The Murder That Shook Edwardian Britain

When the music hall dancer, Belle Ellmore, disappeared in January 1910, it was her performing colleagues who raised the alarm. Her murder by Dr. Crippen became a media sensation, and he became the star of the story. Why was Belle Ellmore murdered? Why did it cause such a sensation at its time? And what role did her friends and colleagues in the music hall industry play in bringing justice? Joining Kate today is historian and author, Hallie Rubenhold, whose feminist lens on this story, in Story of a Murder https://www.waterstones.com/book/story-of-a-murder/hallie-rubenhold/2928377304799, is long overdue. This episode is edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 1:07Speaker 03

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• 1:44Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets, and you are you, and I am me, and I'm very glad that we are here together. But before we can go any further, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults, about adulty things, and an adulty way of covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And we call that the Fair Do's Warning, because if you listen to that, keep listening, and then happen to get offended, well, tough [BLEEP] because fair do's, you were warned. Right, on with the show.

• 2:18Kate Lister?

  Join me on the deck of the SS Montrose. Let's take in some sea air as we approach the shores of Canada. Ooh, it's good for what ails ya. The year is 1910, and some of my fellow passengers are beginning to attract unwanted attention. They claim to be father and son, but, I dunno, there's an odd level of familiarity between them. And as young boys go, he looks...kind of womanly, but hey, I guess that's none of my business. But it is most definitely the business of Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard, who has journeyed all the way from London and is now making a beeline for these two suspicious characters. Now, this is getting juicy.

• 3:02Kate Lister?

  He's brandishing handcuffs, and the father-and-son duo, aka Dr Crippin and his lover Ethel Lanive, are looking like the game is up. Are you keen to know more? Well, I know I am. Let's get into it.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  What are you looking for, madam?

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Oh, money, of course.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  I make perfect copy of whatever my boss needs by just turning him on and pushing the button.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 3:42Speaker 05

  Goodness, what beautiful time! Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.

• 3:50Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet: The History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. You may not have heard of it, but the murder of Belle Ellmore by her husband, Dr Crippin, gripped Britain in a way that only a true crime mystery can. It was an absolute sensation, in no small part because of the man at the centre of it, Dr Crippin. Well, today's guest is the wonderful Hallie Rubenhold, who has made a career reshaping historical narratives through a feminist lens, and she's done it again with this tale in her new book, Story of a Murder. But who was Belle? Why was she murdered? What influence did the women of London's music hall world play in solving this crime?

• 4:34Kate Lister?

  And why has Belle's side of the story been sidelined for so long? I am ready to find out if you are.

• 4:45Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back. It's Hallie Rubenhold. It's so nice to see you. How are you doing?

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Really well. I'm getting very excited about this new book being published. And I'm talking about all of these things that I've been researching over the years and very excited.

• 5:08Kate Lister?

  I'm so pleased that you've got a new book out. I've been on tenterhooks for this one. Your last one, The Five, was just such a phenomenal piece of work. That must have felt a little bit, I mean, obviously, everyone wants their work to do as well as that did. But after you'd written that, did you feel a little bit like, how the fuck am I going to follow that one up?

• 5:27Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. It was very, very daunting because I had, it's like I had this book sitting on my shoulder. I had The Five sitting on my shoulder the whole time I was writing Story of a Murder, thinking, how am I going to top this? And The Five was such an enormous success that it just was like, wow, okay, how am I gonna, how am I gonna match that?

• 5:50Kate Lister?

  Well, Hallie, you're gonna match it by writing about Dr. Crippen. Honestly, I didn't see that one coming, but like when I saw your first post, that's what you were writing about. I was like, that makes sense. That makes sense, actually. So I have been lucky enough to get a sneaky PDF copy of this and I've heard some fabulous buzz amongst other historians about how much they love it. But I didn't want to binge the whole thing in one go. And I'll tell you for why, because I know what you're really good at and you're really good at busting myths and making you think about things in different ways. So I thought that I would come to you with some of the myths about the Crippen case.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 6:30Kate Lister?

  So like what, what I kind of think about. So my knowledge of this is early Edwardian, there's a Dr. Crippen and he's got this horrible, shrewish wife who's really overbearing and shouts at him all the time. And he's this little man who's like, can barely say boot or goose. And eventually he gets sick of it and then he murders her and he runs off with his younger lover. And he almost would have got away for it as well, were it not for some police officers that stopped him on a ship or something like that. Am I close?

• 6:58Speaker 04

  No.

• 6:59Kate Lister?

  No.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  The police officers that stopped an ownership to a certain degree, you have basically just regurgitated to me everything that was in Filson Young's account, written in 1920, of the trial. He wrote a summary of the trial for the Great British Trials series, and he wrote an essay introducing this. And in that, he kind of solidified this kind of picture of Crippen. I mean, first of all, he was the most gigantic misogynist and had a number of women in his life who he treated very badly. And that's not surprising. I mean, again, just as a sidebar to all of this, I kept thinking I was finding people who were

• 7:43Speaker 04

  genuine heroes. And then they turned out to be eugenicists.

