Walter Dew: The Man Who Caught Crippen

by Connell, Nicholas

  Ethel Le Neve’s reaction to the news of Crippen’s appeal failing was bizarre. The actor/manager Seymour Hicks was visiting a detective at Bow Street police station. Hicks was told that Le Neve was in the building to ask if she could borrow the pair of boy’s trousers that she had worn on the Montrose, because she had been offered money by a newspaper to pose as a boy for a photograph. The news of Crippen’s failed appeal came through while Le Neve was still there. When she heard the news all she said was ‘Oh!’

  Coincidentally, Seymour Hicks was a cousin of Alfred Tobin and had previously met Dr Crippen. The pair had enjoyed a ‘long and pleasant chat together’. Hicks found Crippen to be a man of a gentle nature, whose most striking feature was his strong spectacles, which gave the impression that he had bulging eyes. Like many others, he admitted, ‘I don’t know why, I always had a sneaking pity for the wretched man Crippen’.5

  Now that the normal courses of action had failed to save Crippen, desperate measures were being taken. Crippen’s former employer, Dr J.H. Munyon, offered a £10,000 reward for the reappearance of Cora Crippen, or for anyone who could prove that she was still alive.6 Francis Tobias, a Philadelphia lawyer, claimed to have proof that Cora Crippen was alive and in hiding in Chicago, ‘in order to carry out the most diabolical plan of revenge in the annals of crime’. However, Tobias failed to produce any evidence to support his story. In Cambridge an old soldier applied to the Borough justices offering himself to be hanged in place of Crippen, as a doctor should not be executed.7

  While Crippen was languishing in Pentonville Prison awaiting his fate, the prison’s governor, Major Owen Mytton Davies, was paying close attention to his notorious charge:

  Crippen was another prisoner who remains impressed on my mind, chiefly, I must admit, owing to the notoriety surrounding his case, as there was nothing heroic about him. He was a sordid, mean, avaricious little man, whose one redeeming feature was his extraordinary devotion to Ethel Le Neve.

  My first glimpse of him in prison garb was in the central hall at Pentonville; in his drab convict clothes, stamped with a broad arrow and ill-fitting, he looked more than unprepossessing.

  I was very suspicious concerning Crippen, and even had the rims and ear-pieces of his spectacles examined for concealed poison.8

  The prison’s chief warder, Mr H.T. Boreham, had a more sympathetic attitude towards the prisoner. He recalled Crippen as being ‘a very pleasant little man’.9 Another warder, J. Alan Shields, was similarly impressed by Crippen’s demeanour. Upon his arrival at Pentonville, Crippen asked for the prison’s regulations to be explained to him so that he could conform to them and be as little trouble as possible. Shields said that it was rare for a murderer to elicit any sympathy from the warders, but ‘there was about Crippen something that made it possible to forget for the time being … the crime he was accused of’.

  Shields noticed that Crippen was not sleeping at night. Crippen explained that he was seeing visions of the scaffold and of Cora passing through his cell. Crippen told Shields that this was not the first time he had figured in an execution:

  Years ago when I was living in Cleveland, Ohio, my wife and I both took part in private theatricals for the benefit of a local charity, and I played the part of a man falsely accused of murder and cut down from the gallows at the last moment on the arrival of the heroine, my wife, with proof of my innocence.10

  With all hope of a reprieve gone, Crippen published a statement that appeared in the Daily Mail and clearly showed the depth of his feelings towards Ethel Le Neve, as well as declaring her total innocence in the whole affair. Crippen took full responsibility for her plight, but not for the murder of Cora:

  About my unhappy relations with Belle Elmore I will say nothing. We drifted apart in sympathy; she had her own friends and pleasures, and I was rather a lonely man and rather miserable. Then I obtained the affection and sympathy of Miss Le Neve. I confess that, according to the moral laws of Church and State, we were guilty, and I do not defend our position in that respect. But what I do say is that this love was not of a debased and degraded character. It was – if I may say so to people who will not perhaps understand or believe – a good love. She comforted me in my melancholy condition; her mind was beautiful to me; her loyalty and courage and self-sacrifice were of a high character. Whatever sin there was – and we broke the law – it was my sin, not hers …

