For readers whose interest had not been slaked by weeks of front-page news coverage, the bookshops were full of pulp, true-crime paperbacks on the case. Most of these were simple rehashes, cobbled together from previously published accounts. Others—like Sold to Satan: A Poor Wife’s Sad Story—offered new (and wholly fabricated) revelations about the archfiend’s murderous career.
The appearance of these shoddy “instant” books, which proliferated in the months of Holmes’s imprisonment, further ratified his status as a genuine cultural phenomenon. For Holmes was not merely America’s original serial killer. He was its first celebrity psycho.
Psychopath or not, Holmes was no fool, and he quickly perceived the commercial potential of his infamy. Clearly, there was a booming market for books on his case. Even unalloyed hackwork was selling briskly—cut-and-paste jobs like Robert L. Corbitt’s The Holmes Castle and the anonymous Holmes, the Arch Fiend, or: A Carnival of Crime. Sold to Satan, the trashiest of the lot, was such an immediate success that it was quickly translated into several languages, including German (Dem Teufel verkauft Holmes!) and Swedish (Massemorderen Holmes, alias Mudgett). Frank Geyer himself would ultimately cash in on the craze, publishing his own bestselling account, The Holmes-Pitezel Case: A History of the Greatest Crime of the Century.
Seeing a prime opportunity to profit from his crimes, Holmes decided to produce his own book.
He had another motive besides simple avarice for undertaking the project. If the newspapers had been reckless in their accusations against Holmes, some of the new books were completely unbridled. The anonymous author of Sold to Satan, for example, went so far as to blame him for the notorious 1879 killing of a New York City socialite, Mrs. Jane Lawrence DeForrest Hull, who had been strangled in her bedroom by a vagrant named Chastain Cox. According to this writer, Cox had committed the crime while under the hypnotic influence of Holmes, who had mesmerized the “mulatto brute” and sent him off to slay the “splendid woman” for no other motive than “pure deviltry.” Cox was “but the ignorant puppet in the hands of the hideous creature who, by his diabolical power, caused him to do as he did.”
Holmes saw his book as a way of countering such charges. In its pages, readers would discover a personality very different from the Holmes of popular myth—not a blood-crazed monster but a common (and not especially successful) crook. With his trial date nearing, it is easy to see why he was eager to present himself in the most innocuous light—as “a swindler, yes, but innocent of murder.” Though cast as an autobiography, the book was actually intended as Holmes’s personal public-relations campaign.
After enlisting a freelance journalist named John King to assist him with every phase of the project, from copyediting to promotion, Holmes commenced his handwritten account in midsummer 1895. By early fall, Holmes’ Own Story was already on the stands, published by the Philadelphia firm of Burk & McFethridge.
A fat, paperbound volume priced at twenty-five cents, the book follows Holmes’s criminal career from his boyhood to imprisonment. An engraved likeness of its infamous author adorns the cover. Holmes’s efforts to humanize himself in the eyes of the world are immediately apparent in this picture. It is hard to conceive of a less menacing figure than the portly, bearded gentleman who stares gravely at the viewer like a bank president posing for a company portrait.
Though Holmes had a taste for good fiction (he whiled away his time in prison reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables), his own book is more or less completely devoid of literary merit, veering wildly between mawkish sentimentality and lurid melodrama. What unifies the work is its overwritten style—prose, as one commentator put it, “of the most vibrant purple”—and its shamelessly self-serving intent. For all his attempts to project an air of candor and sincerity, his deeply manipulative nature comes through in every line.
Even before the story proper begins, Holmes starts pulling out the emotional stops, making a flagrantly flag-waving appeal to his readers’ patriotic feelings. “My sole object in this publication,” he intones hi a brief preface, “is to vindicate my name from the horrible aspersions cast upon it, and to appeal to a fair-minded American public for a suspension of judgment, and for that free and fair trial which is the birthright of every American citizen, and the pride and bulwark of our American constitution.”
The story opens with a cloying evocation of Holmes’s childhood world. “Come with me, if you will, to a tiny, quiet New England village, nestling among the picturesquely rugged hills of New Hampshire …. Here, in the year 1861, I, Herman Mudgett, the author of these pages, was born. That the first years of my life were different from those of any other ordinary country-bred boy, I have no reason to think. That I was well-trained by loving and religious parents, I know, and any deviations in my after life from the straight and narrow way of rectitude are not attributable to the want of a tender mother’s prayers or a father’s control.”
Despite his insistence on the normalcy of his background, however, an unsettling, even sinister, note immediately intrudes. In place of the pleasant recollections one might expect from such an idyllic introduction, Holmes describes a number of disturbing, if not traumatic, childhood events. He recalls the time his sadistic schoolmates dragged him through the “awful portals” of the village doctor’s office and brought him “face to face” with the “grinning skeleton” dangling from its wooden display stand. He recounts an incident in which an itinerant photographer, who had set up shop in the village, removed his wooden leg in front of the eight-year-old boy, providing little Herman with his first, horrified view of an amputated limb. And he lingers over an episode in which he mailed away his “entire wealth” for a treasured watch and chain that turned out to be dross. Within days of its arrival, its “wheels had ceased to turn, its gold had lost its lustre, and the whole affair had turned into an occasion of ridicule for my companions and of self-reproach to myself.”
