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“Famous Serial Killers” Introduction: Why Did They Do It?

Why did they do it? Well, that’s really the question, isn’t it: why? Why do people commit heinous crimes against their fellow human beings, all the while knowing that the possibilities are quite good that they will be captured, convicted, and in some cases, even executed? Furthermore, what possible motive could exist for those who murder not one victim out of malice, or greed, or inflamed, perverted passion, but for those who murder a continual string of victims, anonymous personages, many of whom they have never before even met?

The term serial killings a relatively new one: before the term came into existence, the widely applied designation of such random acts of perverted violence was a “stranger killing.” Such individuals who perpetrated these crimes were believed to be transients, bums who wandered into a sleepy town, and caught the unsuspecting victim by surprise. Usually, these victims were dispatched in a quick act of brutal savagery, and then their earthly remains were deposited, unceremoniously, in an abandoned lot, the woods, a country field, or, as in the case of Jack the Ripper, in an alleyway in a major metropolitan area. The psychiatric aspect and rationale behind “stranger killers” eluded police experts; to a great degree, they still do.

It was once believed that such nefarious individuals were the product of genetics, a sort of “throw back” to an earlier form of man that was alternately cursed or blessed with a more primitive, brutal set of adaptive skills; in other words, his savagery was something that was bred into him by the fierceness of his conditions, by the need to hunt, survive, to “kill or be killed.” Phrenologists, those discredited quacks of long ago who maintained that the character and intelligence of an individual were, somehow, related to the shape and size of their skull, gave ample (if questionable) evidence concerning what they believed to be the genetic character of homicidal madness and perversion. Yet, their notions are seen today as discarded and outmoded nonsense.

Today, we take the psychiatric angle: abuse, poor parental relations, sexual dysfunction, and other psychological abnormalities are brought into play as the chief culprit behind the deranged actions of fiendish killers. In our more enlightened age, we have replaced demonic possession with schizophrenia, genetics with being born just plain “bad.” But are we really any closer to actually discovering the truth? Perhaps not. For, for every case of a mad killer that’s been spawned by an abusive, horrid childhood, there are myriads of other examples of mad killers that had “model childhoods” (Ted Bundy, for example). No, the answer must, we believe, lie in the strange, spiritual composition of every human heart. As writer Jim Goad once observed, in the pages of his horrid, graphic, controversial “murder zine” Answer Me!: “Great souls rarely spring from happy environments.” If this be true, than our measure of greatness must be proportionate to the amount of objective “good” an individual can perform for society; other souls may be “great” as well, but not in the same sense as a Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King.

Some would contend that Osama Bin Laden was a “great soul,” that Adolph Hitler shined like a star in the firmament of a dark, blood-streaked Wagnerian sky, that Jack the Ripper earned every single decade of his long infamy, and would , indeed, qualify as a “great soul,” if not a particularly conspicuous character. Indeed, there seems to be something rotten at the core of some of us, something that actively seeks our own destruction, to a greater or lesser degree, as well as the destruction of our environment and our fellow beings. The healthy individual subsumes these gross, barbaric, bestial feelings beneath layers of socialization, respecting the aura of “taboo” that makes indulging in murder and vice a step downward, toward the animalistic. The vast majority of men and women, while they may violate the social contract in some small way at some point in their lives, know instinctively that certain barriers can never be crossed without a concomitant loss of that essential something that comprises the makeup of our humanity. Some doors can never be closed; some nightmares last forever. Not so for the “great souls” of the biographies that comprise the body of this volume. Each, in their turn, were missing that same essential element that keeps the vast majority of their fellow men from engaging in Locke’s “War of All Against All.” Some were driven by madness, some by money, and some by sheer mischief; driven over the edge by the “Imp of the Perverse,” they sought destruction as an antidote to a life and a sense of self that seemed forever to be missing the essential ingredient that makes great and useful souls of us all. The 20th century stands as the most blood-soaked epoch in human existence: from the horrors of the trenches of WW1; to the nightmares of Nazism; the Holocaust; genocide; Hiroshima; Nagasaki; the “Cold War”; Vietnam; assassinations; terrorism; racial riots; lynching; famine; AIDS; crime; and serial killings, we spent the nineteen hundreds awash in a mighty ocean of blood, malevolence, paranoia, and suffering. At the dawn of the 21st century we find the situation to be much the same; in fact, in some ways, it has simply escalated forward another few steps. War rages in Iraq, Islamic militancy threatens lives worldwide, social upheavals have become as common as the twirling masses of tired propaganda printed on one, many yellowed pages, or filling up bytes of information on the Internet. Everywhere we turn, Jesus prophetic words ring: “And there will be wars, and rumors of wars.” And, as recent media events have shown, we aren’t shut of the serial killer as a social phenomenon just yet. Just recently, the notorious killer known for years only as “BTK” was apprehended by police, who realized in shock that the fellow they had so long been in pursuit of was little more than a common, humdrum little man who went to church, watered his lawn, and looked like everybody’s next door neighbor. Once again, the world had expected a gorgon of monstrosity, a “great soul” of killing, and instead had found that the individual from their worst nightmares wore the face of suburban placidity.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

This volume attempts to trace the history of murder and mayhem through its celebrity practitioners. The vast majority of individuals included in these pages could clearly be defined as “serial killers”; that is, they have each killed at least three people with a short “cooling down” period in between murders. Some however are included not because they can be clearly defined as serial killers, but because the sheer gruesomeness and barbarity of their acts sets them apart from the run-of-the-mill murderer whose passion is often directed toward murder for profit or out of a single, jealous burst of romantic passion. Although there are several killers profiled within that might qualify as being, at least partially, motivated by profit, by and large all of the histories I have written cover individuals whose names have become synonymous with bloodletting. They did it for many reasons, some true and some only partly true, but for the most part, the individuals who were deemed worthy of being included did it because they liked it. It’s just that simple. Even Lizzie Borden, who spent her homicidal passion in one morning of mad mutilation, could not be accused of acting out of any motive besides a deep-seated emotional need to rid herself of the pain inflicted upon her by those she had ceased to love. Having indulged this need, having enjoyed the aftermath, she disappeared into obscurity.

We have left out the notorious bootleggers, Mob hit men, and other Mafioso of Roaring Twenties fame, simply because there is nothing about them, especially, that suggests that they enjoyed murder. In fact, they seemed to use it, for the most part, as simply a means to an end, and not as the end in and of itself. In fact, it is often said that the code of the Italian Mafia was that they only killed their own, or, whoever had personally wronged their organization. They, nearly always, left the families of their respective victims alone. Let’s hope this honorable code still survives today.

