Walter Dew: The Man Who Caught Crippen Read online

  Walter DEW

  Walter DEW

  The Man Who Caught CRIPPEN

  Nicholas Connell

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by

  Sutton Publishing Limited

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Nicholas Connell, 2005 2013

  The right of Nicholas Connell to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9544 6

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  For Mum

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: Walter Dew’s Early Days

  1. The Beginning of the Red Terror

  2. Long Days and Sleepless Nights

  3. The Elusive Jack

  4. 13 Miller’s Court

  5. Other Whitechapel Murders

  6. Theories and Suspects

  7. Harry the Valet

  8. Conrad Harms/Henry Clifford

  9. The Disappearance of Belle Elmore

  10. Doctor Crippen

  11. The Remains

  12. The Hunt

  13. The Capture

  14. Magistrates and Coroners

  15. Rex v. Crippen

  16. The Verdict

  17. Rex v. Le Neve

  18. Appeal and Execution

  19. Retirement and Libel Cases

  20. The Wee Hoose

  21. Memoirs

  Appendix 1: Aftermath of the Crippen Case

  Appendix 2: Dew’s Appearances in Films and Fiction

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  I would particularly like to thank Jon Ogan, who lent me his own copy of Walter Dew’s autobiography for several years while I was researching and writing this book. I would also like to thank the following for their invaluable help: Maggie Bird, Sarah Bryce, Alex Chisholm, Stewart Evans, Christopher Feeney, Stuart Goffee, Jonathan Goodman, Brian Gravestock, the late Melvin Harris, Peter Lovesey, Gary Moyle, Phil Sugden and Richard Whittington-Egan.

  The staff of the following archives and libraries were all unfailingly helpful: the British Library, The British Library Newspaper Library, Churchill Archives Centre (Churchill College, University of Cambridge), Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertfordshire Central Resources Library, Islington Central Library, London Metropolitan Archives, Madame Tussaud’s Archives, Metropolitan Police Records Management Branch, the National Archives, Northamptonshire County Record Office, Northamptonshire Studies Collection, Tower Hamlets Local History Library, University College London, West Sussex County Record Office and Worthing Library.

  The work of Inspector Dew is worthy of close study.

  L.A. Perry MD, ‘Crippen’,

  from Crime and Detection, vol. II

  Prologue: Walter Dew’s Early Days

  So commenced my career in the finest police force in the world.

  Walter Dew

  Walter Dew, the man who was to capture the most infamous murderer of the early twentieth century, was born on 7 April 1863 at Far Cotton, a hamlet in the parish of Hardingstone, some two miles south-east of the county town of Northampton. Hardingstone had a railway station on the London & North Western line and Dew’s Herefordshire-born father, also named Walter, worked as a guard for the railway. His Irish mother Eliza1 would eventually have ten other children. When Dew was ten years old the family moved to London.

  Dew was no scholar. He would later recall that ‘I detested school, and was an absolute dud there, and promptly left when I attained the ripe age of thirteen.’ He got a job at a solicitor’s office off Chancery Lane, the result of which was that Dew frequently had to attend the old Law Courts at Westminster. The job only lasted a year. He left after he ‘got fed up’. Despite the boredom that office work brought on he had always enjoyed attending court and he never grew tired of listening to the cases.

  The young Dew’s next job was as a junior clerk with a large seed-merchants in Holborn. This only lasted for a few months. One lunchtime he spotted a fire on the roof of the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) and rushed off to the fire station and raised the alarm. Dew then stayed to watch the fire being put out, which made him late back to work and resulted in him being sacked. Little could he have envisaged that, some thirty years later in that same court, he would be watched by the eyes of the world when he gave evidence in one of the most sensational trials ever to be held there.

  Following in his father’s and brother George’s footsteps Dew took a job with the London & North Western Railway. He had always loved the railway and it was his ambition to become a guard.2 Dew stayed with the railway for some years and said that he ‘enjoyed every day of it’. When he was nineteen it was suggested to him (it is not recorded by whom) that he should join the Metropolitan Police. This struck Dew as an unusual suggestion as, ‘for some strange reason or other, I had an instinctive dread of the London policeman, which lasted more or less until I became one myself’.

  Overcoming his fears, Walter Dew applied to join the Metropolitan Police force. He doubted he would be accepted, because he ‘was very slim and boyish looking’ in those days.3 However, Dew passed his medical at Scotland Yard and was sworn in and given the warrant number 66711. For his first ten weeks he was forced to stay in seedy digs at a common lodging house while he underwent drill training at Wellington Barracks. He was paid a modest 15s a week, but that rose to 24s when he was posted to Paddington Green police station in X Division, Kilburn, in June 1882.

  On 15 November 1886 Dew married coachman’s daughter Kate Morris4 at Christ Church, Notting Hill. They moved to Tinnis Street, Bethnal Green, and would eventually have five children: Walter (b. 1887), Ethel (b. 1891), Stanley (b. 1893), Kate May (b. 1895) and Dorothy Bertha (b. 1903). Another son, Raymond, died in infancy in 1891.