A common theme informs these memories—a sense of the world’s duplicitous nature, of the underlying foulness and corruption concealed beneath the bright, innocent surface of things. That Holmes selects these particular experiences to represent his earliest life reveals more, perhaps, about the fundamental darkness of his vision than he intended.
If Holmes’ Own Story has any claim to distinction, it lies in the work’s stunningly self-justifying quality. The book is a tour de force of rationalization, the printed equivalent of one of Harry Houdini’s escape acts. For two hundred pages, the reader cannot help but be amazed as Holmes performs the most painful contortions to wriggle free of blame. And when the irrefutable facts make it impossible for him to do so, he resorts to a simple expedient—he refuses to acknowledge their existence. Thus, he makes no mention at all of his New Hampshire wife, Clara Lovering (or, for that matter, of his second, bigamous marriage to Myrta Belknap).
After briefly attending the University of Vermont at Burlington, Holmes moved to Ann Arbor to complete his medical education. Beyond a titillating allusion to “some ghastly experiences” in the dissection room, he provides no details about those years. He is at pains, however, to deny one of the more sensational charges leveled against him—that he paid his way through college by robbing graves and peddling the cadavers to his fellow students as anatomical specimens. To bolster his assertion, Holmes points to the “well-known fact that in the State of Michigan, all the material necessary for dissection work is supplied by the state.”
Holmes describes his first, aborted venture as a swindler at some length, though—characteristically—he glosses over its more repellent details. After a stint teaching school in Mooers Fork, New York, he opened a doctor’s office in the village, providing “good and conscientious service” in return for “plenty of gratitude but little or no money.” With “starvation … staring me in the face,” Holmes (so he implies) had no other choice but to swindle an insurance company, deploying a plan he had worked out with a Canadian friend, a former fellow student at Ann Arbor.
The convolutions of
this scheme defy paraphrase. As Holmes explains it:
At some future date a man whom my friend knew and could trust, who then carried considerable life insurance, was to increase the same so that the total amount carried should be $40,000; and as he was a man of moderate circumstances, he was to have it understood that some sudden danger he had escaped (a runaway accident) had impelled him to more fully protect his family in the future. Later, he should become addicted to drink, and while temporarily insane from its use should, as it would appear, kill his wife and child.
In reality, they were to go the extreme West and await his arrival there at a later date. Suddenly, the husband was to disappear, and some months later a body badly decomposed and dressed in the clothing he was known to wear was to be found, and with it a statement to the effect that while in a drunken rage he had killed his family and had shipped their dismembered bodies to two separate and distant warehouses to conceal the crime, first having partially preserved the remains by placing them in strong brine. That he did not care to live longer, and that his property and insurance should pass to a relative whom he was to designate in this letter.
At the proper time, he was to join his family in the West and remain there permanently, the relative collecting the insurance, a part of which was to be sent to him, a part to be retained by the relative, and the remainder to be divided between us [i.e., Holmes and his Canadian friend].
As Holmes diplomatically puts it, this scheme called for “a considerable amount of material”—namely three dead bodies to pass off as the remains of the husband, wife, and child. Holmes and his Canadian accomplice agreed “that they should both contribute to the necessary supply.”
The conspirators did not have a chance to put their scheme into motion until 1886, when Holmes was living in Chicago. After securing two corpses—“my portion of the material,” as he puts it—from an unnamed source, Holmes was suddenly called away to New York City. For reasons he chooses not to explain, he “decided to take a part of the material there and leave the balance in a Chicago warehouse. This necessitated repacking the same.”
One of the most chilling aspects of Holmes’s autobiography is his consistent reference to dead bodies as “material,” as though decomposed corpses were simply the stuff of his trade—the equivalent of a seamstress’s cloth or a cobbler’s leather.
Registering in a downtown hotel, Holmes “divided the material into two packages,” placed one in the Fidelity Storage Warehouse and shipped the second to New York City.
The plan, however, was never realized. Shortly after his return to Chicago, Holmes came across several newspaper accounts “of the detection of crime connected with this class of work” and realized “for the first time how well organized and well prepared the leading insurance companies were to detect and punish this kind of fraud.” “This,” he writes, “together with the sudden death of my friend, caused all to be abandoned.”
The abrupt cancellation of his scheme left Holmes with two dead bodies to dispose of—a problem he solved by burning part of the “material” in the furnace of his Castle and burying the remainder in a remote corner of the cellar. Holmes describes this operation in the most matter-of-fact tone, as though the household incineration of human corpses were a routine domestic chore. He concludes by insisting that the skeletal remains “lately found” in the Castle by police investigators were nothing but the burned and buried scraps of these discarded cadavers.
