The Crippen Obsession Transcript

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Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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I mostly talk about fictional murders on this show. But there is one real life case, from 1910, that has been on my mind since the very start of Shedunnit. The second ever episode I made, back in 2018, is about it, and it's been present in lots of the others since then. That's partly because the facts of the case are unusual and intriguing, but more because of the way writer and readers have reacted to it in the hundred plus years since it happened. You can't really talk about golden age detective fiction without talking about the Crippen case, I've discovered.

But the version of the Crippen case that tends to show up in crime fiction and in true crime narratives isn't the whole story. It usually focuses on Dr Crippen himself — his lies and his attempted escape — and gloss over his victim and her story. And so today, we're going to redress the balance, and look more closely at the obsession with all things Crippen. Why does one version of this narrative still haunt the way we think about crime in the twentieth century?

Joining me to answer that question is the historian Hallie Rubenhold, whose book Story of a Murder interrogates the popular story of the Crippen case and looks at the lives of the women who are too often erased in the retellings. I started off by asking Hallie how she got drawn into researching the Crippen obsession herself.

Hallie: It sort of crept in the back door in a way, because when I was writing The Five, which was about the five victims of Jack the Ripper, there was a book I was using by Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard, and the book was called I Caught Crippen. Now why I was using it for The Five is interesting because it's his memoirs. They were published after he retired and he was involved as a young police officer in the investigations in Whitechapel. And so I was very interested in reading his account and after I finished The Five and I was thinking about what I want to write next, I thought, well, hang on a second, let me go back.

What was this Crippen story anyway? And I read this account that he'd written and you know, his account is very embellished as I was to realise. And I thought, my God, this is really an incredible story. I just couldn't believe how of its time, of its moment, it was at the turn of the century. It just really sort of encapsulated what the Edwardian era was about in terms of technology and change, in terms of women and their experiences. And it really seemed to create a picture of a society in flux. And as a historian, that fascinated me. But also what really gripped me about the stories and the more I looked at it was I could not believe how many women factored into this story. If you looked at the number of women who testified at Crippen's trial, more than half of the witnesses were women, and I thought, this is really amazing also because at a time when we think of women really just finding a voice and finding a voice through suffrage. That's the way in which the pre-World War One era is presented to us is through this lens of suffrage, and yet here is this trial.

We get a real insight into all of these women's lives and actually how much agency they had. Suffrage was just one other thing. These women had lots of things going on in their lives. They had lots of ways in which they could use their voices and their economic power and their experiences, and it was this combination of all of these things that made this story so rich for me. It made me want to tell it.

Caroline: And how did all of that discovery match up with what you already knew ambiently? I feel like for most people, just the name Crippen does conjure something at least.

Hallie: Well, you know, funny enough, and, and again, this is one of the things I've found really since the book has been published, is I'll go into a room to do an event and about half the people I'm addressing will know about Crippen, will know about the crime, will be really engaged in the details of it, and then half of the people in the room will have never heard of it.

And that to me is fascinating. Also, I was one of those people, I'd never heard of this story. I mean, I'd heard the name Crippen mentioned, like in the same way I'd heard the Dr Cream mentioned and the Brides in the Bath and these types of iconic crimes that happened in the 19th and 20th centuries, Christie, people like that. But I didn't really know what the full story was until I started reading about it.

Caroline: Yes, I think sometimes people associate the name with creepy, quiet little man without necessarily knowing more of it.

Hallie: Yeah.

Caroline: Do you have a theory of why. The name does still linger for some people because I think of all of those crimes you've mentioned in that kind of late 19th, early 20th century, I think Crippen is probably among the more prominent, maybe Jack the Ripper excepting.

Hallie: Yeah, and Christie, I think people know Reg Christie. And it's funny, I think it's, and this is something I really grappled with when I wrote the book, is why do we remember Crippen? You know why? And I think there are certain people, certain crimes, certain incidents which are cultural touch points for us, and then a certain amount of time passes.

We can't even remember with subsequent generations why this was of importance, and yet we repeat the story over and over again. And that to me was very intriguing because I realised, in 1910, the whole world knew who Dr Crippen was because he was on the front page of every newspaper in the world, in every language, because there was an international manhunt for him and for Ethel Le Neve, his mistress and his accomplice in this.

