by Gordon Kerr
It had been a normal morning for seventy-year-old Andrew J Borden. He had gone to the bank and the post office before returning home. AJ, as he was known, was one of the richest men in Fall River. Tall, thin and white-haired, he was also one of the most unpopular men in town, renowned for his thrift. He was too mean, for instance, to install indoor plumbing and, in the undertakers he owned, was rumoured to cut the feet off corpses so that they would fit into smaller and, consequently, cheaper coffins.
His meanness had almost tragic results several days before his murder. The entire family was laid low with chronic food poisoning, but, according to some reports, it was caused by the fact that the meat they had eaten had been kept in a broken freezer that he was too mean to have repaired. Of course, there were also those who claimed that Lizzie had tried to poison them all. Nonetheless, when a doctor called at the house to treat them, stingy old AJ sent him packing, refusing even to pay for a house call.
The gruesome murders of AJ and Abbey Borden became a national sensation and a full-blown media frenzy ensued. The reason for the media’s interest was the mystery and conjecture that surrounded the killings. There was no murder weapon, although an axe was found in a woodshed that was claimed to have been used, even though it was clean. The handle was broken off and the prosecution claimed it had been broken and disposed of because it had been soaked in blood. However, as seemed to be a regular feature of this case, there was disagreement – one police officer claimed the broken part of the handle was lying beside it and another claimed that it wasn’t.
There was conjecture, too, about the blood. Such vicious and bloody attacks would lead one to expect the murderer’s clothes to be covered in blood. So, where were they, especially if one of the two women present in the house at the time, Lizzie and the servant, Bridget, was the killer? There was a report of Lizzie burning a light-blue dress in the stove, but she claimed it had been stained with whitewash. However, no one could even agree on what colour dress she had been wearing on the day. Another story has Bridget Sullivan carrying a bundle out of the house, but, again, there was no evidence to support this.
Lizzie and Bridget both told police their movements at the time that the crime was committed. Bridget had been instructed by Abbey Borden to clean all the windows in the house, but Lizzie changed her story several times. She initially said she had been in her room and then said she had been in the basement. Finally, she claimed to have gone out to the barn where she had remained for 40 minutes. This was thought to be slightly odd, as it was 38°C (100°F) outside and would have been even hotter in the barn.
Life at 92 Second Street had become increasingly unpleasant of late. Relations between parents and children were so bad that they had virtually split the house in two, Lizzie and Emma occupying the front part of the house and the parents the rear.
The cause of much of the argument was AJ’s will. He had already given a house to Abbey’s relatives and the girls’ uncle had come to visit that week in order to organize the transfer of farm property, including a summer house that the girls loved. Shortly before the murders, both girls had briefly left home on what were termed ‘extended vacations’, but Lizzie had decided to return early.
Eventually, the police decided to arrest Lizzie Borden and charge her with the two murders. However, after only an hour’s deliberation, the jury found her not guilty. There was just not enough evidence to convict her.
Speculation continues as to who killed the Bordens. An axe murder in the same area, not long after Lizzie’s acquittal, helped her cause, but there is still disagreement.
Bridget Sullivan returned to her native Ireland, returning to live and eventually die in Butte, Montana, in 1948 and, although ostracized by her neighbours ever after, Lizzie Borden continued to live in Fall River until her eventual death, in 1927, aged 66. Her name continues to echo down the years, especially in the popular children’s skipping rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
H H Holmes
The Murder Castle, Chicago, USA
The Castle stands out among other houses of death because it was designed and built with killing in mind. Psychopath, HH Holmes, dedicated his life to two things: gruesome murders and the pursuit of money. It is impossible to say which one he loved more, but the Chicago World. Fair offered him the perfect opportunity to delight in both his favourite pastimes.
Holmes called it his ‘Castle’.
