FIVE JARS
ON THURSDAY, JULY 14, 1910, two men from the Islington Mortuary Chapel of Ease on Holloway Road came to Hilldrop Crescent to collect the remains and bring them back to the mortuary for a formal postmortem examination, to be conducted the next morning by Drs. Pepper and Marshall. The mortuary’s men brought a coffin. Two constables placed the remains inside, using only their bare hands.
Dew and the two doctors watched this process closely and from time to time selected items to be placed on a tray beside the excavation. They found a Hinde’s curler with hair still crimped to its vulcanite core; two pieces of what appeared to be a woman’s “undervest,” or camisole, with six buttons and lace around the neck; and a large man’s handkerchief, white, with a reef knot connecting two corners, the portion opposite torn through. Affixed to the handkerchief were a number of strands of fair hair.
Dew also retrieved a length of “coarse string” fifteen inches long, and a second piece eleven inches long, and theorized that these, along with the knotted handkerchief, “might well have been used for strangulation, or for dragging portions of the body along.”
The mortuary’s men sealed the coffin and loaded it into an undertaker’s van. As appalled neighbors looked on, the men drove slowly from the crescent onto Camden Road.
The next morning Pepper, Marshall, and Dew gathered at the Islington Mortuary for the formal postmortem. Pepper long ago had ceased to be squeamish about work such as this and saw the examination not as a horrific task but as the first step in resolving an engrossing puzzle, far more compelling, certainly, than conducting a routine examination of a victim who had died of a gunshot wound or been bludgeoned with a drainpipe.
First, with delicacy, he probed the mass of tissue and teased out all organs, muscles, and tendons that he was able to recognize. “There was one large mass which comprised the liver, stomach, gullet, lower 2? inches of the windpipe, 2 lungs, the heart in its bag intact, the diaphragm or septus between the chest and abdomen, the kidneys, the pancreas, spleen, all the small intestines and greater part of the large”—all of this in one continuous chain. (In fact, as Pepper later realized, one kidney was missing.)
The connectedness was noteworthy. “It would not be a difficult thing to remove all this mass in one part from the body, but it would be a difficult thing to do it as it was done,” Pepper said. “There was no cut or tear in any of the viscera, except where it was necessary for removal. There is a cut at the upper part where the gullet and windpipe were severed and at the large intestine and lower part. This showed that the person who removed the viscera was possessed of considerable dexterity: this must have been done by someone with either a considerable anatomical knowledge or someone who had been accustomed to the evisceration of animals (including human beings).”
Amid the discarded skin he found a few individual pieces that seemed worthy of extra attention. One measured seven by six inches. It had a gray-yellow hue that deepened in places to blackish gray and carried an odd mark on its surface. Pepper set it aside for closer study. He also examined the strands of hair caught in the Hinde’s curler that Dew had found in the cellar. The longest strand was eight inches, the shortest, two and a half. That the hair had not come from a wig was obvious, for each strand was cut only at one end. “False hair,” as Pepper put it, inevitably was cut at both ends. Where the hair was trapped around the core of the curler, its color ranged from yellow to light brown, clear evidence that the hair had been bleached.
As Pepper probed, he found additional man-made articles, including the sleeve of a pajama jacket made of white cotton with broad green stripes, and the “right posterior portion” of what appeared to be the same jacket, in which he found a label: “Shirtmakers, Jones Brothers, Holloway, Limited.” This portion was stained with blood.
Pepper’s initial examination suggested the victim was a woman, though the evidence was only circumstantial and was in part rebutted by the presence in the remains of a man’s handkerchief and pajama top. The bleached hair, however, gave Pepper and Chief Inspector Dew confidence that the remains were indeed female and thus increased the likelihood that the victim was Belle Elmore. According to her friends in the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, she had bleached her hair blond.
Dr. Pepper placed certain organs and the reserved man-made articles into five large jars, for safekeeping. The pajama arm went into jar number four by itself; the rear portion with collar went into jar number five. The jars were stoppered, covered with white paper, tied with tape, then secured with the seal of the coroner’s office.
Dew found the pajamas particularly interesting. He and Sergeant Mitchell returned to Hilldrop Crescent for another search, this time with a specific goal in mind.
ETHEL GREW WEARY of Brussels. “I had exhausted all the shop windows, which I had gazed into at first with such delight, and now I wanted to move on somewhere else.”
She told Crippen of her ennui.
“Tired of Brussels already?” he said. “Very well, we will push on. How about Paris?”
“No,” she said, “not Paris. Somewhere else.”
Crippen suggested America.
On Friday, July 15, as Dew and the doctors probed the remains from Hilldrop Crescent, Crippen and Ethel stopped in at a ticket office and learned that one ship, the SS
They planned to leave Brussels on July 19, spend that night in Antwerp, and board the ship first thing in the morning.
AT HILLDROP CRESCENT Chief Inspector Dew and Sergeant Mitchell concentrated on searching boxes and wardrobes and anything else in which clothing was stored. They found dresses and furs and shoes in quantities they still found staggering.
In a bag in Crippen’s bedroom Dew discovered two complete suits of green-striped pajamas that seemed similar to the fragments found with the remains, except that these were new and apparently never worn. He checked their collars for labels and found “Shirtmakers, Jones Brothers, Holloway, Limited.”
His search also turned up a single pair of pajama bottoms, white with green stripes, that showed signs of having been “very much worn.” He could not locate a matching jacket.
THE LONDON
The case dominated conversation everywhere, from the City to the Metropolitan Cattle Market, among the guards and prisoners at Holloway and Pentonville prisons, and at the Long Bar at the Criterion, and in the great clubs, the Bachelor’s, Union, Carlton, and Reform. “It was the one big topic of conversation,” Dew wrote. “On the trains and buses one heard members of the public speculating and theorizing as to where they were likely to be.”
Suddenly reports of sightings of Crippen and Le Neve began to arrive at New Scotland Yard. They came by telephone and telegram and by that latest miracle, the Marconigram. The urgency and number of these tips became amplified when the home secretary, Winston Churchill, authorized a reward of ?250—$25,000 today—for information leading to the fugitives’ capture. “Not a day passed without Crippen and Miss Le Neve being reported to have been seen in some part of the country,” Dew wrote. “Sometimes they were alleged to have been in a dozen places at the
