviews as formal and unemotional as possible’. Churchill disagreed. He would not instruct the prison governor to keep Le Neve and Crippen apart, as long as every precaution was taken to prevent Crippen obtaining any poison.