Hallie Rubenhold

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 realized, well, I may not have such an opportunity to become an opera performer in London, so I know I'll just pivot on to musical.

And so she rebuilt herself musical, singing lessons and ingratiated herself with all of these rules.

Really famous people in the musical.

You know, she really climbed into it.

Whether or not she was a success on the stage is almost irrelevant.

I mean, she was hanging out with the most famous people in the musical at that time.

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 the focus off the murderer.

But not only that, it's to do something that I think increasingly in this day and age we find very uncomfortable, which is to find the gray area and to sit with A, not having absolute answers for everything B,

and be 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.