The Hilldrop Crescent Murder

The case

On 22 July 1910 the captain of a Canadian Pacific liner in mid-Atlantic sent a wireless message about two of his saloon passengers: a man who had recently shaved off his moustache and his "son", whose manner and build were "undoubtedly a girl". The captain was Henry Kendall of the Montrose, and the passengers, travelling under false names, were Hawley Harvey Crippen and his typist Ethel Le Neve. No fugitive had been caught this way before.

Crippen was born in Coldwater, Michigan, in 1862 and trained in homeopathy in Cleveland. In 1894, after his first wife's death, he married a young aspiring singer who called herself Cora Turner and later took the stage name Belle Elmore. They moved to London in 1897 when he was sent to run the British office of a patent-medicine firm. His American qualifications did not allow him to practise as a doctor in Britain, so he sold remedies, managed an ear clinic and, in 1900, hired Ethel Le Neve as a typist. By 1910 he and Cora were living at 39 Hilldrop Crescent in Holloway, taking in lodgers, while he carried on an affair with Le Neve.

On the night of 31 January 1910 the Crippens gave a small supper for two music-hall friends, Paul and Clara Martinetti, who left in the early hours. Cora was never seen again. Crippen told her friends she had gone to America, then that she had died there and been cremated. Le Neve moved into the house and was soon seen wearing Cora's furs and jewellery.

Cora's friends in the Music Hall Ladies' Guild did not believe him. One of them, the singer Lil Hawthorne, and her husband took their doubts to a Scotland Yard superintendent they knew. On 8 July Chief Inspector Walter Dew called on Crippen, who now admitted the death story was a lie: Cora, he said, had left him for another man and he had invented her death to spare himself the embarrassment. Dew searched the house, found nothing and was largely satisfied.

Crippen was not. Within a day or two he and Le Neve had left for Brussels and then Antwerp, where on 20 July they sailed on the Montrose for Quebec, Le Neve in boy's clothes. Their flight sent the police back to Hilldrop Crescent, and on 13 July, on the last of several searches, they found human remains buried under the brick floor of the cellar. The head and limbs were never recovered. The Home Office analyst William Willcox found the poison hyoscine in the tissue, and a local chemist's records showed that Crippen had bought a quantity of it shortly before Cora vanished.

Kendall's message reached Scotland Yard, and Dew sailed from Liverpool on the faster White Star liner Laurentic, overtaking the Montrose. On 31 July, near Father Point at the mouth of the St Lawrence, he came aboard dressed as a pilot and greeted Crippen by name. Crippen's reported reply was that he was glad the suspense was over. Because Canada was a British dominion, no extradition hearing was needed, and the pair were brought back to England at the end of August.

Crippen was tried at the Old Bailey in October before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Alverstone. The crown's case rested on the hyoscine, on a piece of skin that the young pathologist Bernard Spilsbury identified as bearing an abdominal scar matching Cora's medical history, and on a fragment of pyjama jacket found with the remains that carried a maker's label from no earlier than 1908, after the Crippens had moved in. The jury took 27 minutes to convict. Le Neve, tried separately as an accessory after the fact, was acquitted.