For nearly 100 years his name has been a byword for murder most foul, but Hawley Crippen, the infamous doctor hanged for poisoning and dismembering his British wife, may have been innocent, new research suggests.

Dr Crippen fled Britain in 1910 after the death of his wife, Cora. The mild-mannered American was captured after he was recognised by the captain of the ship on which he and his mistress were fleeing across the Atlantic.

But yesterday a team of American scientists who compared mitochondrial DNA from the corpse that was claimed to be Mrs Crippen with that of her living relatives said that the dismembered body was not her.

After a seven-year search the team, led by John Trestrail, head of the regional poison centre in Grand Rapids, Michigan, located several female descendants of Mrs Crippen, with whom they compared the genetic material.

Times Archive, 1910: The Crippen inquest

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

• Leader: Crippen trial

• Execution of Crippen

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“That body was not Cora Crippen’s,” said David Foran, a forensic biologist at Michigan State University. “We don’t know who that body was or how it got there.”

The body was found under the Crippens’ London home, with no head, no bones and no genitals. A tissue sample was kept on a slide in the archives of the Royal London Hospital.

Crippen was convicted of poisoning his wife and burying her body, slaked in lime, in the cellar of their house. He and his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, were charged on a warrant “that they did, at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, feloniously and wilfully, of their malice aforethought, kill and murder one Cora Crippen, otherwise Belle Elmore.”

Crippen and Le Neve fled the country on the SS Montrose, a transatlantic ship, only to be arrested as it entered Canadian waters. The captain had recognised the doctor from newspapers and had become suspicious of Le Neve, who had disguised herself as a boy, and he famously used the newly-invented wireless telegraph to alert the British police.

Newspapers at the time, reacting to public revulsion at such a grisly killing, described Crippen as “one of the most dangerous and remarkable men who have lived this century”.

Dr Trestrail, a expert on poisoning whose books are used by detectives across the world, said that the fact that Cora Crippen’s body had been badly mutilated suggested that she had not been poisoned.

“The thing about the Crippen case is the mutilation, which is contradictory to what poisoners do,” he said. “They want a ‘natural death’ certificate, and to walk away.”

Despite Crippen’s protestations throughout his trial that he was innocent and that the remains were not his wife’s, the conflicting accounts he gave of the reason for his flight undermined his defence.

The research team said that a scar on the abdomen of the body, which convinced the jury that the remains were Mrs Crippen’s, was incorrectly claimed to be so. But they said that other evidence showed the body could only have made its way to Crippen’s house when he and his wife were living there. One of Dr Trestrail’s hypotheses is that Crippen was performing illegal abortions and that the body could have resulted from a botched procedure.

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