Thunderstruck

“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