It was built on three stories and boasted 100 rooms. With soundproof sleeping chambers, complete with peepholes; asbestos-padded walls; gas pipes; walls that slid across, making a room bigger or smaller, as necessary, and trapdoors with ladders leading down to the rooms below. It was a maze of secret passages and false doors, and a number of the rooms were filled with gruesome torture equipment. Chillingly, there was also a specially equipped surgery. Holmes is thought to have placed his victims in special rooms into which he pumped lethal gas, watching their death throes through peepholes. On occasion, he might even set fire to the gas in order to add a little more excitement. When he tired of that, there was always the ‘elasticity determinator’, an elongated bed to which a victim was tightly strapped and then stretched. Holmes liked to experiment. Chutes, the sides greased for easier dispatch, led down to a two-level basement with a large furnace burning fiercely. Once he had finished with a corpse, it slid down a chute to the basement where he used vats of acid and other chemicals to get rid of any evidence that it had ever existed. Alternatively, he might remove all the flesh and sell the skeleton to a local medical school.
HH Holmes – real name Hermann Webster Mudgett – arrived in Chicago in the 1880s. The city was brimming with excitement as well as visitors, as the World’s Fair, or Great Exposition, was about to take place. The hordes of people – some estimates put it at a staggering 27 million – passing through the city, put a strain on the forces of law and order, but also opened up opportunities for crime and for psychopaths, such as Mudgett, now going under the name Holmes. He found work as a prescription clerk in a pharmacy when he first came to town, but the owner of the premises where he worked left town suddenly, or ‘went to California’ as Holmes said at the time. She and her daughter were never heard of again, and it is almost certain that he killed them. He took ownership of the business and bought an empty property across the road, on 63rd Street.
He began to raise money through murder and fraud in order to build his ‘Castle’, and then let rooms to young women who had come to Chicago to enjoy the fair. Of course, they quickly disappeared, as did a number of the women he employed. They were forced to take out life-insurance policies as a condition of their employment, and he claimed on these as he dispatched the women. He also carried out hundreds of illegal abortions in the Castle’s dark rooms, many of his patients did not survive the procedure.
When investigators finally examined the Castle, after Holmes’s arrest, the media had a field day. ‘The Castle is a Tomb!’ screamed the headline in the Chicago Tribune. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it a ‘charnel house’. True crime writers quickly made it a staple of the genre. In Philadelphia, a Holmes Museum opened. As for the narcissistic Holmes, he wrote a memoir, Holmes’ Own Story, in which the Alleged Multimurderer and Arch Conspirator Tells of the Twenty-two Tragic Deaths and Disappearances in which he is Said to be Implicated. ‘My sole object in this publication is to vindicate my name from the horrible aspersions cast upon it,’ he wrote, ‘and to appeal to a fair-minded American public for a suspension of judgment.’
In the book, Holmes describes the day that his unhealthy interest in medical matters began. A gang of boys tried to frighten him by confronting him with a skeleton in a local doctor’s office. Rather than terrify him, it made him resolve to pursue a career in medicine. His first job was in an asylum, an experience that scarred him. He then moved to Chicago.
Holmes’s fina
nces were in a mess at the end of the World’s Fair, and, with creditors moving in, he abandoned Chicago and moved to Fort Worth, Texas. He had killed a couple of railroad heiress sisters, but, before killing them, had arranged their affairs so that he would inherit property they owned in Texas. He intended to construct another death factory, along the lines of the Castle in Chicago, but the authorities in Texas were not as easily fooled as those in Chicago and he abandoned the project.
He set off on travels around the US and Canada, and is thought, in all likelihood, to have continued in his murderous ways, although no bodies were found to corroborate this.
It was Holmes’s killing of his business partner, Benjamin Pitezel, and his children, that was his downfall. Pitezel and Holmes had concocted a scheme whereby Pitezel would fake his death so that his wife could collect on a $10,000 (£20,000) insurance policy. This would be split with Holmes, whose role in the scheme was to provide a body to stand in for Pitezel. But Holmes, who never really liked Pitezel, actually did kill him and used the real corpse to collect the insurance money. He told Mrs Pitezel that her husband was hiding out in South America and persuaded her to allow him to have custody of three of her five children. The three children were killed in various locations as he travelled across America.
