This was too much for the authorities to ignore. The local magistrate now initiated an investigation, sending gendarmes out to search for witnesses and evidence. The postal worker provided a description of the man he saw with the victim, and police got wind of the attack on the beggar woman in August and quickly came to the conclusion that it had been perpetrated by the same man who had served two months for the attack on the miller. An arrest warrant was issued for Juan Díaz de Garayo, and two weeks later he was arrested. During twelve days of questioning, he first denied all the accusations, but police appealed to his religious piety, persuading him that a confession would bring divine forgiveness. Garayo eventually confessed to the murders and provided detailed descriptions of each of the six killings and four attempts. There does not seem to have been a trial, as he pleaded guilty in the murders. On November 11 he was sentenced to death for the last two murders.
Garayo appealed his sentence on the grounds of insanity. Psychiatrists for the defense argued that Garayo was an “imbecile” and had committed the crimes under the influence of a “partial madness” or “intermittent monomania, amidst long intervals of lucidity.” Psychiatrists for the prosecution argued that Garayo was lucid and aware of what he was doing, and therefore legally sane. His appeal was refused and he was executed by garrote on May 11, 1881.
A popular story circulating before Garayo’s arrest was that the murders were the work of a sacamantecas who killed women and children to make soap from their fat. Garayo said he himself had heard this, and that his disembowelment of the last victim was a calculated attempt to fan the rumor to throw suspicion off himself and the real motive for the murders, his sexual impulses. It’s more likely that he simply couldn’t stop himself from escalating his brutality.
Many serial killers in Spain were labeled sacamantecas, but it was Garayo who became the sacamantecas.
* * *
• • •
All these cases in France, Germany, Italy and Spain transpired before the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, and some of the cases display the same signature and psychopathology. A similar pattern of pre–Jack the Ripper serial killings occurred in the United States, as we will now see.
EIGHT
Back in the USA: The Rise of the Modern American Serial Killer
The Western was really about serial killing all along.
—MARK SELTZER, SERIAL KILLERS: DEATH AND LIFE IN AMERICA’S WOUND CULTURE
The United States was not immune to serial murder in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As in Europe, many of the known American serial killers prior to the Jack the Ripper era were pathological or profit-hedonist female serial poisoners—like Lydia Sherman, the “American Borgia” (10 victims: 1864–71); Sarah Jane Robinson, the “Poison Fiend” (8 victims: 1881–86); and Jane Toppan, “Jolly Jane” (31 victims: 1885–1901)—or outlaw profit killers preying on frontier settlers and travelers, like the Harpe Brothers in Tennessee in the 1790s or the Bloody Benders and their “murder inn” in Kansas, 1869–72.1
Life on the frontier was violent and often beyond the pale of civilization. Although in many ways American Western movies exaggerate and glorify the reality of “gunfighter” murderers, social critic Mark Seltzer was not exaggerating when he commented on our fascination with frontier violence, “Serial murder and its representations have by now largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of the body and of bodily violence in our culture . . . the Western was really about serial killing all along.”2
In literature on serial killers, the United States has often been perceived as the “natural habitat” of serial killers, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, with 76 percent of the world’s serial killers.3 Today, of all serial killers in the world between 1900 and 2010 cataloged in the Radford University/FGCU serial-killer study, the US’s share has declined to 67 percent (2,743 out of 4,068), followed in order of magnitude by Britain, South Africa, Canada, Italy, Japan, Germany, Australia, Russia and India.
Who is considered the “first” American serial killer depends on the “flavor of the month” in literature, film and other popular media. At this writing, Herman Webster Mudgett, also known as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes or simply H. H. Holmes, is often called America’s “first modern serial killer.” A Google search for “first serial killer” returns his name, along with Jack the Ripper, as a top result.4 Recently, film director Martin Scorsese announced he is making a film, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Holmes, based on the Erik Larson bestseller The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.5 Hollywood’s publicity machine went into action to tout Holmes as “America’s first serial killer” as a prelude to the upcoming movie and the History Channel has been broadcasting a “fantasy documentary” series American Ripper, which ridiculously claims H. H. Holmes as not only the first American serial killer, but possibly Jack the Ripper as well.
