Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
For editors around the world, one point seemed obvious: Wireless had made the sea less safe for criminals on the run. “Mysterious voices nowadays whisper across it,” a writer for the Daily Mirror observed: “invisible hands stretch out upon it; viewless fingers draw near and clutch and hold there.” A French newspaper, Liberté, proclaimed that wireless “has demonstrated that from one side of the Atlantic to the other a criminal lives in a cage of glass, where he is much more exposed to the eyes of the public than if he remained on land.”
The thing that most entranced readers was that Crippen and Le Neve knew nothing of the pursuit by Dew. To be able to watch the chase as it happened, from afar, was unprecedented, almost miraculous. J. B. Priestley wrote, “The people, who have a sure instinct in these matters, knew they had seats in a gallery five hundred miles long for a new, exciting, entirely original drama: Trapped by Wireless! There were Crippen and his mistress, arriving with a smile at the captain’s table, holding hands on the boat deck, entirely unaware of the fact that Inspector Dew…was on his way to arrest them. While they were looking at the menu, several million readers were seeing their names again in the largest type.”
Crippen had made a serious error, Priestley wrote: “he had forgotten, if he ever knew, what Marconi had done for the world, which was now rapidly shrinking. So we see two hunted creatures, say a fox and a hare, with millions of hounds baying and slavering after them.”
IN LONDON, SCOTLAND Yard and the forensic scientists of the Home Office continued to puzzle over what had killed the victim found in the cellar at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent. Yes, the body had been mutilated, but paradoxically the state of the remains told nothing about the proximal cause of death. For all anyone knew, the victim could have died by accident or from an illness and been eviscerated after the fact.
At St. Mary’s Hospital in London, William Henry Willcox, a famed forensic chemist and senior scientific analyst for the Home Office, took delivery of the five jars of remains held at the Islington Mortuary and began a detailed examination of their contents. He was an expert on poisons and testified so often that reporters gave him a nickname, “The King’s Poisoner.” He took the first steps toward determining whether poison might have been the cause of death, a painstaking process that he expected would take another two or three weeks to complete.
In the meantime he asked the police surgeon, Dr. Marshall, to return to the mortuary and probe the mass of remains for additional organs. He most wanted the second kidney, the remainder of the liver, and more intestine. This was gruesome, taxing work. “The remains,” Dr. Marshall noted, “had greatly changed.” He succeeded in locating a portion of liver weighing 161⁄2 ounces and a length of small intestine at 131⁄2 ounces, but he could not locate the other kidney. He placed his finds in a sixth jar, along with a fresh discovery, another Hinde’s curler with hair attached. He delivered the jar to Willcox.
But poison was only one possibility. Crippen had possessed a revolver—perhaps he had shot his wife. Or bludgeoned her and removed her head to eliminate the evidence. Or stabbed her to death and then simply kept on carving.
Superintendent Froest assigned Sgt. C. Crutchett to revisit Hilldrop Crescent and talk to the occupants of neighboring houses about anything suspicious that they might have seen or heard. He began canvassing on Wednesday, July 27, and immediately heard stories that seemed to merit further investigation.
At No. 46 Brecknock Road, which overlooked the Crippens’ back garden, Crutchett interviewed a Mrs. Lena Lyons, who told him that one night at the end of January or beginning of February, while lying awake in bed, she heard “distinctly” the sound of a gunshot. It was dark at the time, though she placed the hour at about seven in the morning. Moments later a lodger, an elderly woman with the improbable name Mrs. May Pole, burst into her bedroom and said, “Did you hear a shot, Mrs. Lyons?” Mrs. Pole occupied the upstairs-rear bedroom of the house, from which she had a clear view of the Crippens’ garden. She was terrified and sat on the end of Mrs. Lyons’s bed. An instant later there was another gunshot. Mrs. Pole stayed at the end of the bed until daylight.
Another neighbor, Franziska Hachenberger, told Crutchett that early one morning at the end of January or in early February, at about one-thirty, she heard a scream. She lived with her father, a musician, in a house on a street adjacent to Hilldrop Crescent, and through her window she had an unobstructed view across the back gardens of the Crippens and their neighbors. “I only heard the one long scream and it ceased suddenly,” she told Crutchett. She did not hear a gunshot, but she immediately suspected foul play. “As soon as I heard the scream I thought of murder,” she said. “It gave me a nasty turn.” For the next week she checked newspapers and the placards of newspaper hawkers for word of a murder in the neighborhood but found nothing.
The most detailed report came from a man who lived at No. 54 Brecknock and whose garden was only several yards from the rear of the Crippens’ house. A metalworker and auditor of two private clubs, Frederick Evans had been out with friends at a public house, the Orange Tree, and returned home at about 1:18 A.M. He knew the time because each night when he rounded the corner of Brecknock Road, he made it a practice to stop in front of a jewelers’ shop and adjust his watch. “I had been indoors a few minutes and taken my boots off when I heard a terrible screech which terminated with a long dragging whine,” he said. As best he could tell, whoever had screamed had been outdoors or in a room with the windows wide open. “It startled me and I at once thought of the Ripper murders, and knowing the locality and that Parmetes Row, a turning out of Hilldrop Crescent, is frequented by prostitutes, I thought it was one of these poor creatures in trouble.”
