Holmes himself served as architect. The hotel boasted one hundred rooms in a strange and sprawling structure that occupied a full city block.52 The plans, pulled from the dark recesses of Holmes’s murderous mind, defied logic (and not a few building codes). Janice Tremeear discusses its features in a book about “haunting” spaces: staircases that went nowhere, walls on hinges, blind passageways, rooms with no doors—or too many doors—or doors that opened to nothing.53 The hotel also possessed hidden chambers, trap doors, and secret passages that no one besides Holmes could possibly understand. He had, in fact, ensured it by continually hiring and firing construction workers. When Holmes was captured, the dizzying tale scandalized and outraged the city of Chicago and, for a time, turned the World’s Fair Hotel into a famed house of horror. He had murdered many of his own lovers, including the bookkeeper’s wife, Julia, and her daughter, Pearl, and even his last lover, Minnie. How many others is difficult to imagine, but his cold dismissal of the crimes was perhaps most shocking: “I would have gotten rid of [Julia] anyway [. . .] I was tired of her.”54
Holmes confessed to twenty-seven murders committed on site, though only nine were specifically proven. The reason has to do with remains—or rather, the lack of them. The disposal process varied. He practiced defleshment on some, meaning he stripped them of skin and muscle before selling the articulated bones to doctors. Larson’s history links Holmes with a man named Chappell, who had mastered the art (and would do it for about thirty-six dollars); murder turned a relatively tidy profit that way.55 Holmes dissolved other victims—turning them into the liquid flesh not so different from the “meat juice” elixirs popular at the time. The process itself bore certain similarities (macabrely ironic given that Holmes’s hotel wasn’t terribly far from Chicago’s famous Stock Yards district). Liebig’s elixir had been boiled and pressurized, though a small amount of hydrochloric acid aided the process (not that different from natural digestion).56 Investigators discovered vats of acid with ribs and skull bits at the bottom, quicklime, a kiln, and a bloody dissection table with surgical tools.57 Holmes had dissected the bodies, and then used heat or acid and lime to macerate the remains. The estimate of Holmes’s crimes in those years during and after the World’s Fair ranges from nine to over two hundred—but though acid aided disposal, it would be forty years after H. H. Holmes swung for his crimes in 1896 before the equally well-dressed and charming Haigh would earn the title “acid bath murderer,” simultaneously returning sulfuric acid (vitriol) to center stage.
Vampires and Vats: John George Haigh
How much acid does it take to dissolve a body? Typing this question into a search engine returns a surprising variety of (frequently very accurate) hits, from the television series Breaking Bad to mortuary science. The most recurrent entry, however, concerns a British serial killer of the 1940s. Described as suave and good-looking (rather like his predecessor), Haigh dissolved at least six bodies using a forty-five-gallon drum of sulfuric acid. The National Archives has the collected letters from Haigh, who was accused of murdering for monetary gain—but who, during his trial, claimed he was a “vampire” who killed in order to drink the victims’ blood. In his final letter to his parents, he claims to be a martyr for his “religion,” stating that “other nations are more enlightened than we are. They don’t hang people for their religious convictions even though Sacrifice is involved.”58 His story about drinking blood could not be corroborated, and though he had hoped to escape murder under a plea for insanity, his claim was thrown out. A manipulative and compulsive liar, Haigh had previously spent time in prison for fraud, where he learned that sulfuric acid had curious effects—mainly its ability to dissolve animal tissue. He had experimented on rats using acid from the prison’s tin shop; upon his release he set himself up—not in a hotel, but in a basement off Gloucester Road.59
In his biography of Haigh, Dr. Jonathan Oates remarks on the seeming glamour of the murderer. Attractive and well-spoken, and seemingly well-liked, Haigh swindled and cheated his way from one city to the next. To begin with, fraud seemed his primary mode of operation. Haigh delighted in the cleverness of his own scheming, and he steadily took greater and greater risks. Unlike H. H. Holmes, Haigh murdered men as well as women—Donald and Amy McSwan, and their son, William; Dr. Archibald Henderson and his wife, Rosalie; and Henrietta Durand-Deacon.60 Also unlike Holmes, Haigh killed principally for money; he had no relations with his victims, though he did have a long-standing romantic friendship with a woman twenty years his junior named Barbara Stephens. Their love letters remain, and in them he appears courteous, gentle, and in every respect a kind man—and a loving son to his parents.61 This, no less than his final confession of vampirism along with comparing himself to Jesus, Napoleon, and other “martyrs,” caused journalist Stafford Somerfield of the Daily Telegraph to label him “one of the most