Thunderstruck

Thunderstruck (2006) is a true-crime historical non-fiction book by Erik Larson. Set in the early twentieth century, he weaves together the stories of two men: Guglielmo Marconi, a brilliant, driven, and eccentric man who would revolutionize long-distance wireless communication; and the innocuous, well-regarded Hawley Crippen, who nearly pulled off the perfect murder. Along the way, we also meet a bevy of the men’s wives, lovers, a ship captain, and one chief inspector of Scotland Yard who embarks on a relentless criminal chase across the Atlantic.

To be clear, Marconi and Crippen never meet. Larson chronicles the rise of Marconi’s empire and the risks he took to learn how to send wireless transmissions. The son of an Italian man and an Irishwoman, Marconi grows up wealthy and with little formal education until he is older. His experiments take him to Europe, Britain, Nova Scotia, and to ships at sea, and are instrumental in developing the technology to relay messages wirelessly, enabling ships to call for help and communicate with land even when thousands of miles out to sea. While Marconi enjoys many successes in his professional life—even though he teetered on the brink of ruin several times—his personal life is perpetually in shambles. He marries Beatrice, a beautiful young woman but their long relationship is stormy. Marconi is neglectful, and after he has an affair with another woman, Beatrice asks for and is granted a divorce and custody of their children. He later remarries, to Beatrice’s disappointment and heartbreak. He dies of a heart attack in July of 1937. However, his wireless technology would prove Crippen’s undoing. Although the chapters go back and forth between Crippen and Marconi, the heart of the story is Crippen’s doomed romance and murder plot. A homeopath, Crippen often worked for various drug companies. By all accounts, he was a likable, innocuous, and kind man whom many had a hard time accepting was a cold-blooded killer.

Crippen meets and marries Cora Turner, a young woman who is eleven years his junior. Cora is brash, passionate, a domineering spendthrift with dreams of becoming a diva on the stage. Her dreams take her from America to London, but her career fails. Along the way, she changes her name to Belle Elmore and takes up a long-term love affair with a prizefighter from Chicago. Her marriage to Crippen is tumultuous nearly from the start, although in public they keep a happy face on it so that no one knows of their troubles. She spends money with wild abandon and periodically threatens to divorce Crippen and return to her lover. Crippen is desperately unhappy until he meets the young Miss Ethel Clara Le Neve, a typist at his office. The two of them strike up a friendship that deepens into a love affair that would endure until his execution.



The trouble starts when Belle disappears without warning. It seems she walked straight out of her house and vanished, without taking any of her clothes or jewelry. No one hears from her, no one receives any letters or telegrams, and then Crippen begins telling people that she died. However, when pressed, he does not seem to know the details of her death, and he tells conflicting stories. He says she died in America, or on the ship crossing to America, or in California. He does not have a death certificate, and he says that she was cremated. Worse, yet, after Belle’s disappearance, he begins attending public outings with Ethel, giving Ethel Belle’s best jewelry and furs. Still, Belle’s friends are not suspicious of foul play, so much as concerned about the lack of details, so they speak to Walter Dew, one of the best detectives on the Murder Squad.

Dew begins investigating. He questions the couple’s friends, Crippen, and Ethel (who had been moved into Crippen’s house already). He searches their house, including the cellar, but is unable to find anything to suggest that something dastardly had happened to Belle. Nevertheless, Crippen hatches an escape plan: he and Ethel will go on the run as a man and his son. Ethel, always up for an adventure, cross-dresses as a teenage boy, and the two of them flee to the continent under false names. Eventually, they decide to go to Canada, booking passage on the Montrose, captained by Henry George Kendall. Quickly noticing something off about the two passengers, Kendall has every English newspaper on the ship locked away.

After the lovers’ escape, Scotland Yard is hard at work. With Crippen and his mistress fled, possibly disguised, they search the house again and make a grisly discovery in the coal cellar. They find a human torso buried under the floor. The hands, feet, head, and even genitals are all missing, and every single bone removed—in short, anything that could help identify the body is gone. Detectives uncover some scraps of material, revealed as pajamas, a handkerchief, and some blonde hairs. They do not have much to go on, but they have enough to ascertain that the remains, in fact, belong to the missing Belle Elmore and that her husband killed, dismembered, and buried her in his cellar.



The gory affair is splashed across the newspapers. Aboard the ship, Kendall is increasingly convinced that his passengers are the fugitives, and he uses Marconi’s wireless device to send a message back to the mainland. Scotland Yard is notified, and Dew is put on the next ship out, arriving in Canada before Crippen and Ethel. As the ship arrives into the harbor, Dew and his detectives go with the pilot out to the Montrose, where he identifies the couple. The jig is up, and they are taken back to London. Crippen is found guilty and hanged; Ethel convinces her jury that she knew nothing of the crime and is acquitted.

The murder described in this book is one of the most famous and well-known murders in England, second only to Jack the Ripper’s. According to Larson, the sensational event “fascinated Raymond Chandler and so captivated Alfred Hitchcock that he worked elements into some of his movies, most notably Rear Window. Followed by millions of newspaper readers around the world, the great chase that ensued helped advance the evolution of a technology we today take utterly for granted.” Larson pulls together multiple narratives using investigative reports and case notes from Scotland Yard, as well as letters, diaries, memoirs, and other documents.