• 7:47Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's awful. The historians bind for that one. I was recently researching the history of birth control. And every time you find a name, you're like, please don't be an asshole. Please don't be an asshole. But oh, no. And they are.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Maybe we can come back to this about, you know, like how we treat people in the past. And we just cannot judge them by our standards at all. It's impossible. But having said that, I mean, Filson Young was absolutely determined. And we know this as early as 1910, because he wrote a letter to an editor of a newspaper saying that whatever you think of Ethel Le Neve and Dr. Crippen, you know, when they were running away together, dressed as father and son, you know, their love is the most important thing. And, you know, no matter what their crime, their love is, you know, is like sacred. And so he took this attitude in 1920, when he was doing basically an introductory essay for a very

• 8:44Speaker 04

  edited version of the trial transcripts. And he created this entire kind of myth, which was, oh, Crippen was this poor little downtrodden man. And he and Ethel was just this kind of wallflower. And their love was so noble and so beautiful. And this here's this kind of bitch and this monster who stood in their way. And so it was a good and Noble thing to kill her.

• 9:11Kate Lister?

  That's the gist, isn't it? That's the narrative that's been handed down.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:16Kate Lister?

  About this one.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  I mean, the interesting thing, one of the interesting things about this, about the myth of it, and then obviously this catches fire and it just runs through the 20th century. And even women are jumping on the bandwagon and Dorothy Sayers, for example, and a woman called Ursula Bloom, who became obsessed with Ethel. And and they echoed all of this, you know, like, you know, horrible, shrewish woman deserves to be murdered, you know. This is, this is, she's getting what's coming to her. And everybody's, you know, from 1920, but from the time when this story was published. Everybody subsequent to that is kind of making it bigger, making it bigger, making Belle like this sexually voracious monster. And I'm sure we'll come back to this as well because it's another major myth that needs to be busted about.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Poor Belle. And I mean, it's all about Belle's reproductive system. Unfortunately, there's so much of this story. The reality was at this time, you know, that in 1920, it was just after the First World War and women's positions. In the world had changed so much. I mean, we had just had the Sex Disqualification Removal Act passed in 1919. Which meant women can enter the professions. They could be solicitors, embarrassers, doctors. And women had got the vote and women were wearing shorter hemlines and wearing makeup and bobbing their hair. And there was like, there was a revolution that was happening. And I think in many ways, what Philson Young wrote about this as a myth.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  Was in response to this upsurge of kind of women's voices. And there are a lot of people who are enormously uncomfortable with women, you know, finding their voice. And asserting their sexuality as well and asserting their place. And I think this fits right in with that that era.

• 11:07Kate Lister?

  I agree. So let's take this back because there'll be people listening to this that are going, Doctor Who, sorry. So we should probably explain a little bit about what happened. And I have had a sneaky peek of your book. I told a little lie. And one of the things that I love is that you set out the beginning like a play programme and there's the cast of characters in the beginning. So let's try and do that. So there was a Doctor Crippen and he was married to, now I didn't even know what her real name was. So you can tell me what her name was. And he did kill her.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Well, you mean, are we talking about his first wife? Or are we talking about his second wife?

• 11:42Kate Lister?

  Oh, Hallie. Right. Okay. Let's just slip this back and we'll just go first wife. Who was Doctor Crippen and who did he marry?

• 11:48Speaker 04

  People will come to this story either knowing about Doctor Crippen, knowing a lot about Doctor Crippen, or knowing absolutely nothing. And for those people who know about the Doctor Crippen legend, a lot of people don't know that he was married before. He had two wives and Ethel, who was his mistress, was going to, looks like, become his third. And his first wife, Charlotte Bell, we should start this in America because Crippen was American. That's another thing that a lot of people don't know. Crippen was American. He was born in Michigan. He grew up in San Jose, California, and his family moved all over the United States. And indeed, he moved all over the United States in his youth. He studied medicine. So he had a legitimate

• 12:30Speaker 04

  medical degree, albeit in homeopathy, which was at the time considered a legitimate branch of medicine. And he married a woman who was an immigrant from Ireland, a Protestant Irish woman named Charlotte Bell, who came from a family who didn't have money but behaved as if they did have money because of the strange peculiarities of the Irish system, landing system. He married her and she was a nurse. I mean, the amazing thing about Charlotte was that she had had two separate careers before the age of 30 in the late 19th century.

• 13:07Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  I mean, all of the women in this story are so incredible. And in fact, that's, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to write this is they they are incredible women for their time. So Charlotte had trained as a teacher and had become a teacher. And then immigrated to the United States with her mother and her sister to join her brother, who was already in New York. And then decided she would train as a nurse and then became a nurse. And, you know, the stuff that nurses saw, you had to be have a pretty strong constitution and, you know, and the scales had to fall from your eyes about human nature to become a nurse. So she was not a kind of, you know, weak person at all. And she married him and they went out west.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  And a number of other things happened, but the long and short of it is in Salt Lake City in the early eighteen nineties, she suddenly died. And she died under very mysterious circumstances. And he said she died of a stroke. But in a professional journal, when they were reporting her death, it was said that she died of a heart attack. Now, he had her buried in a pauper's grave in Salt Lake City, which I went to go and see, by the way. Which is pretty amazing. Within seventy two hours, in the height of winter, when the ground was frozen, you know, unmarked grave. What the hell was going on there? He had his friends sign the death certificate and that was it. That was it. And he never talked about her again.

