Thunderstruck

THE TRUTH ABOUT BELLE

CRIPPEN LED THE DETECTIVES INTO his office—“quite a pleasant little office,” Dew said. It was now about noon. A clamor of hooves and engines rose from the street outside, and the increasingly prevalent scent of gasoline tinged the air. Sergeant Mitchell sat at a small table, pencil and paper at hand. Dew began asking questions, and Crippen answered each without hesitation. “From his manner,” Dew wrote, “one could only have assumed that he was a much maligned man eager only to clear the matter up by telling the whole truth.”

The interview had barely begun when all realized it was time for lunch. Dew and Mitchell invited Crippen to join them, and the three left Albion House for a nearby Italian restaurant. Le Neve watched them go, chafing at Dew’s order to remain in the office and at his lack of courtesy in failing to notice that she might wish to have lunch as well. “Meanwhile,” she wrote, “I was absolutely fainting with hunger.”

Over lunch the men talked. Crippen ordered a steak “and ate it with the relish of a man who hadn’t a care in the world,” Dew wrote. He found himself liking Crippen. The doctor was gentle and courteous and spoke with what appeared to be candor. Nothing in his manner suggested deception or anxiety.

Once back in Crippen’s office, Dew continued his interview. He asked a question one way, then later asked it again in a different form to test the consistency of Crippen’s story.

“I realized that she had gone,” Crippen said, “and I sat down to think it over as to how to cover up her absence without any scandal.” He wrote to the guild that she had gone away. “I afterwards realized that this would not be a sufficient explanation for her not coming back, and later on I told people that she was ill with bronchitis and pneumonia, and afterwards I told them she was dead from this ailment.”

To “prevent people asking me a lot of questions,” he said, he placed a death notice in the show-business journal The Era.

He said, “So far as I know she did not die, but is still alive.”

Dew watched Crippen closely. “I was impressed by the man’s demeanor,” he wrote. “It was impossible to be otherwise. Much can sometimes be learned by an experienced police officer during the making of a statement. From Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen’s manner on this our first meeting, I learned nothing at all.”

The detectives then reduced Crippen’s story to a written statement. Crippen initialed each page and signed the last.

IT WAS ABOUT FIVE o’clock. Six hours had passed since the detectives had first come to Hilldrop Crescent. Ethel was hungry and annoyed but also fearful. With each hour the detectives had spent closeted with Crippen, her concern had deepened.

Now it was her turn, as Dew put it.

Ethel told the detectives about Belle’s sudden departure, her illness, and her death. Mitchell took careful notes. “The girl showed some signs of embarrassment when she came to the admissions about her relations with Crippen,” Dew wrote later. “But making due allowance for this, there was nothing in Miss Le Neve’s manner which gave rise to anything in the nature of suspicions.”

As had been the case with Crippen, nothing about the way she spoke suggested an attempt at deception. She seemed to be telling the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it, but Dew wanted to make sure.

He turned to her abruptly. “He told you a lie,” he said. “He has just admitted to us that, as far as he knows, his wife [is] still alive, and that the story of her death in America was all an invention.”

Any last doubt about her candor now disappeared.

“I WAS STUNNED,” Ethel wrote. “I could not believe it. It seemed impossible to me that Belle Elmore might still be alive.” Crippen would never have lied, she believed, and yet here was Dew confirming that he had done so. “Stricken with grief, with anger, with bewilderment, I answered all the questions put to me about my relations with the doctor, my love for him, and my life. But all the time I was thinking of the way I had been deceived if this story about Mrs. Crippen were true.”

She signed her statement, but the ordeal, she now learned, was not yet concluded.

TO BE THOROUGH, DEW wanted to search Crippen’s house. He knew, however, that no judge would give him the legal authority to do so. “There was not enough evidence against the man—indeed any evidence at all—on which I could have asked a magistrate for a search warrant.” He asked Crippen’s permission, and Crippen readily assented. Shortly after six that evening all four climbed into a growler and rode to Hilldrop Crescent, Le Neve and Crippen at one end of the cab, the detectives at the other. It was a long, silent ride. “I seemed to be living in a nightmare,” Ethel wrote. “I felt rather faint and sick.”