Our roster includes only deviants, and while many of those deviants may, in fact, have offered one excuse or another for their behavior, or some practical motive, they all shared one common trait: they excelled at being bad people. Thus we begin our tour of the blood-soaked catacombs beneath the mainstream of conventional history, taking our tour through the gas-lighted streets and dripping alleys into the recesses of minds poorly developed, of souls suffering sin and seeking salvation in the solace of sex and violence, derangement and defilement; love and death. Rome led the way, with their packed coliseums of cheering, jeering countrymen, all glutted to the overflow of their sensory organs on the sights, smells, and sounds of struggle and death.

Let the games begin!

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Albert Fish

In the long history of murder and mayhem, there are few characters more sickening and reprehensible than Albert Fish. Born Albert Howard Fish in 1870, Fish was the scion of a respectable upstate New York family with ties in the American Revolution. Fish nonetheless was abandoned from childhood and left in the care of a brutal orphanage, where he claimed that he first gained his predilection for masochism and sadism, practices he indulged in for the rest of his life.

After a short period of wanderings and doing odd jobs, Fish “settled down” for a short time, fathering children and trying to cultivate an aura of domestic respectability. It was to be short lived.

His wife, a no less bizarre creature than her husband, soon attracted the affections of an extramarital paramour, whom she initially insisted must be allowed to move into the house with the family. When Fish objected, she left with her lover for a short time, only to return later and demand that they be readmitted into the household. Fish relented, and allowed her to move back in, but insisted that her lover find himself another place to stay. However, later Fish found that she had simply secreted him away in the attic.

Fish finally booted them both out of his sordid life, but his character only continued to sicken into a nightmare of diabolical perversity. He would frequently encourage neighbor children to paddle his buttocks; it was eventually discovered by one of the children that he had manufactured his own studded paddle for the purposes of self- flagellation.

Although Fish gave off the aura of being the long-suffering single father trying to do his best to keep his small family of children clothed and fed, he began to privately seek out children to molest. One of his most well-known instances of maniacal behavior involves him taking his children to the family cottage, stripping off his clothing, running outside under the full moon, and declaring to the night, “I am the Christ!”

Fish’s tally of child victims of molestation are sickening enough, but slowly, the thrill of simple sexual abuse began to wear thin. Darker ideas began to explode in the fragmented recesses of his insane mind: ideas involving murder, dismemberment, and cannibalism. Fish was a devotee of cannibalistic stories, finding especial inspiration in the story of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe, and the newspaper accounts of infamous German “lustmord” killers such as Fritz Harrmann. Fish, as a fetish, carried clippings of sensational cases and anecdotes involving cannibalism in his pockets for years, and it was at this time, according to his children, he also gained his predilection for eating raw meat.

Fish’s first run-in with the authorities occurred, oddly enough, due not to his sexual abuse of young children (he never abused his own), but because of another of his morbid sexual activities: his habit of writing obscene letters to women seeking companionship through “Lonely Hearts” pen-pal clubs. The letters frequently began with his describing himself as a friendless, older man who had had the great misfortune of losing his family in an accident. He would usually continue, his letter becoming gradually more shocking and perverse with each sentence, by explaining that it was absolutely necessary that he be flogged by a handsome woman, so as to enable him to maintain his psychological equilibrium. By the end of reading the letter, the luckless recipient would usually be too shocked to give any sort of reply. Soon, the obscene “mash notes” caught the attention of police authorities, and Fish found himself interred at Bellevue, where examining “alienists” pronounced him as “sane, but seriously perverse.” Make of that what you will.

(Fish moved into murder, one supposes, in an effort to recapture the initial thrill he must have felt with his first crimes against children. There are no hard and fast estimates concerning the number of unfortunate children who fell prey to the demented fiend, but he confessed to a foggy six, and alluded, darkly, that it may have been dozens more.)

Fish, a religious maniac as well as a sexual predator, scrupulously devoured the Bible, interpreting verses that seemed to suggest cannibalism and making them part of his own bizarre ritual of sin and repentance; sadistic mutilation, followed by self- flagellation. It must have been during this period that Fish first concocted the idea of repenting for his sins by punishing himself with large needles, which he inserted methodically into the soft area between his anus and scrotum. Unbelievably, Fish lived with 29 large needles inserted deep inside his body, all of which worked their way into the layers of his flesh, and even broke into pieces inside of him. An x-ray later confirmed this.

Albert Fish pelvic x-ray showing needles

Fish was, in the words of one examining authority at his later trial “a polymorphous pervert.” His activities list a bewildering array of fetishes and perversions, including coprophilia (ingesting of human feces, his own), the drinking of his own urine, and cannibalism. The last became the cornerstone of his infamy.

It was in 1928 that Fish first placed an add in a New York seeking the services of a young man to do “farm work, upstate.” Unfortunately for the Budd family of Manhattan, young Edward Budd Jr. saw the add, and telegrammed Fish, telling him that he would be more than interested in helping out. Fish made his appearance at the Budd home, using the assumed name “Mr. Howard,” and, sizing up Edward as being possibly too strong and healthy to kill (Fish was then a wheezy, weak fifty-eight-year-old, who seemed to anyone that met him even older), became quickly entranced with twelve-year-old Grace Budd, who seemed a much more fitting prospect for what Fish really had in mind. He quickly assured the family that young Edward Budd Jr. would work out just fine, but that “Mr. Howard” would have to go back to his farm to prepare a room for him, and then would come to get him in just a few hours. He also charmed the family into letting their daughter, little Grace accompany him to his “daughter’s birthday party,” assuring them that she would be fine with him until they returned, and that young Edward should hurry up and pack a few things. This proved to be a tragic, fatal mistake, and one Mr. and Mrs. Edward Budd regretted for the rest of their lives.

Fish took the unsuspecting Grace to the train station, carrying with him his familiar black briefcase in which he carried his “Implements of Hell”: a bizarre collection consisting of razors, needles, a saw, a butcher knife, a studded paddle, belt, etc. It was his own “torture and murder kit,” and he rarely left home without it.

Grace Budd

The train took them to white plains, N.Y. , to Fish’s own Wisteria Cottage , where he left little Grace playing outside (somewhat confused, we must assume, at where the location of the birthday party was supposed to be). He then went inside, stripped off his clothing, and called her from the window. Grace ran into the cottage, made her way up the dim, dust-choked stairs, and, according to his confession after he was arrested, screamed when she saw him, declaring pitifully, “I’ll tell mama!” Fish decapitated the girl, drained her blood into a bucket, and then proceeded to dismember and cut sections of her flesh away. These he cooked and consumed in an orgy of deviancy that occupied him for several sickening days.

