Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - The Torso in the Basement: The Case of Dr. Crippen

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

A boisterous entertainer and wannabe opera singer disappears from her London home. Before detectives find human remains in the basement, her mild-mannered husband flees across the Atlantic with his lover, in disguise.Sources for this episode include: Thunderstruck by Erik Larson Molecules of Murder: Criminal Molecules and Classic Cases by John Emsley Story of a Murder by Hallie Rubenhold“Was Dr Crippen innocent of his wife's murder?” (BBC)Keep up with Killer Stories! Instagram: @killerstoriespodTikTok: @killerstoriespodX: @killerstorieshq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's the version of people we see, and then there's the version we never do. Most of the time, the difference doesn't matter until it does. Because when someone disappears or turns up dead, the story people believe about who they were can start to matter as much as what actually happened. Was she difficult? Was he devoted? Was this a troubled marriage, or just an unusual one? Today's story is about a couple who spent years presenting a certain version of their lives to the world,

to friends, to neighbors, to coworkers, a woman who wanted the spotlight and took up space, a man who stayed quiet and stood beside her. And when one of them vanished, that version of events didn't vanish with her. The question is, what was that performance really covering up? I'm Harvey Guillen, and this is Killer Story. When someone winds up mysteriously dead or missing, police are going to look at their partner, whether it's a spouse, situation ship, or. one-night stand. History and the data suggests they're the most likely culprit. And that's

especially true if the victim is a woman. It's terrible. And it doesn't need to be the case, and I hope one day it won't be. But it's a global trend that's been happening for a very, very long time. Today's case, for example, starts more than a century ago in the late 1800s. At the tell end of America's Gilded Age. The country's rounding out the corner in a new era, defined by innovation, progress, and reform.

Opportunity is everywhere, just waiting to be grabbed by the horns, which can be both thrilling and terrifying. Somewhere, New York City is a young woman, Cora Turner. She's a singer, and she's come to the city that never sleeps with just a small suitcase and a big

dream. She doesn't care what it takes. She's determined to one day see her name in light. Okay, so maybe I exaggerated just a little bit, just a teeny bit. She didn't arrive in New York. She was born in Brooklyn. But, but, but, the spirit of everything I just said is true. Cora really does fancy herself an opera singer, and she really wants to be a star. She performs under the stage name Belle Elmore, and she's got one of those personalities.

you immediately notice, larger than life, boisterous, loud. Some have said, dominant and overbearing, which might be totally fine. There are plenty of divas in show business. Patty Lepone, Bernardine, Bernard Peters, that guy who won't shut up at the drag show. But unfortunately, for Accora, her talent doesn't match her confidence. By many accounts, she doesn't have any. The good news is Kora's found a husband

with a great mustache who supports her dreams, both literally and financially. Dr. Holly Krippen, he's a homeopathic doctor and he's the yin to Kora's yang. He's much more practical and sedu. He works at a clinic in the city and really encourages Kora's entertainment career.

He also puts her medical bills and pays for her singing lessons. At least he does until the economy takes a big hit and money becomes tight. But their problems are relatively short-lived because in 1897, Dr. Holly gets a promotion and a raise. It means moving to London, but that's not a problem for him or Cora. It's not like her career is going well in New York, so a new city could be exactly what the doctor ordered.

And for a while, it looks that way. Cora actually books some roles, but the critics aren't kind to her. Some of the reviews are apparently so bad, the productions don't last a week before closing, and Cora's failures end up putting a strain on her marriage. Even though her doctor husband is making more money than ever before, they're still pinching pennies. Between Cora's singing lessons, self-produced shows, and the elaborate wardrobe she insists she needs their burning through cash. And a bad situation becomes worse when Holly loses his fancy job at the clinic.

He's not unemployed for long. He finds work where he can, hopping jobs, some of which are really shady, but none of which pay very well. So he and Cora have to downsize their life to get by. And by he and Kora, I really mean just him, because Kora acts like she's allergic to a good bargain. She continues to buy expensive jewelry and clothes and she wears them as she goes out with her friends to clubs and events. Which is just like Kora, get a grip girl. And Holly, grow a spine. Stop being such a pushover and giving her money.

