Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Rewriting True Crime with Hallie Rubenhold

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

This week, Anthony talks with Hallie Rubenhold, author of 'The Story of a Murder: The Wives, The Mistress, and Dr. Crippen.' The discussion delves into the life of Dr. Crippen, the role of victims in true crime narratives, and the implications of forensic science in justice. Hallie shares her insights on human nature, morality, and the fascination with murder, concluding with reflections on her future works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad. I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today is Hallie Rubenhold. What a phenomenal book this is. The title of the book is Story of a Murder, The Wives, the mistress, and Dr. Crippin. Am I going to see this stream somewhere? Probably, right? I hope so. It's been optioned. So, you know, fingers crossed. Yeah, no, this is going to be stream somewhere. This isn't going to be a good stream. Okay, but by the way, congratulations on this. And you are also the bestselling author of the book, The Five, which I now have to go back and read after reading this. And so why don't we start with you, if you don't mind? Tell us a little bit about your background and your journey into writing. And I know you're a book worm and a book nerd, because I can see a stack of books behind you. So tell us a little bit about your affection for reading. and writing. Well, I mean, this is, you know, it's interesting. So I grew up, my, my dad is English

and my mother is, my mother was American. My mother is no longer with us. And so I was born in Los Angeles, but I've now lived the majority of my life in the UK. So I'm, I'm truly a dual national. And my parents loved reading and they loved history. And my dad got me very interested in history because he used to talk about his time living in London growing up, during the Blitz and what it was like being evacuated and and my grandparents were Cockneys and they used to do you know they used to sing musical songs and and my mother you know she came from Kansas City, Missouri. She was American and so, you know, she also loved reading and I say at the beginning of my book that I dedicate my book to my mother because she taught me to love books and and I love

storytelling and history is an extended story. Well, first of all, I'm sorry about your loss of your my. I lost my dad a couple of years ago. It's a painful process to go through. It is. But unfortunately, it's a rite of passage in our lives, right? We can't escape life without experiencing death, including our own eventually. But this is start here.

Why did you write about, first of all, this is an unbelievable story. which makes it so good. But where did the apple hit you in the head to write about this story? Well, I mean, interestingly, there is one commonality between a story of murder and the five, which is the book that I wrote before.

And that is Inspector Walter Jew of Scotland Yard. And Walter Dew was a junior police officer and he worked on the on the on the ripper case and however he wrote his memoirs and he is best known for his memoir which was entitled i caught crippin and so i had to dip into his memoirs when i was writing five and then you know i read well what's what's this other story about and i just thought this was the most phenomenal story because not only is it a story which is about the transatlantic world really at the birth of the modern age. But this is also a fantastic story of, you know, two fugitives on the run from justice.

It was a story that everybody was following in the news. And also consider the source. This is a police officer's memoirs. You know, it's going to be embellished. And I thought, there's really got to be something more to this story than this. You know, I mean, who is it? You know, this guy wasn't necessarily a hero. You could tell from what he was writing that he got a few things wrong.

And the more I dug into this case, the more incredible, it just kept opening up. It was like a sort of Russian doll of more and more stories within this story. Well, I don't want to give away the book. I just want to encourage people to go out and read it. There's so many plot twists in this book and there's, I mean, there's so much action in this book. And also, the thing about your writing style, which I give you a huge crue. credit for you understand people and you understand the darkness in people, the light in people, and you understand that we can be mendacious with others and ourselves. And it's all here. So give me a

description without giving away the book, but give me a description of Edwardian society for the contemporary viewer, the contemporary reader. Well, it's just quite an interesting time for a lot of people. And, you know, I always give the caveat as a historian that just because some people were experiencing some set of circumstances didn't mean that everybody was experiencing it. You know, we tend to use very broad brushstrokes. And this is one of my complaints with history, the way we tell histories. We assume, oh, this was the time when X was happening. This was the time when this was happening. And actually, it was happening for a segment of society may not have been happening for everybody. But what I will say certainly about the people in this book is that certainly in the United States, States and in Britain, and really in most of Europe at this time, there was, people were experiencing more access to education. They had more economic freedom. They were able to earn a bit more money. So the middle classes were growing. And along with this growth in the middle classes came a desire for respectability, you know, keeping up appearances. And, you know, there is a theme that runs through this book about, you know, this kind of ambitious.

middle-class people who have come up really from nothing and desperately wanting to better their lives, but at what expense? Dr. Crippin, tell me a little bit about it. Interesting person. I would say Crippin in many ways was very much a product of his era and was very much a product of the United States in the late 19th century. Born in the 1860s, he was born in Michigan. And his parents, really surprisingly, I did not learn until I really started looking at the documentation, were not married until they were in their 50s. So they were not married until the 1890s.

