The Ability to Kill (11 page)

‘May we have a further statement from you regarding the definition of reasonable doubt. Would you confirm that we judge the case on reasonable doubt, or must we be certain sure of the prisoner’s guilt to return a verdict?

‘Will you please also comment on the summing-up quoted by defence counsel, with a special reference to circumstantial evidence on the previous case, and the bearing on this case with regard to identification and the cartridge cases found at the Vienna Hotel?

‘Would you please comment on the point made that when there is circumstantial evidence which admits of more than one
theory, then the theory in favour of the defence must invariably be adopted?’

The jury returned to court to hear the Judge’s reply.

He reminded them that he had said that they must be ‘sure,’ and went on: ‘Well, if you have a reasonable doubt, not a mere fancy sort of doubt, if you have a reasonable doubt you cannot be sure.’

On the question of identification, he said: ‘You have to be quite sure that the evidence of identification was such that you, and each of you, can feel sure that, as a result of that identification, it was the prisoner that has been identified.’

Hanratty was found guilty, and in April he was hanged.

There was, and is, no reasonable doubt that he was guilty. But when we are taking the irreversible step of executing a man, should there be
any
permissible kind of doubt, even the ‘mere fancy’ kind?

Well, doubtless there has to be. Otherwise, nobody would
ever
be executed.

Ladies and gentlemen, little more than a century has passed since Thomas de Quincey wrote those oft-quoted words. Yet, to the modern student of murder, steeped in the tradition of William Roughead, Edmund Pearson, William Bolitho and Christopher Morley, they already have a platitudinous ring.

Yes, we have come a long way; and British students have not been slow to recognise the debt they owe to American scholarship. Nevertheless, it has seemed to some of us in Britain that, in spite of the great erudition and high sensibility of the post-Woollcott school of American murder-fanciers (or, perhaps, because of them?), their insights have remained to some extent limited. When, therefore, the President of the Incorporated Society of American Murder-Tasters asked me, an Englishman, to deliver the Lizzie Borden Memorial Lectures for this year, I had no difficulty in choosing a theme.

Ladies and gentlemen, our Anglo-Saxon culture is built on studious denials of the existence within us of the primitive. The revelation that there is, after all, an ape beneath the velvet is perennially fascinating. Surely, that is why we so value a good murder. Where you, my American friends, seem to have gone astray (and I offer the suggestion in all humility) is in your tendency to concentrate your interest and researches on the ape, to the virtual exclusion of the velvet. The two must be complementary. What the murderer said to his victim as he slipped the antimony into the cocoa is undeniably important; but how can we assess the full emotional flavour of the situation (to say nothing of that of the cocoa) without also considering the
actual building in which the crime was hatched and committed
?

I do not pretend that my interest in this important facet of murder-study is a recent development. In fact, it originated in a disturbing emotional experience of my adolescence.

On Saturday, April 12, 1924, a young man named Patrick Mahon entered a London hardware store and bought a meat-saw and a cook’s ten-inch knife. Thus equipped, he went to Waterloo Station, picked up a suitcase he had checked there, and took a train to Eastbourne, a town on the Sussex coast of the English Channel.

Between Eastbourne and Pevensey Bay is a desolate area of shingle and sand dunes known locally as the Crumbles; and here, in a small cottage which he had rented a few days earlier, a Miss Emily Kaye awaited him. She was a stenographer whom he had met in London; and this was to be the beginning of a two months’ ‘love experiment’ (to use Mahon’s own limpid phrase) which would, if it proved successful, make way for a more permanent relationship.

At least, that was Miss Kaye’s understanding of the situation, and she had demonstrated her optimistic view of it by
selling some bonds she owned and giving her lover the proceeds. His feelings about the future were undoubtedly different. On the following Tuesday he strangled her, dismembered her body, packed the pieces tightly into some old boxes, and returned to London.

From the point of view of the serious murder-fancier it was not a particularly distinguished crime. There was no mystery about it, and, in spite of the newspapers’ efforts, precious little of the macabre. No special detective skill was needed to bring the murderer to book. No doubts exercised the jury. Patrick Mahon was a commonplace psychotic who had already served a five-year prison sentence for assault.

However, distinguished or no, it was the first real murder case in which I had taken an interest. A lad of fifteen, I had just read Dostoevski’s
Crime and Punishment
and been shattered by it. Wrapped in the mantle of Raskolnikov, I used to go for long, gloomy walks in the more depressing quarters of London, looking for fallen women whom I could salute, though from a respectable distance, in the name of suffering humanity.

The family holiday that year took us to a resort within cycling distance of Eastbourne and, three days before Mahon was hanged, I decided to ride over there, visit the Crumbles and inspect the celebrated cottage. Through solitary communion with the scene of the crime, I felt that I might come to closer grips with the problems of good and evil with which my anxiety-laden mind was preoccupied.

Judge, then, my horror, my disgust, my indignation, when I found the whole site cluttered with morbid sight-seers, and the murder cottage itself practically torn to pieces by souvenir-hunting vandals!

The incident made an unforgettable impression on me. When the London County Council initiated the system of
marking those houses which possess literary, artistic or other historical association with blue commemorative plaques, it was I who proposed that distinguished murder houses be marked with red plaques. My proposal was ignored. Some people seem to have no sense at all of historical responsibility. No sooner is a distinguished murder committed than they are agitating for the street name to be changed or the houses to be renumbered.

Happily, these ill-natured attempts are not often successful. The classic instance of a failure to distort history in this way is, of course, supplied by the English town of Rugeley in Staffordshire, home of Dr William Palmer, probably the most distinguished poisoner of all time. Palmer certainly poisoned at least fourteen persons for money, and although only three of the murders were proved against him at his trial in 1856, the case aroused enormous public interest. One might suppose that Rugeley would have been proud of Palmer; but no. Soon after the trial a craven group of citizens actually petitioned the Prime Minister of England for permission to change the town’s name.

