Chapter FIFTEEN

More Criminals I Have Met--Dr. Crippen, the Poisoner, Gives
me Material for a Murder Mystery--My Secret Knowledge of
Him--On his Arrest I Remain on the Continent in Order to
Avoid being Called as Witness--My Friendship with Armstrong
the Poisoner--Our Chats in the Club--At the Invitation of
the Paris Police, I Assist in the Investigations against
Landru, “the French Bluebeard”--What Landru Said to Me when
he was Brought to Gambais--My Suspicions of an American
Multi-Millionaire.

My adventures among criminals have been many. One little incident is kept ever fresh in my memory by the ring that is on my finger as I write these lines.

I happened, as I periodically am, to be on a visit to the Balkans, seeking local colour for a new novel, but principally picking up any scrap of information that might be of service to the confidential department at Whitehall that Lord Roberts had organized.

I found myself in the picturesque little capital of Herzegovina, arriving at the Hotel Narenta late one evening. The town was well known to me, and the hotel, with its delightful garden sloping to the river, is among the most comfortable in Eastern Europe. Ivan, the tall, bald-headed _maître d’hôtel_, welcomed me, and gave me a very late dinner, after which I went along to the Officers’ Casino and returned at about twelve o’clock.

I suppose it was about three when I was awakened by a half-dressed waiter, who, speaking in Serbian--which I understood slightly--told me that an elderly English gentleman, who had arrived that morning, had been taken very ill. The waiter could not understand English. Would I kindly see him?

I got up, and, following the man, was taken to a large bedroom, where in bed lay a white-bearded old man, apparently in great pain.

With difficulty he asked me to summon a doctor, which I did at once.

The stranger’s face was death-like, and very soon after my entry he lost consciousness. Presently a young Serbian doctor arrived, and, the patient being conscious again, I translated his symptoms as well as I could. Then, after a further half hour, the mixture that the doctor had hastily given him brought him round again completely, so much so that he sat up in bed and chatted quite cheerily.

He told me that sometimes he had similar attacks.

“Curiously enough, they generally come on when I am travelling alone,” he went on. “It is really very good of you to have taken so much trouble over a stranger. But now, please, you must return to bed, and not worry about me any more. I shall be quite all right. My name is Askew--Charles Askew. We will meet in the morning. What is your name?”

I told him.

But I sensed something peculiar--an air of mystery that I could not define. He seemed very anxious about a battered tin box that lay on a table near him. I had the impression that he suspected me of taking the key and opening it during the time he was unconscious.

When I returned to my room, I began to wonder whether he was a crook in hiding, for Herzegovina is a good country in which to hide one’s identity.

Next day we went for a long walk together, and the old fellow talked shrewdly of many matters, but concerning himself he was extremely reticent. I showed him the bazaar where one can buy beautiful Oriental work much cheaper than in the bazaar at Sarajevo or at Constantinople. On the following day we walked a long way up the beautiful valley of the Buna river.

Whatever else Mr. Askew was, he was a studious man, a lover of nature, and something of a botanist, possessing a wide knowledge of wild birds and their habits. He had a keen, rugged face that made him look younger than his years. In his habits he was frugal. For his breakfast he took fruit, which he ate sparingly, and at both lunch and dinner limited himself to a single glass of white wine. He also smoked only three cigarettes a day.

One day, as we were wandering about the Town of the Thirty Mosques, as the place is often called, he turned to me and, with a laugh, said:

“You may think me a bit of a crank. Perhaps I am. I sometimes come abroad alone, just for a change, and forget to leave my address, and----” Then he suddenly hesitated, rather embarrassed, I thought, and did not finish his sentence.

As we returned to lunch I became more than ever convinced that Mr. Askew was a crook in hiding.

That same night, however, when I went to my room before dinner, I found on my dressing-table an envelope addressed to me.

I tore it open and, to my surprise, found inside the curious antique ring that Mr. Askew had worn on his finger and in which, as it was unique, I had evinced an interest.

With it was a charming little note of thanks, begging me to accept the ring as a souvenir--a letter signed by one of America’s multi-millionaires, a man who is credited to be one of the richest men in all the world!

I dashed downstairs, only to be told by the porter that Mr. Askew had left Mostar an hour before for Agram.

The ring has ever since been on my finger, as a present from one of the most modest, charming, and unassuming of men I have ever been privileged to meet.

And I had suspected him of being a crook in hiding!

The keeper of the gems at the Louvre in Paris has pronounced the gem set in the ring to be one of the smallest engraved Greek gems in the world. It still has its ancient oval setting in ivory, yellow with age, while the perfectly engraved Greek figures can be seen only by the aid of a magnifying glass. How it was ever engraved in the days before the invention of the microscope is a mystery.

