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How and Why did Crippen kill his wife and Where did he dispose of her other remains?

How?

This is the easy bit because, quite obviously, he had poisoned her with Hyoscine, a drug that he had not bought previously and which he had evidently acquired solely for this purpose on 19 January 1910.

The probability is that he had spiked one of her drinks.

Speculation that he may have shot her (he kept a loaded revolver in his house) is not supported with any evidence.

Why?

This is also an easy bit because:

  1. Crippen was clearly besotted with Ethel Le Neve whose company and disposition he preferred to his wife's. Otherwise, why did he get engaged to Le Neve on 14 August 1909 and then 'marry' her on 12 March 1910? (There is no record of their ever having actually married in the accepted sense.)

  2. Divorce wasn't an easy option in those days, particularly for those of the Catholic faith. (His wife was Catholic and a regular churchgoer; and Crippen had converted, to please his wife. Later, a Catholic priest visited him in his cell prior to his appointment with the Hangman.) Fifty years later, a similar problem was the basis of the plot for a 1961 movie 'Divorce Italian Style' (Divorzio all'italiana)

  3. Crippen would have had good reason to believe that, if his wife were to leave him, then she would have disappeared with most of their life savings which had been primarily generated from his earnings. His wife may have taken a very different view: she had been squirreling money away in various bank accounts and she may have then considered it 'hers'. A Divorce Court may have agreed with her so, clearly, it was not a risk worth taking. Consequently, Cora had controlled the purse strings - an advantageous but, in the circumstances, a potentially very dangerous position. See: Crippens' Finances.

Where?

This is the hard bit because, as most of his wife's body parts have never been recovered, it's anybody's guess what happened to them and, as you would expect, almost everyone has either made a guess or has a favourite hypothesis.

Among the possibilities are:

  1. They had been stashed away in a Left Luggage Locker. Such lockers used to feature on Railway Stations in that era and beyond. The Police had evidently considered such a possibility and they carried out several searches.

  2. They had been thrown in the nearby Regent's Canal which was about a 30 minute walk away but, as Crippen wasn't a big man, he would have had to make possibly two, three or more journeys. This seems unlikely but not as unlikely as the hypothesis that he had disposed of some of her body parts in the English Channel when he and Le Neve had taken their Easter Break in Dieppe.

  3. Crippen had burned her remains either in the open fires in his house or among other rubbish in his garden. This is unlikely because bones don't burn and, in modern crematoria, special machinery called either a Bone Mill or a Cremulator (essentially a big blender) is used for this purpose.

  4. Now here is my favourite hypothesis. Knowing chemicals as he did, Crippen would have opted for a chemical solution, namely, that he deposited her body in their bath-tub and then poured in enough acid to cover her - a variation of the method later used by John George Haigh aka 'The Acid Bath Murderer', as discussed in this link.

  5. And, finally, why didn't Crippen dispose of all her parts in this way? Simply because he did not have sufficient acid, a problem that he recognised only after he had killed her and he had deposited her in the bath. Accordingly, using his basic surgical skills, he filleted out sufficient of her body parts to match the acid that he had available. He also took care to ensure that any parts that may have provided some measure of identification (e.g. fingerprints, face, teeth, sexual organs, etc.) were destroyed by acid. Consequently, he buried her few remaining body parts in his cellar, where they remained undetected until after John Nash had reported the concerns of the Music Hall Ladies' Guild to Frank Froest at Scotland Yard on 30 June 1910.

 

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