Killer Facts, Richmond Magazine, September, 2025

Historian Hallie Rubenhold has given voice to the women surrounding a notorious villain. Deana Luchia listens in

After the huge success of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, author and social historian Hallie Rubenhold is back with another intriguing tale.

Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Doctor Crippen explores the killing of music hall singer Belle Elmore by her husband, the eponymous doctor – a crime that gripped Edwardian England.

Crippen himself remains a staple of criminal mythology: the first offender to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy. But it was the sheer number of women involved in this chilling saga that drew American-born Hallie to recount it.

“It was so rare at that time to hear women’s voices outside – and I hate to say this – of the context of suffrage,” she tells me. “The issue seems to suck all the oxygen out of the air when it comes to telling women’s stories in that era. But these events provide a really full picture of what it was like to be a woman at the turn of the century.”

Along with Belle – parts of whose dismembered body were discovered in July 1910 in the cellar of the North London house she shared with Crippen – Story of a Murder also looks at Charlotte Bell, Crippen’s deceased first wife; Belle’s music hall friends who pushed for a police investigation when she vanished; and Crippen’s secretary, mistress and possible accomplice, Ethel Le Neve.

Whilst Crippen was eventually found guilty of murder and hanged, Ethel was charged only with being an accessory and acquitted.

“If anyone had tried to build a serious case against her they would have found some overwhelming evidence,” insists Hallie.

“The week before the murder she was showing off an engagement ring Crippen had bought her and was out and about in Belle’s clothes. People underestimate women, for better or for worse. They underestimate their capacity for evil.”

Interestingly, despite the tilt of her books, Hallie dislikes the term ‘feminist historian’.

“I hate putting labels on history because I think it others the subject. It suggests that there is ‘real’ history and then there’s feminist history. It’s all history!”

Nevertheless, it’s often a version of events written by and about men – something which Hallie regrets.

“History is about how we got to be what we are today, and that involves incorporating everybody’s tale into the telling. It’s not just a top-down story about kings and statesmen and statecraft and war.”

The subject, she believes, should be taught somewhat differently in school.

“Kids turn off from history when you just feed them names and dates. It feels like useless information. You have to make it relevant to their lives. So, don’t talk about the Corn Laws in the early 1800s because nobody cares about that. Instead, look at some families and how they were living. Then see how various problems were addressed and how their lives changed or didn’t change as a result.”

What does she think of the current push for schools to focus on STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths] subjects rather than humanities?

“There’s this feeling of terror that everybody has to be a scientist in order to give our society any value at all. The idea that the humanities don’t offer any value is shocking – look at the multibillion pound creative industries in this country. It’s a message that must be radically re-examined.”

Despite the thematic content of her recent work, Hallie insists that she’s not interested in true crime as a literary genre.

“I hate it,” she says. “What interests me is social history. Documents from a crime – witness statements and trial transcripts – are one of the richest sources of information about how people lived their lives.

“My work is not just about killers and their victims. It’s about families, communities and society, the imprint that certain crimes can leave on history and cultural identity, and how and why we tell those stories.”

Hallie Rubenhold will be talking about Story of a Murder on Sept 28 (2pm) at Barnes Green Centre, as part of Barnes BookFest

DEANA’S TOP PICKS FOR THE BARNES BOOKFEST (26-28TH SEPTEMBER)

The big one for me is Rachel Joyce, bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and the brilliant Miss Benson’s Beetle. Joyce is in conversation with actress Niamh Cusack about her new book, The Homemade God, in which she examines family dynamics, including those between a dominant father and his four adult children. 27th September, 6pm, Barnes Green Centre

I’m also hoping to see William Boyd who will be talking, no doubt very eloquently – he is a superlative castaway on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs – about his new novel, The Predicament, a sequel to last year’s bestselling Gabriel’s Moon. 26th September, 4pm, St Mary’s, Barnes

As a quite recent convert to cricket, I’m really looking forward to hearing Sir Trevor McDonald talk about his new book, On Cricket, which describes his childhood in the Caribbean and, of course, his love of the sport. 28th September, 8pm, St Mary’s, Barnes

And I’d also like to catch broadcaster and journalist Mishal Husain discussing her new memoir, Broken Threads. It tells the story of her family as they live through the turmoil of Partition, the 1947 severance that created independent India and Pakistan. 28th September, 4pm, Barnes Green Centre

---

This article originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Richmond Magazine.