Let's be adults about this. But here's the thing, I haven't even told you the worst part. Cora isn't just plain dress-of for her friends at the expense of her marriage. She's also carrying on a very public affair. I know. Ballsy, yes, yes. You don't need the guy's name. It's not important. What you need to know is, rather than address any of the problems in their marriage, Dr. Hawley fights fire with fire by getting his own mistress.

And pretty soon, their relationship basically becomes one big facade. In public, he and Cora pretend to be a happily married couple, but behind closed doors, that couldn't be further from the truth. Even as money becomes less of a problem, they drift apart. They move to a bigger home, sleep in separate bedrooms, invite their respective lovers over whenever they see fit. And I suppose life could have carried on that way forever, if they wanted to.

They're all consenting adults. No one is hurting anyone else that we know of. But then, one day, Corr stops making public appearances, which is unusual for the woman who feeds on attention and lives for the spotlight. After a while, friends report her missing, and the police pay a little visit to the Crippin House. Officials have some questions for her husband. And real quick, the meek little doctor who spent so long playing second fiddle to his wife

stops looking like a pushover. Because first, he can't seem to keep his story straight about where Cora is, then he flees the country, and then the police find a body in his basement. Three decades ago, a young woman named Angie Dodge is found brutally murdered in Idaho Falls. Police put a man behind bars. But as the years pass, doubts emerge about whether the real killer was ever caught. That's when Angie's own mother embarks on a decades-long mission to uncover the truth. Listen to The Snare, a new series from ABC Audio.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. When Cora Crippin stops going out on the town, her friends aren't immediately concerned. And that's because they receive letters that are supposedly from Cora. and the letter say she's taking an unexpected trip to the United States because a family member got sick and everyone's reaction to this is basically, well, that is so nice of her and a total normal thing to do. But then, Cora doesn't come back, ever.

And her husband starts telling people it's because she died. A sudden illness took her life, which should be really sad. He lost his wife and was robbed of a proper good. by. But here's the thing. The good doctor, who had been so supportive of Cora in life, doesn't act very sad. And I know grief looks different on everyone, but here's the timeline of events. Cora allegedly writes those letters announcing her trip to the States in February 1910. That same spring, Holly invites his mistress to move into their home. Now, I haven't properly introduced his mistress yet. Her name is Ethel, and she and Holly met at work at a place called

the Drouye Institute for the Deaf, which sounds like a place that practices real medicine, but it's basically a giant scam. They see real patients, they just don't prescribe real care. It's one of those take two fish oil pills and you'll be cured kind of place. Anyway, Ethel, who is 21 years younger, was hired to be Holly's assistant, and somehow, do you need a hand with that? Turned into, do you need a hand with that? Cut to, Holly's wife, Cora, suddenly and mysteriously, dies. An ocean away from all her friends, and the good doctor's mistress is acting like she's the new wifie.

Like Cora never existed in the first place, Ethel literally starts wearing her expensive jewelry and clothing in public. The whole thing robs Cora's friends the wrong way. One ends up reporting Cora missing to the police and another make sure the case gets escalated to Scotland Yard. Yeah, they're that concern about her. And pretty soon, detectives are as well. See, when they pay Holly a visit, he tells them a new story.

He says Cora didn't actually die. The truth is, she left him and ran away with her lover. He claims he made up the story about Cora dying to save himself from having to tell people what really happened. It was too embarrassing. Now, Holly is, of course, saying all of this while his much younger girlfriend is prancing around in Cora's old clothes. But still, detectives give him the benefit of the doubt, and they're like, well, amazing. We're glad this is just a misunderstanding. We'll talk to Cora and make sure she's okay and put this whole thing to rest.

Except they never find Cora. And pretty soon, they can't find Holly or Ethel either. The next time detectus visit the house, it's completely empty. Which isn't a good sign. They now have three missing people on their hands. One may be dead or in trouble, and it seems like the other two are on the run. While detectives try to track everyone down, they order a bunch of searches at the Crippin House. They've already done one, but they want to make sure they didn't miss anything,

so they don't leave any stone unturned. And I mean that, almost literally. During one of the searches, detectives find some loose bricks in the cellar that are hiding a gruesome surprise. A headless, limbless torso, wrapped in bloody pajamas, which you think would be the strangest discovery, but it's not because the torso doesn't have any bones in it. First of all, huh?

