Hallie Rubenhold

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.

Why do you think that was?

God, I mean, 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 tearjerker.

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, 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

And people think, 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 by that.