Depraved

by Harold Schechter

  Slightly less than two hours after Holmes’s execution, undertaker John J. O’Rourke drove his wagon up to the rear of Moyamensing. In the bed of the wagon lay a plain pine coffin. Within minutes, Holmes’s body had been bundled out of the prison and placed in the box. O’Rourke immediately returned to his house and pulled the wagon around back where two assistants awaited. On the grass beside them sat an oversize casket and five barrels of portland cement.

  The coffin was taken down from the bed of the truck and the big casket loaded on. Then—in accordance with Holmes’s instructions—O’Rourke and his assistants poured a ten-inch layer of freshly mixed cement into the bottom of the casket. Holmes’s corpse—still dressed in the suit he was hanged in—was laid in the cement and his face covered with a silk handkerchief. More cement followed, O’Rourke packing it tightly over the body.

  When the casket was filled to the top, the lid was nailed down. Then the casket was driven to Holy Cross Cemetery in Delaware County and transferred to a vault, where it was guarded overnight by two Pinkertons.

  The following afternoon, Friday, May 8, a crowd of over one hundred men, women, and children watched as two dozen burly laborers hauled the cement-filled casket up a wooden ramp and onto a furniture wagon. It was driven to a double grave, dug to a depth of ten feet, which Samuel Rotan had purchased earlier that day for $24. As the casket was lowered carefully down a wooden slide to the bottom of the hole, Father MacPake spoke a few words over it.

  When the brief service was finished, the gravediggers covered the casket with another layer of sand and cement, two feet thick. Then they picked up their spades and began shoveling in the dirt.

  Holmes’s final wish had been fulfilled. His corpse was encased in several tons of rock-hard cement. It would take an unusually determined grave robber—one armed with drills, dynamite, and a derrick—to get at his remains.

  But if Holmes’s body was imprisoned forever, his malevolent soul was another matter. Though his fortitude in the face of death had gained him the grudging admiration of the press, he continued to live on in the public mind as a creature of supernatural evil. In the months following his execution, this perception seemed confirmed by a bizarre series of misfortunes that befell many of the people involved in his case. It was as if Holmes’s demonic spirit had risen from the grave to take vengeance on those who had conspired against him.

  In rapid succession, Dr. William K. Mattern—the coroner’s physician who had been a major witness against him—died of blood poisoning; both Coroner Ashbridge and Judge Arnold suffered life-threatening illnesses; Superintendent Perkins of Moyamensing committed suicide; Peter Cigrand—the father of Holmes’s murdered mistress, Emeline—was horribly burned in a gas explosion; and Detective Frank Geyer was stricken with a serious malady.

  Not long afterward, a fire gutted the office of O. LaForrest Perry, the claims manager for Fidelity Mutual, who had been so instrumental in Holmes’s apprehension. All the furnishings and appurtenances in Perry’s office were destroyed by the flames, except for three framed mementos: the original copy of Holmes’s arrest warrant, plus two photographic portraits of the world-famous criminal. When Perry’s secretary saw these unscathed souvenirs hanging on the wall above the charred ruins of his desk, she begged him to destroy them. By then, people had already begun talking about “the Holmes Curse.”

  Even those who had given succor to the archcriminal did not seem immune from it. Several weeks after the hanging, the Reverend Father Henry J. MacPake—the young, gentle-faced priest who had helped administer last rites to Holmes and then officiated at his funeral—was found dead in the rear yard of St. Paul’s Academy on Christian Street. The coroner named uremia as the cause of death. That, however, did not explain the heavy bruises on the young priest’s face and head. Or the bloody stains on the backyard fence and the mysterious footprints on the ground beside the corpse.

  Yet it was the tragic death of Linford Biles that caused even skeptics to wonder if there might be some truth to all the talk about Holmes’s “malignant influence.”

  On a Saturday morning some weeks after the execution, Biles—the sixty-five-year-old paymaster who had served as the jury foreman—was awakened by a commotion below his bedroom window. Looking outside, he saw a small crowd gathered on the street They were gesturing upward and shouting something about a fire.

