Depraved

by Harold Schechter

  Soon after purchasing the store, however, Holmes took rooms a few blocks away. Early on weekday evenings and on Sunday afternoons, he would stroll around the neighborhood; walking stick in hand, he was the very picture of suave self-possession, tipping his hat to the ladies and pausing to exchange small talk with the men. His fellow merchants along Sixty-third Street regarded the well-spoken, industrious young druggist as an asset to the community.

  Mrs. Holton, however, was coming to a very different conclusion about her former employee. Relations between Holmes and the elderly widow had become increasingly bitter over the issue of his purchase payments—or, more precisely, nonpayments. Holmes kept promising to deliver the money and then, with equal consistency, failing to come up with it. The situation became so desperate for Mrs. Holton that she finally threatened Holmes with legal action, and when that tactic failed, filed papers against him.

  What happened next remains a mystery, though one fact is indisputable. Shortly after Mrs. Holton brought suit against Holmes, she dropped out of sight.

  When her former customers, having noticed her absence from the neighborhood, inquired as to her whereabouts, Holmes informed them that she had moved away from Chicago. With her husband gone, he explained, the apartment had come to seem painfully empty to the lonely widow, and so she had decided to go live with relatives in California.

  By then, of course, Holmes had already given up his rooms in the nearby boarding house and moved his belongings into the far more convenient living quarters directly above his store.

  * * *

  Just a few years later, the name of H. H. Holmes would be emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers throughout the United States (and beyond). Enterprising reporters would scour the country for anyone who could furnish information on the man. And scores of individuals, even those who had had only the most casual dealings with him, would step forth and volunteer their recollections.

  But Mrs. Holton, who had learned so much about the man who called himself H. H. Holmes, remained forever silent. Like so many other women who met and fell prey to his enticements, the elderly widow was never seen or heard from again.

  3

  Godliness is in league with riches …. Material prosperity is helping to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more unselfish, more Christ-like …. In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes.

  —Bishop William Lawrence, “The Relation of Wealth to Morals” (1901)

  To the good burghers of Englewood, particularly the mothers of marriageable daughters, it seemed a terrible waste that a gentleman of Dr. Holmes’s eminent qualifications should remain a bachelor. Personable, educated, infused with the entrepreneurial spirit of the age, he appeared supremely well suited for matrimony. For such a man to refuse to take a wife seemed vaguely irresponsible, if not unnatural.

  It was with markedly mixed emotions, then, that his neighbors reacted to the news, which spread rapidly through the community early in 1887, that Dr. Henry Howard Holmes had gotten married.

  His bride, the former Miss Myrta Z. Belknap, was a buxom young woman with long blond curls, placid brown eyes, and a soft, baby-smooth face. Holmes had met her during a business trip to Minneapolis in late December 1886 and, after a whirlwind courtship, wed her there on January 28, 1887.

  For several months after their return to Chicago, the new Mrs. Holmes worked contentedly at her husband’s side as a salesclerk in the store. Quiet and self-effacing, she had nothing of Holmes’s glib, outgoing charm. Customers were struck by the contrast in their personalities—and by the open adoration in the young woman’s eyes whenever she gazed at her handsome, successful husband.

  After a short period, however, Myrta Holmes was seen only infrequently in the store. At her husband’s insistence, she busied herself upstairs with domestic chores or passed the time window-shopping along Sixty-third Street.

  It was not that she had proved to be an incompetent clerk. Holmes simply wanted her out of the way. She had quickly become a nuisance to him, cramping his flirtatious style. An incorrigible ladies’ man, he refused to modify his behavior merely because he was burdened with a wife. If anything, his manner toward his female patrons grew steadily more seductive in the months immediately following his marriage.

  As for Myrta, though she did her best to make light of her husband’s behavior—to dismiss it as nothing more than the mark of his natural gallantry—she could not help being pained by it. Eventually she was moved to make mild protests to which Holmes responded snappishly. Tensions mounted. Myrta’s meek complaints turned into angry recriminations. By the time a year had passed, visitors to the store witnessed increasingly embarrassing scenes, which generally ended with Holmes hissing sharp imprecations while Myrta stormed tearfully upstairs.

  Before long, the situation grew intolerable. Divorce was out of the question. In spite of her husband’s faults, which made it impossible for her to continue living with him above the store, Myrta still loved Holmes. Besides, she could not abide the stigma of divorce. And there was another, even more compelling reason why she would not consider ending her marriage.

  By the spring of 1888, Myrta Holmes was pregnant.

  New living arrangements had to be made. Though Myrta, in her weekly letters home, had bravely concealed the painful truth from her parents, she was finally forced to reveal to them just how dire her situation had become. Her mother and father responded without hesitation. In the summer of 1888, the elder Belknaps moved into a tidy, two-story, red-frame house in Wilmette, Illinois, just north of Chicago, and took Myrta in to live with them. Holmes agreed to provide financial support and pay regular visits to his wife.

  Once again, H. H. Holmes found himself living alone on Sixty-third Street—a position that suited him perfectly, given the plan that was taking shape inside his head.

