Hawley Crippen

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Hawley Crippen

Hawley Harvey Crippen (born September 11, 1862 in Coldwater , Michigan , † November 23, 1910 in London ) was an American medic and convicted murderer. He is the central figure in a criminal case that caused a great stir in the British public in 1910. Years after the case was closed, the psychological side of the crime was still a topic of discussion, including Agatha Christie , who dealt with it extensively. Crippen went down in criminal history as the first criminal who could be arrested using wireless communication .

Life

Born in the USA, Crippen received his license to practice medicine around 1885 and then worked as a homeopathic doctor for the pharmaceutical company Munyon's Remedies . In 1887 he married Charlotte Bell, and the marriage resulted in their son Otto. Charlotte Crippen died a few years after the wedding of a cerebral haemorrhage . In 1892 Crippen married Cora Turner (actually: Kunigunde Mackamotzki, of German-Polish origin), who was 14 years his junior and who dreamed of a career as an opera singer. Crippen and his wife emigrated to Great Britain around 1900 . The couple moved to 39 Hilldrop Crescent in the north London borough of Holloway . Crippen promoted the career plans of his wife, who now went by the stage name Belle Elmore , by funding her singing courses as well as theater and variety agents. But due to her lack of talent, she never made the breakthrough and eventually sought solace in alcohol and other men.

Ethel le Neve

On the evening of January 31, 1910, a small celebration with friends took place in the house of the Crippens. After they were gone, there were between spouses to battle, and Crippen brought his wife by a poison - cocktails around. Crippen dismantled the body and buried it under the tiles in the basement of the house. He told friends that his wife had moved back to the USA and died there. At the same time, Crippen's lover Ethel le Neve (actually: Ethel Clara Neave ) moved into the house, who soon after began to wear the jewelry and clothes of the missing wife. The police eventually became aware of the incident and questioned Crippen. However, he was able to dispel the suspicions, and since the police had found nothing unusual in the house, the matter was left alone. However, Crippen and Ethel le Neve immediately left for Brussels and finally boarded the ship Montrose in Antwerp , which was to take them to Canada .

British wanted poster for Hawley Crippen and Ethel le Neve

The hasty departure prompted Scotland Yard to conduct a further investigation, and in July some remains of his wife Cora Belle's body were found under the basement floor of the house. Well-known British forensic doctor Sir Bernard Spilsbury identified the body from a scar in the abdominal tissue and continued to discover traces of the sedative hyoscine (also known as scopolamine).

With this analysis Spilsbury laid the foundation for modern forensic medicine . An explanation of poisoning by hyoscine has only been possible since the crystallization and melting point determination introduced by the doctor and toxicologist William Henry Willcox (1870-1941) into forensic pharmacology to determine the lethal dose of 300 mg hyoscine administered by Crippen from the remains of the dead became possible.

The captain of the SS Montrose , Henry George Kendall, was informed of what was going on in Great Britain by telegram and recognized the fugitives among his passengers, even though Ethel le Neve had dressed up as a young man. An inspector boarded the White Star Line's faster ship Laurentic and arrested Crippen and Ethel le Neve on July 31, 1910. They were brought back to England and tried at the Old Bailey in October .

During the trial, public interest in circumstantial evidence, reports and minutes increasingly turned to the impression the accused made on the judiciary, the public and the press: he was clearly a lovable person.

Filson Young wrote in his introduction to “The Trial of Dr. Crippen "in the series" Memorable Trials in Great Britain ":

“ We may think of Crippen as a hateful person; but no one who came into contact with him could describe him that way - he was probably just a lovable murderer. "

The court was not deterred by the defendant's demeanor and found him guilty of the murder of his wife. He was executed in November 1910 in Pentonville Prison by John Ellis . His lover was acquitted of the charge of aiding and abetting after the fact in a separate trial.

Doubts about the verdict

As is often the case with spectacular criminal cases, doubts about the "official version" were repeatedly raised in the Crippen case:

  • It is unusual - if not unique - for a poisoner to cut up his victim. Murdering doctors usually try to cover up poisoning as natural death.
  • Cora Crippen's ingestion of the toxic dose of hyoscine could have been an accident. Crippen was hardly so naive as to buy the drug from a pharmacist he knew personally and then use it to kill his wife a few days later. He actually wanted to treat Cora's “ nymphomania ” or a heart disease with this drug - in low doses .
  • The torso found is not Cora's, but belongs to a woman who died in an illegal abortion by Crippen.

In 2007, scientists at Michigan State University came to the conclusion that the body parts found could not have come from the allegedly murdered Mrs. Crippen. A comparison of the mitochondrial DNA from the body parts with the DNA of now living descendants of Mrs. Crippen's mother showed no agreement. Even more, the DNA should even be that of a man. A Times columnist vividly described his doubts about the scientists' new findings: The relationship between the comparator and Cora Crippen was poorly documented, the method used to determine sex from archived DNA was not tried and tested, but new, and the DNA sample was also admitted of the research team "not optimal".

The sinking of the Empress of Ireland

During the arrest on board the Montrose , Crippen is said to have shouted to Captain Kendall: "You will still pay for this betrayal!" This was later interpreted as a bad omen when the Empress of Ireland, later taken over by Kendall , sank after a ship collision in the Saint Lawrence River on May 29, 1914 , at almost the same spot where Crippen had been arrested four years earlier .

Crippen in popular culture

The murder case has been filmed several times, including:

The author James Ronald published his Crippen-based novel This Way Out in 1939 . This was filmed in 1944 as Under Suspicion by Robert Siodmak . Even John Boyne processed the case in 2004 in his novel Crippen . The German translation The friendly Mr. Crippen - The story of a murder was published in 2013 by Arche-Verlag Zurich.

In the making-of of the Hitchcock film Das Fenster zum Hof (1954), Hitchcock's daughter Patricia explains that her father was fascinated by Crippen's case and that the murder inspired him in the production of the film, in which a man dismembered his wife in his house. Various elements of the case can be found in other works by Hitchcock.

In 1979 the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation produced the detective radio play Der Fall Dr. Crippen (52 minutes) based on the script by Helmut M. Backhaus . The director was Alexander Malachovsky . The speakers were Herbert Fleischmann , Michael Hinz , Harald Leipnitz , Uta-Maria Schütze , Gottfried John , Otto Stern , Helmuth M. Backhaus, Michael Schwarzmaier , Rüdiger Bahr , and others. v. a. The music is from Frank Duval .

A wax figure of Crippen is in Madame Tussaud's London wax museum .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jürgen Müller : Pharmaca diabolica and Pocula amatoria. On the cultural history of the Solanaceae alkaloids atropine and scopolamine. In: Würzburger medical historical research 17, 1998, pp. 361–373; here: p. 369 f.
  2. ↑ David Foran et al. a., Innocent man hanged in famous British murder case ( Memento of the original from July 4, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / special.news.msu.edu
  3. ↑ David Aaronovitch: "I'll eat my hat if Dr Crippen was innocent - OK?"
  4. ↑ Hitchcock's Favorite Crime ~ The Case of Dr. Crippen
  5. ↑ hördat.de: The case of Dr. Crippen ( PDF )
personal data
SURNAME Crippen, Hawley
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Crippen, Hawley Harvey (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American medic and convicted murderer
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Coldwater , Michigan
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1910
Place of death London