Fortunately, the Prime Minister was a man of wit and also a keen murder-taster. He readily gave the permission, but with the proviso that the town should be renamed after him. His name was Palmerston. Rugeley’s name remained Rugeley.

As you may imagine, the World War II years brought additional anxieties. And some bitterness too. When other national treasures were being moved to safe places in the country, it was heart-breaking to find that
no special steps whatsoever
were being taken to protect such famous London buildings as 63 Tollington Park, and the left luggage office at Charing Cross Station
^*
from enemy attack.

They survived, of course, but only thanks to Providence. I well remember my despair on hearing that the Camden Road
area of London had been badly hit in a night bombing and that the immortal 39 (now 30) Hilldrop Crescent was a hole in the ground. I was away in the army at the time and could not check this terrible report. In fact it was not until I came to do the field work for this very survey that I learned that, although the bombs had fallen very close to Dr Crippen’s former home, and although the damage to neighbouring property had been severe, the old place itself still stood; a little shabby, perhaps, a little run down, but still proudly intact.

It was a moving discovery. Britain and America have many cultural ties; but what could be a more enduring emotional link between our two democracies than the basement of 39 Hilldrop Crescent?

Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was the son of a dry-goods merchant in Coldwater, Michigan. He studied medicine at the Homeopathic Hospital College of Cleveland, Ohio, and took his diploma as an eye and ear specialist at the Ophthalmic Hospital in New York. As American as they come. After the death of his first wife in 1891 (from natural causes) in Salt Lake City, he went to New York. There he met a girl of seventeen, Kunigunde Mackamotzki (father Polish, mother German), who called herself Cora Turner. She was living at the time with a man named C. C. Lincoln. In 1893 she became the second Mrs Crippen.

A great deal has been written about the insignificant-looking, myopic little doctor with his sandy moustache, his gold-rimmed spectacles, his high, domed forehead, his apologetic manner. He has been, too, the archetype of many a medically qualified fictional murderer. Let us look, for a moment, at Miss Mackamotzki.

She was a robust, handsome brunette-turned-blonde with dark, heavily-lidded eyes and a manner which all who knew her described as ‘lively.’ She had heavy demands to make upon the
man of her choice. To begin with, he must patronise her ambition to become a professional singer by paying teachers to foster her non-existent talent, composers to write songs for her, and agents to offer her services to unresponsive managements. He must also, of course, pay for her clothes; no ordinary liability since she believed that her inability to get professional engagements was somehow due to the inadequacies of her wardrobe, and every setback was followed by an orgy of dress buying. To complete the picture, it must be said that she was a full-blooded girl whose carnal needs were as excessive as her financial ones. Lively, indeed! C. C. Lincoln must have sighed with relief when she left him.

Towards the end of 1899, the doctor obtained a job with a patent-medicine manufacturer and was sent to England to manage the London office. Four months later Cora joined him. It was not until 1905 that they moved to Hilldrop Crescent.

The intervening years had not dealt kindly with either of them. We can learn about the state of their relationship from the interior arrangements of the house at that time.

The walls were painted a florid pink, Mrs Crippen’s lucky colour, and, owing to her dislike of ventilation, the place smelled. The four upper rooms were occupied by lodgers and the Crippens lived mostly in the basement. At six every morning the doctor would get up to clean the lodgers’ shoes, light the fires and make breakfast for all before leaving for his office. On his return at night he would help with supper. Mrs Crippen appropriated the rent money for her dress allowance. The household bills were paid by the doctor.

Soon after she arrived in England, Cora Crippen took the stage name of Belle Elmore and set out to conquer London music hall audiences. She flopped abysmally, and at the last of her two or three isolated appearances was booed off the stage. After that, she cultivated the fiction that she had retired from
the stage after a long, successful career. She read the stage papers, bought expensive clothes and joined an artistes’ benevolent association, The Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. The ladies of the Guild found her gay and generous; ‘lively,’ in fact. At home she was a slattern and a scold.

Crippen bore his troubles with remarkable patience and restraint. He knew, because she had told him, that his wife was unfaithful to him. Yet, in spite of everything—her meanness at home, her wild extravagance outside, her selfishness and her shrill outbursts of nagging—he remained quietly subservient to her; until January, 1910.

The problem of how this mother-fixated masochist could suddenly turn into a wilful murderer has always been a tantalising one.

The most popular theory nowadays seems to be that he did not turn into a wilful murderer, but that he killed his wife accidentally. Having fallen in love with his secretary, Miss Ethel Le Neve, the story goes, and being unable to meet the double demands upon his virility, he recalls from his medical studies that nymphomania is treated with hyoscin hydrobromide. Thereupon, he doses his wife with the stuff, misjudges the quantity and kills her. He then panics, dismembers the body and buries it under the basement floor.

Unhappily, this engaging explanation is contradicted by the evidence. Firstly, the Crippens had been sleeping in separate rooms for years. Secondly, the dose of hyoscin he administered was ten times the maximum prescribed in the pharmacopoeia, a book with which he was certainly familiar. Thirdly, his behaviour immediately after the murder (for example, he gave Miss Le Neve some pieces of Mrs Crippen’s jewellery to wear in public) suggests not panic but a ghastly self-confidence. The panic flight aboard the S.S.
Montrose
came later.

Personally, I prefer a more old-fashioned explanation. Crippen fell in love with Miss Le Neve and told Cora he wanted a divorce. As a devout Catholic, she refused. It was the last straw. When he is really in love for the first time in his life, even a mother-fixated, masochistic worm can turn.