Conclusion

inadequate, and the prosecution alleged an alternative reason for lying about Belle’s death in the US: Crippen knew that she was already dead because he had murdered her.

Conclusion

As with all the cases we review in this book, a single explanation for Crippen’s conviction is unlikely to be suffi cient. Apart from inconsistencies in his testimony, there are other aspects of his case which also need to be considered. First, the forensic evidence that we have mentioned only in passing – the identity of the remains in the cellar and the presence of hyoscine hydrobromide in them – occupied quite a large part of the trial proceedings as expert witnesses were examined and cross- examined by both the prosecution and the defence. Among the experts for the prosecution was Bernard Spilsbury, who went on to achieve national fame as ‘the people’s pathologist’ and who was in the vanguard of forensic pathologists’ eff orts ‘to secure its expertise over the evidentiary centrepiece of murder investigations – the dead body’ ( Burney and Pemberton, 2011 : 44). If the presentational strategies of the experts for the prosecution were persuasive, jurors would most likely have concluded that the remains in the cellar at Hilldrop Crescent were those of Belle Elmore and this piece of evidence would have had a strong infl uence on the decision to convict Crippen.

Second, Crippen was perhaps not best served by the lawyers he sought for assistance. After his arrest off the coast of Canada and before arriving back in England he accepted the services of Arthur Newton, a solicitor from London who had sent him a telegram saying that ‘Your friends desire me to defend you and will pay all necessary expenses’ ( The Fargo Forum, 1910). However, Newton did not have a good reputation – he was subsequently suspended from practice in 1911 13 – and he was thought to have advised Crippen wrongly by telling him to say nothing in his fi rst appearance at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court prior to the trial at the Old Bailey. This, at least, was the opinion of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, the most famous defence barrister of the time ( Marjoribanks, 1929 ), who later gave a talk on the case in which he put forward an alternative defence strategy. Belle, he would have argued, was sexually demanding of Crippen (an appalling way to demonise the victim) and to pacify her appetite Crippen gave her hyoscine hydrobromide but got the dose wrong. When she died from the overdose, he panicked and disposed of her body, rather than tell the authorities. If this defence were successful, Crippen might have avoided execution. 14 However, Marshall Hall said that he declined to take the case because Crippen had already appeared at the Magistrates’ Court, represented by Newton, and had said nothing to alter his story about Belle’s disappearance. In Marshall Hall’s view, this made the defence of accidental death more diffi cult to put forward ( Young, 1920 ). 15

As it was, Newton contracted with Arthur Tobin to represent Crippen at the Old Bailey, and Tobin and his team had no option but to continue with Crippen’s story that Belle had gone to the US.

Third, as we will see in Chapter 7 , the social geometry of a case has been theorised to aff ect its outcome. It looks as if Crippen underestimated the strength and resources of Belle’s social network, whose members were able to make inquiries in the US about her purported death and also to make eff ective representations to Scotland Yard expressing their concern about her disappearance. If, rather than throwing herself into the music hall world, Belle had lived the isolated life of a foreigner in England, married to a foreign man, would her disappearance have been noticed, or caused concern, or led to a persuasive request to get the police involved? If Crippen had been English rather than American, would he have had an active social network to aid in his defence; and would his social standing as a citizen rather than a foreigner lead him to have been judged less severely?

However, alongside these factors that probably played a part in his conviction, the inconsistencies in his testimony – which we have explored in this chapter and which were exploited by the prosecution – were arguably an additional contributing infl uence. In particular, his admission that he had lied and his failure to provide an adequate account for his lying destroyed his credibility. In Chapter 2 , we saw how James Hanratty changed his alibi midway through his trial, to say that he had spent the night of 22 August in Rhyl, not Liverpool. When cross- examined about why he had fi rst claimed he had been in Liverpool, he admitted lying:

Hanratty: Because at this stage when I spoke to Mr. Acott over the phone I know I had already told Mr. Acott a lie about Liverpool and it was quite obvious to me inside that I never committed this crime and I had nothing at all to fear. (Cross- examination of Hanratty, cited in Foot, 1971 : 272)

As we can see, Hanratty was even less clear than Crippen in accounting for his lying, something which surely contributed to his conviction.

In the next chapter, we will look at other ways in which credibility is challenged.

Exercise 2:

What do you think about Marshall Hall’s proposed defence for Crippen? At trial, Crippen would have had to acknowledge that the stories he told to the MHLG and to Inspector Dew were both lies. How might he have accounted for this?