Hawley Harvey Crippen conclusions are disputed. Crippen was born in Coldwater, Michigan, to Andresse Skinner (died 1909) and Myron Augustus Crippen (1827–1910), a merchant. Crippen studied first at the University of Michigan Homeopathic Medical School and graduated from the Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College in 1884. Crippen's first wife, Charlotte, died of a stroke in 1892, and Crippen entrusted his parents, living in California, with the care of his two-year-old son, Hawley Otto. Having qualified as a homeopath, Crippen started to practice in New York, where in 1894 he married his second wife, Corrine "Cora" Turner (stage name: Belle Elmore), born Kunigunde Mackamotski to
Hawley Harvey Crippen his wife because she had syphilis. Whether Crippen murdered his wife has been disputed. The novelist Raymond Chandler commented that it seemed unbelievable that Crippen would successfully dispose of his wife's limbs and head and then, rather stupidly, bury her torso under the cellar floor of his home. Dornford Yates, a novelist who was a junior barrister at the trial, records that the remains were placed in lime so that they would be destroyed, but suggests that Crippen failed to realise that while dry quicklime destroys, if water is added, it becomes slaked lime and preserves. Yates used this fact