The Cringing Case of Dr. Crippen
In 1910, London was taken by storm as the mass media spread news of the brutal murder of housewife and well-known town member, Cora Crippen. Due to his blatant infidelities, her husband Dr. Hawley Crippen was accused of having murdered her in order to seek out a happier life with his secretary, Ethel LeNeve…It seems to always be the secretary.
Once interrogated on the status of his missing wife, Dr. Crippen claimed that the night she went missing, they were arguing and fighting. He then stated that in a rage, Cora said she was leaving him and would never see Dr. Crippen again. In that, Dr. Crippen concluded that Cora would be fleeing to be with a Mr. Bruce Miller, whom he believed she was seeing outside of their relationship. Basically, they endured a very dysfunctional marriage. But enough of the drama, let’s get to the science of it all.
After finding out that Dr. Crippen had fled from London to Belgium and was planning a subsequent steamship trip to Canada, the lead investigator on Mrs. Crippen’s missing case decided to search the Crippen household. After many days of investigation, the cellar revealed a slew of information which lead to Dr. Crippen’s face being plastered onto a wanted poster. A few inches under the brick floor of the cellar uncovered decomposing flesh along with bleach blond hair still in its curlers, a man’s pajama shirt, various articles of female clothing as well as viscera. The interesting aspect is that no bones, limbs, head or reproductive organs were found.
An analytical chemist was brought in to examine the flesh and remnants found in the floor of the basement. The toxicology analysis lead to the determination that a lethal dose of hyoscine hydrobromide was administered to the person that the remains belonged to. Since Dr. Crippen had recently purchased this drug for his uses as a homeopathic medicine man, the investigators
Figure 1. One of Dr. Spilsbury’s slides donated to Michigan State University for DNA analysis. The yellow tint of the slide is due to the use of pine resin as the seal for the tissue to the slide itself. It is labeled “R. v Crippen. Scar in Skin,” which was subsequently used in the trial and as the proof of the remains being that of Cora Crippen.
concluded that he procured this drug and utilized it to rid of his wife. The tissues found among the remains were also analyzed (the best they could be in that time period) by the pathologist of the town, Bernard Spilsbury. One particular tissue found among the remains resembled that of Cora Crippen’s scar she had procured across her abdomen and this became Splisbury’s basis for the claim that said remains belonged to her.
Analysts at Michigan State University decided to look at this century old case and determine if these remains truly belonged to Cora Crippen. Due to the infamous nature of the crime back in its day, Dr. Spilsbury’s slides still remained in tact at the Scotland Yard’s Police Evidence Museum. One of the tissue slides was sent to the University and, following its arrival, underwent extensive analysis. The DNA from the slide was isolated from its very intact pine resin seal and then put through organic and Chelex extraction. The Chelex extraction, however, was the only process yielding any useful PCR amplification results due to the “cross-linking activity of formaldehyde,” that occurred in the organic extraction. Mitochondrial DNA analysis was performed on this tissue as well as buccal swabs taken from Cora Crippen’s grand-nieces. After cross examining the results with the haplotypes of Cora Crippen’s proven maternal relatives, it was determined that the results clearly did not match up. The mtDNA regions in the Spilsbury slide in no way matched to those of the Crippen’s relatives with a difference of at least 5 nucleotides occurring at one time. Furthermore, the slide continually produced Y chromosome products, meaning that the tissue was not even female in origin. Uh oh.
Figure 2. Both graphs display autosomal and Y-chromosome curves from the mtDNA analysis of the slide. Both curves clearly exceed the threshold of 10, leading to the conclusion that the DNA was male in origin.
The simple conclusion made from this analysis is that the remains found in Dr. Crippen’s basement did not belong to Cora and Dr. Crippen was wrongfully hanged for the heinous crime he was accused of. To the day of his execution by hanging, Dr. Crippen stood strongly by his innocence and proclaimed, ‘”I insist I am innocent…some day evidence will be discovered to prove it…” As shown in this experiment, Dr. Crippen was 100 percent correct in this statement. Had this occurred in our time period with the convenience and accuracy of our technology, Dr. Crippen most likely would have been proven not guilty and the identity of the remains very well could have been identified through DNA profiling and further investigation.
Sources:
Foran, David R., Beth E. Wills, Brianne M. Kiley, Carrie B. Jackson, and John H. Trestrail Iii. “The Conviction of Dr. Crippen: New Forensic Findings in a Century-Old Murder.” Journal of Forensic Sciences 56.1 (2011): 233-40. Web.
My email rayfysh@sky.com
I am looking to obtain a copy of the following thesis
Kiley BM A highly sensitive sex determination assay (thesis). E.Lansing (MI): Michigan State University, 2009