Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [137]
Dew found the pajamas particularly interesting. He and Sergeant Mitchell returned to Hilldrop Crescent for another search, this time with a specific goal in mind.
ETHEL GREW WEARY of Brussels. “I had exhausted all the shop windows, which I had gazed into at first with such delight, and now I wanted to move on somewhere else.”
She told Crippen of her ennui.
“Tired of Brussels already?” he said. “Very well, we will push on. How about Paris?”
“No,” she said, “not Paris. Somewhere else.”
Crippen suggested America.
On Friday, July 15, as Dew and the doctors probed the remains from Hilldrop Crescent, Crippen and Ethel stopped in at a ticket office and learned that one ship, the SS Montrose, was to depart Antwerp for Quebec the following Wednesday, July 20. They learned too that the ship carried only two classes of passengers, second and steerage. Crippen bought a cabin in second class. For purposes of the passenger manifest, he identified himself as John Philo Robinson, a fifty-five-year-old merchant from Detroit, and Ethel as his son, John George Robinson, age sixteen, a student. No one asked to see identification.
They planned to leave Brussels on July 19, spend that night in Antwerp, and board the ship first thing in the morning.
AT HILLDROP CRESCENT Chief Inspector Dew and Sergeant Mitchell concentrated on searching boxes and wardrobes and anything else in which clothing was stored. They found dresses and furs and shoes in quantities they still found staggering.
In a bag in Crippen’s bedroom Dew discovered two complete suits of green-striped pajamas that seemed similar to the fragments found with the remains, except that these were new and apparently never worn. He checked their collars for labels and found “Shirtmakers, Jones Brothers, Holloway, Limited.”
His search also turned up a single pair of pajama bottoms, white with green stripes, that showed signs of having been “very much worn.” He could not locate a matching jacket.
THE LONDON TIMES GAVE the mystery a name, “The North London Cellar Murder.” The Daily Mirror published photographs of the house and of the fugitive couple. The case seized the imagination of editors abroad, and soon news of the remains found at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent was the stuff of breakfast conversation for readers from New York to Istanbul. “There has never been a hue and cry like that which went up throughout the country for Crippen and Miss Le Neve,” Dew wrote.
The case dominated conversation everywhere, from the City to the Metropolitan Cattle Market, among the guards and prisoners at Holloway and Pentonville prisons, and at the Long Bar at the Criterion, and in the great clubs, the Bachelor’s, Union, Carlton, and Reform. “It was the one big topic of conversation,” Dew wrote. “On the trains and buses one heard members of the public speculating and theorizing as to where they were likely to be.”
Suddenly reports of sightings of Crippen and Le Neve began to arrive at New Scotland Yard. They came by telephone and telegram and by that latest miracle, the Marconigram. The urgency and number of these tips became amplified when the home secretary, Winston Churchill, authorized a reward of £250—$25,000 today—for information leading to the fugitives’ capture. “Not a day passed without Crippen and Miss Le Neve being reported to have been seen in some part of the country,” Dew wrote. “Sometimes they were alleged to have been in a dozen places at the same time.” Nearly every lead had to be examined. “One couldn’t afford to ignore even the slenderest chance,” he wrote, “and all such reports were carefully inquired into.”
One man who resembled Crippen found himself arrested twice and released twice. “On the first occasion he took the experience in good part,” Dew wrote, “but when the same thing happened a second time he was highly indignant, and said it was getting a habit.”
On this score the police were especially wary, for Scotland Yard was still smarting from the infamous example of Adolph Beck, a Norwegian engineer who over the preceding decade