They got married in New York. And so that meant that Crippin was legitimate. And I think this is quite an interesting thing considering that Crippin's grandfather was quite a respected man in Coldwater, Michigan. He was quite religious. They were Methodists. And somehow they managed to slip this one under the radar. There was something quite unusual about his family in the sense that they moved around a lot. And that in itself isn't that unusual in the United States because one of the things that I find fascinating about American history is that people constantly tried to reinvent themselves. And it was very easy to reinvent yourself. You could screw up in one city somewhere and then get on a train or, you know, get on a wagon train and go somewhere

else and become somewhere else. And you could do that repeatedly and nobody would ever know anything. Well, this is something that Crippin's family opted to do. His father opted to kind of take them all over the country. And we don't know why. And that's why I said this is strange. We don't know what Myron Crippen was hiding. And we know that his mother lived apart from his father quite often. She paid for Crippin to go to medical school, which he did. He went to medical school in Ohio and also in Michigan. And he studied homeopathic medicine. And homeopathy at this time was considered a reputable branch of medicine. It was an alternative to orthodox medicine, traditional medicine, which could be quite brutal. You know, you know, imagine people dying on operating

tables. Imagine, you know, post-operational infections. And homeopathy promised a kind of safer and gentler way of curing disease. And so people were drawn to it. And he was drawn to it. And he was really determined to make a name for himself as a reputable physician. And then eventually he gives up on this. And we don't know why. But much like his father, he moves rather mysteriously from city to city. He gets really good opportunities, and then the next thing you know, he's somewhere else. And, you know, why has he left this teaching hospital? You know, why has he left this position? And there's no explanation.

But he does end up working in something called patent medicine for a man called James Monroe Munion, who was a multi-millionaire and basically sold sugar pills and sugar water. And interestingly, lived in Palm Beach, Florida. with various wives that he had at various times in his life. And so Crippin in him saw a mentor, saw somebody he wanted to emulate, and threw himself into patent medicine and later medical fraud and later stock fraud.

I mean, you know, it's just so much going on here. The other thing I love about the book is that it's the story of a murder. It's not the story of a murderer, which is usually what happens, right? we focus on the killer, but we don't focus on the victims and we don't focus on the aftermath of the murder. So tell me from your perspective why that was important for you, Howley. I really wanted to take a panoramic look at really true crime. And I think I have some

issues with the way in which we consume true crime, the way in which so many of us so kind of thoughtlessly plunge into this and don't ask whether these stories are true. We become obsessed with the idea of, you know, the inspector as, as, you know, this hero who solves the crime. You know, so we're getting part of the story. We're never getting the full story. And so I wanted to tell the story in the round, kind of, and show, first of all, you know, how important the justice system is. It doesn't matter if you have a star detective who can collar this criminal. If you don't have the evidence, then you can't convict. And then if you can't convict, then you haven't actually solved the crime.

You know, and people tend to forget that when we tell crime stories. But also, we often tend to glamorize, you know, sometimes inadvertently the murderer in these stories. We like to take their perspective because actually we have a lot of questions. You know, why did this person do what they did? But in taking that line and following that narrative, we exclude so many other perspectives that are so fundamentally important to really understanding what a murder is and the impact it has on people, on families, on communities, and even the imprint it leaves on history. It's incredibly well says. That's why I'm letting you run here, Miss Rubenhold, because it's incredibly well said. I want to go to the young mistress, though.