I will outline the Holmes case first, and then chronicle five earlier sexual serial killers in the United States. Most of the cases occurred before Jack the Ripper (1888), while a few, including Holmes, caught the attention of the authorities and the media shortly afterward. (Holmes was arrested in 1895, seven years after the Whitechapel murders, but he claimed he had killed for many years before that.)
Herman Webster Mudgett, or H. H. Holmes—Chicago–Philadelphia, 1895
A Chicago-based contemporary of Jack the Ripper, the renegade physician, bigamist and fraud artist was convicted in 1895 in Philadelphia of only one murder, of his employee and insurance-fraud coconspirator Benjamin F. Pitezel; but the evidence is persuasive that Holmes took custody of three of Pitezel’s children and later murdered them as well.6 Beyond those four murders, the Holmes story is very tenuous.
After his conviction, Holmes published a confession to a total of twenty-seven murders—of men, women and children—for a variety of motives, including selling their bodies as anatomical medical specimens, insurance fraud, mortgage and loan fraud, property theft, inconvenient mistresses, jealousy and perhaps even pathological motives (he was a notorious womanizer).
At the center of the Holmes case was his infamous “Castle,” a bizarre eight-thousand-square-foot three-story Victorian apartment building with storefronts on the ground floor. Holmes had custom-built the structure in 1888 in Chicago’s south-side Englewood neighborhood, on the corner of West 63rd Street and Wallace Avenue, and he kept an office there. After Holmes’s arrest, the building was allegedly discovered to contain “secret” soundproof rooms, some lined with asbestos; a system of gas pipes controlled from Holmes’s office; hidden chutes; acid pits; and what looked like dissection tables and airtight gas chambers. In the basement, investigators found what looked like fragmentary remains of human bones mixed with animal bones and strands of human hair.
The notoriety of the case was heightened by allegations that Holmes converted the Castle into a temporary hotel during the 1893 World’s Fair (World’s Columbian Exposition) for the purpose of murdering tourists visiting Chicago for the fair.
After Holmes was arrested, the Castle was on the brink of becoming a tourist site when it burned down, in August 1895. New upper floors were built on top of the ground floor and foundation and the new building remained standing until the late 1930s, when it was torn down for a railway overpass and post office, obliterating that portion of Wallace Avenue. A utility tunnel in the post office appears to be built through a nineteenth-century brick foundation, very likely the original foundation of the Holmes Castle.7
But as a recent history of the case concludes, “Many of the stories of him and his ‘Castle’ are pure fiction. The castle never for one day truly functioned as a hotel, and the actual number of World’s Fair tourists he’s suspected of killing there has remained the same since 1895—a single woman, Nannie Williams. The “secret” rooms were almost certainly used more for hiding stolen furniture than for destroying bodies.”8 Moreover, many of the rooms, while hidden
, were not exactly secret: employees knew about them and occasionally slept in them.
In the end “only” nine of the twenty-seven murders that Holmes confessed to were actually proven to have occurred, and only four were conclusively linked to Holmes. He was convicted and sentenced to death for one murder, of Pitezel. There is little doubt that he also murdered three of Pitezel’s children. So Holmes was certainly a serial killer, but of what scale and magnitude?
While awaiting execution, Holmes confessed to 27 murders in an autobiography for which he was paid $7,500 (equivalent to $213,330 today) by the Hearst newspapers.9 Some of the victims named by Holmes turned out to be alive, so perhaps his confession was his last scam before he went to the gallows. On the eve of his execution on May 16, 1896, Holmes retracted his confession and said he had killed only two victims, also an unlikely claim. Numerous people who had business or personal contact with the charming and affable Dr. Holmes vanished without a trace, leaving at least the possibility that he murdered as many as two hundred victims, which would certainly elevate him to the top of the pantheon of history’s most prolific serial killers. But no conclusive evidence has ever been uncovered to confirm that any of the missing people were murdered by Holmes.
