What’s in it for me? Murder, love, and one of history’s most suspenseful criminal cases.
The story of Thunderstruck takes us through the interwoven relationship between a very unlikely pair.
The first of these two men is Guglielmo Marconi, a brilliant inventor.
At the age of 20, he does the impossible: he creates a radio wave–based wireless telegraph system.
But Marconi is more of an ambitious entrepreneur than an altruistic scientist and his ambition knows no bounds.
The second man is a bit less remarkable.
Meet Dr.
Hawley Crippen, a man who makes his living selling lucrative “miracle cures.
” But when the government steps in and starts shutting down the patent medicine industry, Crippen begins to get desperate.
Despite their differences, these two men do have some similarities.
Both fall in love with beautiful young women.
Both make terrible husbands.
But only one ends up a murderer.
In this Blink to Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck, we’ll take you through the rise of wireless communication in the age of Tesla and Edison all while following one of the most exciting criminal chases of all time.
And, as most murder stories go, there’s a rather grim description of the crime in section five … so if you’re a bit squeamish, keep that in mind.
With that, if you’re ready, buckle up for a wild ride.
Section One: Two Men with Nothing In Common
How did the invention of a seemingly magical form of communication technology coincide with the flight of an unlikely murderer in the early twentieth century?
It starts with a love story.
Dr.
Hawley Harvey Crippen, already a widower at the age of 30, has the misfortune of being visited by a seductive young woman, Cora Turner.
At 17, Cora harbors dreams of big-stage stardom as a singer.
But she endures excessive pain on a monthly basis.
As a result, she has her ovaries surgically removed leaving the couple forever childless and herself with a massive scar along her belly.
This is a crucial detail for later in the story.
Crippen is a smallish man with slight features.
He’d been brought up in Coldwater, Michigan in a family that was well-known and respected.
The Crippen family has invested heavily in building a Methodist church and is devoutly religious.
The medical profession hasn’t always been a lucrative one, but by the time Crippen enters it, doctors have begun to gain respect and social position.
In fact, Crippen has been finding his fortune in the world of homeopathy which, at the time, is recognized as a respected form of medicine.
Eventually, he starts to work for a company that sells “miracle cures.
” But, in 1893, a recession slows down his income and prevents his new bride from pursuing her dream of living in New York and becoming a famous stage singer.
She refuses to move with Crippen to London and stays in New York.
That, paired with her propensity to flirt with other men, causes Crippen a great deal of unhappiness.
While all this is developing, in another part of the world a 20-year-old man named Guglielmo Marconi has learned of the amazing work of German physicist Heinrich Hertz in transmitting electrical signals wirelessly.
What Marconi doesn’t know is that the respected minds of the time aren’t even considering using this for long-distance transmission.
That’s understood to be impossible.
Had Marconi been told that, he may have left it at that.
Instead, Marconi dedicates years working on the invention of a long-distance wireless communication device.
Thinking his idea is fairly unoriginal and being simultaneously pursued by others, Marconi works at a frantic pace.
Not being a scientist, his experimentation is a matter of simply trying everything until something works.
His mother is supportive but his father isn’t.
In the end, Marconi prevails.
He packs up his machine and travels with his mother to London.
As soon as he gets off the train, the police confiscate his device thinking it might be a bomb.
They promptly destroy it.
Section Two: A Tale of Two Ambitions
It turns out Cora Crippen can’t cut it in New York.
She ends up moving to London to be with Crippen and pursuing show business in Britain’s version of vaudeville.
So while she begins chasing her new dreams in England, Crippen stays busy pursuing business and trying to turn a blind eye to his wife’s indiscretions.
But when Cora finds herself a new love, he can no longer look away.
But he can’t cut her loose, either.
For reasons unknown, he continues to pay for her lifestyle, even occasionally paying for her nights out with Bruce Miller – the man she’s professed to be in love with.
She and Crippen agree to keep their marriage intact publicly but feel no obligation to comfort each other in private.
Meanwhile, Marconi has recovered from his setback with the London Police and has built a new device.
The delay aggravates his paranoia over the possibility of someone else achieving his vision before he can get to it.
He quickly meets with William Preece, chief electrician of the British Post Office.
Preece falls immediately in awe of the invention and spares no expense supporting Marconi’s continued experiments.
Preece comes to take on a sort of fatherly role in his support, so it hurts when Marconi shakes off his support in favor of private enterprise.
Marconi isn’t a scientist, he’s a practitioner or inventor, someone who takes existing science and works to create something useful from it.
He’s also an entrepreneur – and an ambitious one at that.
