Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [138]
Dew met with the Crippen duplicate and found no particular likeness. “I did what I could to pour oil on troubled waters, offering the man my profound apologies; and after a while I was able to make him see that the police officer who had made the mistake was really only doing his duty.”
ON FRIDAY, JULY 15, Dew and Mitchell visited Emily Jackson for the first time and heard her tell of Le Neve’s miscarriage and the period in late January 1910 when she had seemed so depressed and perturbed. They revisited Clara Martinetti, this time at her bungalow on the Thames, and collected details of the dinner at the Crippens’ house when she had last seen Belle alive. They interviewed Marion Louisa Curnow, a manager at Munyon’s. She reported that on the day he disappeared she had cashed a check for him in the amount of £37, more than $3,700 today. She paid him in gold.
At every stop Dew and Mitchell and the detectives working with them heard anew how kind and good-natured Crippen was. Witness after witness portrayed him as too gentle to cause harm to anyone. A former neighbor, Emily Cowderoy, told one detective how she had never heard Crippen speak crossly to his wife. “They were on exceedingly good terms with each other,” she said. The phrase that police heard most often in describing Crippen was “kind-hearted.”
Yet there in Crippen’s house at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Dew had seen the eviscerated remnants of a human being who in all likelihood had once been Crippen’s wife. What kind of strength, both psychic and physical, did one need to fillet one’s helpmate?
It stretched plausibility to envision Crippen conducting the many different acts of dissection necessary to reduce so robust a woman to the mass unearthed in the cellar. How had he done it? Where did he begin? At the head? Perhaps a quick decapitation with a butcher’s knife, maybe the same knife he had used to carve the “joint” of beef during that last dinner with the Martinettis on January 31. Or did he start with the feet, working his way up from the easy portions and coping with each new challenge as he went along? No bones remained, not even the tiny bones of the hands and feet. No doubt he simply had disposed of these extremities, but as he moved upward, then what? What tools did he use to strip muscle and tendon from the rib cage? By what means did he dislocate and detach the upper arms from the shoulders? As he advanced, did he experience elation, or was each step a source of sorrow and bittersweet recollection?
And what of the janitorial aspects? How did he cleanse the house of blood and viscera so well as to leave no apparent trace? On that score Crippen’s bull terrier had perhaps proved an able assistant. The missing portions—the head, pelvis, and outer extremities—clearly had been disposed of elsewhere.
At Dew’s direction, police searched the garden. They probed with spades and in places dug deep but found none of the missing components. They searched neighboring yards and mused about likely repositories—perhaps the rendering pits and waste basins and hog sloughs of the Metropolitan Cattle Market, or the nearby channel of the Regent’s Canal, which ran through North London toward Regent’s Park. The canal passed under Camden Road three-quarters of a mile south of Hilldrop Crescent, an easy walk for a man with a satchel; an even easier journey if one dared carry such macabre cargo on the electric tram.
Could Crippen have done all this and, further, could he have done it without help? If so, how had he steeled himself, and how had he then managed to erase the knowledge of the act from his eyes and visage?
BY WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, the challenge confronting Chief Inspector Dew had become far more daunting. Somehow Crippen