• 14:36Kate Lister?

  And spoke about her so little, in fact, that she is left out of the Crippen narrative. So I knew that I was going to come and talk to you today. So I did a bit of a binge watch of like random Crippen stuff on YouTube.

• 14:47Speaker 04

  God, help you.

• 14:48Kate Lister?

  Well, you know, I just wanted to like, see, like, is is my take on this story kind of what other people? None of them mentioned that he had a first wife, not one.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  I think there is a real desire to exonerate Crippen, and there always has been. A lot of that came from Crippen himself, who was basically given a lot of leeway as he was waiting to be executed to just write his own story in a sensationalist way and say, I'm innocent, I'm an innocent man, and I love Ethel so much and Ethel loves me and oh, you know, we've done nothing wrong. And not, I was gonna say, not surprisingly, I mean, if you think about today and how people are swayed by the media. You know, I think people started to believe this, you know? How could somebody who loves like this be a monster?

• 15:35Kate Lister?

  Well.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Maybe he's lying.

• 15:38Kate Lister?

  So his second wife, let's talk about her.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  Yes. Okay. So his second wife. So after Charlotte dies mysteriously, Crippen goes to Brooklyn. Crippen trained, you'll be interested to know, as a gynecologist and obstetrician.

• 15:55Kate Lister?

  And a homeopath.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  And a homeopath. So when he goes to New York, he's working for a woman's doctor. And this doctor performed abortions, which were highly illegal at the time. I mean, you could go to, you could go to jail in the state of New York. You could go to jail for twenty years for performing an abortion, even if the woman wasn't pregnant. Even attempting to perform an abortion, you could go to prison. But people still did it. It was one of these things that it's been around since Eve, hasn't it? And Crippen meets Belle because she has had an abortion. And, you know, he describes it in a way that was very sort of careful, saying, well, you know, it was a miscarriage.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  But, you know, she was living with this other man and he put her up in lodgings and it was so obviously an abortion.

• 16:45Kate Lister?

  Wow, okay.

• 16:46Speaker 04

  And this relationship developed between them and it was a kind of whirlwind romance. And she was coming up on nineteen at the time. And they went to Jersey City, which was like a Gretna Green, and they just got married within, you know, knowing each other for a couple of months. You know, so there must have been some actual genuine affection at the beginning of this relationship. But then it goes sour because they really are really quite an unsuited couple.

• 17:14Kate Lister?

  They do seem quite unsuited. I mean, from admittedly the limited amount that I know. Is, would it be true to say that she was, but I know that she was a singer, she was into music hall, that she was quite a, she's often painted as quite vivacious, quite loud, quite sociable. What's your take on that?

• 17:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, so were so were most people who worked in the music hall.

• 17:36Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  You know, I mean, that's there was absolutely nothing different about her from anybody else who worked in the music hall. You know, she didn't have some sort of flawed character that was any different than anybody else. You know, and certainly the way she was described, all of her friends loved her. She was.

• 17:51Kate Lister?

  She seems really popular, well loved, but Crippen was not loud and vivacious. Or have I got that wrong?

• 17:59Speaker 04

  No, no, I mean, he was a very quiet man, but he was also, I mean, the important thing to bear in mind about Crippen was he was a fraudster. His medical career just didn't take off. We don't know why. He eventually turns to the dark side and turns to patent medicine sales. And then when he moves to London, he gets into medical fraud and actual stock fraud as well. And all sorts of really dodgy schemes and all the men who surround him are incredibly dodgy people who are in and out of prison, who are violent at times. You know, birds of a feather flock together, right?

• 18:41Speaker 04

  That is who he was. He was not a nice man. He was not a good man. And he was also an incredibly accomplished liar. He was a con man and he conned people.

• 18:54Kate Lister?

  Okay, so they've ended up in the UK. Do we have any kind of sources as to what, her name was Belle, wasn't it?

• 19:02Speaker 04

  Belle Ellmore, yes.

• 19:03Kate Lister?

  Belle Ellmore.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  She had several names, which she changed throughout her life. Belle Ellmore was her stage name, which she adopted as her name and everybody knew her as that.

• 19:12Kate Lister?

  Okay, so Belle and Crippen are living together. Do we have any sources as to what their relationship was like?

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Well, it's interesting because, you know, there is a lot of testimony from people who knew them from their friends and said, you know, they had a perfectly, on the surface, a perfectly good marriage. And, you know, nobody ever heard them screaming at each other. You know, there were times when they would get angry with each other, but that was normal, you know. He wasn't violent towards her, as far as anybody knew. Gosh, I mean, there's so many accounts, there are accounts from lodgers who lived with them. There was an account from Belle's sister who stayed with them for a while. Some of the things that her sister does say is that when Crippen lived with

• 20:02Speaker 04

  the family, when they first got married, they lived with Belle's family in Brooklyn, that Crippen basically molested all of her sisters when they were teenage girls.