  Dew remained at Paddington Green for five years, where he made a good impression on his superiors. He had quickly taken to his new profession, made numerous arrests and received rewards and commendations from magistrates and judges. Consequently, in June 1887 he was made a plain-clothes detective in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), where he would deal exclusively with crime, instead of the high-profile public policing duties he had undertaken when in

  uniform.5 It was as an officer of the CID that Dew was to play a role in two of the greatest events in British criminal history. The case of Dr Crippen and the hunt for Jack the Ripper.6

  The young detective was transferred to H Division, Whitechapel. He was somewhat apprehensive about the move:

  From Paddington and Bayswater I was sent to a district which, even before the advent of Jack the Ripper, a year later, had a reputation for vice and villainy unequalled anywhere in the British Isles.

  I had attained my first ambition as a police officer, being now a member of the famous Criminal Investigation Department – a detective officer. But the natural elation with which I viewed
my promotion was tempered by my knowledge of my neighbourhood to which I had been sent to win my detective’s ‘spurs’.

  I knew that I might have to spend many years there. For myself I did not care so much. My chief concern arose from the fact that I had just married, and the thought of taking my wife to live in that hot-bed of crime filled me with foreboding.

  Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Shoreditch were now my hunting-ground, with hundreds of criminals of the worst type as my quarry.

  Whitechapel in those days was full of slums in which vice of all kinds was rampant. Sordid narrow streets, still narrower courts, filthy and practically unlighted.

  Woe betide any innocent wayfarer venturing alone down any of those dark and sinister passages.

  So bad was the reputation of Flower-and-Dean Street that it was always ‘double-patrolled’ by the police. A single constable would have been lucky to reach the other end unscathed.

  Crime was rampant, but it did not go unchecked. A study of the Old Bailey calendar of the time would confirm this. I had the pleasure of seeing scores of them sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and lashes with the cat.

  I say I saw this with pleasure, for had I not seen the suffering of many of the victims?

  A Home Office report written at the height of the Ripper murders in October 1888 gives a clear indication of what type of area Dew was about to enter:

  there has been no return hitherto of the probable numbers of brothels in London, but during the last few months I have been tabulating the observations of Constables on their beats, and have come to the conclusion that there are 62 houses known to be brothels on the H or Whitechapel Divn and probably a great number of other houses which are more or less intermitently [sic] used for such purposes.

  The number of C.L.Hs. [Common Lodging Houses] is 233, accommodating 8,530 persons, we have no means of ascertaining what women are prostitutes and who are not, but there is an impression that there are about 1,200 prostitutes, mostly of a very low condition.

  The lower class of C.L.Hs. is naturally frequented by prostitutes, thieves & tramps as there is nowhere else for them to go, & no law to prevent their congregating there.

  The press too highlighted conditions for the poor in Whitechapel. The following is a description of a typical slum area in the district:

  A wretched back street is crowded with houses of the most miserable class. Nearly all of them are let out in lodgings, of a single room, or part of a room. Loose women have as free run in these abodes as rabbits in a warren. There is a continual coming and going. Precepts of decency are not observed, the standard of propriety is low, the whole moral atmosphere is pestilential. Poverty in its direst form haunts some dwellings, ghastly profligacy defiles others, and this in street after street, alley after alley, cul de sac after cul de sac, garret after garret, and cellar after cellar. Amid such gross surroundings who can be good? With this atrocious miasma continually brooding over them and settling down among them, who can rise to anything better? Morally these people are not only lost – they are dead and buried.7

  At this time the population of London that was policed by the 14,000 Metropolitan Police officers was around 5,500,000. H division had over 110,000 inhabitants and 548 officers. Dew was one of the 473 constables in the Whitechapel Division, and was quickly given the nickname ‘Blue Serge’ by his colleagues, on account of the blue serge suit he habitually wore when he joined H Division. He worked alongside some interesting characters, all under the charge of the head of the Whitechapel Division, Superintendent Thomas Arnold, a veteran of the Crimean War.

  The head of the Whitechapel CID since 1878 had been Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline, an officer for whom Dew had the greatest respect. Dew described him as being

  portly and gentle speaking.

  The type of police officer who might easily have been mistaken for the manager of a bank or a solicitor. He was also a man who had proved himself in many previous big cases. His strong suit was his knowledge of crime and criminals in the East End, for he had been for many years the detective-inspector of the Whitechapel Division, or, as it was called then, the ‘Local Inspector’. No question at all of Inspector Abberline’s abilities as a criminal-hunter.

