Harleybloke

Anybody see the '5' prog last night casting doubt on Crippen's conviction? Hanged in 1910 for mudering his wife. Body parts found in the cellar of the house were said to be hers. She disappeared without trace.

Crippen always protested his innocence.

According to the prog, DNA tests on her decendants rule out any chance of the body parts being hers. Moreover, new DNA tests can deterimine whether or not the sample is from a male or female.

Samples from the body are still at the London Hospital museum. The tests carried out confirmed the body was a male.

Do we have another 'oooops' situation.................?? Hanged for his adultary rather than the murder?

Anyone else have a view?

.....You couldn't hear it, if they were shooting at me with howitzers!

batman

I read a book a few years ago which claimed that the body wasn't Belle's. The author claimed to have tracked down evidence to 'prove' she had a lover and that they had framed Crippen. It all seemed a bit far-fetched but you never know!

"Do you know why fattries are called fattries .... it's because they are big and people make things in them."

apricot

But...Remains were still found in Dr Crippen's cellar, wrapped in what were proved tobe Dr Crippen's pyjamas, so if it wasn't Belle, he still killed and filleted someone!

batman

According to that book I read, Belle and her secret lover killed that person so she could disappear and Crippen would take the blame for the murder.

"Do you know why fattries are called fattries .... it's because they are big and people make things in them."

apricot

Did the book say why he ran off with Miss LeNeve before the body was found?
Best book I read on the case was "Supper with the Crippens" by David James Smith, not a big fan of Ethel!

Hugo Fitch

I once heard a suggestion that Crippen was an abortionist which might explain body parts in the cellar if something went wrong. But not of course if the remains are male. But Belle ( who did not hide herself) was not seen again and Crippen had his lover cut her hair and pretend to be a boy so that they could escape and start a new life in the USA. If Crippen was innocent then he did everything he could to look guilty.

Here's a quiz

name the KCs who prosecuted and defended Crippen ( and who is reputed to have turned down the defence brief ?)

Harleybloke

A.A.Tobin was defence, no idea on the prosecution..................

Edward Marshall Hall. Crippen refused the line of defence that EMH wanted to follow.

.....You couldn't hear it, if they were shooting at me with howitzers!

Harleybloke

The prog put forward the theory that as Jack the Ripper had only been 20 years before, the Govt didn't want another gruesome murder unsolved. WSC was Home Sec and he was a man that always wanted quick results.

The suggestion was that the Police planted the evidence..................? They had been in the house for 3 days searching. When the remains were found only the Inspector and a Sgt were there. The Inspector had worked on the Ripper case, was he ensuring a result this time? He left the force a year later to become a private detective.

If the remains are male. Crippen is innocent of the crime. Cora disappeared but as an adulteress in Edwardian England, who let her husband hang, could she re-emerge?

Even if, as has been claimed, Crippen did murder his wife and dispose of the body, there is no evidence. Technically, I guess, he should be pardoned but it was a prog worth watching. Made very much from his point of view but what a thought, to be in the condemmed cell for a crime you didn't committ.

.....You couldn't hear it, if they were shooting at me with howitzers!

batman

To 'start again' elsewhere with Ethel. Belle made threats to 'expose' his abdultery and her cruelty to him in general were pretty good reasons for him to want to disappear. He saw her disappearance as the ideal opportunity.

"Do you know why fattries are called fattries .... it's because they are big and people make things in them."

Harleybloke

Try this link for more background.

BBC NEWS | UK | Crippen mystery remains despite DNA claim

.....You couldn't hear it, if they were shooting at me with howitzers!

apricot

What an amazing story, I didn't think there was any doubt it was Belle, oh-er.
By the way, Richard Muir led for the prosecution.

mrs_emma_peel

Found this interesting article in The Guardian (Mon, 30 June, 2008) by Andy Webb - the Director of the excellent Channel 5 documentary - Was Crippen Innocent? Revealed - with additional information from The Times:

As a journalist it's good to uncover a miscarriage of justice. But not so good to realise that the media largely caused it. I've directed a TV film that goes out tomorrow night and proves, thanks to DNA, that one of the most reviled killers of all time, Dr Crippen, didn't commit the murder for which he was hanged in 1910. But the subtext to this ripping yarn is that while Crippen might have been stitched up by the police, he was certainly stitched up by the press. It was the first feeding frenzy in newspaper history, with tabloid tricks that wouldn't sound out of place today.
The case was compelling from the start. Dr Hawley Crippen, American born, was a doctor married to the flamboyant Belle Elmore, a music-hall singer. After a party at their home, Elmore disappeared. Crippen told everyone she had returned to America, and later added that she had died in California and had been cremated. Meanwhile, his lover, Ethel Le Neve, moved into his house and began openly wearing Elmore's clothes and jewellery.