* * * * *

Among the many letters I have received from readers of my books in various parts of the world, none perhaps has been more curious that the epistle that the hall-porter at the Devonshire Club handed me one night on my return from the Continent. Many letters from unknown readers are of interest, some of them suggesting new themes, and new plots for books.

It was so in this case. The brief, polite letter was from a certain Doctor Adams, living in Essex, who expressed himself greatly interested in my mysteries of love and crime, and asking when it would be convenient for me to see him, as he had a suggestion to put before me regarding a new and exciting plot. I was particularly busy at the time, and was about to go to Khartoum, therefore I replied that I was leaving London for three months. After the lapse of that period he wrote again, and was so anxious to see me “at any time or any place in London” that I made an appointment at the club, and one morning he called.

He was a dapper, fair-haired man, of middle age, very well-dressed, with a tall hat and patent-leather boots. I took him into one of the smaller rooms, and while we smoked he told me that he was a doctor in the country, and an ardent reader of my books, especially those that concerned secret poisoning.

“In one of your books you mention a volume, _Secrets of the State of Venice_,” he said. “I believe it gives, in Latin, copied from the original secret documents of the Council of Ten, still preserved in the archives of Venice, the formula used in preparing the slow poisons used by those in the pay of the Council to poison their enemies.”

I explained that it was a very rare book, which had been printed in Petrograd about 1869, and that I had found it in a second-hand booksellers’ shop in Stockholm. It was at the moment in my study in Florence.

My visitor expressed regret that it was not in London, but hoped that he might one day be permitted to read it. He went on to tell me that he had been in the Far East and had made deep studies in toxicology. Indeed, he seemed to know the standard _Manual_ of Dr. Witthaus by heart, and he then quoted many bewildering facts concerning poisons.

“I suppose many people are deliberately poisoned and the murderer never traced?” I remarked.

“Hundreds,” he declared. “Since the days when Palmer poisoned thirteen people with his old-fashioned strychnine--in those days very hard to discover--hundreds of people of both sexes have been got rid of by poison or the bacteria of fatal diseases.”

I was inclined to be a little sceptical, and mentioned the skill of such pathologists as Drs. Willcox and Spilsbury, both of whom I knew, and whose marvellous mirror-tests for arsenic I had witnessed, whereupon, smiling, and in a strange, mysterious voice he said:

“Ah, of course you do not know the newly-invented poisons, some of them German--poisons that, if administered in their proper doses, produce death from apparently perfectly natural causes and which utterly defy detection.”

This interested me, and I listened while he explained the effects of several of them, naming them, and telling me the minimum fatal dose of each. He spoke of death calmly and coolly, as only medical men can.

“Poisoners are always bunglers,” he declared. “The fools use arsenic, antimony, alkaloidal and glucosidal poisons, under the delusion that they won’t be found out. Sometimes they are not. The doctor, who has been attending the patient for some disorder and the patient apparently dies from it, is often unsuspicious. He gives a certificate of death without even dreaming that poison is the cause.”

“Have you ever known such cases?” I asked.

He hesitated, then with some little evasion, I thought, declared that there had, no doubt, been many.

Our conversation was certainly such as would interest anyone who, like myself, studied the psychology of crime.

The next time we met was in Devonshire. He happened to be at Plymouth, and motored across Dartmoor one afternoon to call.

Again as we sat in my study our conversation drifted to his pet subject--one by which he seemed obsessed--namely, that of secret poisoning.

He described to me the formula of certain secret poisons, and, after a long chat, told me more about the newly-discovered poisons, and of one which, if given hypodermically, would cause almost instant death, as though from heart-failure.

“If the body were discovered at once, poison might be suspected because of a peculiar smell, which, however, would disappear after about four hours,” he added. “To obviate that, the puncture or scratch should be rubbed with menthol. And I defy any pathologist to discover the true cause of death!”

Then he confessed to me that the reason he had approached me was because my books had attracted him, and that he thought he might be able to suggest the plot of an up-to-date novel dealing with the most subtle form of poisoning.

I listened as he unfolded to me a most diabolical and ingenious plot, at which I sat aghast at the man’s mentality. He had weighed every detail and taken every precaution that there was no flaw by which the assassin could be traced. I agreed that it was wonderful, but far too morbid and horrible.

“Bah!” he laughed. “Tell the public the truth, and show them how easy it is to commit murder and go scot-free. It would protect them from jealous, murderously inclined enemies.”