And so people spoke of nothing else and they talked about it for years, and it wrapped into the general psyche to such an extent. And I'll tell you a really interesting story. I drew these two pieces together as I was researching and writing the book. My father, who grew up in Stoke Newington, the family were evacuated to Northampton and came back just after the war and lived in Stoke Newington. And Stoke Newington is literally, I think, it's about three miles up the road from Holloway, and my dad, when he was a boy, said he was afraid to go into the coal cellar in their house because he believed a woman was buried in the coal cellar and that she would reach up through the coal and grab him. I realised, the penny dropped as I was writing this book that, oh my God, he was obviously picking up on, you know, the story would've still been in the ether because this was the 1940s that was, it was about 30 odd years ago.

If we can think, 30 years past in the 1990s, we still talk about crimes that happened. They're very much part of our mindset and what we discuss, and so that to me was astonishing that this even somehow crept into my own family's cultural memory.

Caroline: Yes, I absolutely agree. That seems very indicative, and it's true, you know, all of the sort of urban crime legends that we remember now of, oh, you know, like, don't flash your lights on a deserted road, or all of those kinds of things, that's, it's the same thing, isn't it? You know, he'd obviously imbibed buried woman stories at an impressionable age.

Hallie: And this was really, really basically almost in his neighbourhood. This was North London.

Caroline: Local. Yeah.

Hallie: And so of course people would be making jokes about Crippen. They'd still be talking about the Crippen case. They'd be talking, oh, you don't want to go down to the coal cellar, that sort of thing. That's very interesting. That's how these things stay alive. That's how they stay in our memory.

Caroline: People tell them to each other, and I think sometimes with crime, there's this peculiar effect where people feel local ownership over it. Like if you go to a particular place where something bad happened, they will tell you about it with this mixture of horror and pride.

Hallie: This is the sort of juncture that I'm very interested in between legend and history. And I think it's really important, especially with where true crime is concerned, because as we know with the retelling of stories, stories become tall tales, they become embellished, they become legend.

And then at what point, as historians, we have a duty to go back in and kind of strip away these layers and find what the actual truth is. And in many cases, the truth is entirely different from the legend that grew up. And that's a really important process that we should apply to things not only crime, but all aspects of history.

And again, this is why the book is called Story of a Murder, not Story of a Murderer, because it tells the story in around of what happened to all of these people, what was going on in society. It's a bigger, wider picture. It's a panoramic view. And you know, with a legend. What you're often getting is a repetition of mores, of a particular time when that crime was committed that don't necessarily chime with our sets of beliefs today, and yet they reinforce a lot of stereotypes, a lot of injustices, a lot of things that we are now well passed in our evolution as a society. And so I think we really need to more closely inspect what it is that we're saying when we repeat these crime stories.

Caroline: What does the legend of Crippen get wrong?

Hallie: Oh, I mean, remarkably everything except for the fact that he was paying for his wife's murder. And even that as a result of the legend overtaking the actual facts that has subsequently been questioned and it needed be.

And I like to say that there is like a Wikipedia version of the Crippen story. And then there's the actual story and the Wikipedia story. And I do wish, and this is maybe a call out to your listeners, if you have read Story of a Murder and you want to go back onto the Wikipedia site and make adjustments to it, please do.

Because the Wikipedia version goes something like Dr Crippen, who was an American homoeopathic doctor, came to London with his wife, Belle Elmore. or Cora Crippen as she was also called, but I'll call her Belle Elmore, because that's how she liked to be known. Came to London in the late 19th century with her, his wife. She wanted to become a music hall performer.

He was peddling patent medicines. She was a horrible shrew of a woman who treated him terribly and was an alcoholic and unfaithful and didn't even have any talent and every sort of pathetic he could possibly throw at her is thrown at her. And so of course, he was forced into the arms of his lovely young lady typist, as they were called at the time.

Ethel Le Neve. And Crippen decided he wanted to be with Ethel, so he had to get rid of his wife. So he went out and he bought this hyoscine hydrobromide, which would put her to sleep, had it all been administered correctly, but he didn't administer it correctly. And anyway, put her to sleep. When I say put her to sleep, this is the euphemism for murdering her, but murdering her in a gently and thoughtful way, as actually Alexander Bell Filson Young suggests, and then he could have married Ethel, but that it didn't quite work out that way.