He put his boots back on, checked on his wife, and went outside and quickly walked through the neighborhood, along Brecknock and Hilldrop Crescent and Camden Road, but saw nothing suspicious. Like Miss Hachenberger he checked the newspapers to see if a crime had been discovered.
He also told Crutchett that a few days later, while he was in his garden, he scented what he called a “strong burning smell.” At first he thought it was the odor of burning leaves, but it was midwinter and there were no leaves left to burn. He concluded that “perhaps somebody had stripped a room and was burning the old wallpaper.” The fires continued over the next several mornings. At one point he looked over his wall and saw smoke rising from the Crippens’ garden. He had never known the Crippens to burn refuse before. He also told Crutchett that another neighbor had seen Crippen carrying a “burning substance” in a white enamel pail, which Crippen then emptied into a dustbin and stirred.
Evans said he missed Belle. He and his wife had enjoyed hearing her sing as she worked in the garden.
Crutchett tracked down the “dustman” employed by the Islington Borough Council to collect refuse from Hilldrop Crescent. Every Wednesday for nine years William Curtis had come to No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent to empty the accumulated waste. He told Crutchett that in February 1910 he and another dustman, James Jackson, took from the Crippens’ back garden four and a half baskets of partially burned material, in addition to the ordinary contents of the dustbin. “There was burnt stuff of all description, paper, clothing, womens petticoats, old skirts, blouses,” Curtis said.
On the next two Wednesdays Curtis and Jackson took away additional baskets of burned refuse, though it had been reduced entirely to ash. In his years as a dustman Curtis had learned to tell one kind of ash from another. This ash, he told Crutchett, was not ordinary fireplace ash; nor was it the ash one would expect to find after incinerating paper. “It was very light stuff, white ash,” Curtis said. He added, “I did not see any bones amongst it.”
Just how much credence could be given to all these accounts was unclear. None of the witnesses had seen fit to report the shots and screams to police at the time they occurred. As any detective knew, one had to treat such belated reports with a good deal of skepticism, especially in the midst of an investigation as celebrated as this one. It was likely that storie
Sergeant Crutchett had each witness sign a statement; he gave them to Superintendent Froest.
ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, at midnight, far out in the Atlantic, Dew’s ship passed the Montrose. The vessels never came close enough for visual contact. Their courses, though parallel, were separated by a vast swath of deep ocean. But now, for the first time during the voyage, the ships came within wireless range of each other. At last Dew was able to contact Kendall directly. “Will board you at Father Point,” Dew’s message read. “Please keep any information till I arrive there strictly confidential.”
Kendall replied, by wireless, “What the devil do you think I have been doing?”
CORRESPONDENTS FROM CITIES throughout North America began making their way to Quebec and from there to Father Point and Rimouski on the St. Lawrence. Provincial towns that had never seen a reporter now saw dozens trooping through with valises, stenographic notepads, and cameras.
Within Scotland Yard, however, a good deal of skepticism remained as to whether Crippen and Le Neve really were aboard the Montrose. Alternative leads continued to reach the Murder Squad, including a report that Crippen and Le Neve had escaped to Andorra, a small republic situated between France and Spain.
“Speaking for myself,” Superintendent Froest told a reporter, “I am keeping a perfectly clear mind on the subject. We have so many of these houses built with cards which fall down when the last of the pack is placed on top, and for this reason we are pursuing every clue which comes to us, just as if the Montrose incident had never occurred.”
QUIVERING ETHER
FOR CAPTAIN KENDALL, IT WAS irresistible. Here they were, Crippen and Le Neve, aboard his ship, utterly unaware of the messages rocketing back and forth all around them. Relayed from ship to ship, at least fifty Marconigrams arrived at the Montrose wireless room from editors and reporters. The Daily Mail said, “Kindly wireless on business terms good description of how Crippen and Le Neve arrested.” The New York World tried to reach Crippen himself and promised, “Will gladly print all you will say.” Kendall withheld the message.
The captain loved the attention. Suddenly his modest ship was the most famous vessel afloat. It was indeed “too good a thing to lose.” Aware that he had an audience of millions around the world, Kendall prepared an account for the Daily Mail of how Crippen and Le Neve spent their days. When the Montrose was about one hundred miles east of Belle Isle, an island just north of Newfoundland that marked a vessel’s entry into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Kendall instructed his Marconi man to send his story to the newspaper’s correspondent in Montreal.
He knew, however, that his account would gain much wider distribution. Once reduced to the invisible confetti of Morse, his story would hurtle from ship to ship, station to station, until it suffused the atmosphere, available to any editor anywhere.
AS THE MONTROSE ENTERED the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Ethel’s excitement rose. She could not wait to disembark and proceed to America. Crippen, however, seemed to grow anxious. He came to their cabin looking “very serious” and handed her £15 in notes. “My dear,” he told her, “I think you had better take charge of these.”