We met several times afterwards, and he unfolded to me many plots from his fertile brain, one of which, indeed, I did use later in my novel, _The Red Widow_.

But in his presence I always felt a strong antipathy towards him, though he was such a frank, merry, easy-going man. He had explained so many means by which deadly poisons and bacteria of fatal diseases could be disseminated that at last, whenever I received a letter from him, I opened it with the scissors, held it from me as I read it, and dropped it straight into the fire. I confess that I feared lest he might do me harm!

At last I refused to see him any more, and a few weeks later I went back to Florence, where I had rented a villa on the Viale dei Colli and forgot about the affable but repulsive Adams.

One day, however, on opening the _Daily Mirror_, I saw a large photograph of him smiling out at me. He was wanted by the police, having eloped with a young girl, named Le Neve, after the sudden disappearance of his wife in Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway.

Beneath the photograph of my whilom friend Dr. George Adams was the name of “Dr. Crippen”!

I confess that the unexpected charge against him caused me considerable anxiety. I knew that he was an expert poisoner, and felt certain that his poor wife had died at his hand. He had on that first day we met declared to me that “Poisoners are always bunglers,” and certainly he himself had been no exception.

That his wife was not the only person he had murdered I feel confident, because of the halting and evasive replies he gave to many of my questions. He was, no doubt, an expert who knew as much about the latest discovered poisons and their effects as any of our greatest toxicologists. He had declared to me--with what truth I know not--that a certain chemist in Frankfort sold secret poisons with full directions at very high figures and asked no questions. This seems to be borne out, for in at least two recent cases of murder by poison, one in France and one in Italy, the poison used is known to have come from Frankfort.

At last, by means of wireless, Crippen was detected and arrested with the girl. Portions of his wife’s body were discovered, and he was charged with poisoning her.

Then I suddenly recollected. I had written him two or three letters! Would the police discover them and call me as witness? I knew that the evidence I could give would have great weight with the jury, but I had no desire to appear at the Old Bailey. Therefore I remained in Florence and said nothing to anyone till, on Crippen being executed, I breathed more freely.

* * * * *

Another queer but perfectly cool murderer was “the world’s great lover,” Henri Désiré Landru, the French “Bluebeard.” He was a little bald-headed, spade-bearded man, with deep-set, ferret eyes. In April, 1919, he was arrested at his home in the Rue Rochechouart, in Paris, because a woman to whom he had promised marriage had mysteriously disappeared. The sister of the missing woman had accidentally recognized him in the street and insisted that a police agent should watch where he went.

Slowly and with great patience the Sûreté learned that their prisoner was a man of mystery known as Diard, Dupont, Freminet, Guillet, and a dozen other names, and one of the most alert and cunning _escrocs_ in France. Soon the police began to discover that on at least eight occasions he had proposed marriage to women, who, in each case, were never afterwards seen, and of whose fortunes he had managed to acquire entire possession. It was plain that he had been gambling in women’s lives, but if he had murdered them, where were the bodies?

For over a year he was kept in prison and constantly interrogated, but not by a single word did he betray the truth. There was no evidence against him, and he constantly declared his innocence. The houses in which he had lived out in the country at Neuilly, Vernouillet, and the villa of mystery at Gambais in the Forest of Rambouillet, about forty miles from Paris, had been investigated, but nothing had been found. Indeed it looked as though he would have to be released, when in 1921 the police decided on making a more thorough investigation at the villa at Gambais, which several of the missing women had been known to visit.

As one interested in criminology I was invited by the Chief of the Sûreté to assist the police and the medicolegists in their investigations. I motored out each day from Paris to a lonely house called “The Hermitage,” on the high road to Houdan. There I rendered what assistance I could in the excavations, which consisted in digging up the rather extensive garden and a field adjoining, taking up the floors of the villa itself, as well as the concrete flooring of the outhouses and garage.

It was under the concrete of the latter that we discovered a number of small pieces of charred bone, which, after microscopic examination in Landru’s dining-room, where an apparatus had been set up, the medical experts, Doctors Anthony and Paul, declared to have come from at least three bodies. In addition, we found burned hairpins, two steel stay-busks, bone buttons, and other objects. The search had been exciting enough, and we were all keen on examining most critically each handful of earth and stone. But those were the discoveries that eventually brought Landru to the guillotine.

The authorities resolved on a reconstruction of the crime, for now they were certain that several of the missing women had been lured to that lonely house, killed, and their bodies cremated in the kitchen-stove.

I was present. Landru, brought by car under police-guard and in secret, arrived at the scene of his crimes at about eleven o’clock one morning.

