In This 1910 True Crime Story, the Victim Finally Gets Some Respect

STORY OF A MURDER: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen, by Hallie Rubenhold

The case of Dr. Crippen, detailed in Hallie Rubenhold’s “Story of a Murder,”would have been familiar to many in 1910. According to contemporary newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, the London-based doctor — a meek, feeble, bespectacled man — fell so passionately in love with his typist, Ethel Le Neve, that he murdered his wife to be with her. At the time, Crippen was declared to be “kindhearted,” “good-tempered” and “amiable,”a victim of romantic urges beyond his control.

His murdered wife received no such accolades.

Née Kunegunde Mackamotzki, she was a music hall performer professionally known as Belle Elmore. At the trial, it was repeatedly noted that she had kept company with other men, even prior to her marriage. She spent her own earnings on jewelry and pretty clothing. She had, in her husband’s words, “an ungovernable temper.”

Certainly, Hawley Crippen had poisoned her, hacked her body to pieces and buried it in his cellar. Still, chroniclers of the crime would claim that she was “a flashy, faithless shrew, loud voiced, vulgar and florid” and dismiss her as “a worthless creature.”

This, as you might expect, is not the whole story.

It has taken over a century, but Rubenhold, an American British historian who has written extensively on social history, has at last delivered justice to Belle Elmore.

Belle emerges as a far more complex person in “Story of a Murder” than the frivolous would-be chanteuse the newspapers of the age depicted. Readers discover that she was a resilient Brooklyn native who made a new life for herself when her husband, Hawley, decided they would move from America to his native London. A talented singer who initially sought to become an opera diva, Belle found work at music halls in the city.