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Chapter 1: Why is the Crippen case still relevant today?
Welcome to She Done It, I'm Caroline Crampton. 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 She Done It. The second ever episode I made back in 2018 is about it, and it's been present in lots of the others since then too.
That's partly because the facts of the case are unusual and intriguing, but it's more because of the way writers 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 isn't the whole story. It usually focuses on Dr. Crippen himself, his lies and his attempted escape, and gloss over the 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.
Chapter 2: What aspects of the Crippen case are often overlooked?
Why does one version of this narrative still haunt the way we think about crime in the 20th century? Joining me to try and 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.
Chapter 3: How did Hallie Rubenhold become interested in the Crippen story?
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. And 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.
Chapter 4: What role did women play in the Crippen trial?
And after I finished The Five and I was thinking about what I wanted 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 realize. 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 this story, 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 was really amazing also because at a time when we think of women really just finding a voice and finding a voice through suffrage, And that's the way in which the pre-World War I 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 and how did all of that discovery match up with what you already knew ambiently i feel like for most people just the name gripping does conjure something at least
Well, you know, funny enough, and again, this is one of the things I 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.
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Chapter 5: What misconceptions surround Belle Elmore's character?
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 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.
Yes, I think sometimes people associate the name with creepy, quiet little man without necessarily knowing more of it. 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.
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.
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Chapter 6: How did media narratives shape the perception of Crippen?
And yet we repeat the story over and over again. And that to me was very intriguing because I realized 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 Leneve, his mistress and his accomplice in this. And so people spoke of nothing else.
And they talked about it for years. And it crept into the general psyche to such an extent. And I will 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 like 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.
And I realized like the penny dropped as I was writing this book that, oh my God, he was obviously picking up on, you know, the story would have still been in the ether because this is the 1940s. That 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.
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, don't flash your lights on a deserted road or all of those kinds of things.
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Chapter 7: What evidence challenges the legend of Dr. Crippen?
That's the same thing, isn't it? He'd obviously imbibed buried woman stories at an impressionable age.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And this was really, really basically almost in his neighborhood. This was North London. Local. Yeah. Yeah. 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.
Yes, people tell them to each other.
Chapter 8: How does this case reflect broader societal issues?
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.
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 a round 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.
Yeah.
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 past 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. What does the legend of Crippen get wrong?
Oh, I mean, remarkably everything, except for the fact that he was hanged 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 needn't be. 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 homeopathic doctor, came to London with his wife, Belle Elmore, or Cora Crippen, as she was 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 musical performer.
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