Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [133]
Most notable, however, was all that was absent. There was nothing to confirm sex. No sign of hands or feet. No teeth. The head and scalp were missing. And there were no bones whatsoever. None. Dew wrote, “Someone had simply carved the flesh off the bones and laid it there.”
The scope of the challenge ahead immediately became clear. It was one thing to infer from the circumstances of the case that the remains had once been Belle Elmore; it was quite another to prove it beyond doubt. The first step was to confirm that the remains were human. That proved simple: The organs were in such good condition that Dr. Marshall on first viewing was able to confirm their provenance.
It was equally obvious, however, that nothing else would be so easy. The next challenge was to identify the sex of the victim, yet no reproductive organs, pelvic bones, or other physical markers of gender could be found, save for one lump of tissue that seemed, at first, as though it might have been a portion of a female breast. Once the sex was confirmed—if ever—then Dew would have to prove that the woman was Belle Elmore. Next he would have to find the cause of death, to determine beyond doubt whether she had been murdered or had died from illness or accident. Finally he would have to determine who killed her.
What lay before him in the cellar was an affront to his working hypothesis that the killer was Dr. Crippen. It defied physics and common sense. Crippen was five feet four inches tall and of slight build. Everyone Dew had interviewed described him as kind, gentle, and affectionate. How could he kill a woman so much larger and more robust than he and then marshal the physical and mental stamina to bring her to the basement, strip the flesh from her body, remove her head, denude every bone, somehow dispose of head, bones, teeth, and sexual organs, and then bury the remainder in his cellar, all without showing signs of physical or emotional duress?
According to witnesses, on the day after Belle had last been seen alive Crippen was his usual calm and peaceful self, cheerful and ready with a smile. That day he had stopped by the Martinettis to check on Paul, and Mrs. Martinetti had noticed nothing unusual about his demeanor.
But three facts were beyond challenge:
—a mass of human remains lay in Crippen’s cellar;
—Belle had disappeared; and
—Crippen and his typist, Miss Le Neve, seemed to have fled.
MACNAGHTEN AND FROEST ARRIVED, bearing cigars. Dew showed the men the cellar and walked them through the rest of the house. What most struck Macnaghten was how near the burial site was to Crippen’s kitchen and breakfast area. “From the doctor’s chair at the head of the dining-room table to the cellar where the remains had been found was a distance of only some fifteen or twenty feet,” Macnaghten wrote. It would have taken a character of cool temperament indeed to have continued cooking and dining while aware of what lay buried beyond the next door.
After seeing the remains thus far exposed, Macnaghten telephoned a friend, Dr. Augustus Pepper, at St. Mary’s Hospital. Pepper was a surgeon and one of the foremost practitioners of the emerging field of forensic pathology, “the beastly science,” and as such had helped investigate many of England’s ugliest murders. Recognizing that the hour was late and that much work had yet to be done to expose fully the remains, Macnaghten asked Dr. Pepper to come to the house first thing the next morning.
Macnaghten authorized Froest and Dew to spare no effort in solving the case. Dew prepared another circular, this for distribution to police throughout the world. He added photographs of Crippen and Le Neve and samples of their handwriting. He described each suspect in detail, including Crippen’s habit of throwing his feet out as he walked and his