  Throwing on his clothes, Biles hurried onto the sidewalk. Up on the roof, a bluish flame shot skyward. Biles instantly guessed its source—the crisscrossing wires strung over his house had touched, sparked, and ignited his shingles. Those wires had given him trouble before.

  Within minutes, Biles had run back inside his house, hurried upstairs, and climbed onto the roof, intending somehow to move the wires away from the shingles. When his daughter saw what he was up to, she roused her brother, urging him to climb onto the roof and bring their father back inside before he hurt himself “fooling with” the wires.

  The young man did as he was told. Seconds later, the spectators below heard a strange thudding sound on the roof—then an ominous silence. By then the police had arrived. Climbing onto the roof, they found the bodies of the father and son stretched out side by side. The younger Biles was still breathing, but the father—who had accidentally come in direct contact with the live wires—had been electrocuted. His left hand was scorched, his forehead blackened, his left foot badly burned.

  As news of the tragedy spread, neighbors gathered outside the house. One of these was Mrs. Crowell, an old woman who had been present two years before when the same wires had nearly started a major fire. She had sensed something sinister on that occasion and had feared that Mr. Biles would come to a bad end. Now that her dark presentiment had been realized, she could only shake her head in wonder.

  “I read in the papers where Holmes said he was starting to look like the devil,” the old woman told a reporter for The Philadelphia Times who had arrived to investigate reports that the “curse” had claimed another victim. “Now I’m thinking he didn’t just look like the devil but really was one in fact.”

  In the coming years, other men who’d had dealings with Holmes would meet violent ends. One of these was Marion Hedgepeth.

  For informing on Holmes, Hedgepeth had expected a pardon. An official word of gratitude was all he received. On the very day of Holmes’s execution, Hedgepeth was transported to the Missouri State Penitentiary to begin his twenty-five-year sentence. “This is what a life of graft got me,” he said, scowling, as the deputies led him inside.

  Still, the “Handsome Bandit” had his loyal supporters, who immediately began campaigning for his release, sending petitions to the governor that praised Hedgepeth as a “friend to society” who had “helped exterminate a horrible monster.” As the years went by, newspapers periodically printed stories about Hedgepeth’s jailhouse rehabilitation. According to these inspiring accounts, the former highwayman spent much of his free time reading the Bible and composing letters to his mother.

  He wrote other letters, too, including one to William Pinkerton, in which he urged his former nemesis to help him win a pardon: “Here I am, a broken old man, with an incurable disease, just waiting to die…. If I ever am released, I will flee back to the arms of my poor old mother.”

  Finally, on July 4, 1906, Hedgepeth’s prayers were answered. He was pardoned by Governor Folk. Speaking to a crowd of well-wishers outside the prison gates, the formerly dashing outlaw—now white-haired and toothless—told the crowd that “I shall go to Colorado if I can get that far. If I cannot, then in the arms of my poor old mother and four devoted sisters, I shall give up my miserable and misspent life.”

  Back home in Missouri, however, Hedgepeth seemed less inclined simply to curl up and die. He managed to finagle employment as an informer for the Pinkertons, working under the direction of F. H. Tillotson, general manager of the agency’s Kansas City branch. Many of the detectives were openly distrustful of Hedgepeth, but Tillotson stood firm in his belief that “Hedgepeth is ho
nest in his endeavor for reformation … and can be trusted to do anything we ask of him.”

  An ability to read character is a requirement for a good detective and Tillotson was first-rate. That his judgment in this case proved so unsound was less a mark of his deficiencies than of Hedgepeth’s exceptional cunning.

  In September 1907, Hedgepeth was arrested for blowing a safe in Omaha, Nebraska. He was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in jail. Released after only two, largely because he was dying of tuberculosis, he immediately assembled a new gang and held up a Chicago saloon at midnight of New Year’s Eve, 1910. As Hedgepeth was stuffing the loot in a burlap sack, a policeman walked through the door. Hedgepeth went for his gun, but the policeman drew first.

  Hedgepeth died with a bullet in the chest.