  In this farewell letter to the world, written as I face eternity, I say that Ethel Le Neve has loved me as few women love men, and that her innocence of any crime, save that of yielding to the dictates of the heart, is absolute. To her I pay this last tribute. It is of her that my last thoughts have been. My last prayer will be that God may protect her and keep her safe from harm, and allow her to join me in eternity.

  Despite his moving words, there was still the stench of hypocrisy when Crippen claimed ‘that the love of Ethel Le Neve has been the best thing in my life – my only happiness – and that in return for that great gift I have been inspired with a greater kindness towards my fellow beings, and with a greater desire to do good’. Clearly this kindness had not extended to his murdered wife’s family and many friends.

  Crippen wrote to Le Neve every day. One letter read:

  How can I find the strength and heart to struggle through this last letter? God indeed must hear our cry to Him for Divine help in this last farewell.

  How to control myself to write I hardly know, but pray God help us to be brave to help to face the end so near.

  The thoughts rush to my mind quicker than I can put them down. Time is so short now, and there is so much that I would say.

  There are less than two days left to us. Only one more letter after this can I write you, and only two more visits – one to-night before you read this letter, and one tomorrow.

  When I wrote to you on Saturday I had not heard any news of the petition, and though I never at any time had hope, yet deep down in my heart was just a glimmer of trust that God might give us yet a chance to put me right before the world and let me have the passionate longing of my soul.

  Your letter, written early Saturday, came to me last Saturday evening, and soon after the Governor brought me the dreadful news about ten o’clock.

  He was so kind and considerate in telling me, in breaking the shock as gently as he could. He was most kind, and left me at last with ‘God bless you! Good night,’ so that I know you will ever remember him most kindly.

  When he had gone I first kissed your face in the photo, my faithful, devoted companion in all this sorrow.

  Oh, how glad I am I had the photo. It was some consolation, although in spite of all my greatest efforts it was impossible to keep down a great sob and my heart’s agonised cry.

  How am I to endure to take my last look at your dear face? What agony must I go through at the last when you disappear for ever from my eyes? God help us to be brave then.

  Prison governor Mytton Davies recalled how Crippen took the letter from Le Neve, read it and then kissed it again and again. His last request to Mytton Davies was for Le Neve’s letters and photograph to be buried with him.

  Crippen’s executioner was John Ellis, the public hangman. As soon as the death sentence was passed on Dr Crippen, Ellis’s tribulations began. In addition to carrying out executions Ellis ran a barber’s shop, which was inundated with people coming in, not for haircuts, but to ask Ellis about Crippen. People stopped in the street and pointed excitedly at him, saying to their friends, ‘That’s him! That’s the man who is going to hang Crippen!’ To add to his woes, Ellis had to carry out an execution both the day before and after he hanged Crippen. Ellis said that the execution of Dr Crippen ‘was about the only time in my life that I really almost regretted the office I held’.

  Ellis arrived at Pentonville Prison on the afternoon of 22 November:

  I learned that the condemned murderer had been deeply disappointed when he found that all hope of a reprieve must be dismissed from his mind. He seemed to have convinced h
imself that he would never be hanged, and when the truth came home to him he was on the verge of total nervous collapse.

  Terrible though the shock was, he soon controlled his feelings once more and became his old cool, calculating self, a fact of which we were to have startling evidence that very night.

  The peephole in his cell door provided me with means of observing him, and as I gazed in at the man who had set the whole world by the ears I marvelled at his calmness. He sat there writing, and would occasionally break off to chat pleasantly and in most affable fashion with the warders whose duty it was to watch him night and day until the scaffold claimed him.

