Depraved

by Harold Schechter

Twenty-seven people—men, women, and children.

  Before providing the hideous details of his crimes, Holmes offered a few prefatory comments. The nature of these remarks suggests that, besides being a reader of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, Holmes was familiar with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, especially the famous short story “William Wilson,” whose narrator begins by describing his transformation from a “trivial” criminal into the most infamous villain of his age, “an object for the scorn—for the horror—for the detestation of my race.” Wilson’s “record of unpardonable crime” is so painful for him to set down that he contemplates his rapidly approaching death with relief.

  Holmes begins his confession in a strikingly similar vein. “A word as to the motives that have led to the commission of these many crimes and I will proceed to the most distasteful task of my life, the setting forth in all its horrid nakedness the recital of the premeditated killing of twenty-seven human beings … thus branding myself as the most detestable criminal of modern times—a task so hard and distasteful that, beside it, the certainty that in a few days I am to be hanged by the neck until I am dead seems but a pastime.”

  In spite of his promise, however, Holmes does not offer any motives for his crimes. Instead, he describes an extraordinary metamorphosis that has taken place during the past two years.

  “I am convinced that since my imprisonment I have changed woefully and gruesomely from what I was formerly in feature and figure. My features are assuming a pronounced Satanical cast. I have become afflicted with that dread disease, rare but terrible, with which physicians are acquainted, but over which they have no control whatsoever. That disease is a malformation or distortion of the osseous parts…. My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil—that the similitude is almost completed.

  “In fact, so impressed am I with this belief, that I am convinced I no longer have anything human in me.”

  After reading the narrative that followed this amazing declaration, his readers were undoubtedly inclined to agree.

  Though evidence strongly suggests otherwise, Holmes insists that he was innocent of murder until 1886, when he killed his first victim, Dr. Robert Leacock of Baltimore, “a friend and former schoolmate,” whose life was “insured for a large sum,” which Holmes made a failed attempt to collect. Until that time, writes Holmes, he had “never sinned so heavily by thought or deed. Later, like the man-eating tiger of the tropical jungle, whose appetite for blood has once been aroused, I roamed about the world seeking whom I could destroy.”

  Another physician, a man named Russell, became Holmes’s second victim. Russell, a tenant of the Castle, had fallen behind in his rent. During a heated quarrel over the matter, Holmes “struck him to the floor with a heavy chair,” and “with one cry for help, ending in a groan of anguish, [Russell] ceased to breathe.” Russell’s corpse became the first of many that Holmes sold to an acquaintance at a medical college for $25 to $45 apiece.

  Julia Conner and her four-year-old daughter, Pearl, were next. Holmes is titillatingly vague about Julia’s murder, writing only that she died “to a certain extent due to a criminal operation.” He did away with the little girl to eliminate her as a potential witness. “The death of Pearl,” he writes, “was caused by poison…. It was done as I believed the child was old enough to remember of her mother’s death.”

  The fifth murder was the cold-blooded killing of a man identified only as Rodgers, a fellow tenant at a rooming house in West Morgantown, Virginia, where Holmes was “boarding for a few weeks” during a business trip. “Learning that the man had some money, I induced him to go on a fishing trip with me, and, being successful in allaying his suspicions, I finally ended his life by a sudden blow upon the head with an oar.”

  Victim number six also died of a fractured skull—though in this case, Holmes claims, the fatal blow was struck by an accomplice. The victim was a “Southern speculator” named Charles Cole. “After considerable correspondence, this man came to Chicago, and I enticed him into the Castle, where, while engaging him in conversation, a confederate struck him a most vicious blow upon the head with a piece of gas pipe.” Cole’s skull was so damaged that the corpse was “almost useless” as a medical specimen. As for the unnamed accomplice, Holmes says only that “he was fully as guilty as myself and, if possible, more heartless and bloodthirsty, and I have no doubt is still engaged in the same nefarious work.”

