Infamous Murderer Dr Crippen's Prayer Book to Auction
The prayer book with Dr Crippen’s name and address written inside the front cover
A prayer book belonging to Dr Crippen will go under the hammer at Richard Winterton Auctioneers on March 24.
American homeopath, ear and eye specialist and medicine dispenser Hawley Harvey Crippen was hanged in 1910 after the disappearance of his wife Cora, a music hall singer. Crippen claimed his wife had left him and gone to the US but her friends convinced police to pursue investigations and they found a boneless human torso buried under the cellar of the doctor’s London home.
Traces of toxins were later found in the remains, which were identified as Cora's due to a scar on the abdomen. The head, limbs and skeleton were never recovered. By the time of the search, Dr Crippen and his typist mistress Ethel Le Neve had left London in a bid to sail to Canada but the couple were recognised by the ship’s captain, who telegraphed the authorities.
Chief Inspector Walter Dew from Scotland Yard – who was also a detective in the hunt for Jack the Ripper – caught a faster boat and arrested them on the St Lawrence River, making Dr Crippen the first to criminal to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy. At the ensuing trial, Ethel was acquitted but the jury found Crippen guilty after just 27 minutes and he was hanged at Pentonville Prison at 9am on November 23 1910.
His personal leather-bound Book of Common Prayer, which he had in jail before his execution has been in the possession of a UK collector who bought it at auction in 2007. Its inside front cover is signed in pencil: “Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, Hilldrop Crescent, London.”
“This prayer book is a chilling artefact of one of Britain’s most notorious crimes,” said auctioneer Richard Winterton. “One wonders whether the hymn The Lamentation Of A Sinnner – appropriately at the very end of the book – was the very last thing Crippen read in his cell before he was fetched for sentence to be carried out. In recent years some have cast doubt on the conviction but in 2009 the Criminal Cases Review Commission said the Court of Appeal would not hear the case to pardon Crippen posthumously."
The pocket-sized prayer book has an estimate of £250 - £350.