And he ended up having to dispose of her body in the basement, cutting up her body into pieces and disposing of it in the basement. And in the meantime, Ethel moves in. Ethel knows nothing about anything, completely innocent. They lead a happy life until Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard comes round. And you know, there've been reports that Belle has gone missing and reported by her friends at the Music Hall Ladies' Guild and of course, Crippen and Ethel leg it because they get nervous and they dress as father and son and they try to run away together on a ship to Canada and Inspector Dew gets on a faster ship. He's tipped off that they're on the ship. He gets on a faster ship, he gets to Canada before them. He arrests them, they're sent back to England. Crippen is found guilty for the murder of Belle and he's hanged, and Ethel is acquitted. And that's the end of the story.

That is skimming over the top of the story and not giving a lot of people their due credit, including Belle for who she was as a person. Completely defames her. She was none of the things that she was described as. And Ethel, who was his accomplice, and it was decided that really there was no need to actually really sort of go ahead with the trial. They would do it as a courtesy in a way to the justice system, but they just really wanted him and the evidence against her wasn't even thoughtfully collected in its totality. And so the victim gets victim blamed. One of the accomplices goes free, and then his first wife, Charlotte, who he very well may have murdered in Salt Lake City, is completely forgotten about.

Caroline: So what would you say is the biggest thing that people should know that they don't?

Hallie: My goodness. There are a couple of things. First of all, Ethel was certainly by no means innocent at all and has been painted to be the innocent party and all of this and that Belle Elmore was not this harridan, this shrew, this talentless woman that nobody loved, that subsequent authors have made her out to be. It's a complete fiction. Belle was very well loved by her friends and her family. Her career as a music hall performer did not take off, but neither did the majority of people's careers.

Caroline: It's not a personality flaw, is it?

Hallie: It's not a personality flaw. And in fact if you go back as I did, and you look at the reviews of her performances, she got standing ovations and people liked her. It's just that she wasn't exceptional.

But you know, not everybody is Marie Lloyd. You know, that's no reason to penalise somebody. She was very well loved. She made a name for herself as the Treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies' Guild. And the Music Hall Ladies' Guild was this organisation, it's like a sort of proto union for music hall women who looked after other music hall women and their children.

And it was a charity organisation and a social organisation. Belle raised, was one of a number of very high profile women who raised, money for women in need in the music hall and their children. And she was so successful at it that actually a couple months before she was murdered she was publicly honoured in a ceremony by the Music Hall Ladies Guild for her charitable work, and pictures of her appeared on the front page of the Era newspaper, which was, you know, the show newspaper. So this idea that she wasn't loved or respected, nobody knew who she was and nobody cared about her, it was a complete lie.

Caroline: And her friends from the Guild are very important to the case. Could you tell us a bit more about them?

Hallie: Yes. Oh, they're really extraordinary and I think, again, as I say in the book, that this story is largely a book about women, but kind of appropriated by men who tell it and that men tell it in this way. It's interesting if you look at who left accounts of this case and it, it appears a lot in memoirs and writing autobiography in the early and mid twentieth century was a big trend and you had everybody from Inspector Dew to Captain Kendall, who was the captain on board the Montrose, the ship where they were found to lots of journalists, to all the barristers, to everybody involved in the case, wrote their memoirs and told a version of the Crippen story. You have all these male voices. By comparison, you have very few female voices telling this story.

So you have Ethel. Ethel tells the story several times through ghost writers, and that's fascinating, but only one other person really gets to tell her story. And that's Melinda May, who was the secretary of the Music Hall Ladies Guild, who tells her story in a book about how she experienced all of this. But these women did leave witness statements. They left police statements we can cobble together their stories. They are amazing, they indefatigable in their work in trying to track down what happened to their friend. When Belle goes missing, they think there's, there's something really wrong here, and they go knocking on doors. They interrogate Crippen on a number of occasions. They even hire a private detective to trail him and Ethel and this person got invited to a dinner party where Ethel and Crippen were at, and it's very interesting. I mean, he wasn't able to really ascertain anything. But they had, the president of Music Hall Ladies Guild was touring in the United States at the time, and she got involved and she tried to get the American authorities involved. She got in touch with Belle's sisters, so when they were on that ship coming and they, they figured they would be going to America, didn't realise they were going to Canada, but organised this dragnet.

