After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Murder That Shocked Edwardian Britain

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

It was a murder that shook Edwardian Britain, and became a media sensation around the world.Joining Maddy and Anthony today is the best-selling historian and author, Hallie Rubehold, to explore one of the most infamous murders of the 20th century, and the rapidly changing world it took place in.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitProduced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Tomos Delargy. 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 survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. The Atlantic Ocean churned beneath the SS Montrose as it made its way to Canada. Captain Kendall was, so far, pleased with progress, though there was something that was unsettling him. On board, there was a father and son that had caught his eye, and although Kendall couldn't quite put his finger on it,

there was something strange about them, about the way the boy's ill-fitting clothes hung to his body, about the... affection between the pair. In fact, they were not father and son at all, but man and woman fleeing from Britain. Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen had shaved off his distinctive mustache, while his partner, Ethel Lanive, had set aside her usual skirts and ornaments in favour of a boy's garb. Why the disguise? The pair were heading for what they thought was a new life, their gruesome misdeeds left behind in London, the authorities outwitted. As the nautical miles sped by, Crippen and Lemeve began to relax.

They'd gotten away with murder, the killing of Belle Elmore to be precise. But little did they know, and despite the waves that separated them, the police were already in hot pursuit. As the Canadian coastline lunged into view on the horizon, it promised a freedom close enough to touch. Captain Kendall, though, had other plans. Emerging now through the ocean fog was a faster vessel, the SS Laurentic. On board was Chief Inspector Walter Dew, who'd been tipped off by Kendall, something only

made possible through a new technology, the telegraph. Chief Inspector Dew boarded the Montrose, his eagle eyes scanning the deck until he spotted Krippen. He had his man. As the sea calmed and land grew nearer, Dr. Krippen's world began to collapse. Seeing their game was up, he and Laniv surrendered. And part of them was relieved, too. The suspense, Crippen told the inspector, had been too great. I couldn't stand it, he said, any longer. Hello and welcome to an After Dark that we think you're going to particularly enjoy. My name's Anthony. And I'm Maddie.

And what you just heard there was the moment that Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen was arrested for the murder of Belle Elmore. Now, this is the story that caused, I suppose, a sensation across the globe in its time. And it is the subject of today's guest's brand new book, Story of a Murder. Now if you've ever done any research, you'll know that when you're stuck in books yourself, you find it very difficult to read for pleasure. But when this book came across my desk, it inveigled its way into every moment of my day. I was reading when I should have been researching, so if I'm late with deadlines we can blame this

book. And the guest that's responsible for my potentially late deadline is the utterly brilliant historian and author Hallie Rubenhold, whose work, as you may well know, challenges long-held narratives and gives voice to those who history has overlooked. Her groundbreaking books, like The Five, don't just tell histories, they change how we think about those histories. If you're not reading her work, you're missing out on some of the most important historical writing and resulting conversations today. Hallie, welcome to After Dark.

Thank you, that's quite an introduction. Well listen, we're fans on After Dark. It'll come as no surprise. So this is a really special one for us. So we're delighted to have you. Thank you. I have to say, as we are recording this, my laptop is sat on a pile of books and making up this pile is the new story of a murder that we're here to talk about

and the hardback copy of the five. So you are literally holding up the work that I'm doing right now, Halle. That's very flattering. Let's begin with the world that this story is set in because the thing that I admire so much about the work that you do is not only that you take us into history that we feel we know something off and you give us a new perspective on it, but also that you give us a panoramic view. You really build the world in which it is set. This time we're in the Edwardian era in the UK and also in the US. We're moving between both sides of the Atlantic. Can we just start with a sense of what this world looks like, feels like, what's going on in this moment? Gisela M So, I mean, you have to think that really from, I mean, the book kind of covers the 1880s roughly,

but more the 1890s, 1900, the murder takes place in 1910. And in that period, especially the 1890s, and you know, turn of the century, and certainly the decade before the First World War, there was so much intense and fast change happening. If you think about it, the automobile, the airplane, motion picture, x-rays, Marconi Wireless, wireless technology, which is what we were talking about, all of these things that we tend to associate with the birth of modernity. Also, at the press as well, the media becoming much more modern in our sense in that the updates that were possible through wireless technology and also through the telephone as well, people could phone their stories in if they wanted to.

News traveled incredibly quickly, which is one of the fascinating features of this story is that the scene that you were describing with Crippen and Ethel on the Montrose and the Laurentic chasing after them with Inspector Dew on it, the whole world was following that story. Crippen and Ethel didn't know that they had been found. They had been discovered by Captain Kendall, and he had used the Marconi wireless to wire back to shore to tell everybody this, and Scotland Yard knew about it, but also so did the press. They were actually tracking the positions of the ships, both ships as they were pulling into Quebec. Newspapers were published

twice a day, so you could get twice daily updates about what was going on. You could imagine how riveting that was. That was like real time. It was almost like a reality drama. It was like the O.J. Simpson chase of the 1910s. This is why the story was called – well, it was named the crime of the century at the time because it was this intersection of technology, superfast ships, wireless technology, and also psychology. This idea that people were coming alive. This is the time of Freud and trying to understand the criminal mind. There was a lot of discussion about that and who was this person in Crippen and who was this woman in his thrall. All of these things were intersecting at this moment. the people writing about it became very excited about, you know, what does this say about the 20th century? What's going to happen?

