In 1910, a brutal murder in London sparks a transatlantic manhunt and the rise of a cultural obsession.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What sparked the cultural obsession with true crime?
It's late at night. You've had a long day at work. You're exhausted. You finally turn out all the lights and go to bed. But, of course, you get a notification on your phone. You have to check it, right? You're not sleeping yet, so you take a quick look. And that's when you see that it's about that story that you've been following all week.
The international manhunt that's basically the next smash-hit true crime docuseries in the making in real time. and updates are coming in rapid fire. You sit bolt upright, take a deep breath, and begin scrolling. For the next two hours, you devour every delicious detail about the grisly crime, the search for a fugitive, and the mindless commentary that goes along with it.
Our collective obsession with true crime stories has, of course, exploded in the last several years, and movies, books, podcasts, social media, daily news stories, they all feed this obsession constantly. it's pretty easy to think that this is a relatively new thing. But of course, it's not.
And while it may be difficult to pinpoint a single moment in history when this cultural phenomenon began, there is one story which may be the very reason why you're up late at night doom-scrolling. One story about a brutal murder, the heart-pounding pursuit of the killer, and a revolutionary new technology which sparked a cultural obsession that we still can't get enough of.
History always has a twist. A single, unexpected, and often forgotten moment that changes everything that comes after it. In this series, each week, you'll hear a riveting story about a twist that you've probably never heard of. But it's these stories that have shaped the very world we now live in. On today's episode, how murder went viral. This is A Twist of History.
It's July 9th, 1910 in London, England. A 16-year-old boy flies down four flights of stairs of a concrete office building and steps out onto Borough High Street on the south bank of the River Thames. The noise hits him immediately. People rushing down the sidewalk, the road filled with a mix of horse-drawn buggies and rattling automobiles. The street is so crowded it overwhelms the boy.
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Chapter 2: What significant event occurred on July 9th, 1910 in London?
He quickly pulls his hat down further to partially cover his face and starts weaving his way through the foot traffic. He darts his eyes back and forth, convinced that someone is going to recognize him. He can feel his heartbeat all the way up in his ears. He keeps rushing and scanning the street, but nobody pays any attention to him, so the boy finally relaxes a little.
He slows down to a normal walk and makes his way to the entrance of a nearby London underground station. A few minutes later, the boy sees his father coming towards him, holding a single small suitcase. The boy greets his father, and they run down the steps together in the underground, just in time to catch the next train. The boy watches the train doors close and the mass of passengers exiting.
He looks around to make sure that he still hasn't been recognized by anyone and follows his father on board. As the train car continues to fill up, the boy and his dad lower their heads, avoiding eye contact with their fellow passengers. And finally, the train starts to roll down the underground tracks, and the boy and his father exhale. Their escape from England has begun. Four days later.
It's July 13th, 1910, in the office of newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth on Fleet Street in London. 44-year-old Alfred sits at his massive leather-lined desk, looking over the recent editions of the two most popular newspapers he owns, runs, and publishes, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Both papers are huge in London. In fact, they're two of the best-selling newspapers in all of England.
But Alfred isn't satisfied. He knows he can always sell more. He flips through the pages of the mirror and shakes his head. The writing's fine and he loves the layout, but there's no hook, no story to keep people's attention day after day. He tosses the paper aside, stands up, and comes face to face with a bust of Napoleon that he displays on the windowsill nearby.
The dead French general and emperor serves as a reminder that Alfred is a conqueror. Alfred opens a desk drawer and pulls out boxes of cigarettes. He marches across the plush carpet in his upstairs office, opens the door and walks to the top of a stairwell. Alfred stops and listens.
Any frustration that he might be feeling just disappears, because hearing his writers banging away on their typewriters downstairs is one of his favorite sounds. Alfred descends the steps and walks into one of the newsrooms housed in his building.
He opens a cigarette box, tosses the loose cigarettes to his reporters and shouts, The reporters shout back, And this has been a near-nightly ritual for years. It gives Alfred a chance to mingle with his staff and remind them that he wants short, crisp, exciting stories. Cigarette smoke starts to fill the room as Alfred heads back upstairs to his office.
He sits down at his desk and looks over the pages of the mail in the mirror again. Alfred knows what's missing, and so does everybody downstairs, because explain, simplify, clarify isn't the only phrase Alfred is fond of using with his reporters. He's also famous for shouting, "'Get me a murder a day.'" And right now, there's no murder or any gripping crime stories in his papers.
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Chapter 3: Who was Alfred Harmsworth and what was his role in the media?
But more than that, he wants to entice readers and get them to understand that this is just the beginning They can keep coming back day after day to watch the story unfold, just like people did when the Ripper was on the loose. And after kicking around a bunch of ideas, the team comes up with what they think is a simple but evocative headline for the next edition of the Daily Mirror.
Strange Camden Town Mystery. Police find a woman's body underneath cellar floor. The following morning, July 14th, 1910, that Daily Mirror headline, a short article, and the photos of Cora Crippen and the murder suspects hit newsstands. The Daily Mail also runs a more detailed story. This news ignites the imagination of readers across London.
And by the end of the day, all anyone wants to know is, where in the world are Cora Crippen's killers? It's the night of July 22nd, 1910, eight days after Alfred broke the news that captivated London. He sits behind his desk, again surrounded by writers and editors. He stares at a telegraph message in his hand, and he's more excited than he's been in a long time.
He feels like this message is something he's been waiting for, for years. It's like the perfect combination of his two real passions, crime stories and new technologies. The telegraph itself had actually been invented over 60 years earlier. It allowed people to send messages in Morse code across landlines to telegraph receivers.