Meanwhile, the Budds had become frantic when “Mr. Howard” failed to return with their daughter, and quickly alerted police. But it was to no avail: the trail of “Mr. Howard” was cold, and all traces of him disappeared into thin air. Amazingly, Fish later recounted that he traveled back to New York City with the flesh remains of Grace Budd wrapped entirely in an old newspaper, sitting with it on his lap on the train, feeling the special thrill of it against his pulsating, needle-stuffed groin. Six long years passed with nary a hint of what had happened to poor, unfortunate Grace Budd. Despite the best efforts of detectives, the trail went completely cold. Finally, an enterprising detective by the name of King caught up with Fish, chiefly due to a letter that the demented Fish, in a stab at perverse repentance, scribbled anonymously to the Budd family.

The letter, which must now qualify as a classic in the annals of demented documents, follows:

Dear Mrs. Budd. In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 -3 per pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak — chops — or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl’s behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John stayed there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys, one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them — tortured them — to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 1 1 year old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except the head — bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 St. near — right side. He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3, 1 928 I called on you at 406 W 1 5 St. Brought you pot cheese — strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You saidyes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wild) lowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick — bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

Of course, it was not long after receiving this hideous missive that Detective King was on the trail. Upon examination, the letter proved to be written on a particular type of hotel stationary, and was quickly traced back to a bell hop, who admitted pilfering some of the stationary, which, he admitted, must have been left by accident in a room he had just recently vacated for different quarters. The room turned out to be the current residence of Albert Howard Fish.

When King first stepped forward to arrest Fish, he described the strange behavior of the old man. Fish, his eyes steady and calm, reached into his pocket and took out a razor blade, and held it up as, one supposes, some sort of feeble gesture of defiance. It was the work of a minute for Detective King to twist it out of the old man’s fist, and get the cuffs on him.

Fish was first imprisoned in the Tombs, the infamous New York City jails, and then later sent to Sing-Sing to await execution. His trial revealed him to be a man whose appetite for perversion was never sated, and whose demonic deviance had descended to depths unparalleled in the annals of criminal history. Fish readily admitted his infatuation with feces; his drinking of blood; urine; his molestation of possibly hundreds of innocent children; his predilection for inflicting and experiencing pain and torture; his obsession and practice of cannibalism; and his murder of six children. Fish blamed his mad obsession with sadomasochism as stemming from his abusive childhood in a Catholic orphanage, where he repeatedly saw young boys whipped and was whipped himself. It was here he began to enjoy “everything which caused pain.” Or so he claimed.

The jury was treated to a mind-boggling litany of lurid details, but it was not only those who found themselves in the courtroom during the sensational trial of the “Moon Maniac” that were privy to Fish’s abnormalities: the prison staff were ever-vigilant with Fish’s food, lest any bones or sharp objects be let into him to eat with. We must assume he was forced, quite a bit, to use his fingers. On one occasion, when Fish was accidentally left with a portion of meat still attached to bone, he carefully removed the bone, and was caught using it to carve slashes into his withered chest. The cadaverous old fiend was quickly relieved of his prize, and the authorities promised themselves a greater degree of circumspection henceforth in regards to inmate Fish’s meals. (One further incident serves to illustrate the depth of the man’s surrealistic obsession with self abuse. Fish managed by some means to obtain cotton balls and medicinal alcohol [perhaps from the prison infirmary], as well as wooden matches. When found with these contraband items, he confessed freely that he received great pleasure from soaking the cotton balls in alcohol, inserting them into his rectum, and lighting them.)

The jury took almost no time in finding Albert Fish sane, and therefore culpable and a candidate for a ride on “Old Sparky.” Fish was sentenced to die by electrocution, a notion that he claimed satisfied him. He remarked that electrocution would be “…the supreme thrill of my life. The only one I haven’t tried.” Fish spent the short days leading up to his death studiously seeking salvation in the pages of his Bible, and promising to intervene with God on behalf of the living whom he was leaving behind. His final words, while being led to the chair were, reportedly, “I don’t know why I’m here.” An apocryphal story has long circulated concerning the needles that Fish lived with in his groin, and the flow of the electricity from the chair. Supposedly, when the switch was thrown, the needles caused the electric current to spark, short-circuiting the chair and requiring that Fish be given a second jolt of current before he died. But it was all a myth.

Fish died, in sharp contrast to how he had lived, completely normally.

He was the oldest prisoner ever executed at Sing-Sing, up to that time: January 16th , 1936.

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Bela Kiss

The career of blood-drinking serial killer Bela Kiss was immortalized in a play called 23, by Antonin Artaud. Certainly his fiction could not have been much stranger than Bela’s own truth. You decide.

Bela Kiss, by all accounts was immensely popular in his little town of Czinkota, in Hungary, where he was something of a local bon vivant, a party-going, garrulous, free-spender whose good looks and sheer charm caught the eye of any number of eligible ladies, who often wondered at the strangeness of such a kindly, generous, and handsome man remaining, all to himself, in a roomy house with not but an elderly housekeeper. It must have seemed to them a regrettable waste of good husbandly material. Indeed, it was not long before Bela began to see the situation in quite the same light. Unbeknownst to his fellow townsfolk, he busily began placing adds in a number of prominent newspapers, seeking the companionship of young ladies as lonely as himself, ladies seekeing to meet a prospective partner for courtship.

Locals were quick to notice the steady stream of attractive young ladies that seemed to flock around the Kiss home. It seemed that every time the villagers of Cinkota turned around, Bela would come to town sporting a lovely woman on his arm. Many were quick to point out that the women he was seen with, most often, were only with him for a very short time.

Sometimes merely a single occasion.

Rumors began to spread in the way that they will, but before anything could come of mounting suspicions, the life of Bela Kiss took an unexpected turn. In June of 1914 a young, Slavic nationalist named Gavrilo Princip stepped into a side-street in Sarajevo, raised his pistol, and fired into a car in which were riding the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. The Archduke clutched his breast, fell over on his wife, and gasped out her name one last time. He then plunged headfirst into the bitter maelstrom of death. It was this single incident, performed by the unwitting hand of a fed-up Serbian nationalist , which erupted the smoldering “powder keg” of World War 1.

It was only a scant time later that countries began to align themselves to commence what would become the “Great War,” the “War to End All Wars,” and the first real modern war fought in human history. The grueling hell of trench combat, where soldiers spent interminable, maddening hours dug into the mud and filth, shooting at the enemy from behind protective barricades of sandbags, served only to add an increased fillip of personal misery to the duty of doughboys who may have been away from home for the very first times of their (often) short lives. Trenches quickly filled with dead, wounded, and dying. Rodents became a common nuisance, but that was nothing compared to the onslaught of death that might accompany anyone going “over the top.” Men returned— “Men With Broken Faces”— as little more than pathetic, wounded shadows of their former selves. Missing limbs, legs, and faces, they formed a repellent reminder of the devastation wrought by man in the guise of industrialized killing and international conflict.

