Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Murder That Shook Edwardian Britain

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

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, 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 survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixta 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 to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way 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 because fair do's. were warned. Right, on with the show. Join me on the deck of the SS Montrose. Let's take in some sea air as we approach the shores of Canada. Oh, it's good for what ails you. The year is 1910, and some of my fellow passengers are beginning to attract and wanted attention. They claim to be father and son, but I don't know, 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 Jew 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. He's brandishing handcuffs and the father and son duo, aka Dr. Cripping and his lover, Ethel Lanieve, are looking like the game is up. Are you keen to know more? Well, I know I am.

Let's get into it. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the money. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry.

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society. With me, Kate Lister. You may not have heard of it, but the murder of Belle Elmore 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. Cripping. 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 and why has Bell's side of the story been sidelined for so long?

I am ready to find out if you are. And welcome back. It's Hallie Rubenhold. Hello. It's so nice to see how you're doing. Really well. I'm getting very excited about this new book being published and talking about all of these things. things that I've been researching over the years and very excited. I'm so pleased that you've got a new book out. I've been on Tentahooks 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? 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 going to match that? Well, Hallet, you're going to match it by writing about Dr. Crippin. 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've 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 Cripping case. Oh, okay. So, like, what I kind of think about it. And my knowledge of this is early Edwardian, there's a Dr. Cripping, 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 a goose. And eventually he gets sick of it and 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?

No. No. 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 Prypin. 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 genuine heroes. And then they turned out to be eugenicists or... 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. Oh, no! And they are. 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, Philson 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 Etheleneve and Dr. Crippen, you know, when they were running away together dressed his 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 edited version of the trial transcripts. And he created this entire kind of myth, which was, oh, Crippin 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 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.

That's the gist, isn't it? That's the narrative that's been handed down about this one. 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 they echoed all of this, you know, like, you know, horrible, truish woman deserves to be murdered, you know.

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 Bill like this sexually voracious monster. And I'm sure we'll come back to this as well because it's another amazing. myth that needs to be busted about poor Bell. And I mean, it's all about Bell'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 could enter the professions. There could be solicitors and barristers and 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 was in response to this upsurgence of kind of women's voices. And there were a lot of people who are an 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. I agree. So let's take this book, 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 program and there's the cast of characters in the beginning. So let's try and do that. So there was a Dr. 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. Well, so you mean, are we talking about his first wife? Are we talking about his second wife? Oh, Hallie. Right. Okay.

Let's just step this back and we'll just go first wife. Who was Dr. Crippin and who did he marry? People will come to this story, either knowing about Dr. Krippin, knowing a lot about Dr. Krippin, or knowing absolutely nothing. And for those people know about the Dr. Krippin 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 Krippin was American. That's another thing

that a lot of people don't know. Krippin 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 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, landowning 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. Wow, okay. 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 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 the stuff that nurses saw, you have to have a pretty strong constitution 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. And a number of other things happened. But the long and short of it is in Salt Lake City in the early 1890s, 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 72 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 friend sign the death certificate, and that was it. That was it. And he never talked about her again. And spoke about her so little, in fact, that she is left out of the Crippin narrative. Because 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 Cripping stuff on YouTube. Oh, God, help you. I just wanted to like see, like, is my take on this story kind of what other people?

None of them mentioned that he had a first wife, not one. I think there's a real desire to exonerate Crippin, and there always has been. A lot of that came from Crippin 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 I was going to 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?

Well, maybe he's lying. So his second wife, let's talk about her. Yes, okay, so his second wife, So after Charlotte dies mysteriously, Crippin goes to Brooklyn. Crippen trained, you'll be interested to know, as a gynecologist and obstetrician. And a homeopath. 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 jail.