  The seventh victim was a domestic named Lizzie, who worked in the Castle restaurant. Holmes’s underling, Pat Quinlan—a married man with several small children—had become infatuated with the young woman. Afraid that the indispensable Quinlan might quit his employ and run off with the girl, Holmes “thought it wise to end [her] life…. This I did by calling her to my office and suffocating her in the vault, she being the first victim that died therein. Before her death, I compelled her to write letters to her relations and to Quinlan, stating that she had left Chicago for a Western state and would not return.”

  Throughout the Castle investigation, Holmes had been compared to the folktale character Bluebeard—the legendary lady-killer who butchered each of his successive brides when she opened a forbidden door and discovered the dead bodies of her predecessors. Holmes’s account of his next crimes made this analogy seem more apt than ever.

  These murders occurred immediately after Lizzie’s killing—indeed, on the very evening that Holmes was getting the corpse of Quinlan’s sweetheart ready for transport to a medical college. Among the tenants of the Castle at that time were a gentleman named Frank Cook, his wife, Sarah, and the latter’s niece, Miss Mary Haracamp of Hamilton, Canada, who, shortly after her arrival in Chicago, had entered Holmes’s employ as a stenographer.

  For reasons he fails to explain, “Mrs. Cook and her niece had access to all the rooms in the Castle by means of a master key.” On the evening in question, Holmes was upstairs “busily preparing my last victim for shipment” when “the door suddenly opened and Mrs. Cook and her niece stood before me. It was a time for quick action, rather than for words of explanation on my part, and before they had recovered from the horror of the sight, they were within the fatal vault, so lately tenanted by the dead body.”

  What made this crime even more abhorrent was the fact that “Mrs. Cook, had she lived, would have soon become a mother.” Counting the unborn child, Holmes’s murder tally had now reached ten.

  Emeline Cigrand became victim number eleven. For the first time, Holmes confirmed what the police had suspected for months—that he had murdered the lovely young woman by suffocating her in his vault. He had done this, he claimed, because Emeline had become engaged to another man—an “attachment that was particularly obnoxious to me, both because Miss Cigrand had become almost indispensable in my office work and because she had become my mistress as well as stenographer.”

  On the morning of her marriage day, Emeline dropped by Holmes’s office to bid him good-bye. Tricking her into his vault, he slammed the door behind her, then promised to release her if she wrote a letter to her fiancé, calling off the wedding. “She was very willing to do this and prepared to leave the vault upon completing the letter, only to learn that the door would never again be opened until she had ceased to suffer the tortures of a slow and lingering death.”

  Holmes then goes on to describe a botched attempt at a triple murder. Apparently hard up for money and eager to collect “the ninety dollars that my agent for disposing of ‘stiffs’ would have given me for the bodies,” he had attempted to kill three young women who worked in his restaurant. Late one night, he snuck into the room they shared in the Castle and attacked them in their beds. “That these women lived to tell of their experience … is due to my foolishly trying to chloroform all of them at the same time. By their combined strength they overpowered me and ran screaming into the street, clad only in their night robes.” Holmes reveals that he “was arrested the next day but was not prosecuted.”

/>   Adding these intended victims to Mrs. Pitezel and her two surviving children, whose lives he had also attempted to take, Holmes feels justified in claiming (whether with pride or contrition, it is impossible to say) “thirty-three [victims] instead of twenty-seven, as it was through no fault of my own that they escaped.”

  Holmes was more successful with his next victim, “a very beautiful young woman named Rosine Van Jossand.” After living with her “for a time” in the Castle, he poisoned her “by administering ferro-cyanide of potassium” and then buried her remains in the basement.

  Holmes’s claim that his bloodlust grew stronger with each new death seemed borne out by the sadistic cruelty of his next killing. The victim was a onetime Castle employee named Robert Lattimer, who knew “of certain insurance work I had engaged in” and made the mistake of trying to blackmail Holmes. “His own death and the sale of his body was the recompense meted out to him. I confined him within the secret room and slowly starved nun to death…. Finally, needing its use for another purpose, and because his pleadings had become almost unbearable, I ended his life. The partial excavation in the walls of this room found by the police was caused by Lattimer’s endeavoring to escape by tearing away the solid brick and mortar with his unaided fingers.”