baffling criminals of this or any other age.”62 Acid made his murders possible, not as a means of death but a means of escaping justice; he made a quarter of a million pounds selling off the properties of the McSwans (his abilities in forgery also handy in the crime) and various amounts for the sale of the Hendersons’ personal items. In that sense, Haigh did “feed” off his victims, but with avarice rather than hunger, after money rather than blood. But acid, even of the sulfuric variety, doesn’t dispose of everything. Haigh’s final victim left a telling record of her demise, a trail to follow composed of three human gall stones and a dental plate.63 Pathologist Keith Simpson—of the by then well-established field of forensic pathology—made a positive match, and Haigh was charged and brought before the Sussex/Lewes Assizes. The smooth, fresh-faced Haigh calmly explained that he should not be persecuted for his life as a blood-drinking vampire. Given so bizarre a claim, the papers originally dubbed him “the vampire,” but this moniker didn’t stick nearly so well as “acid bath murderer.” A shame, in a sense, as he might have then been the “Sussex Vampire,” completing our criminal circuit back to Sherlock Holmes’s “Illustrious Client.” In any event, both H. H. Holmes and Haigh proved the utility of the “bubbling death” for villainous intent. But we return to the Great Detective another way; Smith’s work as a forensic pathologist sheds light on one final acid trick.
Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook details the “birth” of forensic medicine in the Jazz Age. But well before forensic chemist Alexander Gettler helped Charles Norris set up the field in the 1920s, toxicologists and other chemical experts were using acid to solve crimes—and to catch criminals. In 1836, the same year Humphry Davy began work on the “safety lamp” and the British Association meeting lauded Andrew Crosse, James Marsh had been called to assist in the Bodle Case. The whole Bodle family, it seemed, had been poisoned by tainted coffee. Arsenic poisoning mimicked cholera symptoms, which are devilish enough; once it enters the bloodstream, vessels become inflamed, and the victim suffers cramping and violent vomiting. The body tries to purge the poison, emptying the bowels, resulting in severe dehydration and burst capillaries. Since victims of poison and cholera died in similar fashion (and in similar agony), how could the casual observer ever tell the difference? Adding body tissue to a glass vessel with zinc and acid, Marsh incited a reaction for arsine gas. When ignited, the gas produced a telling silver-black metallic glaze, separating tragic but natural death from murder. It was the first test of its kind, but hardly the last; technology’s progress is an arms race at best. And acid found its way into Gettler’s lab, too, pulping pink organs into acidic solutions, allowing forensic specialists to sift through what remained. Dread tech, in the hands of detectives, becomes the means of tracing a mystery, a murderer, a villain.
If technology engineers its own accident, then acid provides for both ends of the spectrum: it operates as successful innovation and devious design, as germ-fighting wonder and vitriolic villainy. The steampunk tales in which acid appears span the same breadth; acid may threaten the heroes of The Wild Wild West, but it aids them almost as often (and eats through steel in the same episode t
o aid in their daring escape). Nemo’s ship might be green energy, but the acid battery enables him to pursue his own deadly sort of revenge—and in Doyle’s “The Illustrious Client,” acid serves as weapon and justice in the same event. The evolution of this single innovation, appearing as it does in fiction as well as fact, paved the way for medical science, then for murderous intent, and then, once again, to a particular kind of medical specialist: forensic toxicologist. Anarchy and control find themselves wrapped up in the same technologies, the same drive for creating and maintaining power. And finally, a third figure, neither scientist nor engineer, appears on the Victorian stage. Forensic pathology rises from mid-Victorian laboratories to produce the most illustrious of steampunk of careers, the detective. In a “lofty chamber, lined and littered with countless bottles, [. . .] test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames,” Watson meets Sherlock for the first time, an absorbed student chemist in the midst of discovering a reagent “which is precipitated by hoemoglobin, and by nothing else.” It would be thirteen years after the story’s publication before such a test for “differential diagnosis” of human blood existed,64 but Sherlock is ever ahead of his time. Like steampunk itself, the modern sleuth defies limitation, a retro-futurist subject standing between the old and new, a bridge figure in the age-old contest between our desire and our dread—and finally, between death and immortality. Many of our heroes, and a few of our villains, rise boldly into myth, appear in fiction, or (as with Tesla) compose a few fictions of their own. But in the face of death and misdeed, the greatest of Victorian heroes moves on a reverse track. Sherlock Holmes steps out of fiction and, seemingly, into fact.
