Thunderstruck

CAGE OF GLASS

ABOARD THE LAURENTIC FELLOW PASSENGERS knew Chief Inspector Dew only as Mr. Dewhurst, and on the Montrose Crippen and Le Neve remained the Robinsons, but suddenly millions of readers around the world now knew, or at least suspected, their real identities. On Sunday Scotland Yard released a brief statement:

“It is believed that ‘Dr’ Crippen and Miss Le Neve are now on board a vessel bound for Canada. Chief Inspector Dew has left Liverpool for Canada, and hopes to overtake the fugitives and arrest them on arrival.”

It took only a bit more effort by reporters to learn the names of the ships involved and the contents of Kendall’s initial message. Marconi operators on other ships had intercepted it and passed it on. Aboard inbound liners the news moved from passenger to passenger. Some ships may even have reported the telegram in their onboard newspapers. Foreign correspondents based in London passed the news by cable to their editors in New York, Berlin, Stockholm, and New Delhi, and soon the front pages of newspapers around the world bloomed with maps of the Atlantic showing the supposed relative positions of the Montrose and the Laurentic.

The story consumed the editors of the Daily Mail, who offered a reward of £100—about $10,000 today—for information about Crippen and Le Neve. On Tuesday the paper reported, “At noon to-day the Laurentic will be only 253 knots (285 miles) behind the Montrose.” The article predicted that Dew would try to intercept the ship at Father Point in the St. Lawrence River, where pilots boarded large ships to guide them to Quebec. One article speculated that Crippen would realize, eventually, that he had been discovered—“that he will not before long have gauged the fact that the cracking, snapping, in the ‘wireless’ cabin means that messages about him are flying to and fro across the hundreds of miles of sea. All on board will assume that nothing is amiss, and even those who know most will pretend an ignorance of the fact that the air is quivering with wireless messages transmitted, perhaps, by intervening ships. It will be a voyage which no one aboard will be likely to forget.”

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 stories had circulated through the neighborhood many times over, each time gaining detail and color. Still, the accounts were consistent and thus worthy of record.

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.”