The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (37 page)

The Scottsdale Police probably did bungle the investigation at the start as many people and outside law enforcement agencies say.

But there is also the possibility that Bob Crane “entertained” the wife or girlfriend of some powerful figure in the oligarchy. Many in Scottsdale believe this may be the case and, therefore, the police department AND the County Attorney have “backed off” filing any charges.

On the other hand, Scottsdale, Arizona, is a very close-knit retirement community in the Arizona desert. It is a wealthy area and it is highly possible that Crane could have also “entertained,” and featured in living color on a videotape, the wife and/or girlfriend of one of Scottsdale’s leading citizens, with access to many sources of information and the seat of power in Scottsdale.

Nevertheless, it would appear that now, over ten years after his murder, the killer of Bob Crane will never be brought to justice—unless the killer confesses, or gives himself absolution on his deathbed by confessing to the crime. Either of the latter two options seems highly unlikely.

But as the American theologian Tyron Edwards wrote in the 19th Century:

It may well have been “poisoned bread and forbidden pleasures” that were the catalysts which precipitated the murder of Bob Crane.

But Hollywood and television are the losers for the loss of the witty, brash and personable high school dropout from Waterbury, Connecticut. His murder, and who did it, might always be considered another of Hollywood’s unsolved mysteries.

John Carpenter was arrested in 1992, fourteen years after the murder of Bob Crane. Cold-case investigators had concluded that fragments of tissue from Crane’s brain, found in the car Carpenter had rented on the murder night, matched those found at the murder scene. But the evidence had not improved with age: the tissue existed only in photographs. After a two-month trial, John Carpenter was found not guilty and he died in 1998 aged seventy, leaving Bob Crane’s murder unsolved.

(Edwin Bartlett, 1875)

Christianna Brand

The case of Adelaide Bartlett is one of a clutch of Victorian poisoning dramas that galvanized the British murder-reading public during the closing years of the nineteenth century. There mere several crowd-pleasing features: the accused woman, at thirty, was still young and presentable, born in France, and the widow of a prosperous grocer ten years older than she was. Adelaide was accused of murdering him with liquid chloroform. The fact that she had slept with her husband’s brother within a year of her marriage furnished a further frisson. Although acquitted, most observers of the case believe that Mrs Bartlett was a very lucky woman. Her case has prompted a number of full-length books, including a novelised interpretation by the crime writer Julian Symons,
Sweet Adelaide.
This miniature treatment first appeared in 1974, in a collection of (mostly fictional) short crime stories by the detective writer Christianna Brand (1909–88).
Her mystery novels (including
Green for Danger,
which was filmed starring Alistair Sim) appeared over a period of some forty years. She also wrote books for children, most notably
Nurse Matilda
(1963), illustrated by her cousin Edward Ardizzone.

Murder hath charms, we must confess, for those of us not too closely brushed against it; and how much more so “when a lady’s in the case”—those delicious pouter-pigeon ladies who so closely followed each other into the dock in the latter half of the last century: with their bosoms and their bustles and their tight little waists, all starry-eyed. And when, furthermore, the truth of their innocence or guilt must now be for ever in doubt—they are surely irresistible? Mrs Bravo so plump and pretty, lacing the wine or the water with antimony—
did she or didn’t she?
Poor Florence Maybrick, adding to her elderly husband’s already sufficient consumption of aphrodisiac arsenic—
did she or didn’t she?
And Adelaide, sweet Adelaide, with her great big brown eyes and her great big brown bottle of chloroform—
did she or didn’t she . . . ?
We shall never know now.

It was in the year 1875 that the friends of Miss Adelaide Blanche de la Tremoille purchased for her a husband—in the shape of a Wicked Grocer named Edwin Bartlett, who thenceforward kept her in a cage most cruelly all day—and in a separate bed most cruelly all night. Or so said Adelaide, on trial for his murder eleven years later. For he believed that a man should have two wives, one for use and one for companionship; and Adelaide, he explained to her, was to be the one for companionship.

To add to the improbability of her name, Adelaide Blanche de la Tremoille was, as Miss Austen would say, the natural daughter of Somebody—rich enough to have provided for her adequately, “decent enough to have wished for concealment”. She was nineteen when the marriage was arranged but Edwin, having “a reverential regard for advanced learning” of which he himself had very little, packed her off to boarding school for the next three years and only then received her permanently into his home. He had invested his own purchase price in the family grocery business and now had a chain of flourishing shops. They set up house in rooms over one of these establishments in Herne Hill.

There she remained, poor young creature, very friendless, occupying herself with her needlework, music and the care of some Newfoundland dogs which her husband bred “for showing”—one gets the impression that there was not very much that Edwin did just for fun—and which were kept in kennels close by. Her sole companion was her aged father-in-law who, devoted to his son, with whom he incessantly talked business, had disapproved of the marriage and henceforward disliked and distrusted her.

After two years of this she petitioned for a baby of her own; and at last, evidently feeling that the better the day the better the deed, Edwin relented and on a Sunday afternoon “a single act” took place. Adelaide became triumphantly pregnant and, attended only by a midwife named Annie Walker, in due course she was delivered of a child. But the baby was stillborn. She went through a bad time, declared herself unwilling to have any more children; platonic relations were resumed and that was that.

Or so said Adelaide.

After several changes of residence, in the course of which they got rid of the company of Bartlett senior, the couple finally came to rest in Claverton Street, Pimlico—a typical London house of that period, of which so many still exist—one of a long, stuccoed terrace, with steps up to the front door and two pillars and a balcony forming a porch. But it was not much of a life for an active and alertly minded young woman: two first-floor rooms, divided only by partitioning doors, and all the housework and cooking done by a landlady . . .