His efforts to patent his technology irk the scientific community, especially one Oliver Lodge who feels he could easily have achieved what Marconi has if he’d known the public would be interested.
Lodge begins writing regularly to newspapers to remind people that these “Marconi waves” were actually discovered by Hertz and that everything Marconi does has already been accomplished.
He isn’t entirely accurate on that point.
A few years previously, he demonstrated the device and technology Marconi is now using, only Lodge made the declaration that electric waves could only travel half a mile at most without interference.
And then he promptly abandoned the study.
In contrast, Marconi has his eye set on the Atlantic.
He’s determined to create wireless communication between Britain and America and onboard ships.
And he’s in a hurry.
His demonstrations to seek support have galvanized other inventors around the world to take up their own efforts at achieving long-distance wireless communication.
Section Three: Honor Among Frauds
There was a time when miracle cures, or patent medicines, were legally sold as basic medical treatments.
Manufacturers could make any claims they wanted.
But that time was now nearing an end.
The government is shutting down company after company and Crippen finds himself forced to change jobs and he earns less and less.
Even with that, he’s far from poor.
He needs a new house, one that will give Cora the space she needs but at a lower price than he’s currently paying.
To his luck, he finds just such a location.
It’s larger and cheaper than his current home, but it turns out to be too good to be true.
It’s situated downwind of a cattle farm and within hearing distance of a prison where executions are committed.
Still, the house gives Cora and Crippen the ability to live separately under the same roof while maintaining the facade of a happily married couple.
They’re far from happy though.
Cora is increasingly antagonistic, and Crippen has started an illicit affair of his own with a receptionist, Ethel Le Neve.
He’s quickly falling in love with her, too.
On the other side of the pond, Marconi has found himself an eight-mile parcel of land on which to build a power station with antennae tall enough to send and receive signals across the ocean.
He has no engineering knowledge or scientific basis for the construction of his antennae, nor does he listen to people who do.
Marconi is a man who tries and tries almost blindly until something works.
The weather is against him, knocking down his construction until he finally decides to do something drastic.
He’s so desperate for a successful test to ease the minds of his investors that he has his men fly kites with wires attached as a way to receive signals.
And it works – sort of.
He’s able to receive some of the three-dot signals sent his way, but he doesn’t receive them in the normal way that produces an inked record.
He also doesn’t have a witness.
Essentially, on the day he calls the newspaper and announces his victory, he has no evidence at all.
Skepticism abounds.
Soon Cora Crippen leaves for America, or so her husband tells everyone.
Oddly, she leaves without any of her beloved clothes and jewelry.
Crippen acts as a go-between to Cora’s friends, telling them he’s corresponding with her.
He relays the upsetting information that Cora has fallen ill in America.
And, just as he’s thinking he should go to her, he receives the dreadful news that she’s dead.
His receptionist, Ethel Le Neve, moves into the house with Crippen and begins wearing Cora’s jewelry.
The two of them are very happy together.
It doesn’t take long before Cora Crippen’s friends begin digging a little deeper into the mysterious circumstances of her death.
Dr.
Section Four: Lies, Lies, and More Lies
Crippen’s answers just don’t seem consistent or specific enough.
One pair of friends, John Nash and Lil Hawthorne go to a friend of theirs who happens to be in charge of Scotland Yard’s recently established murder squad.
He listens to their story and dispatches Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew to look into the situation.
At first, Dew doesn’t think there’s anything to it.
It seems like a perfectly typical case of a man in an unhappy marriage quickly moving on with his receptionist after his wife’s death.
Maybe not a pretty circumstance, but certainly not criminal.
But upon further investigation, Dew finally decides it’s time to address Crippen directly.
When pressed, Crippen confesses that he lied about the circumstances of his wife’s death.
Indeed, according to the doctor, his wife is actually still alive.
Marconi’s experiments during this time take him back and forth across the Atlantic as he fights against time to be the first to perfect transatlantic wireless communication.
He’s experienced some successes, but none of these match the promises he’s made.
One of the claims he’s made to the public is that he’s perfected a form of tuning that eliminates the danger of interference.
This means, according to Marconi, that he can transmit and receive signals without other signals disrupting them.
Of course, Marconi is lying.
And one man, a magician named Nevil Maskelyne, is determined to prove it.
Maskelyne makes a living fooling people, so he can spot when someone else is doing it as well.
One day, Marconi and his hired electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming arrange to give a lecture and demonstration at the Royal Institution, London’s premier venue for sharing scientific knowledge.
In the midst of the demonstration, Maskelyne hijacks Marconi’s device and begins transmitting passages from Shakespeare.
This goes unnoticed by the audience because the man collecting the transmissions keeps his cool.