Grisly murder
Suspicious of the couple's actions, Elmore's celebrity friends called the police. An interview with Scotland Yard was enough to scare Crippen, who fled London with Le Neve. With her dressed as a boy, the two of them boarded a liner, the SS Montrose, bound for Canada.
When subsequent police searches found a dismembered female body in the cellar of the Crippen house in Camden, it was a sensation.
For the new photo-dailies that had just appeared (the Daily Mail was born in 1896, this was the story with everything. Grisly murder, sex, celebrity, disguise - and a chase across the high seas.
However, the SS Montrose was exactly the wrong boat to catch. First, it boasted a new Marconi wireless set. Second, it had a skipper, Harry Kendall, who was utterly media-savvy.
Kendall recognised Crippen from newspaper photos. He immediately tipped off Scotland Yard by wireless, but then went on to strike a series of deals with various papers, largely so that he would have sole claim to the huge reward of £250. He offered them a moment-by-moment account of the fugitives' every move: what they ate for supper; the books they read; how Le Neve's trousers were held together with a safety pin.
It was an extraordinary situation - as Scotland Yard detectives raced to overtake the Montrose on a faster ship, newspaper readers from Melbourne to Manchester were getting, each morning, an intimate account of the doomed lovers approaching their fate.
The papers came up with some very modern-feeling stunts - one hired a make-up artist and a tailor to give a female reporter a masculine makeover. If only Le Neve had done it properly. The Times reflected: "There was something intensely thrilling, almost weird, in the thought of these two passengers travelling across the Atlantic in the belief that their identity and whereabouts were unknown, while both were being flashed with certainty to all quarters of the civilised world."
After a breathless five-day chase across the Atlantic, Crippen was arrested. The story had become so big that more than 100 reporters had gathered near Father Point on the Quebec coast, first landfall for the Montrose. They hired their own ship to try to intercept the liner, but were lured away by a complicated decoy plan by the Mounties. Scotland Yard feared Crippen would jump overboard if he saw a boat-full of unruly hacks approaching.

Demon status
Crippen and Le Neve were eventually arrested and brought back to England. After a four-day trial at the Old Bailey Ethel was cleared, and Crippen was hanged. The papers had pretty well convicted him before his trial. For them, this odd-looking Yank with a gothic-sounding name was a perfect candidate for demon status.
Before the trial, Crippen and Le Neve were the centre of a newspaper bidding war that became comically bizarre. Le Neve dressed in her boy's escape outfit, for the Lloyd's Weekly News, and paid her legal costs by posing for photos. Crippen appointed a solicitor called Arthur Newton, which turned out to be a disaster.
Newton said he'd work for free, taking only the rights to the newspaper story once the trial was over. But what Crippen hadn't realised is that a hanging is a far more lucrative punchline than an acquittal.
The jury took just 27 minutes to convict - and Newton then sold, for 500 guineas, an entirely false "confession" which Crippen knew nothing about. He pleaded his innocence to the end.
The London Evening News, which bought Crippen's false admission, went from selling its usual 100,000 copies to 1m for the "confession special edition". Newton was later struck off for his role in the Crippen case and spent three years in Parkhurst, for fraud.
Crippen's family in America are now lobbying for a pardon and for the body to be repatriated to Crippen's home town of Coldwater, Michigan.

Ethel
Ethel Le Neve was tried 4 days later and found not guilty as an accessory after the fact. On 23 November 1910, Crippen was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London. Before his execution, Crippen requested that a photograph of Ethel Le Neve be buried with him.

Ethel Le Neve sailed for New York, under the name of Miss Allen, on the morning of Crippen's execution. She is thought to have then moved to Toronto - calling herself Ethel Harvey. During the period 1914-18, she returned to London and married a clerk called Stanley Smith. The couple settled down in Croydon and had several children, eventually becoming grandparents. She never told her husband or two children about her sinister association with Crippen. Ethel died in hospital in 1967, aged 84. She insisted that a photograph of Dr Crippen be secretly buried with her.

Poster/stills from the 1962 movie Dr Crippen with Donald Pleasence as Crippen, Samantha Eggar as Ethel Le Neve
and James Robertson Justice as the Captain Harry Kendall of the SS Montrose


The real Ethel Le Neve dressed as a boy


The Trial of Dr Crippen

Mrs Emma Peel

dpgmel

Thanks for that posting Mrs P- fascinating stuff.

mrs_emma_peel

You're welcome dpgmel

Mrs Emma Peel

apricot

Damn! I so wish I had seen this programme, sorry if I've missed something but who does he think the body was and how did it get in Crippen's cellar?