Thunderstruck

THE TABLE OF DROPS

TWO DAYS AFTER THE ARREST detectives learned for the first time of Crippen’s January purchase of five grains of hyoscine hydrobromide. Soon afterward Dr. Willcox, at St. Mary’s Hospital, confirmed that the alkaloid he had isolated was indeed hyoscine. He was able to extract two-fifths of a grain from the available remains but knew that if he had been able to analyze all of the body, the amount would have been far greater. Just a quarter grain could have been lethal. “If the fatal dose were given,” he said, “it would perhaps produce a little delirium and excitement at first; the pupils of the eyes would be paralyzed; the mouth and the throat would be dry, and then quickly the patient would become drowsy and unconscious and completely paralyzed, and death would result in a few hours.”

By now Willcox and colleagues were confident the remains were those of a woman, though this conclusion was based entirely on circumstantial evidence, namely the curlers, the bleached hair, and the fragments of a woman’s underclothing found in the excavation. The question of identity remained daunting until Dr. Pepper happened to reexamine the pieces of skin still held at the Islington Mortuary Chapel of Ease. One piece—the fragment measuring six by seven inches—had a mark on it about four inches long. Having learned from Chief Inspector Dew that Belle once underwent an abdominal operation, Pepper now took a closer look. It was possible, he decided, that the mark was a scar. He gave it to Willcox, who passed it on to the youngest member of the Home Office’s elite forensic group, Dr. Bernard Spilsbury, an expert on scars.

Investigators made another important discovery. Upon close examination, the torn pieces of pajama jacket found with the remains proved to match exactly the pajama bottoms that Dew had found at Hilldrop Crescent.

IN QUEBEC, WHILE AWAITING extradition, Crippen was lodged in a prison on the Plains of Abraham, where he seemed in good spirits and gave full play to his passion for reading. Ethel, feeling ill, was allowed initially to stay in the home of one of the Quebec inspectors, where Dew told her at last that he had found human remains in the cellar at Hilldrop Crescent. She stared at him, speechless, the expression on her face one of amazement.

Sergeant Mitchell arrived from London accompanied by two female officers to help Dew bring the captives back to England. Early one morning they smuggled Crippen and Le Neve into two closed carriages and raced over quiet, mist-shrouded country roads to a remote wharf, where all of them boarded a river steamship. No one followed. Soon afterward the little steamer intercepted the White Star liner Megantic, which halted and took them aboard.

Dew and Mitchell treated the captives with kindness. Dew’s manner was so paternal and solicitous that Ethel teasingly called him “Father.” During the voyage the inspector visited both Crippen and Le Neve in their cabins many times a day and always asked how they were faring. Crippen struck him as utterly untroubled. He ate well and slept well and conversed avidly about a broad range of subjects, though never about Belle. “He mystified me,” Dew wrote. “He seemed quite happy. He gave no trouble, and never once tried the patience of Sergeant Mitchell or myself. The impression he gave was that of a man with mind completely at rest.” Crippen’s main preoccupation, as always, was reading. “I used to fetch his books myself from the ship’s library, being careful, of course, never to get him one with a crime or murder plot,” Dew wrote. “He loved novels, especially those with a strong love interest.” At the Quebec prison, he had read Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope, then had autographed the book and given it to a guard for a souvenir.

Dew kept Crippen and Le Neve isolated from each other. Between eight and nine o’clock each evening the Megantic’s captain cleared the boat deck to allow the captives exercise. Crippen walked first, Le Neve second, the timing such that they never saw each other. This arrangement was painful for Crippen, and one day he begged Dew to allow him to see Le Neve just one time—not talk to her, just look at her. “I don’t know how things may go,” Crippen told him. “They may go all right or they may go all wrong with me. I may never see her again, and I want to ask if you will let me see her. I won’t speak to her. She has been my only comfort for the last three years.”

