Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [147]
The most detailed report came from a man who lived at No. 54 Brecknock and whose garden was only several yards from the rear of the Crippens’ house. A metalworker and auditor of two private clubs, Frederick Evans had been out with friends at a public house, the Orange Tree, and returned home at about 1:18 A.M. He knew the time because each night when he rounded the corner of Brecknock Road, he made it a practice to stop in front of a jewelers’ shop and adjust his watch. “I had been indoors a few minutes and taken my boots off when I heard a terrible screech which terminated with a long dragging whine,” he said. As best he could tell, whoever had screamed had been outdoors or in a room with the windows wide open. “It startled me and I at once thought of the Ripper murders, and knowing the locality and that Parmetes Row, a turning out of Hilldrop Crescent, is frequented by prostitutes, I thought it was one of these poor creatures in trouble.”
He put his boots back on, checked on his wife, and went outside and quickly walked through the neighborhood, along Brecknock and Hilldrop Crescent and Camden Road, but saw nothing suspicious. Like Miss Hachenberger he checked the newspapers to see if a crime had been discovered.
He also told Crutchett that a few days later, while he was in his garden, he scented what he called a “strong burning smell.” At first he thought it was the odor of burning leaves, but it was midwinter and there were no leaves left to burn. He concluded that “perhaps somebody had stripped a room and was burning the old wallpaper.” The fires continued over the next several mornings. At one point he looked over his wall and saw smoke rising from the Crippens’ garden. He had never known the Crippens to burn refuse before. He also told Crutchett that another neighbor had seen Crippen carrying a “burning substance” in a white enamel pail, which Crippen then emptied into a dustbin and stirred.
Evans said he missed Belle. He and his wife had enjoyed hearing her sing as she worked in the garden.
Crutchett tracked down the “dustman” employed by the Islington Borough Council to collect refuse from Hilldrop Crescent. Every Wednesday for nine years William Curtis had come to No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent to empty the accumulated waste. He told Crutchett that in February 1910 he and another dustman, James Jackson, took from the Crippens’ back garden four and a half baskets of partially burned material, in addition to the ordinary contents of the dustbin. “There was burnt stuff of all description, paper, clothing, womens petticoats, old skirts, blouses,” Curtis said.
On the next two Wednesdays Curtis and Jackson took away additional baskets of burned refuse, though it had been reduced entirely to ash. In his years as a dustman Curtis had learned to tell one kind of ash from another. This ash, he told Crutchett, was not ordinary fireplace ash; nor was it the ash one would expect to find after incinerating paper. “It was very light stuff, white ash,” Curtis said. He added, “I did not see any bones amongst it.”
Just how much credence could be given to all these accounts was unclear. None of the witnesses had seen fit to report the shots and screams to police at the time they occurred. As any detective knew, one had to treat such belated reports with a good deal of skepticism, especially in the midst of an investigation as celebrated as this one. It was likely that stories had circulated through