  Much to Dew’s regret, Abberline was soon transferred to Scotland Yard. He was replaced by Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, who had previously been the Local Inspector in the neighbouring Bethnal Green Division. At 5ft 6in, Reid was the shortest officer in the Metropolitan Police. After a myriad of occupations, including hotel waiter, ship’s steward and pastry cook, Reid had joined the police in 1872. In addition to being a renowned detective Reid was also famous as a pioneering parachutist, and the inspiration for the fictional character Detective Dier in a series of books written by his friend, the Scottish author Charles Gibbon, whose work was reputed to be enjoyed by Queen Victoria.

  Among the sergeants in the CID was William Thick, ‘a holy terror to the local law-breakers’, according to Dew. He was known as ‘Johnny Upright’ because, Dew said, ‘he was very upright both in his walk and in his methods’. Another sergeant was Eli Caunter, known as ‘Tommy Roundhead’. This came as no surprise to Dew, who observed that Caunter ‘certainly had an unusually round head’.

  Dew mentioned a further two anonymous colleagues, whom he referred to only by their nicknames. There was ‘The Russian’, who had ‘a very thick, long auburn beard which I am afraid must have been a severe handicap when he was struggling with a prisoner’. Then there was ‘The Shah’, a ‘finely built man with jet black hair and moustache, one of the best-looking police officers I have ever seen. It was his appearance which had earned him his nickname.’

  1

  The Beginning of the Red Terror

  I knew Whitechapel pretty well by the time the first of the atrocious murders, afterwards attributed to Jack the Ripper, took place. And I remained there until his orgy of motiveless killing came to an end.

  Walter Dew

  The Metropolitan Police’s surviving files upon the unsolved series of Whitechapel murders are now held at the National Archives, in Kew, Surrey. They list eleven murders that took place between 1888 and 1891, more than one of which was committed by the unknown murderer who was to become known as Jack the Ripper. Walter Dew worked as a detective in Whitechapel through the very worst period of the Ripper’s reign of terror, a period upon which he commented, ‘Life for the police officer in Whitechapel in those days was one long nightmare.’

  The first name that appears in the files is that of 45-year-old prostitute Emma Smith. Separated from her family, she lived at a common lodging house at 18 George Street, Spitalfields. In the eighteen months she had lived there, Smith had gained the reputation of one who stayed out all hours, often returning drunk. Dew said of her:

  Her past was a closed book even to her most intimate friends. All she had ever told anyone about herself was that she was a widow who more than ten years before had left her husband and broken away from all her early associations.

  There was something about Emma Smith which suggested that there had been a time when the comforts of life had not been denied her. There was a touch of culture in her speech unusual in her class.

  Once when Emma was asked why she had broken away so completely from her old life she replied, a little wistfully: ‘They would not understand now any more than they understood then. I must live somehow.’

  Around 1.30 a.m. on the night of 3 April 1888 Smith was attacked in Osborn Street by three men. They robbed and assaulted her, inflicting fearful injuries by thrusting a blunt instrument into her vagina with great force. This ruptured her peritoneum, adding to her injuries of a bruised head and a torn right ear. She managed to drag herself back to her lodging house, from where she was taken to the London Hospital. Smith managed to point out where the attack took place, and said that one of her attackers was a youth of about nineteen years of age. Emma Smith died at the hospital the next day, at 9 a.m., from peritonitis.

  Dew was not surprise
d that such a terrible crime had been committed in the Whitechapel division, but had no idea about what was to follow; nor did the police or the public. ‘How could they do so?’, Dew asked. ‘The crime itself, save for the unusual nature of the injuries, was no novelty in Whitechapel.’ He pointed out that ‘a single killing in the streets of Whitechapel of that time was not unknown’. The streets were terrorised by the High Rip gang, who extorted money from prostitutes. Smith’s fellow lodger, Margaret Hames, had been attacked the previous December, but she had survived and told of her attack at the coroner’s inquest on the death of Emma Smith.

  The police investigation, under Detective Inspector Reid, was thorough. Dew recalled:

  As in every case of murder in this country, however poor and friendless the victim might be, the police made every effort to track down Emma Smith’s assailant. Unlikely as well as likely places were searched for clues. Hundreds of people were interrogated, many of them by me personally. Scores of statements were taken. Soldiers from the Tower of London [which stood within H Division] were questioned as to their movements. Ships in docks were searched and sailors questioned.

  There were two issues with the Smith case in which Dew was at odds with the general consensus of opinion. Firstly, there was the question of the motive behind the murder. Inspector Reid and Chief Inspector West both clearly stated in their reports that the motive had been robbery. Mary Russell, the deputy keeper of the lodging house, also testified that Smith told her that she had been robbed before she died. In spite of this, Dew was adamant that robbery had not been the motive.

  Dew conceded that the High Rip gang was initially suspected, partly on account of Smith’s purse being found empty. However, Dew argued that Smith might have had no money when she had left the lodging house, and having an empty purse was ‘far from being a novel experience to women of their type’. If robbery had been the motive, surely the killer would have chosen a different type of victim? Dew’s theory is flatly contradicted by the surviving evidence.