Dew arranged it. In mid-Atlantic, at an agreed-on time, he brought Crippen to the door of his cabin. Ethel appeared at her door thirty feet away. The two looked at each other and smiled. They did not speak. “I had to be present,” Dew wrote. “But somehow as I looked on I felt an interloper. Not a word was spoken. There were no hysterics on either side. Just a slight motion of the hand from one to the other. That was all.”

The encounter lasted perhaps a minute. They did not see each other again for the rest of the voyage.

CRIPPEN’S TRIAL WAS HELD first and began on October 18,1910. Four thousand people applied at the Old Bailey for tickets, so many that court authorities decided to issue passes good for only half a day, so that as many people as possible could attend. The spectators included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan. During the trial a sympathetic portrait of Crippen emerged. Witnesses described him as kind and generous, Belle as volatile and controlling. Even the women of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild could not find anything bad to say about him. In the typewriters of the press the case became a darkly shaded love story—a sad, abused man finds his soul mate, who loves him back, deeply and truly.

But then came the evidence of what had been done to the victim in the cellar. On the stand Spilsbury—thirty-three years old, achingly handsome, and wearing a red carnation—testified that he had determined without doubt that the mark on the six-by-seven-inch piece of skin was indeed a scar and likely to have been caused by surgery to remove a woman’s ovaries. At this point a soup plate containing the skin in question was passed among the jurors.

Misled by Spilsbury’s youth and his pampered appearance, the defense attacked headlong and brought forth two physicians who swore the mark could not have been a scar. Spilsbury held fast. He spoke with such quiet confidence and aplomb that he won the jury and became the darling of the press. The episode launched him on a career without parallel in the history of forensic medicine.

The scar, the pajamas, and Crippen’s purchase of hyoscine were damning, but there was broad agreement that what clinched the case for the Crown was an exchange between Crippen and the prosecuting barrister, Richard Muir, at the start of the second to last day of trial.

Muir asked, “On the early morning of the 1st of February you were left alone in your house with your wife?”

Crippen: “Yes.”

“She was alive?”

“She was.”

“Do you know of any person in the world who has seen her alive since?”

“I do not.”

“Do you know of any person in the world who has ever had a letter from her since?”

“I do not.”

“Do you know of any person in the world who can prove any fact showing that she ever left that house alive?”

“Absolutely not,” he said.

The jury stayed out for twenty-seven minutes and returned with a verdict of guilty. As the judge prepared to read his sentence, he donned a black scarf.

Ethel’s trial took place soon afterward, but her jury decided she had known nothing of the murder and set her free.

ON OCTOBER 25, 1910, Crippen was transferred to Pentonville Prison, in his old neighborhood. A warder took his money and jewelry, made him take off his clothes, and examined his ears and between his toes, then gave him a prison uniform. The fact of his incarceration did not stop one woman, Adele Cook, from writing to prison officials to ask if he might be allowed to write her a prescription. The reply: “The applicant should be informed that if she wishes to write letters for Crippen she may do so.”

He filed an appeal but failed to reverse his conviction. In a letter to Ethel he insisted he was innocent and that someday evidence would be discovered to prove it. He acknowledged, however, that his fate was sealed. He wrote, “It is comfort to my anguished heart to know you will always keep my image in your heart, and believe, my darling, we shall meet again in another life.” On November 23 he awoke to the certainty that he would never see another dawn.

Prison authorities filled out the required execution form, which they gave to the executioner, John Ellis, a village hairdresser who moonlighted as hangman. Ellis took careful note of Crippen’s weight, then consulted the “Table of Drops” to determine how far Crippen’s body should fall to ensure a death that was instant but not gory. Ellis was known to be an efficient hangman, though with a tendency to add a few more inches to the drop than strictly necessary.

Ellis saw that Crippen weighed 142 pounds. Next he checked the entry under “Character of prisoner’s neck” and found that Crippen’s neck was quite normal. Ellis saw too that his build was “proportional” and that he was only five feet, four inches tall. He set the length of drop at seven feet, nine inches.

For his last request, Crippen asked the prison governor, Major Mytton-Davies, to place a number of Ethel’s letters and her photograph in his coffin. The governor agreed.