In recounting this episode—and another, similar adventure that turned into a kind of ghastly comedy of errors when Holmes’s custom-designed, corpse-smuggling trunk sprang a leak—Holmes clearly intends to create an impression of disarming frankness. Indeed, judging by the self-satisfied tone that occasionally creeps into his narrative, he apparently feels that he deserves credit for the ingenuity of his schemes and the energy with which he pursued them. Once again, he appears completely oblivious of the true picture he projects—of a life steeped in the stench of decomposed corpses, and a sensibility so warped that it regards a dead child’s body as a financial resource.
At this point in the story, Benjamin Pitezel first appears on the scene. Since Pitezel’s murder was the immediate charge confronting Holmes, he spends much of the book exonerating himself of the crime by depicting his late accomplice as a hopeless, embittered failure who neglected his children, abused his wife, and ultimately took his own life in a fit of drunken despair.
This portrait of Pitezel is consistent with Holmes’s strategy throughout the book. To counter the “horrible aspersions cast upon” his name, he relies on the clever device of casting horrible aspersions upon others. At the same time, he presents himself as a model of affection and fidelity—a devoted friend and patron who did everything in his power to assist Pitezel and his family, but, in the end, could not save his wayward associate from those “pernicious habits” that finally drove him to suicide.
Even more egregious in this regard is Holmes’s portrait of Minnie Williams—a woman, by all accounts, of such extreme naïveté that she sometimes appeared to possess as little worldly sense as a newborn. In Holmes’s version, she emerges as a hardened sophisticate with a highly checkered past—a woman who had been seduced and betrayed by various lovers; suffered a nervous collapse after aborting an illegitimate child; been committed to a mental institution; slaughtered her own sister in a jealous rage; and ultimately absconded to London to open a “massage establishment” with her current lover, a shadowy character named “Edward Hatch.”
Of the countless fabrications in the book, perhaps the most fascinating is Hatch, the mysterious being on whom Holmes pins the deaths of the three Pitezel children. There is no doubt that Hatch was pure invention. At the time of Holmes’s trial, thirty-five witnesses—from Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Detroit, Toronto, and Burlington—traveled to Philadelphia to offer their testimony. None had ever seen the children in the company of anyone but Holmes.
In Holmes’s telling, however, Hatch “accompanied us” everywhere. It was Hatch who took Howard away on the day the boy was murdered; Hatch into whose care Holmes placed Alice and Nellie; Hatch who was with the girls in Toronto the last time Holmes saw the two sisters alive.
And yet, Hatch remains a completely amorphous figure m the book—Holmes supplies him with no dialogue, no distinguishing features, no psychological motivation. As the story progresses, the reader comes to see Hatch less as a separate human being than as a dark alter ego: the name Holmes gives to his own most malevolent tendencies. Indeed the name itself—with its suggestions of subterfuge (as in “to hatch a plot”) and concealment (as in “to keep under hatches”)—points in this direction. It is as if Holmes were unconsciously confirming the popular comparison of himself with Dr. Henry Jekyll, and creating, in the sinister figure of Edward Hatch, his own version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edward Hyde.
In recounting his journey back to Gilmanton just before his arrest, Holmes goes straight for the reader’s heartstrings: “My pen cannot adequately portray the meeting with my aged parents, nor, were it possible, would I allow it to do so for publication. Suffice it to say that I came to them as one dead, they for years having considered me as such …. That after embracing them, as I looked into their dear faces once more, my eyes grew dim with the tears kindly sent to shut out for the moment the signs of added years I knew my uncalled-for silence of the past seven years had done much to unnecessarily increase.” Holmes’s self-described ability to “let loose the font of emotions” is nowhere more apparent than in the trumped-up pathos of this episode.
Shameless to the end, Holmes concludes his book by insisting that his own fate is a matter of indifference to nun, and that his single concern is to see justice served: “And here I cannot say finis—it is not the end—for besides doing this there is also the work of bringing to justice those for whose wrong-doings I am today suffering; and this is not to prolong or even save my own life, for since the day I heard of the Toronto horror I have not cared to live.”
For
a man who had given up on life, Holmes took an exceptionally active interest in the success of his book. Shortly after the manuscript had been transcribed by a professional typist and was ready to be sent to the printer, Holmes composed a letter to his associate, John King:
Dear Sir:
My ideas are that you should get from the New York Herald and the Philadelphia Press all the cuts they have and turn those we want over to the printer, to have them electroplated at his expense. Use the large cut with full beard published August 25 in the Herald for my picture on page opposite the opening chapter, having the autographs of my two names (Holmes and Mudgett) engraved and electroplated at the same tune, to go under the picture ….
As soon as the book is published, get it onto the Philadelphia and New York newsstands. Then get reliable canvassers who will work afternoons here in Philadelphia. Take one good street at a time, leave the book, then return about a half hour later for the money. No use to do this in the forenoon, when people are busy. I canvassed when a student this way, and found the method successful.
Then, if you have any liking for the road, go over the ground covered by the book, spending a few days in Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis. Give copies to the newspapers in these cities to comment upon, it will assist the sale.
Holmes’s eagerness to see the book distributed was a function, in part, of his business acumen—his desire to exploit his notoriety while public interest in the case was at its peak. But there was another reason for his urgency. On September 23, 1895, he was arraigned at the Philadelphia Court of Oyer and Terminer, and his trial date set for October 28.
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