Thunderstruck

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.