  Like all those who came into contact with Crippen, Ellis was struck by his amiable and helpful nature, which always came to the fore despite his awful predicament. He said that Crippen, ‘execrated murderer though he was … had a natural amiability and innate gentlemanliness that seized the affections of even his warders’. There must have been some inner turmoil under the calm façade, for Crippen attempted to commit suicide on the eve of his execution:

  Crippen undoubtedly committed a hideous crime which admits of no excuse but he had two sides of his nature, and it was the pleasant only that was uppermost during my contact with him.

  Yet that very night he showed that behind his suave graciousness lay power to make firm life and death decisions. Just before midnight one of the warders in that silent cell made a thrilling discovery.

  Crippen was in bed, and the men watching his progress through his last night on earth felt uneasy at Crippen’s restless motions. The strain on warders in such a position is a most intense one, and these men would have been superhuman if they had not felt overweighted with the responsibility that was resting upon their shoulders.

  At last one of them went to Crippen’s bedside to satisfy himself that the latter’s movements were nothing more than the usual restless tossings of a condemned man on his last night, but to his amazement found he was just in time to prevent the scaffold being cheated of its victim!

  For some reason never explained, Crippen had been allowed to retain his glasses, and the determined man had deliberately broken one of the lenses with the intention of using the jagged edge to cut his throat. This was discovered when the warder, seeing that Crippen’s glasses were not in their usual place, asked him where they were.

  ‘They are here,’ he replied, pointing under the bedclothes.

  He was at once ordered to get out of bed and then the frame, with one of the lenses broken out of it, was then found – just in time.

  This act was about the only one Crippen ever did that caused his custodians any trouble, for he was a most considerate prisoner, never making unnecessary trouble, and always doing exactly as he was told.11

  William Willis, Ellis’s assistant, confirmed the story. Willis thought that Crippen had planned to puncture an artery and slowly bleed to death while he slept.12 In addition, there was another incident two days earlier which the prison governor had noted in his diary: ‘Broke off rim of glass whilst retiring to lavatory with the presumed idea of attempting self-injury.’

  Hawley Harvey Crippen barely touched his final breakfast, which consisted of a pot of tea, bread and butter, and two eggs.13 He was hanged at Pentonville Prison at nine o’clock on the dark, cold and foggy morning of 23 November. Ellis had correctly determined that a drop of 7ft 9in would be sufficient to instantly dispatch Crippen, who stood 5ft 4in tall, and weighed 142lb clothed the day before the execution. The character of Crippen’s neck was recorded as being ‘normal’. Dew was relieved that he was not there to witness it: ‘How he met his death I do not know. Happily it was not part of my duties to be present at that grim scene. But knowing the man as I had learned to know him, I have no doubt that he bore himself bravely, and that his self-control never deserted him on that cold November morning when he breathed his last.’ Despite Crippen’s earlier suicide attempt, Dew was right in his guess. Ellis described Crippen’s last hours:

  His face throughout wore a set, calm expression. His warders looked more distressed than he was and nobody glancing at him would have realised that this was the man who had committed a fearful murder, had attempted to commit suicide a few hours ago, and who, in an hour and a half would have to walk to the gallows from which he would never return alive.

  As I stood on the scaffold I could see the procession come into view twelve yards distant. Behind the praying priest came the notorious Dr. Crippen, no longer a murderer to fear but rather a man to be pitied. Yet his attitude was not that of one who asks for sympathy. If he had ever shown cowardice or collapse he displayed none now.

  I could see him smiling as he approached, and the smile never left his face up to the moment when I threw the white cap over it and blotted out God’s light from his eyes for ever.

  In a trice he was on the trap-doors with his legs strapped together and a rope round his neck. One swift glance round to be assured that all was right and my hand shot to the lever.

