Hawley Harvey Crippen | |
|---|---|
 Crippen, c. 1910 | |
| Born | (1862-09-11)11 September 1862 |
| Died | 23 November 1910(1910-11-23) (aged 48) Pentonville Prison,London, England |
| Cause of death | Execution by hanging |
| Resting place | HM Prison Pentonville |
| Occupation | Homeopath |
| Known for | First suspect to be captured with the aid ofwireless telegraphy[1] |
| Criminal status | Executed |
| Spouse(s) | Charlotte Crippen (died 1892) |
| Children | 1 son |
| Conviction | Murder |
| Criminal penalty | Death |
| Details | |
| Victims | Corrine Henrietta Crippen |
| Date | 31 January 1910 |
Date apprehended | 31 July 1910 |
Hawley Harvey Crippen (11 September 1862 – 23 November 1910), colloquially known asDr. Crippen, was an Americanhomeopath,ear andeye specialist and medicine dispenser who was hanged inPentonville Prison,London, for the murder of his second wife, Cora Henrietta Crippen. He was the first criminal to be captured with the aid ofwireless telegraphy.[1]
Hawley Crippen was born inColdwater,Michigan,[2] the only surviving child to Andresse Skinner[3] and Myron Augustus Crippen,[4] a merchant.[5] He was educated first at theUniversity of Michigan'shomeopathy school, then graduated from the Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College in 1884.[6] After his first wife, Charlotte Jane (née Bell), died of astroke in 1892, Crippen entrusted his parents, living inSan Jose,California, with the care of his son, Hawley Otto (1889–1974).[6]
Having qualified as a homeopath, Crippen started to practice inNew York City. In 1894 he married his second wife, Corrine "Cora" Turner (born Kunigunde Mackamotski), amusic hall singer who performed under thestage name Belle Elmore.[5][7] That same year, Crippen started working for prominent homeopathJames M. Munyon, moving toLondon with his wife in 1897 in order to manage Munyon's branch office there.[5]
Crippen's medical qualifications from the United States were not sufficient to allow him to practise as a doctor in the United Kingdom.[8] He initially continued working as a distributor ofpatent medicines,[9] while Cora embarked on a stage career and socialised with a number ofvariety players of the time.[10]
After Crippen was sacked by Munyon in 1899, he worked for other patent medicine companies, ultimately being hired as the manager for the Drouet Institute for the Deaf - one of his prescriptions from there is now in theWellcome Collection.[11] There he hiredEthel Le Neve, a young typist, in 1900. By 1905, the two were having an affair.[5] After living at various addresses around London, Crippen and his wife Cora finally moved to No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent,Camden Road,Holloway, where they took in lodgers to augment Crippen's meagre income. Cora had an affair with one of these lodgers and, in turn, Crippen took Le Neve as his mistress in 1908.[5]
On the evening of 31 January 1910, Cora disappeared following a party at the Crippen residence at Hilldrop Crescent. Crippen claimed that she had returned to the US and later added that she had died and had been cremated in California. Meanwhile, Le Neve moved into Hilldrop Crescent and began openly wearing Cora's clothes and Jewellery.
Police first heard of Cora's disappearance from her friend, the strongwomanKate "Vulcana" Williams,[12] but only began to take the matter seriously when asked to investigate by two other friends, the actressLil Hawthorne and her husband (and manager) John Nash, who pressed their acquaintance,Scotland YardSuperintendentFrank Froest.[13]
During his first questioning by Chief InspectorWalter Dew on 8 July,[14] Crippen admitted that he had fabricated the story about his wife having died, claiming that he did so to avoid personal embarrassment because she had in fact left him and fled to the US with one of her lovers, a music hall actor named Bruce Miller. Dew was satisfied with Crippen's story and searched the house, finding nothing.
However, Crippen and Le Neve assumed Dew had more evidence than he had and fled in panic toBrussels, where they spent the night at a hotel. The following day, they went toAntwerp and boarded theCanadian Pacific linerSS Montrose, bound for Canada. The couple's disappearance led police to perform further searches of the house. The fourth and final search was on 12-13 July, during which they found thetorso of a human body buried under the brick floor of the basement.[14] Senior scientific analyst to theHome OfficeWilliam Willcox found traces of the toxic compoundhyoscine hydrobromide (scopolamine) in the torso.[15] The remains were identified as Cora's by a piece of skin from the abdomen; the head, limbs and skeleton were never recovered. The remains were later interred at theSt Pancras and Islington Cemetery,East Finchley.