  Asphyxiation, slow starvation, and chloroform poisoning—Holmes’s favorite methods of destruction—were used to eliminate several more Castle victims: a woman identified only as “Kate -----”; a “young Englishman” who had been Holmes’s partner in various real-estate schemes; a wealthy widow “whose name has passed from my memory”; and a “man who came to Chicago to visit the Columbian Exposition.” For the sake of either convenience or variety, however, he occasionally employed other methods as well. He dispatched two women—a Miss Anna Betts and Julia Conner’s sister, Gertie—by substituting poison for prescription medicines. And he claims to have killed a man named Warner—the “originator” of the patented “Warner Glass Bending Process”—in an especially gruesome way.

  “It will be remembered,” Holmes writes, “that the remains of a large kiln made of firebrick was found in the Castle basement…. It was so arranged that in less than a minute after turning on a jet of crude oil atomized with steam, the entire kiln would be filled with a colorless flame, so intensely hot that iron would be melted therein.” Holmes had presumably constructed this kiln because he was interested in going into the glass-bending business himself, and it was under the pretext of getting “certain minute explanations of the process” from the inventor that he managed to lure Warner into the oven. As soon as Warner was inside, Holmes “closed the door and turned on both the oil and steam to their full extent. In a short time, not even the bones of my victim remained.”

  Victims twenty-one and twenty-two were the Williams sisters. At long last, Holmes gave up pretending that Minnie Williams was alive and admitted that his lurid tale of sororicide was a lie.

  Retracting his earlier aspersions—his portrayal of Minnie as a mentally unstable strumpet who had run off to London to open a massage parlor after murdering her sister in a jealous rage—Holmes apologizes for the “wrongs I have heaped upon her name” and attests to her “pure and Christian life…. Prior to her meeting me in 1893, she was a virtuous woman.” Soon after her arrival in Chicago, Minnie came to work for Holmes, and it wasn’t long before he had persuaded her “to give me $2,500 in money and to transfer to me by deed $50,000 worth of Southern real estate.” He also induced her “to live with me as my wife, all this being easily accomplished owing to her innocent and child-like nature, she hardly knowing right from wrong in such matters.”

  Correctly perceiving her younger (and far shrewder) sister, Nannie, as a potential threat to his schemes, Holmes invited her to Chicago, brought her to the Castle, and killed her in the vault. “It was the footprint of Nannie Williams,” he writes, “that was found upon the painted surface of the vault door, made during her violent struggles before death.” Minnie’s murder followed shortly thereafter. According to this version, Holmes took her on a trip to Momence, Illinois, where—in an abandoned house on the outskirts of town—he poisoned her and buried her body in the basement.

  But Holmes hadn’t finished with the Williams family. After Minnie’s death, he “found among her papers an insurance policy made out in her favor by her brother, Baldwin Williams of Leadville, Colorado. I therefore went to that city early in 1894 and, having found him, took his life by shooting him, it being believed I had done so in self-defense.”

  Of all his sins, Holmes professes the deepest remorse for those he committed against Minnie. “Because of her spotless life before she knew me, because of the large amount of money I defrauded her of, because I killed her sister and brother, because, not being satisfied with all this, I endeavored after my arrest to blacken her good name … for all these reasons this is without exception the saddest and most heinous of any of my crimes.”

  Unsurprisingly, Holmes devotes the most space to the crime he had been condemned for. After two years of denying his guilt, he finally admits to Benjamin Pitezel’s murder. In fact, he goes even further. For reasons that can only be surmised—a perverse desire to live up to his satanic billing, a showman’s willingness to give his public their money’s worth, or possibly a sincere need to confess his most heinous sins—he portrays himself as infinitely more cruel than even his prosecutors had suggested.

