Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
Pepper’s initial examination suggested the victim was a woman, though the evidence was only circumstantial and was in part rebutted by the presence in the remains of a man’s handkerchief and pajama top. The bleached hair, however, gave Pepper and Chief Inspector Dew confidence that the remains were indeed female and thus increased the likelihood that the victim was Belle Elmore. According to her friends in the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, she had bleached her hair blond.
Dr. Pepper placed certain organs and the reserved man-made articles into five large jars, for safekeeping. The pajama arm went into jar number four by itself; the rear portion with collar went into jar number five. The jars were stoppered, covered with white paper, tied with tape, then secured with the seal of the coroner’s office.
Dew found the pajamas particularly interesting. He and Sergeant Mitchell returned to Hilldrop Crescent for another search, this time with a specific goal in mind.
ETHEL GREW WEARY of Brussels. “I had exhausted all the shop windows, which I had gazed into at first with such delight, and now I wanted to move on somewhere else.”
She told Crippen of her ennui.
“Tired of Brussels already?” he said. “Very well, we will push on. How about Paris?”
“No,” she said, “not Paris. Somewhere else.”
Crippen suggested America.
On Friday, July 15, as Dew and the doctors probed the remains from Hilldrop Crescent, Crippen and Ethel stopped in at a ticket office and learned that one ship, the SS Montrose, was to depart Antwerp for Quebec the following Wednesday, July 20. They learned too that the ship carried only two classes of passengers, second and steerage. Crippen bought a cabin in second class. For purposes of the passenger manifest, he identified himself as John Philo Robinson, a fifty-five-year-old merchant from Detroit, and Ethel as his son, John George Robinson, age sixteen, a student. No one asked to see identification.
They planned to leave Brussels on July 19, spend that night in Antwerp, and board the ship first thing in the morning.
AT HILLDROP CRESCENT Chief Inspector Dew and Sergeant Mitchell concentrated on searching boxes and wardrobes and anything else in which clothing was stored. They found dresses and furs and shoes in quantities they still found staggering.
In a bag in Crippen’s bedroom Dew discovered two complete suits of green-striped pajamas that seemed similar to the fragments found with the remains, except that these were new and apparently never worn. He checked their collars for labels and found “Shirtmakers, Jones Brothers, Holloway, Limited.”
His search also turned up a single pair of pajama bottoms, white with green stripes, that showed signs of having been “very much worn.” He could not locate a matching jacket.
THE LONDON TIMES GAVE the mystery a name, “The North London Cellar Murder.” The Daily Mirror published photographs of the house and of the fugitive couple. The case seized the imagination of editors abroad, and soon news of the remains found at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent was the stuff of breakfast conversation for readers from New York to Istanbul. “There has never been a hue and cry like that which went up throughout the country for Crippen and Miss Le Neve,” Dew wrote.
The case dominated conversation everywhere, from the City to the Metropolitan Cattle Market, among the guards and prisoners at Holloway and Pentonville prisons, and at the Long Bar at the Criterion, and in the great clubs, the Bachelor’s, Union, Carlton, and Reform. “It was the one big topic of conversation,” Dew wrote. “On the trains and buses one heard members of the public speculating and theorizing as to where they were likely to be.”
Suddenly reports of sightings of Crippen and Le Neve began to arrive at New Scotland Yard. They came by telephone and telegram and by that latest miracle, the Marconigram. The urgency and number of these tips became amplified when the home secretary, Winston Churchill, authorized a reward of £250—$25,000 today—for information leading to the fugitives’ capture. “Not a day passed without Crippen and Miss Le Neve being reported to have been seen in some part of the country,” Dew wrote. “Sometimes they were alleged to have been in a dozen places at the same time.” Nearly every lead had to be examined. “One couldn’t afford to ignore even the slenderest chance,” he wrote, “and all such reports were carefully inquired into.”
One man who resembled Crippen found himself arrested twice and released twice. “On the first occasion he took the experience in good part,” Dew wrote, “but when the same thing happened a second time he was highly indignant, and said it was getting a habit.”
On this score the police were especially wary, for Scotland Yard was still smarting from the infamous example of Adolph Beck, a Norwegian engineer who over the preceding decade and a half had been erroneously imprisoned for fraud, not once but twice, on the basis of eyewitness testimony, while the look-alike who actually had done the crimes remained free. The most important lesson of this “lamentable business,” wrote Sir Melville Macnaghten, “was unquestionably the extreme unreliability of personal identification.”
Dew met with the Crippen duplicate and found no particular likeness. “I did what I could to pour oil on troubled waters, offering the man my profound apologies; and after a while I was able to make him see that the police officer who had made the mistake was really only doing his duty.”
ON FRIDAY, JULY 15, Dew and Mitchell visited Emily Jackson for the first time and heard her tell of Le Neve’s miscarriage and the period in late January 1910 when she had seemed so depressed and perturbed. They revisited Clara Martinetti, this time at her bungalow on the Thames, and collected details of the dinner at the Crippens’ house when she had last seen Belle alive. They interviewed Marion Louisa Curnow, a manager at Munyon’s. She reported that on the day he disappeared she had cashed a check for him in the amount of £37, more than $3,700 today. She paid him in gold.
