The Five author Hallie Rubenhold: ‘I really hate true crime'

The Guardian

29-03-2025

It was called 'the crime of the century' and 'the north London cellar murder', and more than 100 years after it happened, the name of the murderer is still widely known. Dr Crippen has been the subject of multiple books, movies and TV shows and had a waxwork made of him at Madame Tussauds. But the story of his crimes, writes Hallie Rubenhold in Story of a Murder, remains one 'predominantly about women but told almost exclusively by men'. As such, Crippen's victim is long forgotten. Her name was Belle Elmore, and in Rubenhold's book she is brought back to life.
Rubenhold and I are in a cafe in Muswell Hill, north London, a 10 minute walk from where Elmore is buried, and where the 53-year-old author lives with her barrister husband, Frank. Writing Story of a Murder was nerve-racking, says Rubenhold, partly because of the usual dizzying challenge of converting huge volumes of research into a brisk narrative and partly because of the expectations raised by the success of Rubenhold's 2019 blockbuster The Five, in which she told the story of five of Jack the Ripper's victims. The Five won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction and triggered huge interest and discussion for its radical refocusing of the story away from the murderer. The book triggered a bizarre hate campaign by so-called 'Ripperologists,' while effectively re-inventing true crime. 'I'm pleased to say it has quietened down,' says Rubenhold of the backlash. 'But they have been on my back for the better part of five to six years.'
She needn't have worried: Story of a Murder is just as compelling and revelatory. In Rubenhold's meticulous retelling, the story begins decades earlier in turn of the century New York, where Crippen's first wife, Charlotte Bell, arrives as an immigrant from Ireland. The young woman meets and falls in love with Hawley Harvey Crippen, a newly qualified doctor, and the pair marry and move to Salt Lake City, where Charlotte, 'a healthy 33-year-old woman', dies suddenly. After her death, Crippen moves to New York, meets and marries Belle and, after bouncing around the US for a while, the couple move to London in 1897, where they settle into a house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway – the address where, 13 years later, Belle's remains will be found in the cellar.
'No murderer,' writes Rubenhold in the opening line of the book, 'should ever be the guardian of their victim's story, and yet this is the role that Hawley Harvey Crippen has always held.' After an extraordinary police chase across the Atlantic, Crippen was brought back to Britain, stood trial in 1910 and was ultimately hanged for his second wife's murder. But somehow his account of Belle Elmore still stands: an overbearing, nagging harridan of a woman who drove him into the arms of his secretary and co-conspirator, Ethel Le Neve.
It is, says Rubenhold, 'staggering' how awful the depictions of Belle have been. 'It started with Alexander Bell Young, who wrote about the trial [in 1920] and who decided early on that this was a beautiful romantic relationship between Crippen and Ethel, and that Belle was a monster who had to be slayed. If you start from that, what hope do you have?' And so it went on, she says, underpinned by this notion that, 'if anyone deserved to die it was Belle Elmore'. A 1963 movie starring Donald Pleasence as Crippen also demonised Belle. As recently as 2007, 'there was a documentary in which they went out of their way to try to prove that the body [in the cellar] wasn't Belle. That's simply not true: the people behind it had bought so far into this myth of Belle being a horrific human being, it's gotten to the point where the murderer is the victim and the victim is the murderer.'
After The Five, in which Rubenhold reclaimed individual women from the conglomerate mass known as Jack the Ripper's 'prostitute victims', this kind of correction has become her speciality. And as with The Five, which animated the slums of Victorian Whitechapel and London's underclass, Story of a Murder is also a piece of gripping social history, in this case focusing on the Edwardian lower middle classes. When Crippen came to trial in 1910, the case 'touched a nerve about social climbing' that helps explain how, despite the low body count, the story would dominate world news for weeks. The Crippens weren't entirely respectable; Belle worked in London's musical hall theatres and her husband was a con-artist, selling bogus medical treatments. But they were affluent and, viewed from the outside, says Rubenhold, their story was one 'of the aspiring middle classes that starts with Pooter and the Diary of a Nobody and ends with [Crippen] and what's under the surface. So much for your sherry glasses and your Christmas cards – there's actually a body in the cellar.'
One singular and cheering aspect of the story is the role played by Belle's loyal female friends, spirited members of the Music Hall Ladies' Guild, as she herself had been, who first raised the alarm when she went missing. Crippen insisted that Belle had run back to America, leaving behind all her clothes and personal items and failing to say goodbye or stay in touch with her friends. They didn't buy it, and then, definitive proof, as they saw it: Ethel Le Neve turned up at a gala dinner on Crippen's arm, wearing Belle's jewellery. At the women's urging, the police searched 39 Hilldrop Crescent and made a grisly discovery: parts of a body, minus a head, stuffed into jars. Belle had been poisoned and dismembered so Crippen could be with his lover.
Piecing together all the tiny shards of research to build up a full and novelistic portrait of these characters was particularly difficult because, when Rubenhold started the project in 2020, the world had just been shut down by Covid. (The timing was almost comically bad; her first research trip to the US, to investigate Crippen's first marriage and the unhappy fate of Charlotte, was booked for April 2020, a month into lockdown.) She was permitted into various research archives for short periods of time and scrambled to photograph documents for later study. 'It reminded me of a combination of Supermarket Sweep and a spy film,' she says.
Through family letters, Rubenhold made the bleak discovery that Crippen had been performing abortions on Charlotte; he was known to hate children, and after the couple's son was born, whenever his wife became pregnant, he tricked her into submitting to surgery. This pattern was repeated when Belle became pregnant; Crippen performed first an abortion on her, and then, claiming she had a prolapsed uterus, what was known as an 'ovariectomy', sterilising his second wife and plunging her into menopause. Belle survived those surgeries; Charlotte did not. According to her brother, William, Charlotte had written to him shortly before her death in Salt Lake City: 'My husband is about to force me to the knife again, and I feel that this will be the last time. I want my relatives to know that if I die it will be his fault.' Within a few weeks, the healthy 33-year-old died, allegedly of a stroke. Crippen buried her in a paupers grave and moved back to New York.
