Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 by Nicholas Connell Page B

the original coroner, Dr Danford Thomas. He had been suffering from ill health and decided to take a holiday between hearings. He died suddenly at the coastal town of Hastings. It was agreed that the assistant coroner, Walter Schröder, who was familiar with the facts, should replace him. Superintendent Froest appeared and said that he could not predict exactly when Dew and Mitchell would return with the prisoners but it would probably be in about three weeks time and suggested that the inquest be adjourned until then.

9
PRE-TRIAL PROCEEDINGS
    How dull the murders are getting nowadays. Not a patch on the old domestic poisoning dramas. Crippen, Seddon, Mrs Maybrick; the truth being, I suppose, that you can’t do a good murder unless you believe you’re going to roast in hell for it.
    George Orwell, Coming Up For Air
    Crippen’s decision to plead not guilty could have sealed his fate, for there may have been an alternative. As soon as Arthur Newton had been retained by Crippen, he wanted to offer the brief to Edward Marshall Hall, a charismatic parliamentarian whose forays into the criminal courts often attracted publicity. He had a commanding presence and ‘a passion for showing off, tempered by an attractive simplicity and combined with a love of the marvellous, which made him on questions of fact somewhat of an impressionist. But there was about his personality something which even his most austere critics found hard to resist.’ 1
    Unfortunately for Newton, Marshall Hall was on holiday abroad. When he called in at Marshall Hall’s rooms in Temple Gardens he was met by the senior clerk, Archibald Bowker. Despite being very keen to accept the defence brief on behalf of Marshall Hall, who he knew would rise to the occasion, Bowker was wary because ‘I knew Newton to be utterly unscrupulous … he was not prepared to pay any of the fees until after the case was over, I became suspicious and insisted on a cheque with the brief’. Newton stormed out of the chambers when Bowker was forced to turn him down. 2
    Marshall Hall was convinced he could have proved Crippen’s innocence of the charge of murder if the accused man would only admit to everything except intent to murder, thus resulting in a conviction for manslaughter. Marshall Hall’s biographer set forth the potential defence:
    Crippen, in order to spend the night with his paramour, whether at home or elsewhere, drugged his wife with a new and rare drug of which he knew little, and of which he had lately purchased five grains. To be on the safe side he gave her a large dose, which turned out to be an overdose; or perhaps his continual dosing of her necessitated a big dose to ensure unconsciousness. In the morning he found his wife dead, and in a panic he made away with the remainder of the hyoscine, and with all a surgeon’s skill cut up her body, rising above his inexperience with the inspiration of despair. Then, hurriedly wrapping the flesh in an old pyjama jacket of his own, he buried it in quicklime, thinking it would thus be destroyed; as a matter of fact the quicklime had the reverse effect, and preserved the remains. Then he proceeded to write to a number of his friends a transparent tissue of lies. Crippen admitted that Miss Le Neve had slept at Hilldrop Crescent on February 2nd. Might she not have slept there on one or both of the previous nights, and frequently before that, while his wife was drugged with hyoscine and unconscious? 3
    Marshall Hall knew that Crippen’s not guilty plea would be disastrous. He thought that Crippen would not have agreed to his line of defence anyway as it could have made Le Neve an accomplice if she had been in the house with him as Cora Crippen lay dying or dead. Crippen would never allow any suggestion of guilt towards Le Neve. 4 Newton would have to find a defence team who were willing to try to convince a jury that Crippen knew nothing of the human remains found in his house.
    At Brixton Prison, Arthur Newton’s young