Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [158]
That Crippen intended to kill her cannot be doubted. What remains, then, is the likely reality that he had come to loathe Belle so completely, and to need Ethel so deeply, that when Belle lit into him for the minor infraction of failing to show Paul Martinetti to the bathroom, something in his soul fractured. Aided by gravity, he dragged Belle’s corpse to the basement and in an adrenaline-powered fugue set out to remove her from the world as utterly as if she had never existed. One of the three barristers assigned to his prosecution, Travers Humphreys, later wrote, “I never looked upon Crippen as a great criminal. He made a bad mistake and paid the penalty which Society provides for those who commit the crime of which he was rightly convicted, but in another country he would I feel sure have been given the benefit of ‘extenuating circumstances.’”
As to whether he had help, no one can ever know. Ethel’s jury accepted without quarrel her defense that she knew nothing of the killing. And yet there were aspects of Ethel that abraded the popular image of her as an unwitting and lovestruck companion. She wrote with sophistication. She was daring and craved adventure. Richard D. Muir, who led her prosecution as well as Crippen’s, seemed to have his doubts about her innocence. He wrote later, “Full justice has not yet been done.”
The missing portions of Belle’s body were never found, though Scotland Yard spent a good deal of time looking. Detectives probed Regent’s Canal where it passed through Regent’s Park. A London “sewerman” named Edward Hopper came forward and recommended that detectives examine the “intercepter” on the sewer line that drained waste from Nos. 38 and 39 Hilldrop Crescent. “We carefully examined a quantity of dirt and rubbish which was in the intercepter, but could not find any trace of flesh or bones,” wrote the detective in charge, one Sergeant Cornish.
Prior experience had taught Scotland Yard that English murderers had a predilection for stuffing bodies into trunks and leaving them at train stations, so the CID asked the managers of every station in London and its suburbs to check their cloakrooms for parcels and luggage left unclaimed since early February. They found mysterious boxes and suitcases of all sizes, including a trunk with three padlocks at the Cambridge Heath Station of the Great Eastern Railway. Police opened some of the abandoned cargo, but in most cases a simple external examination sufficed. Sergeant Cornish, in charge here as well, concluded his report, “There is no bad smell attached to any of the packages, all of which we are quite satisfied contain household effects and wearing apparel.”
The women of the Ladies’ Guild took custody of Belle’s remains from the Islington Mortuary Chapel of Ease. The Public Health Department was glad to see them go, judging them “likely to cause a serious nuisance.” At precisely 3:15 on October 11, 1910, a small cortege consisting of a horse-drawn hearse and three mourning coaches set off on a slow, sad drive across the top of London to the St. Pancras Cemetery in East Finchley. Soon afterward the ladies of the guild watched as a coffin bearing their old friend was set into the earth. The police were on hand to make sure spectators did not disrupt or crowd the service, and they reported that everything “passed off quietly.”
CHIEF INSPECTOR DEW saw the Crippen case as a fitting point at which to retire. His career as a detective had begun with a crime involving mutilation and murder, and now it ended with one. He felt great sympathy for Crippen and Le Neve. He wrote, “Dr. Crippen’s love for