“Why?” she asked. “I have nowhere to put them except in these pockets. You can keep them, can’t you, until you get to Quebec?”
He paused. “I may have to leave you.”
“Leave me!” His remark left her “astounded,” she wrote. “It seemed to me incredible that I should have come all this way and then should be let alone.”
Crippen said, “When you get to Quebec you had better go on to Toronto. It is a nice place and I know it fairly well. You have not forgotten your typewriting, have you, and you have got your millinery at your fingers’ ends?”
She relaxed. She had misunderstood, she thought. Crippen was not in fact planning to abandon her but rather wished to scout opportunities in America first, on his own, and then would send for her, “that we might settle down in peace in some out-of-the-way spot.”
She asked, “How about these clothes?”
Crippen smiled. “Are you tired of being a boy?”
They worked out a plan where as soon as they left the ship, they would check into a hotel. He would go out immediately and find a dress shop and buy all the clothes she needed. The prospect restored her optimism. She wrote, “I looked forward with keen delight to an adventurous life in Canada.”
Crippen went back up on deck. Ethel returned to her reading. The deck had little appeal for her now. The weather was too cold, and she found the periodic fogs unbearable.
ON FRIDAY, JULY 29, the London Daily Mail published Kendall’s dispatch, transmitted by wireless from the Montrose, snared by the wireless station at Belle Isle, and relayed to London by undersea cable—and doubtless touched up by the newspaper.
Kendall began by describing his own detective work, starting with his discovery of the Robinsons holding hands. “Le Neve squeezed Crippen’s hand immoderately,” Kendall wrote. “It seemed to me unnatural for two males, so I suspected them at once.”
He described Le Neve as having “the manner and appearance of a very refined, modest girl. She does not speak much, but always wears a pleasant smile. She seems thoroughly under his thumb, and he will not leave her for a moment. Her suit is anything but a good fit.” A wave of sympathy must have risen from women around the world. “Her trousers are very tight about the hips, and are split a bit down the back and secured with large safety-pins.”
Crippen was growing a beard but continued to shave his upper lip to prevent the reappearance of his mustache, Kendall reported. The doctor still had marks on his nose from his glasses. “He sits about on deck reading, or pretending to read, and both seem to be thoroughly enjoying their meals.” Crippen seemed knowledgeable about Toronto, Detroit, and California, Kendall wrote, “and says that when the ship arrives he will go to Detroit by boat if possible, as he prefers it.”
Kendall listed some of the books Crippen had been reading and noted that at the moment he was engrossed in a thriller called The Four Just Men, a novel by Edgar Wallace in which anarchists assassinate Britain’s prime minister despite every effort of Scotland Yard to protect him.
“At times both would sit and appear to be in deep thought,” Kendall wrote. “Though Le Neve does not show signs of distress and is perhaps ignorant of the crime committed, she appears to be a girl with a very weak will. She has to follow him everywhere.”
One evening about midway through the voyage there was a concert on board, which Crippen and Le Neve both seemed to enjoy. The next morning Crippen told Kendall “how one song, ‘We All Walked Into the Shop,’ had been drumming in his head all night, and how his ‘boy’ had enjoyed it and had laughed heartily when they retired to their room. In the course of one conversation he spoke about American drinks and said that Selfridge’s was the only decent place in London to get them at.”
Kendall wrote, “You will notice I did not arrest them: the course I am pursuing is the best as they have no suspicion, and with so many passengers it prevents any excitement.”
TO READERS AROUND THE WORLD, this report was magic. They knew what books the fugitives were reading. They knew about their contemplative moments, and how much they enjoyed the ship’s concert. They saw Crippen laughing at the captain’s jokes and Le Neve deploying her feminine manners to pluck fruit from a tray. The London Times said, “There was something intensely thrilling, almost weird, in the thought of these two passengers traveling across the Atlantic in the belief that their identity and their whereabouts were unknown while both were being flashed with certainty to all quarters of the civilized world.” From the moment of their departure, the paper said, the two “have been encased in waves of wireless telegraphy as securely as if they had been within the four walls of a prison.”
One newspaper invited W. W. Bradfield, one of Marconi’s principal
ON ONE OCCASION KENDALL found Crippen sitting on deck looking up at the wireless antenna and listening to the electric crackle coming from the Marconi cabin. Crippen turned to him and exclaimed, “What a wonderful invention it is!”
Kendall could only smile and agree.
THE ST. MARY’S CAT
AT ST. MARY’S HOSPITAL, LONDON, Dr. Willcox conducted an initial series of experiments to rule out certain easy-to-detect poisons, such as arsenic, antimony, and prussic acid. He found trace amounts of arsenic and carbonic acid but attributed them to a disinfectant that a police officer enthusiastically if unwisely had applied to the sides of the excavation in the Hilldrop cellar before the remains were removed. Willcox found the traces only in some organs, not in all, which reassured him that the arsenic was a contaminant, not the cause of death. Now he turned to the more complex and time-consuming task of determining whether the remains contained any poisons of the alkaloid variety, such as strychnine, cocaine, and atropine, a derivative of deadly nightshade. He estimated this phase would take about two weeks.