I think that's a really good insight, Hallie, into what people are reacting to within this story on the ground at the time. And I love that idea of news at this moment in time, traveling around the world as fast as it possibly can. And there's this chase happening at the same time. It's so, so dramatic. And you can see why it appealed to people. And before we get into talking a little bit about some of those people and the events that unfolded, I just want to hone in on its draw to you because you finish a book like The Five and it's incredibly well received, it makes a huge impact in the field, and I would imagine that there's a moment where you sit and you go, good lord, what am I doing next? I know I would. Yeah, you've read my mind. I mean, that is exactly what I said for years as I was doing this.

The terrible, almost crippling fear of the shadow of the five being cast over this book and how on earth could I top or even match the impact of that book? At some point, I just had to reconcile myself to not doing that. You know, that this would be a different book and, you know, it was what it was and it will be accepted for what it is or people won't like it or they will like it. It's just, you know, it's just the way books are. But it's terrifying. It's like, I can imagine being like a-winning athlete at the Olympics and having won gold

or triple gold or something like that. What do you do when you come back from four years time? And that in itself, the psychology said, it was called the crime of the century. It's kind of reflective of the, I suppose, the optimism, the self-interest of that moment that only a little bit of the 20th century had elapsed at that point. This is already the crime of the century. You think about the Ripper case that the five is about and that it expands and sponges out in lots of ways was the crime of the 19th century. And so I can see why this would interest you, Halley, as a sort of, I suppose, a natural progression of that, that this is another massive case to sink your teeth into and one, as we're about to find out, that has so many different viewpoints, perspectives, ways into it as

well. Let's talk about some of the characters then in this. I don't want to start with Crippen, so let's start with Belle Elmore or Cora Crippen as she's called. Can you explain first of all why she has those two separate names and tell us a little bit about her? JG Well, I call her Belle Elmore for the better part of the book because that's how ultimately she liked to refer to herself. That was the name she settled on. It's interesting. Both of you will have come across this as historians, especially 18th century historians. I love how people just shrug off names and put on new ones all the time. It's just like, could

you imagine if we could just all do that? It's just the ease with which you can give yourself another name in previous centuries, I think is fascinating. It really speaks to an individual sense of identity and how mutable that could be. Gretchen Kerr Particularly for women, right? Ange Lennard For women, particularly, yes. Belle was born in Brooklyn. Her original name was, and this is quite a mouthful, Kune Gund Makamotsi. Her mother was of German descent and they were immigrants, and her father was Polish-Russian. And so the name Kune Gund is German. I'm probably mispronouncing

it because I don't speak German. But the problem with that is that it was a really ungainly name and they realized that this is not a great name for a young girl born in America because Americans can't pronounce it. They quickly changed her name to Concordia and she changed it to Cora, which is what she then came to be known as. Sometimes she called herself Corine, and so she's constantly playing with her names. She changes her last name as well. Her father, biological father, died shortly after she was born,

and her mother remarried, somebody called Frederick Mersenger. Just before Belle left home to go out to work as a servant, she was told by Frederick that she was his adopted daughter and he wasn't her biological father. I think that must have surprised her in some way because she then adopted the surname of Turner. She called herself Cora Turner. The reason for that is, and I consulted a number of people, is in Brooklyn and all over the United States and in Germany as well, there were these societies called the Turnverein. The Turnverein. They were social societies, they had gymnasiums, they had singing groups, they had schools, and they were kind of German cultural centers. And often, immigrants to the United States, German immigrants, changed their surnames to Turner because the Turnverein were called the

Turners. I think that's where she got that. Then eventually she calls herself Cora Crippen when she marries Crippen. Then when she takes to the stage and becomes a musical performer, she reinvents herself as Belle Elmore. That is the name she is happiest with and most comfortable with. CHARLEYY So how does she end up on the stage in the musical Halle? Because the Victorian musical certainly there's a sudden image that's coming to mind, the sort of raucousness of it, the bawdy songs, the fun of it, I suppose, and the slight risk and potentially sort of sexiness. Is the Edwardian musical like that?