The interest in and fascination with Holmes was revived in the 1990s, with true-crime historian Harold Schechter’s 1994 book Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer. (For subsequent editions, Schechter changed the subtitle to The Definitive True Story of H. H. Holmes, Whose Grotesque Crimes Shattered Turn-of-the-Century Chicago.) Recently, Chicago indie filmmaker John Borowski produced an award-winning documentary, H. H. Holmes: America’s First Serial Killer,10 while Erik Larson’s bestselling account, The Devil in the White City, situated around the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, focused on two “architects”—Daniel Hudson Burnham, who designed the “White City” pavilions at the fair, and H. H. Holmes and his Castle.
Most recently, Chicago historian Adam Selzer has taken on the task of debunking the myth in his 2017 H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil, in which he argues that while Holmes was confirmed to have killed at least four victims, most of the narrative around his case is legend and myth.
The lore of H. H. Holmes has merged with the cult of ripperology to assert that Holmes committed the Jack the Ripper killings on a trip to London during the summer and autumn of 188811 (see more on Jack the Ripper and ripperology in chapter ten). Alas, there is absolutely no evidence that Holmes made any trips overseas in 1888 (or any other time). For one thing, he spent that year in Chicago supervising the complex construction of the Castle with its hidden passageways and secret rooms (apparently firing workers and contractors every few weeks so that nobody could get a full picture of the architecture and its sinister purpose). In the summer and autumn of 1888, when the Jack the Ripper murders were taking place, the historical record shows that Holmes was in the midst of a lawsuit over payments due for the construction of the Castle and was at risk of losing the property.12 It’s highly unlikely that Holmes would leave for a trip to England in the middle of the complex and troubled construction of the Castle.
Moreover, there are absolutely no signature similarities between the intricate murders that Holmes is accused of discreetly committing indoors, using gas, poison, battering, or strangulation of victims with whom he had prior personal or financial relationships, and the brutal outdoor “blitz-attack” evisceration of randomly selected stranger prostitutes on the sidewalks of London. You don’t have to be an FBI behavioral scientist to see that there are absolutely no similarities between the two serial killers.
Further undermining the timeline, in his confession for Hearst newspapers, Holmes alleged that, with an accomplice, he murdered somebody by the name of Rodgers in Virginia on a fishing trip in the late summer of 1888 (during the same period Jack the Ripper was starting to kill in London). Holmes confessed that he struck the victim in the head with a boat oar and made the death appear as an accidental drowning.
I searched local American newspapers from that period and found no reported drownings of anyone named Rodgers in Virginia that summer, but typical of the daunting mystery of Holmes, there is a drowning reported on August 18, 1888, of a Joseph Seymour Rodgers in the Catskill Mountains of New York. A local newspaper reported that Rodgers was in the company of a “Mr. Webster and his son” when he drowned after apparently having a heart attack while swimming.13 Tantalizingly, Holmes’s birth name was Herman Webster Mudgett. Beyond that, no further details of the death or about “Mr. Webster and his son” survive on the record.
No matter what Hollywood and the History Channel will claim, H. H. Holmes was by no means the “first American serial killer,” any more than Jack the Ripper was the “first modern serial killer.”14 Holmes might have been the first “big number” serial killer, if his newspaper confessions are to be believed, but there were several cases before H. H. Holmes that fit the “traditional” sexual-lust murder pathology and thus make far better candidates for “America’s first serial killer.”
Jesse Pomeroy, the “Boy Fiend”—Boston, 1874
If we accept the FBI’s new minimum-two-victim definition of a serial killer, then it can be argued that America’s first modern pathological sex serial killer on the record, and perhaps the youngest, was fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy in Boston, arrested in 1874 for the murder of two children. This case predates H. H. Holmes by twenty-one years.
