Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

  Suddenly Beatrice appeared.

  She had expected him to be delighted by her surprise visit, but instead, according to Degna, his welcome “was like a pail of icy water poured over her head. Returning to his bachelor habits, he was having a gay time with the ship’s passengers…. The last thing he expected or wanted to see, popping out of the sea like a mermaid, was his wife’s face.”

  Beatrice fled to Marconi’s cabin, where she spent the night in tears.

  The next morning Marconi apologized and urged her to come join the group. Beatrice refused. She felt awful, and believed she looked awful, and did not feel up to competing for her husband’s attention among such a glamorous crowd. She stayed in the cabin until the ship reached Liverpool.

  THE MYSTERY DEEPENS

  WHERE THE BRICKS HAD LAIN, Dew found a flat surface of clay. He broke into it with the spade and found that the soil underneath seemed to be loose, or at least looser than it would have been had it lain there undisturbed for a period of years. He thrust the spade in deeper. The unmistakable odor of putrefaction struck him full in the face and sent him reeling. “The stench was unbearable,” he wrote, “driving us both into the garden for fresh air.”

  Outside in the brilliant cool green, Dew and Sergeant Mitchell steeled themselves. With one last full breath they reentered the cellar, where the odor now suffused the entire chamber. Dew removed two more spadefuls of earth and found what appeared to be a mass of decomposing tissue. Once again he and Mitchell were driven from the house. They gulped the fresh cool air, found brandy, and took long draughts of it before entering the cellar a third time. They uncovered more tissue and viscera, enough to convince them that the remains were those of a human being.

  At five-thirty Dew called his immediate boss, Superintendent Froest, head of the Murder Squad, and told him of the discovery. Froest notified Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, in charge of the entire Criminal Investigation Department. As Macnaghten left his office, he grabbed a handful of cigars, with the idea that Dew and Mitchell might need them to counter the awful stench. He and Froest set out immediately in a department motorcar. Traveling first along the Embankment, they moved through air gilded with sun-suffused haze, the Thames a lovely cobalt edged with black shadow.

  DR. THOMAS MARSHALL, divisional surgeon for Scotland Yard’s “Y” Division, which encompassed Hilldrop Crescent and the surrounding district, walked over from his practice on nearby Caversham Road. His task would be to lead the postmortem examination once the remains were removed from the house.

  He and Dew watched the constables dig. Lanterns had replaced candles, and the close work had begun, the constables on their knees pushing dirt away with their hands as macabre shadows played on the surrounding walls. The men concentrated on an opening at the center of the floor about four feet long by two feet wide.

  What Dew saw before him evoked recollection of his discovery of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and begged comparison: This was worse. The remains bore no resemblance to a human body, and the distortion had nothing to do with decomposition. In fact, much was well preserved, surprisingly so, though why this should be the case was itself a mystery. As Dew would note in a report entitled “Particulars of Human Remains,” the largest mass consisted of one long connected train of organs that included liver, stomach, lungs, and heart. All the skin—“practically the whole of the soft covering of a body”—had been removed and lay in a pile, like a coat dropped to the floor.

  Most notable, however, was all that was absent. There was nothing to confirm sex. No sign of hands or feet. No teeth. The head and scalp were missing. And there were no bones whatsoever. None. Dew wrote, “Someone had simply carved the flesh off the bones and laid it there.”

  The scope of the challenge ahead immediately became clear. It was one thing to infer from the circumstances of the case that the remains had once been Belle Elmore; it was quite another to prove it beyond doubt. The first step was to confirm that the remains were human. That proved simple: The organs were in such good condition that Dr. Marshall on first viewing was able to confirm their provenance.

  It was equally obvious, however, that nothing else would be so easy. The next challenge was to identify the sex of the victim, yet no reproductive organs, pelvic bones, or other physical markers of gender could be found, save for one lump of tissue that seemed, at first, as though it might have been a portion of a female breast. Once the sex was confirmed—if ever—then Dew would have to prove that the woman was Belle Elmore. Next he would have to find the cause of death, to determine beyond doubt whether she had been murdered or had died from illness or accident. Finally he would have to determine who killed her.

