alt="background image"/>
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3QUEBEC. the city from which chief inspector walter dew contacted the canadian authorities.
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47
ENGLAND — LONDON.
A discovery in the cellar of Crippen’s home changed everything. A police search unearthed what appeared to be human remains, wrapped in cloth, under the flagstones. ‘We found only masses of human flesh,’ Dew wrote in his memoirs. ‘The head was missing. No bones were ever discovered. Identification seemed impossible.’ An unrivalled team now investigated the find; the pathologist, Augustus Joseph Pepper (1849–1935), and Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947), his junior, were assisted by two toxicologists: William Willcox (1870–1941) and Arthur P. Luff (1855–1938). A scar on the abdomen was assumed to be evidence of a miscarriage Cora had suffered and a pyjama top found in the house matched the cloth found wrapped around the body in the cellar grave.
The forensics experts were sure that this was Cora’s mutilated body; they now had to determine the cause of death. A chemical test for alkaloids revealed the presence of the poison hyoscine, which was far from a common means of killing. Crippen was an expert in drugs, having trained in medicine in the United States (where he was born) and in London. He sold remedies by post, and a pharmacist testified that Crippen had purchased 5 grams (¹⁄5 oz) of hyoscine hydrobromide on 19 January 1910. The evidence was stacking up, but the police still did not have a suspect in custody because Crippen had vanished.
Then Dew got the breakthrough he needed. The captain of the Montrose, a passenger ship bound for Montreal, Canada, who had seen the press reports of Crippen’s flight sent a ‘marconigram’ (radio telegram) to his employers. The message, passed on to Dew, relayed that the captain believed he had the fugitives on board under false names, with Ethel (disguised as a boy) travelling as Crippen’s son. This was to result in Crippen becoming the first criminal to be caught with the aid of wireless telegraphy. Dew boarded a faster vessel – the Laurentic – and arrived in Quebec, Canada, on 30 July, at Farther Point, where the Montrose docked a day later. Dew went aboard disguised as a ship’s pilot and arrested Crippen, who made no attempt to escape. ‘I won’t [jump],’ he told Dew, ‘I am more than satisfied because the anxiety has been too awful.’
Crippen’s trial began on 18 October amid huge public interest. It lasted five days and the jury took just twenty-seven minutes to convict him. Ethel was acquitted of being an accessory, and sold her story to a newspaper. After an appeal failed, John Ellis (1874–1932) hanged Crippen at Pentonville Prison on 23 November 1910. 39 Hilldrop Crescent was bombed during the Second World War. Cora’s head and limbs have never been found, leaving the remote possibility that the remains belonged to someone else. Crippen killed for love and he maintained Ethel’s innocence to his last breath. •
ST LAWRENCE RIVER. the location of the ss montrose when
chief inspector walter dew arrested hawley crippen.
F
G
HI
ethel le neve arriving at holloway prison following her arrest
as an accomplice.
crowds outside the bow street magistrates’ court
during the trial.
hawley crippen and ethel le neve in the
dock at their trial.
newspapers publicizing the
details of the case.
48
PART ONE — EUROPE.
‘Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great.
I couldn’t stand it any longer.’
hawley crippen to walter dew at his arrest.
—————
Above. scenes from the crippen house investigation, and the
location in the cellar where the body was discovered.
49
ENGLAND — LONDON.
‘You must entertain no expectation or hope that you will
escape the consequences of your crime.’
lord alverstone before sentencing hawley crippen.
—————
Above. bill poster from contemporary press coverage
of the crippen murder mystery.
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123
50
PART ONE — EUROPE.
In May 1827, Maria Marten (unknown–1827) disappeared. She was last seen heading off to marry her latest beau, William Corder (1803–28), a local tenant farmer who owned a barn at Polstead, Suffolk. Maria was no virgin bride; she had already had two illegitimate children by two different lovers and she had given birth to Corder’s child earlier that year. However, the subsequent discovery of her dead body, buried in Corder’s red-painted barn, allowed her less than respectable past to be airbrushed for a very public refashioning of her life story.
Corder almost certainly killed Maria and then fled, claiming he and his bride had moved to the Isle of Wight. Maria’s father found her body, supposedly after Maria’s ghost had appeared to her stepmother in a dream. More plausibly, Mr Marten (dates unknown) grew suspicious after he received a letter from Corder saying all was well but that his new wife had injured her hand and was unable to write herself. The local magistracy commissioned a Bow Street Runner from London to hunt down the farmer and Corder was caught and put on trial
for murder. Even if he had been innocent, he would have stood no chance of being acquitted. The press had already condemned him, painting Maria as the melodramatic victim of an evil seducer intent, without any foundation in truth it seems, on getting his hands on her property. It was claimed that Corder had tricked her into marriage, that he had tried this several times with other women and that he had even attempted to poison Maria’s two older children by secreting pills inside pears. None of this was true, but that hardly mattered to a reading public who were becoming increasingly fascinated by each and every twist of the ‘red barn’ murder case.
A play was made about Maria’s murder and was performed while Corder was awaiting trial; there was even a report of a magic lantern show in the local church hall that presented Corder as Maria’s killer. His defence team did what they could to complain but it made little difference. Corder was convicted, having cut a pathetic and unconvincing figure in the dock. He was hanged in August 1828 and died slowly, taking eight minutes to expire as the hangman pulled on his legs. His dissected body was flayed and the skin tanned and used to bind a printed account of the murder; the rope was sold off at a guinea an inch, and pottery miniatures of Corder, Maria and the red barn at Polstead were bought by curious middle-class collectors.
Corder was an ordinary murderer, Maria’s death a fairly ordinary murder, but the press and the emerging ‘murder industry’ turned an otherwise squalid, if tragic, killing into the leading sensation story of its day. In several respects, the red barn murder was the birth of ‘true crime’ in ‘modern’ Britain and it set the model for the exploitative presentation of murder news that developed across the next century or more. •
WILLIAM CORDER’S HOUSE.
the