Thunderstruck (43 page)

T
HE
D
YNAMITE
P
RIZE

S
LOWLY, 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.”

H
E 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.

F
IVE
J
ARS

O
N
T
HURSDAY
, J
ULY 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.

Pepper’s initial examination suggested the victim was a woman, though the evidence was only circumstantial and was in part rebutted by the presence in the remains of a man’s handkerchief and pajama top. The bleached hair, however, gave Pepper and Chief Inspector Dew confidence that the remains were indeed female and thus increased the likelihood that the victim was Belle Elmore. According to her friends in the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, she had bleached her hair blond.

Dr. Pepper placed certain organs and the reserved man-made articles into five large jars, for safekeeping. The pajama arm went into jar number four by itself; the rear portion with collar went into jar number five. The jars were stoppered, covered with white paper, tied with tape, then secured with the seal of the coroner’s office.

Dew found the pajamas particularly interesting. He and Sergeant Mitchell returned to Hilldrop Crescent for another search, this time with a specific goal in mind.

E
THEL GREW WEARY
of Brussels. “I had exhausted all the shop windows, which I had gazed into at first with such delight, and now I wanted to move on somewhere else.”

She told Crippen of her ennui.

“Tired of Brussels already?” he said. “Very well, we will push on. How about Paris?”

“No,” she said, “not Paris. Somewhere else.”

Crippen suggested America.

On Friday, July 15, as Dew and the doctors probed the remains from Hilldrop Crescent, Crippen and Ethel stopped in at a ticket office and learned that one ship, the SS
Montrose,
was to depart Antwerp for Quebec the following Wednesday, July 20. They learned too that the ship carried only two classes of passengers, second and steerage. Crippen bought a cabin in second class. For purposes of the passenger manifest, he identified himself as John Philo Robinson, a fifty-five-year-old merchant from Detroit, and Ethel as his son, John George Robinson, age sixteen, a student. No one asked to see identification.

They planned to leave Brussels on July 19, spend that night in Antwerp, and board the ship first thing in the morning.

A
T
H
ILLDROP
C
RESCENT
Chief Inspector Dew and Sergeant Mitchell concentrated on searching boxes and wardrobes and anything else in which clothing was stored. They found dresses and furs and shoes in quantities they still found staggering.

In a bag in Crippen’s bedroom Dew discovered two complete suits of green-striped pajamas that seemed similar to the fragments found with the remains, except that these were new and apparently never worn. He checked their collars for labels and found “Shirtmakers, Jones Brothers, Holloway, Limited.”

His search also turned up a single pair of pajama bottoms, white with green stripes, that showed signs of having been “very much worn.” He could not locate a matching jacket.

T
HE
L
ONDON
T
IMES
GAVE
the mystery a name, “The North London Cellar Murder.” The
Daily Mirror
published photographs of the house and of the fugitive couple. The case seized the imagination of editors abroad, and soon news of the remains found at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent was the stuff of breakfast conversation for readers from New York to Istanbul. “There has never been a hue and cry like that which went up throughout the country for Crippen and Miss Le Neve,” Dew wrote.

The case dominated conversation everywhere, from the City to the Metropolitan Cattle Market, among the guards and prisoners at Holloway and Pentonville prisons, and at the Long Bar at the Criterion, and in the great clubs, the Bachelor’s, Union, Carlton, and Reform. “It was the one big topic of conversation,” Dew wrote. “On the trains and buses one heard members of the public speculating and theorizing as to where they were likely to be.”

Suddenly reports of sightings of Crippen and Le Neve began to arrive at New Scotland Yard. They came by telephone and telegram and by that latest miracle, the Marconigram. The urgency and number of these tips became amplified when the home secretary, Winston Churchill, authorized a reward of £250—$25,000 today—for information leading to the fugitives’ capture. “Not a day passed without Crippen and Miss Le Neve being reported to have been seen in some part of the country,” Dew wrote. “Sometimes they were alleged to have been in a dozen places at the same time.” Nearly every lead had to be examined. “One couldn’t afford to ignore even the slenderest chance,” he wrote, “and all such reports were carefully inquired into.”

One man who resembled Crippen found himself arrested twice and released twice. “On the first occasion he took the experience in good part,” Dew wrote, “but when the same thing happened a second time he was highly indignant, and said it was getting a habit.”

On this score the police were especially wary, for Scotland Yard was still smarting from the infamous example of Adolph Beck, a Norwegian engineer who over the preceding decade and a half had been erroneously imprisoned for fraud, not once but twice, on the basis of eyewitness testimony, while the look-alike who actually had done the crimes remained free. The most important lesson of this “lamentable business,” wrote Sir Melville Macnaghten, “was unquestionably the extreme unreliability of personal identification.”

Dew met with the Crippen duplicate and found no particular likeness. “I did what I could to pour oil on troubled waters, offering the man my profound apologies; and after a while I was able to make him see that the police officer who had made the mistake was really only doing his duty.”