STORY OF A MURDER

A comprehensive telling of the North London Cellar Murder and its aftermath.

Kunegunde (often spelled Kunigunde) Mackamotzki had other names and trajectories before she became Belle Elmore, a singer, friend, and Music Hall Ladies Guild treasurer who was brutally killed by her husband in early 1910. Hawley Harvey Crippen was a fraudster preoccupied with wealth and notoriety who moved mysteriously between questionable business enterprises and romantic interests. And Ethel Le Neve was the last of Crippen’s paramours, boldly winding through her own layers of obfuscation and opportunism into both his workplace and his home. While Belle’s killing and Crippen’s and Le Neve’s arrests and trials became the stuff of cultural legend, the maze between these three individuals has long been muddied by deceptions, omissions, and inaccuracies. Rubenhold, whose previous work includes The Five: The Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, leaps into the dark holes in the historical record with her trademark commitment to reorienting mythologized true-crime stories around the stories of the victims. She meticulously constructs the fullness of the web that contains Belle, Crippen, and Ethel, along with the friends, colleagues, and family members affected by Belle’s murder, sketching the turn-of-the-century backdrop with notes on the era’s medical practices, London’s sphere of stage performers, and the influential notion of the “New Woman.” The author deftly maintains fidelity not only to facts, distinguishing between what can and cannot be certain and proved, but also to narrative intrigue, somehow creating suspense despite decades of extensive journalistic coverage and study of her subject. But Rubenhold’s true mark as a narrator of historical true crime is reinforced in this work by her continued loyalty to the women whose characters and stories have been flattened and overshadowed by journalists’ assumptions, their killers’ fame, or the simple fact of their victimhood.

A satisfying read that gives the impression that some new justice has been done.