How Murder Went Viral

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 the boy.

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, Explain, simplify, clarify.

The reporters shout back, thanks Chief, light up their smokes, and get right back to work.

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.

Alfred takes a deep breath and tries to relax.

He's fully aware that most people would be jealous of him and would find it ridiculous that he puts so much pressure on himself and his reporters.

After all, Alfred is really rich.

Easily the equivalent of a multi-millionaire in today's money.

A few years earlier, the king even gave him the title Baron Northcliffe, which means Alfred is a member of the English aristocracy.

But that's not where he started.

Alfred was born to a large working-class family in Dublin, Ireland.

And because of that, he's always believed that he has to work harder and differently than people born into wealth.

And he knows that there are two big reasons that he and his newspapers have been so successful.

First, Alfred Alfred embraces new technology.

The Daily Mirror is one of the only true illustrated newspapers that uses photography throughout its pages, as opposed to mainly relying on artist drawings like a lot of other illustrated papers.

And this alone is already transforming how people consume the news.

Alfred is also one of the few publishers who uses mechanical typesetting and rotary printing machines, which allow him to print more copies of his papers faster and for less money than most of his rivals.

But more importantly, Alfred has never forgotten where he came from.

He makes sure that his papers appeal to everyday working class people.

He features stories that he thinks they want to read, sensational, thrilling stories, preferably with a bit of blood and scandal involved.

A loud knock breaks his concentration.

He shouts, come in, and a crime reporter, Henry Barlow, enters with a huge grin on his face.

Alfred asks why he looks so excited.

Henry says he's gotten a tip from a a police contact at Scotland Yard, and he has a murder story.

Alfred's face lights up, and Henry's grin gets even wider.

He says it's way bigger than just an average murder story.

The dismembered, headless body of a dancehall singer has been found in her own cellar, and the cop's two biggest suspects have disappeared.

It's later that night in Camden Town, North London.

Henry makes his way through a neighborhood lined with run-down stone houses.

The flicker from the gas lamps casts strange shadows on the ground and he can feel himself tensing up.

He's not scared, but knowing someone got killed and hacked up nearby has him on edge.

He shakes it off and focuses on the job at hand.

He understands that he could be onto a huge story.

It's not every day the police find a dismembered body in a cellar.

Henry hears voices coming from outside a house further down the street, so he quickly moves through the shadows.

He wants to get a feel for what he's walking into before he lets anyone see him.

He approaches the house, and the voices get louder.

He crouches down and peers at three men standing near the front steps,

and he can't believe his luck.

One of the men is Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Walter Dew, one of the most famous cops in London.

Dew is a member of the yard's murder squad, a unit of elite detectives committed to solving violent crimes.

And when Dew was a young man, one of his first major assignments as a police officer was to try and hunt down the most notorious killer in British history, Jack the Ripper.

Henry can barely contain himself.

His boss, Alfred Harmsworth, cannot get enough of Jack the Ripper.

Alfred still draws inspiration from the salacious Ripper coverage from over 20 years ago that dominated the Penny Dreadfuls.

These serialized stories obsessed with crime and the dark side of society that only cost a penny.

Henry knows having Chief Inspector Dew on the case will make it easier to compare this new murder to the still unsolved Ripper murders.

He steps out of the shadows and says hello to Dew.

The annoyed look that Dew gets on his face makes Henry want to laugh.

It's well known that Dew has a love-hate relationship with the press.

Henry fires off a series of questions.

Can Dew confirm the identity of the dead body?

Does he know the cause of death?

Have the yard's two main suspects really disappeared?

Henry watches Dew wrestle with how much information he's willing to give.

And finally, Dew says that they believe that the body belongs to a dance hall singer named Cora Crippen.

They need to wait for a coroner's inquest to determine the cause of death.

And yes, their two main suspects seem to have fled.

Henry doesn't waste any time.

He leaves Dew and the other men and starts knocking on doors and talking to neighbors to get as much information about Mrs.

Crippen as he can.

In addition to Mrs.

Crippen being a singer and entertainer, he learns that she was married to a mild-mannered American, Dr.

Holly Harvey Crippen.

And all the neighbors are shocked.

They can't believe something so horrible could happen to someone as lovely as Mrs.

Crippen.

Late that night, a few hours after Henry left the Crippens' house, he stands in Alfred's office along with several other reporters and editors.