And what is the route that she takes to get there? CK Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, something really interesting had happened from about the 1890s. There was a real impetus to clean up the musical. So all of these kind of bawdy songs and things like that, the music hall suddenly became a place where you could bring your family. It became variety performance. Variety performance was... I remember when I was researching this, I really didn't know very much about the music hall, even though my grandfather and my nana used to sing the songs, my Cockney grandparents used to sing the songs. I recently discovered in some of my grandfather's old things, he's

long passed away, but he had this big book of musical history that I thought, oh, he'd be so proud of me doing this now, he'd love it. There was this desire to make it very family-, and it was a variety performance. The thing about Music Hall is that it wasn't just people singing and dancing, as we would tend to think. There were singers and dancers, but there were magicians and ventriloquists and animal acts and performing elephants and even weird motion pictures. Motion pictures starts to feature in musical at about the turn of the century as well. So it's like, you can have dancing dogs, and then you'll have a woman on a high wire, and

then you'll have somebody singing a kind of sad song, and then you'll have a pantomime, and then you'll have a mime artist. And you know, it was this weird breadth of stuff. And it was kind of like the precursor to television. And that's where people would go. It didn't cost very much. You could all go and have a laugh and leave singing the songs. And so that's what it had become by the time Bel Elmore had embarked upon a career

in musical. Though it's still, you know, women as performers, you know, still had a somewhat questionable reputation according to society. And, you know, this idea that, you know, they're all rather kind of a lascivious bunch and sleeping with each other and having illegitimate children. And they just had, they were Bohemians. They had a completely different way of living. One of the things I think musical does in the book so well, actually, and, you know, no spoiler to anybody who maybe does not know this history, but things, as we shall discover, don't necessarily end very well for Belle.

In so many retellings of this particular crime and this particular life, that's the kind of key part of the story. However, what musical does for Belle, I think, is bring her back to life. You get this great sense of urgency, of vitality, of music, singing, dancing, creativity. And you know, for most of the book, that's where we are living in that world with her. That's where we spend most of our time. And I just think that's a really useful tool in Story of a Murder that gives her as much life as she possibly can, given that we're over 100 years removed from it. But we have another woman that's at the heart of this case as well, and that's Ethel Lanive. And Ethel is actually such a complex person. It's so easy to maybe think of these people as characters, but this is a person who lived and breathed. And Ethel is very different to Belle in so many ways. Halle, can you introduce us to Ethel and the complexities therein?

Yes. You really kind of hit the nail on the head with Ethel. I have to say that Ethel. I have to say that Ethel has haunted me. I have thought about her constantly, even since writing this book. She's been a presence because she's so enigmatic in many ways. Throughout her life, she told her story on a number of occasions. She told her story to the press. her story to the press. So many things change in each account that she gives of herself. As time goes by, she seems to implicate herself more and more in the murder. Almost unashamedly, after being acquitted. So Ethel was born in Disse in Norfolk. Her parents were not well off.

She was born in basically a two-room cottage. Her father was, I don't want to say ticket taker, he was a clerk in part of the railway station in Disse. The interesting thing is, and this says a lot about social history and upward mobility in the late 19th century, For centuries, the Neve family, as they were known, I will explain the le at the beginning of the name in a moment, but the Neve family were agricultural laborers. Something really interesting had happened about mid-19th century, which was Walter, Ethel's father's father, became a gardener to a kind of lower gentry family, the Mannings, who were the vicars and dis.

In becoming a gardener, he suddenly attained more social status. And then he could put Walter, Ethel's father, into school, proper school. And at proper school, he learned to read and write to a standard, which would allow him to become a clerk. And once you were a clerk, you were no longer part, technically, of the working class. You were sort of very low middle class, so he had jumped in status very subtly. Walter wanted this for his children, and so he moved the family to London, and they lived in Hampstead. He wanted to put his daughters, which is quite surprising. Walter is a very interesting character because he is very

conservative. He's very religious. He is, you know, Paterfamilius, you know, Victorian Paterfamilius. And he's also rather stupid as well because Ethel is a bit of a rebel and he's just, the wool has been pulled over his eyes so significantly that it's embarrassing. His sons get proper schooling, but he also schools his daughters and they are taught shorthand. They go to Pittman's Secretarial College, which was a type of continuing education for girls after they finished their education and school. Ethel learned shorthand typing, which was a sort of entry way, shorthand and typing, I should say, and lots of other things like bookkeeping and how to answer telephones. This was a gateway to getting what might be considered a respectable job

working in an office. Because for women, the options were women of Ethel's class. You either worked in domestic service, you worked in a factory or you worked in a shop, but this was something altogether different and you could, you could meet a man of a different class. You could meet a man, you know, kind of comfortable middle class who might even marry you. So it had a lot of benefits. And that is how Ethel met Dr. Crippen because she was

hired to work in one of his dodgy places of employment. Crippen was a con artist and a fraudster and he was involved in medical fraud and patent medicine. Ethel and her sister were both working for the Drouet Institute, which purported to cure deafness with its plasters, which you stuck behind your ear. They managed to get themselves into a lot of trouble, just fraudulently peddling medicines. Ethel became Prypon's right-hand woman and knew all of his schemes and helped out in them and became very important to his business. And then they became lovers as well. You've set out there two very different routes that these two very different women take. We've got on the one hand a story of an immigrant family and a woman who eventually ends up on the stage in a profession that is questionable in terms of respectability,

