Dr. CRIPPEN INNOCENT ?????

Was Dr Crippen REALLY innocent? We exam the startling new evidence

By DAVID JONES
DAILY MAIL online.

19 October 2007

Among the many grim historical characters in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds, one small, innocuous-looking man, peering through the bars of a cell, evokes a chilling image.

Set in the context of the grisly crime for which he was hanged, it is the very ordinariness of Dr Hawley Crippen that sends a shiver through anyone who lingers beside his waxwork model.
Slightly built and barely 5ft 3in tall, he is dressed soberly in an Edwardian three-piece suit and starched wing-collar.

 

New evidence: Long despised as a cold-blooded murderer, Dr Crippen may not have killed his wife Cora

Thin gold-rimmed spectacles suggest a sense of cruelty in his ice-blue eyes; his walrus moustache cannot disguise a little smirk.
To many, the mere mention of Crippen's name induces nightmares, and if 20th-century villains were ranked by notoriety, this infamous wife-killer would be bracketed with the Yorkshire Ripper, the Moors Murderers and Fred West.
Or at least that was Crippen's reputation until this week. Now, in an extraordinary turnabout that may force Tussauds to melt down one of its most infamous exhibits, the original 'Dr Death' has apparently been exonerated.
According to prosecutors at his Old Bailey trial, in October 1910, the outwardly mild-mannered homeopathic practitioner killed his unfaithful second wife, Cora, coldly dissected her body, dumped the head and larger bones, and buried what remained beneath the floor of their North London home.
Then, with Scotland Yard on his trail, he and his lover Ethel le Neve (disguised as his teenage son) fled to Canada on the SS Montrose passenger liner.
But they were recognised by the captain from a newspaper photograph.
Using the wireless telegram transmitter ?then a new invention ? he alerted the British authorities and Crippen was arrested as the ship docked in Quebec.
Back in London, it took the jury just 27 minutes to find him guilty. A month later , in November 1910 , he was hanged at Pentonville prison, where he was buried in an unmarked grave.
A gripping saga of passion and betrayal, brutality and suspense, the Crippen story has inspired 40 books, half-a-dozen films and many documentaries.
Yet for almost a century, the central player's guilt had never been seriously questioned.
Ten years ago, though, the worldrenowned U.S. criminal scientist John Trestrail began to re-examine the case.
As a toxicologist who advises the FBI on investigations into poisoning, one detail in particular troubled him.
The prosecution had accused Crippen of slipping his wife a lethally powerful sedative before killing and mutilating her.
Yet in the 1,100 poisonings he has studied, 63-year-old Mr Trestrail has never come across another mutilated victim.
"Poisoners just don't operate that way. They are secretive murderers who want the death to appear natural, so the use of sedatives just didn't add up," he said.
The scientist examined all the evidence.
Because the body had been decapitated, he noted, Cora Crippen had been identified only by a scar on her torso, which seemingly corresponded to an operation she had some years earlier.
However, the Home Office pathologist of the day, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, was a blustering law unto himself who frequently rode roughshod over scientific detail to help secure a conviction.
And a leading pathologist has since deduced that the 'scar' was probably a fold in the flesh accentuated by pressure from the soil and stones piled on top of the remains.
Whoever was right, reasoned Mr Trestrail, countless other women in London, with its backstreet abortionists and heavy-handed surgeons, would have had similar surgical scars.
