In an internal shrine set up to worship my own personal gods, there is a niche allocated to the television documentary producer, Roger Graef. I have never known Graef to make a silly film or to hold anything other than a sensible opinion. So to find him, yesterday morning on BBC radio, apparently arguing that Dr Crippen was innocent OK, was a little like being administered a cranial taser. “If he says it,” I thought, still in shock, “it can't be the load of old nonsense that these things usually are,” and I ordered up a DVD of tonight's Five programme upon which Graef's claim seemed to be based.

The North London Murder, as the Crippen case was called at the time, achieved outrageous fame partly because it incorporated a real-time chase, and the first telegraphic interception of a fugitive at sea. Even 50 years later, when I first went to a boys' comprehensive that backed on to Hilldrop Crescent, where Crippen and his disappeared wife had lived, there was a frisson to the doctor's name that, say, the Kray twins would have today.

The case was fairly straightforward. In early 1910 Mrs Cora Crippen (or Belle Elmore, as she was known on the music-hall stage), a Rubensesque woman in her mid-30s, suddenly evaporated, leaving behind only her husband, some jewellery (subsequently spotted on her husband's young and long-term mistress) and a letter to the committee of the Musical Hall Ladies Guild resigning as treasurer because of the illness of a relative in America. This letter was undated, was not written in her hand, and was delivered to the guild by the lover, Ethel Le Neve. Crippen - like his wife, an American - later told inquirers that Belle had died of pneumonia in Los Angeles or San Francisco and that her body had been cremated, but he didn't know where.

In July, after promptings from various suspicious friends and relatives, the police called at Hilldrop Crescent, where Crippen “confessed” that the pneumonia death tale had been a fib designed to cover up his embarrassment at his wife's abandonment of him. She wasn't dead, she had just upped and left. Which, when Chief Inspector Dew and Sergeant Mitchell went back a couple of days later, was what they discovered Crippen had done. Searching the cellar later that week, the policemen discovered some buried, boned body parts wrapped in clothing. They asserted that these were some of the remains of the missing Cora.

Times Archive, 1910: The Crippen inquest

The coroner, Mr Walter Schroder, told the jury that the parts distinctive of sex were absent

• The Crippen trial: leading article

• Execution of Crippen

Background

• Desperate police ‘framed’ Crippen for wife’s murder

• Doctor Crippen may have been innocent

• Innocent Crippen?

Crippen was caught, a trial was held, followed a few weeks later by a hanging.

What tonight's programme on Five will claim is that the body in the cellar wasn't Mrs Crippen's and that therefore her husband was wrongfully convicted. Using century-old slides from the original forensic examinations held at the Royal Hospital, the programme establishes that the Crippen DNA bears no relation to DNA taken from someone in the US claiming to be Cora's grand-niece. Even more amazing, a “new” technique developed in Michigan suggests that the slides are from the body of a man, not a woman. So unless Cora was a transvestite, the decaying offal examined by the celebrated forensic pathologist, Bernard Spilsbury, didn't belong to her.

Dr Crippen himself had argued that the gunk must have been there when he'd moved to the house in 1905. His problem was that the label on the buried clothing was clearly identified as dating from some time after 1908. In fact, it looked like the jacket of a pair of pyjamas whose bottoms were upstairs in Crippen's house.

But how did Five explain the mystery? Their questing hero, an American toxicologist, John Trestrail, who'd been attracted to the case because “dismemberment does not fit the psychology of a poisoner”, hypothesised that it must have been a police plant. Some time in the two or three days after Crippen's absconding, Dew and Mitchell had acquired body stuff, wrapped it in the pyjamas and put it in the cellar. The ambitious Spilsbury had then perjured himself in court. A modern Crippen was filmed in a Michigan cemetery pointing to the spot where he wants to inter his pardoned ancestor and the credits rolled.

Amazing, no? But there's Graef's imprimatur and the DNA and that is it, surely? And all I have to go on, in the first instance, to justify why I am sure that all this is nonsense and will one day be proved to be nonsense, is what you might call - after the 20th-century British historian - Namier's Intuition. “The enduring achievement of historical study,” said Namier, “is a historical sense - and intuitive understanding - of how things do not work.” The murdered wife works, the planted body just doesn't.

If she lived, where was Mrs C? The programme produces a letter purporting to be from Cora, written to her husband in jail from Chicago. But it isn't in her handwriting and the authorities decided that it was one of many hoaxes. The documentary-makers also think a Belle Rose who travelled across the Atlantic in August 1910 may have been Cora. But given the incredible celebrity of the Crippen case that summer, this seems most improbable.

But if the police didn't know she was dead, what would that say about the risk supposedly taken by Dew and Mitchell, planting corpse bits of a woman who might turn up any day and utterly destroy their careers? That really makes no sense. Nor was Spilsbury the only scientist who examined the tissue. Unquoted by the programme (but available on our archive) is the testimony to the coroner's court of the police divisional surgeon who “thought that the work of dissection was done in the cellar, and whoever did it must have taken his time about it, for it was a most deliberate and long process”.

Which leaves the very awkward matter of the DNA. Well, of course, one possibility is that the newly discovered grand-niece of Cora Crippen, only contacted after messages were posted on the internet, is in fact no blood relative whatsoever of the long-dead Elle. We know (again from the archive) that Cora/Belle had a step-family in Brooklyn, so such lack of consanguinity is not restricted to the modern era. As to the body being male, well the American team was using a “special technique” that is “very new” and “done only by this team” and working on a single, century-old slide, described by the team leader as a “less than optimal sample”.

Have they, possibly, gone beyond their technique's competence? That, in the end, becomes the test for the time being - the supposed scientific deus ex machina versus Namier's Intuition. It will have to do until the Five evidence is debunked. As I absolutely predict it will be.

Times Recommends

• Navigating the new global archipelago
• Comment: McCain isn't Bush and voters know it
• Religion's history of self-inflicted pain