The Crippen Incident
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
A kind of perverted lover, named "masochist" by Kraft-Ebing, is, needless to say, a person who feels pleasure in being abused by the opposite sex. Therefore, it seems unlikely that such a man - even if he were a man and wanted to be killed by a woman - would ever kill a woman. However, although it may seem strange at first glance, there are instances of masochists killing their wives or mistresses. For example, in England, on the 1st of February, 1910, the masochistic husband, Hawley-Harvey Crippen, murdered his mistress Cora, an actress for whom he had a great admiration. Cora, whose stage name was Belle Elmore, was the ideal of all masochists: a flirtatious, selfish, extremely extravagant woman who always had numerous admirers on either side, and who used her husband as if she were a queen, forcing him to perform slave-like services. The exact time of the crime is still unknown to this day, but after one o'clock in the morning on the 1st of February in the year 1910, Cora went missing and no one has ever seen her again. When asked, the Crippen husband said that his wife had died of illness in her new home. Five months later, Scotland Yard came to his notice and when the detectives asked him for an explanation, he replied in a very nonchalant manner, "Who told you she was dead? Actually, we had a quarrel on the night of January 31st, and she got angry and ran away from home. I think she probably went to America. She was born in America, and I heard that there was a man there, so she must have gone to him. I spread the word that she was dead because it would be bad for public appearances if I didn't say so." He then led the detectives to his house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent and left them to search the entire house thoroughly. The case was thus buried in obscurity, and although the suspicion against him was cleared for the time being, but in his haste, Crippen suddenly disappeared the following day. That was on July 12th, and on the 15th, detectives searched his house again, discovering a mass of flesh that appeared to be a headless, limbless human torso beneath the bricks of the basement floor where coal was stored. This was five and a half months after Cora had disappeared.
It is not my aim to recount the Hawley-Harvey Crippen case for profit. I will therefore keep it as brief as possible, what is particularly noteworthy about him is that Crippen was the first criminal to be arrested by the use of wireless telegraphy. He fled to Antwerp, and on July 20th, he boarded the steamship Montross, which departed from Antwerp for America, under the pseudonym Mr John Robinson. However, Mr Robinson was accompanied by a beautiful boy who claimed to be his son, and who appeared to be a woman dressed as a man, which finally aroused the suspicions of Captain Kendall, who then sent a wireless telegram to the relevant authorities. On the 31st of the same month, a police officer who had followed him from Liverpool captured him and the woman dressed as a man on board the ship. Who was this woman? Her name was Ethel Le Neve, a typist whom Crippin loved. He was gradually growing tired of his wife, and he had taken the typist as his mistress.
I would like to draw the reader's attention to this point. For although masochists enjoy being abused by women, their pleasure is entirely physical and sensual, and does not include any spiritual element whatsoever. Some may say that the masochist does not derive pleasure merely from being despised and toyed with in his heart. The masochist does not feel pleasure unless he is struck with the hands and kicked with the feet. Of course, this is not necessarily the case. However, even if they say that they are despised in their hearts, in reality they are just creating such a relationship and taking pleasure in imagining it as if it were real, in other words, it is only a kind of play, a kind of farce. Every man and woman knows that a truly respectable woman, a noble woman who truly despises him, would never have anything to do with him at all. In other words, the masochist does not actually become a slave to a woman, but rather he delights in the appearance of it. They would be annoyed if they were really enslaved more than they appear to be. The man is tempted to the point of being unable to resist, and this makes him accumulate hatred in his heart, and eventually he has no choice but to get rid of the other woman in some sinister way. (After fiddling with the doll for a long time and using it as much as he can, he throws it into the garbage dump.) Since the other party is on his guard, there are plenty of opportunities for him to take advantage of them. This is carried out without reason. And the world is not suspicious of a man who has been as pliable with women as he has been with them. Such was the case with Crippen. For a time, it seemed that a gentleman who could tolerate the wishes of his wife would never commit such a horrendous crime.
Crippen never confessed, and to this day it is not known when or by what means he killed Cora. The British courts sentenced him to death for poisoning Cora, based on the fact that Cora was out of sight, that a mass of flesh appeared under the cellar floor, his sudden attempt to escape by dressing his mistress up as a man, that he had been gradually purchasing large quantities of a deleterious drug as a sexual stimulant from a drug dealer he knew, and that the entrails of the mass of flesh contained that same deleterious drug. However, the state of science at the time made it extremely difficult to academically prove that the mass mass flesh in the cellar was part of Cora's corpse. The mass of flesh was so damaged and decomposed that it had to be separated from the torso. There is no definite answer as to when the severed head and limbs were removed from the house or where they were disposed of, other than the supposition that they were probably thrown into the English Channel from the deck of a ship while he was traveling to Dieppe with his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, during the Easter holidays, before the crime was exposed.