even by the Edwardian period. And then you have this other woman who has opportunities, okay, certainly not handed to her. She has to work hard and circumstances align, but she has an opportunity to take that road to a more respectable life. And the thing that unites these women is Dr. Crippen himself. One thing that I'm curious about Halley is when you wrote The Five, obviously you sort of to a certain extent, as much as possible really, removed so-called Jack the Ripper from that story, or at least removed his central starring role, I suppose, and the sort of monstrous presence that he has in those retellings. In this case, we know who the central male figure is of the story, and

there's presumably a lot already documented about him. So how did you approach how you're going to tell Crippen's story and get to who he was, knowing that he, I suppose, having that information about him already and that identity already attached to him. a story of a murder, not a murderer. Most true crime will take either the perpetrator and put them in the centre of the story, and it becomes their story. Why did they do this, and we follow them all the way through? Or it becomes the story of the police officer, the detective, or who catches the criminal. But it's such a one note telling of a crime story. And the difference with story of a murder is that, is the acknowledgement that crime is an incredibly,

gosh, complex and potentially panoramic story, which encompasses so many people and so many things, so many lives, so many subplots and so many stories. And a murder is never simple, and especially a murder like this, which becomes a historic event. And so the more you pull back the lens, the more you see and the more you understand.

And so that is my approach. So I have kind of de-centred Crippen. Of course he's present in the story, but it is also equally Belle's story. It is also Ethel's story. And it's the story of the musical Ladies Guild, who would later pursue Crippen for the disappearance of his wife, the very strange disappearance. Everybody plays a role in a story of a murder. It's an ensemble cast. BD And it's not just people who are playing these roles. We also have the house in North London where becomes a really kind of a key, well, it becomes a crime scene. But it also before that is the domestic setting in which Belle and Crippen are living together as man and wife and they're

entertaining their friends and you get this real sense of people coming and going. Also, incidentally, and this is not that important, but it just struck me when I was reading it, how far people had to travel in cars at those times when it was like, we can just hop on the tube and get there now. And it's like, gosh, it's so far away actually. But anyway, look, sorry, I digress. We have this, the house and we have the home and Belle and Crippen are there and they're entertaining and they're living this seemingly happy, although we know it's not quite so content life. Now, we also then have Ethel coming into that same domestic space at various times in this story. Assuming, especially when, as we will learn, Cora and Belgo's missing, but she assumes

some of those roles. She even claims to be the woman of the house at certain times. So I'm just wondering if you can take us into the house, Halle, and let us know the different dynamics that are unfolding there. And eventually we'll build up to what we think happens there, what does happen there, what we know happens there. But give us an idea of the setting that we're in. Yeah. I mean, so Hill Drop Crescent is, you know, it's funny when you talk about this crime, and people remember a handful of things. They'll remember Marconi Wireless,

and they'll remember Ethel dressed as a boy, and they'll remember the Montrose, and then they'll remember Hill Drop Crescent as being this address, 39 Hill Drop Crescent. Hill Drop Crescent, so the Cripans moved there in 1905 and before that they were living on Store Street in Bloomsbury in central London. This was really what, I mean, by the sort of Edwardian expectations, Crippen was expected to provide a proper house, a proper home for his wife, even though there would not be any children, because he had removed Belle's ovaries when she was about 21 years old because he didn't want children and he

made up some sort of excuse. But you know, he had to give her effectively what was expected. And so he rented this house, although he pretended he wasn't renting it, he pretended he bought it. But that's completely in keeping with his personality. And the Cribbins were completely obsessed with keeping up appearances. And and and Hill Drop Crescent really fed into that as well. So this was an address, this is an address in Holloway, and if any of you are familiar with a contemporary book that was published kind of maybe about 10 years before the Crippins moved there, called Diary of a Nobody, which is by the Grossmith brothers,

which is about Charles Pooter, this clerk who lives in Holloway and has all of these, you know, keeping up with appearances, you know, affectations and, you know, worries about his sherry glasses and his Christmas cards and his house backs onto a railway line, you know, and everybody laughed at the social satire. Well, the Cripans were living that. I mean, the Cripans were living that. The absurdity of this is that they had walked right into Puteville. It was this 10-room house. It was a massive house for them. They lived largely in the downstairs, in the kitchen, and what was called the breakfast room. Their English friends were a bit sniffy about this

because they thought, God, they live with a sort of undue informality. They've got this big house, why are they spending so much time down here? They only use the upstairs rooms when they had company and they didn't. They were very informal. It's interesting because there was a lot of anti-Americanism at this time and this is really reflected in the commentary, the kind of sniping, catty commentary about, oh, well, you know, oh, she's so messy and she doesn't keep her maid and she, well, she did keep her maid. She kept a child woman who came and went, they just wasn't a live-in servant. And so, there was, you know, there's a lot of kind of snippiness about that. The two of them actually planted an enormous, kind of beautiful garden in the back, which included like they kept chickens as well and birds and an aquarium.

