BRUCE MILLER

BRUCE MILLER HAD ONCE BEEN a prizefighter and had the handsome but battered features to prove it. He had given up boxing for the stage and had come to England some months before meeting Belle in hopes of making a career in variety. He was, literally, a one-man band, playing drums, harmonica, and banjo all at the same time, and performed in London and in the provinces, at Southend-on-Sea, Weston-super-Mare, and elsewhere. When he met Belle, however, he was preparing to leave for Paris and the Paris Exposition of 1900, where he had entered into a partnership involving certain “attractions” at the exposition. He met her one evening in December 1899, about a month after Crippen’s departure for Philadelphia. He was sharing an apartment with a male roommate, an American music teacher, on Torrington Square in Bloomsbury, adjacent to University College. That evening Belle came to the apartment to have dinner with his roommate, who introduced them. On that occasion, Miller said, “I merely shook hands with her and went away.”

They met again, perhaps with Miller’s roommate as intermediary, and became friends. Belle clearly was drawn to his size and rugged good looks. Miller was attracted by her energy and buoyancy and by her lush sexuality. He had a wife back in America, whom he had married in 1886, but as far as he was concerned the marriage had failed and he was married in name only.

“I cannot say that I told Belle Elmore that I was married,” Miller conceded later, “but if I kept it from her it was not done intentionally. I never had anything to hide, or any object in keeping the information from her. When I first came to England I was separated from my wife. She wrote to me pleading to go back and live with her, and I showed Belle Elmore the letters.” Belle agreed he should return to America and rejoin his wife.

Belle was not exactly forthcoming about her own marriage. “When I first met her, she was introduced to me as a Miss Belle Elmore,” Miller said. “I met her several times before I knew that she was married. She frequently spoke of Dr. Crippen, and finally roused my curiosity, and I asked her who was Dr. Crippen?”

“That,” she said, “is my husband. Didn’t your friend tell you I was married?”

With Crippen away in America, Miller began coming to the apartment on Guildford Street two or three times a week, “sometimes in the afternoons,” he said, “and sometimes in the evenings,” though he contended later that the only room he entered was the front parlor.

He began calling Belle “brown eyes.” He gave her photographs of himself, one of which she propped on the piano in the apartment. They went out together often, to restaurants popular with the theatrical crowd, like Jones’s and Pinoli’s, Kettner’s in Soho, the Trocadero—the “Troc”—and most charismatic and infamous of all, the Café Royal on Regent near Piccadilly Circus, frequented by George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, the sex researcher Havelock Ellis, the sex-obsessed Frank Harris, and before his fall the sexually indiscreet Oscar Wilde; here one Lady de Bathe, known best as Lillie Langtry, was said to have launched ice cream down the back of Edward, the future king. (Only partly true, as it happens—the incident did occur, but at a different place, and it involved a different actress.) Bookies mingled with barristers and ordered such drinks of the day as the Alabazan, the Bosom Caressa, Lemon Squash, and the Old Chum’s Reviver.

For Bruce Miller and Belle, however, the drink of choice was champagne, and to commemorate their encounters they marked the date on each cork, until they had a string of them, which Belle kept in her possession. “Anything we do is always satisfactory to my husband,” she told Miller. “I always tell him everything.”

By the time Crippen returned, Miller was in Paris. He wrote to Belle “often enough to be sociable, to be friends.” Crippen never met Miller, but Belle made sure he knew more than perhaps he wished. She continued to display at least one photograph of Miller in their home. In March 1901 she sent him an envelope containing six photographs of herself and told him they were taken by Crippen “with his Kodak.” She hinted that Crippen knew she was sending them.

At one point, either by accident or by Belle’s design, Crippen came across letters from Miller that closed with the line, “with love and kisses to Brown Eyes.”

The letters induced in the little doctor a feeling akin to grief.



LATER, MILLER WOULD BE ASKED at length about these letters and about the true meaning of those closing words.

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