Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew (17th April 1863 – 16 December 1947) was a Metropolitan Police officer who was involved in the hunt for both Jack the Ripper and Dr Crippen.

Early life

Dew was born at 'Far Cotton', in Hardingstone, Northamptonshire, one of seven children to Walter Dew Snr, a railway guard, and his wife Eliza. His family moved to London when he was 10. As a boy Dew was not a natural scholar, and left school aged 13. As a youth Dew found work in a solicitor's office off Chancery Lane, but not liking the work he became a junior clerk at the offices of a seed-merchant in Holborn. Later, he followed his father on to the railways, for on the 1881 census he is listed as a 17 year-old railway porter living in Hammersmith in London. However, in 1882 he joined the Metropolitan Police, aged 19, and was given the warrant number 66711. He was posted to the Metropolitan Police's X Division (Paddington Green). On 15 November 1886 Dew married Kate Morris in Notting Hill. They had six children, one of whom died in infancy.

Jack the Ripper

Early in 1887 Dew was transferred to Commercial Street police station in H Division (Whitechapel), where he was a detective constable in the Criminal Investigation Department during the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

In his memoirs, published fifty years later in 1938, Dew made a number of claims about being personally involved in the Ripper investigation. None of these claims have been confirmed by surviving police records, and some of them contradict known evidence in the case. Dew claimed to know Mary Jane Kelly by sight. "Often I saw her parading along Commercial Street, between Flower and Dean Street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road", he wrote. "She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron, but no hat."^[1] Dew also claimed to have been one of the first police officers on the murder scene, though none of the records mentioning those people who were present list his involvement. Dew wrote that he saw Kelly's mutilated body in her room in Miller's Court and that he regarded it as "the most gruesome memory of the whole of my Police career."^[2] Dew wrote that Kelly's open eyes were photographed in an attempt to capture an image of her killer,^[3] but police doctors involved in the case had already determined that such an effort would be futile. Dew stated that Emma Smith was the first Ripper victim, a view that has often been contested by Ripperologists^[4], and opined that "Someone, somewhere, shared Jack the Ripper's guilty secret."

Police career

In 1898 Dew was promoted to Inspector, and was transferred to Scotland Yard. He moved to T Division in Hammersmith in 1900, and in 1903 was promoted to Inspector First Class and moved to E Division, based at Bow Street. In 1906 he became a Chief Inspector, and returned to Scotland Yard. By the time of his retirement from the police in 1910 Dew had received 130 recommendations and rewards from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, judges and magistrates.

Arrest of Crippen

Hawley Harvey Crippen was an American, born in Michigan in 1862. He qualified as a doctor in 1885 and worked for a patent medicine company. Coming to England in 1900, he lived at 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway, with his second wife Cora Turner, better known by her stage name of 'Belle Elmore'. Early in 1910 Belle disappeared and Crippen moved his young mistress, Ethel le Neve, into his house. Le Neve began to wear Belle's clothing and jewellery, and when people questioned Crippen about his wife's whereabouts he told them that she had moved back to the U.S.A. to visit a sick relative.

Belle's friends reported their suspicions to the police. Dew visited Crippen, and left the house after Crippen had claimed that his wife had eloped with a lover, and a search had not revealed anything suspicious. Unnerved by the sudden interest of the police, Crippen and le Neve left the country for Antwerp, and then boarded the SS Montrose for Canada. The house at Hilldrop Crescent was searched again, and this time the remains of a female body were found buried in the cellar. Dr Bernard Spilsbury, the famous pathologist, identified the body as that of Mrs Crippen from a piece of abdominal scar tissue, and found that there were traces of the poison hyoscene remaining in her body.[1]

The search for Crippen was assisted by the master of the SS Montrose, who suspected that the 'boy' accompanying one of his passengers, Mr Robinson, was Ethel le Neve in disguise. He entered criminal history through the first use of radio to send his suspicions to the ship's owners and the police. Dew took a faster ship, the SS Laurentic, and, on July 31 1910, disguised as a pilot officer, went on board the SS Montrose from a pilot vessel and, on recognising the Crippen, arrested him. He then had to wait for three weeks while extradition paperwork was completed, meantime regularly visiting the couple in jail.

In his 1938 memoirs, Dew recalled:

"I had landed on July 29 by the liner Laurentic, arriving two days before the Montrose, which was already well out in the Atlantic when we first suspected that Crippen was aboard, but which was a much slower vessel than the mail steamer Laurentic. Old Crippen took it quite well. He always was a bit of a philosopher, though he could not have helped being astounded to see me on board the boat. He was quite a likeable chap in his way. Much of my time in Canada was spent evading reporters and cameramen, who knew all about my arrival in spite of our efforts to keep it secret, and who frequently became personal when I did not give them a statement. As it happened, Crippen and his companion, Miss Ethel Le Neve, showed no desire to postpone our departure and waived their extradition rights, which enabled us to make the return journey after being only three weeks in Canada."[2]

Dew returned to England with Crippen aboard the SS Megantic, paving the way for a sensational trial at the Old Bailey. Newspapers at the time said he had "effected the most sensational criminal capture of the century".[3]

Later years

By now internationally famous, Dew resigned from the police and set up as a "Confidential Agent". In 1911 he brought libel actions against nine newspapers for comments they had printed about him during the Crippen case. Most settled out of court, and Dew won his case against those who did not, resulting in his being awarded substantial sums as damages.

After his retirement, Dew became an unofficial 'criminal expert' for the British press, who would print his comments and opinions on various cases then in the public eye, such as the mysterious disappearance in 1926 of crime-writer Agatha Christie.^[5] He published his autobiography 'I Caught Crippen' in 1938. This contained factual errors as many of the events described were being recalled sometimes more than fifty years later; Dew himself admitted this in the book. However, compared to many of the memoirs written by Dew's contemporaries about the same events, it is "broadly accurate".^[6]

Dew retired to Worthing, living at the Wee Hoose, 10 Beaumont Road, until his death in 1947. He was buried at Durrington Cemetery in Worthing.

Film portrayals

Television portrayals

References

External links

• Dew on the Casebook:Jack the Ripper website
• The Man who caught Crippen
• Census details concerning Walter Dew