Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [157]
Ellis continued to moonlight as an executioner and at one point acted the role of hangman in a local play about a notorious criminal named Charles Peace. After the last performance he was allowed to take the scaffold home. When he was not hanging people or doing their hair, he demonstrated the art of execution at country fairs.
On September 20, 1932, he killed himself by slashing his own throat.
MYSTERY LINGERED AROUND THE CRIPPEN case like tulle fog at a cemetery. An editor for the magazine John Bull addressed an open letter to Crippen shortly before his execution in which he asked, “Was it your hand which did the deed, and was it your hand alone which sought to destroy all traces of the tragedy?” He did not believe it possible. “Tell me,” he wrote, “by what superhuman strength was the body of a heavy woman carried down below? Did you alone do that, and, in addition, dig the floor, remove the clay, cover up, rebrick and make good—you, a little, half-blind, elderly, weak and timid man? And, including the butchery, all in twenty-four hours!”
John Bull’s scenario did challenge the imagination. It presupposed that Crippen killed Belle somewhere upstairs, then dragged her down to the basement. The evidence at the grave certainly suggested that at one point or another dragging occurred. There were pieces of cord and a man’s handkerchief that had been tied tightly to form a loop. The handkerchief could have been secured around Belle’s neck, the cord then attached to it to form a convenient handle for towing—at least, that is, until the handkerchief became torn.
But maybe Crippen never dragged Belle’s entire corpse down to the basement. The remains of pajamas and a camisole suggest she was in nightclothes at the time of her death. Perhaps he killed her upstairs. He gave her poison, maybe in an evening brandy, and when she became disoriented, he led her to the upstairs bathroom. There, perhaps, she began to make far more noise than he had anticipated. It is possible he shot her, as the reports from neighbors suggested—though again such belated accounts must be treated with skepticism. More likely he strangled her. He tied his handkerchief tightly around her neck. She struggled but began to lose consciousness. She fell. Using all his strength, Crippen levered her body into the bathtub. He severed both her carotid arteries and waited as her body drained of blood. The tub provided an operating theater within which the gore could be contained and rinsed. He would not have risked leaving a trail of blood as he carried Belle’s head, hands, feet, and bones to the Regent’s Canal or the Cattle Market or some other suitable point of disposal. He brought the rest of Belle to the cellar in fragments.
There are problems with this theory as well. If Crippen had conducted his evisceration under such well-lit and controlled conditions, surely he would have recognized that he had left important pieces of evidence in the debris—the Hinde’s curlers, complete with strands of hair; the portions of pajama top; the camisole; the knotted handkerchief. Their presence in the remains suggests he worked under conditions far less ideal than the bathroom afforded, and that he overlooked them because they were masked by blood and viscera and darkness. As Belle lay dead, upstairs or down, he dug the grave in the cellar, planning to rely on the earthen walls of the excavation to contain the blood. He dragged her to the grave and then began his surgery. The light was not good. Blood coated everything. He pulled from the remains Belle’s head and the other portions that he hoped to get rid of, then rinsed them in the sink of the adjacent kitchen. He wrapped them carefully in oiled canvas or a raincoat and left them in the cellar, where he could be reasonably certain Ethel would not go. Over the next few nights, in installments, he carried off the head, bones, hands, and feet.
The most important question is how a man so mild and kind-hearted could resort to murder in the first place.