Pomeroy was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on November 29, 1859, the second of two boys. His mother was a seamstress and his father was a laborer.15
Jesse was apparently a sickly baby, scrawny and frail. He also had a clouded cornea in one eye, which other children ridiculed as a “demonic eye” (and later helped in identifying him). Even his father would call his son a “goddamn jack-o’-lantern.”
There are no stories of him as a child violently attacking other children, or committing typical acts of arson or cruelty to animals (other than one apocryphal account of him stabbing a cat and throwing it into the river when he was five years old and a report that he wrung the necks of two pet canaries). Jesse was, however, frequently horsewhipped and lashed with a belt by his father until one day Jesse’s mother chased the father out of the house with a butcher knife after a particularly vicious beating. His father never returned.
Under his mother’s protective supervision, Jesse grew up a lonely and aloof boy who was intelligent and enjoyed reading dime novels, which would be denounced by social critics after the Pomeroy case in the same way that crime comics would be denounced in the 1950s, for spawning juvenile delinquency. Pomeroy rarely played with other children except in games of cowboys and Indians, in which Pomeroy preferred to take the “villainous” Indians’ part as long as it included play sessions of torture inflicted on “captives.”
Jesse was a good student, but odd. One teacher stated that he was “peculiar, intractable, not bad, but difficult to understand.” As an adolescent, Pomeroy was frequently truant and was on at least one occasion sent home from school for terrorizing younger children by sneaking up on them and making scary faces. On another occasion, he was reported for throwing firecrackers into a group of children at recess.
Typical of some serial-killer cases, Pomeroy apparently began his attacks a few months after he recovered from a serious medical episode, a case of pneumonia in October 1871. On December 26, 1871, the twelve-year-old Pomeroy lured four-year-old Billy Paine into an outhouse on top of Powder Horn Hill in Boston’s Chelsea district. Once inside, Pomeroy threw a rope across an exposed rafter, tied the boy’s hands together and suspended him from the beam, reminiscent of a dungeon-torture scenario. He then severely whipped the boy across his back. Passersby found the boy hanging by his arms where Pomeroy had left him. The boy was too traumatized to give police much information.
On February 21, 1872, a seven-year-old boy named Tracy Hayden was lured to the same outhouse by an offer to
see soldiers on parade. His feet and arms were tied and a handkerchief was stuffed into his mouth, and he was suspended from the beams by rope. He was not only whipped across his back with a stick but severely beaten around the face, resulting in a broken nose, two front teeth knocked out, a split upper lip and severe battering around the eye sockets. The perpetrator, according to the boy, also threatened to cut his penis off. The only description that Hayden could give of his assailant was that he was “a big boy with brown hair.”
On May 20, 1872, eight-year-old Robert Maier was approached by an older brown-haired boy on the street who invited him to come with him to the circus. They walked in the direction of Powder Horn Hill and near there the boy assaulted Maier and dragged him into another abandoned outhouse, suspended him from the rafters and beat the boy while forcing him to say obscenities. Apparently, the assailant climaxed and afterward untied the boy and released him.
On July 22, 1872, seven-year-old Johnny Balch was lured away from in front of a toy-store window by a brown-haired boy who offered him some money for running an errand. The boy was taken to the outhouse on Powder Horn Hill, suspended from the beam by rope and then beaten for approximately ten minutes on the chest, stomach, back, thighs, buttocks and finally his genitals. When it was over, the assailant took down the rope and coiled it, and warned the victim to remain in the outhouse or he would slit his throat. A passerby found the boy two hours later. By now these attacks were being reported in the newspapers and a five-hundred-dollar reward was posted for information leading to the arrest of the “Boy Torturer,” as the mysterious perpetrator was dubbed in the papers.
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