Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  In June 1928, he carried out his most notorious crime and the one that would lead to his eventual arrest. On May 28, 1928, Fish came to the house of the Budd family in Lower Manhattan. The family was struggling financially and their eldest son Edward had placed an ad in the newspaper looking for a residential job in the countryside. Fish claimed to be a farmer called Frank Howard and offered the young man a job at the excellent rate of fifteen dollars a week. The generosity of the offer allowed the Budds to ignore the supposed Mr Howard’s rather shabby appearance, and they were happy to accept him as a benefactor. With grossly misplaced trust they even allowed ‘Mr Howard’ to take their twelve-year-old daughter Grace to a birthday party at his sister’s house.

  There was, of course, no such party. Instead Fish took Grace to an abandoned house in Westchester. While Grace was outside collecting wild flowers, Fish took all his clothes off, then called out to the girl to come indoors. When she did so, she was horrified by the naked apparition that confronted her. She tried to escape but her abductor was too strong for her. He strangled her, then dismembered her body. Over the next nine days he cooked up and ate as much of her remains as he could, before burying her bones in the yard.

  Abducted and Eaten

  When Grace Budd failed to return home by the following morning her distraught family raised the alarm. The story was soon picked up by the newspapers, accompanied by an angelic-looking picture of Grace, and a huge manhunt was launched. It was all to no avail, however. The mysterious Frank Howard had vanished into thin air.

  That might have been the end of matters if it had not been for the determination of one man, veteran detective Will King. He became obsessed with the case. Not a day would go by for years without him trying to find some new angle on the case. And finally some six years later, in November 1934, his patience was rewarded in the most grotesque of ways.

  During that month Mrs Budd received an anonymous letter. It was clearly written by her daughter’s murderer as it contained details of Mr Howard’s meeting with the family. The rest of its contents were unspeakably foul. The letter writer talked of being friendly with a sailor who had eaten human flesh while stranded in China. These tales had inspired the writer to embark on his own quest for human flesh and, as a result, he had abducted and eaten Grace. He did, however, assure the grieving mother that he had not raped the little girl. ‘She died a virgin’ the letter ended.

  This bizarre missive must have been unimaginably distressing to its recipient, but it provided Will King with just the fresh piece of evidence he needed. Under detailed examination he noticed that the envelope used bore a minute emblem containing the letters NYPCBA (the New York Private Chauffeurs Benevolent Association). King followed the clue with renewed energy. He assembled all 400 members of the association and checked their handwriting against that of the letter writer. When none of them matched he asked if anyone had ever taken any of the association’s stationery for personal use. One member confessed that he had and that he might have left some of it in a lodging house he’d recently stayed in.

  King hurried round to the lodging house and discovered that the chauffeur’s old room had recently been occupied by a strange old man called Albert Fish. King had a hunch that this might be the guilty man. Fish was no longer staying at the lodging house, but he was in the habit of coming by once a month to pick up a cheque. So determined to catch him was King, that he rented his own room in the lodging house and waited there till Fish finally showed up four days later.

  Detective King found Fish talking to the landlady. When he told the apparently harmless old man that he was wanted for questioning, he was amazed to see Fish lunge at him with a straight razor. Razor or not, King was a much stronger man and he quickly overpowered Fish and arrested him.

  Obscene Confession

  Once back at the police station Fish made no attempt to deny his guilt. Instead he embarked on a long, wandering and graphically obscene confession not just to Grace Budd’s murder but to a whole string of crimes, most of which the police had no knowledge of. Typically grotesque was his account of the killing and eating of a four-year-old boy called Billy Gaffney in 1929: ‘I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did.’

  Just how many people Fish actually killed remained a mystery. He claimed to have killed dozens, but his confessions were often very vague and in the vast majority of cases no body could be found to verify his stories. Apart from Budd and Gaffney there is only one other murder that he is unquestionably linked to, that of five-year-old Francis McDonell in 1934.

  In the end he was only tried for the murder of Grace Budd, as that was the case with the most supporting evidence. His defence, the only possible one, was insanity. His defence lawyer simply read out Fish’s long confession as evidence that here was a madman. The jury, however, were unimpressed. Mad or not, they clearly wanted Fish to be punished for his crimes and he was duly found guilty and sentenced to death.

  This didn’t seem to bother Fish in the slightest. When he was told that he was to die in the electric chair he reportedly said that this would be ‘the supreme thrill of my life’.

  The sentence was carried out in Sing Sing Prison on January 16, 1936. At the first time of asking, the chair failed to electrocute Fish. Legend has it that this was because the metal pins that Fish had inserted into his body had caused the machine to short circuit. At the second time of asking there was no mistake and Fish was duly killed. His career of evil lives on, however, as his life and crimes provided some of the inspiration for Thomas Harris’s fictional serial killer Hannibal ‘the cannibal’ Lecter.

  H. H. Holmes

  H. H. Holmes was the alias of Herman Webster Mudgett, an American serial killer who is thought to have been responsible for literally hundreds of murders, although only a few of these were ever confirmed. His most notorious crimes involved entrapping large numbers of mostly female employees and guests at his Chicago hotel and torturing them, before gassing them to death and selling their bodies to medical schools.