  “It will be understood,” Holmes states, “that from the first hour of our acquaintance, even before I knew he had a family who would later afford me additional victims for the gratification of my bloodthirstiness, I intended to kill him.” He is at pains to exonerate his late accomplice of any involvement in murder, declaring that Pitezel “neither knew of nor was a party to the taking of any human life.” Investing the victim with a dimension of innocence, this revelation only adds to the horror of the crime.

  And indeed that crime, as Holmes here describes it, was far more horrific than anyone had suspected:

  Pitezel left his home for the last time late in July, 1894, a happy, light-hearted man, to whom trouble or discouragements of any kind were almost unknown. We then journeyed together to New York and later to Philadelphia, where the fatal house upon Callowhill Street in which he met his death September 2, 1894, was hired…. Then came the waiting from day to day until I should be sure of finding him in a drunken stupor at midday…. After thus preparing I went to the house, quietly unlocked the door, and stole noiselessly within and to the second-story room, where I found him insensibly drunk, as I had expected.

  Only one difficulty presented itself. It was necessary for me to kill him in such a manner that no struggle or movement of his body should occur…. I overcame this difficulty by first binding him hand and foot, and having done this I proceeded to burn him alive by saturating his clothing and his face with benzine and igniting it with a match. So horrible was this torture that in writing of it, I have been tempted to attribute his death to some more humane means—not with a wish to spare myself, but because I fear that it will not be believed that one could be so heartless and depraved.

  Holmes’s description of the death of little Howard Pitezel is equally shocking. After making his preparations—“purchasing the drugs I needed to kill the boy,” then stopping at “the repair shop for the long knives J had previously left there to be sharpened”—Holmes “called [Howard] into the house and insisted that he go to bed at once, first giving him the fatal dose of medicine. As soon as he had ceased to breathe, I cut his body into pieces and by the combined use of gas and corncobs proceeded to burn it with as little feeling as though it had been some inanimate object…. To think that I committed this and other crimes for the pleasure of killing my fellow beings, to hear their cries for mercy and pleas to be allowed even sufficient time to pray and prepare for death—all this is now too horrible for even me, hardened criminal that I am, to again live over without a shudder. Is it to be wondered at that since my arrest my days have been those of self-reproaching torture and
my nights of sleepless fear? Or that even before my death, I have commenced to assume the form and features of the Evil One himself?”

  As for his final victims, Alice and Nellie Pitezel, Holmes confirms the theory that he murdered the girls by locking them in his trunk, inserting a rubber tube into the hole he had bored for that purpose, then connecting the opposite end of the tube to a gas jet and asphyxiating them. “Then came the opening of the trunk and the viewing of their little blackened and distorted faces, then the digging of their shallow graves in the basement of the house, the ruthless stripping off of their clothing and the burial without a particle of covering save the cold earth.”

  He also confirms the truth of the insinuation made during the trial—that he had “ruined” Alice Pitezel. The deaths of the two girls, he writes, “will seem to many to be the saddest of all, both on account of the terribly heartless manner in which it was accomplished and because in one instance, that of Alice, the oldest of these children, her death was the least of the wrongs suffered at my hands.”

  As though recognizing that he has damned himself beyond the hope of human forgiveness, Holmes refrains from offering a conventional closing word of repentance. “It would now seem a very fitting time for me to express regret or remorse…. To do so with the expectation of even one person who has read this confession to the end believing that in my depraved nature there is room for such feelings is, I fear, to expect more than would be granted.”

  By the time this extraordinary document was syndicated in the papers, Holmes’s notoriety had spread around the world. (At one point in the confession he notes with apparent pride that his name is known “even in South Africa, where the case was recently given considerable prominence in a local issue.”) Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that this shocking catalog of bloodshed and torture was a major sensation.

  Within a few days of its publication, it was also the object of a heated controversy. For all its apparently brutal candor, there was a significant problem with it. Parts of it were demonstrably untrue.