(At least, sometimes survivors COULD be revived from the dead. Accidents and injuries, weapons that once would have killed rather than maimed, and explosions that, heretofore, had been unknown anywhere and everywhere on Earth, had been unleashed, but could be survived. But at what cost to the physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being of the individual? Some supposed the lucky ones had been those that were shot, blown to hell from artillery fire, or choked to death on “mustard gas.” One supposes this is why an entire new science of false limbs, false noses, and other false body accoutrements was soon developed. But I digress.)

It was to this great conflagration of slaughter that Bela Kiss found himself called, and being a dutiful son of Hungary, was soon departed from his home, leaving the custodial care of his property in the hands of an elderly female servant (whose later professed ignorance in the face of so much appalling evidence is still a subject of great conjecture). Soon however, as the thick of fighting and the catastrophe of battle began to brew heavy in the Hungarian ranks, it became apparent (at the very least, to the landlord that owned his property), that Kiss was going to be considerably in arrears as to the payment of his rent. What said individual could possibly do about this, under the circumstances, is anyone’s guess, but it is highly unlikely that anyone under the circumstances would have the temerity to evict a man that was away busily fighting at the front lines. But, then, there is no reckoning with the strangeness one could witness in the various shadings of human character.

The landlord became distressed when, upon first entering the premises , he found what appeared to be a few drum-sized metal containers, and not much else. Kiss was still off, presumably killing people on the battlefield (as opposed to his usual habit of snuffing them off of it), and he assumed that the house had been vacated. He was wrong about this, but that didn’t at all stop him from attempting to open the metal container. He managed to poke a small hole in the top, from which exuded a noxious odor that quite nearly bowled him over. His suspicions grew, and upon fetching a local chemist, he soon had his worst suspicions confirmed: the smell was, undeniably, that of rotten flesh. Once the canisters were opened (and to the horror of both men, they found several more hidden in a storage shed), it was discovered that within each was crammed the nude body of a young woman, preserved in alcohol, The women had, apparently, each been strangled. The authorities were alerted immediately, a police inspector, Dr. Nagy, departing immediately for the former Kiss residence. By this time, the housekeeper had finally made her terrified appearance, rushing out and commanding the assembled men to leave her master’s property instantly. Of course, pointing out their finding of the canned young corpses, the men assured her that, at this point, that that was quite beyond their ability to do. At which point she launched into frantic protestations of her innocence, as the assembled investigators began to scour the grounds. In short time, they found additional canisters, each offering up another grisly, nude young woman.

Later, some digging revealed bodies that had been buried in the earth behind the house.

Although accounts vary, the final grisly body count attributed to Bela Kiss has been recorded as anywhere between seventeen and twenty-four. Each victim had been strangled, and, perhaps most horribly, there was evidence of puncture marks on the side of the throat. The only conclusion that could be drawn from this was that Kiss, in his heated, fetishistic passion, had drawn out the blood from his victims, in order to bathe or drink it.

Most probably, he drank it.

The military was alerted quickly, and Kiss was eagerly sought after in the field. Meanwhile, the frantic housemaid was fervently protesting her innocence concerning ANY knowledge of her employer’s homicidal habits. Sensing that, perhaps, she could be primed for more information, Dr. Nagy pressed her emotionally on certain points, but she remained consistent enough in her protestations that he began to believe in her utter ignorance.

One thing that her hysterics did reveal however was her knowledge of a key that led to a secret room, always locked, which she had been instructed never to open under any circumstances. Shades of Bluebeard aside, Dr. Nagy must have thought it singularly odd that, given the long absence of her employer, Mrs. Jakubec had never once decided to simply peep inside, out of even curiosity. Perhaps it just proved how wise she was. Inside, Dr. Nagy found, to his surprise, a room covered completely in dusty old volumes, most of them relating, in some way, to murder, poisoning, criminal detection, or forensic pathology. He further discovered a massive ledger, the chronicle of Kiss’ correspondence with hundreds of different women across Hungary.

Kiss had, apparently, been writing women for years, seeking them out by placing adds in newspapers and classified columns of Budapest papers. When he found, eventually, a prospect that seemed promising, he would romance, wine, dine, defraud, and destroy the young woman utterly. Then, he would drain her corpse, and drink her blood. Lastly, of course, he canned his virginal victims like so much processed meat, capping them off with a lid, and leaving the corpses to ferment in wood alcohol. One supposes that, eventually, he may have hit upon the idea of cannibalism as a way of ridding himself of the growing cemetery he was tending.

One of the most amazing discoveries made by Dr. Nagy was that Kiss had apparently been married. He had courted, and defrauded, a young woman fifteen years his junior, under an assumed name. Apparently, he had an actual fancy for this one, as he went to the considerable trouble and took the risk of meeting her parents. Or perhaps it was only for the sake of securing the dowry, but, at any rate, the parents were supremely satisfied that their daughter had managed to secure such a prosperous, handsome husband. After the young woman returned with him to Cinkota, Kiss decided that she no longer amused him. She was coldly dispatched in a short period of time, and joined the rest of his paramours, a human pickle in a giant metal drum. Amazingly enough, the parents became concerned when, after a considerable amount of time had passed, they had still heard nothing from their newly wedded daughter. In mounting anxiety they traveled to Cinkota to confront Kiss, who did his best job of appearing distraught, explaining that his new bride had run away to America, supposedly to pursue a career on the stage. He even produced a letter to this effect, penned in her unmistakable hand. Dr. Nagy could only suppose under what pretence or threat he had forced her to compose it; possibly, he gave her no explanation at all, save that she was his wife. Then,afterwards, he had simply killed her, now content that he could use this letter as a convenient piece of evidence should he ever be questioned.

The military, which had under the most precarious of circumstances put out a general call to the front to apprehend Infantryman Kiss, finally decided it had located him in a field hospital, where reposed, in critical condition, a soldier named “Bela Kiss,” who answered to the same, general description as Dr. Nagy’s man. Rushing to the field hospital, Nagy and other detectives found themselves in an unenviable situation. To begin with, the man had expired just hours before they reached him, dying from injuries received in combat. Also, he wasn’t the right size. The fact that “Bela Kiss” was a fairly common name in Hungary wasn’t lost on them, either.

Bela Kiss was never apprehended or seen again.

