Dr Crippen and the Wireless

The first fugitive caught by radio, and a disguise that fooled no one at sea.

Hawley Harvey Crippen was a mild, bespectacled American doctor living in north London with his flamboyant wife Cora. In early 1910 Cora vanished. Crippen told her friends she had gone to America and later that she had died there. Soon his young typist, Ethel Le Neve, had moved in, and was seen wearing Cora's jewellery.

The puzzle

Cora's friends went to Scotland Yard. Chief Inspector Walter Dew interviewed Crippen, who calmly admitted the story about her death was a lie to avoid scandal: she had, he said, left him for another man. Dew was half satisfied. But when he returned a few days later, Crippen and Ethel had fled.

Dew searched the house again and found human remains buried under the cellar floor. The hunt was on.

Caught by wireless

Crippen and Ethel had sailed from Antwerp for Canada on the SS Montrose, travelling as a father and son, with Ethel in boy's clothes. The captain, Henry Kendall, had read about the case and noticed the pair holding hands a little too fondly. He sent a wireless telegram to England.

Dew boarded a faster ship, overtook the Montrose, and came aboard in the St Lawrence disguised as a pilot. Crippen was arrested and brought back to London. Newspaper readers on both sides of the Atlantic followed every day of the chase.

What happened next

Crippen was convicted and hanged in November 1910. Ethel Le Neve was tried separately and acquitted. In 2007 a team of scientists reported that DNA from the cellar remains did not match Cora's relatives, a finding other experts have disputed. The case that seemed closed in 1910 is still argued over today.