In the state of New York, you could go to jail for 20 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 Crippin meets Bell 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, but, you know, she was living with this other man and he put her up in lodgings. and it was so obviously an abortion. Wow, okay. And this relationship developed between them, and it was a kind of whirlwind romance, and she was coming up on 19 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. They do seem quite unsuited. I mean, from admittedly, the limited amount that I know, 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? Yeah, well, so were most people who worked in the music hall, you know? I mean, there was absolutely nothing different about her from anybody else who worked in

the musical. 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 well-loved. She seems really popular, well-loved. But Cripping was not loud and vivacious. Or have I got that wrong? No, no.

I mean, he was a very quiet man. But he was also, I mean, the important thing to bear in mind but Crippin 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? 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 conman and he conned people. Okay. So they've ended up in the UK. Do we have any kind of sources as to what her name was Bell, wasn't it? Belle Elmore. Yes. Bell Elmore. She had several names which she changed throughout her life. Bell Elmore was her stage name, which she adopted as her name and everybody knew her as that. Okay.

So Bell and Cripping are living together. Do we have any sources as to what their relationship was like? 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 Bell's sister who stayed with them for a while. Some of the things that her sister does say is that when Crippin lived with the family, when they first got married, they lived with Bell's family in Brooklyn, that Prypin basically molested all of her sisters when they were teenage girls.

Wow. 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, for a man to like 14 and 15-year-olds, girls got married, could get married at 16. I think it still would have raised a few eyebrows.

A few. A few. Whereas now if someone was dating a 14-year-old, I think you'd probably remove them from your house immediately. But I think the time it's more like a bit young, but no more than that. Exactly. So 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. I'll be back with Halle after this short break. Do you know something? I know this is horrendously unscientific, and I shouldn't say it's a disgrace to myself

and all other academics, but he looks creepy. Yeah, he does look creepy. I shouldn't say that. But he's got like the... Walrus mustache. Yeah, like that sort of creepy mustache. And he's a creepy mustache. Like little man.

Maybe he wasn't little, actually. How big was he? Well, he was. He was a small man. Okay. In that way, they are correct. But also, Bell was short also. So there's a lot of fat shaming around Bell.

You know, and really, to be honest, if you look at Bell 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 desire She desires food, she desires sex, she desires

All of this stuff she's depraved 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. You see that all the time. I was watching Faulty towers the other day. There's Basil Faulty and Sybil Fultes. She isn'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 and this poor henpecked husband. Well, that's interestingly, as the image of Bell 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, 1970s is this woman who laid about in her pajamas, pajamas. It was on the stage? Yeah, and drank. There is absolutely no evidence at all for any of this. I mean, you know, there's nobody says, well, she had problems drinking. There was nobody, you know, I mean, Crippin didn't even say that. And believe me, you know, in Crippin's witness statements and his interviews with the

please. He has never, ever, I mean, 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. Interesting. Yeah. So, Bell disappears. Yes. What's the lead up to this, Halley? What is going on? 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 defining who Bell was. And shortly after they got married, when Bell was probably about 21, Crippin had her ovaries removed. Holy fuckballs.

What? Yeah. At 21. 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. with her periods. She had no issues at all. Bell wanted children, and quite frankly, Crippin

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. 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 was. wasn't like, you know, if you went to the GP with a headache, they'd go, right, let's have your womb out. Yeah. But it is documented.

But I didn't know it was carrying on. I thought this was a Victorian madness. Well, it was. It was. This was about, it was about 1894 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 calling it the castration of women.

Yeah. And so there was a move against it by that. that point. So it was unpopular, but still he did it. And for the rest of her life, first of all, she's 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. That's forced into complete menopause, right? Totally and instantly. And I mean, surgical menopause is like that and at 21 and you know all of these things happening to her body and also that didn't cure the

prolapse uterus so she still had a prolapse uterus and what is so important about this is that crippin says so various times crippin 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 hold over the calls by his employer for acting as belles stage manager. And they have a kind of, it's an agreed separation. And Bell meets this other performer called Bruce Miller. Now, this is really weird and this is a really, really important part of this story.

Okay. 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 something that most of the male writers have 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.