At precisely nine A.M. Ellis released the floorboard, and an instant later Crippen’s neck broke, quite cleanly, at the third cervical vertebra. Happily for all present, his head remained attached.

The prison warder took note of the possessions he left behind: one overcoat, one coat, one waistcoat, one pair of trousers, two hats, four shirts, one pair of underwear, four socks, six handkerchiefs (one silk), ten collars, two bows, one pair of gloves, one gladstone bag, one toothbrush, a small amount of cash, and one pair of spectacles.

Ellis continued to moonlight as an executioner and at one point acted the role of hangman in a local play about a notorious criminal named Charles Peace. After the last performance he was allowed to take the scaffold home. When he was not hanging people or doing their hair, he demonstrated the art of execution at country fairs.

On September 20, 1932, he killed himself by slashing his own throat.

MYSTERY LINGERED AROUND THE CRIPPEN case like tulle fog at a cemetery. An editor for the magazine John Bull addressed an open letter to Crippen shortly before his execution in which he asked, “Was it your hand which did the deed, and was it your hand alone which sought to destroy all traces of the tragedy?” He did not believe it possible. “Tell me,” he wrote, “by what superhuman strength was the body of a heavy woman carried down below? Did you alone do that, and, in addition, dig the floor, remove the clay, cover up, rebrick and make good—you, a little, half-blind, elderly, weak and timid man? And, including the butchery, all in twenty-four hours!”

John Bull’s scenario did challenge the imagination. It presupposed that Crippen killed Belle somewhere upstairs, then dragged her down to the basement. The evidence at the grave certainly suggested that at one point or another dragging occurred. There were pieces of cord and a man’s handkerchief that had been tied tightly to form a loop. The handkerchief could have been secured around Belle’s neck, the cord then attached to it to form a convenient handle for towing—at least, that is, until the handkerchief became torn.

But maybe Crippen never dragged Belle’s entire corpse down to the basement. The remains of pajamas and a camisole suggest she was in nightclothes at the time of her death. Perhaps he killed her upstairs. He gave her poison, maybe in an evening brandy, and when she became disoriented, he led her to the upstairs bathroom. There, perhaps, she began to make far more noise than he had anticipated. It is possible he shot her, as the reports from neighbors suggested—though again such belated accounts must be treated with skepticism. More likely he strangled her. He tied his handkerchief tightly around her neck. She struggled but began to lose consciousness. She fell. Using all his strength, Crippen levered her body into the bathtub. He severed both her carotid arteries and waited as her body drained of blood. The tub provided an operating theater within which the gore could be contained and rinsed. He would not have risked leaving a trail of blood as he carried Belle’s head, hands, feet, and bones to the Regent’s Canal or the Cattle Market or some other suitable point of disposal. He brought the rest of Belle to the cellar in fragments.

There are problems with this theory as well. If Crippen had conducted his evisceration under such well-lit and controlled conditions, surely he would have recognized that he had left important pieces of evidence in the debris—the Hinde’s curlers, complete with strands of hair; the portions of pajama top; the camisole; the knotted handkerchief. Their presence in the remains suggests he worked under conditions far less ideal than the bathroom afforded, and that he overlooked them because they were masked by blood and viscera and darkness. As Belle lay dead, upstairs or down, he dug the grave in the cellar, planning to rely on the earthen walls of the excavation to contain the blood. He dragged her to the grave and then began his surgery. The light was not good. Blood coated everything. He pulled from the remains Belle’s head and the other portions that he hoped to get rid of, then rinsed them in the sink of the adjacent kitchen. He wrapped them carefully in oiled canvas or a raincoat and left them in the cellar, where he could be reasonably certain Ethel would not go. Over the next few nights, in installments, he carried off the head, bones, hands, and feet.

The most important question is how a man so mild and kind-hearted could resort to murder in the first place. One theory, put forth by a prominent jurist of the day, proposed that Crippen killed Belle by accident—that he deployed hyoscine merely to sedate her in order to buy himself a night of peace but miscalculated the dose. This seems improbable. Crippen knew the properties of hyoscine and knew how little of it would constitute a fatal dose. How much he actually gave her can never be known, but those familiar with the case believed he administered all five grains.