So the Music Hall Ladies Guild in United States and the sisters of Belle Elmore were waiting in New York in the harbour to try to identify him as he got off these ships. These women did everything in their power. And then obviously when her body was found and when Crippen was arrested, they testified at the trial. They testified at the inquest. They raised money for Belle's funeral. They paid for her funeral, and they actually even got inheritance law changed in this country so that if you have murdered your spouse you cannot inherit their worldly goods. Well, who would've thought, right? But their impact was tremendous.

Caroline: It's extraordinary, and it's such a brilliant part of the story that, as you say, the narrative after the fact is so male dominated. But I particularly find the period before her body is discovered, when there's this competing narrative, her friends are all saying, we think something's really, really wrong. And her husband is saying, no, no, no. She's just gone to America. It's completely fine. No need to worry here. They don't give up. They don't take his word for it, which I think is a great testament to her character that they loved their friend and they wanted to know.

Hallie: Yeah, absolutely. And Scotland Yard wouldn't listen to them.

Caroline: Of course.

Hallie: They went to Scotland Yard several times. It was only until Lillian Nash, she and her husband went to Scotland Yard and he called on a friend of his at Scotland Yard, that they took it seriously. What is so frustrating about this is there were women who were saying, this is our friend. We know her behaviour. We know this is not something she would do, and they weren't taken seriously.

Caroline: Yes. They were trying to point out the anomalies even as Crippen was trying to smooth them over and pretend they weren't happening. He came with a huge societal advantage when it came to being believed. So could you tell us a bit more about Belle Elmore, about her life pre murder?

Hallie: Yeah. I think she's quite a fascinating character. I hate using this term, she was a woman before her time, but she really was a woman before her time. I do think that if she were alive today, she'd be an influencer because she's just got this get up and go about her. She's got this spirit in her, which is just amazing. I mean, she's born in Brooklyn, in a tenement building. Her family are very poor. They're immigrants, German and Polish immigrants, and Russian, and when she's very young, her father dies and her mother remarries immediately to a German man. And they struggle. I mean, it's an enormous family. She gets a fairly decent education for the time because in the United States, they were quite keen on making sure that public school, as in state school education, was widely available to people.

She leaves school at about 16ish and she goes and works as a servant for a family who have slightly more money and something happens. We don't know what, but I mean this family were very strange. I mean, when I tell you this story is so gothic at times, it really is quite surprising.

So she's working for a man called Charles Lincoln who made a lot of money basically being one of the people who helped to invent central heating in the 1890s, which is very interesting in itself. And he was moving into property development and it just so happened that at about the time that Belle came to work as a housemaid in the house, he had just put his wife in an asylum, that wonderful Victorian chestnut, and we don't know why, but then he and his brother basically took all of his wife's property and Belle worked for them and suddenly Bell finds herself pregnant. So we don't know if this was a consensual relationship, if it was rape, we don't know what the situation was. But she was pregnant and she was a pregnant teenager, and she was hiding from her family. Her family didn't know about it.

And he put her in a little flat of her own in Brooklyn and arranged for her to have an abortion. And abortions at this time were highly illegal in New York. I mean, you could literally go to prison for being in the same room where an abortion was performed, yet they were doctors who still did it because the money and because there was an enormous demand for it, as they have always been.

And Crippen was one of the men involved in procuring that abortion for her, and he looked after her. What's so creepy about him, he was a homeopathist but he was also a specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics. He did perform abortions, and so he met Belle and a relationship formed between them.

It's very creepy in itself. And they quickly got married. They got married in New Jersey, which was sort of like a Gretna Green in the United States, so it's a very quick marriage, and then he decides he doesn't want her to have any children, so he makes an excuse and tells her she needs her ovaries out. Basically at the age of 21, she's sterilised. That completely devastates her.

Caroline: Of course. Yeah.

Hallie: Yeah. You can imagine. This is a girl, a young woman who grew up in a Catholic family who is whole, you know, Victorian era that her whole calling in life was to be a mother and a wife. She now had that taken away from her. So what does she do? A lot of women would just kind of wilt under the misery of that, but Belle said, I'm going to have a career and I'm going to be an opera singer.

