Story of a Murder by Hallie Rubenhold

Story of a Murder:

The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen

By Hallie Rubenhold

Dutton 2025

When people stopped seeing his wife shortly after the end of January 1910 in London, the meek and kindly Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen did two things: he started telling people that his wife and moved to California and died there, and he installed his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, in his home at Hilltop Crescent, where she began wearing the missing Belle Elmore's furs and jewels when the couple entertained guests. Melinda May, Louise Smythson, and other of Belle's friends from the Music Hall Ladies' Guild naturally started asking questions, and eventually another two things happened: Scotland Yard began to investigate, and Crippen and his mistress fled the country, shorn of his droopy mustache and her long hair, disguised as a man and his teenage son.

Human remains were uncovered from the coal cellar of Hilltop Crescent, and when Crippen and his mistress were almost immediately caught (thanks in part to the wonders of modern technology, as we'll see), he stood trial for the murder of his wife. After the first genuine media circus of the modern era, Crippen was found guilty and promptly hanged (Ethel was acquitted of far lesser charges). The Crippen Murder Case, otherwise known as the North London Cellar Murder, became a print sensation; virtually everybody involved gave interviews or had books ghost-written, and lurid true-crime books followed, epitomized by The Trial of Hawley Hawson Crippen by Filson Young in 1902.

In many ways, Hallie Rubenhold's new book, Story of a Murder, takes its starting point not from the Crippen case itself but from Young's “misogynistic parable” and its subsequent imitators, which tended to portray Belle Elmore as a blowsy termagant, somebody so insufferable that she could drive even the milquetoast Crippen to murder. According to Rubenhold, this became the established account “because it makes for a good story, because it is still considered acceptable for a man to claim he killed 'a difficult woman' under duress. She was asking for it.”

Rubenhold is the author of the much-praised The Five: The Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2019, and when she points out that “the North London Cellar Murder is a story predominantly about women but told almost exclusively by men,” she's entirely right. The same tenor of insightful indignation that made The Five such gripping reading fills the pages of Story of a Murder and fleshes out not only Belle and Ethel but also the ladies of the Ladies' Guild, the intrepid female journalists of the time, and what little can be cobbled together about Crippen's first wife, Charlotte, whose death in 1892 struck plenty of people at the time as mighty odd.

In telling the stories of all these women and the great crowd of in-laws, cousins, and distant relatives who came out of the woodwork when the Crippen case became the talk of the Western world, Rubenhold is discerning but frank about the obstacles involved:

What of their stories were concocted, omitted or hidden to save face, and how much was embellished by journalists who serialized their interviews, is uncertain. At different times, each family member offers a different set of narratives at variance with what others have said. The Neaves frequently contradict each other and their daughters, while Nina contradicts Ethel and Ethel regularly contradicts herself.

And despite all the good intent in the world to shift the focus of the story onto the women, any book on the Crippen case is going to spend a good deal of time recounting the sensational aspects that have made it a macabre classic in the annals of true crime. Rubenhold is a fierce advocate for the voices of history's (and crime's) forgotten women (a book like these about Ted Bundy's victims would be astounding coming from this author, for instance), but she's also a professional writer with bills to pay. Despite her opening declaration to the contrary, Story of a Murder must inevitably become for long stretches the story of a murderer, the crime he committed, and all that followed.

Rubenhold doesn't stint on any of these details, so readers looking for an engrossing narrative of the Crippen case written for the modern era will certainly find it here. There's obsessed Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard, of course, the man who examined Hilltop Terrace, including the coal cellar, without finding anything amiss until on a subsequent examination of the cellar's flooring he made a ghastly discovery:

The smell which rose from the shallow hole was unmistakable. It filled their nostrils with a nauseating, putrid horror. Fearing they would be sick, the men scrambled up the stairs, gasping for breath. Dew and Mitchell knew what they had found, or rather, whom they had found. 

And there's Captain Kendall of the Monstrose, who became suspicious of the disguised Crippen and the 'young man' with him, speaking to them often and never revealing that he was simultaneously speaking with Scotland Yard via the miraculous new Marconi wireless (the voyage and the wireless are the subject of Erik Larsen's terrific 2006 book Thunderstruck):

Standing on deck, Crippen could hear the electrical crackling as messages to and from the ship sparked off the antennae. “What a wonderful invention!” he had exclaimed to Kendall one day, looking aloft. Surely, he feared, and not incorrectly, that some of what was zipping through the ether concerned him.

And ultimately, there's Crippen himself, who comes across in these pages more as a goggle-eyed blunderer than as “the swindling, duping, lying Crippen, confidence trickster to the very end of his life.” Rubenhold clearly hates this little man and wants her readers to hate him too, mainly for the atrocity he committed against his second wife and may have committed against his first, put very much also because, like Jack the Ripper, in her narrative he also represents men killing women, the violence of the patriarchy in human form. Belle “does not deserve to be depicted or remembered in the manner that she has been,” she writes. “Her murderer should not have the final word.”

Which makes it all the more puzzling that Rubenhold waits until page 410 of her book to inform readers that Crippen wasn't Belle's murderer after all. Toxicologist John Trestrail, she tells her readers, using forensic evidence (read: body parts) from the coal cellar at Hilltop Terrace, DNA swabs from living descendants of Belle's family, and the DNA expertise of Dr. David Foran of the University of Michigan, determined that not only was the flesh and skin buried in Crippen's cellar not genetically related to those descendants, but it also wasn't from a woman. So yes, the final word about Belle Elmore shouldn't go to her murderer – whoever that may have been. For the sake of Rubenhold’s narrative, here’s hoping it wasn’t a woman.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News