They all watch Alfred pace back and forth behind his desk.

Alfred stops and looks at them.

He's sure they all know that this is the kind of story they've been waiting for.

He wants tomorrow's papers to grab readers' attention.

He wants a photo of the dead woman.

a beautiful actress who was killed in cold blood.

And he wants photos of the suspects.

When people walk down the streets and see the papers for sale, he wants these fugitives staring back at them.

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 a 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 the cellar floor.

The following morning, July 14, 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 technology.

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.

And that is something that was impossible before Marconi's invention.

Captain Kendall initially sent this message to his bosses in Liverpool, England, and somehow Alfred has gotten his hands on it.

He begins reading the message to the group and he watches their stunned faces.

The message itself feels even more mind-blowing than the equipment used to send it.

It says that Captain Kendall believes that two people aboard his ship, a father and a son, are the missing suspects in Cora Crippen's murder.

Alfred finishes reading and everyone in the room springs into action.

For the past week, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror have been publishing story after story about the Mrs.

Crippen case and the search for her killers.

The public remains completely enthralled, but Alfred has to admit that the stories have gotten a little thin.

The Daily Mirror even recently published a letter from a woman who had a dream that Mrs.

Crippen's killers were in Spain.

Alfred knows those kinds of articles can take a back seat now.

He tells his staff there is one person above anybody else they have to talk to, Captain Kendall.

They need to find out exactly how he came to believe two potential murderers are on his ship as it steams towards Canada.

Alfred watches his staff take their marching orders and he feels a rush because he believes he is one of the few men in the world who is ready to rise to this moment.

His love of technology has often kept him one step ahead of his competitors.

Unlike some in the newspaper business, he had already predicted the wireless telegraph would be the wave of the future, so his papers are equipped to use it.

That night and the following morning, staff from the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror send messages to spots all over the world.

In addition to opening a direct line of communication with Captain Kendall, Alfred wants to make sure that the London staff is in contact with their special correspondents on the continent and overseas in Canada and America.

He wants to cover the story of the father and son fleeing on the Montrose from every possible angle.

It doesn't take long for a fuller picture of the story to come into focus.

Reporters in London track the father and son's whereabouts back about two weeks earlier.

It appears they fled London on the underground.

Special correspondents in Paris and Antwerp pick up the trail after that.

The correspondents send messages back to London that place the father and son at various restaurants and hotels in Europe days before they boarded the Montrose for a near two-week journey across the sea.

Following that, New wireless messages come in directly to the mail and mirror from Captain Kendall.

He says he suspected the father and son were not who they said they were almost from the moment they boarded his ship.

He says that he saw the pair squeezing hands immoderately and whispering to each other.

Then, he ate dinner with them on the first night at sea.

He watched the boy pick up a piece of fruit from a serving plate on the table, and that's when he felt sure that he knew who this father and son really were.

Alfred and his team know that each new message from Kendall and the special correspondence will serve as the basis for news stories that could keep readers on edge for weeks.

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 Montreuse 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 Montreuse 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 2.15 p.m.

in Alfred's office, nine days after Captain Kendall sent his first wireless telegraph about the Cora Crippen murder.

Alfred and his staff listened 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.

A jolt of energy runs through everyone in the room.

Some writers and editors start laying out plans for their next editions.

Others dash out to work the wireless to get in touch with Bernard and other photographers and correspondents in North America.

But as reply messages start to come in, Alfred feels like it's a letdown.

Nobody has much more information than what Scotland Yard already provided because, somehow, Inspector Dew managed to arrest arrest the suspects and hide them away aboard the ship without anyone, including Bernard, catching a glimpse of them.

Dew isn't allowing any photographs of the suspects, and he's refusing to answer questions about the case.

Alfred knows whatever story his staff runs about the capture will be a compelling one, but he wants more.

He's sure other papers will use artist renderings of what the arrest might have looked like, but he believes that's like something from the past, something that worked in the days of Jack the Ripper.

Now, people want proof.

They want to see these suspects with their own eyes.

Alfred's papers will keep running stories with the information they have, but he tells his team to send another message across the sea.

Bernard's plan is still the same: get photos of the suspects and give the people a proper ending to the story.

It's August of 1910, several weeks after the Mrs.

Crippen saga began.