And so Crippen gave her music lessons and opera lessons, and she took opera lessons. That's what she wanted to do. And then Crippen got this opportunity to work in London, and she went with him and she realised, well, I may not have such a opportunity to become an opera performer in London, so I know I'll just pivot onto music hall.

And so she rebuilt herself: music hall, singing lessons and ingratiated herself with all of these really famous people in the music hall. You know, she really climbed into it whether or not she was a success on the stage as almost irrelevant. I mean, she was hanging out with the most famous people in music hall at that time, so she really was a self-starter.

Caroline: So she really took what she had and made a lot out of it, it sounds like.

Hallie: Yeah.

Caroline: And none of this, of course, ever appears in the way the story is told after her husband murders her.

Hallie: No.

Caroline: Your book is called Story of a Murder, these stories, what do they tell us more generally about media, about history? What do we learn from the trends in these stories?

Hallie: I mean, the way in which I address these stories tends to be quite different than other people. My whole purpose in writing this is to take focus off the murderer. Apart from that, it's to do something that I think increasingly in this day and age, we find very uncomfortable, which is to find the grey area and to sit with (a) not having absolute answers for everything, and (b) the reality that people are deeply complex and even what we would call bad people, don't necessarily start out bad and to have empathy for everyone.

And I know it's a very hard position to have. I do believe that people exist on a kind of sliding scale. You know, we do good things and we do bad things, and I heard the saying that a hero is just a villain on a good day. And as I demonstrate by tracing the histories of all of these people, Crippen started out as just a boy who wanted to be a doctor and something went wrong along the way, and people find themselves sliding down a slippery slope. Ethel just wanted a better life and then finds herself deeply embroiled in fraud. And the commercial enterprises that Crippen is involved with that are very dark. And does that make Ethel a terrible human being? It makes her fascinating and complex human being, you know, and it's that I think we need to be much more comfortable with not knowing and with nuance.

Caroline: Where do you find the grey area in this story?

Hallie: In the personalities. What I love is that people will read this and they'll go, well but Belle could be difficult. Well, of course, who can't be difficult? Not everybody likes you. Well, everybody who will meet you, not everybody will like you or have something complimentary to say about you.

Does that make you a bad person? No. Doesn't make you a bad person. Now, that's the grey area is in that, I think. I mean, there is no doubt that something terrible happened here. Somebody was murdered. And what made it even worse? Yeah, horrific lies that were told. Crippen was really a morally flawed, defective person.

He killed somebody that's really hard to get away from, very deliberately, not accidentally, deliberately, and in a calculated way set about murdering his wife, and Ethel knew about it and chose Crippen's side, rather than the right thing to do and never expressed any remorse or any sympathy for Belle's family or her friends.

Caroline: Even though Crippen was found guilty, Crippen was executed, it feels like his side of the story still kind of won in the immediate aftermath.

Hallie: Yeah.

Caroline: Why do you think that was?

Hallie: God, I mean, it's, it's newspapers. It's the press. In 1910, you had the Lloyd's Weekly News who paid him a lot of money to give his final confessions or his story, and in that he chose to paint himself as a tragic figure. He kind of exonerates Ethel of any wrongdoing and it's such a load of just utter rubbish what is written. And I think that dark, you know, people like a tear jerker and that was all facilitated by the newspapers. But it's interesting because if you read accounts and what people actually say peripheral to that, it's like, oh yeah, they still thought he was a very dodgy and nasty man. But it's often what remains in print that kind of stays with us. And again, it's back to what we were saying about legend. You know, this idea that, oh, he was a very small and kind of deferential man. And he had this way of being very polite and very conciliatory and people like, oh, in the Edwardian era when people really didn't have the same sort of cynicism that we have today, or even in the later 20th century, oh, people were taken in like that this poor little man, he couldn't possibly have done anything terrible. Just look at him.

Caroline: That's definitely the way it shows up in crime fiction immediately after and for many decades after. And I can see the point of view of a writer of fiction, how that's a really attractive dichotomy. It's always the quiet ones, but crime version. It's, I suppose, frustrating and a bit sad that that also was the nonfiction take as well. With your more victim centred approach to this kind of thing, what are the challenges you arrive at in terms of research when you are trying to show the full story?