• 20:12Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  Would not surprise me at all. He was very interested in teenage girls, young teenage girls. But again, you know, this is the late 19th century. And what is completely unacceptable for us was acceptable for them. You know, from man to like fourteen and fifteen year olds, girls got married, could get married at sixteen.

• 20:35Kate Lister?

  I think he still would have raised a few eyebrows.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  A few.

• 20:38Kate Lister?

  A few. Whereas now if someone was dating a fourteen year old, I think you you'd probably remove them from your house immediately, but

• 20:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:45Kate Lister?

  I think at the time it was more like a old, a bit young, but no more than that.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. So he he did have this thing for that and I found somebody saying that before he married Charlotte, there was a young woman he was interested in pursuing, whose mother basically broke off the relationship because she was too young. So he does have this history of, I mean, he is so creepy. He is a really, really creepy, disgusting man.

• 21:19Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Hallie after this short break.

• 21:35Kate Lister?

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• 23:28Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

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• 24:46Kate Lister?

  Do you know something? I know this is horrendously unscientific and I shouldn't say it. It's a disgrace to myself and all other academics, but he looks creepy.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, he does look creepy.

• 24:55Kate Lister?

  I shouldn't say that, but he's got like the-

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Walrus mustache.

• 24:59Kate Lister?

  Yeah, like that sort of creepy mustache.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Creepy mustache.

• 25:03Kate Lister?

  Oh, like little man. Maybe he wasn't little, actually. How big was he?

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Well, he was. He was. He was a small man.

• 25:10Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  In that way, they are correct, but also Belle was short also. So there's a lot of fat shaming around Belle. You know, and really, to be honest, if you look at Belle and all of the other women of her acquaintance, she certainly was, you know, more kind of robustly shaped. It's the fat shaming kind of comes subsequently. And it comes as a part of this, oh, well, she was a depraved woman. You know, a fat woman can't control herself. A fat woman, you know, just can't control her desires. She desires food. She desires sex. She desires all of this stuff. She's depraved.

• 25:50Kate Lister?

  And it's also quite a clever way of like coding age as well. That idea of like the domineering, frumpy wife who is making her husband's life a misery.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:03Kate Lister?

  Like you see that all the time. I was watching Faulty Towers the other- Day like this Basil faulted, Sybil faulted, she's lying, she wasn't fat, but she's lying there with all these rollers in her hair and like smoking. You know, it's the idea of like, you've got this domineering shrew in this poor henpecked husband.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  Well, that's interestingly, as the image of Belle evolved through the 20th century, as more and more people kind of piled on to kind of turn her into this sort of image of unacceptable womanhood. That's what she became in the kind of 1960s. 1960s, 1970s is this woman who laid about in her pajamas, pajamas.

• 26:39Kate Lister?

  Was on the stage?

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and drank. There is absolutely no evidence at all for any of this. I mean,

• 26:47Kate Lister?

  Really?

• 26:48Speaker 04

  You know, there's nobody says, well, she had problems drinking. There was nobody, you know, I mean, Crippen didn't even say that. And believe me, you know, in Crippen's witness statements and his interviews with the police, he has never, ever, I mean, he, he kind of pulled out of the closet, like every possible defamatory thing he could say about his wife in order to save himself. And the one thing he didn't say was she drank.

• 27:11Kate Lister?

  Interesting.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:13Kate Lister?

  So Belle disappears.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:17Kate Lister?

  What's the lead up to this, Hallie? What is going on?

• 27:21Speaker 04

  Okay. First of all, there's one thing I want to bring in, which we haven't talked about, which is very, very important in, in terms of um defining who Belle was. And shortly after they got married, when Belle was probably about 21, Crippen had her ovaries removed.

• 27:38Kate Lister?

  Holy fuckballs. What?

• 27:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:41Kate Lister?

  At 21?

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. He had told her, you know, she had various problems and what she had, and I found the records of this. She had a prolapsed uterus and her mother and her sisters both said she had no problems with her periods. She had no issues at all. Belle wanted children and quite frankly, Crippen didn't want children. He had a child from his first wife, who he basically palmed off to his parents to look after. And he rarely ever saw Otto, his son, again.

• 28:15Kate Lister?

  Wow. Now, we should say that the removal of ovaries, the removal of the clitoris, a hysterectomy, this is all documented in Victorian quack medicine. It wasn't routine. I think we should point that out. It wasn't like, you know, if you went to the GP with a headache, they'd go, right, let's have your womb out.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:34Kate Lister?

  But it is documented, but I didn't know it was carrying on. I thought this was a Victorian madness.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Well, it was, it was. This was about, was about eighteen ninety four when this surgery was done. But at that time, there were a lot of doctors, even homeopathic doctors, speaking out against it and saying, this is not something we should be doing. They were, they were calling it the castration of women.

• 28:56Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  And so there was a move against it by that point. So it was unpopular, but still he did it. And, and for the rest of her life, first of all, she was traumatized by the surgery and it was a terrible surgery. And it took her months and months and months to recover. And she was traumatized by this idea that she had always wanted to be a mother. She couldn't now be a mother. She felt, you know, completely different in who she was.

