Hallie Rubenhold

Killing another human being was less important than romantic love.

This is the position that he's coming from.

So he invents love.

this absurd notion that Crippen was bullied by his wife, which he wasn't, every single thing that was written from that point on referenced Filson Young's story and built a fiction on top of this that he was somehow this little harmless man

And his wife was this terrible, shrewish, unfaithful alcoholic.

I have done four years of research and I have had absolutely no evidence of any of this.

And to the contrary, I have found tons of evidence that Crippen was a fraudster, was a practiced conman and a criminal and highly capable of killing his wife.

Because people want to believe that women push men to kill them.

And really, that has been with us from the beginning of time.

People want to believe that Eve was the one who tempted Adam.

Women make men do terrible things.

Well, I don't think so.

I think we're all human beings and men are completely capable of making their own decisions.

They don't need women to tempt them into things.

And so this is just something that plays out really well.

And unfortunately, a lot of people have bought into this because people don't question true crime.

A crime that happened in the past is a historical event and should be interrogated as a historical event.

You know, it's not just a good story to tell.

Well, one of the problems is with historical true crime in particular is a kind of, you know, it's a freeze frame of an era and an era's values.

The way it's reported, the way it's prosecuted and defended is about an era's values.