Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [120]
The interview had barely begun when all realized it was time for lunch. Dew and Mitchell invited Crippen to join them, and the three left Albion House for a nearby Italian restaurant. Le Neve watched them go, chafing at Dew’s order to remain in the office and at his lack of courtesy in failing to notice that she might wish to have lunch as well. “Meanwhile,” she wrote, “I was absolutely fainting with hunger.”
Over lunch the men talked. Crippen ordered a steak “and ate it with the relish of a man who hadn’t a care in the world,” Dew wrote. He found himself liking Crippen. The doctor was gentle and courteous and spoke with what appeared to be candor. Nothing in his manner suggested deception or anxiety.
Once back in Crippen’s office, Dew continued his interview. He asked a question one way, then later asked it again in a different form to test the consistency of Crippen’s story.
“I realized that she had gone,” Crippen said, “and I sat down to think it over as to how to cover up her absence without any scandal.” He wrote to the guild that she had gone away. “I afterwards realized that this would not be a sufficient explanation for her not coming back, and later on I told people that she was ill with bronchitis and pneumonia, and afterwards I told them she was dead from this ailment.”
To “prevent people asking me a lot of questions,” he said, he placed a death notice in the show-business journal The Era.
He said, “So far as I know she did not die, but is still alive.”
Dew watched Crippen closely. “I was impressed by the man’s demeanor,” he wrote. “It was impossible to be otherwise. Much can sometimes be learned by an experienced police officer during the making of a statement. From Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen’s manner on this our first meeting, I learned nothing at all.”
The detectives then reduced Crippen’s story to a written statement. Crippen initialed each page and signed the last.
IT WAS ABOUT FIVE o’clock. Six hours had passed since the detectives had first come to Hilldrop Crescent. Ethel was hungry and annoyed but also fearful. With each hour the detectives had spent closeted with Crippen, her concern had deepened.
Now it was her turn, as Dew put it.
Ethel told the detectives about Belle’s sudden departure, her illness, and her death. Mitchell took careful notes. “The girl showed some signs of embarrassment when she came to the admissions about her relations with Crippen,” Dew wrote later. “But making due allowance for this, there was nothing in Miss Le Neve’s manner which gave rise to anything in the nature of suspicions.”
As had been the case with Crippen, nothing about the way she spoke suggested an attempt at deception. She seemed to be telling the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it, but Dew wanted to make sure.
He turned to her abruptly. “He told you a lie,” he said. “He has just admitted to us that, as far as he knows, his wife [is] still alive, and that the story of her death in America was all an invention.”
Any last doubt about her candor now disappeared.
“I WAS STUNNED,” Ethel wrote. “I could not believe it. It seemed impossible to me that Belle Elmore might still be alive.” Crippen would never have lied, she believed, and yet here was Dew confirming that he had done so. “Stricken with grief, with anger, with bewilderment, I answered all the questions put to me about my relations with the doctor, my love for him, and my life. But all the time I was thinking of the way I had been deceived if this story about Mrs. Crippen were true.”
She signed her statement, but the ordeal, she now learned, was not yet concluded.
TO BE THOROUGH, DEW wanted to search Crippen’s house. He knew, however, that no judge would give him the legal authority to do so. “There was not enough evidence against the man—indeed any evidence at all—on which I could have asked a magistrate for a search warrant.” He asked Crippen’s permission, and Crippen readily assented. Shortly after six that evening