And they had cats and they had a dog and, you know, because Belle couldn't have children and it always just played on her that she couldn't have children. But the house was a very comfortable and very nice house, which they had parties in, all the music, all the performers. These people were really famous who were coming over. You can imagine what your neighbors would say if suddenly kind of Brad Pitt come over one night and all of these other sort of famous people, you know, turning up at your house and that's how they lived their lives. And so, you know, Ethel really, really, really, really craved this life. She wanted this and she wanted the nice clothes and the diamonds that Belle wore and the celebrity friends and all of these

things and that was behind a lot of what would happen next. I have to say I did once see Josh Harkness in my street hully so you know I do live in a pretty famous area. I live in the middle of nowhere. It's funny because you paint this picture of on the one hand sort of suburban mundanity really, that this is, as you say, a life of affectation and aspiration, but just not quite attaining the level that the people living it would like to occupy, I suppose. Then on the other hand, you have this creative energy and this community that's buzzing with aspiration, but also with genuine creativity that's fitting into this house in a slightly strange way. And then we get

the same house being transformed into a crime scene. And it's strange to think about that architectural space functioning in all those different ways. And I think that must be very exciting as a writer when you go into a story like this, spending so much time imagining that space, walking those rooms. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, first of all, there are a couple, first of all, there, well, as a historian, now, now I'm going to get all nerdy and excited as a historian because you're in the right place for it. Welcome to After Dark.

I know. So one of the reasons why I just think murder stories or crime stories are so fantastic for historians is that just the amount of documentation that a crime produces is like gold for us because it's all firsthand accounts. It's people saying, well, I was living here and I was doing this and I was eating this and I was wearing this and I had this and I saw this person, I said this to this person, and I thought this and I did that. And where do you get that normally as a historian? It's so hard to find those things. Maddie, you just absolutely honed into this. God, we are such kindred spirits. This is like you guys are just asking all the right questions. I spent a lot of time thinking about this house and imagining it, but also it helped to have these documents and the neighbors,

what the neighbors said about the house. Also, the inventory, because at one point, everything the Cribbins owned was put on the market on auction to pay legal bills. put on the market on auction to pay legal bills. And so you have a total inventory of like everything they owned. So you can refill those rooms. Yes, you can refill those rooms. In fact, I was talking to a curator the other year, I think about, you know, how do we know about house history and, you know, what sort of things that people have and how do they live in these rooms at these times? And I said, look at the old Bailey Sessions papers, look at reports, look at any crime will tell you these things. You will know exactly how people occupied

houses or businesses or anything because it's all there in great detail. So that's really, really exciting for me. Thank you, fellow fellow nerds for letting me do that. You take as much time as you need. But you talk about, you know, imaginatively filling these rooms. Let's do that now. Let's fill those rooms the night in question. The Cripans have visitors over on this key night. And they almost, Dr. Crippen almost bullies these poor people into coming over that they, you know, just they kind of don't want to go but anyway, they end up being there. Give us a sense of that night. Oh, that night.

Yeah. And then how what unfolds thereafter. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, this is a perfect segue from what we were saying, because there is this incredible document, which was written by Clara Martinetti, who was Bell's best friend, about the last night they spent with the Cripans at their house. And it is an eight-page document where Clara writes down everything that happened that night. Scotland Yard had said to her, Inspector G, had said to her, write down everything you remember about that night, and she did. Everything that she talked about, it's just so amazing. She talks about, well,

you know, we were trying to decide whether we wanted to go or not. And Paul, her husband, Paul Martinetti, Paul wasn't feeling that well because he was being treated for some condition he had and she never really revealed what that was. And he came back from his treatment and he felt a bit queer, they said, and they didn't want to go and Crippen was knocking on the door and saying, Oh, come on, come on, please. And you can kind of understand because the Crippins and the Martinettis used to see each other a couple of times a week, a time before television, a time before, you know, obviously you could text your friends. People didn't spend that much time ringing each other on the phone. They did have phones, but they didn't spend tons of time talking.

You know, you spent your past your evenings with your friends and it's so touching, this relationship. What is so appalling later is just how Crippen exploited this and the way he treated the Martinetti's afterwards is just disgusting. They were invited, the Martinetti's went very grudgingly and then they recount their entire, they lived just off Shaftesbury Avenue in mansion flats. They recount their entire journey, how they got to Hill Drop Crescent in 1910 on the 31st of January. They walked and it was one of those, I love that they said,

we walked and walked and we couldn't get a taxi. I thought, oh God, anyone who lives in London knows that experience. We ended up having to get public transportation, which is what she said. We got the tram, and we got the tram all the way to Hilderup Pressant. And then she says, and it's just so lovely because I often think of when you're going to see your good friends and there's the bans, the bans is recorded. And you know, she turns up and Bell opens the door and she says, you call this seven o'clock and they all start laughing and you're like, that's so. Timeless.

That is such a timeless kind of expression of friendship and the joking and the, and they take off their coats and their hats and they sit down. Clara and Belle are sort of like, oh, Belle, you shouldn't have made such an effort. And she goes into the kitchen, she brings out meat and she brings out, oh, no, you really shouldn't. Let me get up and help you with no, no, no, no. And that whole interplay and then what cigarettes they smoked afterwards. And then they go upstairs and they play bridge and, it's getting late and Paul isn't feeling well. And then Crippen is sent out to get a taxi and he disappears and they're waiting and it's getting later. And then finally they get a taxi and they leave. And that's the last time she sees her friend alive. And it's hugely moving.