The Crippen Incident is briefly summarised above. I would now like to introduce to you, the reader, a case similar to this one - the Crippen Incident in Japan. The incident refers, not surprisingly, to an incident that made headlines in the Kyoto and Osaka regions two or years ago, which took place at the private home of a company employee, Yujirō Oguri, in Aza XX, XX village, Muko County, Hyogo Prefecture. The reason I bring it up again and appeal to the reader's interest is that, although various articles appeared in the newspapers at the time, none of them did a fair job of observing the incident, only writing about the bloody scene and the "wicked and treacherous" crime that was "extremely ferocious and horrific," with a string of exaggerated adjectives. It seems that none of the newspapers paid special attention to the fact that the incident was a second Crippen case, a masochist murder. Moreover, since the incident took place in the Kansai region, the Tokyo newspapers covered it lightly, so there must be many people who were not aware of it. It is not my aim to write it in the style of a detective story, but rather to gather facts based on records and organise the already known materials according to my own unique perspective, in other words, to replace the centre of the given matter and present it to you in as concise and summary a manner as possible.
It was around 2:00 a.m. on March 20th, 1923. The owner of a farmhouse called B, located five or six chō northeast of the Ashiyagawa (Noyagawa) stop of the Hankyu Railway, heard the sound of a guard dog moaning and the sound of people shouting from the direction of his neighbour's house, Yujirō Oguri. For those who do not know the geography of the area, there are two train lines connecting Osaka and Kobe. One line runs along the coast, while the other line weaves through the foothills of the Rokko Mountains, running toward higher ground. One line runs along the coast, while the other runs along the foothills of the Rokko Mountains. The Hankyu line refers to the latter, and although the area along this line has only recently experienced rapid development, at that time there were not even half as many houses as there are today. In particular, the area above the railway line, in the mountainside, was quite deserted at the time, and apart from the peasants who had lived in the village for a long time, there were only two rented houses that had been built for the victims of the earthquake that hit the Kanto region last year. One of these two houses was still unoccupied, and the other had been occupied by Yujirō Oguri for about two months. The aforementioned House B was located four or five ken east of the house and was the closest to Oguri's house. However, when the owner of House B heard such noises that night, he was not too suspicious. He knew that Oguri kept a large guard dog, and had often heard the dog grunting like a bull every night recently. As for the screams, it would not have been surprising if they had come from the Oguri house. The reason was that the wife would sometimes have hysterical fits, hitting and kicking her husband and causing mayhem, and the rumour had spread throughout the village in the blink of an eye since she had moved in.
If a red-tiled cultural house were to be built on such a traditional site and a young couple from the city were to move in, it would inevitably attract the attention of the villagers, but this couple was an excellent source of gossip. As far as the villagers could see, the husband and wife lived alone together without a maid, except for a dog. The husband was a thirty-five or thirty-six year old man who was said to be an employee of BC Cotton Flower Company Ltd. in Semba, Osaka. The wife may have been twenty-four or twenty-five years old, but she looked like she was around twenty, and she was the first to catch the villagers' eyes. Every day around noon, she would lock up her house and go out for a walk, towing her dog on a thick chain. Her clothes were strange, with her hair cut short, which was rare in the neighbourhood, and a very old, faded, long-sleeved kimono made of flashy merino yuzen dye, and purple corduroy tabi socks. She looked quite beautiful, but no matter how you look at it, she was the kind of person who would be photographed by a madman. After taking her dog for a walk, she would come back home, and then, around noon, this time wearing terribly fashionable, racy clothing, she would go out somewhere by train, wielding a thin, whip-like walking stick. It had long been a question as to where the wife went each day when her husband was away from home, but it was soon discovered that she was a vaudeville actress performing in Sennichimae, Osaka, and Shinkaichi, Kobe. In other words, the couple were dual-income earners. Since the wife stayed up late at night, she seemed to be asleep in bed in the morning, and the husband was always seen leaving the house at around seven am, the time he left for work, locking the front or back door. Sometimes the husband would return straight from work at around six pm, and sometimes he would go to the hut where the wife was working and return home around eleven pm, arm in arm. Therefore, since the couple rarely had time to see each other during the day, it is not surprising that when they returned home, they would talk until late into the night. For some reason, they began quarrelling every third day, and at around two am, the sound of their fierce clash broke the peaceful sleep of the village. Not only that, but something strange was discovered about the inner workings of the fights. At first, the villagers imagined that the husband was jealous and was bullying the wife, but when they looked into the situation, they found that it was the wife who was yelling and hitting the husband, while the husband was crying and begging for forgiveness. This is why they thought, "That woman is hysterical, I thought it was strange for an actress to be like that, but..." Rumours that the wife was insane spread like wildfire.