The one thing he will admit to is that he did kiss her, and he writes letters to her, which he signs loving kisses to brown eyes. And this is basically, at the time of the trial, this is the only evidence that Crippin can produce that his wife had an affair was a letter signed love and kisses to brown eyes. That isn't the impassioned, overflowing gushings

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 me sounds like a very guarded way of saying there was a physical impediment to sexual intercourse. That does, doesn't it? And if she has had what sounds like an abortion at some point, possibly abut abortion, they're very dangerous, and she's had her ovaries removed, which is just butchery,

A prolapse. She has a prolapse. Yeah. And she's in menopause as well without HRT. As you said, instant surgical menopause. So this is the thing. Krippin would have known if his wife had kind of sworn off sex or wasn't able to have sex anymore. I 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. Absolutely prick. I know. I'll tell you someone who was having an affair, Ali, that we know about. It was Crippin.

Cripping. Yeah. So Crippen is at this time also having an affair, well, is having an affair with Ethel Leneve, who is his what was called a lady typist. You know, women were entering the workforce at that time. Yep. And she was a clerk and 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 10-roomed house and 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 it was Ethel, who was the engine behind this murder. Mike drop. Plot twist. Hallie, okay. Why would you say that? Well, Ethel, I mean, she was a very dark and very dark.

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 1967, which is amazing. And her children had no idea who she was. And there are audio interviews with her children in the 80s and 90s. Wow. 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 were involved for six years. Oh, wow, that's a long time. And they had a sexual relationship. And he kept saying, oh, Bell's going to leave me for Bruce Miller. Bell's going to leave me, just, you know,

just hang on. Of course, she was never going to leave him for Bruce Miller. Bruce Miller had gone back to Chicago, you know, and she occasionally got a letter from him. But this was a nice way of keeping your mistress, you know, and Eiffel got tired of this. She got tired of it. And the real tipping point came when Ethel got pregnant. And Crippin, obviously, made her have an abortion. And that's documented. Again, it's called a quote-unquote miscarriage, but you had to call it that at that time

because abortion was illegal and you would be implicating yourself in another crime if you said that you had participated in that. And from that point, you know, just the tension just ratchets up. He buys Ethel an engagement ring, even though Bell is still alive. So this is a couple months before she's murdered.

Okay. And then the week before Bell is murdered, Ethel decides basically bring this engagement ring out and tell all her friends she's engaged, while Crippin has gone off to buy the hyacine hydra bromide, which he uses to poison Bell with. Yeah, she knew it was going to happen. And she is definitely, well, maybe this is untrue as well, but wasn't she caught wearing Bell's clothes? Oh, God, yeah. I mean, it gets, it gets, I mean. I mean, have a word with yourself. Wow. 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.

Bella's gone missing. Nobody knows where she is. Crippin says she's gone to America to deal with some family emergency. Because one thing that he underestimated was she was missed very quickly by her friends, very quickly. Yeah. And her friends, so she was part of this organization called the Music Hall Ladies Guild, which was a charitable organization. and 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 going to 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 normal. She's just nipped over to America for some family business. Yeah. And she's not even texted me. She's not sent me a message.

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

And they proceed to just kind of sit at the table with all of Bell's friends as if nothing's happened. Could you even imagine? I know. 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 jewelry. I know. 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 like, oh, these are bohemian people. You know, they have racketing 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 Bell's friend's husbands to go with Lil Hoff Her name was to Scotland Yard to say, look, I'm a man and I think there's something wrong here. I have a penis and I think this is important. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to throw my penis on the table and you're going to 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. Am I right in thinking that we don't actually know what happened to Bell? They found human remains in the basement. of their house, but we don't know what happened to her. We know that she was poisoned with hyacine hydropromide. What has been speculated, and certainly I think the best theory, comes from a man called Ingleby Audie, 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 saw subsequent cases of poisoning and various other things. And Ingleby-Oddy said that he believed what had happened was that this was a poisoning gone wrong, that the intention was that hystine hydrogen bromide is a sedative and it would put you to sleep 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. 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 behavior 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. 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, 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 when water interacts with it, it acts as a preservative. And so it preserved the viscera. So when Inspector Jew of Scotland Yard went looking after Ethel and Krippen took flight because he had come to interview them and they got scared, he found the remains in the cellar. And so Crippin, I don't even know what his first name is. What is his first name?

