Hallie Rubenhold
Story of a Murder

Saturday 12 April 2025
1.30pm - 2.30pm; £10/£7

Central Library, 555 Silbury Blvd,
Central Milton Keynes, MK9 3HL

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​​‘Unbelievably addictive. Written with a unique combination of sleuthing, storytelling and compassion.’ – Lucy Worsley

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In Story of a Murder, Hallie Rubenhold, award-winning author of The Five, retells the infamous historical true-crime story of wife-murderer Dr Crippen through the voices of those who were never properly heard: the women.

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On 1 February 1910, vivacious music hall performer Belle Elmore vanished from her London home. Her circle of female friends in the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild demanded an immediate investigation, which would lead to the unearthing of a gruesome secret and trigger an international manhunt for Belle’s husband, the medical fraudster Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. He had fled with his typist and lover, Ethel Le Neve – but was Ethel just an ‘innocent young girl’ in thrall to a powerful older man? And was there an equally sinister story behind the death of Crippen’s first wife, Charlotte?

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In a tale brimming with twists and featuring a carnival cast of eccentric entertainers, starry lawyers, zealous detectives, medics and liars, Hallie Rubenhold reveals the true Story of a Murder.

 

About Hallie Rubenhold
Hallie Rubenhold is the no.1 Sunday Times bestselling and Baillie Gifford prize-winning author of The Five: The Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. A renowned social historian whose expertise lies in revealing stories of previously unknown women and episodes in history, she is the author of The Covent Garden Ladies, which was the inspiration behind BBC TV's Harlots. Her biographical work, Lady Worsley's Whim, was dramatised by the BBC as The Scandalous Lady W. She has also written two acclaimed novels, Mistress of My Fate and The French Lesson, which give voice to the women written out by eighteenth-century literature. She lives in London with her husband. 

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