When Hawley Harvey Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve were committed for trial in 1910 on the charge of murdering Crippen’s wife, the street outside Bow Street Magistrates’ Court was thronged from sunrise with thrill-seekers. Reporters, society ladies, an MP and the dramatist WS Gilbert were among those who got seats inside. The less fortunate stood crammed together for hours on the pavement, while an enterprising few clambered up on to the roof of the courthouse to peer in through the skylight.
The case of Dr Crippen satisfied a variety of appetites. To the thousands of people who crowded the docks when Crippen and Ethel were brought back to England, having attempted to flee, it was – as one of them acknowledged – a “thrilling form of entertainment”, made all the more piquant by the fact that one or both of the runaways might soon hang. To a reporter who was shown Crippen’s letters, written to Ethel from his prison cell but clearly intended for publication, it was the story of a “deep sincere and passionate love” – albeit one between a “little weak-eyed, middle-aged quack doctor” and a “common, pretty little cockney girl”. To lawyers and journalists and to the principals’ friends and relations, it was “an exciting commercial opportunity”. Ethel’s father Walter was quick to cash in: without consulting her, he offered to sell her story. And now, to the social historian Hallie Rubenhold, it is an opportunity to explore the “grubby and unmentionable” matters that interest her most.
The stories Rubenhold likes to tell are not about the well-documented goings-on of the high and mighty. Rather, she looks for ways of visiting the experiences of the silent majority. Those experiences are seldom recorded, except in the paperwork generated by a violent crime. For her, police statements, “the interviews with witnesses, the inventories of confiscated property and even the newspaper reports”, are “like gold dust”.
Crippen was a small quiet man who liked cutting up women. He grew up in Michigan and moved around a lot, initially finding respectable jobs, as a homeopathist and surgeon, but repeatedly giving them up and drifting on.
Averse to the prospect of fatherhood, he persuaded his first wife to undergo a sequence of abortions. She wrote to her brother saying: “My husband is about to force me to the knife again… if I die it will be his fault.” A few weeks later, die she did. Marrying again, Crippen moved to London, to become a purveyor of patent remedies – most of them useless sugared pills – and perpetrator of scams involving dentistry. His second wife, born in Brooklyn as Kunigunde Mackamotzki, reinvented herself and performed on the music-hall stage as Belle Elmore.
Belle was a great deal more outgoing and popular than her husband. When her career as a showgirl declined she became a moving spirit in the Music Hall Ladies’ League. Crippen bought her jewellery (a sound investment) and – to those who disapproved of her – she demonstrated her “vulgarity” by wearing it all at once, half a dozen brooches twinkling on her bodice. (Rubenhold likens her to Dickens’ Mrs Merdle, whose large bosom is the display case on which her husband’s wealth is laid out.)
There was another man. Belle may, or may not, have had an affair with him. Crippen was sleeping with Ethel, his secretary. One night, after the evening’s dinner guests had left, Belle vanished. Crippen said she had run off to America with her lover. Belle’s friends wondered why she wasn’t writing to them. Then Crippen began to say she had died. Ethel moved into the Crippens’ house and was seen wearing Belle’s diamonds. The Music Hall Ladies’ League went to the police.
After he was first questioned, Crippen persuaded Ethel to flee the country with him disguised as a boy. While they were crossing the Atlantic, Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard searched their house in Holloway, north London, and found human “remains” buried beneath the cellar floor. For once the grim euphemism is exact. This wasn’t a body – no head, no bones – just left-over bits and pieces of skin and flesh. That ghastly fact, along with the headlined drama of Dew’s pursuing the runaways in a faster liner and arresting them in Canadian waters, caused a sensation. Crippen was hanged. Ethel was acquitted of being an accessory to murder, mainly, it seems, because neither judge nor jury could believe that a young person with such decent clothes and nice manners could have been complicit in Crippen’s butchery.
