Doctor Crippen & Reginald Christie

Jack the Ripper & The Lodger

Besides Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock was fascinated by two twentieth-century British murder cases, both with strong sexual dimensions. Doctor Crippen and Christie are both mentioned by name in Hitchcock movies.
Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen (1862-1910) was a notorious British murderer (born in the U.S.) who became known as the first criminal apprehended by wireless radio.

In January 1910, Crippen's wife Belle disappeared; he told friends she had moved back to the US and
subsequently died in California. When Crippen was questioned, he panicked and fled with his lover Ethel le Neve. Investigation of the Crippens' house revealed flesh from Belle's dismembered body buried in the cellar (left). Her head, arms, legs, and skeleton were never found. When Crippen and le Neve were discovered to have embarked for
Canada on the ocean liner SS Montrose, police used wireless radio (a new invention) to alert the ship's captain. Upon arrival, the unsuspecting Crippen and le Neve (who made the trip disguised as a boy) were arrested. Crippen was returned to England, tried, and hanged in November 1910. Ethel le
Neve was acquited. At the trial, Crippen described in detail how he had used his medical skills to remove his wife's head, limbs, and bones, dissolve her organs in acid, and then drop the head overboard in a handbag while crossing the English Channel.

The Crippen case attracted enormous publicity and spawned conspiracy theories, as well as non-fiction books, novels, and at least two films, including Dr. Crippen (1962; see above).

Crippen is mentioned in Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), when a member of the music hall audience asks Mr. Memory, "When was Crippen hanged?"


Reginald Christie (1899-1953) was a petty criminal turned serial killer who was arrested in 1953 and executed for murdering at least six women, including his wife, mistress, a coworker, a neighbor and her baby, and prostitutes. Some of the murderers involved the use of poison gas, and Christie was also said to have practiced necrophilia on corpses. Several bodies of his victims were discovered buried in the garden and cellar of Christie's home at 10 Rillington Place in London.
The Christie case was even more notorious because Christie had, in 1950, testified against another tenant of 10 Rillington Place, Timothy Evans, who was convicted and executed for the murder of his pregnant wife and infant daughter. It is now thought that Christie himself was responsible for those crimes. The Evans case, with its apparent execution of an innocent man on the testimony of the actual murderer, was a significant factor in the successful movement to abolish capital punishment in England.

Like Doctor Crippen, Christie has been the subject of books and a movie (see at right).

In Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), a distinguished gentleman drinking in a pub ironically laments that England hasn't had a juicy sexual mass murderer (good for tourism) since the Christie case.