A telegraph operator would translate the Morse code, which looks like a series of dots and dashes, into words. And then they would pass along the message to whoever it was intended for. But the message in Alfred's hand is not a standard telegraph message. It's something different. Something new.
because it originated from the SS Montrose, a ship sailing in the Atlantic Ocean from Antwerp, Belgium to Quebec, Canada, which at this point is still part of the British Empire. To send it, the Montrose's captain, William Kendall, used what Alfred considers to be one of the most important new technologies in the world, the Marconi wireless telegraph.
Named after the man credited with its invention, Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi, the Marconi wireless telegraph does not rely on the same physical wires or cables as the traditional telegraph.
Instead, Marconi's machine used radio waves to send messages through the air, making it way faster and cheaper to exchange messages between distant and remote locations around the globe in a way that was never even possible before. In 1910, Marconi's wireless telegraph is already revolutionizing mass communication.
This has made it easier for companies to conduct international business, for families to stay in touch with loved ones overseas, and for news to spread. But what Alfred finds truly exciting, and what is most important to him in this moment, is that the wireless telegraph now enables ships at sea to send telegraph messages back to land.
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Chapter 4: What was the gruesome discovery related to Cora Crippen?
But as all of this is happening, they get word directly from Scotland Yard that the story is about to change again. Because Chief Inspector Dew himself, the man who once tried to hunt down Jack the Ripper, has boarded the fastest ship he could find. He is currently racing the Montreux's across the Atlantic, and he plans to be in Quebec to greet the potential murder suspects when they arrive.
And Alfred wants someone waiting there too. It's late July at a theater in London's West End. Bernard Grant, a photographer for the Daily Mirror, sits in the audience and watches a variety show performer hit the final note of a song and take a bow. Bernard stands and applauds along with everyone else. The electric stage lights dim and then electric lights come up in the audience.
Bernard doesn't think much about it, but a lot of the audience members around him look like they're in awe. West End theaters are some of the first buildings in the country to be lit entirely by electric light, and a lot of people still aren't used to it. Bernard walks past some of these people towards the lobby, thinking he might grab a drink during the interval between the next act.
Suddenly, he hears someone shouting his name behind him and he sees an anxious-looking theater attendant standing in the aisle. Bernard signals to the young man who rushes towards him. The attendant catches his breath and says the theater received an urgent message. Bernard is needed back at the paper right away.
Bernard's first thought is that some catastrophe has hit London, and the paper needs him to get photographs right away. He runs out of the theater, hails a motor cab, and tells the driver to get to Fleet Street as fast as possible. Ten minutes later, Bernard sits across from the Daily Mirror's photography editor, confused and annoyed.
There was no catastrophe he needed to cover and he's pretty sure his editor is playing a joke on him and that he rushed out of the theater for nothing. But his editor assures him that this is very serious. Bernard needs to get on the fastest ship he can find right away. The editor says Chief Inspector Dew is already chasing the Montrose across the Atlantic.
The paper needs Bernard to get to Canada, beat everyone to the punch, and take the first photos of the potential murder suspects that Dew is tracking down. If there was a faster way to catch up to them, Bernard can be sure that the paper would have him do that. But since the Wright brothers' first airplane flight only took place about seven years earlier, a fast ship is still the best bet.
Bernard gathers his equipment, rushes home to pack a suitcase and heads for the docks, and within hours, he's aboard a ship sailing across the ocean. He believes if everything goes just right, he could be the one to provide the perfect ending to the Cora Crippen murder story.
It's July 31st, 1910, at about 2.15pm in Alfred's office, nine days after Captain Kendall sent his first wireless telegraph about the Cora Crippen murder. Alfred and his staff listen to an out-of-breath crime reporter who has just come from Scotland Yard. He has major news. Earlier that morning, Inspector Dew arrested the two suspects aboard the Montrose when it landed in Quebec.
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Chapter 5: How did the Daily Mirror engage the public with the Crippen case?
And over a week later when they arrive, Bernard knows that he'll have to scramble to get his photos prepped for publication. But before he can do that, he watches Dew lead Crippen and Ethel off the ship and he sees a massive crowd of onlookers desperate to just get a glimpse of the potential murderers.
And in that moment, even though all of this has been going on for weeks, it finally hit Bernard and Chief Inspector Dew that while they were rushing across the Atlantic Ocean, the entire world was watching. Dew's pursuit of Crippen would come to be known as the first modern manhunt and the first major murder case of the 20th century.
While sensational coverage of crimes has been around a long time, and it caught fire during the Jack the Ripper murders, this was the first time a global audience was able to follow a murder investigation step by step in as close to real time as possible.
As wireless messages came in from Captain Kendall aboard the Montrose, from Do In Pursuit, and from special correspondents around the world, papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror had been publishing regular updates.
Readers from all over were able to chart Dew's path across the ocean with bated breath, as he gained three and a half miles per hour on the Montrose for over a week until he overtook it before landing in Quebec.
Readers also learned the intimate details of the personal investigation Captain Kendall had conducted aboard the Montrose, and how when he ate dinner with the father and son aboard his ship, he started to see through their disguise because the son used table manners that were only common to women at the time.
like delicately picking up fruit with the tips of her two fingers instead of simply grabbing it. The public's obsession with the manhunt led papers to sell millions of copies across the globe. This event would alter the way murder investigations were presented in the press forever, and the use of the wireless telegraph would change how police conducted these investigations.
Dr. Crippen was eventually found guilty of murder and hanged. Ethel was acquitted of all charges. But it wasn't even Crippen's end or even the brutality of the murder he was accused of committing that would cause this case to have such a massive effect on the culture at large.
It was the fact that it took place at a moment in history when all of these seemingly disparate elements converged to create something new. The invention of the Marconi wireless telegraph and its use on ships at sea. Publishing giants like Alfred Harmsworth embracing new technology
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