  What lay before him in the cellar was an affront to his working hypothesis that the killer was Dr. Crippen. It defied physics and common sense. Crippen was five feet four inches tall and of slight build. Everyone Dew had interviewed described him as kind, gentle, and affectionate. How could he kill a woman so much larger and more robust than he and then marshal the physical and mental stamina to bring her to the basement, strip the flesh from her body, remove her head, denude every bone, somehow dispose of head, bones, teeth, and sexual organs, and then bury the remainder in his cellar, all without showing signs of physical or emotional duress?

  According to witnesses, on the day after Belle had last been seen alive Crippen was his usual calm and peaceful self, cheerful and ready with a smile. That day he had stopped by the Martinettis to check on Paul, and Mrs. Martinetti had noticed nothing unusual about his demeanor.

  But three facts were beyond challenge:

  —a mass of human remains lay in Crippen’s cellar;

  —Belle had disappeared; and

  —Crippen and his typist, Miss Le Neve, seemed to have fled.

  MACNAGHTEN AND FROEST ARRIVED, bearing cigars. Dew showed the men the cellar and walked them through the rest of the house. What most struck Macnaghten was how near the burial site was to Crippen’s kitchen and breakfast area. “From the doctor’s chair at the head of the dining-room table to the cellar where the remains had been found was a distance of only some fifteen or twenty feet,” Macnaghten wrote. It would have taken a character of cool temperament indeed to have continued cooking and dining while aware of what lay buried beyond the next door.

  After seeing the remains thus far exposed, Macnaghten telephoned a friend, Dr. Augustus Pepper, at St. Mary’s Hospital. Pepper was a surgeon and one of the foremost practitioners of the emerging field of forensic pathology, “the beastly science,” and as such had helped investigate many of England’s ugliest murders. Recognizing that the hour was late and that much work had yet to be done to expose fully the remains, Macnaghten asked Dr. Pepper to come to the house first thing the next morning.

  Macnaghten authorized Froest and Dew to spare no effort in solving the case. Dew prepared another circular, this for distribution to police throughout the world. He added photographs of Crippen and Le Neve and samples of their handwriting. He described each suspect in detail, including Crippen’s habit of throwing his feet out as he walked and his “slight Yankee accent,” and Le Neve’s penchant for appearing to listen “intently when in conversation.” He titled the circular “MURDER AND MUTILATION.”

  The hunt for Crippen and Le Neve began in earnest, and suddenly Dew found himself at the center of a storm of effort and press scrutiny surpassed in his recollection only by the days of the Ripper.

  THAT AFTERNOON IN LONDON two detectives from Scotland Yard’s Thames Division, Francis Barclay and Thomas Arle, began visiting ships moored at Millwall Docks to alert crews to the manhunt underway. Among the vessels they boarded was a single-screw steamship, the SS Montrose, owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s shipping division. After a ship’s officer informed them that the Montrose was not going to pick up any passengers in London, the detectives disembarked and continued on their way, but soon afterward they learned from another source along the wharf that while the Montrose would not accept passengers i
n London, it would do so in Antwerp, its next destination. The detectives returned to the ship and there met one of its junior officers.

  The detectives told him about the recent discovery at Hilldrop Crescent and suggested that he might want “to take a few particulars.” The officer had a taste for mystery and invited Barclay and Arle into his cabin, where they conversed for about an hour. The detectives suggested that the fugitives might attempt to join the ship in Antwerp and described several likely ruses that Crippen and Le Neve might deploy. Crippen, they said, might be masquerading as a clergyman, and Miss Le Neve might try “to disguise herself in youth’s clothing.”

  The ship’s officer said he would keep an alert watch and would pass the information to his captain, Henry George Kendall. The detectives departed and continued their canvass of the wharves.