CHARLEYY It's such a gift as well. I mean, not to bore people too much with the process of writing, but so often when you sit down as a historian to write and you are responsible for reporting the facts as you can find them out. And of course, you know, we can argue about the distance of time and how much of fact and truth we can actually recover. But when you sit down to write, you start to think, okay, I need to describe the scene I need to describe. Were the birds singing, was it raining? Was it sunshine? What time of year was it? What time of day was it? Was it dark? Was it light? Could you hear the church bells? And to have someone record all of that, and you don't need to imagine or make clear that you're imagining a conversation, or as you say, a bit of banter, a bit of friendly joking, it's all there. And you just have to bring it to life on the page. And it's it's the job is half done for you. I mean, that's, ah, that's so satisfying and so rare to find. Merle Oh, satisfying. And it's so but this is the thing is that this stuff, I mean, this is, this is a gift for social historians. And you know, this is, it's the very, very essence of the human experience. It is the very essence of our life experience. To me, history is about the human experience. It is that experience. It is what we do every

day. It's what we feel. It's what we say to our friends. It's the stuff that we can relate to and also the stuff that feels so distant and so weird and so bizarre and to try to understand why that feels so weird and bizarre and what the other contexts of an era were. That's why these documents are so fantastic. I remember having a very similar experience when I wrote one of the books. I wrote Lady Worsley's Wim, which was about a very infamous criminal conversation trial in the 18th century. I found that enormous cache of documents about what Lady Worsley and George Bissett's elopement to London. It was told in the round by the servants who

witnessed it. Every step of the way, these were the servants at the hotel, this was the private investigator and what he saw, this was the hotel owner, this was this person's story, and it told the story in the round. But the dialogue that came out, the bits of dialogue, that genuine bits of 18th century dialogue that people spoke to one another and how they felt about the situation and what they saw. It's arresting. It is like, I think it's as close as we can get to time travel, to be honest. I love that. That's exactly how it feels. Sometimes you can get that in historic properties as well, where you kind of, you know, I often talk about like putting my hand on the jam of the door that somebody has put their hand on that door 300 years earlier and you're like, what? I'm literally traveling through time right now. The other thing that was really striking about this

house and then we'll kind of move beyond the house a little bit and move on with the story, but you know, you're saying that that's the last time that Belle was seen alive. And we don't really know what happens that night after the Martinetti's leave. But there's something so haunting about this idea that your friends leave, all seems well, and the next thing we know of Belle is that she is occupying a space in a cellar in the house. I guess that the secrecy, the privacy, and then the mundanity of everyday life behind that closed door and the way in which that can conceal something so monstrous for quite some time, because at this point people don't know where Belle is. That's where these women come in from the musical society, and we'll talk about them in just a moment,

but there's something so haunting about that. And I think when we're saying that certain things appeal, i.e. this location, I think that that's potentially one of those reasons because it's so affecting and it's so haunting to think that was in her home, as is still so often the case for so many women in violent situations. So what happens thereafter then, Halle, is because Belle is missing, people start to question where she is. She's not the type of person to just go. And Crippen invents this story that she's very suddenly had to go to America to deal with a family matter. And I'm skipping forward ever so slightly here, but just to kind of get us to the women,

really, in order to do this. He then says, actually, yeah, when she was there, she also died. She also happened to die. And then suddenly the Martinetes and others are going, hold on, this is not Belle. This is not how this would go. Tell us how important you think that group of women were to uncovering what had happened to Belle Elmore. Absolutely fundamental. Crippen would have got away with this had it not been for those pesky meddling women. They raised the alarm. They were the ones who said this story just does

not fit. This is, there is what you're saying is so completely out of character for our friend. And what you're doing is so weird that we don't believe what you're telling us. And we think there's more to the story. You know, of course they would later say, we had no idea she'd been murdered, we just thought something strange had happened. I think they were starting to suspect there could have been foul play. But okay, so it gets especially weird. So he lies, she says she's had to go to America, somebody's ill in California and she's gone all the way there.