This was scant proof of identity.
Now the sleuth started to think the unthinkable. What if the filleted and dismembered corpse, dug up by detectives from beneath heavy stone slabs near the coal cellar at Crippen's home, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway, wasn't that of the doctor's wife at all?
There was only one way to prove his sensational theory. Mitochondrial DNA, which passes unchanged down the female line of families, would have to be obtained from the remains and matched against samples from Cora's living descendants.
Since Cora Crippen had no children and her Polish-German American heritage is complex, tracing these relatives took Beth Wills ? an amateur genealogist enlisted by Mr Trestrail ? seven years.
The breakthrough came after she placed a notice on the internet.
It was drawn to the attention of Cora's great-niece, Marie Hamel, now aged 64 and living in a suburb of Los Angeles.
Mrs Hamel agreed to provide a saliva swab. Her daughter, Anna, and sister Louise, who lives in Puerto Rico, also co-operated.
Samples from Crippen's purported victim are stored in three places: Scotland Yard's Black Museum, which has kept strands of her hair; the Royal London Hospital archives, which has preserved nine slides of tissue; and St Pancras Cemetery, where a plain grey headstone marks her grave.
According to Mr Trestrail, the Yard offered to do a test on two strands of hair for £17,500.
The body could not be exhumed, but the Royal London Hospital was willing to help.
The DNA experiment was conducted by Dr David Foran, a respected forensic biologist at Michigan State University.
Dr Foran carried out the standard procedure twice to ensure there were no errors or contamination.
He concluded with 'absolute certainty' that the body was not Cora Crippen's.
"When I saw the results, I thought: 'They got the wrong guy,'" he says. "It was quite amazing. I don't know who was buried under Dr Crippen's house, but it certainly was not his wife."
Dr Crippen's closest blood relative, 71-year-old J. Patrick Crippen, a distant cousin living in Ohio, may now petition the British Government for an official pardon.
He is also thinking about asking to remove Dr Crippen's remains from Pentonville so that they can be reburied in the family plot, in Crippen's home town of Coldwater, Michigan.
Meanwhile, in California, Marie Hamel, whose grandmother Bertha Mersinger was Cora's half-sister, wept when she heard the news.
"It was a really emotional moment," she said in an exclusive interview.
"I was happy Hawley was proved innocent, but I felt so bad that he died for a crime he didn't do.
"If that body wasn't Cora's and she was still alive, then she must have known Hawley was about to hang for murder and she didn't have the decency to come forward and save his life."
So, if the remains really weren't Cora's then whose were they? And how did they get beneath the doctor's heavy stone floor?
The son of prosperous Midwestern store owners, Hawley Harvey Crippen was born in September 1862.
He was raised as a hard-working, abstemious, God-fearing Protestant, and after graduating in homeopathic medicine, he moved to work in New York, where he married an Irish nurse.
She died of apoplexy soon after bearing their son, Otto, leaving Crippen a widower in his late 20s.
Crippen soon fell for teenager Cora Turner, a shapely and attractive aspiring Broadway showgirl of German-Polish descent.
They were an unlikely match. According to her friend, Adeline Harrison, Cora was 'a brilliant chattering bird' who 'seemed to overflow the room with her personality'.
Sexually alluring and outrageously flirtatious, in her high heels she towered above Crippen, who was bookish, reserved and prudish.
It was quite obvious why he was attracted to her.
 

