Why capital punishment is immoral - Dr Hawley Crippen (1910).

Crippen features on the front of the Mirror in 1910
The title Dr is in inverted commas.

Executing a criminal is murder, by hanging, gas chamber, injection or firing squad. Firstly the execut­ioner bec­omes a murd­erer himself, as destructive as the criminal he is killing. Secondly noone knows who was responsible for the crime with 100% certainty. Mistakes happen all the time.

Hawley Crippen (1862-1910) was born in Michigan US. He was working in a Philadel­phia hospital when he met his first wife, Charl­otte Bell, and had a son Otto. In 1892 while pregnant with their sec­ond child, Charlotte died. Crippen quickly left Otto with his parents, moved to New York and was married once again.

He was a homeo­pathic physician in New York when he married his second wife, singer Kunigunde Macka­motz­ki/Cora Turner in 1894. Having gained qualifications in both homoeo­pathy and ocular medicine, Crippen was wor­k­ing in a homeopathic pharm­aceut­ical company but eventually he was sacked from the pharm­ac­eut­ical company for spending too much time managing the wife’s stage career.

In contrast to her more amiable husband, Cora Turner Crip­p­en was dominating, chang­ing her stage name to Belle Elmore. After they moved to Lon­d­on in 1897, Cora became a music-hall singer and socialised widely. Because Crippen’s U.S medical qualifications weren’t recognised, he worked selling pat­ent medicines. He shared the business with a very young secretary, Ethel Le Neve (1883–1967)

 Cora Crippen on stage

 as Belle Elmore

The Crippen marriage was unhappy. Cora was a keen drinker and happy to indulge her taste for unfaithfulness. Hawley also enjoyed his own aff­airs. Then his wife disappeared in Jan 1910, the month after telling him she planned to leave him and to withdraw their savings from the bank. Crippen explained her disappearance to friends by saying that she was visiting the U.S; later he publ­ished a death notice from the U.S. Meanwhile Ethel Le Neve moved into the Crip­pen house and accom­panied Dr Crippen in  public, wearing Cora Crippen’s jewels.

  

39 Hilldrop Cres, Camden Town 

Crippen’s Edwardian "house of horrors" 

Suspicions were raised, and Crippen was visited by Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard. Crippen said his wife had left to live with an­other man. By the time Insp Dew visited the Crip­pen house again, Crippen and his mistress had sail­ed to North America. Dew ordered a thorough search of the house, leading to a grisly discovery. 

 SS Montrose en route to Canada

Dr Crippen boarded the SS Montrose to Canada with Le Neve, as­suming he would never be located, nor identified. But did he not know that his crime had made a sensation in the Brit­ish press? Ethel wore boy’s clothes on board and pretended to be Hawley’s son. But the ship capt­ain recog­nised the pair holding hands and notified his superiors via the recently developed technology of wireless telegraphy, marking the first time this modern skill was us­ed to track a criminal in the middle of the open ocean and rep­ort­ed back to the British police. The British public became even more rivetted to the ens­uing chase!

Police arresting Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve

on SS Montrose, July 1910.

Dew pursued and overtook the fugitive pair on a faster ship to Canada, and arrested them aboard. The couple returned to London, where they went on trial in mid Oct 1910. Evidence showed that Cora was definitely alive at a dinner party she hosted in their own home, in Jan 1910. As noted Hawley told everyone her that she moved back to America, raising sus­picions, but it wasn’t until July that police made a grim disc­overy in the mar­ital home. In the coal cellar lay human skin packs with no head and no bones. An aut­opsy and forensic analysis ident­ified the remains as those of Cora, who’d been poisoned then dismem­bered.

Crippen and Ethel le Neve in court,  London 1910

Daily Mirror

The evidence against Dr Crippen was nasty: missing wife; heap of human flesh in his basement; dodgy flight with a mistress; and inter­nat­ional manhunt and ar­r­est. But in court the pathologist testified he could not identify the torso remains or guess its gender. Yet after a five day trial filled with scan­dalous details whipped up by the me­d­­­ia, the jury con­vict­ed Crip­p­en in just 27 minutes of del­ib­er­­ation! Le Neve was found not guilty. VERY QUICKLY after the guil­ty verd­ict, Crippen was hanged at Pentonville Pris­on London, 23rd Nov 1910

But if Crippen’s guilt was uncertain, how could capital punishment have been considered? Since 2010, there’s been support for reop­en­­ing the case. Mito­ch­ondrial DNA, discovered in the 1960s, is st­ably transmitted only from mothers to their daughters. Inherit­an­ce made mitochondrial DNA suitable for use in forensic science, as in analysing the body parts found in Crippen’s London basement. Foren­sic experts showed that the body in the basement wasn’t Cora, possibly not even female. Perhaps the body had been put in the basement by a ten­ant before the Crippens moved there. [Of course if Crippen was the murderer, he would have stored his wife’s body somewhere else].

Is it pos­sible that one of Britain’s most infam­ous murderers was­ not a killer after all? So far, all attempts to reopen the murder trial have been re­jected. But even if the courts didn’t know about DNA testing back in 1910, they recognise that immediate execution allowed no time for appeals, new witness­es or new medical knowledge.

Ethel Le Neve's Life Story, published 1910

Photo credits: Daily Mirror