  Though Holmes had clearly come to regard Myrta as a serious inconvenience, there are reasons to believe that he cared for her, after his fashion.

  The first was a legal action he initiated on February 14, 1887, just a few weeks after his marriage. On that date, Holmes appeared at the Cook County Courthouse to file divorce papers against Clara A. Lovering Mudgett of Alton, New Hampshire—his childhood sweetheart and first wife, to whom he was still wed at the tune of his union to Myrta Z. Belknap.

  Myrta, of course, did not know of Clara Mudgett’s existence—or that her own marriage to Holmes, being bigamous, had no legal validity.

  As it happened, Homes never followed through on his divorce from Clara Mudgett, and the suit was eventually dismissed by the court “for default of appearance of complainant.” Still, for a fleeting moment, Holmes had at least contemplated doing right by Myrta Belknap—possibly the first time in his life that he had ever experienced such an impulse, and certainly the only time it can be documented.

  In the years to come, there would be other indications that Holmes felt something like human warmth for Myrta. But perhaps the most convincing proof is simply this: unlike most of the women who became intimately involved with Holmes during his years in Chicago, Myrta Belknap lived to enjoy her old age and died of natural causes.

  With his wife out of the way, Holmes lost no time in putting his master plan into motion. To those customers who inquired after Myrta’s whereabouts, he explained that the stresses of her physical condition, combined with prolonged exposure to the din of the nearby railway trains—whose clanging bells, piercing whistles, and chugging engines sounded constantly throughout the day—had left her in a state of nervous exhaustion. Being preoccupied with the demands of his business, he had thought it best to consign her to the care of her parents. His customers conveyed their sympathy and continued to regard the enterprising young druggist as a paragon.

  And indeed, in all outward respects, Holmes was the very model of the up-and-coming young businessman. “Say to yourself, ‘My place is at the top!’” preached Andrew Carnegie in his popular lecture, “The Road to Business Success.” Holmes—an avid devo
urer of the how-to advice of his day—had clearly taken the message to heart. The Holtons’ corner drugstore could not contain his colossal ambitions. Fortunes were to be made by young men of pluck, drive, and vision. Holmes would not be satisfied until he became the owner of a magnificent building that proclaimed his success to the world.

  There were other reasons why he desired to construct a building of his own. His lust for wealth was not only undisguised but—given the ethics of the day—widely admired. But beneath his money hunger lurked other, far darker appetites whose gratification demanded a high degree of privacy. The small apartment he inhabited above the drugstore was ludicrously insufficient for the fulfillment of those needs.

  It was no coincidence that an ideal spot for his purposes existed so close to the Holtons’ store. Holmes had spent a good deal of time scouting various locations before settling on the corner of Sixty-third and Wallace. His shrewd eye for real estate had recognized the intersection as a prime business site. Deeper still, in his mind’s eye, he perceived possibilities of another kind.

  Even with the money he was making from his store, Holmes did not have adequate funds for his purposes. But that disadvantage had never stopped him before.

  By the summer of 1888, he had managed to secure a lease on the vacant property across from the store. In the fall of that year, shortly after Myrta moved in with her parents, he set about making his secret blueprint a reality.

  4

  The most sensational American case of the same decade was in some ways more sensational than that of Jack the Ripper…. Like the Ripper, Holmes is a kind of grim landmark in social history. But his sadism was far more cold and calculating.

  —Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind

  At that very moment, half a world away, a maniac was on the loose—a madman whose crimes so unsettled society that the aftershock can still be felt today.

  He struck first in the early hours of August 31, 1888. At three-forty A.M., while walking down Buck’s Row—a deserted, dimly lit street in London’s squalid East End—a market porter named George Cross stumbled upon what he took to be a tarpaulin-wrapped bundle. Peering closer, he saw that the sprawling heap was the butchered body of a woman, later identified as a forty-two-year-old prostitute named Mary Anne Nicholls. Her killer had clamped a powerful hand over her mouth, then slashed her throat so savagely that his blade had cut all the way through to her spinal column. Not until the corpse was laid out in the mortuary, however, did examiners discover her other injuries—belly slit from left to right, vagina mutilated with stab wounds.

  The second killing, which occurred a week later, provoked a citywide panic, sending shock waves through every level of London society. At six o’clock in the morning of September 8, the mutilated remains of Annie Chapman, a wasted, forty-seven-year-old prostitute suffering from malnutrition and consumption, were discovered in the rear of a lodging house at 29 Hanbury Street, a half mile from the site of the first murder. The woman’s head was barely attached to her body—the killer had severed her neck muscles and nearly succeeded in sawing through her spine before abandoning the effort.

  Chapman had also been disemboweled. In a postmortem report published in the medical journal The Lancet, the examining surgeon, Dr. Bagster Phillips, graphically described the condition of the corpse: “The abdomen had been entirely laid open and the intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments which had been lifted out and placed on the shoulder of the corpse; whilst from the pelvis, the uterus and its appendages with the upper portions of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder had been entirely removed. Obviously the work was that of an expert—or one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife.”