Oh, you can't contact her." These women knew. They were her very good friends. Belle was active with the Musical Ladies Guild, which was a charitable organization which raised money for women and their children who were out of work as musical performers, and they gave them clothes and they raised money for them so they could pay doctor's bills and legal bills and their rent and all sorts of things like that. She was the treasurer of this organization and they met every Wednesday. This became the center of her life and these friendships and these relationships. She was very close with a handful of women,

including Clara Martinetti, who was one of the vice presidents. Very interestingly, on the 2nd of February, Ethel appears instead of Belle at the meeting of the Musical Ladies Guild, which is just, by by the way down the hall from where Crippen has offices because Belle had arranged for offices in Albion House, which is where the offices were. And Ethel turns up with a resignation letter, which she hands over. And the women were kind of like, what? This doesn't make any sense. I mean, imagine just imagine, you know, your closest friend, somebody who's always in touch with you just suddenly stops messaging you. Doesn't call doesn't answer your calls, doesn't pick up their messages. And their partner or spouse just, oh, yeah, yeah, they've had to go to, you know, Tierra del Fuego or something like that, where, you know, they can't get a signal. What? That's weird. Then what's

even weirder is that there is a charity ball which is held. Bell's been gone for about a month and Crippen buys two tickets to this charity ball organized by his wife's friends with all his wife's friends present, and takes Ethel to the ball filled with musical performers. Ethel is wearing Belle's diamonds and she's wearing the Rising Sun brooch, which factors into this story because it's quite a unique piece of jewellery that her friends all recognise. She's wearing clothes that she had remade, that Belle owned, and later she's identified as wearing Belle's furs. And they're dancing and laughing and pretending that nothing here is strange at all. And from that moment on, I mean, that was a deliberate insult. We have to remember that, again, a very Bohemian circle, very tolerant of a lot of things. People had quite what would be

called irregular relationships. They had affairs, they had children outside of marriage, and everybody knew about that. But this was something else, you know, when you turn up with your typist to a ball, and your wife is gone. I mean, that's a very clear sign that this person is your mistress. That was pretty shocking. It wasn't that she was the mistress, it was that it was being done. It was flying in the face of all these friends. What do you think is going on in Crippen's head in this moment? What is the thought process behind this? Because it's so brazen. It's so remarkable. It's so brazen. I think he is reacting in part to Ethel and Ethel's demands. This is Ethel's debut. Ethel has waited six years for this moment because Cribben has been telling

her, oh, you know, Bill's going to leave me. She's going to leave me. She has a man in America. She's going to go and see Bruce Miller. She'll be with him. There was no proof that they were having a sexual relationship. And certainly by the time Bruce Miller had left in 1904, bear in mind it's 1910, they would correspond occasionally. The interesting thing is when the one piece of evidence that he tried to show that they were having an affair was produced in court, it was this letter which was signed, Love and Kisses to Brown Eyes.

That was the most, the steamiest thing he could find as proof of their affair, which is hardly some sort of impassioned declaration. Ethel's been waiting for Belle to leave for ages, and now she's gone. Ethel finally gets what she wants, which she gets a house, she gets a jewelry, she gets the identity of Mrs. Crippen. She's even mistakenly called Mrs. Crippen by the press and, you know, on the seating chart and everything. She's loving that. I think this is all Ethel behind the scenes pushing this.

It feels like that. But if Ethel had been patient up until that point, or just just patient enough, let's say the women of the musical guild are less patient and rightly so, and just patient enough, let's say. The women of the musical guild are less patient, and rightly so, and they are pushing and pushing and pushing. They eventually, even though Inspector Dew is initially a little reticent, he's like, well, I'm not seeing this, I don't know. Enough comes together eventually that he does decide to pay a visit to the house where, am I right in thinking he encounters Ethel first of all?

Yes. Yeah. So Ethel's there and she's playing this, it's an odd scenario to find her there in the first place. And then Jew leaves, but he still then thinks he's going to come back. This is after the disappearance, isn't it? That's where the discovery is made. Maybe just talk us through that sequence of events, Halle. Halle Haas It takes due a while. First of all, Scotland Yard ignores what all of the women have been saying. A number of them go to Scotland Yard and they just don't want to know. To them, it's like, what evidence do you have of anything? They start their

own investigation. They hire a private investigator and they're not really able to come up with anything. But ultimately, so Lillian Nash, her husband, is friends with somebody at Scotland Yard quite high up. And they will listen to a man. So he comes in and says, look, you know, my wife and I believe that something strange has happened here. And they finally listened to him. And that's when Inspector Dew, still is not, as you said, he's a bit on the fence about this,

takes his time to finally go and investigate 39 Hill Drop Crescent, meets Ethel and then takes Ethel to Albion House so he can interview Crippen. Some really bad policing happens at this point. He writes his memoirs and he just glosses over this. Again, this is a pause for history nerding. One of the exciting things is when you get sources that you can corroborate or compare to one another. So we have Jews actual memoirs that he wrote, and then his police report that he wrote up

of what happened on that day. And then also you have Ethel's account of what happened. And so you can line all of these up and you can see, and then you have Arthur Mitchell, who is his sergeant as well, telling the story. You can line these up and you can see where the holes are. Actually, Ethel was a really difficult witness. She was a really difficult person to deal with. She was trying to slow everything down. She's throwing spanners in the work. She's god. And you think, my god, this woman is really practiced at putting people off the scent. And it's not surprising, you know, her job was working in

fraud. She was in business with a fraudster. They had people turning up all the time going, this medicine doesn't work. You know, come, you know, I'm going to report you to the police. And people asking questions and reporters coming by. And, you know, of course she knows how to deal with these people. So she treats Jew and Mitchell the same way. And so she tries to stop them from going into Albion house. She starts, tries to delay them. And then annoyingly, so Jew says to her, she says, Oh, should I call him and tell him you're coming, you know, before they leave, before they leave Hillcrest and he said, no, no, no, I want it to be a surprise.

