American-born British historian Hallie Rubenhold scored a bestseller with 2019’s The Five, which focused on the victims of Jack the Ripper rather than the killer. With Story of a Murder, she applies a similar approach to the celebrated case of Dr Hawley Crippen, concentrating on the women central to the story rather than the doctor who, going on the evidence presented here, murdered his second wife and possibly dispatched his first as well.
While married to the Irish-born Charlotte Bell, Crippen criss-crossed the United States with their son Otto as the homeopathic doctor with a specialty in gynaecology flitted from position to position. The unfortunate Charlotte met her fate in Salt Lake City in 1892, ostensibly from a stroke, and was quickly buried in a pauper’s grave.
Abandoning his son to the care of others, Crippen moved to London to flog highly dubious patent medicines with his second wife Cora, who would later be known as Belle Elmore, while she pursued a music hall career. They had met when he performed an abortion a relationship with her then employer had forced on her.
Crippen would later insist on an unnecessary ovariectomy, something Belle never fully recovered from. This came back to haunt him when the scars of the operation were later used to identify the victim’s body.
The life of Ethel Le Neve, the young typist who succumbed to the doctor’s somewhat mystifying charm and became his mistress, is also richly detailed, with her family’s slow rise towards the middle class being especially fascinating.
She escaped conviction while Crippen swung, but Rubenhold is not entirely convinced of the innocence of a woman happy to assume the position vacated by Belle and disguise herself as Crippen’s son when the couple absconded first to mainland Europe and then across the Atlantic.
Crippen was eventually captured in Canada thanks to a ship’s captain who happened to have seen his picture in the press – one of the first uses of wireless telegraphy technology in such a pursuit – and the efforts of the Music Hall Ladies Guild, but even after his execution in 1910 there were those who thought Belle had “brought it on her outlandish, hyper-sexualised self”.
Then as now, “the fear of the empowered woman” makes some parties very nervous, but as Rubenhold puts it in the epilogue, “her murderer should not have the final word”.