The detectives began their search, but there was nothing in particular that Dew hoped to find. “I certainly had no suspicion of murder,” he wrote.

First the detectives walked around the garden, then entered the house and went through each room, searching wardrobes, cupboards, dressing tables. They found signs that Crippen and Le Neve had been packing for a move, including filled boxes and rolled carpets. They found nothing that shed light on Belle’s current whereabouts, but they did find “plenty of evidence that Belle Elmore had a passion for clothes,” as Dew put it. “In the bedroom I found the most extraordinary assortment of women’s clothing, and enough ostrich feathers to stock a milliner’s shop. The whole would have filled a large van.”

No search, of course, would have been complete without a visit to the coal cellar. “I had no special motive in looking there on this occasion,” Dew wrote. “It was just that I wanted to make certain that I had covered the whole of the house.”

Crippen led the detectives down a short passage that ran from the kitchen to the cellar door.

ETHEL WAITED UPSTAIRS, struggling to absorb the news of Crippen’s deception. She sat in the sitting room, “quite stupefied and dazed,” she recalled. “What were these men doing? Would they never go? It grew dark, and I sat there in the gloom. My head was aching furiously.”

CRIPPEN WATCHED from the cellar doorway.

The cellar was cramped—nine feet long and six feet, three inches wide. “The place was completely dark,” Dew wrote, “I had to strike matches to see what it contained and what sort of a place it was. I discovered nothing unusual. There was a small quantity of coal and some wood which looked as though it had been cut from the garden trees.” The floor was brick, coated with a fine layer of dust.

The detectives and Crippen next went to the breakfast room off the kitchen and took seats at the table. There Dew asked his last questions and examined the jewelry Belle had left behind, including the rising sun brooch. He told Crippen, “Of course I shall have to find Mrs. Crippen to clear this matter up.”

Crippen, helpful as always, agreed and promised to do everything he could to assist. “Can you suggest anything?” Crippen asked. “Would an advertisement be any good?”

Dew liked that idea, and together he and Crippen composed a brief advertisement for placement in newspapers in America. Dew left that task to Crippen.

It was after eight when the detectives said good night and exited the house. They had found Crippen’s story, especially his fear of scandal, entirely plausible, though the fact that Crippen clearly had lied was troubling. In a deposition Dew said, “I did not absolutely think that any crime had been committed.”

He told at least one observer that for all intents and purposes the case was closed.

ETHEL FELT GREAT RELIEF that she and Crippen at last were alone, “but I am bound to say,” she wrote, “that I was angry and hurt, and that I felt in no mood for conversation. One thought only was in my head. It was, that the doctor had told me a lie. He had been untruthful to me for the first time in ten years—to me, of all people in the world, who was certainly the one to know the truth and all the truth. I had been faithful to him. I loved him. I had given up all things for him, and it hurt me frightfully that he should have deceived me.”

Crippen attempted to cheer her up. He made supper and coaxed her down to the breakfast room. She could not eat and said nothing. At ten she went up to the bedroom and sat in a chair fully dressed, too tired to get ready for bed. Soon Crippen came up.

“For mercy’s sake,” she said, “tell me whether you know where Belle Elmore is. I have a right to know.”

“I tell you truthfully that I don’t know where she is.”

Crippen told her that he had concocted the story of Belle’s disappearance and death to avoid scandal, but now in the wake of the detectives’ visit, everyone would know the truth and his and Ethel’s reputations would be destroyed. It would be impossible to face the ladies of the guild. The scandal, Crippen feared, would be far more damaging to Ethel. He would do anything, he said, to spare her the inevitable humiliation.

It seemed to Ethel that Crippen had a plan in mind. She asked him what he intended.

“My dear,” he said, “there seems to me only one thing possible to do.”