  Gradually, the stories about the Holmes Curse faded. But on March 7, 1914, nearly twenty years after the notorious “multimurderer” was put to death, a disquieting article appeared in The Chicago Tribune. “HOLMES CASTLE” SECRETS DIE, read the headline.

  The story reported the suicide of Pat Quinlan, former caretaker of the Castle and suspected accomplice in Holmes’s crimes. At the time of his suicide, Quinlan was living on a farm near Portland, Michigan. He had killed himself by taking strychnine, and his death—as the newspaper noted—meant that “the mysteries of Holmes’ Castle” would remain forever unexplained.

  As to the reason for Quinlan’s suicide, no one could fully explain it, though his relatives offered a suggestive clue.

  Something seemed to be haunting him, they told the police. For several months before he swallowed strychnine, Pat Quinlan could no longer sleep.

  Sources and

  Acknowledgments

  When I began researching this book in the fall of 1990, I was amazed (and a little daunted) by the sheer mass of material printed about Holmes from the day of his arrest until his bizarre interment in several tons of cement. Given the enormous fascination he exerted on the American public, it seemed inexplicable that this extraordinary criminal had been so thoroughly forgotten by everyone except the most hard-core true-crime enthusiasts. Meanwhile, his English contemporary, Jack the Ripper, had achieved the immortality of a true pop myth.

  Part of the Ripper’s appeal, no doubt, derives from the mystery of his identity, which continues to tantalize armchair detectives everywhere. But the answer to Holmes’s current obscurity also lies, I believe, in the nature of his crimes.

  Though the precise number of his victims will never be known—estimates range into the hundreds—it seems certain that, at the very least, he murdered nine people over a period of years (Ben Pitezel and his three children, Julia and Pearl Conner, Emeline Cigrand, and the two Williams sisters), thus qualifying as America’s first serial killer. Still, with his “Castle of Horror,” chloroform, and chemical vats, he often seems like a figure from a different era, a creature out of gothic romance or Victorian nightmare. (His contemporaries described him as a real-life Jekyll and Hyde.) Moreover, though he was certainly a psychopath (at the time of his execution, reports began to surface that he had originally fled New Hampshire after mutilating his own son by Clara Levering), it is hard to determine the degree to which his crimes were motivated by sexual sadism. By contrast, the Ripper—the blade-wielding lust-murderer stalking women in the night—speaks more directly to the anxieties and obsessions of our own age.

  In any event, the newspapers of his day served as my primary source material. The Holmes case was front-page news from coast to coast, though it was covered most exhaustively in the two cities directly involved with his crimes, Chicago and Philadelphia. He also received lavish attention from the New York City press (indeed, The New York World seemed to enjoy a particularly privileged relationship with Holmes, who supplied the paper with a steady stream of exclusive statements during his trial).

  For my reconstruction of Holmes’s early life, education, and criminal career; of the building, exploration, and destruction of the Castle; of the insurance swindle and investigation into Pitezel’s death; of Holmes’s arrest, trial, execution, and burial—for these and other parts of the story (Marion Hedgepeth’s early exploits, for example, and my epilogue on the Holmes Curse), I relied primarily on the following newspapers: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Public Ledger, The Philadelphia Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Inter Ocean, The Chicago Times-Herald, The New York Times, The New York World, and The New York Herald.

  My re-creation of Geyer’s celebrated hunt for Alice, Nellie, and Howard Pitezel also drew on these newspapers, though my major source was Geyer’s own book, The Holmes-Pitezel Case (Philadelphia: Publisher’s Union, 1896). As far as can be determined, only a single copy exists of Holmes’s Own Story (Philadelphia: Burk & McFethridge Co., 1895). It is preserved in the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress and formed the basis of my chapter on that fascinating, if wildly unreliable, autobiography. My description of the trial drew heavily on the official transcript, published in book form as The Trial of Herman W. Mudgett, Alias, H. H. Holmes, For the Murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel (Philadelphia: George T. Bisel, 1897).

