It is one of the most notorious cases in British legal history, the story of an apparently mild-mannered doctor who poisoned and dismembered his showgirl wife, then fled across the Atlantic with his young lover -- only to be caught after a sharp-eyed captain recognized him from the newspapers.
Hawley Crippen was hanged in 1910, after a jury at the Old Bailey central criminal court in London took just 27 minutes to find him guilty of murdering his wife, Cora, who had vanished earlier that year.
Nearly a century later, research appears to show that the evidence which sent Crippen to the gallows was mistaken: the human remains discovered under his London house could not be those of Cora.
Working from a sample kept at the museum of the Royal London Hospital Archives, a forensic science team from the US compared mitochondrial DNA from the remains presented at the trial with samples taken from Cora Crippen's surviving relatives.
The results were conclusive, said David Foran, the head of the forensic science program at Michigan State University.
"That body cannot be Cora Crippen, we're certain of that," he said.
Police found the mutilated remains with no head and no bones. Newspapers at the time described Crippen as "one of the most dangerous and remarkable men who have lived this century."
But according to John Trestrail, the toxicologist who led the new research, poisoners rarely inflict external damage on their victims.
"It is so unusual that a poisoner would dismember the victim, because a poisoner attempts to get away with murder without leaving any trace. In my database of 1,100 poisoning cases, this is the only one which involves dismemberment," said Trestrail, who heads the regional poison center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The discrepancy prompted him to re-examine the evidence in the Crippen case. Working with a genealogist, Beth Wills, he set about finding Mrs Crippen's surviving family. After seven years, the team tracked down three distant relatives in California and Puerto Rico.
The challenge then was to find viable DNA from samples presented at the trial. At the archives of the Royal London Hospital, in Whitechapel, researchers found the microscope slide which helped hang Crippen. In court, a pathologist, Bernard Spilsbury, identified it as an abdominal scar consistent with Cora's medical history.
Mitochondrial DNA is passed down in the egg from mother to daughter and remains relatively unchanged through generations, but the DNA in the sample was different from the known relatives of Mrs Crippen.
"We took a lot of precautions when doing this testing," Foran said. "We just didn't stop. We went back and started from scratch and tested it again."
The evidence offers no suggestion of who may have been buried in the coal cellar at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway, in north London.
But, according to Trestrail, Crippen is innocent of the crime for which he was hanged.
"Two weeks before he was hanged he wrote `I am innocent and some day evidence will be found to prove it.' When I read that the hairs stood up on my arms. I think he was right."
The team concede that they may never discover what happened to Mrs Crippen, but several intriguing clues emerged during the research.
Cora sang on the British stage under the name of Belle Elmore. Ten years after the trial, a singer with a similar name was registered as living with Cora's sister in New York.
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