Notorious killer hanged for murdering wife may have been INNOCENT
The case of Dr Crippen caused a sensation not just in Edwardian Britain but around the world. It certainly had all the elements needed to grip the imagination of the news-paper-reading public of the 1910s. There was the gruesomeness of the discovery of a dismembered corpse underneath Crippen’s coal cellar. The escape of Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve, disguised as a boy, on a ship bound for Canada. And their dramatic capture, the first brought about by the new invention of wireless telegraphy.
It took the jury just 27 minutes to find Hawley Harvey Crippen guilty of murdering his wife Cora, a music hall performer, at their north London home, a crime for which he was hanged. But now, in a twist worthy of Agatha Christie, a new book argues that he was innocent. Mr Crippen, Cora & The Body In The Basement by Matthew Coniam claims the notorious murderer was in fact the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice.
Summing up at Crippen’s trial, the Judge said: “Were the remains found at 39, Hilldrop Crescent the remains of Cora Crippen? If they were not, there is an end of this case.”
DNA analysis wasn’t around in 1910. But new examinations of the scarred skin of the corpse thought to be Cora Crippen were conducted by a team of US scientists, led by forensic biologist Dr David Foran.
The result was a double bombshell. First, it was found that the mitochondrial DNA of the skin of the corpse was different from that of grand-nieces of Cora Crippen. Not only that, it was discovered that the original tissue originated not from a woman but from a man.
“We tested and tested and tested and if I had any doubts whatsoever I would never have come out with it. The body is not Cora Crippen’s,” Foran said.
For Coniam, the scientific findings prove conclusively that the verdict was wrong. “Let us be absolutely clear,” he says. “Foran’s tests show beyond any reasonable doubt that the remains in the cellar were that of an unknown male.
