LONDON: It is one of the most notorious murders in British history: a doctor kills his wife, flees on a cruise ship with his mistress dressed as a boy, and is finally intercepted and hanged.

But according to new evidence published on Wednesday, Doctor Hawley Crippen may not have been guilty of murdering his wife nearly 100 years ago after all.

Crippen was convicted of poisoning his wife Cora in 1910 and buried her in the cellar of their north London home before moving in his mistress, Ethel le Neve.

After police interviewed him about his wife’s disappearance, Crippen, originally from the United States, panicked and fled with le Neve on a cruise ship to Canada. But the ship’s captain recognised him and wired police, who nabbed the couple when they got to their destination. Crippen was executed that year.

Now, however, a team of scientists from the United States has compared samples from Cora Crippen’s grand-nieces with mitochondrial DNA from the body which has been kept on a slide at a London hospital’s archives for decades.

And they say the body in Crippen’s cellar was not his wife.

“That body was not Cora Crippen,” David Foran, a forensic biologist from Michigan State University in the United States, who worked with a team on the case for seven years, told British newspaper The Times.

“We don’t know who that body was or how it got there.” Crippen had protested throughout his trial that the body was not his wife’s, The Times reported. Bookmakers Paddy Power offered odds of 14/1 that Crippen would be given a royal pardon for the crime after the findings emerged.—AFP