• Dr. Hawley Crippen was hanged in London in one of the most notorious and famous murder cases in British history for murdering his wife Cora Crippen in 1910 on the basis of forensic evidence.
• Now forensic science at Michigan State University is producing evidence that his execution was a mistake.
David Foran, a forensic expert and director of MSU’s forensic science program, partnering with clinical and forensic toxicologist John Harris Trestrail the managing director of the regional poison center in Grand Rapids, is combining state-of-the-art DNA analysis with solid sleuthing to show the remains buried in Crippen’s basement couldn’t have been his wife. For nearly a century, Crippen, a doctor, was thought to have poisoned his wife with an obscure toxin, and buried. Crippen was labeled “one of the most dangerous and remarkable men who have lived in this century.”Michigan’sForan’s laboratory has devised methods to extract and isolate mitochondrial DNA.Foran’s laboratory specializes in ancient and forensic DNA evidence, often working with human remains that are thousands of years old. The nearly 100-year-old microscope slide, sent to Michigan State from the Royal London Hospital Archives and Museum, is the same one the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury used to help hang Crippen in 1910. At that time forensic medicine/ pathology was more primitive; Spilsbury’s testimony, identifying what he claimed was an abdominal scar consistent with Cora’s medical history, convinced the jury that these were Cora’s remains.
• Crippen went to the gallows insisting he was innocent.
• The present-day challenge: getting past the pine sap that sealed the slide and the formaldehyde used to preserve the tissue in order to examine the mitochondrial DNA that could identify Cora Crippen based on the genetic history of her maternal relatives.
• Mitochondrial DNA is the genetic blueprint that is passed down in the egg from mother to daughter. Unlike regular DNA, which comes from the cell’s nucleus,
• Foran explained that mitochondrial DNA remains more stable in aged tissue and is easier to retrieve. Also, mitochondrial DNA remains relatively undiluted through generations, offering a reliable familial match
.
• Crippen was not convicted just of murder – but the murder of Cora Crippen,Body was not of Cora proving after 100 years?
• Foran’s laboratory has devised methods to extract and isolate mitochondrial DNA. Unable to break through the sap seal, he chipped away at the slide’s glass cover slip to get at the tissue sample. One of his graduate students recently studied ways to work around formaldehyde fixation to isolate DNA.
• The goal: compare the mitochondrial DNA in the slide that convicted Crippen with Wills’ assignment – finding a maternal relative of Cora Crippen.
If Hawley Crippen indeed killed his wife and buried some of her remains in the cellar, those remains would share specific DNA characteristics with Cora Crippen’s current day relatives. To paraphrase the famed attorney in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Johnnie Cochran, if the DNA doesn’t fit, you can’t convict. Wills spent some seven years pouring through genealogical records and taking on the somewhat nontraditional task of finding living female relatives of Cora Crippen’s mother. Usually, in genealogy, you work backwards, but in this case, we went forward,” she said. As she traced through the family line, she found elderly relatives who remembered talk of a family scandal, one where a woman had been murdered by her husband in London. She ultimately located three grandnieces. “We took a lot of precautions when doing this testing,” Foran said. “We just didn’t stop. We went back and started from scratch and tested it again. The DNA in the sample is different from the known relatives of Cora Crippen.” “Crippen was not convicted just of murder – but the murder of Cora Crippen,” Trestrail said that body is not of Cora?
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