So that night, when the owner of House B heard the dog's barking and other noises, he was not likely to pay it any attention, but simply thought, "They're at it again," and fell asleep immediately. However, about three hours later, at around five in the morning, when the owner woke up again, the noises from the neighbouring house were still continuing, albeit faintly. However, this time he did not hear the dog barking, but instead heard a staccato, pathetic, and weak voice that sounded like the husband was probably screaming as usual, saying something like, "Please bear with me!" or "I'm sorry!" At the time, the owner thought this was a little strange, as trains had never continued running until the early hours of the morning before. If there was a fight, there would have been the sound of the fine lady's hiding, or the sound of her husband's side being knocked down, but they did not hear any of that. In the quietness of the room, all that could be heard was the scream of the owner. If one listened carefully, the screams did not sound like "please bear with me," but rather "please help me.'
The owner of House B, who later appeared as a witness, stated that he had nothing further to do with the case. First, he heard the screams of Yujirō Oguri, but was hesitant to rush to the scene because he could not make them out clearly. Then, by chance, a second man who was passing by Oguri's house heard a voice clearly saying, "Help me!'' --The following are facts based primarily on the testimony of the second man.
The second man was a horseman who was carrying a carload of stones to be quarried from a small mountain five or six chō to the northeast of Oguri's house to the coast at Uozaki. As he approached the house a little after five o'clock that morning, he heard a voice from the second-story window saying, "Help me!" The window was unmarred, with a chintz windowpane hanging down, and the morning sun reflected red and sparkling off the tight glass shoji. Despite this, the repeated cries for help were so urgent that he immediately tried to enter the house, but both the front and back doors were securely locked. Without any other recourse, he broke through the glass sliding door in the kitchen. He ran up the stairs to what he thought was the room where the voice had come from, and saw that one of the sliding doors of the room had been removed and that it was three feet wide. As he tried to look in, a huge wolf-like dog suddenly jumped at him from inside the room. He immediately heard a man in the room shouting, "Ess, ess!" and trying his best to control the dog. The dog became quiet and stopped its hostile behaviour, but was still sniffing the horseman's body, as if on alert.
The next moment, the horseman looked around the room and saw a man on the bunk, stripped naked and his hands and feet bound with a rope. He appeared to have been beaten severely all over his body, with welts and blood flowing everywhere. No doubt it was this man who had called for help and who had also just scolded the dog. But even more tragic was the corpse of a young woman with her hair bobbed, lying face up at the foot of the bed. She was dressed in garishly embroidered pyjamas - or, as the horseman put it, "in Chinese clothes" - with a leather whip in her right hand, and her head had been viciously gouged out, and she lay dead in a pool of blood flowing from her wounds. At first, the horseman's confused mind only vaguely saw this horrible scene, and he had no idea what it all meant. He found the dog, Ess, covered in the same blood, with fresh red streaks dripping from his lips. "The dog had killed and eaten her" - that was all he could make out. If anything, Ess let down his guard against the horseman at that moment and began to connect the corpse again. The corpse - and he noticed for the first time - had wounds all over it, not just on the head, as if flesh had been torn off.
Soon after, police officers and a police doctor arrived to investigate, and the bound man, namely Yujirō Oguri, and the witness, the horseman, were taken to the police station, where Oguri's explanation inadvertently revealed the full details of this mysterious tragedy. According to Oguri, the dead woman was a vaudeville actress with the stage name Paris Ogata, and was his common-law wife. And that night, too, he was being tortured by Paris, as usual. Paris stripped him naked, ordered him to lie down on the bed, tied his hands and feet with a dog chain, and beat him all over his body with a leather whip. He was screaming in pain. Meanwhile, about ten days earlier, they had specially brought in a German wolfdog from Shanghai. It was a ferocious dog, weighing 13 to 14 kg, and they had tied it up in a room downstairs. As soon as it heard the screams, it assumed its master was in urgent danger, and suddenly tore off the rope, kicked down the door, ran into the room on the second floor, and jumped on Paris, biting her throat in one blow.