  Thud! The fatal doors had fallen. The slack rope tightened, and in an instant was still. Dr. Crippen was dead.14

  All rumours of a last-minute confession made by Crippen were flatly denied. As with all executed criminals, a coroner’s inquest was held to establish the cause of Crippen’s death. Walter Schroder, who had been the coroner at Cora Crippen’s inquest, oversaw this formality. Dew knew that Crippen went to his death safe in the knowledge that his beloved Ethel had been set free. He wondered ‘if Crippen died with Miss Le Neve’s name on his lips?’ He probably suspected that he did, and was probably correct.

  POSTSCRIPT: THE MYSTERY OF CRIPPEN’S CONFESSION

  While reliable sources state that Crippen made no confession to the murder of his wife, the possibility that a confession did exist led to dramatic scenes the day before Crippen’s execution. On 22 November a young man entered the offices of the London Evening Times, a newspaper that had only been in existence for twenty days. He told the editor that Arthur Newton had a confession from Crippen, and was prepared to sell it.

  The Evening Times’s crime reporter, Arthur Findon, hurried to Marlborough Street magistrates’ court, where he found Newton. After much bartering Newton settled on a price of £500 in cash for the confession, and an assurance that his name would not be mentioned. They agreed to meet at 8 p.m. at the Langham Hotel, where Newton would hand the confession over. Findon took Newton at his word, and told his editor that it would be safe to announce in that evening’s ‘Stop Press’ column that the next day’s issue would contain the confession.

  Findon, along with reporter James Little, met Newton at the Langham, but the solicitor said he was reneging on the deal, fearing that he would be struck off the rolls by the Law Society if they ever found out what he had done. Findon threatened to print a story of how Newton tried to sell the confession. Newton backed down and said that an associate of his named Low would bring the confession to Findon’s house at 2 a.m. on 23 November (the day of Crippen’s execution). Low would show Findon the confession and then burn it. That way, Newton could say that he had not given it to Findon.

  Low duly arrived and read the confession to Findon and Little, who took notes. He then threw the papers on the fire; but as soon as his back was turned, Little plucked the half-burned confession from the grate. From this and their notes the two journalists pieced together Crippen’s confession.

  The Evening Times ran the story of Crippen’s confession on 23 November,15 and the paper sold close to a million copies that evening. The newspaper’s problems started when another London evening paper ran a story the same day that they had interviewed officials at the prison and the Home Office who denied that there had been a confession. They had also interviewed Newton, who had refused to comment. These denials were circulated by press agencies and appeared in the final editions of the evening papers.

  The next day the Evening Times staff held a meeting to decide what to do to protect their reputation. According to Findon they decided to say nothing, to preserve Newt
on’s reputation. Furthermore, Findon did not reveal any of this until immediately after Newton’s death in 1930. This remarkable altruism seems a little unlikely, as Newton had pocketed £500 of the Times’s money and humiliated them in front of their Fleet Street rivals. Findon said that he went to see Newton for an explanation and a statement. An unrepentant Newton told him, ‘I can say nothing about the confession. I personally know of no confession, but beyond this I cannot discuss the matter except to say that it is not within the right of any man to throw doubt on the confession.’ It was too little, too late. By 26 November the Evening Times’s circulation had fallen from 1 million to 30,000, and it went out of business after just over a year.16

  If Findon’s story is to be believed, then that was not the only occasion that Newton profited from an alleged Crippen confession. In 1922 he sold his memoirs to Thomson’s Weekly News, and these included the claim that Crippen had signed a confession in Brixton Prison before his trial.

  According to Newton, Crippen revealed that he had been driven to murder by Cora’s infidelity, nagging, drinking and jealousy. The murder was premeditated, for Crippen had bought a dissecting knife for the purpose of dismembering Cora. He had hidden the knife under his mattress, safe in the knowledge that Cora would not find it, ‘for she never even bothered to make my bed’. He burned the missing remains in the kitchen stove, but could not finish the job as the fumes were overpowering and he did not want to arouse the suspicions of his neighbours. Newton added that the confession was either lost or destroyed by the time he gave up his practice.17