  The true identity of the killer would never be known. But on September 28, the Metropolitan Police received a taunting letter by a writer who claimed to be the culprit and signed his note with a sinister nom de plume. The name caught on with the public. From that point on, the mad butcher of Whitechapel would be known throughout the world by his grisly nickname—Jack the Ripper.

  On September 30, two days after the police received the “Ripper” letter, the killer cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute named Elizabeth Stride in a courtyard behind the International Working Man’s Educational Club in Berner Street. Before he could commit any further atrocities on this unfortunate woman, he was interrupted by the sounds of an approaching horse-drawn wagon, driven by the club’s steward.

  Hurrying away down Commercial Street, the Ripper encountered Catherine Eddowes, a forty-three-year-old prostitute who had been released only moments before from the Bishopsgate police station, where she had spent several hours sobering up after having been found lying drunk on the pavement. The Ripper lured her into Mitre Square, where he dispatched her in the usual fashion, slitting her windpipe with a single vicious slash. Then, in the grip of a demoniacal frenzy, he proceeded to savage her corpse, disfiguring her face, splitting her body from rectum to breastbone, removing her entrails, and carrying off her left kidney.

  Part of that kidney (with an inch of renal artery still attached) was enclosed in a parcel that arrived on October 16 at the home of George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a group of local tradesmen who had organized to assist in the search for the killer. Accompanying this ghastly artifact was an equally appalling letter, addressed to Mr. Lusk: “Sir I send you half the kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that I took it out if you only wate a whil longer. Signed Catch me when you can Mister Lusk.”

  The sender’s address on the upper-right-hand corner of the letter said simply: “From Hell.”

  The final crime committed by the Ripper was also the most hideous. On the evening of November 9, he picked up a twenty-five-year-old Irish prostitute named Mary Kelly, three months pregnant, who took him back to her rooms in Miller’s Court. Sometime in the middle of the night, he killed her in bed, then spent several leisurely hours butchering her corpse. The next morning, the landlord’s assistant, sent to collect Kelly’s rent, discovered her body, whose horrific condition was reported in the Illustrated Police News:

  The throat had been cut right across with a knife, nearly severing the head from the body. The abdomen had been partially ripped open, and both of the breasts had been cut from the body. The left arm, like the head, hung to the body by the skin only. The nose had been cut off, the forehead skinned, and the thighs, down to the feet, stripped of the flesh. The abdomen had been slashed with a knife across downwards, and the liver and entrails wrenched away. The entrails and other portions of the frame were missing, but the liver, etc., were found placed between the feet of this poor victim. The flesh from the thighs and legs, together with the breasts and nose, had been placed by the murderer on the table, and one of the hands of the dead woman had been pushed into her stomach.

  Following this outrage, the Whitechapel murders came to an abrupt halt. Within the next few years, several more prostitutes were killed, their throats slashed and stomachs sliced open. But police judged these crimes to be the work of copycat killers. The Ripper vanished forever, stepping out of history and into the realm of myth.

  The Ripper murders made headlines around the world. To the citizens of Chicago, reading the sensational details in The Tribune, The Times-Herald, or The Inter Ocean, the depredations of the Whitechapel monster, as disturbing as they were, must have seemed reassuringly distant from the realities of their own lives.

  They had no way of knowing that even at that moment, in the outskirts of their city, a psychopath who called himself H. H. Holmes was busily laying the groundwork for a murderous career that would rival, and in some ways outmatch, the atrocities of his English counterpart, Jack the Ripper.

  5

  My son, if sinners entice thee,

  consent thou not….

  Refrain t
hy foot from their path:

  for their feet run to evil,

  and make haste to shed blood.

  —Proverbs 1:10, 15-16

  During the month of February 1879, Benjamin W. Pitezel of Kewanee, Illinois, composed a keepsake for his wayward son, Benjamin, Jr. Known to the family by his middle name, Freelon, the younger Pitezel was paying a rare visit to his parents before returning to his wife and children in Galva.

  The keepsake was a miscellany of family anecdotes, meticulously inscribed in a three-by-five-inch notebook with marbled covers. Interspersed with accounts of assorted milestones—births and deaths, marriages and funerals, illnesses and religious conversions—were extended passages of fatherly counsel and heartfelt prayer.

  “Freelon,” Benjamin, Sr., wrote toward the end of the journal, “I have written some things in this book for you to think about. As you will be going back to your home soon, this may be the last advice that I may ever be permitted to give you in this way, as life is so uncertain and I cannot tell how soon I may fall.”

  Then, in images and diction drawn from Scripture, he poured out a final appeal:

  Come with me and I will do the good is the Saviour’s command. Will you go? Listen. I will take all your old garments and I will put on you a clean white robe. I will put shoes on your feet and a ring on your hand. I will take that wicked nature out of you, and I will wash from you all your stains, and I will be a father to you and you shall be a son and an heir…. I love you, although you have gone far astray. But now come back and let me clothe you in your right mind…. If you will come to me, I will take that hard heart of yours and give you a new heart. All this will I do because I have loved you.