Or it wouldn’t have been; but by now a new and exciting element had been introduced. The Reverend George Dyson had arrived upon the Bartletts’ scene.

The Rev. George was attached to a Wesleyan chapel, where his duties appear to have been light for soon he was spending a great deal of time with the Bartletts, both of whom quite doted upon him (a young man with a large, plummy face, soft, dark eyes and a plentiful, black drooping moustache, it is nowadays hard to find much charm in him)—and soon he had undertaken to promote even further the advanced learning for which Edwin had so much regard. Latin, history, mathematics and geography—the last perhaps somewhat in the general direction of Oh, my America, my new-found-land!—a poem by a fellow cleric considerably more literate, if a great deal naughtier, in verse than the Rev. George. For while Donne addressed himself strictly to his bird, with George it was all his birdie—

This effusion went on for many stanzas, all with the same refrain. After Edwin Bartlett died, the author was at great pains to get it back from Adelaide: and who can blame him?

The lessons took place in the front room at Claverton Street and often lasted all day; not surprising that sometimes Adelaide was so exhausted as to have to take them sitting on the floor, her head resting against George’s knee, the curtains drawn across and even pinned together, to take the strain from her eyes. These were very dark and large in an oval face, crowned by close-cropped, curly dark hair. The mouth is full-lipped and rather sensuous. No wonder that at last it was all too much for George who went to Edwin and confessed that he was becoming “too interested” in Adelaide.

Edwin was unperturbed. He begged George to continue as before and soon a somewhat astonishing situation emerged, which certainly was understood and accepted by all three—in which it was agreed that Edwin had some obscure condition which gave him not much longer to live and that Adelaide was more or less made over to George in advance, as his prospective wife.

October. November. On 8 December—in 1885, this is, the eleventh year of the marriage—Adelaide sent round the corner for the nearest available doctor. He found Edwin very low, weak and deeply depressed, suffering from sickness, diarrhoea, and haemorrhage of the bowels. On looking into the mouth, he observed also a blue line round the edge of the gums which suggested that at some time the patient had taken mercury. This in turn suggested what counsel later referred to euphemistically as “a pestilent disease” which, however, Edwin to the last refused to admit to; (one wonders a little, all the same, about that baby, stillborn to a perfectly strong and healthy young woman; and it does seem that Edwin was ever a prey to undefined, perhaps secret, fears). It later emerged that as a young man he had decided that dentures would be better than the real thing and had accordingly submitted to the awful agony of having all his own perfectly good teeth sawn off at the gums. The stumps had now decayed and his entire mouth was in an appalling condition. Within the next twelve days he had sixteen of these stumps removed; they revealed an underlying fungoid growth with resultant sloughing, eroding and sponginess which we may feel it more agreeable to pass over.

By the 19th however, things were much improved and the doctor wanted the patient to go away for a change—preferably without his wife who, said the doctor, “petted him too much”. But though brighter, Edwin was now terrified about his health and refused, and on the 23rd his fears seemed—to himself at any rate—justified. Whatever a lumbricoid worm may be, he passed a lumbricoid worm.

By this time it really seems fair to describe the wretched man as half out of his mind with fear, distress and a very understandable self pity. He felt worms constantly wriggling up and down his throat and one night, he told the doctor, he arose and stood before Adelaide as she slept, “extracting the vital force from her to himself”. And each time he grew a little brighter, fresh disaster struck. Now necrosis of the jaw was suggested and it had a frightening ring to it. On 31 December, New Year’s Eve, yet another stump of tooth must come out.

In preparation for this event, he ate for his breakfast half a dozen oysters and a large helping of jugged hare. On return from the dentist, “this remarkable invalid” had another half dozen oysters, a quantity of mango chutney—all by itself?—cake and tea; and ordered a large haddock for the next morning’s breakfast, saying that he would wake up early in anticipation of this treat.

Alas, he was destined never to wake up again.

Adelaide, meanwhile, had been looking after her husband with a truly devoted assiduity, sitting up with him all night and every night, holding his toe which seems to have afforded him some obscure satisfaction. On 27 December, however, four days before he died, a most curious event had taken place. She had—apparently accidentally—run into the Rev. George Dyson in the street, and had sent him off upon an errand. He was to obtain for her quite a large quantity of chloroform. Edwin had long suffered from an internal complaint, she explained, about which he was too sensitive to speak to anybody, and nothing but chloroform had ever been able to soothe him and send him to sleep. She had previously got it from her friend, the midwife, Annie Walker—this was untrue—but Annie Walker was now abroad. She could not ask the doctor for it as he would never understand how skilled she was in its use.

She said nothing about keeping the matter secret and George could not, later, say why he should have gone such an odd way about obtaining it—going round to three different chemists—collecting the amount in three small bottles—telling lies as to its intended purpose—transferring it all to one bottle and handing it to Adelaide surreptitiously; though that, he explained, was only because Edwin was present.

The bottle was never seen again; and four days later Edwin Bartlett lay dead with a large quantity of chloroform in his stomach.

Adelaide had awoken, she said, at four o’clock in the morning; had turned him on his back, tried to pour brandy down his throat—there was a smell of spilt brandy on his chest and half a glass of it on the mantelpiece within reach of his bed. She had sent the maid for the doctor and called up the landlord. He testified that the room had smelt “of paregoric or ether” and especially the brandy glass.