Depraved
THE DEFINITIVE TRUE STORY OF H. H. HOLMES, WHOSE GROTESQUE CRIMES SHATTERED TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY CHICAGO
HAROLD SCHECHTER
Brigid Pearson
Columbian Exposition Building in Chicago: ©Bettmann/CORBIS sky: Byron Aughenbaugh/The Image Bank
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DEVIANT
DERANGED
DEPRAVED
BESTIAL
FIEND
FATAL
and
THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF SERIAL KILLERS
by Harold Schechter and David Everitt
Be sure to read Harold Schechter’s acclaimed historical
crime fiction featuring Edgar Allan Poe
THE HUM BUG
and
NEVERMORE
All available from Pocket Books
The essential account of H. H. Holmes,
Chicago’s most gruesome killer—
from Harold Schechter,
“America’s foremost pop historian of serial murder”
(The Boston Book Review)
DEPRAVED
“DEPRAVED demonstrates that sadistic psychopaths are not a modern-day phenomenon…. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.”
“A meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed, and above all riveting account of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century serial killer who embodied the ferociously dark side of America’s seemingly timeless preoccupations with ambition, money, and power. Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.”
—Ann Rule, bestselling author of Without Pity
“I unhesitatingly recommend [DEPRAVED] … to round out your understanding of the true depth, meaning, and perversity of [this] uniquely American brand of mayhem.”
—Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist
“As chilling as The Silence of the Lambs and as blood curdling as the best Stephen King novel…. It will deprive you of your sleep, and take your attention away from everything else on your schedule until you finish it.”
—The Boston Book Review
“Schechter’s writing keeps you turning the pages….”
—Flint (MI) Journal
—Syracuse Herald-American
More praise for Harold Schechter’s true-crime accounts,“well-documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look” (Journal Star, Peoria, IL)
FIEND
The Shocking True Story of America’s
Youngest Serial Killer
“A memorably gothic tale…. True-crime lovers will not want to miss it.”
“A seamless story, fascinating in its horror…. In Fiend, Schechter succeeds at reminding us that modern times don’t have a monopoly on juvenile terror.”
—Publishers Weekly
BESTIAL
The Savage Trail of a True American Monster
—Amazon.com
“[An] essential addition…. Deserves to be read and pored over by the hard crime enthusiast as well as devotees of social history.”
“[A] deftly written, unflinching account.”
—The Boston Book Review
DERANGED
The Shocking True Story of America’s
Most Fiendish Killer
—Journal Star (Peoria, IL)
“Reads like fiction but it’s chillingly real….”
DEVIANT
The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein,
the Original“Psycho”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“[A] grisly, wonderful book…. Scrupulously researched.”
—Film Quarterly
THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS By Harold Schechter and David Everitt
“The scholarship is both genuine and fascinating.”
“A grisly tome…. Schechter knows his subject matter.”
—The Boston Book Review
“The ultimate reference on this fascinating phenomenon.”
—Denver Rocky Mountain News
Critical acclaim for Harold Schechter’s historical
crime fiction featuring Edgar Allan Poe
—PI Magazine
THE HUM BUG
“A riveting excursion…. Poe and his times come across with wonderful credibility and vitality.”
“Evocative….”
—Booklist
NEVERMORE
—Kirkus Reviews
“Schechter’s entertaining premise is supported by rich period atmospherics…. Keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end.”
“A literary confection…. A first-rate mystery.”
—The New York Times Book Review
—Booklist
Pocket Books by Harold Schechter
NONFICTION
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
(with David Everitt)
Deranged
Depraved
Deviant
Fiend
Bestial
Fatal
FICTION
Nevermore
The Hum Bug
Outcry
HAROLD SCHECHTER
Depraved
THE
DEFINITIVE TRUE STORY OF H. H. HOLMES,
WHOSE GROTESQUE
CRIMES SHATTERED
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY
CHICAGO
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In memory of Mildred Voris Kerr
Ourself behind ourself, concealed—
Should startle most—
Assassin hid in our apartment
Be horror’s least.
—Emily Dickinson
prologue
Among the human predators that exist in every period of history, a few become legends. From Gilles de Rais (the original“Bluebeard”) to Jack the Ripper to Ted Bundy, these beings assume the status of myth. That status derives partly from the hideous nature of their crimes, which seem less like the product of madness than the handiwork of some supernatural horror@the doings of demons or ghouls.