  The Evil One

  Mudgett was born in New Hampshire on May 16, 1860, the son of an alcoholic father and a timid, submissive mother. He later wrote, ‘I was born with the devil in me. I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into this world. He has been with me ever since.’ As a child, Mudgett was bullied remorselessly by his father, and his mother was too intimidated to intervene. However, the young Herman did well at school, being intelligent, charming, and good-looking. Despite the problems of his home life, he was convinced he would do well in the world and had an ambition to be a doctor. As an adolescent, he took to killing and dismembering small animals, conducting experiments on them, and became fascinated with anatomy.

  By the age of eighteen, Mudgett had married a young woman called Clara Lovering and was studying at the University of Michigan Medical School. However, he was expelled from there for stealing corpses, and had to relinquish his hopes of becoming a doctor. He changed his name to Dr Henry Howard Holmes and found work at a pharmacy, which went well until the woman he was working for, a Mrs Holton, disappeared. At the same time, Mudgett remarried, though without divorcing his first wife, and had a daughter with his new wife, Myrta Belknap. The couple named their daughter Lucy. He then married yet again to a woman named Georgiana Yoke, and went on to have an affair with the wife of a colleague, Julia Smythe, who later became one of his victims.

  Torture rooms

  Mudgett then murdered the pharmacist and his wife, and with the money he gained, began to construct a large building across the street from the store, which residents of the area called the ‘Castle’. It was a block-long, three-storey building and during its construction many of the building contractors were hired and fired. The reason, as it later emerged, was that Holmes did not want anyone to know what the real purpose of the building was. It had many secret rooms and passages, some of them fitted with gas jets. In the basement, there were large vats and s
ecret chutes that led down to torture rooms. Also in the basement there was a dissection table and surgical tools.

  While the building was under construction, Holmes was involved in various scams to make money. One of these was to take water from the tap, mix it with vanilla essence, and sell it in the pharmacy as ‘Linden Grove Mineral Water’. The authorities found out soon enough and he was banned from selling the water. However, he was not prosecuted and went on to run several other rackets, including selling fresh bodies to the medical schools in the area for students to dissect. Ironically, nobody asked where the bodies came from.

  Dismembered bodies

  By the time he was thirty, Holmes was a successful businessman. He owned a pharmacy, a hotel, a jewellery store, a restaurant, a barber’s and several other businesses as well. He had many employees, including one named Ned Connor, who had moved to Chicago with his wife Julia and their daughter Pearl, to take up the position of manager in one of Holmes’s businesses. Unbeknown to Connor, Holmes was strongly attracted to Julia, a good-looking woman with red hair and green eyes. When Julia invited her eighteen-year-old sister Gertie to stay, Holmes propositioned her as well, promising to divorce his wife so that he could be with her. Gertie, however, was not interested, so Holmes turned his attention to Julia once more. This time, Julia fell in love with Holmes and soon became his lover. Eventually, Connor found out what was going on and the couple separated, after recriminations on both sides.

  Sadly, Julia was to suffer a great deal as a result of her attachment to Holmes. She became pregnant with their child and Holmes asked her to have an abortion, but Julia initially refused. Eventually, however, she agreed to let Holmes perform the operation on her, and he took her down to the cellar to do so. But instead of performing the abortion, Holmes murdered her instead, dismembering her body so that all the flesh was cleaned off, leaving only her skeleton, which he sold to a medical school for the sum of $200. Nobody knows exactly what happened to Julia’s daughter Pearl, but she was never seen alive again.

  Gassed to death

  In 1893, a major exhibition opened in Chicago, bringing visitors flocking to the city, and to the hotel that Holmes had opened there. Over a period of three years or so, he selected his mostly female victims from the guests, took them to the soundproof rooms and tortured them, before gassing them to death and dissecting them. So that he would not be discovered, he constantly changed the staff who worked at the hotel, firing them every fortnight or so. In this way he was able to carry on his grisly work without detection.

  The usual way he operated was to murder his victims, then push the bodies down a secret chute that took them to the basement. There he would dissect them, remove all the flesh from the bones, and assemble their skeletons to be sold to medical schools. He also cremated his victims, throwing their bodies in huge lime pits so that they would be destroyed. In addition, there were two giant furnaces in the building, a torture rack and a huge assortment of poisons and acids designed to dispose of his victims in various ways, as the mood took him.

  Not content with this, Holmes decided to make more money by operating an insurance scam with one of his employees, Benjamin Pitezel. Pitezel took out a life insurance policy for $10,000, citing Holmes as the beneficiary. The idea was that Pitezel would then disappear, Holmes would find a corpse to disfigure, then identify it as Pitezel. Pitezel’s children would be roped in to help to identify the body.

  The long arm of the law

  What in fact happened was that Holmes murdered Pitezel, then panicked when the police began to snoop around the hotel. Holmes set the hotel alight and escaped to Philadelphia, taking one of Pitezel’s daughters with him. Meanwhile, evidence of what had been going on in the hotel all those years finally came to light. The remains of over 200 bodies were found, and police launched a major manhunt.

