America somehow has forgotten the 'Monster of 63rd Street'A century ago, the thought that America would forget the "Monster of 63rd Street" was preposterous. Dr. H.H. Holmes' was a swindler, bigamist, horse thief and pharmacist - not to mention sadistic killer - who died at the end of a hangman's noose in Philadelphia. Newspaper readers from coast to coast knew of his 100 - room Frankenstein - fantasy - come - true castle in Chicago, where authorities believe hundreds may have died amid a maze of trapdoors and trick hallways. A greedy man, Dr. Holmes considered the "Evil One" his constant companion, and one biographer baptized him the "greatest criminal the police have ever handled."
Yet Dr. Holmes has disappeared from the American consciousness while another diabolical killer - Jack the Ripper, who gutted five London prostitutes just eight years earlier - remains known even to children. "Part of the Ripper's appeal, no doubt, derives from the mystery of his identity, which continues to tantalize armchair detectives," says professor Harold Schechter of Queens College, author of the biography "Depraved."
"But the answer to Holmes' current obscurity, I believe, also lies in the nature of his crimes." The Ripper was a sexual sadist, a stalker who more directly reflects the anxieties of our age, according to Mr. Schechter. Dr. Holmes' was a product of "The Gilded Age," a late 19th-century period of feverish enterprise and gaudy excess - and Chicago was its nucleus. "He was always seeking to profit from his victims - turn them into cold cash in one way or another,"Mr. Schechter says." Getting in the way of Holmes' and his lust for wealth wasn't a good idea."
Dr. Holmes' was hanged for one murder in Philadelphia, but he might have committed hundreds more in Chicago. Authorities suspected as many as 50 visitors to the World's Fair in 1893 made a tragic choice of lodging and stayed at Dr. Holmes' boardinghouse, later dubbed Nightmare Castle and The Castle of Horror. In addition, as many as 100 young, female stenographers who answered Dr. Holmes' continual string of newspaper ads disappeared forever after they entered the three-story labyrinth.
The mansion was filled with doors that opened to brick walls, stairways to nowhere, an elevator without a shaft and a shaft without an elevator. There was an airtight and soundproof vault, torture chambers, dissecting tables, a crematorium, chemical vats, quicklime pits and human-sized greased chutes leading from the living quarters to the cellar. The bedrooms had peepholes and were equipped with asphyxiating gas pipes connected to a control panel in Dr. Holmes' closet. Dr. Holmes' also had an "elasticity determinator," a curious contraption he claimed could stretch experimental subjects to twice their normal length and produce a race of giants. Those who viewed it - and lived - said it appeared to be a medieval torture rack. Exactly why this monstrous mansion was built is a mystery trapped inside its architect's psychopathic mind. Unfortunately for historians, much of the knowledge about the man comes from scores of pulp, true-crime books and from Dr. Holmes' own story published from prison in 1895.
"Like the man-eating tigers of the tropical jungle, whose appetites for blood have once been aroused, I roamed about this world seeking whom I could destroy," Dr. Holmes' wrote.
Dr. Holmes' was born Herman Webster Mudgett on May 16, 1860, in the rural New Hampshire hamlet of Gilmanton. "I was born with the devil in me," he wrote. "I couldn't help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing. And I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world. He has been with me ever since." He grew up in a household with an abusive father and a pious, submissive mother, developing a penchant early on for killing and maiming stray animals. He finished high school at 16, got married at 18 and finished medical school at the University of Michigan when he was 24.
In 1886, Dr. Holmes' moved to the well - to - do Chicago suburb of Englewood, Ill., and took a pharmacist's job at Dr. E.S. Holton's Drugstore. Dr. Holmes' purchased the shop and began constructing his castle across the street. The next year, he wed Myrta Z. Belknap without bothering to divorce his first wife, Clara Lovering. Pregnant, Ms. Belknap left him within a year, moving back in with her parents. He didn't divorce her either and got married again in 1894 to Georgiana Yoke. His charm and good looks wooed countless women - and enhanced his talent as a get-rich-quick schemer.
Dr. Holmes' once tapped into a city water line in his cellar and flavored the water with vanilla, selling it for 5 cents a glass as an elixir called Linden Grove Mineral Water. He was caught but not charged. Another time, he purchased a huge safe on credit, then moved it into his castle. Dr. Holmes' constructed a room around it with only a tiny exit. When the creditors came to haul it away, they couldn't get it out. Dr. Holmes' supplied countless cadavers to medical schools, selling them for $25 to $50 whenever he needed quick cash. He also dreamed up the insurance swindle that would become his undoing. Dr. Holmes' took out a $10,000 life insurance policy on a friend, Benjamin F. Pitezel. Their plan was to fake Mr. Pitezel's demise, substitute a body and then collect the money. Instead, Dr. Holmes burned his pal alive in Philadelphia so he would not have to split the take. The bloodshed only halted with a tip and the arduous laborings of an intrepid Philadelphia police detective.
Jailed briefly in Missouri, Dr. Holmes' shared a cell with the infamous train robber Marion C. Hedgepeth, "The Handsome Bandit." Perhaps wanting to brag about his own criminal prowess, Dr. Holmes told Mr. Hedgepeth about the Pitezel scam. Mr. Hedgepeth squealed.
Dr. Holmes' was arrested in Boston in 1894 and extradited to Philadelphia for Mr. Pitezel's murder. It was then that Detective Frank P. Geyer began a futile search for three of Mr. Pitezel's missing children. The bodies of Alice and Nellie Pitezel were found in a cellar in Toronto and Howard Pitezel's remains were found near Indianapolis. The Pitezel girls had been stuffed in a trunk and gassed; Howard was poisoned, burned and then dismembered and buried.
Dr. Holmes' pleaded not guilty to killing their father and his trial began on Oct. 28, 1895 with Dr. Holmes firing his lawyers and questioning the prospective jurors himself. He was convicted of first-degree murder on Nov. 4th. After he was convicted of killing his accomplice in the "trial of the century," Dr. Holmes confessed to 26 other murders. He later recanted and several people he said were dismembered, burned and bludgeoned turned up alive and whole. "The confession is a mixture of truth and falsehood. Holmes never could help lying," said George Graham, Philadelphia's district attorney at the time.
Dr. Holmes was executed in a gala public event at Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896. Witnesses said he maintained his cool to the very end, even telling the executioner not to rush. "Take your time. You know I am in no hurry," he said. It took Dr. Holmes more than 15 minutes to die. Afraid scientists might dig up his corpse to study his brain, Dr. Holmes had left specific instructions for his burial. His body was laid in a pine box and the box was then filled with cement. The coffin was buried 10 feet deep in a suburban Philadelphia cemetery, then covered with another thick layer of cement. Upon his death, the New York Times reflected, "It takes a very convinced opponent of capital punishment to maintain that any better disposition could have been made of the wretch Holmes."