• 29:21Kate Lister?

  Like forced into a complete menopause, right?

• 29:23Speaker 04

  Totally and instantly. And I mean, surgical menopause is like that and at twenty one. And, you know, all of these things happening to her body. And also that didn't cure the prolapsed uterus. So she still had a prolapsed uterus. And what is so important about this is that Crippen says, so various times Crippen leaves her for work. And at one point he leaves her when they're living in London. And he has, he's called back to Philadelphia to be basically hauled over the coals by his employer for acting as Belle's stage manager. And they have a kind of, it's an agreed separation. And Belle meets this other performer called Bruce Miller.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Now, this is really weird and this is a really, really important part of this story.

• 30:09Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  That is often, no woman has really kind of investigated. And I think it's really, and I'm saying this, it's very important that women look at these stories because so much is said about women that men don't pick up on necessarily. And the impacts of being forced into sterility, I think, is, is something that most of the male writers just kind of breezed over in this story, which I found pretty incredible. But more to the point, she meets Bruce Miller and they are supposed to have had an affair. We don't know what exactly happened between them. He, the one thing he will admit to is that he did kiss her. And he writes letters to her, which he signs love and kisses to brown eyes. And this is basically at the time of the trial.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  This is the only evidence that Crippen can produce that his wife had an affair was a letter signed love and kisses to brown eyes. That isn't, you know, the impassioned, overflowing gushings of a, of a, of an adulterous lover. But anyway, they probably did have some sort of emotional affair. I mean, they probably were physically intimate in some way, but this is very, very important. Bruce Miller, and he was at the trial, when he was asked, were you more than friends with her? And he used this phrase, and he used it several times. He said, I could not be more than a friend. I could not be more than a friend, which to

• 31:37Speaker 04

  me, sounds like a very guarded way of saying there was a physical impediment to sexual intercourse.

• 31:44Kate Lister?

  It does, doesn't it? And if she has had what sounds like an abortion at some point, possibly a botched abortion, they're very dangerous, and she's had her ovaries removed, which is just butchery, and she has a prolapse.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. And she's in menopause as well, without HRT.

• 32:01Kate Lister?

  As you said, instant surgical menopause.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  So this is the thing. Crippen would have known if his wife had kind of sworn off sex or wasn't able to have sex anymore, found sex very, very painful. And he would know that. And he would also know that in England, he could not divorce her because the grounds for divorce were adultery. So he was stuck with her forever now. After he'd sterilized her, now he's stuck with her forever.

• 32:28Kate Lister?

  Absolute prick.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  I know.

• 32:30Kate Lister?

  But I'll tell you, someone who was having an affair, Ali, that we know about.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Was Crippen.

• 32:35Kate Lister?

  Crippen.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. So Crippen is at this time also having an affair, well, is having an affair with Ethel Linneve, who is his, what was called a lady typist. You know, women were entering the workforce at that time.

• 32:49Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  And she was a clerk and a shorthand taker and a typist. And, you know, they fell in love with each other, but I think Ethel initially really fell in love with the idea that at the time, he was living in a ten-roomed house in Holloway. And he was buying his wife diamonds and really nice clothing. And, you know, he had a lot of money. And Ethel came from social housing. She was born in Norfolk. Her family had no money. And they, you know, they really made a tremendous effort to kind of improve the lives of their children and sent Ethel to secretarial college. You know, they were having an affair. And in fact, I think, I really strongly believe

• 33:36Speaker 04

  it was Ethel who was the engine behind this murder.

• 33:41Kate Lister?

  Mic drop. Plot twist. Hallie, okay, go. Why would you say that?

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Well, Ethel, I mean, she was a very dark and very complicated character. I mean, I have to say, I'm completely haunted by her. I think about her so often. I mean, partially because she didn't die until nineteen sixty seven, which is amazing. And her children had no idea who she was. And there are audio interviews with her children in the eighties and nineties.

• 34:11Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  And I mean, that to me was just absolutely stunning. You know, the story isn't that long ago. So Crippen was stringing Ethel along for you. I mean, they, they were involved for six years.

• 34:23Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow, for a long time.

• 34:24Speaker 04

  And they had a sexual relationship. And he kept saying, oh, Belle's gonna leave me for Bruce Miller. Belle's gonna leave me, just, you know, ju- just, just hang on. Of course, she was never gonna leave him for Bruce Miller. Bruce Miller had gone back to Chicago, you know, and, and she occasionally got a letter from him. But this was a nice way of keeping your mistress, you know, and but Ethel got tired of this. She got tired of it. And the real tipping point came when Ethel got pregnant and Crippen obviously made her have an abortion. And that's documented that, again, it's called a quote unquote miscarriage, but you had to call it that at that time because abortion was illegal and, and you would be implicating yourself in another crime if you said that you had participated in that.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  And, um, and from that point, you know, just the tension just ratchets up. He buys Ethel an engagement ring, even though Belle is still alive. So this is a couple of months before, uh, she's murdered.