However, he became a kind of murderous “Flying Dutchman,” with Bela Kiss sightings cropping up as frequently in the subsequent years and decades as sightings of Elvis or Bigfoot. He was rumored to be in Romania, France, Great Britain, rumored to have booked passage to the States; some said he was in Hong Kong. It was surrealist Antonin Artaud who gave to Kiss a kind of lasting fame, with his short, experimental play 32 , which replaced the character of Kiss with that of a brilliant, well-loved doctor. The play ends with the discovery of several large canisters. Upon one being opened, the body of a naked woman is found inside. But Bela Kiss walked away into the twilight of infamy, another footnote in the long history of horrors. Like Jack the Ripper, he was never captured. Unlike Jack the Ripper, few people still care.

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The Demon of the Belfry

Theo Durrant was a medical student in old San Francisco, who, likewise, was deeply involved in the activities of his family church, Emmanuel Baptist. He was even the leader of the youth group “Christian Endeavor”, and was a well-known local Scoutmaster. He was, in every sense of the word, an upright, outstanding young man. But, as always, there was a fly in the spiritual ointment that comprised Theo Durrant; a wrinkle in the psychic fabric which comprised the totality of his being.

It began quite innocuously , with Theo (who , besides being an usher and Sunday-school teacher, was also Church Librarian and part-time sexton) was entrusted with a master key to the premises. Theo, whose mind must have ever been crawling with ideas and opportunities to enact some of his less savory fantasies, had, up until that time, never had the opportunity to enjoy the uninterrupted privacy the acts he contemplated required. But there must have been something about the sterile sanctity of his church, the well-scrubbed purity of the female parishioners, that sent his fertile, hot little mind into an erotic no-mans-land of sick imaginings.

The first hint that something was wrong about Theo (the first “warning sign” that, perhaps, the nice, decent, ail-American churchgoing lad was quite possibly mad as a hatter) was also completely, perversely ignored. Theo, one fine Sunday after services, invited a young lady into the library to join him for a short discussion. When the compliant young lady found her way to the reading room, she was horrified as Theo Durrant strode out of the shadows, entirely naked from head to foot. We can only imagine what he might have said at this point, if he said anything at all. However, we do know that the young woman fled from the room in terror, screaming in either horror, embarrassment, or disgust; possibly some combination of all of them. At this point, any rational person would expect that the church pastor (whose name goes, strangely, unrecorded in every account) would have had the temerity to take the young man aside, and explain to him, as gingerly as possible, why it was inappropriate for a full-grown man to expose himself in such a lewd and shameless fashion to an embarrassed young lady, particularly within the confines of a church. (In fact, as things stand today, Theo Durrant would have been immediately jailed for indecent exposure, and quite possible charged with attempted sexual assault. At the very least, he would have been confined to a psychiatric facility for an indeterminate duration of time. But, alas, things were handled in a much more circumspect fashion in that delicate day and age.)

His first murder victim, Blanche Lamont, was a distinctively attractive young out-of-towner, who came to San Francisco to make her way as an actress. Quickly deciding to attend Emmanuel Baptist as her church of choice, she made an immediate impression on young Theo Durrant, who, we may safely assume, was only able to physically be close to women when cutting open their cadavers at the medical college. The two became fleeting, flirting acquaintances.

It was one bright, sunny, otherwise happy day when, having last been seen departing from a street car, Blanch Lamont was sighted making her way to Emmanuel Baptist Church. Although he later claimed he, coincidentally was on the same car, Theo Durrant claimed he never saw her, nor did anyone claim to have seen him ever riding that particular car at that exact time . As to what the young lady was doing going to church at that particular hour, we can only surmise that Theo Durrant must have set up a pre-appointed tryst. At any rate, when she arrived, the baleful, hypnotic strains of church organ music resounded through the old building, as the organist was sitting alone practicing. Luckily for Durrant, the volume of the music, as well as the intense concentration of the musician, drowned out the sounds created by what came next. Durrant, stripped naked as the day he was born, stepped slowly from the closet, giving the young woman time to absorb what must have seemed to him like a brilliant, honest gesture. (Some may take note of the personal symbolism that might be involved in Durrant’s choice of locale. It should not be lost on anyone that he chose to murder his victims in a library [a church library, no less], and that the significance of this might lie in the fact that, as a restrained, perfect young scholar, Durrant spent his days in repressed solitude, pouring over books when he wasn’t busy dissecting cadavers. It may be that this ritualistic stripping of himself in a place of study, in a building devoted wholly to piety and abstinence, may have added an extra fillip of fetishistic pleasure to his madness. Or it may have been purely symbolic. Cynical people will say it meant nothing at all. However, we digress.)

Blanche Lamont with students

Blanche Lamont erupted into the expected fit, but, unlike his first attempt at exposing himself to an unwary woman, Theo Durrant sealed his fate, and the fate of the unfortunate young woman, by pouncing upon her in a frenzy of rage and sexual excitement, and throttling her. He quickly and easily snuffed out her life, letting her fall to the floor as he stood gasping from excitement and exertion above her. He had, mysteriously, completed something in his psyche, fed some inner demon that lurked in the miserable recesses of his unarticulated soul.

He quickly donned his clothing, dragging the corpse behind him into the walk-in closet from which he always emerged, and then proceeded to rape the still warm cadaver. He then did something very strange, but which , in light of later events , was necessary in that it allowed him the time to commit his second murder. He dragged the body behind him, clutching a fistful of her long hair, through a back hallway and up a flight of stairs to a ladder which led to the church belfry. He then climbed the rickety old ladder, trailing the corpse of his victim behind him. The work must have been grueling. He laid the young woman out in a gentle repose, using a stray block of wood as a pillow, and carefully folded the hands across the breasts. He must have considered, at that very moment, how peaceful she looked; as if she was only sleeping.

It was at this moment he began the process of expiating whatever psychic guilt would linger in the mind after committing such a grotesque deed. Or, perhaps, in the depths of his insane mind, there was no guilt, only satisfaction, and a knowledge that he had released a soul into the infinite. After all, she was a good Christian girl.

Making his way downstairs, Durrant himself had the very bad fortune, as he was exiting the building, of encountering the organist, who was just closing up for the evening. The man, upon remarking how terrible Durrant looked, was reassured by the young man that he had simply been working at a gas jet, and accidentally had made himself sick. Unsure whether or not he actually believed that, the organist simply shrugged and left the young man to his own devices, unaware that the sound of his own musical talent being expressed had helped to cover the screams and stifle the evidence of the foul deed that had just been perpetrated.