When he was brought into the small dining-room, where it was supposed he had poisoned his victims before disposing of their bodies, his demeanour showed nothing of the criminal.

He wished us a polite, “_Bon jour, messieurs._” Then glancing round that room, which had no doubt been the scene of several most diabolical crimes--six it is believed--smiled superciliously.

“Henri Désiré Landru, you are accused of wilfully poisoning in this room Madame Héon on December 6th, 1916, and of poisoning Madame Collomb, on Christmas Day 1916!” said the examining magistrate in French, in a deep hard voice.

“Rubbish!” laughed the prisoner with a nonchalant air.

“It is the accusation against you!”

“Then prove it!” said Landru jeeringly.

“You must prove your innocence,” replied the magistrate.

“I am innocent--that is all!” was his reply. “And I thank you for a very pleasant motor-ride. The air of Gambais is always delightful. I wish I were coming back here to spend a holiday. But I shall, messieurs--never fear.”

I whispered in English to a detective who had been working in the excavations for the past fortnight, and he overheard me.

“Ah!” he sneered. “I don’t know who you are, but you seem very amused at all this. So am I. You call me Bluebeard. Oh! how foolish and farcical it is!”

I made no reply. But addressing me again, he said:

“I suppose, monsieur, that you are one of the wonderful doctors who hope to establish the fact that when I brought ladies here I killed them for their valuables. Well, all I reply is--just establish the facts. I thank you all for a glorious run through the Forest.”

The examining magistrate put to him other severe questions, but never for a second could he upset the marvellous equanimity of the prisoner.

The next time I saw Landru, on November 30th, 1921, was in the crowded and stifling Assize Court at Versailles. The place was packed. The Court had risen. The Jury were absent to consider the verdict, and before their box was an array of furniture and women’s clothing that gave one the idea of a second-hand dealer’s shop.

The atmosphere was electrical. All the world waited to hear the verdict.

Suddenly Landru was brought in, his face pale, more yellow and strained that when he had jeered at us at Gambais. He noticed the smart women of Paris straining their necks to get sight of him. From his seat a few seconds later, he rose, and bowing politely to the spectators, said with the same cynical smile that he had given me:

“I wonder if there be any lady in court who would like to take my place? I am quite ready to vacate it--I assure you!”

Those were the last words to the public of one of the greatest and most callous criminals of our time.

Five minutes later he was condemned to death. He was theatrical to the end, but his calmness never deserted him. His counsel, Maître Moro-Giafferi, who is an old friend of mine and one of the most famous criminal lawyers in Europe, appealed, but the conviction was upheld and at four o’clock on the morning of February 25th, 1922, Landru, on being offered the usual glass of rum and a cigarette, said with the same cynical laugh:

“I do not need them. I am brave!”

A few seconds later the knife fell and he was dead. How many women he had murdered will never be known.

* * * * *

My next meeting with a murderer was one cold March afternoon. I was sitting before the big fire in the smoking room of a certain West End club of which I am a member--I omit its name for obvious reasons--when there strolled in a fellow member with whom I often chatted when we were spending an idle hour of gossip over our tea and toast. He was a country solicitor, living in Herefordshire and had been a member only a couple of years. Business frequently brought him to London, and on such occasions he slept at the club. He was a man of refinement and taste, a good talker, a golf enthusiast and somewhat humorous. He was, indeed, quite popular.

That March Sunday afternoon I remember well, as I was just back from ski-running at Mürren. As he stood before the fire I chanced to remark that the Crimes Club was holding their usual dinner that night and I was remaining in town to attend it.

“In my profession I am constantly dealing with petty crime. I would so much like to go to one of your dinners,” he said. “I suppose you discuss the celebrated cases of poisoning and so on? It must be most interesting.”

I replied that at the meetings many unknown facts concerning great crimes were often revealed.

But as I sat there I never dreamed of the terrible crime of which, not a month before, the man standing astride the rug had been guilty. He had deliberately poisoned his wife, and at that moment she was lying in her grave!

“Yes,” he repeated, throwing himself into a big armchair and lazily smoking an excellent cigar. “I should so much like to be present at one of the meetings.”

I met my fellow-clubman on quite half a dozen subsequent occasions, and no doubt he would have found the deliberations of the Crimes Club full of interest, for he was none other than the notorious poisoner, Herbert Rowse Armstrong. When his wife’s body was exhumed by order of the Home Office about seven months after our fireside conversation, arsenic was found to have been the cause of death, and then came another charge of attempting to poison a friend.

As everyone knows, Armstrong was hanged in Gloucester Gaol in January, 1922.

Yes, I have met some very queer people.