  IN BRUSSELS ETHEL began to feel that she was falling out of touch with the outside world. She could not read French, though Crippen could and bought copies of L’Etoile Belge. He spoke little about what he found in its pages.

  “I asked him several times to try and get an English paper,” Ethel wrote, “but he never did.”

  THE DYNAMITE PRIZE

  SLOWLY, THROUGH GREAT EFFORT and endless experimentation, Marconi forced his transatlantic service into operation, despite foul weather and frequent malfunctions and in the face of competition that seemed to grow more effective and aggressive by the day. Germany’s Telefunken, marketing the Slaby-Arco-Braun equipment, was particularly energetic. It seemed that every time Marconi’s men approached a new customer abroad, they discovered that Telefunken’s salesmen already had been there. They described the German company’s omnipresence as “The Telefunken Wall.” To make matters worse, in 1908 the provisions of Kaiser Wilhelm’s international wireless conference at last took effect. Marconi ordered his men to continue shunning other systems, especially Telefunken, except in case of emergency; Telefunken engineers likewise refused to accept communication from Marconi-equipped ships. Later, Germany banished all foreign wireless systems from its vessels.

  Marconi’s new transatlantic service was slow and fraught with problems. A company memorandum dated August 4, 1908, showed that from October 20, 1907, through June 27, 1908, the total traffic between Clifden and Glace Bay was 225,010 words—an average of only 896 words a day. Another company report revealed that in March, the best month, the average time needed to complete transmission of a message was 44 minutes; the maximum was 2 hours and 4 minutes. The next month, however, the average climbed to more than 4 hours; the maximum was 24 hours and 5 minutes, an entire day to send one message.

  But the system worked. Marconi had achieved the impossible. These were not merely three-dot messages but full-length dispatches, many of which were sent by correspondents based in America for publication in The Times of London, and Marconi knew, with his usual certainty, that improvements in speed and reliability would come.

  In 1909 he received at last the kind of recognition that had eluded him for so many years, amid the sniping of Oliver Lodge, Nevil Maskelyne, and others. In December the overseers of the eight-year-old Nobel prizes awarded the prize for physics to Marconi, for wireless, and to Karl Ferdinand Braun, for inventing the cathode ray tube, which years later would make television possible. This was the same Braun who had joined with Slaby and Arco to produce the wireless system that Telefunken was so aggressively selling throughout the world.

  To Marconi, the prize was an immense honor and utterly unexpected, for he had never considered himself a physicist. In the opening moments of his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, Marconi conceded that he was not even a scientist. “I might mention,” he said, “that I never studied Physics or electrotechnics in the regular manner, although as a boy I was deeply interested in those subjects.” And he frankly admitted that he still did not fully understand why he was able to transmit across the Atlantic, only that he could. As he put it, “Many facts connected with the transmission of electric waves over great distances still await a satisfactory explanation.”

  He acknowledged that other mysteries remained as well. “It often occurs that a ship fails to communicate with a nearby station, but can correspond with perfect ease with a distant one,” he told the audience. He did not know why this was the case. Nor had he found, yet, a persuasive explanation for why sunlight so distorted communication, though he was “inclined to believe” in a theory recently put forth by physicist J. J. Thomson, that “the portion of the earth’s atmosphere which is facing the sun will contain more ions or electrons than that portion which is in darkness” and therefore absorb energy from the waves being transmitted. He had found too that sunrise and sunset were times of especially acute distortion. “It would almost appear as if electric waves in passing from dark space to illuminated space, and vice versa, were reflected or refracted in such a manner as to be deviated from their normal path.”

  But a few moments later, with particular satisfaction, Marconi said, “Whatever may be its present shortcomings and defects there can be no doubt that Wireless Telegraphy even over great distances has come to stay, and will not only stay, but continue to advance.”

