[MUSIC]
Our last case is a very famous case,
it's the case of Dr. Crippen.
One of the reasons I think it's such
a famous case is perhaps because of his
name -
Crippen sounds like a quite spooky name.
But it turns out that Dr. Crippen was a
very nice guy, and just about everybody
liked him.
One of the exceptions, one of the people
who didn't like him, though, was his wife.
Dr. Crippen was married to a lady called
Cora.
Although Crippen was an American, they
settled in London.
He was working in a medical related
business
while she wanted to be in the music hall
as a singer.
Their marriage started to break up, and by
1909, Crippen
was strongly attracted to his secretary
Ethel Le Neve.
January 31, 1910, was the last day that
anyone saw Cora Crippen alive.
Well, Cora had lots of friends, and they
asked Crippen, what happened to her?
Where's Cora?
And Crippen gave various answers at
different times.
He first said that she'd gone to the
United States to visit a sick relative.
He said later that she'd gone to Los
Angeles and died there.
And finally, he came up with a story that
she'd ran off with another man.
Well, the police conducted investigations.
They interviewed Dr. Crippen,
and clearly, the police involvement
rattled him, because
soon after, Dr. Crippen and Ethel Le Neve
disappeared.
With their disappearance, the police
searched the house.
And in the basement, when they dug up the
basement floor, they found a grave.
The grave contained body parts.
So now the hunt was on for Dr. Crippen,
it was in all the newspapers.
Where is Dr. Crippen?
Now, in those days, if you wanted to
travel from Europe to the Americas, there
was only one way to do it, and that was by
passenger liner across the Atlantic.
One of these passenger liners, the S.S.
Montrose, sailing to Canada,
the captain became suspicious of two of
his passengers.
One of these passengers was registered
under the name of
Mr. Robinson and the other passenger
claimed to be his son,
though the son seemed to be more like a
girl.
And Mr. Robinson, it was noticed, had a
very pale
upper lip, as if he'd just shaved off a
thick moustache.
Well, the captain was suspicious
but there wasn't much he could do.
But the captain could communicate by
wireless telegraphy,
and he sent a message to the police that
he thought
Dr. Crippen and Ethel Le Neve were on board
his ship.
Well, the police officer in charge of the
case, Inspector Dew, took the tip
and hurried to the port of Liverpool to
catch another ship, the Laurentic.
Now, the Laurentic was a much faster ship
than the Montrose
and it was able to overtake the Montrose
In St. Laurence River.
Just got to Canada, but hadn't quite
docked.
Inspector Dew boarded the Montrose, and
the story is that when he
arrested Dr. Crippen, Crippen said, "Thank
God it's over."
He was taken back to England and charged
with murder.
It's not a crime to cross the Atlantic
Ocean under
a false name, and that's not enough to
prove murder.
So questions remain.
The question, how was the murder carried
out?
Who carried out the murder?
The murder is believed to have been a
poisoning.
In those days, highly toxic substances
such
as hyoscine could be bought quite easily.
And Crippen in January of that year had
bought five grains, that's about 300
milligrams, of hyoscine.
In order to buy it, he had signed the
poison's book.
When those human remains found in the
grave in the
house were chemically analysed, it was
possible to detect hyoscine.
Then, is the question, who was the victim?
Because they did not find a whole body,
they only found body parts, including the
torso.
This was one of the cases that made
Bernard Spilsbury famous.
Spilsbury examined those body parts, and
he found on those parts an operation scar,
and this was the scar from operation that
had
been carried out on the ovaries of a
woman.
Cora Crippen had just such an operation.
And therefore, Spilsbury concluded that
those body parts were from Cora Crippen.
Well, with these questions apparently
settled,
Dr. Crippen was found guilty of murder
and he was hanged on November 23, 1910.
What about Ethel Le Neve?
Well, none of the evidence points to any
involvement of her in the murder of Cora
Crippen.
All she had done was pretend to be a boy
and take a ship to Canada.
That's not a crime.
She was found not guilty.
She acquired a new identity, acquired a
new life, even married and had
children, and kept her old identity secret
even until she died.
Her children didn't find out her real
identity until after
her death, when it had been discovered by
an investigating journalist.
And what about Cora Crippen?
The only parts of her ever found were
those body parts in the grave.
For instance, Cora Crippen's head was
never found.
So perhaps it's still somewhere, buried in
the city of London.
[BLANK_AUDIO]

