Thunderstruck

THE MYSTERY DEEPENS

WHERE THE BRICKS HAD LAIN, Dew found a flat surface of clay. He broke into it with the spade and found that the soil underneath seemed to be loose, or at least looser than it would have been had it lain there undisturbed for a period of years. He thrust the spade in deeper. The unmistakable odor of putrefaction struck him full in the face and sent him reeling. “The stench was unbearable,” he wrote, “driving us both into the garden for fresh air.”

Outside in the brilliant cool green, Dew and Sergeant Mitchell steeled themselves. With one last full breath they reentered the cellar, where the odor now suffused the entire chamber. Dew removed two more spadefuls of earth and found what appeared to be a mass of decomposing tissue. Once again he and Mitchell were driven from the house. They gulped the fresh cool air, found brandy, and took long draughts of it before entering the cellar a third time. They uncovered more tissue and viscera, enough to convince them that the remains were those of a human being.

At five-thirty Dew called his immediate boss, Superintendent Froest, head of the Murder Squad, and told him of the discovery. Froest notified Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, in charge of the entire Criminal Investigation Department. As Macnaghten left his office, he grabbed a handful of cigars, with the idea that Dew and Mitchell might need them to counter the awful stench. He and Froest set out immediately in a department motorcar. Traveling first along the Embankment, they moved through air gilded with sun-suffused haze, the Thames a lovely cobalt edged with black shadow.

DR. THOMAS MARSHALL, divisional surgeon for Scotland Yard’s “Y” Division, which encompassed Hilldrop Crescent and the surrounding district, walked over from his practice on nearby Caversham Road. His task would be to lead the postmortem examination once the remains were removed from the house.

He and Dew watched the constables dig. Lanterns had replaced candles, and the close work had begun, the constables on their knees pushing dirt away with their hands as macabre shadows played on the surrounding walls. The men concentrated on an opening at the center of the floor about four feet long by two feet wide.

What Dew saw before him evoked recollection of his discovery of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and begged comparison: This was worse. The remains bore no resemblance to a human body, and the distortion had nothing to do with decomposition. In fact, much was well preserved, surprisingly so, though why this should be the case was itself a mystery. As Dew would note in a report entitled “Particulars of Human Remains,” the largest mass consisted of one long connected train of organs that included liver, stomach, lungs, and heart. All the skin—“practically the whole of the soft covering of a body”—had been removed and lay in a pile, like a coat dropped to the floor.

Most notable, however, was all that was absent. There was nothing to confirm sex. No sign of hands or feet. No teeth. The head and scalp were missing. And there were no bones whatsoever. None. Dew wrote, “Someone had simply carved the flesh off the bones and laid it there.”

The scope of the challenge ahead immediately became clear. It was one thing to infer from the circumstances of the case that the remains had once been Belle Elmore; it was quite another to prove it beyond doubt. The first step was to confirm that the remains were human. That proved simple: The organs were in such good condition that Dr. Marshall on first viewing was able to confirm their provenance.

It was equally obvious, however, that nothing else would be so easy. The next challenge was to identify the sex of the victim, yet no reproductive organs, pelvic bones, or other physical markers of gender could be found, save for one lump of tissue that seemed, at first, as though it might have been a portion of a female breast. Once the sex was confirmed—if ever—then Dew would have to prove that the woman was Belle Elmore. Next he would have to find the cause of death, to determine beyond doubt whether she had been murdered or had died from illness or accident. Finally he would have to determine who killed her.

What lay before him in the cellar was an affront to his working hypothesis that the killer was Dr. Crippen. It defied physics and common sense. Crippen was five feet four inches tall and of slight build. Everyone Dew had interviewed described him as kind, gentle, and affectionate. How could he kill a woman so much larger and more robust than he and then marshal the physical and mental stamina to bring her to the basement, strip the flesh from her body, remove her head, denude every bone, somehow dispose of head, bones, teeth, and sexual organs, and then bury the remainder in his cellar, all without showing signs of physical or emotional duress?

According to witnesses, on the day after Belle had last been seen alive Crippen was his usual calm and peaceful self, cheerful and ready with a smile. That day he had stopped by the Martinettis to check on Paul, and Mrs. Martinetti had noticed nothing unusual about his demeanor.

But three facts were beyond challenge:

—a mass of human remains lay in Crippen’s cellar;

—Belle had disappeared; and

—Crippen and his typist, Miss Le Neve, seemed to have fled.

MACNAGHTEN AND FROEST ARRIVED, bearing cigars. Dew showed the men the cellar and walked them through the rest of the house. What most struck Macnaghten was how near the burial site was to Crippen’s kitchen and breakfast area. “From the doctor’s chair at the head of the dining-room table to the cellar where the remains had been found was a distance of only some fifteen or twenty feet,” Macnaghten wrote. It would have taken a character of cool temperament indeed to have continued cooking and dining while aware of what lay buried beyond the next door.

After seeing the remains thus far exposed, Macnaghten telephoned a friend, Dr. Augustus Pepper, at St. Mary’s Hospital. Pepper was a surgeon and one of the foremost practitioners of the emerging field of forensic pathology, “the beastly science,” and as such had helped investigate many of England’s ugliest murders. Recognizing that the hour was late and that much work had yet to be done to expose fully the remains, Macnaghten asked Dr. Pepper to come to the house first thing the next morning.

Macnaghten authorized Froest and Dew to spare no effort in solving the case. Dew prepared another circular, this for distribution to police throughout the world. He added photographs of Crippen and Le Neve and samples of their handwriting. He described each suspect in detail, including Crippen’s habit of throwing his feet out as he walked and his “slight Yankee accent,” and Le Neve’s penchant for appearing to listen “intently when in conversation.” He titled the circular “MURDER AND MUTILATION.”

The hunt for Crippen and Le Neve began in earnest, and suddenly Dew found himself at the center of a storm of effort and press scrutiny surpassed in his recollection only by the days of the Ripper.

THAT AFTERNOON IN LONDON two detectives from Scotland Yard’s Thames Division, Francis Barclay and Thomas Arle, began visiting ships moored at Millwall Docks to alert crews to the manhunt underway. Among the vessels they boarded was a single-screw steamship, the SS Montrose, owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s shipping division. After a ship’s officer informed them that the Montrose was not going to pick up any passengers in London, the detectives disembarked and continued on their way, but soon afterward they learned from another source along the wharf that while the Montrose would not accept passengers in London, it would do so in Antwerp, its next destination. The detectives returned to the ship and there met one of its junior officers.

The detectives told him about the recent discovery at Hilldrop Crescent and suggested that he might want “to take a few particulars.” The officer had a taste for mystery and invited Barclay and Arle into his cabin, where they conversed for about an hour. The detectives suggested that the fugitives might attempt to join the ship in Antwerp and described several likely ruses that Crippen and Le Neve might deploy. Crippen, they said, might be masquerading as a clergyman, and Miss Le Neve might try “to disguise herself in youth’s clothing.”

The ship’s officer said he would keep an alert watch and would pass the information to his captain, Henry George Kendall. The detectives departed and continued their canvass of the wharves.

IN BRUSSELS ETHEL began to feel that she was falling out of touch with the outside world. She could not read French, though Crippen could and bought copies of L’Etoile Belge. He spoke little about what he found in its pages.

“I asked him several times to try and get an English paper,” Ethel wrote, “but he never did.”