Second of all, how? And third of all, detectives don't really have time to find out. They're assuming the torso belongs to Cora, and Holly is her killer. They have a murder investigation on their hands. Their two biggest suspects are MIA and could be anywhere. With their two faces plaster on the cover of outlets like the Daily Mail, a lot of people now know what Holly and Ethel look like.

And one day, the captain of a ship sailing to Canada notices something strange about two of his passengers. It's a father and son and something's just off. The son's clothes are way too big for his body, and they're always holding hands, but not in a dad and son love each other kind of way, in a way that feels gross. And he starts thinking, huh, what if they're not father and son? What if it's those criminals in disguise? The father doesn't have a mustache like the doctor does in the picture. but there's definitely a passing resemblance,

and without all the baggy clothes, the boy could be a woman. The captain's hunch is so strong he has a telegraph sent back to the authorities in Britain, who take his message very seriously. They immediately hop on a boat and make sure they pick one fast enough to beat the other ship to Canada.

At the port in Quebec, Detective Strasherstall, detectives dress up as harbor pilots and wait for the other ship to arrive. Because who doesn't love a good disguise? Meanwhile, the captain on board the other ship tees up the confrontation. He asked the strange father and son if they want to meet some harbor pilots when they reach their destination. And the father and son are like, yeah, definitely, that sounds cool. Which they wouldn't be saying if they knew the truth. One, harbor pilots aren't cool, and two, it turns out this whole elaborate plan isn't all for nothing.

It actually is Holly and Ethel in disguise. And when they finally realize they're caught, Holly doesn't put up a fight. No, he's like, oh, thank God, the suspense is over. I guess he's relieved not to be a wanted fugitive anymore. The stress must have been getting to him. Holly and Ethel are dragged back to England to a weight trial, which seems like it'll be a piece of cake. I mean, you don't flee to Canada in disguise

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Three months later, Dr. Holly Crippen is put on trial for murdering his wife. And it's a really big deal in London. Thousands of people crowd around the courthouse to see how things shake out. And it probably comes as no surprise that the evidence does not look good. for the doctor. Holly gives the same story he told when police first visited him, that Cora ran away with her lover. She's still alive somewhere,

maybe having a laugh over all the drama she's caused. After all, she did love drama. As for the torso in the basement, Holly's like, oh, that old thing? Oh, yeah, I don't know who put that there, not me. You know what? It probably, it was probably already there when we bought the house.

in 1905. But there's a big problem with that explanation. Remember how the torso was found wrapped in bloody pajamas? The prosecution claims they match a pair that Cora gifted to Holly. Plus, the clothing manufacturer says they didn't sell that specific set of pajamas until 1908, a.k.a. three years after the Crippins move in. So, either someone hit the torso while they were. were living there or someone found the torso and for some reason wrapped it in pajamas,

rehitted, and told no one, which wouldn't make sense. Not to mention, a sedative was found in the torso system, a special kind that's known to be lethal in large doses. And Holly just so happened to purchase that exact sedative from a chemist right before Cora disappeared. Altogether, it paints a pretty damning picture, but there's still a challenge for prosecutors. How can they prove the torso is Cora?

As unlikely as it sounds, there's a chance, however small, that it could be someone else. I know it sounds implausible, but what if Cora and her lover killed someone before they ran away? Maybe to frame Holly, or maybe not? maybe the murder wasn't related to Holly at all and he just got wrapped up in it.

It's a long shot given all the circumstantial evidence, but it's theoretically possible. That said, for the jury, there's one detail that pushes the murder case beyond a reasonable doubt. A scar on the torso's abdomen. Specialists say it suggests the victim had their ovaries surgically removed. It's a procedure Cora had done before moving to London, so to everyone in the room, it sure seems like a smoking gun. The jury reached a verdict in just 27 minutes. They find Dr. Crippen guilty of murdering his wife, and he's sentenced to die by hanging. His execution happens one month after the verdict, and Holly dies insisting he was wrongly charged.

One of the last things he writes is, I am innocent, and someday evidence will be found to prove it. He's buried in an unmarked grave on the grounds of a London prison. But officials honor his last request to be buried with a photo of Ethel, along with the letters she wrote him. Speaking of Ethel, she goes to trial too. But nothing comes of it. it's pretty clear to the jury she didn't murder anyone or act as an accomplice, at least not knowingly. And with her release, police officially closed the book on the Cora Crippin's disappearance and murder.

