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11:30pm UK, Monday June 01, 2009
Martin Brunt, crime correspondent
Notorious murderer Dr Crippen could soon be exhumed from his prison grave as lawyers seek to prove his innocence with DNA evidence.
Efforts to dig up his remains have moved a step closer after prison authorities gave his family the green light for re-burial.
But they have been told they must first get permission from the relatives of three other killers whose bodies lie in unconsecrated graves next to his at Pentonville jail in London.
Now the Crippen lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano is appealing for help in tracing the other families.
And he says he is determined to get a pardon for the notorious poisoner thanks to DNA evidence from the murder scene.
Mr Di Stefano wants to hear from relatives of two murderers hanged in 1910; George Perry, 27 and Andrew Woolf, 58.
Perry was executed for killing his girlfriend Annie Covell while Woolf was convicted of murdering a man called Andrew Simon.
Hawley Crippen, an American physician, was hanged the same year for the murder of his wife Cora, a music hall singer who had a string of lovers.
He told friends his wife had gone to live in California, where she had died and been cremated.
But a mutilated body was discovered buried beneath the cellar of the couple's North London home.
At Crippen's Old Bailey trial prosecutors outlined the gruesome manner in which the body had been disposed of.
They said Cora's bones and limbs were professionally removed and burned in the kitchen stove.
Her organs were dissolved in acid in the bathtub, and her head was placed in a handbag and thrown overboard during a day trip to Dieppe, France.
Crippen was arrested with his new girlfriend Ethel Le Neve as they fled aboard a ship to Canada.
However forensic scientists in the United States have cast doubt on Crippen's guilt.
They claim to have established through DNA that the body in the cellar was in fact that of a man.
At the trial the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury could not identify the remains or even discern whether they were male or female.
Mr Di Stefano said: "Dr Crippen is clearly innocent of his wife's murder. It is the most serious miscarriage of justice in a 100 years."
A cousin of Crippen plans to rebury the body in his native Michigan.
Source: Sky News
Martin Brunt, crime correspondent
Notorious murderer Dr Crippen could soon be exhumed from his prison grave as lawyers seek to prove his innocence with DNA evidence.
Efforts to dig up his remains have moved a step closer after prison authorities gave his family the green light for re-burial.
But they have been told they must first get permission from the relatives of three other killers whose bodies lie in unconsecrated graves next to his at Pentonville jail in London.
Now the Crippen lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano is appealing for help in tracing the other families.
And he says he is determined to get a pardon for the notorious poisoner thanks to DNA evidence from the murder scene.
Mr Di Stefano wants to hear from relatives of two murderers hanged in 1910; George Perry, 27 and Andrew Woolf, 58.
Perry was executed for killing his girlfriend Annie Covell while Woolf was convicted of murdering a man called Andrew Simon.
Hawley Crippen, an American physician, was hanged the same year for the murder of his wife Cora, a music hall singer who had a string of lovers.
He told friends his wife had gone to live in California, where she had died and been cremated.
But a mutilated body was discovered buried beneath the cellar of the couple's North London home.
At Crippen's Old Bailey trial prosecutors outlined the gruesome manner in which the body had been disposed of.
They said Cora's bones and limbs were professionally removed and burned in the kitchen stove.
Her organs were dissolved in acid in the bathtub, and her head was placed in a handbag and thrown overboard during a day trip to Dieppe, France.
Crippen was arrested with his new girlfriend Ethel Le Neve as they fled aboard a ship to Canada.
However forensic scientists in the United States have cast doubt on Crippen's guilt.
They claim to have established through DNA that the body in the cellar was in fact that of a man.
At the trial the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury could not identify the remains or even discern whether they were male or female.
Mr Di Stefano said: "Dr Crippen is clearly innocent of his wife's murder. It is the most serious miscarriage of justice in a 100 years."
A cousin of Crippen plans to rebury the body in his native Michigan.
Source: Sky News
"What our ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: "Why is it so dark in here?"" From Pyramids by Sir Terry Pratchett, a British National Treasure. 
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