And so they turn up at Albion House and she says, let me just go upstairs and tell him that you're here. And he says, well, I don't know. And then she runs upstairs and he's just standing there and Ethel is running up the stairs to go and tell Gryppen the police are here. That's what she's doing. So it's like, okay, activate plan A. So whatever that is, you know, all the lies that have been put in place and what we're going to say in case the police come looking. And it was so obviously all this was discussed and orchestrated. And he interviews them,

interviews Crippen for several hours, and then he interviews Ethel and then they go to the house and they look things over. Then that is what basically makes Crippen and Ethel decide they better hightail it out of there and they leave the next day. LR. Do you think, Halle, that there's an element of denial with Crippen and Ethel where they simply live in this world of their own creating of lies and deception, as you say, that's normality for them. That's their everyday job. That's how they make their bread. Is there a sense that they have just, this is just another lie? This is just something else they've had to think about, plan for, work as a team. Do they even know that they've done this crime? Like, are they deluded? Because the way that they behave, I mean, it is so brazen. They're so

obviously, you know, we're looking from the perspective of knowing what happened and knowing that they are guilty, but looking at it, even from the perspective of an Edwardian, surely it's so obvious what's happened. Do they simply think they're going to get away with it because they are delusional? I don't understand what's happening in their minds. I know, I know, I know. I feel like, okay, so my, I have, you know, obviously ruminated over this for a very long time. I think that in terms of dealing with the actual, the gruesomeness of the murder, I think Crippen just disassociated. I think that was part of it. He knew exactly what he was doing. But Crippen's modus operandi as a fraudster was, and he was very good at what he did, was always do exactly the opposite of what people will expect you to do. So if people expect you to, you

know, lie, confess, you know, and confess to something else, you know, but don't, you know, always it's a three dimensional chess game with him all the time. And you can see what's going on and you can especially see it becomes very, very clear when he's put on the stand. And he's trying to, oh God, it's a gorgeous cat and mouse game. He's trying to outmaneuver Robert Muir, who is the prosecutor. Muir is so sharp and he's got Crippen in corners. This cross-examination goes on for about three hours and he's wearing him down and wearing him down. Crippen is lying and he's tripping over his lies. You can see his whole modus operandi and how he works. It's complete denial. Just keep denying. I think he knew what he was doing. This is how he operated.

And I think Ethel learned this too. I have often suspected, and again, with history, one has to be very careful. I'm not a psychologist. I wouldn't be. I'm not a criminologist. I'm not a psychologist. I wouldn't be. I'm not a criminologist. But my instinct is that Crippen was a sociopath and that Ethel was a psychopath. And Ethel showed absolutely no remorse for anything. She never, ever had an ounce of remorse for Belle Elmore or her family or her friends. She never expressed any of that until not even the day she died. I think there is so much in this history. I think so often people are so easy to say so much in this story. And it is a riveting story, but what it also is, is a history. And the facts that come with history are often so much more bizarre than fiction. And they're more haunting seems to be the word that keeps coming back to me.

And you said it first, Halle, but I think it's so fitting in a case like this. But those facts are just so haunting. And you can see them spread out in such incredible narrative detail in Halle's new book, Story of a Murder, which is available now. Halley, before we let you go, if listeners could take away one thing from the book about Belle, what would you like them to remember of Belle? How would you like them to see Belle in their mind's eye when they come and open this book? And yes, there's some grisly details that come later and that's

very much the truth of her history. How would you like them to take Belle's life away with them after they've closed the final page in your book? I just think she was a kind of remarkable and resilient woman. And I hate using this terminology as a historian, and you will feel this too, is when I say, oh, she was such a modern woman, she feels very modern. She does. I mean, in this kind of way, I think if Belle were alive today, she'd be sort of an Instagram influencer, because she, you know, here's this woman who went into life feeling as if, you know, she was going to, she wanted to be a mother, she wanted to be a going to she wants to be a mother she wants to be a wife she would be good victorian wife and she wanted to have all of the victorian trappings and that is what happened for her that she had that taken away from her and her story is. This is what we want was supposed to be in the victoria those must be mothers and wives and that was it she had that she had taken away from her She could not be a mother. Instead, she chose a career.

At first, it was opera and she couldn't make it an opera, and then she chose musical. Then she wasn't making the progress she wanted in musical. So she worked as part of the musical ladies guild, and then found her metier. She found the people she wanted to be with, she found a cause and a meaning in life, she kept reinventing herself. And I just think what an extraordinary woman to have faced that level of adversity and to still come out on top and to shape her life at a time when, you know, so many doors were closed to women and women faced so many hurdles. She is an extraordinary person and I hope everybody who reads this book gets to know her. Halle, it's just been absolutely fantastic to speak to you. Thank you so much and listeners,

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