At 4 a.m., Bernard shakes himself awake in his room at the Chateau Frontenac Hotel in Quebec, Canada.

He grabs his camera equipment and tries to get dressed.

He's barely slept, but that doesn't matter right now.

Bernard has just gotten word from a correspondent that Chief Inspector Walter Dew is in the process of transferring the murder suspects from a Quebec jail to a ship called the Magantique that will set sail for England.

In order to achieve this, Dew will journey up the St.

Lawrence River on a tugboat and connect to the Magantique via gangplank.

And since the arrest, there still hasn't been a single photo taken of the suspects and Dew has refused to talk to reporters.

Bernard has it on good authority that Dew is particularly fed up with the press from America and Canada.

Bernard rushes out of his room, carrying his equipment and trying to button his shirt.

He knows Dew has a head start and a part of him believes all of this is futile.

Dew has already outrun him once and has outsmarted the press since arriving in Quebec.

But Bernard hears a phrase in his head that his editors and his bosses at the Daily Mirror love repeating.

It is better to do wrong than to do nothing.

Bernard picks up his pace, sprints out of the hotel and heads down a dark street towards the nearby dock.

A tugboat captain who looks like he's already been awake for hours greets him and asks if everything is okay.

Bernard quickly tells him the situation.

There's another tugboat on the water that he needs to beat to a steamship waiting at a port down the river.

The captain tells Bernard to come aboard and not to worry.

His is the fastest tugboat in Quebec.

Bernard clutches his equipment and hops on board.

Minutes later, he listens to the captain shouting at the crew to push the craft to its limits.

The journey takes hours and all Bernard can do is wait as he watches the sunrise.

Finally, Bernard sees the steamship Magantique looming ahead, and he also sees the other tugboat stopped alongside it with a gangplank between them.

Bernard fears he's already too late, but then he sees a man step off the tugboat and walk onto the gangplank.

It's Chief Inspector Dew.

Without thinking, Bernard leaps up onto the roof of the tugboat's wheelhouse and points his camera right at the gangplank.

He sees Dew glance down at him.

The two men have crossed paths in London, so Bernard knows that Dew recognizes him, and he's sure the Chief Inspector will concoct some new plan to hide the suspects from the camera.

Instead, Dew gives Bernard a nod and walks on to the waiting steamship.

Bernard doesn't know it, but Dew is so annoyed with the American and Canadian press that he is willing to let his guard down for a moment and allow a fellow Englishman to take photos of the suspects.

Within minutes, Bernard sees police escorting the two suspects across the gangplank.

He snags a photo of each.

But it's not a father and son, it's a man and a woman.

And for a second, Bernard isn't sure who he just took pictures of, but then it all clicks, and he realizes he is the visual proof that everyone is waiting for.

The murder suspects.

The father and son who fled on the Montrose are really Cora Crippen's husband, Dr.

Hawley Harvey Crippen, and his mistress, Ethel Lenieve.

Ethel had taken on the disguise of a teenage boy right before she ran down Borough High Street, and she and Crippen made their escape from England.

After taking the first photographs of Dr.

Crippen and Ethel since Cora Crippen's murder, Bernard travels to Liverpool, England on the Magantique alongside Chief Inspector Dew.

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 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 Dew 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 we 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 and filling their papers with short, crisp stories about crime that appealed to people of all classes, and the public's growing need to see photographic proof of what they were being told.

All of this would set the stage for the rise of the modern tabloid and would help fuel the public's growing desire for real stories about cops chasing killers.

A desire that persists to this day and often causes a lot of us to stay up way too late scrolling and digesting every sensational detail about the latest true crime story that everybody will be talking about.

From Ballin Studios, this is a twist of history.

A quick note about our stories.

They're all heavily researched, but some details and scenes are dramatized.

A Twist of History is hosted by me, Joel Blackwell.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin and Zach Levin.

Our head of writing is Evan Allen.

Produced by Perry Kroll.

This episode was written by Mike Federico.

Story editing by Mike Federico.

Sound design and audio mixing by Colin Lester Fleming.

Post-production supervision by Jeremy Bone and Cole LaCasio.

Research and fact-checking by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, Alex Paul, Patricia Nicole Florentino, Calvin Riley-Holgate, Matt Gilligan.

Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel.

Artwork by Jessica Clogston-Kiner and Robin Vane.

Thank you for listening to A Twist of History.