But their mythic
dimension stems from another source, too. These individuals fascinate because they seem to symbolize the darkest impulses of their times@aristocratic depravity, the diseased sexuality spawned by Victorian taboos, the sociopathic appetites of our own“culture of narcissism.” As much as any hero or celebrity, such monsters personify their day. In his book Representative Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson argues that the divine essence incarnates itself in remarkable figures@Plato, Shakespeare, Napoleon.
The deeds of creatures like de Rais, the Ripper, Bundy, and others suggest that primordial evil does, too.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a fiend roamed through America.
His career coincided with a remarkable time in the life of our nation@with that era of feverish enterprise and gaudy excess that Mark Twain dubbed“The Gilded Age.” Titanic energies were afoot in the land. It was a period of sweeping social change, when our country was burgeoning into an industrial and commercial giant, and American technological wizardry@Bell’s telephone, Edison’s lightbulb, Ford’s “horseless carriage”—was altering the very nature of modern life.
Most of all, it was an age when the almighty dollar held sway as never before and a“mania for money-getting” (in Mark Twain’s words) gripped the soul of America. In place of the military idols of the Civil War, society now worshiped a new breed of hero—the self-made millionaire, the captain of industry, the financial tycoon. P. T. Barnum publicized “The Rules for Success,” Andrew Carnegie preached“The Gospel of Wealth,” and Horatio Alger inspired the youth of America with his rags-to-riches dreams.
Hungry for their share of that dream, enormous tides of humanity swept into the cities, swelling their populations to unprecedented size. The United States, formerly a country of small towns, villages, and farms, became the land of the metropolis—New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit. But of all the sprawling cities, none epitomized the spirit of the age—the expansive growth, raw energy, and driving ambition—more completely than Chicago, the“gem of the prairie,” the“most American of American cities,” as one awestruck visitor described it.
Reduced to ashes by the great fire of 1871, Chicago soared back to life like a phoenix, becoming the world’s first skyscraper city in 1885 and passing the million mark in population five years later. Booming with vigor, heady with pride, flush with opportunity—“Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads, and Freight Handler to the Nation”—Chicago served as a colossal magnet, drawing newcomers by the thousands.
Pouring out of the countryside in quest of a brighter life, these hopefuls were brimming with spunk and ambition. “How shall one hymn, let alone suggest, a city as great as this in spirit?” rhapsodized Theodore Dreiser, himself one of the legion of“life-hungry” dreamers who swarmed to Chicago.“The American of this time, native, for the most part, of endless backwoods communities, was ignorant and gauche. But how ambitious and courageous! Such bumptiousness! Such assurance!”
And there was another quality, too, that these migrant throngs possessed. They were full of innocence. Fresh from the provinces, they knew little of the corruptions and perils of the big city, of its dark and brutal underside.
For along with the hardworking thousands, the city attracted a very different breed of dweller—creatures lured to the metropolis not by its sparkling promise but by its cloaking shadows, not by the availability of work but by the abundance of prey, not by a hunger for success but by the smell of blood.
For a man of monstrous appetites, Chicago was a land of plenty. It is no wonder, then, that the city became home to the most heinous criminal of the age. Having drifted westward from his birthplace in New England, he arrived in the metropolis in 1886 and, finding it ideal for his purposes, settled in its outskirts.
To all outward appearances, he was a quintessential man of his day, possessed of the prodigious energies characteristic of that bustling era. Doctor, druggist, inventor, get-rich-quick schemer, he consecrated himself to the acquisition of wealth.
But greed was not what drove him. All the wealth of J. P. Morgan could never have gratified his darkest compulsions.
In a booming suburb of Chicago, he erected his stronghold, a place as imposing in its way as Marshall Field’s dazzling emporium or the gleaming domes and spires of the Chicago World’s Fair—“the Great White City” that would arise on the shores of Lake Michigan within a few years of the monster’s arrival. Massively built and bristling with battlements and turrets, the structure served as both business place and residence, though its appearance made it seem more like a medieval fortress. Appropriately, it came to be known as“the Castle.”
To the neighborhood residents, the Castle was a source of pride, a symbol of the prominence and prosperity of their thriving suburb. Those who were enticed inside, however, and who glimpsed the Castle’s darkest secrets acquired a very different impression. But none of them lived to reveal what lay behind the splendid facade.
The discrepancy between its outward appearance and inner reality mirrored the nature of the owner himself. But in this sense, too, the lord of the Castle was a representative man of his day. After all, in characterizing his time not as a golden but as a gilded age, Mark Twain had meant to emphasize its specious quality.
