Crime tale via female perspective

Hallie Rubenhold
Henley town hall
Thursday, October 9

WOMEN are at the heart of Hallie Rubenhold’s true crime history, Story of a Murder: The Wives, The Mistress and Doctor Crippen but, in this book, unlike her previous bestseller The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, not only the victims are female.

Hallie opened her engaging conversation with Daniel Hahn by explaining her fascination for all things transatlantic. This led her to Dr Crippen who, like Hallie, was born in the USA. The Edwardian period was also a huge draw because, as Hallie said, it was a time when technology was developing more rapidly than ever before.

Crippen was the first criminal to be captured through wireless technology when he was arrested disembarking from a ship in Canada. A telegraphed message from the captain had already alerted police to a suspicious passenger on board.

Dr Crippen was not a qualified doctor but practised quack medicine in New York. Here he met his second wife, Belle Elmore, while performing an illegal abortion on her. The deeply creepy doctor married Belle and then, having decided he didn’t want children, tricked her into undergoing a procedure which allowed him to remove her ovaries.

Hallie told the packed audience at the town hall how Belle refused to cave into her husband’s coercion and violence. Instead, she reinvented herself as a music hall singer on the London stage, the most popular entertainment medium of the time.

Misogyny dominated the reporting of Crippen’s crimes, from the sensationalism surrounding his disposal of Belle’s body (only a torso was found buried in his cellar) to Crippen’s trial defence which portrayed Belle as a wife so argumentative she drove her husband to murder. But music hall women were a formidable lot and Belle’s associates from the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild rallied round. Belle’s friend “Vulcana the strongwoman” gave crucial evidence in court leading to a guilty verdict, and Crippen was executed by hanging.

Crippen’s accomplice, Ethel le Neve, his “lady typist” and mistress, was, however, acquitted. Hallie believes Ethel was more deeply involved in the murder than anyone at the time could accept and was probably a psychopath.

After Belle had “disappeared”, Ethel couldn’t stop herself giving the game away by wearing the missing Mrs Crippen’s clothes and jewellery. Then, with Crippen, she fled Britain dressed (unconvincingly) as a boy on their ill-fated voyage to Canada.

Even though The Story of a Murder has a female villain, the book also humanises a previously overlooked victim and gives a corrective retelling of a notorious crime from the woman’s point of view.

Carolyn Kirby