But when Fleming hears of it, he feels insulted by the shenanigans and writes a letter to the Times berating and vaguely threatening the perpetrator.
This is exactly what Maskelyne was hoping for.
By writing that letter, Fleming has exposed Marconi’s lie.
Battling failure, the rage of the press, and falling stock prices, a beleaguered Marconi continues his effort to perfect his transmissions.
In the process, he meets and falls in love with a young woman named Beatrice.
They become engaged.
Dr.
Section Five: Getting Away With Murder
Crippen tells a convincing story about how, in order to avoid scandal, he lied about his wife’s death.
His story works because he has indeed been lying.
Now, he’s also lying about his motive, which he claims was to avoid scandal so he could be with his mistress, Ethel.
Ethel has also been lied to.
Inspector Dew reveals the lie to her and sees that her surprise is genuine.
Crippen makes nice with his Ethel while continuing his deception.
He tells her that the truth will soon be out – that Cora is still alive.
And that they’ll have to run away if they’re to escape the scandal.
He dresses his young lover up as a boy, cuts her hair, and then the two of them flee.
Inspector Dew has already searched the Crippen house three times, always lingering in the coal cellar, always coming back with nothing.
Something has been nagging him about that coal cellar, so he goes back out to the house a fourth time determined to spend more time there.
He and his partner begin prying at bricks until they find one that’s loose.
Then they dig.
They don’t have to dig for long before they find human remains in a shocking state.
And as a warning for those following this Blink, this next part gets pretty grim.
All of the organs in the remains have been removed but remain connected to each other.
The skin has been flayed and buried separately.
Finally, the head, hands, feet, and pelvis have been removed so that it’s impossible to determine the gender of the victim.
Further investigation reveals bleached hair – something Cora did regularly – and a scar along what would have been the abdomen of the skin.
With those key pieces of evidence, Cora’s remains are officially identified.
The hunt for Dr.
Crippen is on.
Meanwhile, Marconi’s wireless technology has advanced largely to Fleming, who was fired for the Maskelyne incident, but then rehired as a result of two inventions that Marconi needs.
Fleming’s inventions finally allow Marconi to make good on his claim of clear signals with no interference.
Additionally, Marconi himself discovers the phenomenon that horizontal lines work better than vertical ones.
Eventually, Marconi is able to perfect transatlantic communication.
And his devices are distributed far and wide.
He marries Beatrice, drags her all over the world, and she manages to have one living child, a daughter.
When she gives birth to their second child, Marconi is at sea conducting experiments.
Beatrice has no idea which ship he’s on, so she addresses a wireless telegraph to Marconi out in the Atlantic somewhere.
Thanks to ship-to-ship wireless communication, Marconi is found and called back home.
There are times when technology advances before the criminal understands it.
Section Six: The Heat Is On
Imagine the first murderer to be caught due to fingerprints or the first speeding ticket given out by traffic cam.
That’s how the rest of this story goes as well.
While the whole world is finding fascination in Marconi’s wireless communication, very few people have actually considered its full implications.
So when Crippen and his mistress board the Montrose piloted by Captain Kendall, it never occurs to them that they’ve already been caught – they just have to wait eleven days for the handcuffs.
Crippen has shaved his mustache and Ethel is dressed like a boy.
They’re going by the last name Robinson and posing as father and son.
Kendall recognizes them early in the journey and by day three, he stands by his Marconi device and waits to pass near enough to a receiver to send one of the most famous wireless messages ever.
The telegram reaches Inspector Dew who then boards a ship that can overtake the Montrose and beat it to its destination by a day.
When his ship passes near enough to the Montrose, he has a signal sent to let Captain Kendall know of his plans.
In the meantime, thanks to wireless communication, the entire world now knows about the murdering doctor and his lover.
Reporters throng the Canadian dock where the ships will eventually arrive.
Kendall enjoys his five minutes of fame by sending details of the couple’s activities.
People everywhere can’t get enough.
For Crippen, the voyage is lovely and pleasant.
It never occurs to either him or to Ethel that the thunderous sounds from the Marconi room on the ship might be signaling his doom.
When the Montrose reaches its destination, Inspector Dew boards it and greets Crippen with a handshake.
Ethel promptly faints.
In this Blink we’ve learned about two men – Marconi, the brilliant young inventor turned wealthy entrepreneur, and Crippen, the small, quiet doctor who’d do anything for love.
Final Summary
We’ve also seen how the invention of a new technology crossed paths with a daring escape and created one of the most exciting criminal chases in history.
One man’s fate was sealed by the ingenuity of another man he never met.