The Cellar at Hilldrop: the trial of Dr Crippen

What happened

Cora Crippen, a music hall performer who worked under the stage name Belle Elmore, disappeared from her home on Hilldrop Crescent in north London at the start of 1910. Her husband, Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American-born doctor living and working in London, told friends she had gone to America. Within months he was convicted of her murder and hanged.

Crippen was by most accounts a quiet, unremarkable man, a contrast most retellings draw against his more outgoing and ambitious wife. He had also been carrying on with a younger woman, Ethel Le Neve, who worked alongside him and who moved into the Hilldrop Crescent house not long after Cora vanished. She was seen in public soon afterward wearing jewellery and furs that had belonged to Cora.

Cora's friends in the music hall world grew suspicious of Crippen's shifting explanations for her absence and eventually went to Scotland Yard. Chief Inspector Walter Dew interviewed Crippen, who seemed at first to satisfy him, then panicked and fled the country with Le Neve, who travelled disguised as a boy.

The evidence

Human remains were found buried beneath the cellar floor at the Hilldrop Crescent house when police searched it a second time. They were identified in part through a piece of preserved skin bearing what was presented as a surgical scar matching one Cora was known to have had, evidence examined by the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury in what became one of the first English murder trials to turn substantially on medical forensic testimony.

Crippen and Le Neve's flight became almost as famous as the killing itself. The captain of the ship they'd boarded for Canada recognised the pair from newspaper photographs and used the vessel's wireless telegraph to alert Scotland Yard, one of the first times wireless communication was used to pursue a fleeing suspect. Dew boarded a faster ship, overtook them, and arrested Crippen the moment they reached Canadian waters in July 1910.

How it's been argued over, then and since

Crippen's trial at the Old Bailey lasted five days. He was found guilty and hanged at Pentonville Prison that November. Le Neve was tried separately as an accessory and was acquitted; she later lived under a different name and, decades afterward, still maintained that Crippen had done nothing.

The conviction itself has never seriously been in doubt, which makes this the one of these three cases with a real ending. What has been argued over since is the forensic evidence used to secure it. In the 2000s, a team of researchers examined preserved tissue samples from the original trial and argued the mitochondrial DNA didn't match living relatives of Cora's family, and further suggested the tissue may not even have come from a woman. The claim made headlines around the world and reopened a hundred-year-old case in the press. Other forensic historians have since disputed both the methodology and the chain of custody of the samples used in that later analysis. Neither side has settled it, so the one fact that was never in question, that Crippen was hanged for his wife's murder, now sits next to a live argument about whether the body in the cellar was even hers.

Murder Mystery Party's case, The Cellar at Hilldrop, sits your table at the same dinner where Cora Crippen's absence was first explained away, working through the same tightening evidence, and asks your guests to reach their own verdict, whether or not it lands where the Old Bailey did.