Word: crippen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Sydney Telegraph rushed Australian Crown Prosecutor Charles Rooney 12,000 miles to London by air to cover the trial with a lawyer's eye. The London Daily Mail hired long-haired Author Peter Quennell, who was obligingly overwhelmed: "By comparison, Crippen was a sentimentalist and Landru† a boastful playboy." Even the dignified London Times gave the story three full columns...
...Hawley Harvey Crippen, a London dentist, was hanged (1910) for poisoning his wife, chopping up her remains and burying them in his cellar. Henri Desire (Bluebeard) Landru was guillotined (1922) in Versailles, France, for butchering ten women...
Fame first came to Sir Bernard through the infamous Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. In 1910, Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife, buried her in quicklime in the basement and ran off with his typist. Before Scotland Yard was sure that a murder had been committed, Spils and his microscope identified something found in the basement as a bit of human skin with an appendectomy scar. Ships at sea were alerted and Dr. Crippen, despite his disguise, was nabbed in the St. Lawrence before his ship landed...
...years passed, Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps bid fair to be the most fought-over composition of the 20th Century. One English critic described it as "a threat against the foundations of our tonal institutions," declared that it should have been dedicated to Dr. Crippen, a dentist celebrated for murdering his wife, cutting her body in pieces. But dapper, energetic Igor Stravinsky found himself the most influential composer of his generation. To younger composers the Sacre became music's Declaration of Independence. By 1920 nearly every musical youngling was throwing over his counterpoint for Stravinskian grunts & groans...