 

Cora: Dr Crippen's wife

What she saw in him is another matter. She may well have regarded this older man with medical letters after his name as someone to take care of her as she clawed her way to stardom.
But life didn't work out that way. They married, in September 1892, when Crippen was 30 and Cora was 19, and lived comfortably for a while.
When the fad for homeopathy waned, Crippen took a job with a medicinal mail order company, and in 1897 he was sent to open its London office.
After sewing her wild oats for a few months, the promiscuous Cora followed him.
They lived first in affluent Piccadilly, but after Crippen was sacked (for devoting too much time to his wife's career) they were forced down market, renting houses in Bloomsbury and then Hilldrop Crescent, a modest terrace to which they moved in 1905.
The doctor, whose medical qualifications counted for little in England, scraped a living by treating all manner of ills. He even dabbled in dentistry.
By now realising she would never forge a stage career, Cora sought vicarious glamour by becoming secretary of the Ladies' Musical Hall Guild, a post that allowed her to mingle with celebrities, several of whom she bedded.
Crippen, meanwhile, became enamoured with his secretary, Ethel. However, by all accounts, he resisted the temptation to sleep with her, even though he knew his wife was cheating on him, until, one evening, he returned home to catch Cora in bed with the German lodger.
Thereafter, Crippen's affair with Ethel was an open secret.
Cora, for her part, embarked on a secret affair with Bruce Miller, a muscular, married former Chicago prize-fighter who performed as a one-man band after his boxing career ended.
For the sake of appearances, the Crippens' marriage limped along for five more years.
Crippen tried to appease his wife by buying her expensive clothes and jewels, but he was fearsomely hen-pecked and there were frequent rows.
Cora was last seen around 1.30am on February 1, 1910, when she waved off a couple of theatre friends, who had joined her and Crippen for dinner and a game of cards at Hilldrop Crescent.
A fortnight before she vanished, Crippen had bought five grains of hyoscine, a highly toxic sedative used to calm psychiatric patients, but lethal in large doses.
He had no use for it when fixing teeth or treating ailments, and the prosecution contended ? with no supporting scientific evidence ? that he slipped it into Cora's drink during dinner, expecting it to make her drowsy enough to kill with quiet efficiency.
But he had used too much hyoscine, making his wife wild and aggressive, and so he had shot her, then chopped her up and buried her to dispose of the evidence.
It was a neat supposition, yet if Crippen really did murder his wife that night, then the shy doctor was a better actor than his stagestruck wife.
For according to their dinner guests, the Crippens had got along amicably, and the following day, clients calling at the doctor's West End office found him in a chipper mood.
According to John Trestrail, nor did he have sufficient time to dispose of his wife.
"Assuming he slipped Cora the drug during dinner, it would have rendered her unconscious by, say, 3am.
"That gave him just four hours to eviscerate her body, before leaving for work at 7am. It just isn't credible."
Mr Trestrail prefers the hypothesis that the remains belonged to a woman who had died during a botched backstreet abortion at the Crippen house.
As hyoscine significantly slows down the digestive system, he says, Cora's stomach would still have been full if she had died in the small hours after a dinner party.
But the Crippen case pathologist, Spilsbury, found this not to be the case with the victim.
"If you were about to have an abortion, your stomach would be empty," Mr Trestrail points out.
"Hyoscine was also commonly used in obstetrics back then. We don't know that Crippen carried out abortions, but he dabbled in all sorts, so it is quite plausible."
The court heard that the body could not have been hidden beneath the house by previous occupants, as a pair of pyjamas buried with the remains carried a label of a type that was not manufactured until 1908 ? three years after the Crippens moved in.
But if the victim did die accidentally under the doctor's knife, why didn't he proffer this explanation, which could have spared him the gallows?
Was there a darker explanation?
Had Crippen secretly murdered this woman and buried her remains?
Did he do away with Cora as well, and conceal her body more successfully?
Immersed in the case for years, Mr Trestrail believes not.
Though Crippen's manner was odd, he says, his profile does not fit that of a coldblooded murderer.
"Anyway, those are questions for another investigation and another trial," he says.
"Hawley Crippen was tried solely on the evidence that he killed Cora. The body wasn't hers, so he was convicted and hanged in error."
Perhaps so, but there is no doubt that Cora vanished ? and the behaviour of Crippen and his lover, Ethel, did nothing to ease people's concerns.
In the spring of 1910, Cora's employers, the Ladies' Guild, received a note, apparently in her handwriting, to say she was returning to live in America.
Ethel then began flaunting her rival's outfits and jewellery. Weeks later, Crippen told his wife's friends that she had died of an illness in California.
When they asked where the funeral had been held, wishing to send flowers to her grave, he said she had been cremated , unusual for a Roman Catholic.
Guild members were suspicious and they contacted Chief Inspector William Dew, one of Scotland Yard's finest.
Without a body he was unwilling to investigate, but when the Guild proved that no transatlantic ferry had sailed on the day Cora supposedly emigrated, he called on Crippen.
Seemingly unflustered, the doctor claimed he had told Cora's friends she had died to avoid the humiliation of them finding out that she had abandoned him for her lover, Bruce Miller.
Dew was inclined to believe him, but the following day Crippen and Ethel panicked and ran away.
When their disappearance was reported to the Yard, Dew and a team of detectives searched 39 Hilldrop Crescent.
After two days, the body was found.
Meanwhile, Crippen and Ethel had booked on the SS Montrose to Canada as 'Mr and Master Robinson', but immediately sparked the captain's suspicions.
When Dew was alerted, he caught a fast boat to Canada, arriving in Quebec just ahead of his quarry.
Handed the arrest warrant, which stated that Cora had been dismembered, Crippen is said to have turned ghostly pale and exclaimed: "Mutilation? My God, not that!"
Was he expressing genuine shock ? or was this another performance?
At his Old Bailey trial, the prosecution's star witness was Bruce Miller, the man with whom Cora was supposed to have run away.
Under the gaze of his wife in the public gallery, he swore that although close friends they had never been lovers and he had not seen Cora for years.
Most people believe he was lying about the relationship, but after a four-day hearing, the jury had no doubt of Crippen's guilt.
Ethel, then aged 27, was acquitted of being an accessory to murder, and visited him daily until he was hanged, on November 23, 1910.
A few days before his death, Crippen wrote to Ethel: "I am innocent, and some day evidence will be found to prove it."
The hangman, John Ellis, later recalled how the condemned man smiled enigmatically as the black hood was placed over his head.
Was it because the doctor's conscience was clear ? or did some darker secret amuse him during his final moments?