The torso's discovery was enough for arrest warrants to be taken out on both Crippen and Le Neve on 16 July.[14][16] They were already crossing the Atlantic aboardMontrose, with Le Neve disguised as a boy. CaptainHenry George Kendall recognised the fugitives and, just before steaming beyond the range of his ship-board transmitter, had telegraphist Lawrence Ernest Hughes send a wirelesstelegram to the British authorities:
Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Mustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.
Had Crippen travelled third class, he probably would have escaped Kendall's notice. Dew boarded a fasterWhite Star liner,SS Laurentic, fromLiverpool, arrived inQuebec ahead of Crippen, and contacted the Canadian authorities.
AsMontrose entered theSt. Lawrence River, Dew came aboard on 31 July disguised as apilot. Canada was then still a dominion within theBritish Empire. If Crippen, an American citizen, had sailed to the US instead, even if he had been recognised, it would have takenextradition proceedings to bring him to trial. Dew and a Canadian police officer quickly joined Kendall on the bridge and the latter then invited Crippen to meet the pilots. Dew removed his pilot's cap and said, "Good morning, Dr. Crippen. Do you know me? I'm Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard." After a pause, Crippen replied, "Thank God it's over. The suspense has been too great. I couldn't stand it any longer." The Canadian officer then arrested Crippen as he held out his wrists for the handcuffs, doing the same to Le Neve soon afterwards.
On 4 August Detective Sergeant Arthur Mitchell began his journey to join Dew in Canada by taking a train fromEuston station to Liverpool[17] - with him he took Sarah Foster and Julia Stone, two wardresses fromHolloway Prison who would have charge of Le Neve.[18] The prisoners, officers and wardresses landed at Liverpool from theSS Megantic on 27 August[19][18] and then travelled to London on theLondon and North Western Railway, which the Met thanked for its assistance during that journey.[20]
Crippen was tried at theOld Bailey before theLord Chief Justice,Lord Alverstone, on 18 October 1910. The proceedings lasted four days.
The firstprosecution witnesses were pathologists. One of them,Bernard Spilsbury, testified they could not identify the torso remains or even discern whether they were male or female. However, Spilsbury found a piece of skin with what he claimed to be an abdominal scar consistent with Cora's medical history.[8][21] Large quantities ofscopolamine were found in the remains, and Crippen had purchased the drug from a local chemist before Cora's disappearance.
Crippen'sdefence, led byAlfred Tobin,[22][23] maintained that Cora had fled to the US with Bruce Miller and that Cora and Hawley had been living at the house only since 1905, suggesting a previous owner of the house was responsible for the placement of the remains. The defence asserted that the abdominal scar identified by Spilsbury was really just folded tissue, for, among other things, it hadhair follicles growing from it, somethingscar tissue could not have;[24] Spilsbury observed that thesebaceous glands appeared at the ends but not in the middle of the scar.[8]
Other evidence presented by the prosecution included a piece of a man's pyjama top, supposedly from a pair Cora had given Crippen a year earlier. The pajama bottoms were found in Crippen's bedroom, but not the top. The fragment included the manufacturer's label, Jones Bros. Testimony from a Jones Bros. representative stated that the product was not sold prior to 1908, thus placing the date of manufacture well within the time period of when the Crippens occupied the house and when Cora gave the garment to Hawley the year before in 1909.[24] Curlers, and bleached hair consistent with Cora's, were also found with the remains.[25]
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Throughout the proceedings and at his sentencing, Crippen showed no remorse for his wife, only concern for his lover's reputation. The jury found Crippen guilty of murder after just twenty-seven minutes of deliberations. Le Neve was charged only with being anaccessory after the fact andacquitted.[5]
Although Crippen never gave any reason for killing his wife, several theories have been propounded. One was by the late Victorian and EdwardianbarristerEdward Marshall Hall, who believed that Crippen was using scopolamine on his wife as adepressant oranaphrodisiac but accidentally gave her an overdose and then panicked when she died.[8] It is said that Hall declined to lead Crippen's defence because another theory was to be propounded.[26]
In 1981, several British newspapers reported thatSir Hugh Rhys Rankin claimed to have encountered Le Neve in Australia, where she told him that Crippen murdered his wife because she hadsyphilis.[27]
Crippen was hanged byJohn Ellis atPentonville Prison, London, at 9 am on Wednesday 23 November 1910.[5][28][29]
Le Neve sailed to the US before settling in Canada and finding work as a typist. She returned to Britain in 1915 and died in 1967.[30] At Crippen's request, a photograph of Le Neve was placed in his coffin and buried with him.[citation needed]
Although Crippen's grave inPentonville's grounds is not marked by a stone, tradition has it that soon after his burial, a rose bush was planted over it.
