Walter Dew

Walter Dew served in London’s Metropolitan Police and worked on major investigations before becoming chief inspector. In 1910 he investigated the disappearance of Cora Crippen and the remains found at her home after Hawley Harvey Crippen and Ethel Le Neve fled Britain.

Dew joined the Metropolitan Police in 1882 and served as a detective constable in Whitechapel during the Jack the Ripper murders, later rising through the Criminal Investigation Department to chief inspector. By the time of the Crippen case he was an experienced Scotland Yard investigator, and the highly publicised transatlantic pursuit made him internationally known. He retired from the police in 1910 and later worked as a private ‘confidential agent’; his 1938 memoir, I Caught Crippen, preserved valuable recollections but also contained errors arising from the long interval since the events described.

In Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck, the ship’s captain recognises them and uses Marconi wireless to alert Scotland Yard, allowing Chief Inspector Walter Dew to cross the Atlantic on a faster vessel and arrest the pair in Canada. In John Boyne’s Crippen, when Cora disappears and human remains are found beneath the Crippens’ house, suspicion turns towards the apparently mild doctor. Crippen and Ethel flee aboard the SS Montrose, disguising themselves as father and son, while Chief Inspector Walter Dew follows their progress through the new technology of wireless telegraphy. Boyne alternates the celebrated manhunt with the lives of passengers aboard the ship, turning a documented murder case into a study of performance, respectability and public fascination with crime.