It was only a scant time later that Blanche Lamont was missed, and a manhunt was called (which, of course, was to no avail, as the corpse was still moldering, undetected, in the belfry of Emmanuel Baptist Church). Ironically, as a local Scoutmaster, it was the handsome, respectable young killer himself, Theo Durrant, who was entrusted to lead his troupe of young cadets through the surrounding hillsides in search of the missing girl. Theo himself had a most interesting theory regarding the missing Miss Lamont: that she had been kidnapped, forcibly addicted to opium, and sold into the burgeoning “white slave” trade. (Despite the sordid nature of his imaginings, this , actually, was not an uncommon occurrence in San Francisco in the late 19th century, as young women were, at times, kidnapped and sold into prostitution, to be used by pimps and hustlers and kept as drug-addicted sexual slaves.)

However, the sheer excitement of the prospect seemed to rivet Durrant as he explained his theory to young friends. Indeed, they could see the macabre joy it afforded him, and some of them must have passed a fleeting thought as to how much Theo Durrant actually knew about kidnapping, sexual slavery, sadism, and Ms. Blanche Lamont. Interestingly, it was some short time later that the grieving parents of Blanche Lamont received, quite by surprise, a package through the mail. In it, the girl’s rings were found, along with the names of the church organist and a Sunday school teacher. Though this was a surprising turn of affairs, the police quickly deduced it was little more than a red herring. In the hindsight of history, we can perhaps see that, in the depths of his distorted soul, Theo Durrant must have wanted to be caught. (This self-destructive “cat and mouse” game with the police is a regular feature of serial murder cases, and one of the most perplexing and diabolical aspects of the personality of these perpetrators.) Likewise, one should note the careless sloppiness with which Durrant committed these crimes, almost as if he were ambivalent about whether or not he should ever be detected as the guilty party. (Is this, in effect, the way such individuals [who are incapable of feeling guilt in any conventional sense] attempt to expiate the deeper, internal feeling of remorse that they understand as a sort of subconscious drive to acquit themselves of the responsibility for their actions?)

Minnie Williams

At any rate, it was from this idle, gross gossip, this compulsive need for Durrant to hint at a far more horrifying fate for his victim than anyone else imagined, that gained him his only known sexual love affair. Not much will ever be known of Minnie Williams, but one thing was for certain: she was a darn sight more liberated than most other women of her generation. What other folks perceived as a slightly sordid undercurrent in Durrant’s personality, she perceived as the hint of an awesome sexual prowess and a deviant appetite. It was not long before they were engaging in sexual trysts in the church library. Apparently, this transpired several times, but the final assignation proved deadly. It was directly after most folks had filed out from Sunday services, when Minnie Williams and Theo Durrant slipped for the last time into the church library, and began to make love. Whatever feral , barbaric thing had been crawling around the depths of the hideous mind of Theo Durrant suddenly reared upward from the black chasm of his being. In a fit of sexual frenzy , he thrust his hands around the neck of Minnie Williams, choking the life from her as she thrashed wildly around the room.

She was damn hard to kill.

He managed to rip her dress off, thrusting the material of it down her throat. He then pulled a surgical knife from his trousers and slashed her neck and wrists, finally rendering her desolation complete. However, the scene of the crime was a picture of total havoc. He pulled the bloody body into the large closet, fell on top of it, and ravished the corpse. He then walked quietly out the front door of the church, into the bright daylight, as if the whole world was his oyster. It was only the next day that several women discovered the scene of horror in the library, where splashes of dried blood and overturned furniture lent mute testimony to the scene of violence that had been perpetrated on the premises only the previous day. Moments later, they found the ravaged corpse of Minnie Williams where Theo Durant had carelessly left it.

A general panic ensued among the women who, fearing the culprit might still be hiding on the premises, rushed out to alert the authorities. It was only a short time later that police, leading the way, returned to the church to confront a scene of appalling homicide. One unnamed officer, upon a hunch, decided that he would ascend the rickety stairs to the belfry, and, upon doing so, discovered much what he had expected: a second body, “as white as marble,” laid out as if in blissful repose, with the head resting upon a block of wood. It was immediately discernible, to all involved, that young Theo Durrant was the most likely culprit, as he was the only fellow with access to the building after hours. Theo first staunchly protested his innocence.

Theo Durrant in prison

A quick trial followed, resulting in a sentence of death by hanging. Three years of appeals transpired before the sentence was finally carried out. Curiously, Theo Durrant walked to the gallows in an amazingly restrained manner, only imploring the executioner to, “Don’t put that rope on me, my boy, until I’ve talked.” The hangman was having none of it, and William Henry Theodore Durrant fell through the trap door and into eternity, on January 7th, 1898. One final grotesque anecdote revolves around the claiming of their son’s body by Theo’s rather cold and obnoxious parents.

As the body was brought into the waiting room after the execution, a warder at the prison asked them if they would like a cup of tea. Mrs. Durrant, indicating that that would be quite nice, was pleasantly surprised to note that the tray that was wheeled in not only contained a kettle and cups, but the remains of a sumptuous roast and some plates. Mrs. Durrant and her husband sat themselves down and began to feast, stopping only to pause as the body of Theo, his face swollen black and his tongue bit nearly in two, was brought in and transferred from a gurney to a pine box. Mrs. Durrant looked at the corpse of her son, chewed reflectively, and continued to finish her impromptu meal alongside her husband. After all, she would later claim, it never helps to grieve on an empty stomach. Theo Durrant was cremated.

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Dr. H.H. Holmes

“In conclusion, I wish to say that I am but a very ordinary man … and to have planned and executed the stupendous amount of wrongdoing that has been attributed to me would have been wholly beyond my power.“–Dr. H.H. Holmes

The career of Herman Webster Mudgett, better known during his lifetime by the alias H.H. Holmes, is one that defies credulity and, were it not truth, would be labeled the basest example of literary invention. The very details of the case itself: bigamy, fraud, theft, medical malpractice, and the construction of a huge, rambling “murder castle” during the World’s Fair of 1893, render the full range of Holmes’ diabolical capability something to truly shudder at. The early years of his life, spent as an over intelligent, sulky boy under the tutelage of his stern, loveless parents, could hardly have provided a better background to the sordid development of a young man that would, in time, be regarded as America’s first “serial killer”.

There was, admittedly, something always “wrong” about young Mudgett: he was known to be a strange, brooding, maladaptive little tyro, whose chief interests, beside torturing small pets to death and dissecting them, seemed to be dominating his mentally slow peers and abusing them as a game of sport (or at the very least, taking unfair advantage of them). This early activity as a scoundrel laid the groundwork for the rest of his life, for he would, within the space of a few years, graduate to acts of forgery, fraud, and insurance scam.

Some of his earliest humbuggery revolved around the acquisition of phony patents for the sale of machines, the function of which, typically, could not be credited with the claims made against them. Also, it is reported that snake-oil and phony nostrums were not altogether out of his league, and must have appealed to the pretensions of a young man that would graduate from medical college a legitimate doctor.

