Victim emerges from the shadows cast by her killer
The wives of the book's subtitle are Corrine "Cora" Turner, otherwise known as music-hall performer Belle Elmore, who Hawley Harvey Crippen killed in 1910, and before her, Charlotte Bell, who died in highly suspicious but unprovable circumstances. The mistress is Ethel Le Neve, Crippen's secretary whose affair with him led to the burying of Cora in the cellar.
It's meaningful that it is Cora who adorns the book cover, flamboyantly dressed as Belle, when the many stories about the case over the years have usually been illustrated with Crippen's widely recognisable image of trademark thick glasses and droopy moustache. And that subtitle relegates him to final place – 'The Wives, the Mistress and Doctor Crippen'.
This is non-fiction, and the choices of presentation reflect that it is the story of a murder, not a murderer, writes Hallie Rubenhold. To the author, the difference is that after Cora was slain it was Crippen and other men who controlled the aspects of her tale, her experiences and opinions, and it would be Crippen's version, his assertions about her, that would endure.
In the century-plus since, there have been voices protesting Crippen's innocence, that the human remains were not Belle's, and if they were she was a wanton woman who deserved to die anyway. Rubenhold touches on this side of the case, for balance, but says it is not so.
The author is known as a social historian and she might be said to be something of a specialist in the violent demise of women, having published 'The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper' in 2019. This new book, she pledges, will remove the killer Crippen as the star and fully restore the predominent but peripheral women into focus.
Charlotte Jane Bell it is, then, who is first introduced. She was born on April 20, 1858 in Ireland. The family was Protestant, farmers but tenants in debt on land that barely yielded enough to live on. During the Great Famine of 1845 to 1851 some one million Irish emigrated. Charlotte's father Arthur died of typhoid in August 1868 and the daughter, aged 19, began teaching in Northamptonshire in 1877. Her mother Susan and sister Selina left for New York in 1882 with Charlotte either accompanying them or following soon after.
Charlotte trained as a nurse, almost certainly at the Deaconess Institute of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a homeopathic hospital, and it was there she met Doctor Crippen, leading to their marriage on December 13, 1887. Crippen had been born illegitimate in Coldwater, Michigan, in 1862, either in July or September 11. As Rubenhold says, his life was riddled with such mysteries and gaps, and this was just the first. It's not the only time her meticulous research hits stumbling blocks, but they are fairly minor and she works around them.
In September 1882 Crippen took his first steps to a career in medicine, at the University of Michigan Homeopathic Medical College in Ann Arbor. He dedicated himself to studying the reproductive organs of women, exploring the link between mental illness and gynaecological 'irregularities', believing the former to be caused by the female reproductive systems. Rubenhold says his 'scientific' conclusions make for profoundly disturbing reading.
Crippen was less a bona fide doctor than a quack, a con man and pedlar of fake nostrums. Thus he was edgy too, and after the couple married in Denver they went immediately to start their life in San Diego, California. The city, still a lawless 'western' place, didn't work out for them and they returned to New York in 1890. Next, Crippen dictated another abrupt switch, to Salt Lake City, Utah, most likely, the author asserts, to flee debtors.
A suspicion arose that Charlotte was being mistreated by her husband, and on January 24, 1892, she died, her death attributed to 'apoplexy' (a stroke). 'How an otherwise healthy 33-year-old woman came to suddenly suffer a stroke is a mystery,' Rubenhold proclaims. Neighbours had seen him throw a book at her, striking her in the back of the neck, and the next day a neighbour called but found Charlotte dead. Nothing could be proved. She had sent letters to her brother complaining that Crippin was making her undergo abortions.
Crippen's first wife had been in her grave for hardly more than six months when he met Corrine Turner. 'Cora' was born on September 3, 1873, in the poverty of Brooklyn. From an early age she displayed a talent for performing, imitating animals and singing. She became a maid, her employer making her pregnant. Enter Crippen, recently arrived from Salt Lake City and now an assistant to a homeopathic physician with a specialism in gynaecology and obstetrics – and discreet abortions, which were a felony. They married in 1894. Rubenhold: 'How the relationship between a doctor and a vulnerable patient who had just endured a harrowing, illegal procedure then grew into a romantic affair begs many questions.'
Somehow, Crippen's young and fertile wife was persuaded to have her ovaries removed in winter 1894-5, but while the operation erased Crippen's concerns about parental liability, it was to have a traumatic and devastating effect on Cora's life, the scars of her ordeal proving both physical and emotional. It was like entering menopause but in her 20s.
Still, if Cora could not have children, she would sing. She went to New York for voice training and her husband was sent to Toronto for six months to set up a company. Acquaintances noticed a growing fissure in the relationship, though back in London the couple continued to present as happy. They kept up a respectable and amiable front, for in Edwardian Britain divorce would not be possible. Crippen would be unable, certainly not when his wife's physical impediments meant she could not have committed adultery. And there were his own misdemeanours with a mistress 21 years younger than himself.
The next major player in the impending tragedy was Ethel Le Neve, born in a two-room cottage in rural Norfolk, UK, on January 22, 1883. As an adolescent, she seized on growing work opportunities for women by joining Pitman's Metropolitan School in London to learn shorthand and typing. She joined Crippen's office in about 1902 and they became lovers.
Ethel wanted to marry her employer, a glamorous American doctor, a man who attended parties of celebrated performers, entertained her in expensive restaurants, made love to her in hotels, bought her jewellery and took her to France. But he strung her along and she endured a 'miscarriage'. To Ethel, the ungrateful Cora had everything she rightly deserved.
In January 1910 Crippen bought hyocine hydrobromide at a chemist and poisoned Cora, mutilating her and burying the headless and boneless remains in the cellar. Now Rubenhold brings more of her peripheral women into the story. Cora was treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies' Guild, a charitable organisation that also gave women a unified voice to agitate for social change, labour rights and the vote. When the guild received Cora's resignation saying she had to suddenly go abroad, suspicions were aroused. Crippen had forged the notes.
The ladies contacted Scotland Yard, Cora/Belle's buried torso was found and Crippen and Ethel fled by sea in disguise. They were recognised aboard and arrested on arrival in Canada. Crippen was found guilty at the Old Bailey in London and hanged. Ethel was acquitted.
Rubenhold's historical detection goes behind the prevailing myths to present a fascinating retelling of a true crime that has already been much told. The book quickly grips, taking the reader on a riveting ride to the end. Fortunately fact rules over supposition as the author draws on achival documents and accounts, though we might question colourful detail such as, 'The jury leaned forward to stare at him. The wooden benches and tip-seats of the Old Bailey creaked amid the expectant hush of the room.' Nice detail, but really?
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