But Holmes’s luck was finally running out. Pinkerton’s Detective Agency had been on his heels for a while, and they finally arrested him in Boston, in November 1894. They had long had suspicions about his activities, but it was only when they gained entry to the Castle, that these suspicions were confirmed.
Holmes confessed to 27 murders, although it is believed he may have murdered as many as 230 people. On 17 May 1896, he was hanged in Philadelphia and was buried, at his own request, in cement, so that his body could not be dug up and dissected. It was a pity, many thought, that he denied such a right to his many victims.
By the time he died, the Castle was no more. On 19 August 1895, the building was destroyed by a mysterious fire. A US post office now occupies the site of the killing factory run by America’s first infamous serial killer.
Newgate Prison
City of London, England
The stench was unimaginable, and permeated the air around Newgate to such an extent that shops around it had to close during the warm summer months. Gaol fever was rife, exacerbated by the rotting cadavers littering the corridors and the disease-ridden rats and lice. In the words of Sir Stephen Jansen, Newgate prison was an 'abominable sink of beastliness and corruption'.
Of the 150 prisons in London during the 18th century, Newgate Prison was probably the one to which one least wanted to be sent. It was the largest, most notorious and, undoubtedly, the worst of those filthy, rat-infested institutions. In fact, Newgate was so bad that only a quarter of condemned prisoners actually survived until execution day – a small mercy.
There had been a prison on its site since the 12th century, and had it been demolished and re-built many times in its 700-year history.
Three hundred years ago, prisons were privately run and it was a lucrative job being a jailer. A fee, known as a ‘garnish’, had to be paid on entering the prison and all essentials – food, soap, candles etc had to be purchased from the guards. Prisoners could also pay to have the heavy and constricting manacles, which were secured to the floor, that all prisoners wore, exchanged for lighter ones or even removed altogether, a privilege known as ‘easement of irons’. Money also changed hands for the right to walk around.
Money also determined where prisoners would be housed. Those without any means of payment could only sleep on the floor without cover and in tiny spaces. In 1753, 300 people were locked up in two rooms a mere 3.4m (11ft) wide and 4.3m (14 ft) long. There were so many lice that, as prisoners walked across their cells, their shells could be heard crackling underfoot. Disease, especially typhus, was rife and killed far more people than the gallows ever did.
If a prisoner had money, on the other hand, he would have a private cell, with a cleaning woman and even a visiting prostitute.
Getting out of Newgate was not easy, even when a sentence was completed, a fee had to be paid before a prisoner would be allowed out. Even if he had died, his family had to pay to have the corpse released. The stench of rotting corpses, whose families did not have the wherewithal to remove them, added to the overall smell of decay that polluted the air around Newgate.
Women prisoners often swapped sex for food, becoming pregnant and having children, who lived inside Newgate. Becoming pregnant was not all bad, as it enabled women to ‘plead the belly’, which could prevent them being hanged.
Public executions had traditionally taken place at Tyburn, but moved to Newgate in 1783, taking place in the street outside the prison building. Executions drew large crowds, but, for those who wanted an inside view of the prison, a permit could be obtained from the Lord Mayor of London for a visit.
A total of 1,169 people were put to death at Newgate or close to it, between 1783 and 1902, the year it was demolished to make way for the central criminal court, known as the Old Bailey. Of these, 49 were women.
Jail sentences were not seen as an effective crime deterrent, and execution or transportation were the preferred means. After 1660, and the restoration of the monarchy, the number of crimes for which you could be executed in England rocketed until, by 1815, there were no fewer than 288. These included stealing anything worth more than five shillings (25 pence or 50 cents), going armed in disguise, forging bank notes, cutting down trees, stealing sheep and poaching fish. This litany of crimes, punishable by death, later known as the ‘Bloody Code’, started to decrease in the 1820s.
All hangings took place on a portable gallows drawn up outside the prison’s Debtor’s Door. The Cato Street conspirators, who had plotted to kill the Cabinet, were hanged and beheaded there, although their actual sentence was the customary one given for treason – hanging, drawing and quartering.