He was not, for long, to remain one.

Medical school, undertaken right before his several bigamous marriages got underway, must have opened up a new facet of his distorted psyche, allowing him to harden the inner contempt he felt for the rest of his fellow creatures . Here, in the darkened sanctity of the dissection chamber, he could autopsy cadavers at his leisure, coldly cutting free the skin and inner organs of the deceased, fondling them in wonder, amazed at the utilitarian nature of each and every fibrous molecule of the body. It was here, (indeed, it must have been here), while he was surrounded at the university morgue by the decayed remnants of life, that he first began to view the world through the pathological prism of the psychopathic killer, as well as that of the habitual conman.

(One wonders, as he immersed himself in the delicate and fragile workings of the body, if he ever evidenced any more than a passing recognition of the humanity that the decaying specimens had once represented. If so, it must have been a passing fancy, because, in future, he would grow to embrace the world of murder for profit with a zeal amounting to vengeance.)

Holmes’ greatest contribution to the world of crime, and his sole contribution to the history of mass murder, was a three-story ramshackle building erected in Chicago, in 1893, to serve as a hotel, primarily for naive young women who came to town for the World’s Columbia Exposition. It was a truly historic event in the life of old Chicago, and brought upwards of thirty million people into the Windy City, swamping local authorities in a deluge of petty crime and graft and ensuring that H.H. Holmes would have a smorgasbord of grim pickings from which to hone his deadly twilight trade.

Holmes had first hit upon the idea when, after coming to Chicago, he secured employment as a pharmacist, managing to steal away a small business from Mrs. E.S. Holten, who became enamored of Holmes’ good looks and glib tongue. Of course, it was not long before Mrs. Holten and her more cautious daughter suddenly “disappeared to settle financial matters in another part of the country,” and, predictably, were never seen again. We can well imagine what their fate must have been, for Holmes quickly took over sole proprietorship of the pharmacy at 63l and South Wallace, and immediately set his eyes on larger scams than pushing bottles of “Miracle Elixir” (these were largely little more than watered-down booze). There was a space across the road that caught the apple of his eye, a place more than suitable to carry out the sort of “death factory” endeavor that was slowly taking shape in his mind. In short order, he began to line up a capital series of crimes and swindles to acquire the money; to break the dirt, lay the foundation, and begin the arduous task of building what would become, to modern crime historians, the “Holmes Murder Castle.”

To complete this task, Holmes found it necessary to employ the services of three separate building crews, all of whom eventually found themselves swindled by the financial machinations of the devious Holmes. That three separate construction crews were employed served to mask the real purpose behind many of the odd architectural features of the three-story, block-long building. Why, for instance, gas pipes were required to reach into each separate guest room; why the walls of certain rooms were lined with asbestos; why one room was, essentially, simply a huge vault-like prison. Accompanying the oddities was the presence of a remarkable setup in the basement, which included a mammoth crematory, pits of quicklime in the concrete floor, a massive dissecting table, and a veritable cornucopia of macabre surgical instruments and poisonous chemicals; all ready to effect, for Dr. “Harry Howard Holmes” the supreme, casual taking of a large swath of human life, for pleasure and profit.

His first victims were culled from the ranks of pretty young women who found themselves hopeful for secretarial work. Unfortunately for them, they hit upon the demented Holmes as a possible employer. His typical modus operandi involved immediate sexual advances on the prospective employee, which resulted, much of the time, in the unfortunate young women becoming enthralled with the tall, dashing rake hell. Seducing his prey, offering them the hopes of a prospective marriage after professions of instantaneous “love at first sight,” Holmes managed to quicken the pulse of a seemingly endless succession of very naive young women.

After spending the night using his victims, he would creep from bed, and casually walk to his office to retrieve chlorophyll. After sufficiently rendering the young woman unconscious, Holmes would then throw the body into a disused elevator shaft. Then, placing a single pane of glass over the doorway, and forthwith attaching a gas-pumping hose into a single hole, he could at his leisure, watch his awakening mistress suddenly struggle in panic, then finally succumb to the asphyxiating effects of the gas. In a few moments, after ventilation had thus assured the gas would be no threat to Holmes himself, he could lasso the girl’s neck, drag her upward, and dispose of her by means of a greased chute to his basement morgue. He would proceed to dismember, cremate, dispose of the remains in quicklime, and steal away to his private “laboratory” on the third floor, to fondle and “experiment” on whatever parts of the corpse interested him most. And the payoff in this macabre routine? Besides the sick gratification in wanton murder, it became known, later, that Holmes had coerced a number of the young women to sign over their savings and insurance to him.

The sun began to set on Holmes just a short while later, with the arrival of a young lady from Texas named Minnie Williams, Minnie was from a wealthy family, but had decided to try Chicago out in the hopes of becoming a shining light of the American stage. When applying for room and board, she chanced, unfortunately, upon the Murder Castle and its monstrous proprietor.

It was only a short time later that Holmes convinced her that they should be married.

He also, predictably, encouraged her to sign over all her worldly possessions and holdings to him. For once , a woman had the temerity to say no to Holmes. He did convince her, however, to contact her sister Nannie in Fort Worth, and to have her come and visit her in Chicago. At first, the strange threesome had a high time on Holmes’ ill-gotten gains, going on shopping sprees and dining in the finest restaurants. But all was not to remain wine and roses, for it was only a short time later that Minnie and Nannie ran into an old mutual acquaintance who, when told that Minnie was engaged to a “Doctor Harry H. Holmes”, was astounded to note that she herself had a friend in Wilmette who was married to a Dr. Harry Holmes!

Minnie confronted Holmes, remembering that, indeed, he had bragged at owning property in Wilmette, and it was not long before she put two and two together. The only witness to the ensuing debacle was the building janitor, who despite being locked out of Holmes’ private world of torture and murder, saw and heard enough to arouse in himself mighty suspicions concerning the strange nature of his employer’s activities. Holmes was married to a woman in Wilmette, as he was married to a woman in Indiana, and another woman in Philadelphia, that he eventually murdered. Of course, Nannie and Minnie Williams disappeared shortly after, and so did Holmes, but not before he had set fire to his own sprawling hotel in an attempt to collect on the insurance money.

This did not go as planned, however, much to Holmes’ detriment; curious policeman demanded to be allowed to first investigate the ruins of the boarded-up hotel, and Holmes, noticeably alarmed, immediately balked. When he finally relented, promising to return to the police station later (after having “attended to business affairs”), he simply fled, first heading to Texas to try once again to lay claim to Minnie Williams’ estate.

