Thunderstruck

THE POISONS BOOK

IN SEPTEMBER 1908 ETHEL LE NEVE became a lodger in a house a few blocks south of Hampstead Heath and a mile or so west of Hilldrop Crescent. The house was occupied by Emily and Robert Jackson. Robert was a “traveler,” or salesman, for a company that sold mineral water; his wife managed the letting of bedrooms in the house and provided the tenants with meals. Mrs. Jackson and Ethel took to each other immediately. Each evening when Ethel returned from work, Mrs. Jackson brought her a cup of tea in her room, where the two would spend a few moments catching up on the day’s events. Soon Ethel was calling Mrs. Jackson “Mum” and “Ma.”

What Mrs. Jackson did not know was that Ethel was four months pregnant, but this became apparent two weeks later, when Ethel had what Mrs. Jackson called a “miscarriage,” though that could have been a euphemism. Female doctors were rare, but one such physician, Ethel Vernon, came to the house to care for Le Neve. “I never saw the baby,” Mrs. Jackson said, later, “and I was present in the room when Miss Vernon asked her where it was.” Le Neve said she did not know, “but eventually said she had been to the lavatory and whilst there felt something come from her.”

The doctor and Mrs. Jackson questioned Ethel “closely” for the name of the father, but she would not reveal his name.

Ethel became ill and Mrs. Jackson tended to her as if she were her daughter. Two or three days later Crippen came to the house and asked to see Ethel, giving Mrs. Jackson his card. He stayed only a few minutes. A week later he returned, but this visit was just as brief as the last. Mrs. Jackson said of him later, “I thought him quite the nicest man I had ever met.”

Ethel remained in bed about two weeks, then returned to work.

CRIPPEN RETAINED A VAGUE connection to Munyon but threw most of his energy into founding a new business, a dental practice, with a New Zealand dentist named Gilbert Mervin Rylance. They called their new venture the Yale Tooth Specialists. “He was the financier,” Rylance said, “and I was the dental partner.” Crippen managed the company and produced the necessary anesthetics. They agreed to split all profits evenly. The practice occupied an office in the building where Crippen already had been working, Albion House on New Oxford Street, and where the Ladies’ Guild maintained its headquarters. Crippen continued to concoct and sell medicines of his own design, including a treatment for deafness called Horsorl.

The miscarriage changed the tenor of Ethel’s relationship with Crippen. Where once the affair had been carefree and daring, especially given the proximity of the Ladies’ Guild, now there was loss and along with it a realization on Ethel’s part that her love for Crippen had grown deeper. She found it increasingly difficult to endure the fact that each night he returned to his home and to his wife, she to a single room in Hampstead, alone.

THE MUSIC HALL LADIES’ GADIES’ continued its good works. Its members grew fond of Belle Elmore and her energy, and Belle returned their affection. Though she herself was not performing, she daily encountered those who were, and at least for the time being this seemed to be enough. The one stubbornly dreary part of her life was her husband. She assured him time and again that there were many men who would have her in a heartbeat. With increasing frequency she reiterated her threat to leave.

She appeared not to realize, however, that her threat had lost a good deal of its power. Crippen was in love with Ethel Le Neve and promised her that one day he would make her his legal wife. She was, he believed, the woman who should have shared his bed all along. Belle’s departure would be a blessing, for desertion was one of the very few grounds that British law accepted as cause for divorce.

In turn, Crippen did not realize that Belle had become increasingly serious about her threat and had begun planning ahead. Their savings account at Charing Cross Bank in the Strand now contained £600 (more than $60,000 today). Under bank rules, Belle and Crippen each had the right to withdraw money, without need of the other’s signature. There was a catch, however. Only the interest could be withdrawn on demand. Closing the account or withdrawing any of the principal required advance notice of one full year.

On December 15, 1909, the bank received a notice of intent to withdraw the entire amount. It was signed by Belle alone.