PART FIVE
“Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott,” Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
NINE
The Science of Sherlock
Some contests never really end. At our earliest beginnings, when humans looked up at the vast, wheeling sea of stars, they sought a place of changeless permanence in the face of corrosion, decay, and death. The darkness lurked as nothingness, a tomb, a fearful place of disintegration and loss; the light offered firm edges, solid ground, life itself. We brought light, and fire, and almost inevitable destruction to distant lands and dark corners; we worked in dim labs to generate sparks; we developed engines and industry; we sought control. But at each step, the threat redoubled. George Shattuck Morison wanted a world with no night, gleaming with created power delivered on rails and wires and through the ether to save us from the one thing we continue to fear, but never to name. Chaos, darkness, privation, anarchy . . . all of these are but other names for death. We die. And we know we die. And we seek immortality. Science never achieves it, but heroes do. One of fictions’ most famous resurrections does not require Dr. Frankenstein or the halo of electric charge. Sherlock Holmes, himself immune to superstition, dedicated to the scientific method, and committed to fact over conjecture, nonetheless returns to the living after his first demise—and continues, immortal.
“The real Sherlock Holmes,” writes one nineteenth-century specialist, “would be a forensic toxicologist.” As the writer himself (John George Spenzer) had this very position, it rings with a kind of pride of profession. But detection had not, to begin with, been a particularly scientific affair. The desire to sort crimes and punishments goes back through all recorded history; one of the earliest works on the subject, Washing Away of Wrongs, appeared in 1248 in China. It offered some useful advice (such as how to tell the difference between a drowning victim and a strangling victim), but relied principally on wise magistrates and good guesswork. The Victorian detective of the Scotland Yard variety arrives very late, preceeded only slightly by the first professional police force. The “Bow Street Runners” originated in 1749, founded by Henry Fielding, who was, himself, a fiction author—and their early cases do read like novel material.
On March 30, 1767, a gang of highwaymen waylaid a coach. They killed one passenger, beat another, and robbed the remaining two before disappearing into the outskirts of London. Within hours, seven men of the Bow Street Magistrate’s office fanned out to gather information, and two days later five men were arrested.1 The Bow Street Runners didn’t just catch the men; they aided conviction by providing evidence in court. One man was hanged and later dissected by eager surgeons; two were transported to British colonies and labor camps. One turned state’s evidence against the very men who had captured him . . . and the press covered it all in high detail. No one called the men detectives; the word wouldn’t be coined until the nineteenth century, but they were stable, professional, and swift, with salaries paid by the government to protect the people.2 By then, Bow Street belonged not to the novelist, but to his blind brother, John—a man who would reform and, in many ways, create the police as we know it. Called the “Blind Beak,” John claimed the ability to recognize over three thousand thieves by their voices alone, an auditory Sherlock, but it was his desire for a paid force of professionals that made him remarkable. Criminals, he noted, had professionalized. It was time the police did the same, but it would be 1829 before a true London police force came into being (with its headquarters, Scotland Yard). They were better paid and better housed, but not necessarily better equipped, but controversy and scandal tarnished the reputation of the official squad and its sometimes blunt or brutal tactics. In 1873, referencing the trial of Sir Roger Tichborne, editor Edward Vaughan Kenealy wrote, “Can there be a doubt that Scotland Yard in all its departments is utterly useless for the duties of Police and Detectives?”3 The science of detection, before the 1880s, was anything but scientific—unless, that is, you turned from the policeman to the chemist, and from the engineer to the medical man. As crime historian E. J. Wagner writes in The Science of Sherlock Holmes, forensics as we think of it today belonged not to policemen but to doctors.
