The First Murderer Caught by Radio

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 765, 19 March 1954, Page 7

The First Murderer Caught by Radio

CTING as the judge, defence, prosecution and yy accused, Edgar Lustgarten (right), an exbarrister, held listeners spellbound last year in "Prisoner at the Bar," a series of reconstructions of famous criminal trials. Soon he'll be on the air again in a new series of this BBC feature, and one of his

subjects this time will be Dr.

Hawley Harvey

Crippen

the first murderer to be caught by radio. _

N the last day of July, 1910, the transatlantic liner Montrose slowed down off Father Point, Quebec, and a muffled figure was hoisted aboard. Many thought it to be the pilot who would take the ship up-river. In fact, it was Inspector Dew, of Scotland Yard, who had travelled from Liverpool by a much faster ship. A passenger was summoned | to the-captain’s cabin. The -~ ies 6 ‘newcomer om acne Good cae Caer en Fam Inspector Dew." "Crippe "the greeting, and. the went on: "You wi!l be arrested for the murder and mutilation of your wife, Cora Crippen, in London, on the 2nd of February last." For the little hen-pecked doctor it was more than the end of the voyage. The arrest created a sensation. I¢ was the first time a major criminal had been apprehended by radio, and in the words* of the criminologist Michael Gilbert, "it is difficult to know if the public were more stirred by the news that Crippen had been tracked down by wireless, or

that he had spent the last days of his freedom reading The Four Just Men, by Edgar Wallace." The crime for which Crippen was wanted was what was then regarded eas a particularly callous and horrible murder. Crippen had married an unsuccessful music-hall actress named Belle Elmore, whom he had met in New York. The marriage had failed. Mrs. Crippen had turned increasingly to her ~ music-hall friends for company, and the doctor had become little more than her servant. Mrs. Crippen held the pursestrings. She chose his suits, his ties, and, with one exception, his friends. The exception was Ethel Le Neve, a short-hand-typist with whom Crippen formed a liaison in 1905. Miss Le Neve was neither domineering nor unfaithful; she was, in fact, the exact opposite of Mrs. Crippen; but, in 1910, with the possibility of marriage to Crippen apparently as far off as ever, she felt her position was becoming intolerable. In the light of what happened it seems probable she told Crippen she would leave him. She was not called on to put this supposed threat into effect, for, within days of the showdown Crippen gave a dinner party. .. The party, with the Crippens’ neighbours and friends Paul and Clara Martinetti present, was held on the*last day of January, 1910. Nobody knows exactly what happened after the party, but the next day Crippen was telling his wife’s friends that she had sailed suddenly for America. The doctor himself began pay- -

ing open court. to Miss Le. Neve, and before long he was giving her presents of his wife’s jewellery. Mrs. Crippen’s friends, already curious, were suspicious. Finally, Scotland Yard was asked to investigate. At first Crippen convinced Inspector Dew that his wife had merely left him, but when the inspector called back three days later to A some small detail of the doctor’s ‘statement, Crippen had gone. The inspector too became _ suspicious. He conducted a search, and, under the brick floor of the cellar, in a bed of quicklime, he found human remains.. The hunt was up, Crippen meanwhile had travelled to Brussels with Miss Le Neve, the latter

posing quite adequately as ‘his son. While waiting for the Montrose to sail they toured the city, apparently. escaping notice, and enjoying their freedom. But, on the Montrose, their luck ran out. The ship’s master, Captain Kendall, had read all about the case in the papers, and he was an observant. man. When he noticed the little man with a newly-grown /beard and no moustache, without glasses, but with a white mark across his nose where they had been, he was interested. He became even more interested when, on the second day out he found the man and "boy" holding hands on the boat deck. He tried using medical terms in conversation and noting the response; he called after his passenger "Mr. Robinson" -to see if he knew his own name. The captain became convinced of the identity of" the two passengers. He drew up a long message to Scotland Yard, and for the first time radio, hitherto the servant of mercy, served the cause of justice. The trial at the Old Bailey was, in some respects, as unusual as the circum-

stances of the murderer’s arrest. Much of the prosecution’s case rested-on evidence relating to the human remains found in the cellar and to the poison which had been administered. For theafirst time, medical witnesses came into_their own. Before 1910 expert witnesses had frequently broken down on ‘their facts under cross-examination. But at Crippen’s trial the evidence was presented by a formidable team, including a Dr. Spilsbury, who was later (as Sir Bernard Spilsbury) to achieve fame as Home Office pathologist and am unshakable medical witness. : Another notable feature’ of the trial was the deadly cross-examination of Richard Muir, chief counsel for the prosecution, with its unrelenting, recurrent theme of "You knew all along, you knew she was dead." It is this aspect that Edgar Lustgarten underlines in his reconstruction of the trial for his programme Prisoner at the Bar. This edition, entitled: "The Case of Crippen," will, with others of the series, be heard from all YA and YZ stations in the next few months. The first broadcast will be from 4YZ at 9.45 p.m. on Wednesday, March 24. Other instalments of Prisoner at the Bar include the story of Madeleine

Smith, who was tried in 1857 for the murder by arsenic of her lover (the verdict was the Scottish one. of "not proven’); of the Staunton brothers, who starved to death a feeble-minded relative, a story which even the hardened Lustgarten describes as "grim"; of Sidney. Fox, who went to the scaffold because of a door he shoald have left open; of Herbert John Bennett, a wifemurderer who was hanged in spite of a cast-iron alibi and the efforts of the famous counsel Marshall Hall; and, of George Archer-Shee, a naval cadet suspected’ of theft, whose case became a landmark of British law, and on which the play and film The Winslow Boy were based. Prisoner at the Bar is sinnaenie to start from other stations as follows: 1YC, 8.30 p.m., March 25; 2YC, 10.0 p.m., March 24 (Madeleine Smith); 4YA, 8.15. p.m., March 28 (The Stauntons); 3YA; 9.36 p.m., March 28 (Sidney Fox).