That Crippen intended to kill her cannot be doubted. What remains, then, is the likely reality that he had come to loathe Belle so completely, and to need Ethel so deeply, that when Belle lit into him for the minor infraction of failing to show Paul Martinetti to the bathroom, something in his soul fractured. Aided by gravity, he dragged Belle’s corpse to the basement and in an adrenaline-powered fugue set out to remove her from the world as utterly as if she had never existed. One of the three barristers assigned to his prosecution, Travers Humphreys, later wrote, “I never looked upon Crippen as a great criminal. He made a bad mistake and paid the penalty which Society provides for those who commit the crime of which he was rightly convicted, but in another country he would I feel sure have been given the benefit of ‘extenuating circumstances.’”

As to whether he had help, no one can ever know. Ethel’s jury accepted without quarrel her defense that she knew nothing of the killing. And yet there were aspects of Ethel that abraded the popular image of her as an unwitting and lovestruck companion. She wrote with sophistication. She was daring and craved adventure. Richard D. Muir, who led her prosecution as well as Crippen’s, seemed to have his doubts about her innocence. He wrote later, “Full justice has not yet been done.”

The missing portions of Belle’s body were never found, though Scotland Yard spent a good deal of time looking. Detectives probed Regent’s Canal where it passed through Regent’s Park. A London “sewerman” named Edward Hopper came forward and recommended that detectives examine the “intercepter” on the sewer line that drained waste from Nos. 38 and 39 Hilldrop Crescent. “We carefully examined a quantity of dirt and rubbish which was in the intercepter, but could not find any trace of flesh or bones,” wrote the detective in charge, one Sergeant Cornish.

Prior experience had taught Scotland Yard that English murderers had a predilection for stuffing bodies into trunks and leaving them at train stations, so the CID asked the managers of every station in London and its suburbs to check their cloakrooms for parcels and luggage left unclaimed since early February. They found mysterious boxes and suitcases of all sizes, including a trunk with three padlocks at the Cambridge Heath Station of the Great Eastern Railway. Police opened some of the abandoned cargo, but in most cases a simple external examination sufficed. Sergeant Cornish, in charge here as well, concluded his report, “There is no bad smell attached to any of the packages, all of which we are quite satisfied contain household effects and wearing apparel.”

The women of the Ladies’ Guild took custody of Belle’s remains from the Islington Mortuary Chapel of Ease. The Public Health Department was glad to see them go, judging them “likely to cause a serious nuisance.” At precisely 3:15 on October 11, 1910, a small cortege consisting of a horse-drawn hearse and three mourning coaches set off on a slow, sad drive across the top of London to the St. Pancras Cemetery in East Finchley. Soon afterward the ladies of the guild watched as a coffin bearing their old friend was set into the earth. The police were on hand to make sure spectators did not disrupt or crowd the service, and they reported that everything “passed off quietly.”

CHIEF INSPECTOR DEW saw the Crippen case as a fitting point at which to retire. His career as a detective had begun with a crime involving mutilation and murder, and now it ended with one. He felt great sympathy for Crippen and Le Neve. He wrote, “Dr. Crippen’s love for the girl, for whom he had risked so much, was the biggest thing in his whole life.”

He retired to a cottage called the Wee Hoose and in 1938 published a memoir, I Caught Crippen, in which he described the case as “the most intriguing murder mystery of the century.” He dedicated the book to his son, Stanley, killed during World War I, and to his three daughters, one of whom happened to be named Ethel.

He died at his cottage on December 16, 1947.

CAPTAIN KENDALL RECEIVED the £250 reward from the Home Office but never cashed the check. He had it framed instead.