  HE HAD COME FAR. Though his company was struggling financially, he believed its troubles soon would ease. Ships now routinely hailed each other at midocean. Shipboard newspapers were becoming common. The term Marconigram had entered the lexicon of travel. Despite the competition rising everywhere, especially in Germany and America, his company had clearly achieved dominance in the realm of wireless, and in large part this was a consequence of his transatlantic gamble and the knowledge it had yielded. In Stockholm, receiving the prize, it seemed as though success had crept up unawares and had overtaken him only there at the podium, as men in black and women in gowns rose and applauded.

  The biggest hurdle that remained was the skepticism that still confronted long-range wireless. For reasons he could not understand, the world continued to see it as an invention of limited use, and nothing he did seemed capable of draining once and for all that vast and persistent reservoir of doubt.

  FIVE JARS

  ON THURSDAY, JULY 14, 1910, two men from the Islington Mortuary Chapel of Ease on Holloway Road came to Hilldrop Crescent to collect the remains and bring them back to the mortuary for a formal postmortem examination, to be conducted the next morning by Drs. Pepper and Marshall. The mortuary’s men brought a coffin. Two constables placed the remains inside, using only their bare hands.

  Dew and the two doctors watched this process closely and from time to time selected items to be placed on a tray beside the excavation. They found a Hinde’s curler with hair still crimped to its vulcanite core; two pieces of what appeared to be a woman’s “undervest,” or camisole, with six buttons and lace around the neck; and a large man’s handkerchief, white, with a reef knot connecting two corners, the portion opposite torn through. Affixed to the handkerchief were a number of strands of fair hair.

  Dew also retrieved a length of “coarse string” fifteen inches long, and a second piece eleven inches long, and theorized that these, along with the knotted handkerchief, “might well have been used for strangulation, or for dragging portions of the body along.”

  The mortuary’s men sealed the coffin and loaded it into an undertaker’s van. As appalled neighbors looked on, the men drove slowly from the crescent onto Camden Road.

  The next morning Pepper, Marshall, and Dew gathered at the Islington Mortuary for the formal postmortem. Pepper long ago had ceased to be squeamish about work such as this and saw the examination not as a horrific task but as the first step in resolving an engrossing puzzle, far more compelling, certainly, than conducting a routine examination of a victim who had died of a gunshot wound or been bludgeoned with a drainpipe.

  First, with delicacy, he probed the mass of tissue and teased out all organs, muscles, and tendons that he was able to recognize. “There was one large mass which comprised the liver, stomach, gullet, lower 2½ inches of the windpipe, 2 lungs, the heart in its bag intact
, the diaphragm or septus between the chest and abdomen, the kidneys, the pancreas, spleen, all the small intestines and greater part of the large”—all of this in one continuous chain. (In fact, as Pepper later realized, one kidney was missing.)

  The connectedness was noteworthy. “It would not be a difficult thing to remove all this mass in one part from the body, but it would be a difficult thing to do it as it was done,” Pepper said. “There was no cut or tear in any of the viscera, except where it was necessary for removal. There is a cut at the upper part where the gullet and windpipe were severed and at the large intestine and lower part. This showed that the person who removed the viscera was possessed of considerable dexterity: this must have been done by someone with either a considerable anatomical knowledge or someone who had been accustomed to the evisceration of animals (including human beings).”

  Amid the discarded skin he found a few individual pieces that seemed worthy of extra attention. One measured seven by six inches. It had a gray-yellow hue that deepened in places to blackish gray and carried an odd mark on its surface. Pepper set it aside for closer study. He also examined the strands of hair caught in the Hinde’s curler that Dew had found in the cellar. The longest strand was eight inches, the shortest, two and a half. That the hair had not come from a wig was obvious, for each strand was cut only at one end. “False hair,” as Pepper put it, inevitably was cut at both ends. Where the hair was trapped around the core of the curler, its color ranged from yellow to light brown, clear evidence that the hair had been bleached.

  As Pepper probed, he found additional man-made articles, including the sleeve of a pajama jacket made of white cotton with broad green stripes, and the “right posterior portion” of what appeared to be the same jacket, in which he found a label: “Shirtmakers, Jones Brothers, Holloway, Limited.” This portion was stained with blood.