BELLE WAS GENEROUS with her new friends at the guild. On Friday, January 7, she and Crippen went together to the guild offices, and there Belle gave a birthday gift, a coral necklace, to her friend and fellow member Louie Davis. Belle was troubled by something that had happened the night before, and now, as she handed the present to Davis, she said, “I didn’t think I should be able to come to give it to you as I woke up in the night stifling and I wanted to send Peter for the priest. I was stifling and it was so dark.”

Belle turned to Crippen. “Didn’t I dear?”

“Yes,” Crippen agreed, “but you are alright now.”

The three then left and walked together to a nearby Lyons & Co. teahouse, crowded as always, and there Belle repeated her story, with still more drama.

“I shall never forget it,” she said. “It was terrible.”

She put her hand to her throat.

Davis found it odd to hear Belle recount such a story, for one of Belle’s most salient characteristics was her robust good health. As one friend said, Belle “did not seem to know what an ache or pain was.”

Over tea Crippen blamed the incident on anxiety generated by Belle’s work for the guild. He urged her to resign, advice that he had given before and that she had ignored, just as she ignored it now. One reason he wanted her to quit was to remove her from Albion House, where she had become a near-constant presence, forcing Crippen and Ethel to maintain a level of circumspection that both found cumbersome and inhibiting.

At Lyons the conversation moved on.

ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1910, Crippen left his office and walked along New Oxford Street to the nearby shop of Mssrs. Lewis & Burrows, Chemists, where he always bought the compounds he used in his medicines and anesthetics. Over the previous year he had acquired hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide, morphine salts, and—his highest-volume purchase—cocaine, which he bought on nine occasions throughout the preceding year, for a total of 170 grains. Today, however, he wanted something different. He asked the clerk, Charles Hetherington, for five grains of hyoscine hydrobromide.

The order did not surprise Hetherington. He knew Crippen and liked him. Crippen always smiled and exuded an aura of kindness. Part of it was the way he looked—the now-graying mustache and beard made him seem approachable, and his eyes, magnified by the lenses of his spectacles, made him seem somehow vulnerable. Hetherington knew also that Crippen made homeopathic medicines and dental anesthetics, and that hyoscine was sometimes used in drugs meant to have a tranquilizing effect on patients.

But Hetherington could not fill the order. Hyoscine was an exceedingly dangerous poison and was rarely used, and as a consequence he did not have it in stock. Indeed, in his three years working for Lewis & Burrows, he had never known the shop to have that large a quantity on hand at any one time. He told Crippen he would have to order it and that it ought to arrive within a few days.

HETHERINGTON RELAYED THE ORDER by telephone to a drug wholesaler, British Drug Houses Ltd., “the largest firm of Druggists in London, and probably in England,” according to its managing director, Charles Alexander Hill.

His company had no problem filling the order, as it typically had about two hundred grains on hand, supplied by Merck & Co. of Darmstadt, Germany. Hyoscine had “very limited demand,” he said. Ordinarily his company supplied chemists with a maximum of one grain at a time, though a wholesale drug firm once ordered three grains and a hospital fifteen, the largest single order he could recall.

The company shipped the five grains of hyoscine to Lewis & Burrows on January 18, along with other compounds the shop had ordered.

THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, January 19, Crippen again walked to Lewis & Burrows’s shop and asked for his order.

In the past whenever Crippen picked up his poisons—his morphine and cocaine—the clerks on duty did not make him sign the poisons book, in which they recorded purchases of “scheduled” poisons. “We did not require him to do so,” said Harold Kirby, an assistant at the shop, “because we knew him, and knew him to be a medical man.”

On this occasion, however, the shop did ask him to fill out an entry in the book and sign it, because of the unusual nature of the order and the potency of the drug. Crippen “did not raise the slightest objection,” Kirby said.

First the form asked for the “Name of Purchaser,” and here Crippen wrote, “Munyons per H. H. Crippen,” though by now he had only a slight connection to Munyon. Where the form asked, “Purpose for which it is required,” he filled in, “homœopathic preparations.” He signed his name.

Kirby handed him a small container that enclosed tiny crystals that weighed only one-hundredth of an ounce yet were capable of killing twenty men. He put the container in his pocket and returned to Albion House.