The story as the Edwardian reading public would come to know it began in the late afternoon of 31 January 1910. Between 4 and 5pm that Monday, Crippen called at the address of friends Paul and Clara Martinetti on Shaftesbury Avenue to extend an invitation to dinner at Hilldrop Crescent. Mutual friends of the Crippens for some eighteen months, the American expatriate couple were retired music hall artistes. Paul was a veteran of the music stage whose own troupe of artistes included wife Clara, and who had been billed as ‘the Prince of Pantomime Artists’ as recently as 1905. Clara was active alongside Cora in the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. When Crippen called to invite the couple to an impromptu ‘pot-luck dinner’ on that January afternoon, Paul was out attending a doctor's appointment and Clara demurred, not knowing how her husband might be feeling on his return. Crippen was insistent, suggesting an evening assembled at Hilldrop Crescent amongst company would prove just the tonic he needed: ‘we’ll cheer him up after dinner and have a game of whist.’ Clara agreed that she would ask Paul on his return from the doctor's around six o’clock and Crippen, with rather curious persistence, said he would come back at the same time to see Paul for himself (the possibility that Crippen was pressing the invitation in order to enlist witnesses or alibis to some predetermined scheme will be explored below). In the event, the couple were prevailed upon to brave the cold January air for the prospect of a convivial evening in Camden; they took a motor bus and then a tram to Hilldrop Crescent, finding Belle and Crippen at the door when they arrived at about eight in the evening.

‘There were just four of us there’, recalled Clara Martinetti at the trial. The small party had dinner in the breakfast room next to the kitchen before repairing upstairs to the parlour. ‘We spent the evening playing cards… It was quite a nice evening.’ Clara's rather anodyne account is surprising given how most literary adaptations of the story have depicted the small gathering as the dinner party from hell, the hosting couple playing out deep-seated domestic grievances and tensions before their embarrassed guests (see Chapter Six).