The Crippen case
Cora Crippen, who performed as Belle Elmore.
Cora Crippen disappeared from 39 Hilldrop Crescent in Holloway in January 1910, and human remains were later found under the cellar floor. Her husband Hawley Harvey Crippen was arrested at sea by ship-to-shore telegraph, convicted, and hanged in November 1910.
What is not in dispute.
Cora Crippen was last seen at the end of January 1910. Her husband, Hawley Harvey Crippen, told her friends she had gone to America and later that she had died there.
Her friends did not accept it and went to the police. After an interview and a search that found nothing, Crippen left the country with Ethel Le Neve, who was travelling dressed as a boy.
A further search of the house found human remains buried under the brick floor of the cellar. Crippen was arrested aboard ship after the captain wired ahead, the first use of ship-to-shore telegraphy in a murder arrest.
Crippen was convicted and hanged in November 1910. Ethel Le Neve was tried separately as an accessory and acquitted.
What the verdict did not answer.
The conviction has stood for over a century. In 2007 an American forensic team argued from DNA that the remains in the cellar were not Cora Crippen's; the work has been disputed in turn and no court has revisited the verdict. The honest position is that the case was settled in court and that the claim exists.
What this page is, and is not.
This case was decided in court. What is written above is the part of the record that is not in dispute. Where something is argued over, this page says it is argued over and does not pick a side. No real person is accused here of anything a court did not find, and no confession is invented for anybody.
- The Cellar at Hilldrop is not a reconstruction. It is an original crime set in this world, with an invented killer. Every real person at your table is innocent of the murder in the game.
- The victim is a person, not a prop. Cora Crippen, who performed as Belle Elmore.
- We publish the rules we work to. How we treat real cases sets out the six things this catalogue will not do, including the two cases that were dropped for failing them.
If you think we have crossed a line, the policy page is the standard to hold us to, and the email address is on it.
The Cellar at Hilldrop
A famous cellar, a flight across the Atlantic, and a house full of people with reasons to lie. The game's crime is invented; the house and the flight are not.
Six to twelve people at your table, hosted from a TV and your guests' phones. The evidence arrives a piece at a time and nobody sees the whole of it until the last act. Read the full case file, including the content note for this one.