On the 18th of October 1910, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was arrested for the murder of his wife, Cora Crippen nee Turner, [born as Kunigunde Mackamotzki] and called Belle Elmore on stage. She was also briefly known as Cora Motzki during performances, but she abandoned this name after being dubbed the Brooklyn Matzos ball due to her plump figure. What he was accused of was poisoning her, chopping up the body and burying it in the cellar in quicklime. When the police started asking questions he said that she had gone to America to visit a sick relative, caught double pleuro-pneumonia, and died. When the police said that he was lying, he said that, what really happened was that she had run away to America and was currently living with Bruce Miller, a man with whom she once had an affair. He had said she was dead to spare himself the shame of having his wife run away. The police believed his explanation but searched the house, just in case, but they found nothing and left. But then Crippen did something stupid, he fled to America. When Chief Inspector Dew returned to his house, simply to check some dates and found that both Crippen and Ethel Le Neve, the woman he was now living with, had fled, he called for policemen to help him search the house again. This time, however, when the searched the cellar, they found the body buried in slaked lime, under several loose bricks. The body was little more than a mass of flesh, as the skeleton, head and sexual organs had all been removed, making it impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. Inspector Dew sent out wireless telegraph messages to all the ships equipped with wireless telegraph machines. A message was then sent back from the captain of the S.S. Montrose, who fancied himself as an amateur detective. He said that a certain Mr Robinson and his son were very close to the descriptions of Dr. Crippen and Ethel Le Neve. He had noticed that Mr Robinson had a mark on his nose, exactly the same as you would get from wearing glass for a substantial amount of time, and then removed them. He also found, when he had invited them to dine with him, after telling a joke, he inspected Robinsons’ mouth when he laughed, and realised that he was wearing false teeth. Master Robinson, the younger of the pair, was wearing pants that were ‘very tight about the hips, and wear split a bit down the back, and secured with large safety pins’. Inspector Dew then boarded a faster ship, the S.S. Laurentic, and arrived in America before them. He made the arrest on the 31st of July 1910. Dr Crippen was tried at the old Bailey, and sentenced to death.
