ForumGarden

You couldn't make this up, seriously. Fiction is nowhere as powerful as reality.

"The poisoned corpse that sent Dr Hawley Crippen to the gallows in London in 1910 was not that of his wife, according to new evidence found by U.S. researchers."

He always said his wife had left him and he'd not killed her, and now it turns out the only physical evidence was mis-identified at the trial. The new DNA analysis looks very convincing to me anyway.

I wonder whether he'll get a posthumous pardon, and if not why not.

It must of happened so frequently back then, it is sad if he was innocent, but I guess it is one of those cases where we will never know, I suppose if the wife did go off to America chances are without media she may have never known that they were looking for her.

Some people believe that with DNA testing and such, nowadays, that these mistakes don't happen anymore.

magenta flame;710284 wrote: I think society puts way to much weight on DNA evidence.
You don't recognise that the new test definitely proves without any shadow of doubt that the body the sample came from isn't that of Dr Cripen's wife? Why would you think that?

magenta flame;710299 wrote: No I mean't in general:)


So does "we'll find, when it's too late of course, that it has it's drawbacks" mean you agree with Lord Denning when he argued that "We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied"? Most people would think that new evidence is worth knowing even after conviction and sentencing.

magenta flame;710310 wrote: spot you're not hearing me.

-----.> see vent thread, I'm not in the mood to argue especially when I'm talking generally.

THe birmingham six? IRA? or something?


I'm only reading what you write. Yes, sentenced for mass indiscriminate murder and eventually exonerated a long long time after they'd have been hanged if we'd still been hanging people.

koan;710283 wrote: Some people believe that with DNA testing and such, nowadays, that these mistakes don't happen anymore.




Back in the day you would have been burned at the stake for such utterances.

DNA...pfft

I remember reading this story a week or so ago. Although the body has been proved not to be his wife it also stated that the body was buried there while Dr Crippen lived at the house.

The suggestion was that Crippen was an abortionist and it was probably the body of one of his patients where something went terribly wrong, but after all this time we'll never know for certain.