San Antonio light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1911-1993, 1925-10-11
CHAPTER VIII.
(continued from Last Sunday

LONDON, October a.
r TOW that the Crippen affair is thing of the
N past, can afford to smile at my own agitation
over it. But it is positive fact that that was
about the only time in my life that really almost
regretted the office held.
1t was purely personal question. No doubts as
to DR.. Crippen's guilt ever entered my mind. My
troubles centered in the extremely unpleasant noto-
riety that was endowed with, because it was who
was to hang this man who had caused the sensation
of the day.
Crlppen! What name representative of thrills
that was! Even now its needs no introduction
to most newspaper readers in England and America;
for his crime of international interest
Everybody knows something about him-his cold
blooded dissection of his wfes body in the cellar of
his house in Hilldrop Crescent, near London, his
fight with Ethel lie Neve dressed in boys clothes,
and his dramatic arrest through the Intervention of
wireless telegraphy after exciting race across
the Atlantic by Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland
Yard.
These things in broad outline are familiar facts,
but it is my part to tell how this man. whose
name became household word, faced doom on the
scaffold, and in doing l believe | shall reveal
things which are new to the public.
In all my career have never known a case to
touch the general imagination so much as the Grip.
pen affair. There was an indefnabe something"
in it that sent it to the top flight of criminal sensa-
tions. And lived under the shadow of the muir
derers notoriety.
Some folk found Crippen guilty in their swn
minds long before he captured, and during all
the seething excitement of those days. when seemed
possible that he might yet escape the detectives,
there was never any question as to whether he was
guilty not. 1t was merely ''W he be captured: ?"
But when he did at last come before the bar of
justice the cocksure got nervous For it is one
thing to believe man to be guilty and different
thing to prove it. And then when these doubts dis
appeared and the was sentenced to death the
reaction in public excitement brought unwelcome
attentions in my direction.
For once the hangman was one of the most con-
spicuous personages in the British Kingdom 1t was
a notorety did not relish. | hardly dared to stir
out of the house. not because there was the slightest
danger, but for the that was the object of
too much curiosity. Whenever went out people
would point at and tell their friends in awestruck
accents:
That's him! That's the man who is going to
hang Crppenw
DR.. Hawley Harvey Crppen was an American,
and his medical degree was granted by an American
college. So he was hardly on the same high footing
our own doctors, but lent himself to all kinds of
patent medicine institutions which our own medical
men would not allow themselves to be associated
with. While still in America-in 1892, to be pre-
cise-he married his second wife, Cora Turner who
was known on the stage as Belle Elmore and who
afterward became the victim of his murderous
scheme.
The couple came to live at Hilldrop Crescent
North London, in 1905 and it was here that the crime
was committed which set the whole world searching
for DR.. Crippen.