It’s a sensationally nasty story, but in literary terms it is also a commonplace one – killer, crime, capture, court room. What makes Rubenhold’s book special is that she disrupts that conventional narrative pattern, focusing instead on what comes before the murder, and after the committal. Despite its title, her book at its best is not about death, but about life.
Relating the backstories of Crippen and his two wives – all from working-class immigrant families – she gives us a crowded, detailed view of various milieus in which new Americans struggled to establish communities and craft new lives.
Wife number one, Charlotte, was a nurse from an Irish family who talked of having left behind a life of rural gentility, but who lived in poverty. Crippen himself was the illegitimate son of a chancer who tried a variety of different trades – clerk, farmer, sewing-machine salesman – before absenting himself. Belle was the daughter of a nail-maker from Prussia, who died when she was a small child. Her mother and stepfather were German. There were pleasures – beer halls and theatres and singing groups. Everyone, children included, worked grindingly hard.
Belle went out to work as a maid. Her mistress was declared insane and consigned to an asylum. Left alone in the house with her master, 18-year-old Belle was soon pregnant. She found a physician willing to give her an illegal abortion. His assistant was Crippen. When the mild-mannered doctor – described about this time as “charming, gentle, kind and always eager to be of assistance, especially to the ladies” – proposed marriage she must have seized at the lucky break with relief. She was less happy when two years later her husband talked her into having her ovaries removed for no good reason.
The couple moved to London. Following them, Rubenhold sketches a panoramic view of the world they found there, taking us into a multitude of lives. The life of what Rubenhold calls the “petty rat swindlers”, the fraudsters of whom Crippen was one: people who peddled pseudo-medicines or set up dodgy stock-dealing companies; or who invited entries to a competition (half-a-crown entry fee) promising a non-existent bicycle as a prize. The life of Walter Neave, who was from a long line of East Anglian agricultural labourers who entered the class of white-collar workers as ticket clerk at the local railway station. The life of his daughter Ethel, one of the newly numerous breed of “lady typewriters” – a young woman entering the professional workforce, financially independent and smartly dressed, but always subordinate to her male colleagues, eating her lunchtime meat-paste sandwich and going home, lonely, to a rented room. The life of Belle Elmore (Mrs Crippen), who found her tribe when she became treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, a union of women viewed by the polite world as disreputable and brassy, but who demonstrated, in their loyalty to her, how formidable they were. The life of the demi-monde in pursuit of pleasure. At the Crippens’ house in Holloway there were noisy parties. On New Year’s Eve 1909 (only a few weeks before she disappeared) Belle said, as she saw her friends off, “I do hope we shall all be together again this time next year.”
Rubenhold knows how to milk that moment. Her narrative is pacy and vigorous. Having immersed herself in her Edwardian sources, she has picked up some of their vocabulary. Clothes are repeatedly referred to as “attire”. Her descriptions of Belle’s “sparkling personality and boundless enthusiasm”, or Crippen’s “suave” manner read like pastiches of period journalism. The effect is odd but pleasing – as though Rubenhold has taken us back, not only into the material conditions of these people, but also into their minds.
And then, halfway through the book, comes the gear change. The gruesome discoveries in the cellar. The flight of the suspects and their capture. The trials. Rubenhold does justice to it all, but her interest is not primarily in whodunnit or how or why, but in the way the story was received and distorted and gloated over.
Rubenhold’s last book, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, was about the women killed by Jack the Ripper. Here again she speaks for the victim. Contemporary reports described Belle as being “unbearable”, “loud” and “aggressive”. She was compared unfavourably with her “lady-like” and “unassuming” rival, Ethel, and with the “quiet”, “considerate” husband who poisoned her and chopped her up. In this lively book, with its teeming cast of characters, Belle finally has an advocate to answer back on her behalf.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s most recent book is “The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham” (Fourth Estate)
Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen
Hallie Rubenhold
Doubleday, 512pp, £25
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?