same time.” Nearly every lead had to be examined. “One couldn’t afford to ignore even the slenderest chance,” he wrote, “and all such reports were carefully inquired into.”
One man who resembled Crippen found himself arrested twice and released twice. “On the first occasion he took the experience in good part,” Dew wrote, “but when the same thing happened a second time he was highly indignant, and said it was getting a habit.”
On this score the police were especially wary, for Scotland Yard was still smarting from the infamous example of Adolph Beck, a Norwegian engineer who over the preceding decade and a half had been erroneously imprisoned for fraud, not once but twice, on the basis of eyewitness testimony, while the look-alike who actually had done the crimes remained free. The most important lesson of this “lamentable business,” wrote Sir Melville Macnaghten, “was unquestionably the extreme unreliability of personal identification.”
Dew met with the Crippen duplicate and found no particular likeness. “I did what I could to pour oil on troubled waters, offering the man my profound apologies; and after a while I was able to make him see that the police officer who had made the mistake was really only doing his duty.”
ON FRIDAY, JULY 15, Dew and Mitchell visited Emily Jackson for the first time and heard her tell of Le Neve’s miscarriage and the period in late January 1910 when she had seemed so depressed and perturbed. They revisited Clara Martinetti, this time at her bungalow on the Thames, and collected details of the dinner at the Crippens’ house when she had last seen Belle alive. They interviewed Marion Louisa Curnow, a manager at Munyon’s. She reported that on the day he disappeared she had cashed a check for him in the amount of ?37, more than $3,700 today. She paid him in gold.
At every stop Dew and Mitchell and the detectives working with them heard anew how kind and good- natured Crippen was. Witness after witness portrayed him as too gentle to cause harm to anyone. A former neighbor, Emily Cowderoy, told one detective how she had never heard Crippen speak crossly to his wife. “They were on exceedingly good terms with each other,” she said. The phrase that police heard most often in describing Crippen was “kind-hearted.”
Yet there in Crippen’s house at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Dew had seen the eviscerated remnants of a human being who in all likelihood had once been Crippen’s wife. What kind of strength, both psychic and physical, did one need to fillet one’s helpmate?
It stretched plausibility to envision Crippen conducting the many different acts of dissection necessary to reduce so robust a woman to the mass unearthed in the cellar. How had he done it? Where did he begin? At the head? Perhaps a quick decapitation with a butcher’s knife, maybe the same knife he had used to carve the “joint” of beef during that last dinner with the Martinettis on January 31. Or did he start with the feet, working his way up from the easy portions and coping with each new challenge as he went along? No bones remained, not even the tiny bones of the hands and feet. No doubt he simply had disposed of these extremities, but as he moved upward, then what? What tools did he use to strip muscle and tendon from the rib cage? By what means did he dislocate and detach the upper arms from the shoulders? As he advanced, did he experience elation, or was each step a source of sorrow and bittersweet recollection?
And what of the janitorial aspects? How did he cleanse the house of blood and viscera so well as to leave no apparent trace? On that score Crippen’s bull terrier had perhaps proved an able assistant. The missing portions— the head, pelvis, and outer extremities—clearly had been disposed of elsewhere.
At Dew’s direction, police searched the garden. They probed with spades and in places dug deep but found none of the missing components. They searched neighboring yards and mused about likely repositories—perhaps the rendering pits and waste basins and hog sloughs of the Metropolitan Cattle Market, or the nearby channel of the Regent’s Canal, which ran through North London toward Regent’s Park. The canal passed under Camden Road three-quarters of a mile south of Hilldrop Crescent, an easy walk for a man with a satchel; an even easier journey if one dared carry such macabre cargo on the electric tram.
Could Crippen have done all this and, further, could he have done it without help? If so, how had he steeled himself, and how had he then managed to erase the knowledge of the act from his eyes and visage?
BY WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, the challenge confronting Chief Inspector Dew had become far more daunting. Somehow Crippen and Le Neve had evaded detection despite a manhunt of an intensity that Sir Melville Macnaghten believed had been surpassed only once in the history of Scotland Yard: the hunt for Jack the Ripper. Eleven days had elapsed since Crippen and Le Neve left Albion House and disappeared. The fastest ocean liners could cross the Atlantic in less than a week. The fugitives quite literally could be anywhere.
And indeed, sightings now poured in from around the globe. One caller swore she saw Crippen and Le Neve strolling along the Seine arm in arm. Another spotted them on a ship in the Bosporus. They were in Spain—and Switzerland.
Mrs. Isabel Ginnette, the president of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, happened to be in New York City and volunteered her services to the police. Accompanied by detectives, she visited the wharves as liners arrived and watched closely for any sign of Crippen and the typist. Mrs. Ginnette and the police boarded one of the newest and most celebrated ships, Cunard’s
On July 20 New York police arrested a passenger who had arrived aboard the
The lack of forward motion in the investigation was discouraging and a source of mounting anxiety for Dew. There had been one recent bit of progress, however. It had come two days earlier, by chance, just after the close of the first coroner’s inquest on the remains.
The proceeding itself had buoyed Dew’s spirits, for the coroner in his opening remarks had praised the chief inspector. “Many a man might have gone into that cellar and made no discovery. It remained for a detective with a genius for his work to go a step further.”
Afterward, in the hall outside, Dew happened to be standing near a group of women, one of them Clara Martinetti, and overheard her say something about Belle having once had a serious operation.
He took her aside and asked if he had heard correctly.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Martinetti said. “Belle had an operation years ago in America. She had quite a big scar on the lower part of her body. I have seen it.”
Dew recognized that this could be a vital clue. If evidence of that operation could be found among the remains now stored at the Islington Mortuary Chapel of Ease, it would greatly support Dew’s presumption that the victim was Belle Elmore. He relayed the information to Dr. Pepper.
Nonetheless, as of Wednesday, July 20, Dew was keenly aware that his investigation, the biggest and most scrutinized of the new century, had stalled. He knew also that not everyone shared the coroner’s appreciation of his investigative genius. At least one newspaper, the
TESTAMENT