Yes. And it's Ethel, and you'll pronounce it for me, but it's Lanif. Ethel Lanive. Ethel Lanive, is she, without giving too much of the plot away, knowing conspirator or just flat-out mistress? Oh, no. I mean, my, gosh, my sense when I started looking at this, and I really think this is anybody who has really done work on this case, I mean, it's very obvious that Ethel was guilty. I think Ethel was up to her eyeballs in this murder. She may not have actually physically helped him

committed. I do not think she did. I think he thought she was too, well, I think she basically played the wilting violet. She played the wallflower for most of her life. And that was a way I think she could manipulate men. And I think that was a way in which she could manipulate. Krippen. And I think he, you know, he didn't want to involve her in getting rid of her love rival. And I think, well, something obviously went very wrong. And I think he then had to involve her. And I think she was involved in the cleanup. But I also think she knew it was coming. Not only did she know it was coming, he went out and bought her an engagement ring, which she then started showing everybody about a week before the murder.

And I think if that isn't an indication that somebody's guilty, I don't know what is. But, you know, she was, I think, fully cognizant of what was going to happen to Belle Elmore. And not only that, she demonstrated absolutely no remorse in later years at all. Never a kind word said for the victim or her family. Visit BetMDM casino and check out the next. newest exclusive, the price is right fortune pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly

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agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Incredible. It's just such an It's such an incredible story. It's a, I don't know, when I read the book, I guess I'm getting older, Holly. I read the book and I was like, yeah, that's how the world works. It's not the way that I want the world to work, but that's how the world works. And so I have to ask this question, should we be cynical or hopeful about life? Oh, that's so difficult. You know, if you'd asked me this maybe two years ago, I would say more hopeful than cynical. Right now, I'm feeling a little bit more cynical. However, I do have enormous faith in human goodness. If we can remove all of the detritus we pile over our good intentions, I think. And our nature. I don't think everybody is bad. I also think, I think murderers, for example,

nobody is born evil. I think people make a series of very bad decisions in their lives. And that's what it comes down to. You know, the reason I'm hesitating is that I'm, we've all been there. Maybe you haven't, but I have been there where I've done something stupid, regrettable. I mean, I once worked for Donald Trump, which I'll have to regret for the rest of my life.

So I'm not saying that we don't do stupid things. And I, you know, my friend Robert Green, who wrote the 48 Laws of Power, has been on our podcast. He does explain in the book that there is a dark side to all of our personalities, right? Herman Hesse writes in the book, Damien, that there's an obraxas in us. We live with light and darkness in our personalities. But when you read a story like this, there's a lot of darkness in this story. but there's a lot of real world stuff. So let me reframe the question.

Let me say it to you. Let me say to you differently. As we walk through life, as we walk through life, are people good generally? Or are people operating in a nefarious way and we just like to think that they're good? I think I like to believe that most people are good. I do not believe it is as black and white as that.

I think we are nuanced beings. And I think this idea that there was, you know, even if you can think of some of the worst people in the world, I know you often think of one of them. You know, these people are human beings. I think the problem is that it becomes very easy, especially in, for example, crime narratives, because we want to simplify these things. We want black and white. We want to think that there is good and bad. And, you know, it's as easy as putting people in boxes. And therefore, we can understand the world that way.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's easy. I mean, listen, I generally think people are good as well. But when I read this book, it is a bombshell of a book. And it's beautifully written. I want to go to a couple more questions if you don't mind. The case was one of the first to rely on forensic evidence.

So what do you make of forensics and the more recent debate over forensics and some people are held guilty that maybe through forensics were innocent? And give me your thoughts on forensics and give me your thoughts on the efficacy of forensics in a case. I mean, interestingly, I mean, it's nothing is a silver bullet. And I think that's very well said. And science is flawed as well. And, you know, there's always wrong for human error. And frequently, you know, again, we like to put things in boxes. We like to say, oh, the science says something, therefore it must be. Because science is the last word on everything. You know, and this is, I think a lot of people have problems, you know, recently with believing science and scientists because science itself will say, look, we have some. answers, but we don't have all the answers. And you know what? Because there's research ongoing all the time, answers will change. And I think, I think a lot of people, I think society doesn't necessarily like