He was rebuffed by Texas authorities, who demanded to know the cause of Mrs. Williams’ death, and who were highly dubious of honoring such a claim minus the findings of a legitimate inquest. Holmes’ luck was running out.

His capacity to act intelligently wasn’t at it’s peak, either.

In Texas, in a panic to flee the increasing suspicions of the authorities (whom he had incited in the first place with his abrupt appearance as the “husband” of Minnie Williams), he committed an egregious blunder, one that was eventually to lead him straight to the waiting gallows. He stole a horse in Texas (a state that, at the time, often strung horse thieves by their necks until dead), fled Texas to Missouri, and was apprehended in St. Louis on an unrelated crime. He was sent to jail awaiting trial, and made the acquaintance, while there, of the notorious train robber Marion Hedgepeth. Holmes Inquired to his new found friend about securing the services of a crooked lawyer, for which Mr. Hedgepeth was offered a sum of five hundred dollars. Overjoyed, Hedgepeth wrote a letter to his own lawyer, Jeptha D. Howe, who in short order arranged bail for Holmes (who gave the St. Louis authorities a false name), and awaited his next set of instructions.

A Benjamin Pitezel, a confederate of Holmes who was assistant on many of his private financial scams, had agreed to go to Philadelphia, under the pretence of opening a patent office, and shortly after, was found dead on his back porch, with a badly burned face. The circumstances of his death were such that the coroner became immediately suspicious at the way the scene had been carefully setup to make it seem as if Pitezel had been killed while lighting his pipe too close to a bottle of flammable chemical. (Obviously, the very notion of that as a plausible means of death, was exceedingly peculiar.)

It only took a proper examination of the corpse to ascertain that Pitezel had been poisoned. However, other than the suggestion that the luckless man had committed suicide, the coroner could find no evidence of actual crime, and so was forced to rule the death an accident. At the same time as this was occurring, lawyer Jeptha D. Howe came forward in Philadelphia, ostensibly representing the widow of the dead man. The insurance company, rightfully mindful of fraud, pursued another angle— they wrote to the only known client of the Pitezel Patent Office: Dr. Harry Howard Holmes, of Chicago. It did not take Holmes long to make his way to Philadelphia with one of Pitezel’s young children in tow, to identify the body and claim the insurance money. Mrs. Pitezel herself was privy to the scam, and had been assured that a dead body would be obtained to substitute for her husband. Then the money would be collected, divided evenly, and all would live happily ever after. Alas, her illusions were to be short lived. Holmes collected the money, and took fourteen-year-old Ben Pitezel with him. It was at this point that Hedgepeth, realizing that he had, essentially, been conned by Holmes, confessed to the police all that he knew concerning the man with whom he’d made the five hundred dollar deal. A detective named Frank Geyer, fascinated with the tangled doings of the nefarious “H.H. Holmes,” began to rapidly trail the man backward, to his state of origin, where he discovered not only that the name H.H. Holmes was simply an alias for Herman Mudgett, but that the sinister man’s parents still resided in the family house; they thought very well of their handsome son, who had bamboozled them for years with far-fetched tales of making his living as an “inventor.” It was from the Mudgett family that he finally tracked Holmes to Boston, where he was with Benjamin Pitezel’s wife, but with none of his children. In short order they were both arrested, and Geyer began to sweat a stoic Holmes through relentless interrogation. Geyer gave Holmes a choice of either returning to Philadelphia with him, or being sent back to Texas to hang for horse thievery. Holmes, predictably chose the former, and when once comfortably stationed in his new, private cell, began to prevaricate with gay abandon.

He at first insisted that Pitezel was in South America, and that the body the police had found was simply a cadaver stolen from a morgue, a nod at his old days of “body switcher” insurance scams. When Geyer found that unlikely, he then claimed that Pitezel had become despondent, killed himself, and that Holmes had burned the remains in an attempt to make it look like an accident and collect the insurance. One great matter distressing Geyer was the fate of the missing Pitezel children, whom Holmes had taken virtually hostage, and whom it was known had been separated and dragged across country on Holmes’ bizarre itinerary.

Geyer first tracked down, after much arduous legwork, a house in Indianapolis that Holmes had rented under a fictitious name.

It was here, in an old stove, that young Howard Pitezel had been disposed of cruelly, after he had outlived his usefulness to Holmes. All that remained were ashes, a partial skull, and a few bits of bone. It was in Toronto, though, were Holmes had taken the two young Pitezel twins, that Geyer discovered what had been their unhappy fate: the Pitezel children had been locked inside a great steamer trunk by the diabolical Holmes, who had then attached a hose to the gas jet, asphyxiating the little twins, and thus ridding himself of the inconvenience of their care. When confronted with this discovery, Holmes replied with faux outrage, exclaiming, “It was a foul deed! What scoundrel did it?”

By the time it all, finally, erupted into national news, Holmes (or rather Mudgett) had fast become the most despised murderer in American history up until that point. A score of penny dreadful pulp publications followed, including the terribly titled book Sold to Satan, Holmes!: A Poor Wife’s Sad Story, which became an instant, immediate success. (It was largely, however, a piece of utter fiction.) The Holmes-Pitezel story, and the resultant revelations concerning the macabre “Murder Castle”, catapulted Herman Webster Mudgett into a strange sort of celebrity the likes of which America had not yet known: The Celebrity Psychopath. Nearly eighty years before Charles Manson first entered world consciousness as a particularly photogenic rogue, Dr. “H.H. Holmes” would become the first sordid tabloid sensation. Some must have wondered what had become of society.

Holmes, not to be outdone, managed to pen his own volume, a largely self-exculpatory piece replete with dissembling, half-truths, and outright balderdash. His more honest attempt at biography came shortly after his conviction, when he called a press conference in his cell and began confessing to a mind-boggling panorama of felonies and murders. Meanwhile, Detective Geyer and his men had proceeded to the condemned remains of Holmes’ former “Castle” where, descending to the basement, they began to excavate in the reeking damp. Sure enough, in short order, they found what amounted to the fragmented, skeletal remains of many, many victims. The sheer, staggering magnitude of Holmes’ crimes paled the hardened policemen. Holmes confessed, at the end of his life to having become “a moral idiot.” Indeed, it was only after being confronted with the overwhelming evidence of his guilt that the futility of lying gave way to the utter joy he quite clearly exhibited in recounting his grave misdeeds for various reporters and alienists. They, in turn , were only too delighted to have the inside scoop of the foulest murderer any of them had ever encountered in their careers. And, they were genuinely dismayed when Holmes’ confessions were cut short by his appointment with the hangman.

He had only managed to confess as far as his 27th victim.

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