The case of Dr. Crippen and the ship's telegraph
London and Canada, 1910
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
On the night of January 31, 1910, the American homeopathic doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen and his wife, the music hall singer Cora Crippen, known on stage as Belle Elmore, hosted a couple of friends for dinner at their house on Hilldrop Crescent, in north London. After that, no one saw Cora again. Crippen told her friends from the music hall ladies' guild that she had gone to the United States and, in March, telegraphed that she had died in California. Meanwhile his lover, the typist Ethel Le Neve, moved into the house and turned up at a ball wearing Cora's jewels, which led the friends to go to Scotland Yard.
On July 8, Chief Inspector Walter Dew questioned Crippen, who admitted he had invented the death and said his wife had left him for another man. Dew left satisfied, but Crippen fled with Ethel to Belgium and sailed from Antwerp on the steamer Montrose, bound for Canada, as "Mr. Robinson and son", with her dressed as a boy. The police returned to the house and, after two days of searching, found human remains under the brick floor of the cellar, containing hyoscine, a sedative Crippen had bought in January from a London chemist, and a piece of pyjama jacket from a shirtmaker that had sold only that model since 1908.
Sources
In the game
Telegram at Sea
St. Lawrence River, Canada, July 31, 1910, before dawn. The steamer Ondine, which left Antwerp eleven days ago, has just taken a river pilot aboard. The pilot is you.
The captain of the Montrose, Henry Kendall, grew suspicious of the couple and, before leaving the range of the onboard apparatus, sent a wireless telegram to London. Dew took a faster ship, reached Canada first and boarded disguised as a pilot on the St. Lawrence River on July 31, when he arrested Crippen, the first criminal captured with the help of the wireless telegraph. Tried at the Old Bailey in October, Crippen was convicted and hanged at Pentonville prison on November 23, 1910. Ethel was tried separately and acquitted. In 2007, a DNA test carried out in the United States suggested the remains were not Cora's, a conclusion that is still disputed.