Before he was executed, Crippen wrote a letter to Ethel Le Neve. In it, he said, "Face to face with God, I believe that facts will be forthcoming to prove my innocence." It is claimed that modern forensic science has now fulfilled his prophecy.[31]
Questions have arisen about the investigation, trial and evidence that convicted Crippen in 1910.Dornford Yates, a junior barrister at the original trial, wrote in his memoirs,As Berry and I Were Saying, that Lord Alverstone took the very unusual step, at the request of the prosecution, of refusing to give a copy of the swornaffidavit used to issue the arrest warrant to Crippen's defence counsel. The judge without challenge accepted the prosecution's argument that the withholding of the document would not prejudice the accused's case. Yates said he knew why the prosecution did this but – despite the passage of years – refused to disclose why.[32] Yates noted that although Crippen placed the torso in dryquicklime to be destroyed, he did not realise that when it became wet it turned intoslaked lime, which is a preservative,[33] a fact that Yates used in the plot of his novelThe House That Berry Built.
The American-British crime novelistRaymond Chandler thought it unbelievable that Crippen could be so stupid as to bury his wife's torso under the cellar floor of his home while successfully disposing of her head and limbs.[34]
Another theory is that Crippen was carrying out illegalabortions and the torso was that of one of his patients who died and not his wife.[35]
In October 2007,Michigan State Universityforensic scientist David Foran claimed thatmitochondrial DNA evidence showed the remains found in Crippen's cellar were not those of his wife. Researchers usedgenealogy to identify three living relatives of Cora Crippen (great-nieces). By providing mitochondrial DNAhaplotype, researchers were able to compare their DNA with that extracted from a microscope slide containing flesh taken from the torso in Crippen's cellar.[36][37] The original remains were also tested using a highly sensitive assay of theY chromosome that found the flesh sample on the slide was male.[38]
The same research team also argued that a scar found on the torso's abdomen, which the original trial's prosecution argued was the same one Mrs. Crippen was known to have, was incorrectly identified. The scientists found hair follicles in the tissue, which should not be present in scars, a medical fact that Crippen's defence used at his trial.[37] Their research was published in the August 2010 issue of theJournal of Forensic Sciences.[39]
Inconsistencies in the evidence and suppressed documents caused James Patrick Crippen, the closest living male relative of Crippen, to formally request the British government pardon the doctor andrepatriate his remains to America.[31]
However, the new scientific evidence for Crippen's innocence has been disputed.[40][41] InThe Times, journalistDavid Aaronovitch wrote: "As to the body being male, well the American team was using a 'special technique' that is 'very new' and 'done only by this team' and working on a single, century-old slide, described by the team leader as a 'less than optimal sample'".[41] Foran responded by saying "tests showed unequivocally that the remains were male".[24]
Traces of the blonde hair found in curlers at the scene are now preserved in the Metropolitan Police'sCrime Museum. Another researcher said they asked to be provided with samples from them for DNA testing, but the request has been denied several times.[24] However,New Scotland Yard was willing to test a hair from the crime scene for a fee, which in turn was rejected by the investigators as "over the top."[24] Researchers hypothesized that the police planted the body parts and particularly the fragment of the pajama top at the scene to incriminate Crippen. He[who?] suggests that Scotland Yard was under tremendous public pressure to find and bring to trial a suspect for this heinous crime. An independent observer points out that the case did not become public until after the remains were found.[24]
In December 2009, the UK'sCriminal Cases Review Commission, having reviewed the case, declared that the Court of Appeal will not hear the case to pardon Crippen posthumously.[42]
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