Two infamous murder cases get reexamined by the best true crime writers working today. Hawley Harvey Crippen and John Reginald Christie each committed homicides that stunned their neighbors, captivated a nation, and overshadowed the lives of the victims at the time. These books seek to train the spotlight back on those that were lost rather than revel in the gory crimes themselves.
In post-war England, just as rations began to ease but neighborhoods were still rebuilding from the Blitz, and the Windrush generation began to populate the suburbs, a gritty, impenetrable fog blanketed London for five days in 1952. By the time it lifted, an estimated 4,000 people died from asthma and heart attacks and road accidents. In the months following another 8,000 people died from lingering health complications. Not included in the death toll were the bodies of murder victims stuffed in the walls of Reg Christie’s flat at Rillington Place.
Notting Hill was not the quirky, desirable neighborhood it is today. It was a cheap, grungy area with sooty row houses divided into apartments. When a tenant attempted to hang a shelf in the tiny kitchen, the wall plaster crumbled and he made an unwelcome discovery. The false wall had been concealing three dead bodies. Police found more in the back garden. But it was reporter Harry Procter who realized that he had been to this location before, when a resident of another apartment in the same building was arrested for killing his wife and baby in the late 1940s. At the time he interviewed Reg Christie, an oddly calm neighbor who was now missing. Procter suspected Tim Evans was the wrong man, caught in 1949, and the real murderer has remained free – and kept killing.
Summerscale walks us through the Christie’s crimes but with a focus on each of the victims. For some, there is little more known than a name and a few biographical details, but with others – like Christie’s own wife – Summerscale has uncovered a wealth of information.
George Stonier of the New Statesman visited North Kensington as dusk was falling on Monday in the spring of 1953. He walked past a nun, in a black-and-white coif and tunic, and a couple of West Indian men ‘with strange gaities of shirt peeing out from raincoats’, before he turned into Rillington Place. There he joined more than twenty bystanders, most of the women, who were watching No 10 in silence from the facing pavement. Every detail of the house seemed sister to him: the cracks in the front door, the shiny patches were its green paint had worn away, the five windows shrouded with curtains. ~Pg. 64
Most interestingly, she stitches in the narratives of Harry Procter and his attempt to clear the name of the wrongly convicted Evans, as well as the writing of Fryn Tennyson Jesse. Herself a prominent journalist, writer, criminologist, and novelist, she attacked the story from a different angle, though no less intense angle as Procter.
Like sensational cases do, this one attracted the attention of notable persons including Robert Sherwood, Terence Rattigan, Margaret Leighton, Christianna Brand, Anthony Berkeley Cox, and Cecil Beaton.
A man sitting next to Cox whispered to him that he had been to every Old Bailey murder trial since that of Dr Crippen, hanged in 1910 for the murder of his wife, and he thought this one unlikely to be very satisfying. ‘There’s no excitement, you see,’ he said. ‘It’s not like not knowing whether he really did it or not; he’s confessed; it’s just his sanity that’s being tried.” ~Pg.150
For Summerscale, the story to be investigated is how the puzzle fits together. There is no mystery to be solved. Rather, it is how did this thing happen? What were the dominoes that had to fall? More importantly, what had to be ignored in order for Christie to get away with it as long as he did.
My thanks to Penguin Press for the advance review copy.
Publisher: Penguin Press (May 6, 2025)
Language: English
Hardcover: 320 pages
ISBN-10: 0593653637
The story of the Crippens never seems to truly fade away. Or if it does, it resurfaces after a brief respite. In some respects, it was so utterly incredible it can barely be believed. In other ways, it has all the elements of classic mystery novel. The characters and motives are so universal they could just as easily appear in an Agatha Christie novel as a Chaucer story (if he had ever decided to dabble in crime writing). Where Erik Larson focused on the fervor of chase and the brilliance of the technology that allowed them to be captured in Thunderstruck, Rubenhold stays closer to the hearth.
Hawley Harvey Crippen was a quack doctor who made money selling “patent” medicines in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. It was a prodigious time for these “wellness” fads and a rising middle class with at least a little disposable income were caught up in the Victorian obsession with physical health and standards.
How could a civilized, educated, professional man, who lived in a ten-room suburban house with a verdant garden, dismember his spouse’s body and then continue with his ordinary existence, catching the tramcar to his office and attending the theater? ~Loc. 4490
Crippen married his wife, Cora, whose dream was to become a stage performer. she changed her name to Belle Elmore and enjoyed a decent amount of success in music halls and theatres of turn-of-the-century London. Enter Ethel, the smart, indispensable typist at the office. She quickly became Crippen’s assistant and office manager for his fake patent schemes. The two began an affair.
For a number of years, the arrangement suited the pair, especially as Belle devoted herself even more to performing. But at some point, they wanted to be married and Belle stood in the way. When she “disappeared” after a sudden trip to California, her friends and colleagues immediately suspected Crippen and his mistress knew more than they were saying. Tales of Crippen and Ethel’s escape and trials entranced the reading public for months.
Edwardian newspapers loved a terrifying tale of true crime, and the story of what had been uncovered at 39 Hilldrop Crescent contained all the elements that readers relished. … Their narrative was both sensational and Gothic. It was not simply the dastardly, spine-tingling act of murder and dismemberment that drew public interest, but its characters and scenarios. ~Loc. 4498
Rubenhold reframes the daring crime around the women in Crippen’s life. His first wife Charlotte, who also died unexpectedly, is given her proper place in the story. He was never accused of her death, but looking back on it, it seems unlikely he was entirely innocent of that either. Belle (or Cora) is front and center under the limelight as she would have wanted. She is not merely a body to be found in the basement. She has a lively personality and strident spirit on the page. Crippen underestimated her closeness with fellow performers (at his own peril).
For her part, Ethel is far from just “the mistress.” Whether she knew of Crippen’s plans or helped him commit murder, she certainly helped him avoid authorities, participated in the escape, and refused to answer questions during the trial. She maintained her would always love him, even when the full scope of his deeds were known.
As Rubenhold did in The Five, the victims (and especially) the women, are given a proper place in the story and not just stock characters. She seeks to untangle the truth through newspapers, magazines, court records, and even interviews of Ethel’s grown children.
My thanks to Dutton for the e-galley. Read via NetGalley.
Publisher: Dutton (March 25, 2025)
Language: English
Hardcover: 512 pages
ISBN-10: 0593184610