The movement of Crippen from the US to London makes him a good subject for Rubenhold, who grew up in LA, the child of Anglo-American parents, and moved to Leeds as a graduate student of history, after studying for her primary degree at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. (In between, she did a year abroad studying creative writing and history at UEA). London always felt like home, she says: 'It may have been that my grandparents were dyed in the wool cockneys – we had home movies of them doing the Lambeth Walk. And I grew up with my father talking about the Blitz, and being evacuated.' After college, Rubenhold worked as an assistant curator at the National Portrait Gallery and in 2005, published her first book, The Covent Garden Ladies, a history of Harris's List, the famous 18th-century directory of prostitutes. Three further books of nonfiction and two historical novels followed, both set in the 18th century, before The Five was published in 2019, driven by what has become her governing ethos: 'I think we approach history from the wrong end most times. When we teach history, it's from the top down. Let's talk about the laws and the people who made them. No, let's talk about why this became necessary? To me, that's where the story is. It's about people's experience.'
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In keeping with this, Rubenhold had a lucky discovery while researching Story of a Murder that brought Belle Elmore's early years spectacularly to life. Part of her research took her to the Bed-Stuy neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where Belle's Polish-German family had settled. 'I hired this amazing tour guide,' she says, 'who took me on a bespoke tour of Brooklyn history from the Slavic perspective – totally niche! He was in his mid-80s, the most incredible person, and was telling me about his grandparents coming to the country in about 1899, which is when Belle's family lived there. We went to the church that Belle attended, and to all the places the family would've gone.'
It's this immersive approach that makes Rubenhold's books click along like good novels and, when she can't find a primary resource, 'that's when you lean on the history,' she says. 'There will always be an example of somebody else in exactly the same situation. So with Charlotte Bell, I didn't know what her precise experiences were as a nurse, but there's tons of information of women from her background in New York at exactly that time.'
Part of Rubenhold's mission, going all the way back to The Covent Garden Ladies, which inspired the TV show Harlots, is to tear up the templates that can mire true crime and crime reporting generally. 'This is going to sound strange,' she says, 'but often when I'm choosing a book I have to find a subject I hate. And then I try to figure out why I hate it so much. And then I become fascinated by it. I really hate true crime.'
Traditional books in that genre foreground the identity of the murderer over his victims, giving rise to the personality cult of notorious killers. Jack the Ripper, whose identity has never been confirmed, is a prime example and, by coming at the story from a different angle, Rubenhold discovered that the entire story changed. 'I'm not interested in straight true crime. I'm interested in the darkness in human nature as seen through historical events. And I'm fascinated by how granular you can get in terms of historical understanding; I'm looking at material that a murder throws up – all the witness statements, all the trial papers, all the unspoken human experience.'
In The Five, this approach resulted in a completely fresh view of Dickensian London in which Polly, one of the Ripper's victims, was discovered to have declared herself legally destitute so she could be free of her husband, who was having an affair with the woman next door. Polly ended up in the workhouse and then sleeping rough, where the Ripper found her. She was not, per common understanding, a prostitute and nor were some of the other victims, which is where Rubenhold ran into trouble.
The backlash against The Five from so called 'Ripperologists' – armchair fanatics with a weird and possessive attachment to the unsolved mystery of Jack the Ripper – was intense. 'What I find incredible is that I've watched what they say about me and it's so disconnected from The Five and what I actually said. I'm accused of hating sex workers; of depriving the women of their actual identities and sanitising their stories. I'm told I've done them a gross injustice. Oh, and that I should die.' She laughs. 'I don't understand the obsession. And it is an obsession.'
There are, presumably, fewer Crippenologists out there than devotees of Jack the Ripper; for a murderer surely he's small fry? But, says Rubenhold, 'Oh, god; the moment I put something out about Belle or whatever, somebody will ask a question on social media: 'Didn't they prove it wasn't her?' Do we have to go through this? I'm hoping that the book will put that to rest.'
The one thing that unifies the crimes behind both books 'is woman hate,' she says. But what makes her work so inspiring is its success in animating real women. Belle Elmore leaps off the page, a woman who rebuilt a vibrant life for herself after her husband took away her longed-for desire to have children. Restoring her to this full-blooded status gives the book a real emotional punch, as does recalibrating Crippen himself. 'I'm really glad to have shone a light on [Crippen's] creepiness,' says Rubenhold. 'Because for so long he was known as the 'mild murderer' and 'a nice man'. No, he wasn't! He was a hardened fraudster and all his friends were criminals. All of them.'
After Belle's death, the loyal members of the Music Hall Ladies' Guild paid for her headstone in Finchley Cemetery and hired a lawyer to stop Crippen leaving Belle's estate to Ethel Le Neve in his will. The book remains not only a tribute to Belle, but more broadly to the value of the individual life. Rubenhold's mother died as she was writing the book and, she says, 'it really made me reflect on being a historian, and documenting lives. Because there's a start date and an end date. Life has a finite beginning and a finite end.' For a book about a murder, it is a movingly life affirming coda. 'This is your time. And that's it.'
Story of a Murder: the Wives, the Mistress and Doctor Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold is published by Doubleday (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.