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

Why? Well, I mean, there are lots of, 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, 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 neighborhood, you know, which means, you know, this could be you, newspaper reading public, you know, sitting there having your tea and your toast 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. And no one knew where they were. 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 fugitive And so he got on his newly invented Marconi wireless.

Well, he had his wireless operator get on and wire the shipping company who wired Scotland Yard, who got in touch with Inspector Jew, who hopped on another ship called Larentic, 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 Prypin 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. Who had no clue what had happened at all. Yeah.

Was she charged? He was charged. Was she charged? Well, they were both charged with murder initially. He was found guilty. and she, and this is the real kicker, she had 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. Wow, okay. But the real problem was they had never, ever bothered to gather all of the evidence against her, because Jew, 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 Crippin. She was, she was obstructive from the very beginning.

It's believed she destroyed evidence on the Montrose when she was arrested also. I'll be back with Halle after this short break. Just listening to your talk. And again, I know that you should never be an absolutist being an even-minded academic stories, leave space for doubt. But she definitely was in on this in some way. Absolutely. And the lies, she told.

I mean, lie after lie after lie to her parents, to her sister, to her friends. It's just not credible the way she behaved and the way she acted in these lies that she's telling that she knew nothing at all. She was as surprised as everybody else. 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. And what's Cripping saying? Is it any point he's saying, hang on a second, Ethel, that's not quite right? 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. Oh, come on. Like this wouldn't stand up in court today. I've got a bit more faith in the judicial system that should have been nailed for this today. But Ethel was written off. I mean, literally. 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. So you've got one woman, Belle Elmore, who the police don't care about all that much at the beginning because she is a music hall 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. 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. Fainting, that kind of stuff. Yeah, and that was an appropriate type of hysteria for a woman to have. Crippin was executed for this, wasn't he? Yes. When was that? 23rd of November, 1910. And what Ethel does, after Crippin is found guilty and she has 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 that we go just 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 no, I never let him completely influence me to do things that I didn't want to do. And so she's kind of overturning her own. story and undermining her own story, she's interviewed in the 1920s 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. She was totally in it. Yeah. So I could talk

you about this forever and ever, Holly, 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 Volkana, the strongest woman in the world?

And again, this is unfortunately one of these things that has made it into the legend. I mean, Volkana, her name was Kate Williams, was part of the Music Hall Ladies Guild, but she wasn't part of this group who investigated them. murder. She wasn't part of the executive committee. So, so no Volcano did not investigate Bell Elmore's murder. There again, there's another one, put that up to bed. Yeah, yeah. But what was the role of women in this? 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 a 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, there 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 Crippin, to kind of seal his guilt was pretty impressive. So these are the friends of Bell 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 Crippin 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 Bell's sisters and helped to create a drag net on the other side of the Atlantic, hoping to catch Crippin when he was on the ship. And then went to Quebec to identify him and Ethel, speak to Ethel, identified the jewelry that was found on them.

And then finally, they paid for Bell'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 Crippin had written a will, so Crippin had inherited all of Bell's worldly goods. Oh, fuck right off.

And then he had bequeathed it all to Eiffel. I very much think not. Well, 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 change. That's 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 power. again. If people want to know more about you and your work, and they will after reading this, where can they find you? Well, I am online in the usual places, Instagram, Blue Sky, Facebook, and the book is available for a pre-order now from any bookshop. It will actually be on the shelves on the 27th of March. Let's give it its full title. 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

days earlier in the UK, so it's available on the 25th of March in the US, 27th of March in the UK. Amazing. Hallie, thank you so much. You've been spectacular. You're welcome. Thanks for listening and thank you so much to Halle 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 betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we have got the final episode in our limited series. series, Real Wives of Dictators, Chung Jing, wife of Chairman Mao, and The History of Gonorrhea. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagi 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.