The great chase made Kendall a world celebrity and a star within the Canadian Pacific Railway. He rose quickly within the company and became captain of the Empress of Ireland, the ship aboard which he previously had been first officer and that once had taken Marconi and Beatrice to Nova Scotia. Just before two in the morning, on May 29, 1914, in almost the same location where Dew had boarded the Montrose, a Norwegian freighter rammed the Empress in the midst of a thick, sudden fog. The freighter backed away and remained afloat. The Empress sank in fourteen minutes, at a cost of 1,012 lives. Kendall was thrown from the bridge into the water when the ship suddenly rolled onto its side. He survived.

The toll would have been higher if not for the presence of mind of Ronald Ferguson, the Empress’s senior Marconi officer, who managed to send a distress call before the ship’s power failed.

An inquiry absolved Kendall of blame, but the railway assigned him a desk job in Antwerp. This, however, did not long shelter him from adventure. He was there when World War I began. As the Germans raced to seize Antwerp, Kendall commandeered his old ship, the Montrose, and filled it and a sister ship with Belgian refugees, then used the Montrose to tow the latter to safety in Britain. He joined the Royal Navy and was given command of a ship, only to have it sunk by torpedo. After the war he spent another twenty years working for Canadian Pacific, again at a desk.

During the war, the Admiralty bought the Montrose and moored it at the entrance to Dover harbor as a guardship, but a storm tore it loose, drove it from the harbor, and destroyed it on the Goodwin Sands, where George Kemp had spent so many harrowing nights aboard the East Goodwin lightship. The Montrose did not go gently. One mast remained in view until June 22, 1963, when yachtsmen suddenly realized the old ship had left them at last.

Two years later the old captain left as well.

THE CASE OF DR. CRIPPEN became the subject of plays and books and drew the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who used elements in several of his movies, including Rope and Rear Window, and in at least one episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. There is a moment in Rear Window when the lead character, played by Jimmy Stewart, looks out at the sinister apartment across the way and says, “That’d be a terrible job to tackle. Just how would you start to cut up a human body?”

Crippen also proved a fascination for Raymond Chandler. He wondered at the inconsistencies of the case—how anyone as clearly intelligent and methodical as Crippen could have made the mistakes he made. In a 1948 letter to a friend Chandler mused, “I cannot see why a man who would go to the enormous labor of deboning and de-sexing and de-heading an entire corpse would not take the rather slight extra labor of disposing of the flesh in the same way, rather than bury it at all.” Chandler did not buy the widely held notion that Crippen would have been safe if he and Ethel had stayed in London rather than fleeing after Chief Inspector Dew’s initial visit. Eventually, Chandler wrote, Scotland Yard “would have come to the old digging routine.” He wondered too “why a man of so much coolness under fire should have made the unconsionable error of letting it be known that Elmore had left her jewels and clothes and furs behind. She was so obviously not the person to do that.”

These were mistakes that panicked men tended to make, Chandler argued. “But Crippen didn’t seem to panic at all. He did many things which required a very cool head. For a man with a cool head and some ability to think he also did many things which simply did not make sense.”

Chandler felt sympathy for Crippen. “You can’t help liking this guy somehow,” he wrote in another letter. “He was one murderer who died like a gentleman.”

A play called Captured by Wireless made the rounds in America and for one week in April 1912 occupied the stage of the Opera House in Coldwater, Michigan, Crippen’s hometown. “The play is full of comedy throughout,” the Coldwater Courier reported. In England the case continued to engage the popular imagination for decades and sparked the creation of a second theatrical production, a musical entitled Belle, or the Ballad of Doctor Crippen. It debuted on May 4, 1961, at the Strand Theater in London and presented its audience with two dozen musical numbers, including “Coldwater, Michigan,” “Pills, Pills, Pills,” and “The Dit-Dit Song.” The show lasted forty-four performances but proved a failure. England was not yet ready to mock this tragic confluence of love, murder, and invention. The Daily Mail headlined its review, “A Sick Joke With Music.”

DURING WORLD WAR II a Luftwaffe bomb hurtling shy of its mark landed on Hilldrop Crescent, obliterating No. 39 and a good portion of the block.