But the legend of Dr. Holly Crippen continues. For a while, his story lives on in rumors and speculations about what actually happened inside his home and why. Mostly driven by morbid curiosity and a flare for the dramatic, the case becomes a thrilling and scary story, people tell. He becomes a featured criminal in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors in London. His home becomes that place where the meteor-lated corpse was found, a notorious fixture of the city. But something else happens, too, almost a century after his death.

In 2007, forensic scientists at Michigan State University, led by a man named John Trestale, take another look at the Crippin case. According to John, something stood out to him when researching the details, that Holly would have poisoned Cora and then dismembered her body. He found that strange. He says it's extremely rare for people who poison their victims to inflict external damage. Out of the 1,100 cases he had in his database, he only knew of one. And in his mind, the reason it's so rare is the whole point of poison is to leave no trace.

So, using new technology, he and his team decide to compare the torso's DNA to samples taken from Kora Crippin's living relatives. And the results show, the world has been wrong this whole time. It's not Cora. They say it can't be. Not only is the torso not related to Cora, they claim they ran special tests that found the torso might be a man. Which is mind-boggling.

I mean, if he wasn't guilty, why did he go on the run? Why wear a disguise? Make it make sense. Stranger still, when John re-examined some old court records, he finds a letter that was supposedly written

by Cora, which he finds really strange because the letter was written after Cora's death. It talks about how she was living in the United States following his trial and had no intention of stopping his execution, which, if real, is just so cruel. The reason the letter was never entered into evidence was because the court thought it was a hoax. They threw it out. But now, with his team's findings, John starts to think, maybe the letter was real. Maybe Cora was never murdered, and Holly was telling the truth the whole time.

Is it possible police felt so pressured to close the case, they planted Holly's pajamas at the crime scene to frame him? John becomes so convinced that he tries to reopen the case. case and get a very posthumous pardon, but his requests are denied. Officials review the evidence and don't think there's enough there. Some of the technique John's teams used were new, and they were using a nearly century-old tissue sample, with so many factors at play, possible contamination being the biggest. Not everyone is quick to take his team's results at face value.

There are plenty who still believe the torso belongs to Cora. Author Hallie Rubenhold, for example, in 2025, years after John's team's findings, Halley did some research of her own. Cora was his second wife, and according to Hallie, Cora may not have been as talentless as the world's been led to belief. She found a few positive reviews mixed in with all the bad ones, so there's that. but more importantly, she took a deeper dive into Holly's first marriage to a woman named Charlotte. Charlotte supposedly died of a stroke.

Hallie says there's evidence to indicate Holly may have been abusive. He apparently forced Charlotte to have abortions and once threw a book at her in front of witnesses. In private, he may have done worse. Charlotte was apparently so afraid of him, she was. once wrote a letter saying, if I die, it will be his fault. Which is to say, at the very least, Holly, probably wasn't the soft-spoken mild manner doctor he once made himself out to be. Was he a monster behind closed doors? Did he actually kill both of his wives and not just the one he was convicted of murdering? Or did he never murder anyone? In one version, this case fits neatly and

to the century-old trend of men murdering their partners. In the other, Holly was a victim of that trend, unfairly cast as the villain and hanged despite being innocent. More than 100 years later, we know both more and less than we did before. So, until there's another update, right now, it's kind of choose your own ending. What do you believe happened? There was the version of this story people saw,

the quiet doctor, the difficult wife, the obvious conclusion, and for more than a century, that version held a body in the basement, a man on the run, a verdict reached in less than half an hour. Case closed. But then,

Time did what it always does. It loosened things. New questions crept in? Old assumptions stopped fitting quite as neatly as they once had. Was the woman who vanished really who the story said she was? Was the man who was hanged really as harmless or as monstrous as he appeared? We have versions of events that almost make sense, but not quite. And what we're left with is uncertainty.

It's the uneasy understanding that once a story takes hold, once a performance becomes the truth people repeat, it can be almost impossible to tell what was real and what was simply believed. More than a hundred years later, the question isn't just what happened in that house. It's how much of this story was decided before anyone ever stopped to look past the roles they were playing. Thanks for tuning in to Killer Stories, the Spotify podcast, new episodes release on Mondays.

If you like today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey Gnand. Stay safe out there.