When asked why Paris had chosen him, Oguri spoke frankly about how he was a shameless perverted sexual lover - a masochist. Paris was by no means a hysterical woman, but rather was acting violently to please Oguri. Furthermore, what was the need for keeping such a vicious dog? Although he (Oguri) was not a dog lover by nature, he and his wife were now both dog-crazy, thanks to the influence of Paris. She had a very specialised taste in dogs, and a dog is an indispensable adornment for women when they walk outside. A woman who does not walk with a dog is not qualified to be a beauty. To serve this purpose, a large, robust dog is better than a small, frail dog. The more dashing and ferocious the dog is, the more striking the appearance of the lady escorted by it will be. This was the theory of Paris. When she started living with Oguri, she immediately bought a dog of mixed blood between a Tosa inu and a wolf, but it died of distemper, so she bought a Great Dane. However, she found that the Great Dane's coat colouration and body did not match her skin and clothing, so she recently sold it to a dog dealer in Kobe and decided to get a German wolfhound instead. The dog that the villagers said they had seen her walking with was a Great Dane, and before the wolfhound arrived, Paris had gone on a half-month tour of Kyushu with a vaudeville troupe, returning in the afternoon of the day before the incident. This incident was the cause of the dog-loving woman being killed and eaten alive by a dog. Both Paris and Oguri had often handled fierce dogs, and as a result, they had little fear of dogs and had let their guard down. Nevertheless, Oguri knew that the new dog was particularly rough, so he had taken it home while she was away and had continued to practise training it every day and night since then. He even kept it locked up in a room downstairs, especially on the days when she would come home, just in case something were to happen. However, this turned out to be a bad thing, as the dog had never had a chance to get to know her until the incident occurred, and came to see her as a devil who was oppressing its master.
The officers examined the layout of Oguri's house to be certain. As mentioned before, it was a rented cultural house, with a Japanese-style tatami room upstairs and a Western-style room downstairs. The room where the tragedy occurred that night had an iron double bed set on an eight-tatami-mat floor, and was the couple's bedroom - or rather, the place where Paris would inflict all manner of torture and corporal punishment on her poor slave night after night. The dog was chained downstairs in the Western room, and one end of the chain was tied to the window grate. However, it was determined that if the wolfdog went berserk, it would not be difficult to break the chain and twist the bars. Moreover, there was no mechanism for locking the room. It was also doubtful whether the door handle had been turned properly, and this was where Oguri let his guard down. In short, the dog ran out, went up to the second floor, and easily removed the sliding door to the Japanese room.
Besides the horseman, the owner of the B family, an actor from the vaudeville company, a dog maker from Kobe, and other villagers were examined as witnesses, and their statements matched those of Oguri. Oguri was not satisfied with the results of the investigation. Oguri expressed a desire to at least avenge the death of his beloved woman with his own hands. His wish was sympathetically granted, and he borrowed a policeman's pistol and shot the dog dead on the spot. The case was thus closed, and the evening papers that day carried headlines such as 'Woman Eaten Alive By Dog,' 'Vaudeville Actress Killed By Dog,' and 'Husband's Perverted Sexual Desires,' bringing to light the secrets of this remarkable couple. But after only five or six days of publicity, it was gradually forgotten.
By the way, some of you may have read a small article in the margin of a few newspapers in mid-August of the same year, about five months later, about a "mysterious luggage with a doll in it." The luggage was found abandoned in the weeds on a plot of land owned by a certain Mr Oguri, Kamakura, Sagami Province, on the morning of August 15. Upon receiving a report, a police officer examined the contents and found a life-size doll. It was a crude doll made by an amateur, made of wire and wooden core wrapped with paper and cloth, and was similar to a scarecrow, but the face was carefully made, and it was crowned with a lock of hair. The policemen recognised the doll as a woman by her face, her hairstyle, and the pattern on the fancy pyjamas she was dressed in. At first, he assumed it was probably a sailor from Yokosuka who had used the doll as a ship's comfort. The reason being, the doll was imbued with the alluring scent of perfume and face powder, which hit the officer's nose as soon as he opened the suitcase. One strange thing, however, was that there was a scar on the doll's head that seemed to indicate that the throat had been deeply gouged out with some sort of weapon. The gouging had to have been repeated several times, with the hole being repaired after each gouging. When the officer examined the wound more closely, he found a lump of dried flesh, about the size of a slice of sashimi, attached to the wound. The results of the examination have shown that it is beef.
I need not explain this further to the reader.
However, when he wondered why Yujirō Oguri had not hidden the suitcase under the floorboards of his house for a longer time, and why he had taken the trouble to carry it out and abandon it, he felt a sense of fear, as if the contents of the suitcase were not a doll but Paris's corpse. As long as the doll was in the house, he could not sleep. His first thought was to leave it under the floorboards and move elsewhere. However, he foresaw a very dangerous situation. His second thought was to secretly dismantle it and slowly, bit by bit, smash each part into pieces or throw them away. In fact, he was planning to do this, and one day he took the luggage out from under the floorboards and opened the suitcase, but he did not have the courage to look the doll in the face or touch it. He was more afraid of the scent of perfume emanating from it than anything else. It was Coty's balsam, a fragrance so specific to her that it could be described as the body odour of a dead woman. To pulverise the doll required the courage to kill her once again. And this time he had to do it directly, with his own hands. -- He hurriedly closed the lid of the suitcase.
At the time of the crime, he was living with a dancing girl from Café Napoli in Osaka, meaning that there was also an Ethel Le Neve in case of Crippen, Japan.