"A QUESTION OF GUILT" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Richard)
Richard Gordon A QUESTION OF GUILT
THE CURIOUS CASE OF DR CRIPPEN First Published in 1981
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the _News of the World._ Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.
_George Orwell_
'Cor blimey! You ought to see the landlady-what a face-Crippen was innocent!'
_Music-hall joke_
Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was sentenced to death at the Old Bailey in London on October 22, 1910, for the murder of his wife Belle Elmore, the music hall artiste. Three days later, Ethel Le Neve was accused in the same court of being an accessory after the fact. The Crippens were Americans who had settled in north London at Hilldrop Crescent. Part of Belle Elmore's remains were dug from the cellar floor. Her head and her bones were never found.