F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead this income even after he took less well-paid government positions in later years, something of which he would bitterly complain. In one of the best-known cases in which Smith was involved he successfully defended Ethel le Neve, mistress of Hawley Harvey Crippen ("Dr Crippen") against a charge of murder. Le Neve was accused of killing Crippen's wife. Crippen was tried separately and convicted. Smith twice unsuccessfully stood for Parliament in Liverpool, for Scotland division in a by-election in 1903, and for Walton division in 1905 before he entered the House of Commons representing Walton in 1906. He attracted attention by
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