Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
THE MONSTER
St Pancras Cemetery. According to Lindsay, who is convinced Ethel was somehow involved in the murder, it means “justice has been served”.
She says: “It is fitting and proper that the remains of the mistress who had been the cause of so much mayhem and ultimately murder were scattered at an unmarked burial site.”
Ethel was just 17 when Crippen first hired her as a typist in 1900.
Over the next five years, their affair developed while Cora – a music-hall singer who performed under the stage name Belle Elmore – openly indulged in extra-marital flings. Historians still don’t know for sure, 107 years on from the murder this month, what part – if any – Ethel played in Cora’s untimely end.
Lindsay believes the fact the pair escaped following the killing is not the most incriminating factor for Ethel.
That came much earlier. After Cora’s disappearance, Ethel moved into the married couple’s home on Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway, and began wearing the missing wife’s clothes.
She desperately wanted to marry Crippen for her own social standing, even telling family and friends they had already wed. Lindsay has also uncovered evidence Crippen gave his mistress shooting lessons in the run-up to Cora’s death, and some neighbours reported hearing gunshots from the three-storey house before her disappearance.
Biologist Prof William Wright also found evidence Ethel had been studiously researching poisons in a library – but he never testified at the trial.
Cora’s actual cause of death was never established, and her head and limbs were never found. But her torso, the only body part that remained, was found to have been drugged with hyoscine.
As revealed in court, Crippen had bought the drug from a local chemist before his wife was killed.
During their affair, Ethel had a miscarriage and began seeing another man, which Lindsay says made Crippen insanely jealous.
“He thought, ‘Now I need to get rid of my wife,” she explains. “So I am not saying Ethel killed Cora, but she definitely knew a lot more than she ever let on, until her dying day.”
Lindsay adds: “Whether or not Ethel was involved in Cora’s death, Ethel really was the cause because it was her affair which served as the motive for the murder. Personally, I do think Ethel knew more than she ever revealed. Then to have fled with Crippen in the way she did was very naive –but she madly in love.”
When he was arrested, Crippen Chief Insp Dew, who was also invo in the Jack the Ripper case: “I am sorry; the anxiety has been too muc
Yet to this day, there are many w believe he is innocent of the crime which he was hanged. James Pat