Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [159]
He retired to a cottage called the Wee Hoose and in 1938 published a memoir, I Caught Crippen, in which he described the case as “the most intriguing murder mystery of the century.” He dedicated the book to his son, Stanley, killed during World War I, and to his three daughters, one of whom happened to be named Ethel.
He died at his cottage on December 16, 1947.
CAPTAIN KENDALL RECEIVED the £250 reward from the Home Office but never cashed the check. He had it framed instead.
The great chase made Kendall a world celebrity and a star within the Canadian Pacific Railway. He rose quickly within the company and became captain of the Empress of Ireland, the ship aboard which he previously had been first officer and that once had taken Marconi and Beatrice to Nova Scotia. Just before two in the morning, on May 29, 1914, in almost the same location where Dew had boarded the Montrose, a Norwegian freighter rammed the Empress in the midst of a thick, sudden fog. The freighter backed away and remained afloat. The Empress sank in fourteen minutes, at a cost of 1,012 lives. Kendall was thrown from the bridge into the water when the ship suddenly rolled onto its side. He survived.
The toll would have been higher if not for the presence of mind of Ronald Ferguson, the Empress’s senior Marconi officer, who managed to send a distress call before the ship’s power failed.
An inquiry absolved Kendall of blame, but the railway assigned him a desk job in Antwerp. This, however, did not long shelter him from adventure. He was there when World War I began. As the Germans raced to seize Antwerp, Kendall commandeered his old ship, the Montrose, and filled it and a sister ship with Belgian refugees, then used the Montrose to tow the latter to safety in Britain. He joined the Royal Navy and was given command of a ship, only to have it sunk by torpedo. After the war he spent another twenty years working for Canadian Pacific, again at a desk.
During the war, the Admiralty bought the Montrose and moored it at the entrance to Dover harbor as a guardship, but a storm tore it loose, drove it from the harbor, and destroyed it on the Goodwin Sands, where George Kemp had spent so many harrowing nights aboard the East Goodwin lightship. The Montrose did not go gently. One mast remained in view until June 22, 1963, when yachtsmen suddenly realized the old ship had left them at last.
Two years later the old captain left as well.
THE CASE OF DR. CRIPPEN became the subject of plays and books and drew the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who used elements in several of his movies, including Rope and Rear Window, and in at least one episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. There is a moment in Rear Window when the lead character, played by Jimmy Stewart, looks out at the sinister apartment across the way and says, “That’d be a terrible job to tackle. Just how would you start to cut up a human body?”
Crippen also proved a fascination for Raymond Chandler. He wondered at the inconsistencies of the case—how anyone as clearly intelligent and methodical as Crippen could have made the mistakes he made. In a 1948 letter to a friend Chandler mused, “I cannot see why a man who would go to the enormous labor of deboning and de-sexing and de-heading an entire corpse would not take the rather slight extra labor of disposing of the flesh in the same way, rather than bury it at all.” Chandler did not buy the widely held notion that Crippen would have been safe if he and Ethel had stayed in London rather than fleeing after Chief Inspector Dew’s initial visit. Eventually, Chandler wrote, Scotland Yard “would have come to the old digging routine.” He wondered too “why a man of so much coolness under fire should have made the unconsionable error of letting it be known that Elmore had left her jewels and clothes and furs behind. She was so obviously not the person to do that.”
These were mistakes that panicked men tended to make, Chandler argued. “But Crippen didn’t seem to panic at all.