This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The women of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild were accustomed to taking all manner of dramas in their stride, but there were certainly some furrowed brows at their weekly committee meeting on 2 February, 1910. Guild treasurer Belle Elmore always attended these gatherings at the charity’s office in London, but on this particular Wednesday she didn’t show up. Instead, she wrote two letters to explain that a relative’s illness meant she had to return to America urgently. She was therefore resigning as treasurer and urged the committee to elect a new one that very day.
Her friends were bewildered. Belle, a bright, vivacious former singer, was a very popular committee member, much admired for her energetic fundraising. This resignation was most unlike her. Was it also a little odd that neither letter was in Belle’s own handwriting? She had apparently been too busy packing at her north London home and so had dictated the notes to her husband … Dr Crippen.
Most readers of The Critic will know who Dr Crippen was, but few will have recognised Belle Elmore’s name. Her obscurity is a key reason for historian Hallie Rubenhold’s new book. In her previous work The Five, an award-winning bestseller, she wrote about the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, motivated by the fact that the Ripper had long been accorded a sort of grim celebrity, whilst the women he butchered were unknown.
Rubenhold is doing something similar here. Story of a Murder seeks to shift the focus from the killer, Crippen, to the victim, his wife, and to all the others impacted by his crime. Rubenhold writes that “murder is never a single act of destruction but experienced as a series of interconnected injuries, a spray of shrapnel scattered throughout the lives of all those in close proximity”.
The first few chapters cover Crippen’s early life — he was born in Michigan in 1862; his first wife died in suspicious circumstances; he met Belle in New York — then Rubenhold really hits her stride with the couple’s move to London.
On 20 February, a couple of weeks after Belle had supposedly raced off to America, Hawley Harvey Crippen, a homeopath involved in all manner of crooked money-making schemes, shocked his wife’s friends by turning up to the grand Variety Artistes’ Benevolent Fund dinner and ball with Ethel Le Neve, his young typist, in tow. Ethel, 21 years Crippen’s junior, was wearing a large brooch that belonged to Belle. A month later, Crippen announced that Belle had died of pneumonia in America. The redoubtable ladies from the guild, who had not heard from Belle since her departure, swung into action.
Under the guise of offering condolences, Louise Smythson, a former dancer and professional footballer, and Clara Martinetti, a retired pantomime comedian, went to grill Crippen at his and Belle’s home. When they weren’t able to get much out of him, Smythson went to Scotland Yard — where no-one took her very seriously. Plus ça change, some readers might feel.
Violet Bartram, a tightrope walker, was given the job of examining the passenger lists of the shipping companies operating sailings to the States. Eventually, guild president Isabel Ginnett, an equestrian performer who was on tour in America, was able to verify that there were no official US records of the death of a woman called Crippen. Consequently, back in London, the celebrated singer Lillian Nash and her husband went back to the police: this time they listened.
As we now know, Crippen had poisoned his wife and then beheaded, dismembered and deboned her body, burying her flesh and organs in the coal cellar of their house, before moving in with his lover. As the net closed, they fled, but thanks to a transatlantic telegraph both were arrested as their ship reached Canada. Crippen protested his innocence but was hanged. Ethel, charged with being an accessory to murder, was found not guilty. Rubenhold makes clear she believes this was the wrong verdict.
She also makes clear that, contrary to the many victim-blaming accounts depicting Crippen as a gentle soul caught in an impossible situation and Belle as “noisy, over-vitalised, animal, seductive and intolerable” (the words of Dorothy L. Sayers, by the way) who was basically asking for it, he was a loathsome control-freak weirdo, whilst she was generous, creative and much loved.
The prologue to this compelling, panoramic book points out that, “One of the most unfortunate aspects of any story of a murder is that the victim can never speak for themselves.” True, obviously, but in Rubenhold, Belle Elmore has a persuasive, eloquent advocate.