Hallie: If you are looking in the right places, you find evidence of the things that really should be brought to the fore, such as Crippen was a very accomplished fraudster. He was not a nice man.

And the fact that people believed him, it's a testimony to his ability as a con artist. He was a con artist. He was up to his neck in fraud. All of the men who he surrounded himself with were fraudsters who did time in prison, who went on the run. Some of whom were violent. It's incredible. And somehow this man, everybody just sees him for who he is, because nobody has ever bothered to really look at this story.

This is the problem. You just skim over the top. You tell the legend, you fall back on the legend. And also, you know that legend was very deliberately constructed in 1920 by Alexander Bell Filson Young, who wrote the introductory essay to, there's this great British trial series where they printed the transcripts and they had an author write the introductory essay.

Alexander Bell Filson Young had decided very early on and he had written an article very early on in 1910 where he was just in love with this romantic story of Ethel and Crippen on the run. And so in his mind he constructed this story of star crossed lovers. But the problem with the story of star crossed lovers is that there needs to be an obstacle that makes them star crossed. That obstacle was Belle, he had to turn her into a monster, which he did, and she was none of those things.

Caroline: That's so interesting that one individual can have so much sway, but it makes complete sense. Those notable British trials series, I think, are so often the canary in the coal mine. There's lots of other cases as well where you read them and you just think, what is this?

Hallie: I know. I'd be interested to know what you have come across in looking at them.

Caroline: I did a whole episode a while ago about F. Tennyson Jesse and her work on them.

Hallie: Ah, yes.

Caroline: And got to dig a bit into her process for working on them. And very similar to how you say with the Crippen writer, that she did seem to have already decided what she was going to say before she did it.

Hallie: They're moral judgements quite often.

Caroline: Yes.

Hallie: Let's not even listen to what is going on. I've already made a decision from what I have read in the newspapers and what I intuit about human relationships and psychology, and I'm going to write this up, and that's incredibly damning and I think today knowing what we do about the media and its sway over our thinking, there will be much more of a, an insistence on being as impartial or attempting to be as impartial as we could at that. We just simply couldn't do something like that. It was unfair.

Caroline: It is very interesting to think about how such writing would be done today, because a lot of the ones I've read do feel like the person writing the introduction is building their own case. Even as they're introducing you to just the court transcripts, no commentary. They are putting their own case before you've even read that. In some cases, I think it's quite palatable to us because they're putting the case for Edith Thompson or whatever.

Hallie: Yes, that's right. Yeah.

Caroline: In this instance, definitely not.

Hallie: Yeah, it's fascinating. What I think is even more worrying is that I know those notable British trials series is the first port of call that even today legal students have gone to.

My husband is a barrister, so I'm friends with a lot of his friends, and one of his friends said to me as I was writing this book, he said, oh, I read notable British trials, I read the Crippen trial and I just like, brakes were just screeching my mind. I was like, oh, you must not read that. It'll just taint your brain. It's full of the worst type of outdated thinking, and I just hope that Story of a Murder is a corrective to that.

Caroline: In the 20th century literature on Crippen, was there ever a point where somebody decided to try and look into it? With some cases, I mentioned Edith Thompson, I do think there was a point in time with her where people started to go, hang on, let's look at the facts of this again.

Hallie: Yeah.

Caroline: Did that ever arrive with Crippen?

Hallie: Well, in fact, really boiled my blood. I think it was 2007, 2008, there was this documentary, well, it was started by a man who is a toxicologist in the United States in Michigan, interestingly, which is where Crippen is from, who never, ever believed that Crippen could have killed Belle.

Well, of course you never believe that because if you read all the literature, if you read everything that's been written, if you read Alexander Bell Filson Young, and the fact that Belle was a terrible monster and Crippen was this, this poor little put upon man and everything built on the back of that. Of course you're going to believe that he couldn't have possibly done this.

If you read enough of that stuff without actually going into the National Archives and reading the boxes of trial information and the witness statements and the evidence that was collected, that wasn't even used in the trial, that points to his guilt. You're going to believe that. And so he somehow managed to convince a friend of his who did DNA testing at the University of Michigan to get hold of a slide that was used in the trial, which was a piece of Belle's skin that was recovered from the cellar with the scar on it and get a DNA test of that.