• 35:20Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  And then the week before Belle is murdered, Ethel decides basically bring this engagement ring out and tell all her friends she's engaged, while Crippen has gone off to buy the hyacinth hydrobromide, which he uses to poison Belle with. Yeah, she knew it was gonna happen.

• 35:40Kate Lister?

  And she is definitely beha- well, maybe this is untrue as well, but wasn't she caught wearing Belle's clothes?

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Oh, god, yeah. I mean, it gets, it gets, I mean.

• 35:49Kate Lister?

  I mean, have a word with yourself. Wow.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Totally. This is where it gets like, kind of see, when I'm saying, you know, that she's a kind of dark and complex person. Belle has gone missing. Nobody knows where she is. Crippen says she's gone to America to deal with some family emergency.

• 36:05Kate Lister?

  Because one thing that he underestimated was she was missed very quickly by her friends, very quickly.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. And her friends, so she was part of this organisation called the Music Hall Ladies Guild, which was a charitable organisation. She was the treasurer. All of her good friends were part of this. They met every Wednesday, and she was so close with her friends. Your friends are gonna know. You know, Kate, you disappear, and your best friends are like, hang on, she's not, what the hell's going on here? You know, this isn't.

• 36:35Kate Lister?

  Well, she's just got, she's just nipped over to America for some family business.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and she's not even texted me. She's not sent me a message, you know, she's not, she's not, you know, what, what's going on? And it was like that with them, you know, they would send telegrams to each other every day, they would ring each other, they would, and so they were saying, look, something's seriously wrong. But then something really, really did appear seriously wrong when, at a charity ball about a month or so later, Crippen turns up, not with his wife, but with his lady typist, wearing his wife's diamonds, the rising sun brooch.

• 37:11Kate Lister?

  Jesus.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  And they proceed to just kind of sit at the table with all of Belle's friends, as if nothing's happened.

• 37:18Kate Lister?

  Could you even imagine?

• 37:20Speaker 04

  I know.

• 37:21Kate Lister?

  Your mate has gone missing, her husband has just said, oh no, she's just gone to see some people, don't worry about it. And then he walks in with this little bit of stuff that he's got, and she's wearing your mate's jewellery?

• 37:33Speaker 04

  I know.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  I know. And so, and that's how they felt as well. And so really, at that point, it was like, you know, the gloves are off. And at first Scotland Yard just wasn't interested because Scotland Yard just thought, oh, these are bohemian people. You know, they have rocky lives. Yeah, musical people, you know, they're all having it off with each other. They've all got illegitimate children. You know, so what? She goes missing. She's probably, you know, run off with her lover, you know, whatever. We're not interested. And so they kept agitating for this, you know, to have it investigated. And eventually it took one of Belle's friend's husbands to go with Lil Hawthorne, her name was, to Scotland Yard to say, look, I'm a man and I think there's something wrong here.

• 38:21Kate Lister?

  I have a penis and I think this is important.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna throw my penis on the table and you're gonna listen to me. And exactly, that's what happened. And then they decided to investigate it. And lo and behold, there was something in this. But it took a long time to get to that stage.

• 38:37Kate Lister?

  Am I right in thinking that we don't actually know what happened to Belle? They found human remains in the basement of their house, but we don't know what happened to her.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  We know that she was poisoned with hyacinth hydrobromide. What has been speculated, and certainly I think the best theory comes from a man called Ingleby Oddi, who has a very bizarre name, but who was one of the junior barristers on the trial, who had access to all of the documentation and then later became a coroner. And so has saw subsequent cases of poisoning and various other things. And Ingleby Oddi said that he believed what had happened was that this was a poisoning gone wrong. That the intention was that hyacinth hydrobromide is a sedative and it will put you to sleep.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  And you can affect a very natural death that way through an overdose. And then he would just get a friend of his to sign the death certificate and that would be it. What actually probably happened was in too high of a dose, and he did give her. Too much. I mean, he probably because he was a homeopathist, didn't understand actual dosage. And what can then happen is your behaviour becomes manic and hyper. And I would say there was probably a struggle. And because there was a struggle, there were marks, there were injuries left on her body, which meant that when she did die. However, she did die, it couldn't be passed off as a natural death.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  And so suddenly he had a body on his hands and he had to dispose of that body. And he wasn't expecting that. And then that's where it all comes unraveled. And he has to literally chop up her body and take her bones out and. I mean, he's probably burying her and disposing of her body at piecemeal in various places. And then buries it under the brickwork of the coal cellar. The viscera, which he covers with quicklime, thinking it's going to, you know, kind of break down the body, but unfortunately the quicklime. Became watered down and and when water interacts with it, it acts as a preservative. And so it preserved the viscera.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  So when Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard went looking after Ethel and Crippen. Took flight because he had come to interview them and they got scared. He found the remains in the cellar.

• 41:11Kate Lister?

  And so Crippen, I don't even know what his first name is. What is his first name?

• 41:14Speaker 04

  His name is Hawley Harvey Crippens and that's spelled H A W L E Y.

• 41:20Kate Lister?

