In a suburban London neighborhood on a cold night in February 1910, two women awoke to what sounded like two shots coming from the vicinity of their neighbor’s house. When the street went quiet, they decided it was merely a car backfiring, and returned to bed. The events of the next few months, however, made the denizens of Hilldrop Crescent take notice: the disappearance of the lady in number 39, a plump, good-natured former performer who loved entertaining in her home; the appearance of a dark-haired young woman none of the neighbors had ever seen before; the unusual amount of refuse that she and the vanished woman’s husband burned in the back garden. It must have made terrible sense when the police made a gruesome discovery in the cellar: chunks of skin, flesh and hair that turned up when the officers removed the brick flooring and dug their shovels into the earth.
In Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen, author Hallie Rubenhold takes on another of England’s most notorious murder cases. For decades after the trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen and Ethel Le Neve for the murder of his wife, Belle Elmore, the public was fascinated by the disturbing murder, and romanticized the love affair between the two accused that sparked it all. Rubenhold strips away the fantasy to reveal what misogyny and sensationalized news have buried. Belle Elmore was loved and loving, far from the florid monster the media turned her into. Likewise, Ethel Le Neve was not remotely the demure, easily swayed woman in love she appeared to be. And, perhaps most shockingly, the unassuming, bespectacled Dr. Crippen had been married once before, to another woman who died suddenly in Salt Lake City in 1892.
The character of Dr. Crippen remains compelling, but Rubenhold focuses her investigation on the women. Belle Elmore overcame considerable challenges to lead an active, joyful life, while Ethel Le Neve displayed a greed, ruthlessness and cold cunning that still chills to the bone. As in The Five, in which Rubenhold chronicles the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper, Story of a Murder masterfully reinvestigates an infamous case in a thoroughly modern way, revealing the women behind the gruesome headlines and restoring dignity to Belle Elmore.