At every stop Dew and Mitchell and the detectives working with them heard anew how kind and good-natured Crippen was. Witness after witness portrayed him as too gentle to cause harm to anyone. A former neighbor, Emily Cowderoy, told one detective how she had never heard Crippen speak crossly to his wife. “They were on exceedingly good terms with each other,” she said. The phrase that police heard most often in describing Crippen was “kind-hearted.”
Yet there in Crippen’s house at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Dew had seen the eviscerated remnants of a human being who in all likelihood had once been Crippen’s wife. What kind of strength, both psychic and physical, did one need to fillet one’s helpmate?
It stretched plausibility to envision Crippen conducting the many different acts of dissection necessary to reduce so robust a woman to the mass unearthed in the cellar. How had he done it? Where did he begin? At the head? Perhaps a quick decapitation with a butcher’s knife, maybe the same knife he had used to carve the “joint” of beef during that last dinner with the Martinettis on January 31. Or did he start with the feet, working his way up from the easy portions and coping with each new challenge as he went along? No bones remained, not even the tiny bones of the hands and feet. No doubt he simply had disposed of these extremities, but as he moved upward, then what? What tools did he use to strip muscle and tendon from the rib cage? By what means did he dislocate and detach the upper arms from the shoulders? As he advanced, did he experience elation, or was each step a source of sorrow and bittersweet recollection?
And what of the janitorial aspects? How did he cleanse the house of blood and viscera so well as to leave no apparent trace? On that score Crippen’s bull terrier had perhaps proved an able assistant. The missing portions—the head, pelvis, and outer extremities—clearly had been disposed of elsewhere.
At Dew’s direction, police searched the garden. They probed with spades and in places dug deep but found none of the missing components. They searched neighboring yards and mused about likely repositories—perhaps the rendering pits and waste basins and hog sloughs of the Metropolitan Cattle Market, or the nearby channel of the Regent’s Canal, which ran through North London toward R
Could Crippen have done all this and, further, could he have done it without help? If so, how had he steeled himself, and how had he then managed to erase the knowledge of the act from his eyes and visage?
BY WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, the challenge confronting Chief Inspector Dew had become far more daunting. Somehow Crippen and Le Neve had evaded detection despite a manhunt of an intensity that Sir Melville Macnaghten believed had been surpassed only once in the history of Scotland Yard: the hunt for Jack the Ripper. Eleven days had elapsed since Crippen and Le Neve left Albion House and disappeared. The fastest ocean liners could cross the Atlantic in less than a week. The fugitives quite literally could be anywhere.
And indeed, sightings now poured in from around the globe. One caller swore she saw Crippen and Le Neve strolling along the Seine arm in arm. Another spotted them on a ship in the Bosporus. They were in Spain—and Switzerland.
Mrs. Isabel Ginnette, the president of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, happened to be in New York City and volunteered her services to the police. Accompanied by detectives, she visited the wharves as liners arrived and watched closely for any sign of Crippen and the typist. Mrs. Ginnette and the police boarded one of the newest and most celebrated ships, Cunard’s Lusitania, the first of the great liners to cross the Atlantic in under five days, but she recognized no one. Over the next few days she and her police escorts monitored the arrivals of the Lorraine from Le Havre, the St. Paul from Southampton—the ship Marconi had made famous—and the Cedric from Liverpool. In a letter to the guild’s secretary, Melinda May, Mrs. Ginnette wrote, “Up till today we have met, and searched every passenger of five boats from England and France.” She added, “May we soon catch him!”
On July 20 New York police arrested a passenger who had arrived aboard the Kroonland of the Red Star Line, believing him to be Crippen. He was, in fact, the Rev. William Laird, rector of an Episcopal church in Delaware. Mrs. Ginnette expressed dismay that the police had not taken her on that inspection as well. She told a reporter, “The reverend gentleman looked about as much like Crippen as I do.”
The lack of forward motion in the investigation was discouraging and a source of mounting anxiety for Dew. There had been one recent bit of progress, however. It had come two days earlier, by chance, just after the close of the first coroner’s inquest on the remains.
The proceeding itself had buoyed Dew’s spirits, for the coroner in his opening remarks had praised the chief inspector. “Many a man might have gone into that cellar and made no discovery. It remained for a detective with a genius for his work to go a step further.”
Afterward, in the hall outside, Dew happened to be standing near a group of women, one of them Clara Martinetti, and overheard her say something about Belle having once had a serious operation.
He took her aside and asked if he had heard correctly.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Martinetti said. “Belle had an operation years ago in America. She had quite a big scar on the lower part of her body. I have seen it.”
Dew recognized that this could be a vital clue. If evidence of that operation could be found among the remains now stored at the Islington Mortuary Chapel of Ease, it would greatly support Dew’s presumption that the victim was Belle Elmore. He relayed the information to Dr. Pepper.