There were a number of executioners. From 1771 to 1786, Edward Dennis carried out 201 hangings as well as the last instance of burning at the stake when, in 1786, Phoebe Harris, Margaret Sullivan and Catherine Murphy were burned for ‘coining’, (forging currency). They were lucky enough to have been hanged first, however. On one memorable day, 2 February 1785, Dennis hanged no fewer than 20 men. His assistant, William Brunskill, succeeded him and was responsible for dispatching a remarkable 537 people at Newgate.
The gallows had two parallel beams, allowing a maximum of a dozen people to be hanged at once. The platform on which they stood measured 3m x 2.5m (10ft x 8ft) and was released by moving a lever that released a bar under the drop of between 0.3m-0.6m (1-2 ft). Consequently, people were often slowly strangled to death, rather than dying of a broken neck.
Other notable hangmen included Thomas Cheshire, known, for obvious reasons, as ‘Old Cheese’. He officiated at a quadruple hanging in 1829. Another hangman, William Calcraft, had sold pies at hangings and, having become friendly with his two predecessors, was offered the job.
The last man to be publicly executed outside Newgate and, indeed, in Britain, was Michael Barrett, on 26 May 1868. After that, executions took place within the walls of the prison and outside a black flag was raised to signal that the hanging had been carried out.
Lemp Mansion
3322 DeMenil Place, St Louis, Missouri, USA
The Lemp Mansion at 3322 DeMenil Place, St Louis, was once a beautiful property, bought by William J Lemp in 1876 with proceeds from his extremely successful brewery business. When they moved in, the family were riding high, but in the years that followed, the Lemps' luck took a severe turn for the worse.
These days, the Lemp mansion is a restaurant and an inn, behind which stands what remains of the famous Lemp brewery. It once covered ten city blocks, but is now derelict. The mansion was once a fabulous place. In its underground caves it boasted an auditorium, a ballroom and a swimming pool built in a natural cavern. A tunnel led from the brewery to the house, inside which visitors would have been delighte
d by beautiful, expensive furniture, hand-painted ceilings, Italian marble, carved wood detailing and an art collection to die for.
Much of the house is now empty or sealed up, but there are many who believe the Lemps never left, even when they died, usually by their own hand. Reports of gunshot sounds, screams, laughing, crying and voices calling out names have served to make the Lemp mansion one of America’s most haunted houses. And it is no wonder, because the Lemps were a family cursed with a uniquely tragic history.
The 33-roomed Lemp mansion was built in 1868 by a St. Louis inhabitant, Jacob Fleickert and, in 1876, William J Lemp and his wife, Julia moved in. 78 years previously, Johann ‘Adam’ Lemp was born, in Gruningen, in Germany. Moving to the US, he had become a naturalized citizen in 1841. He was a grocer who also made beer but, by 1840, he had given up the grocery side of his affairs and focused on brewing and selling beer at his Western Brewery in St. Louis. There were around 40 breweries in the city at the time and Lemp’s was one of the most successful. So successful, in fact, that, by the time of his death, he was a millionaire.
Adam’s son, William J Lemp, took over the brewery on his father’s death, initiating the construction, in 1864, of a larger brewery that would become one of the biggest in the country. He installed the first refrigeration machine in an American brewery and introduced the idea of refrigerated railway carriages so that his beer could be the first to be sold nationally. Soon, it was being exported and sold all over the world.
In 1892, the Western Brewery changed its name to the William J Lemp Brewing Company, of which William became president and his son, William Jr, vice-president. William Jr, known as Billy, had gone to St. Louis University, like his father, but William Sr wanted to pass the business on to his fourth son, Frederick. However, when Frederick died in 1901, aged only 28, it was a devastating blow to William Sr, who slowly began to fall apart. At 9.30 am on 13 February 1904, he shot himself in the head in one of the mansion’s upstairs bedrooms. He died 45 minutes later, leaving Billy to take over.