Of course, Mark Twain could never have imagined a place like the Castle. Theodore Dreiser couldn’t have either, in spite of his deep understanding of the city’s sordid underside. It would have taken a writer with a far different sort of imagination to conceive of such a place. It would have taken Edgar Allan Poe.
When investigators finally broke into the Castle, they were stunned at what they found—a Gothic labyrinth of trapdoors, secret passageways, soundproof vaults, and torture chambers. And then there were the greased chutes—large enough to accommodate a human body—that led down from the living quarters to a cellar equipped with acid vats, a crematorium, a dissecting table, and cases full of gleaming surgical tools.
As the true character of the Castle’s owner came to light, the public struggled to make sense of him. Some saw in him the malignant consequences of Gilded Age rapacity, others diagnosed him as a case of“moral degeneracy,” while there were those who spoke in terms of Satanic possession. Unacquainted as yet with the language of sociopathology, the American public could only characterize him in the terminology of the day—archfiend, monster, demon. They did not know how else to describe him, since the correct label hadn’t yet been invented.
In appearance, manner, and enterprise, he was an epitome of his age. But in respect to his psychopathology, he was very much a man of our own. And for that reason, he is of some historic significance.
An early edition of The Guinness Book of World Records lists him as“the most prolific murderer known in recent criminal history.” In the era of Henry Lee Lucas and John Wayne Gacy, that record has long since been broken. But he holds another distinction that time can never erase.
His name was Herman Mudgett, though the world knew him as H. H. Holmes—and he was America’s first serial killer.
The Castle
1
Men said at vespers: “All is well!” In one wild night the city fell; Fell shrines of prayer and marts of grain Before the fiery hurricane.
On threescore spires had sunset shone, Where ghastly sunrise looked on none. Men clasped each other’s hands and said: “The City of the West is dead!”
—John Greenleaf Whittier, “Chicago”
Legend lays the blame for the disaster on Mrs. Patrick O’Leary’s cow, though the likelier suspects were a crew of young hooligans—neighborhood boys sneaking a smoke in the hayloft of the O’Leary’s ramshackle barn at 137 De Koven Street on Chicago’s West Side. There were other explanations, too. Moralizing on the meaning of the catastrophe, the Reverend Granville Moody declared that it was clearly the work of a vengeful Lord, outraged at a citizenry that permitted saloons to do business on the Sabbath.
Whatever the cause, accident or divine retribution, the conflagration—which began ear
ly on the evening of Sunday, October 8, 1871—laid waste to the city in just over twenty-four hours. The West Side went first. Glancing out his bedroom window, a neighbor saw the flames rising from the O’Learys’ barn and made a beeline for the nearest firebox. But for reasons unknown, his alarm never registered. A full hour passed before a lookout spotted the glow from his post atop the Cook County Courthouse—and even more time was lost when he alerted the wrong engine company after misjudging the fire’s location.
The firemen who responded to his call were an exhausted crew, worn down from a battle with a three-alarm blaze that had raged just the evening before. By the time they arrived at the O’Leary place, the fire was racing northward through the neighborhood, a working-class warren of shanties, sheds, stables, and cottages. At ten P.M., when the flames ignited the wooden steeple of St. Paul’s Church at Clinton and Mather, the conflagration was officially out of control.
Any hopes that the Chicago River would check the fire’s progress were dashed just before midnight when the flames leapt the water, propelled by a parched, gale-force wind, as fierce as a blast from Vulcan’s bellows. The Parmalee Stage and Omnibus Company building—a brand-new, block-long, three-story structure—was instantly engulfed by a “sweeping ocean of flame” (in the words of one eyewitness).
For all its claims to grandeur, Chicago was, in fact, a tinderbox city. Almost two-thirds of its sixty-five thousand buildings were constructed completely of wood, and even its most imposing structures were generally wooden buildings with flimsy brick or fake-marble facades. Its slum districts were crammed with wooden tenements, while its wealthy homes featured wood floors, wood window frames, and wood roofs, with tidy wood fences ringing the grounds. Major downtown thoroughfares were paved with pinewood blocks, and over 650 miles of its sidewalks consisted of raised wooden slats. Wooden ships lay anchored in the Chicago River, which was spanned by wooden bridges.
There were some in Chicago who—decrying it as “a city of everlasting pine, shingles, shams, and veneers”—had warned of the potential peril. The situation was made even more hazardous by the worst drought in recent memory. Since the third of July, less than three inches of rain had fallen on Chicago—about a quarter of the usual amount. The parched weather and omnipresent wood made for an explosive combination.
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