Nonetheless, as of Wednesday, July 20, Dew was keenly aware that his investigation, the biggest and most scrutinized of the new century, had stalled. He knew also that not everyone shared the coroner’s appreciation of his investigative genius. At least one newspaper, the Daily Mail, asked why Scotland Yard had not kept Crippen under surveillance during its initial inquiry into the disappearance of Belle Elmore. A member of Parliament asked Home Secretary Churchill if he would be so kind as to state for the record “who is responsible for allowing Dr. Crippen to get out of their hands.” Churchill declined to answer.
TESTAMENT
IN THE SPRING OF 1910, Marconi was again at sea when Beatrice gave birth to a son, Giulio. By this point Marconi had traveled so much and so far that Bea had no idea what ship he was aboard, only that he was somewhere in the Atlantic. That he would sail so near the time when his wife was expected to give birth was not surprising, given his obsession with work and his social blindness; that he would depart without leaving behind the name of his ship was something else entirely, a reflection of the decline of their marriage.
Beatrice sent him the news anyway, addressing the message only “Marconi-Atlantic.”
He got it. The message was transmitted from station to station, ship to ship, until it reached him in the middle of the ocean.
It would be hard to imagine a better testament to his achievement of eliminating the isolation of the deep sea, yet a better and more public proof—one that would galvanize the world and rupture the reservoir of doubt once and for all—was soon to occur.
With the technology at last in place, the stage was set.
AT EIGHT-THIRTY WEDNESDAY MORNING Hawley Harvey Crippen and Ethel Clara Le Neve, disguised as the Robinsons, father and son, stepped onto a gangplank at the Canadian Pacific wharf in Antwerp and walked aboard their ship, the SS Montrose. No one gave them a second glance, despite the fact that in this age of steamer trunks and bulky coats and dressing for dinner, all they carried was a single small suitcase.
“It was without the slightest sensation of nervousness that I stepped on board the big steamer in my boy’s clothes,” Ethel wrote. “The change of scene seemed to me a delightful thing to look forward to.”
She felt the same sense of adventure that she had felt on the night she and Crippen had sailed from England for Holland. This was escape of the purest kind. She was leaving behind a life corseted by class and disapproval, and doing it, moreover, in the guise of a male. She had shed not only her past but her sex as well.
She wrote, “I was quite easy and free from care when I followed Dr. Crippen on to the deck of the Montrose.”
THE ROBINSONS
ETHEL AND CRIPPEN SETTLED INTO CABIN number five, which Ethel found to be “quite cozy.” The air, the sea, the throb of the engines, the miraculous crackle of the liner’s wireless, all of it thrilled her. “The whole ship was wonderful.”
By now her disguise was as natural to her as dresses once had been. “I felt so sure of myself,” she wrote. At one point she and an adolescent boy became “rather chummy,” as she put it. She could tell that he believed she too was a boy. To her amazement, she soon found herself chatting with him about football. Crippen observed the encounter. Later he told her, with a laugh, “How nicely you are getting on!”
She and Crippen spent hours on the deck, sitting and walking, “but, naturally, I kept rather aloof from the other passengers, and did not speak very much,” she wrote. “On the other hand, when any of the officers spoke to me I did not hesitate to reply, and did not feel in the least embarrassed.”
She marveled at the fact that even the captain gave her a good deal of attention. He was as gracious and accommodating as a steward. “I found plenty to amuse me,” Ethel recalled, “for Captain Kendall supplied me with plenty of literature in the shape of novels and magazines, not forgetting some detective stories.”
The captain also produced books for Crippen, who took a particular interest in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and two novels of the age, Nebo the Nailer by Sabine Baring-Gould and A Name to Conjure With by John Strange Winter, the mercifully truncated pen name for Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Palmer Stannard. Like many passengers, Crippen often checked the ship’s track chart, updated regularly, to see where the ship was and to gauge how many days remained of the eleven the Montrose typically required to reach Quebec. The ship’s open-sea velocity was thirteen knots.
As the weather grew colder, Ethel found that walking the deck with Crippen became less and less pleas
DURING LUNCH THAT FIRST DAY, as the Robinsons and their fellow passengers dined in the second-class saloon, Kendall slipped into their cabin and conducted a brief search. He found their hats and examined them. The inside of the older man’s had been stamped “Jackson, blvd du Nord, Bruxelles.” There was no label in the brown felt hat the boy wore, but Kendall saw that the inner rim had been packed with paper—a means, he presumed, of improving the fit.
The morning of the second day at sea Kendall told his first officer, Alfred Sargent, of his suspicions. He asked Sargent to take a discreet look and see what he thought. Sargent reported back that Kendall’s appraisal might be correct.
Kendall still did not feel certain enough to alert police by wireless, though he knew that after the ship exited the English Channel and entered the open Atlantic, his ability to send such a message would become limited. The shipboard transmitter had a range of about 150 miles, though its receiver could pick up signals at as great a distance as 600 miles. There was always the possibility of relaying a message via another ship closer to land, but to be absolutely certain of contact, he would have to send a message soon.
Kendall ordered Sargent to collect every English newspaper aboard and to say nothing of their suspicions to anyone else.