  Hawley, okay. Hawley Harvey Crippens. Hawley is hauled ass with Ethel. They are on the run and this. Becomes a media sensation, doesn't it?

• 41:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:31Kate Lister?

  Why?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, there are lots of reasons. There are lots of reasons why. What doesn't come out until slightly later is that they are dressed as father and son. Which certainly adds a whole other heightened level of sensationalism to this. Because they've gone incognito and Ethel is dressed in a boy's suit and wearing a hat and has cut her hair short. And he shaved off his moustache. What people found so shocking was the brutality. With which her body was completely desecrated. And the fact that a husband had completely dismembered his wife's body. And then put on his, you know, hat and got on the tram and went to work.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  As if nothing had happened. And that was such a kind of assault on people's sense of decency and dignity and that it had happened in this neighbourhood, you know, which means, you know, this could be you, newspaper reading public, you know, sitting there having your tea and your toast in your, in the morning. This could be you. These people, the Crippins, could be your neighbours. You know, there's all sorts of scary things happening behind the woodshed, you know, in your neighbourhood. And so people became obsessed with this, but they also became obsessed with the fact that Crippin had gone to ground with Ethel.

• 42:52Kate Lister?

  And no one knew where they were.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Nobody knew where they were. And so this international manhunt took place. And this was in all of the newspapers and it was in the newspapers like twice a day because there were two editions published. And so people were kind of following this in real time. And especially when Crippin was discovered to have been on board the Montrose, which was a ship bound for Quebec. And the captain, Captain Kendall, figured out that the weird looking father and son who were holding hands, I mean, who holds hands with their teenage son, right, were the fugitives. And so he got on his newly invented Marconi wireless.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Well, he had his, his wireless operator get on and wire the shipping company who wired Scotland Yard, who got in touch with Inspector Dew, who hopped on another ship called the Laurentic, which left from Liverpool and he hoped to get to Quebec before the Montrose got there. And lo and behold, he did. And he boarded the ship and he arrested Crippin and Ethel. Ethel, incidentally, who started screaming, even before the charges of murder were read out to her, screaming and collapsed and went absolutely berserk. So, you know, that's not the behaviour of somebody who claimed to be as innocent as she was.

• 44:18Kate Lister?

  Who had no clue what had happened at all.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:21Kate Lister?

  Was she charged? He was charged. Was she charged?

• 44:24Speaker 04

  Well, they were both charged with murder initially. He was found guilty. And she, and this is, this is the real kicker. She had her, her charge reduced to being an accomplice to murder. And then it was decided before her trial, they didn't really care about her, whatever happened.

• 44:43Kate Lister?

  Wow, okay.

• 44:44Speaker 04

  But the real problem was they had never, ever bothered to gather all of the evidence against her because Dew, from the very start, was just interested in the man. Despite the fact that, I mean, Ethel was, she was obstructive to his efforts to interrogate Crippen, she was, she was obstructive from the very beginning. She just, it's believed she destroyed evidence on the Montrose when she was arrested also.

• 45:16Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Holly after this short break.

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• 46:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.

• 47:04Kate Lister?

  Right, let's get on with it.

• 47:16Kate Lister?

  Just listening to you talk, and again, I know that you should never be an absolutist, being an even minded academic should always leave space for doubt, but she definitely was in on this in some way.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and the lies she told, I mean, lie after lie after lie to her parents, to her sister, to her friends.

• 47:36Kate Lister?

  It's just not credible, the way she behaved and the way she acted and these lies that she's telling, that she knew nothing at all, that she was as surprised as everybody else, no.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  Yes, and she claimed she knew absolutely nothing and she was completely innocent. She was just dragged along in this kind of evil man's plan, and that was effectively the line that her defence barrister played, and he got her completely acquitted of everything.

• 48:04Kate Lister?

  And what's Creppin saying, is at any point he's saying, hang on a second Ethel, that's not quite right?

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Well, no, no, because it was a complete pact of silence between the two of them. I mean, it was so obvious, at various points, it's just so obvious that the story was so rehearsed and discussed between them beforehand, whatever happens Ethel, say nothing, just be silent, say nothing, say I know nothing, that's all she kept saying was, I know nothing, I know nothing, I know nothing. And she knew, she knew everything, and actually there are contrary statements about what she knew in the witness statements of other people. You know, her sister, her landlady, who said she came home from work one day around the time when the murder took place, and had a complete nervous breakdown and cried out, oh, it's Miss Elmore.

• 48:52Kate Lister?

  Oh, come on, like, this wouldn't stand up in court today. I've got a bit more faith in the judicial system that she should have been nailed for this today.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  But Ethel was written off, I mean, literally written off as a hysterical woman, and that was it. She would have been incapable of keeping a secret, it was said, because she was so hysterical.

• 49:09Kate Lister?

  So you've got one woman, Belle Ellmore, who the police don't care about all that much in the beginning because she is a music hole person, and who is as denigrated as being the wrong kind of woman, and then you've got another woman who might well have helped kill her, and she's going to get away with it because she's a different type of wrong woman.