that. We want absolutes. And that's a problem. So I think, you know, as far as the verdict of this trial goes, I think it's pretty cut and dried. Now, interestingly, around 2007, 2008, there was a documentary which was called executed an error, which was shown in the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.K. And in it, they basically found that, well, they decided to retest Bell Elmore's DNA, which existed on a slide in the London hospital, well, a skin sample. And I think the people behind the documentary had read so many books about Crippin over the years, which a lot of them are really no different than Pulp Fiction. And, you know, try to paint him as this poor man who is so terribly put upon by this heredon of a wife. And I think the underlying set of beliefs here were, how could such a nice man have actually committed this crime? Well, Crippin wasn't a nice man. He was a practiced fraudster. He was a really unpleasant person. But that aside, you know, the decision was that they would retest this skin sample from Bell Elmore's body. And lo and behold, it turns out, it's not Bell Elmore. It wasn't Bell Elmore who was in the basement. Therefore, Crippen must be innocent. And because Bill Elmore went to the United States and she didn't raise the alarm, the victim has become the murderer because Crippen was executed and the murderer has become the victim.

So it's, you know, I think I think it's highly unlikely that that DNA was not hers. And in fact, a news story has just come out about from a famous geneticist has actually looked at her. has looked at the white paper for this and has said, you know, there are a lot of problems with this DNA testing. And she didn't believe it was conclusive. And that actually appears in an appendix in my book. So, you know, science is not the magic bullet all the time. You know, it's so complex, though, isn't it? You said that the murderer is the victim.

And if you think about this case as going on in the United States right now, there's an assassin shows up in front of a hotel and he murders a health care, health insurance executive, and he's celebrated. He's become the victim. And it's just this weird thing about life. I mean, you know, and I think we're fascinated. Let me ask you this. And then I'm going to switch to another time.

Why are we fascinated with murder and murderers? Why are we fascinated with them? You know, I often ask myself that question. I mean, I think there is something in the human condition which really graves the darkness, which really wants to understand what this is that we find so terrifying. You know, everybody's afraid of death. Everybody's afraid of being murdered. Everybody's afraid of some terrible act of violence happening to them. And I think part of it, especially, you know, a lot of women are really interested in true crime.

And I think part of this is just a desire to, weirdly, to be informed. You know, what does a killer look like? What does a killer of women look like? So I know if I encounter him, you know, to stay away. And I think there's that. I think it's a very basic instinct. And I also think people are drawn to the darkness. We want to know what makes these people take.

Yeah. They're drawn to the darkness because they see themselves as not being dark. And they find a purient to be the rubbernecker. They find a purient to be the onlooker to the stuff that goes on. Okay, so I have five words or five themes that we put together, me and our producers. and I'm going to say the name or the word and you're going to react to it. You give me a sentence or two.

You can give me a word, whatever comes to your head. If I say Jack the Ripper, you say what? Big sigh. Jack the Ripper, time to move on. Okay, time to move on. Well, you've exhausted research on that and you won prizes for that book. Bell Elmore. I say Bell Elmore.

You say what? Someone whose reputation really needs to be restored. Someone who has really quite, you know, suffered a lot of degradation and someone who I hope we will all become more familiar with as a result of reading this book. Ethel Laniv. Guilty. Yeah, interesting. Dr. Crippen. Fraudster and murderer.

Yeah, well, that's powerful. We sort of touched on this, but I'm going to say the word, and I want to get your immediate reaction to the word, murder. You know, my response to that was kind of, I really, really have to think about this, because my first response is, this is something we should all be frightened of, but yet at the same time, that wasn't my gut instinct.

It was part of the human condition, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, we see it in the animal world. We see it in the human world. We have to kill for our food, Holly Rubenhold. We have to kill for our food. And so can we project that into other things?

Obviously, we hope through our morality that we can prevent ourselves from our worst instincts. Absolutely. What's next? What are you writing next? Well, it's kind of under wraps because it is, you know, with a deal has not yet been. Okay. You take your time.

Well, so you'll come back with whatever it is that you're writing next. Yeah. This is a phenomenal book. The title of the book is this, it's just an incredible book. Story of a Murder, the Wives, the Mistress, and the very immoral and partially insane Dr. Crippin. And I got to, I got to tell you, it's a phenomenal book. And I really enjoyed every minute of it.

And thank you so much, Hallie Rubenhold, for joining us here on Open Book. Q. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on X or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you.

I'll see you back here next week.