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.”