  Other books from that era which, if nothing else, provided insight into both the public’s obsession with Holmes and the often scandalous journalistic standards of the time were Robert L. Corbitt, The Holmes Castle (Chicago: Corbitt & Morrison, 1895), Holmes, the Arch-Fiend, or: A Carnival of Crime (Cincinnati: Barclay & Co., ca. 1895), and—arguably the most egregious “true crime” book ever published—Sold to Satan, Holmes—A poor wife’s sad story, not a mere rehash, but something new and never before published. A living victim (Philadelphia: Old Franklin Publishing House, ca. 1895).

  Holmes’s story has been told (usually inaccurately) in many histories of crime, going back to Matthew Pinkerton’s Murder in All Ages (Chicago: A. E. Pinkerton and Co., 1898). In addition to Pinkerton’s book, I consulted the following volumes: Thomas S. Duke, Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (San Francisco: The James H. Barry Co., 1910); H. B. Irving, A Book of Remarkable Criminals (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1918); Allan Churchill, A Pictorial History of American Crime, 1849-1929 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964); Robert Jay Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen (New York: M. Evans, 1973); Carl Sifratis, The Encyclopedia of American Crime (New York: Facts on File, 1982); and James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett, The Pinkerton Story (New York: G.P. Putnam Sons, 1951). The latter also contains a good deal of useful information on Marion Hedgepeth’s incorrigible life.

  The lurid doings at Holmes’s Sixty-third Street Castle form a colorful chapter in the annals of Chicago crime. I found useful, often vivid, material in Herbert Ashbury, The Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940); Stephen Longstreet, Chicago 1860-1919 (New York: David McKay, 1973); and Finis Farr, Chicago: A Personal History of America’s Most American City (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1973).

  For my chapter on the Chicago Fire, I drew on Robert Cromie, The Great Chicago Fire (New York: McGraw Hill, 1958), and David Lowe, ed., The Great Chicago Fire: In Eyewitness Accounts and Contemporary Photographs and Illustrations (New York: Dover Books, 1979). I based my discussion of the “Keeley cure” on information in Mark E. Lender and James Kirby Martin, Drinking in America: A History (New York: Free Press, 1982). My chapter on Jack the Ripper derives partly from Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975). My descriptions of the Chicago World’s Fair made use of material from contemporary newspaper sources as well as from David Borg, Chicago’s White City of 1893 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), and Arthur Schlesinger, The Rise of the City: 1878-1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1933).

  Since the 1950s, Holmes has been the subject of several books besides this one. One of the best is also the most difficult to find: Charles Boswell and Lewis Thompson’s The Girls in Nightmare House (New York: Fawcet Publications, 1955), a lively, well-researched (though long-out-of-print) paperback whose lurid title a
nd cover illustration belie the authors’ unsensationalized approach. I am also indebted to David Franke’s scholarly The Torture Doctor (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1972), as I am to David Franke himself, who supplied me with several useful leads. Holmes appears in fictionalized guise in Robert Bloch’s thriller American Gothic (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974) and is the subject of Allan Eckert’s admirable, exhaustively researched novel The Scarlet Mansion (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1985).

  Thanks to Allan Eckert I became acquainted with the person to whom this book is dedicated, Mildred Voris Kerr. The daughter of Dessie Pitezel and granddaughter of Carrie and Benjamin, this extraordinary (indeed inspiring) woman quickly became not just a generous source of knowledge but a friend. Her death at age 89 in April, 1993, took everyone by surprise. She was a person of such remarkable vitality that—to those who had the privilege of knowing her—it seemed as though she might go on enjoying life forever.

  For various forms of assistance, kindness, and support, I would also like to thank Ward Childs, Jennifer Ericson, Eileen Flanagan, Suzanne Katz, Allen Koenigsberg, Catharine Ostlind, Richard and Alice Pisciotta, Ralph Pugh, Sylvia Reid, Patterson Smith, Loretto Szucs, Peter M. Vanwingen, and Mike Wilk.

  Finally—my deepest gratitude, as ever, to Linda Marrow.

  HAROLD

  SCHECHTER

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