Medical practitioners had risen from the early (terrifying) days of butchery and bizarre remedies to astute and analytical observers of the body over the previous century. And, given their experiences in anatomy, they could not only tell what ailed you while you lived, they could learn how and why you died. Andreas Vesalius opened the first wide window into the body through anatomy, but until the work of René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, few had been able to “see” into the living body the same way. In the early nineteenth century, Laennec worked at the Necker hospital in France. Hospitals of days past were not places of healing; quite the reverse. When Whitechapel Gods describes the slimed tools of the physician, prying loose gears out of flesh and expecting no great recovery, it’s not entirely fiction. Hospitals were poorhouses, grimy with cancer-eaten bodies, wracked by the coughs of tuberculosis patients, and essentially a warehouse of soon-to-be buried wretches who couldn’t afford home care. It would be well after Lister introduced the carbolic acid sprayer that such places took a turn for the better, but Laennec wasn’t displeased with his office. After all, he could easily follow a patient from symptom to death to dissection table with a critical eye—and he had a new technology to help him do it. In the winter of 1816–1817, Laennec had invented the stethoscope. The Dittrick Museum has a number of early models—the very first was little more than a tube. But with this brand new device, Laennec listened to the heart and lungs of his patients, heard the rattle and bang of diseased tissue, and (after their inevitable decline) opened their bodies to discover the root cause of disease. It was far from glamorous work; hours spent with sputum-producing, half-drowned patients, hours more with knife and treatise, tracking cause of death. Laennec never collared a criminal, but the diagnostic practice of physicians led the way to seeing the body as more than victim. Corpse became clue—and the dead, from the perspective of the pathologist, spoke. The trouble was sorting out just exactly what they were saying. That took more than anatomy of a body; it required tests for determining how that body had met its end. It meant microscopes and test tubes and magnifying glasses and goggl
es; it meant turning the lens of science upon the workings of the human form. In short, it meant forensics, a new kind of body tech emerging from the same weedy beginnings of the clockwork boy and mother machine. Some of forensics history clearly owes a debt to the leavings of acid baths, but a great deal more has to do with caustic substance of a different kind. If London crime gave rise to the modern police detective, then the forensic specialist was born of poison. And the poison expert would come to play a role not only at the intersection of detection and medicine—it operates as the principal clue in A Study in Scarlet, with its trail of untraceable capsules.
As Deborah Blum writes in The Poisoner’s Handbook, until the nineteenth century, “few tools existed to detect a toxic substance in a corpse.”4 Poison lurked everywhere from dyes to rat poison, and it was easy to get at; a murderer might be a cook, a maid, a wife, a father, a child. No license required, no questions asked. In France, murder by poison became so prevalent that arsenic was dubbed “the inheritor’s powder.” Metallic poisons like arsenic prevailed because, until the 1800s, no one understood the form or structure of the elements. But that was about to change with the advent of the “Marsh test” for discovering arsenic in organ tissue. James Marsh radically altered the future of the profession, not by virtue of a Sherlock mind, but by long hours in the chemical lab. What Marsh had realized at great pains did not, as a rule, result in scintillating courtroom drama. In fact, Marsh’s process was messy and painstaking, and the slightest miscalculation could result in false positives. In chemistry, as in all other fields, it isn’t always the inventor who profits most by his designs, but rather those who come after—people with superior skill, better contacts, or just plain better timing—those who turn first sparks into dynamos worth using. Predating Mr. Holmes (and in fact, most of the other legal medicine experts), we have the “father of toxicology,” a man who arrived on the scene as a brand new kind of alchemist: Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila.
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