• 49:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. And it was believed she had this type of hysteria that was just the right amount of hysteria. It was the sort of hysteria that polite women had. You know, the sort of hysteria that made you take to your bed with headaches and, you know, you had menstrual problems and you didn't eat and, you know, you were very weak.

• 49:47Kate Lister?

  Fainting, that kind of stuff.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that was an appropriate type of hysteria for a woman to have.

• 49:54Kate Lister?

  Crippen was executed for this, wasn't he? He was. When was that?

• 49:58Speaker 04

  Twenty third of November nineteen ten. And what Ethel does after Crippen is found guilty and she is quitted, Ethel then kind of takes up the gauntlet of trying to get his trial overturned, you know, the verdict overturned, and, you know, does everything she can and is really aggressive. You know, she kind of thrusts herself on the governor of Pentonville, you know, goes to his door and says, you must listen to me, you must, you know, I mean, this is not a wilting violet. And the fact that anybody took her for that is ridiculous. And then, of course, she sells her story to the press. And in her stories, you know, she says, oh, this idea

• 50:40Speaker 04

  that we go dressed as father and son, I just thought it was a lark. It was just fun and I had a great time. And, you know, and, and no, I never let him completely influence me to do things that I didn't want to do. And, and so she's kind of overturning her own story and undermining her own story. She's interviewed in the nineteen twenties as well. And the story keeps changing over and over again. And she's admitting a little by little throughout the kind of decades that she was actually much more involved.

• 51:14Kate Lister?

  Totally in it. So I could talk to you about this forever and ever, Hallie, but I'm not allowed to. So as a sort of a final question, one of the things that you've really sought to bring out of the book and that you've spoken about is that this, it was the role of women that really nailed this case, although a lot of it is kind of, you know, it was the police detectives and it was the ship captain. What role was it that Bell's friends had in this? Because she had some show busy friends. She had, was it Volcana, the strongest woman in the world? And

• 51:42Speaker 04

  Again, this is unfortunately one of these things that has made it into the legend. I mean, Volcana, her name was Kate Williams, was part of Music Hall Ladies Guild, but she wasn't part of this group who investigated the murder.

• 51:55Kate Lister?

  Ah, see.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  She wasn't part of the executive committee. So, so no, Volcana did not investigate Belle Ellmore's murder.

• 52:03Kate Lister?

  There we go, that's another one. Put that to bed.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:06Kate Lister?

  But what was the role of women in this?

• 52:08Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the thing is, one of the things that occurred to me as I was writing this, especially during, when I was writing the bit about the trial, is that women had really no voice in justice at all. They couldn't be in the police, they couldn't be solicitors, they couldn't be barristers, they couldn't be judges, they couldn't sit in parliament, they couldn't vote, you know, they couldn't make laws, they couldn't participate in anything legal in that regard. And what is so interesting is the amount of women who testified in this trial against Crippen to kind of seal his guilt was pretty impressive. So these are the friends of Belle

• 52:49Speaker 04

  who were the ones who agitated at the very beginning, something's terribly wrong here, and tried to get Scotland Yard interested and they hired private detectives and they investigated themselves and they questioned Crippen and they chased him literally through buildings and down the street and knocked on his door and really made a nuisance of themselves for a good end, obviously. But they did other things as well, this is important. So their president, Mrs. Jeanette, who was an equestrian performer, happened to be in New York at the time and got in touch with Belle's sisters and helped to create a dragnet on the other side of the Atlantic, hoping to catch Crippen when he was on the ship.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  And then went to Quebec to identify him and Ethel, speak to Ethel, identify the jewellery that was found on them. And then finally, they paid for Belle's funeral, they paid for her grave, assisted her sister and also Finally, most importantly, they had inheritance law changed in this country because Ethel was supposed to inherit. So Crippen had written a will, so Crippen had inherited all of Bell's worldly goods.

• 54:00Kate Lister?

  Oh, fuck right off. No.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  Had bequeathed it all to Ethel.

• 54:04Kate Lister?

  Very much think not.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  It will. Exactly. And that's what the Music Hall Ladies Guild said. They said, no, we're engaging a solicitor. We're going to completely challenge this. And they did. They had inheritance law changed.

• 54:14Kate Lister?

  Amazing. Hallie, you have been incredible to talk to. I knew you would be. You always are, but you've smashed it out of the park again. If people want to know more about you and your work, and they will after reading this, where can they find you?

• 54:26Speaker 04

  Well, I am online in the usual places, Instagram, Blue Sky, Facebook. And the book is available for preorder now from any bookshop. It will actually be on the shelves on the 27th of March.

• 54:40Kate Lister?

  Let's give it its full title.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  It is called Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen. Also, it is available in the US and it is coming out a couple of days earlier in the UK. So it's available on the 25th of March in the US, 27th of March in the UK.

• 54:57Kate Lister?

  Amazing. Hallie, thank you so much. You've been spectacular.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  You're welcome.

• 55:07Kate Lister?

  Thanks for listening and thank you so much to Hallie for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, then you can email us at [email protected]. Coming up, we have got the final episode in our limited series, Real Wives of Dictators, Chung Jing, Wife of Chairman Mao, and The History of Gonorrhea. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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