Well. That's quite frankly preposterous because everybody has breathed on it. There's, they threw bleach on the remains. They degraded the remains, and so this was just like a circus sideshow. And lo and behold, they found that the DNA reading was that it was of a male body in the basement, and it had no connection whatsoever in terms of its genetic coding to Belle Elmore's family.

Everybody, if you look at the case against him is overwhelming if you look at the evidence. To play some sort of trick using science to pretend that you know that you can get the answer from science, science produces trick. It's not true. You speak to absolutely anybody who uses this technology today for, for identifying remains or identifying evidence in trials.

They will tell you it is not a silver bullet. It's not foolproof at all, but more to the point I got Professor Terry King who was responsible for helping to identify the remains of Richard III, and she's one of the, the top experts in the country on this to have a look at the white paper that was produced off the back of this.

And she looked at it and she said, this just simply doesn't hold water. There are all sorts of problems with this nonetheless, because they threw bleach on the remains, which degrades DNA. And so that is in the appendix to my book, but there should be no doubt at all that Crippen was guilty. And this is just a kind of circus sideshow.

Caroline: That's so interesting. I remember years and years ago, I, I did an episode about Bernard Spilsbury, and this is one of his big moments, of course, and I'm by no means of a see a forensic expert or anything, but I remember thinking at the time, just reading about all the stuff he was getting up to with exhibits and evidence and just thinking how, did anyone conclude anything from what you were doing?

Hallie: I know the fact of the matter was there was a lot of other evidence. His wife disappears. Physical remains are found in his basement. I mean, come on. Nobody has ever sees her again, ever. She doesn't see her family. She doesn't see her friends. The man she was supposed to have run away with hasn't seen her.

Not only that, but in the grave site they find part of Crippen's pyjamas and the manufacturer and the people who sold the pyjamas said, look this would've been there and the time when they were living there, because this pattern was produced in 1908 and he bought this, I think it was delivered in the winter of 1909 to his house. So how the pyjama bottoms were still upstairs in his drawer and the pyjama top was wrapped around the remains, I mean, come on. It's pretty conclusive.

Caroline: Definitely, yes. The DNA thing speaks both to the 2000s obsession with DNA as a way of solving all problems.

Hallie: Yeah.

Caroline: But also just with what you say all along, this kind of insistence on wanting to give Crippen the benefit of the doubt at all times while extending none of that courtesy to basically anybody else, especially Belle.

I wanted to finish by asking you a little bit about how you feel about true crime narratives in general, because I think you are pretty clear that this is history you are working on, but true crime is something that a lot of people consume for entertainment, and I wondered if working on this book had given you any fresh perspectives on that.

Hallie: Well, people are free to find joy in whatever they decide they want to find joy in. I wouldn't criticise what people enjoy. That's very personal and it, it's very dependent on personal taste. I personally don't like true crime. I find it really disturbing. I have a completely different way of looking at it in that if it's historical, I'm fascinated because it is a snapshot of an era for me.

And all of the things that tells you about that moment in time, it's like gold for a historian, what people were thinking, what they were wearing, what they were doing. You get this really, really vivid picture of an era through a record of these terrible incidents that occurred. And that to me is what grabs me and the question of why, what was going through people's heads when they did this and in the whole historical context for things and because I'm constantly trying to understand the past and people's very personal experiences living in another time, that's what I do. I'm a social historian. And so this is such a direct through road into that and that's why I enjoy true crime in that context.

Caroline: Yes, I find this when I'm working on the podcast as well, that it always feels like there needs to be a point, like you're saying, revealing things about the past, showing us things about society.

Hallie: Yes.

Caroline: As opposed to just, Ooh, murder.

Hallie: Yeah. I don't understand the gore aspect of it. It doesn't resonate with me. I don't feel comfortable with it, and no judgement on anybody else, but that's just my feeling.

Caroline: Well, thank you very much for joining me, Hallie. It's been very interesting.

Hallie: You are welcome. Thank you for having me on your show.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. Many thanks to my guest, Hallie Rubenhold. The paperback of Story of a Murder is published on 2nd July in the UK. You can find out more about Hallie and her work, including her previous bestseller about Jack the Ripper's victims, The Five, at her website hallierubenhold.com.

For information about the books referenced in this episode, visit shedunnitshow.com/thecrippenobsession. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.