The Metropolis

Was Dr Crippen innocent? Meet the man staging a retrial who wants you to be in the jury

Mike Pollitt | Monday 30 April, 2012 11:10


Dr Hawley Crippen is, by common reputation, one of the guiltiest men in British legal history. His guilt is canonical, so much so that when in 1946 George Orwell outlined his ideal of the “perfect murder”, he found Crippen to be a model killer.

“The [perfect] murderer should be a little man of the professional class…living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs…he should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man…the means chosen should, of course, be poison.”

That sounds like Crippen alright. And Crippen sounds like death. His name is synonymous with guilt.

Why then, over a century after Crippen hung in Pentonville prison for poisoning and dismembering his wife, is a retrial of his case scheduled at Islington Museum in autumn this year?

Greg Foxsmith, the legal impresario behind the event has the audience’s interests at heart:

“It’s entertainment first and foremost. I hope it will be a fun event and lots of people will come.”

Greg, a solicitor and local councillor, has form for this sort of thing, having already overseen a retrial of Joe Orton, the angry 60s playwright who was convicted of defacing books in Islington library. But now he turns to murder, and in Islington that means Crippen, who lived and killed, the story goes, in a now-demolished house at number 39 Hilldrop Crescent.


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Greg has signed up a QC to defend Crippen, and a proper judge to provide oversight. But, this being 21st century entertainment, it’s the audience who will decide Crippen’s guilt.

“Everyone who comes will be given a number and twelve will be randomly picked as jurors,” he says.

But isn’t this all rather pointless, considering everyone from George Orwell to the History Channel knows that Crippen is as guilty as sin?

Perhaps everyone is wrong. In recent years, a case for the defence has begun to appear. New, but disputed, DNA evidence from the fleshy torso (head, legs and bones removed) dug up from Crippen’s basement suggests that it may not have belonged to his wife. It’s been suggested that his wife Cora, who had withdrawn her savings from the bank prior to her disappearance, might have used her money to escape her dreary husband for a new life in America. It’s said that the body in the cellar was not hers, but that of a woman who came to Dr Crippen for a backstreet abortion which went wrong, and which he tried desperately to cover up. This would make Crippen guilty of something different from cold-blooded wife murder, perhaps something we might be able to understand.

This is what Crippen’s descendants believe. They want him pardoned. The retrial might give their cause a push.

“I hope it will be a tongue in cheek airing of the issues, but one that’s sensitive to his relatives”, Greg says. “The barrister instructed to defend Crippen, John Cooper, is also instructed by the family seeking a pardon, so there is some overlap bewteen a real live issue and this macabre crime from the past.”

Without wanting to prejudice the trial, what with all these lawyers about, it’s worth noting that not everyone is buying this innocence guff. Responding to the new evidence, David Aaronovitch wrote a column in The Times entitled I’ll eat my hat if Dr Crippen was innocent, OK?

And if the new botched-abortion theory is correct, why didn’t Crippen say so? What he actually did might have been comic if it wasn’t the prelude to a hanging. For having shaved off his moustache, taken an assumed name and disguised his lover Ethel le Neve as his not-very-convincing son, he jumped on a ship for Canada. It wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Blackadder.

These shenanigans, and the fact that he was the first suspected murderer to be caught by the new-fangled telegraph technology, ensured a bumper turn out at his trial. It was the reality entertainment event of 1910, and Greg Foxsmith hopes some of that drama has survived the 100 years that have followed.

Was Crippen innocent, or guilty? YOU DECIDE.

The organiser – @gregfoxsmith
His previous – Legal Am-Dram: Lawyers Retry Playwright Joe Orton
Full overview of the case and the new evidence at Crippen’s Wikipedia entry
Islington Tribune – John Cooper QC: My mission to prove Dr Crippen was innocent
George Orwell – The Decline of the English Murder


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