  Eventually, Holmes was tracked down in Boston and arrested. While in custody, he struck up a friendship with another inmate, Marion Hedgepath, who constantly boasted to him about the various ways that he had made money illegally over the years. Holmes responded by telling Hedgepath about the murder of Pitezel so as to claim the insurance money, and then went on to claim that he had committed many such murders for financial gain. Hedgepath promptly informed the police of Holmes’s story, and Holmes was duly charged with the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. The story that came out deeply shocked the police and, later, the public. Holmes told his captors how he had burned Pitezel alive, despite the man’s cries for mercy and his pitiful attempts to pray for salvation when his final end came.

  Meanwhile, the police at the Castle in Chicago were tallying up the body count, and found that at least 100 young women, most of them typists and secretaries, had been murdered in the building. The killings had evidently followed a pattern: these young women had caught Holmes’s eye, become his lovers and ended up being murdered. Not only did the police find the bodies of the women; there were also children, including Alice, Nellie and Howard Pitezel, whose remains were found in the building. Alice and Nellie had been thrown into a trunk and gassed to death, while their brother had been poisoned and burned before being dismembered.

  Despite the mounting evidence against him, Holmes was adamant that he was innocent and continued to plead not guilty to murdering Pitezel. However, when he was brought to trial, the jury did not believe his story and he was convicted of first-degree murder. On November 4, 1895, he was sentenced to death. Before his hanging, he confessed to twenty-seven murders and six attempted murders.

  On May 7, 1896, Herman Mudgett, alias Dr H. H. Holmes, was hanged in Philadelphia. According to the New York Times, Mudgett told the executioner: ‘Take your time; don’t bungle it.’ However, the executioner did not make a very good job of the hanging. Holmes’s neck did not immediately snap and he died slowly, twitching for a good fifteen minutes before he was finally pronounced dead.

  Pedro Alonso Lopez

  Pedro Lopez, known as the ‘Monster of the Andes’, is thought to have murdered more people than any other serial killer in the twentieth century. He himself put the score of people he had murdered at 300, although this has never been clearly established. The only other serial killer to have come anywhere near this number of victims is the British doctor, Harold Shipman, who is thought to have murdered over 200 of his patients.

  Feral child

  Pedro Alonso Lopez was born in Tolina, Colombia, in 1949, the seventh of thirteen children born to a prostitute mother. At this time, Colombia was undergoing a time of considerable social unrest, which made his already precarious situation more difficult. By all accounts, Pedro’s mother was a harridan who had little love for her children, and in 1957, when she caught Pedro fondling his younger sister, she evicted him from the family home. He was just eight years old.

  Lopez did his best to survive on the streets, but was soon picked up by a paedophile who took him to a deserted house and raped him repeatedly. Afterwards, the child was taken back to the streets, where he became so frightened that he hid in abandoned buildings by day, and only came out at night to look for food. Little is known of his subsequent life until an American family saw him begging on the streets of Bogota and took him in. They enrolled him in a school for orphans, but he ran away. The reasons for this are not clear, but it is thought that he may have been molested by one of the teachers. However, the school claimed that he had broken into the office there and stolen money.

  Killing spree

  Whatever the truth of the matter, Lopez returned to the streets and became a beggar and petty thief. At the age of eighteen, he was caught stealing cars and arrested. He was brought to justice and received a seven-year prison sentence. In jail, he was reported to have been gang-raped by four other prisoners, and responded by killing three of them with a home-made knife. He was given an additional two years to serve, which was far too lenient. By the end of his sentence, he was an extremely dangerous individual, and was leashed on the world to wreak his vengeance.

  Lopez was released in 1978.
His experiences as a child, and in prison, had made him a very angry man, who had a particular hatred for women. For the next two years, he went on a killing spree, focusing his attention on young girls, mostly between the ages of eight to twelve. Significantly, he chose girls who were in the age range of the sister he had fondled as a child, before being ejected from the family by his mother. He was careful to choose girls from minority Indian tribes, whose disappearance would not be followed up by the authorities, as it would have been if they were white. He also travelled, covering his tracks as he went: he committed crimes all over the Andes, in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Later, he confessed to having killed 100 girls in Peru alone, and was eventually caught by a tribe of Ayachuco Indians while attempting to abduct a nine-year-old girl from them. In revenge, the Indians stripped him and tortured him for some while and were about to bury him alive when an American missionary intervened and persuaded them to hand Lopez over to the authorities. The authorities deported him over the border to Ecuador and let him go. It was the worst mistake they could have made.

  Hundreds of victims

  For the next few years, Lopez travelled back and forth between Ecuador and Colombia, killing as he went and never being caught. Families went to the police, and the authorities noticed an increase in the number of girls reported missing, but they explained this as girls being abducted for the slave trade and did not bother to follow up the complaints. It was only when, in April 1980, there was extensive flooding in the Ecuadorian town of Ambato and the bodies of four missing children were washed up, that the authorities realised something untoward was going on. Then a woman named Carvina Poveda, a resident of Ambato, saw Lopez trying to abduct her twelve-year-old daughter. She called for help. Lopez was caught red-handed and taken away by the police.