Depraved

Prologue

Among the human predators that exist in every period of history, a few become legends. From Gilles de Rais (the original Bluebeard) to Jack the Ripper to Ted Bundy, these beings assume the status of myth. That status derives partly from the hideous nature of their crimes, which seem less like the product of madness than the handiwork of some supernatural horror—the doings of demons or ghouls.

But their mythic dimension stems from another source, too. These individuals fascinate because they seem to symbolize the darkest impulses of their times—aristocratic depravity, the diseased sexuality spawned by Victorian taboos, the sociopathic appetites of our own culture of narcissism. As much as any hero or celebrity, such monsters personify their day. In his book Representative Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson argues that the divine essence incarnates itself in remarkable figures—Plato, Shakespeare, Napoleon.

The deeds of creatures like de Rais, the Ripper, Bundy, and others suggest that primordial evil does, too.

*  *  *

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a fiend roamed through America.

His career coincided with a remarkable time in the life of our nation—with that era of feverish enterprise and gaudy excess that Mark Twain dubbed The Gilded Age. Titanic energies were afoot in the land. It was a period of sweeping social change, when our country was burgeoning into an industrial and commercial giant, and American technological wizardry—Bell’s telephone, Edison’s lightbulb, Ford’s horseless carriage—was altering the very nature of modern life.

Most of all, it was an age when the almighty dollar held sway as never before and a mania for money-getting (in Mark Twain’s words) gripped the soul of America. In place of the military idols of the Civil War, society now worshiped a new breed of hero—the self-made millionaire, the captain of industry, the financial tycoon. P. T. Barnum publicized The Rules for Success, Andrew Carnegie preached The Gospel of Wealth, and Horatio Alger inspired the youth of America with his rags-to-riches dreams.

Hungry for their share of that dream, enormous tides of humanity swept into the cities, swelling their populations to unprecedented size. The United States, formerly a country of small towns, villages, and farms, became the land of the metropolis—New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit. But of all the sprawling cities, none epitomized the spirit of the age—the expansive growth, raw energy, and driving ambition—more completely than Chicago, the gem of the prairie, the most American of American cities, as one awestruck visitor described it.

Reduced to ashes by the great fire of 1871, Chicago soared back to life like a phoenix, becoming the world’s first skyscraper city in 1885 and passing the million mark in population five years later. Booming with vigor, heady with pride, flush with opportunity—Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads, and Freight Handler to the Nation—Chicago served as a colossal magnet, drawing newcomers by the thousands.

Pouring out of the countryside in quest of a brighter life, these hopefuls were brimming with spunk and ambition. How shall one hymn, let alone suggest, a city as great as this in spirit? rhapsodized Theodore Dreiser, himself one of the legion of life-hungry dreamers who swarmed to Chicago. The American of this time, native, for the most part, of endless backwoods communities, was ignorant and gauche. But how ambitious and courageous! Such bumptiousness! Such assurance!

And there was another quality, too, that these migrant throngs possessed. They were full of innocence. Fresh from the provinces, they knew little of the corruptions and perils of the big city, of its dark and brutal underside.

For along with the hardworking thousands, the city attracted a very different breed of dweller—creatures lured to the metropolis not by its sparkling promise but by its cloaking shadows, not by the availability of work but by the abundance of prey, not by a hunger for success but by the smell of blood.

*  *  *

For a man of monstrous appetites, Chicago was a land of plenty. It is no wonder, then, that the city became home to the most heinous criminal of the age. Having drifted westward from his birthplace in New England, he arrived in the metropolis in 1886 and, finding it ideal for his purposes, settled in its outskirts.

To all outward appearances, he was a quintessential man of his day, possessed of the prodigious energies characteristic of that bustling era. Doctor, druggist, inventor, get-rich-quick schemer, he consecrated himself to the acquisition of wealth.

But greed was not what drove him. All the wealth of J. P. Morgan could never have gratified his darkest compulsions.

In a booming suburb of Chicago, he erected his stronghold, a place as imposing in its way as Marshall Field’s dazzling emporium or the gleaming domes and spires of the Chicago World’s Fair—the Great White City that would arise on the shores of Lake Michigan within a few years of the monster’s arrival. Massively built and bristling with battlements and turrets, the structure served as both business place and residence, though its appearance made it seem more like a medieval fortress. Appropriately, it came to be known as the Castle.

To the neighborhood residents, the Castle was a source of pride, a symbol of the prominence and prosperity of their thriving suburb. Those who were enticed inside, however, and who glimpsed the Castle’s darkest secrets acquired a very different impression. But none of them lived to reveal what lay behind the splendid facade.

The discrepancy between its outward appearance and inner reality mirrored the nature of the owner himself. But in this sense, too, the lord of the Castle was a representative man of his day. After all, in characterizing his time not as a golden but as a gilded age, Mark Twain had meant to emphasize its specious quality.

Of course, Mark Twain could never have imagined a place like the Castle. Theodore Dreiser couldn’t have either, in spite of his deep understanding of the city’s sordid underside. It would have taken a writer with a far different sort of imagination to conceive of such a place. It would have taken Edgar Allan Poe.

When investigators finally broke into the Castle, they were stunned at what they found—a Gothic labyrinth of trapdoors, secret passageways, soundproof vaults, and torture chambers. And then there were the greased chutes—large enough to accommodate a human body—that led down from the living quarters to a cellar equipped with acid vats, a crematorium, a dissecting table, and cases full of gleaming surgical tools.

As the true character of the Castle’s owner came to light, the public struggled to make sense of him. Some saw in him the malignant consequences of Gilded Age rapacity, others diagnosed him as a case of moral degeneracy, while there were those who spoke in terms of satanic possession. Unacquainted as yet with the language of sociopathology, the American public could only characterize him in the terminology of the day—archfiend, monster, demon. They did not know how else to describe him, since the correct label hadn’t yet been invented.

In appearance, manner, and enterprise, he was an epitome of his age. But in respect to his psychopathology, he was very much a man of our own. And for that reason, he is of some historic significance.

An early edition of The Guinness Book of World Records lists him as the most prolific murderer known in recent criminal history. In the era of Henry Lee Lucas and John Wayne Gacy, that record has long since been broken. But he holds another distinction that time can never erase.

His name was Herman Mudgett, though the world knew him as H. H. Holmes—and he was America’s first serial killer.

Part 1

The Castle

1

Men said at vespers: All is well!

In one wild night the city fell;

Fell shrines of prayer and marts of grain

Before the fiery hurricane.

On threescore spires had sunset shone,

Where ghastly sunrise looked on none.

Men clasped each other’s hands and said:

The City of the West is dead!

—John Greenleaf Whittier, Chicago

Legend lays the blame for the disaster on Mrs. Patrick O’Leary’s cow, though the likelier suspects were a crew of young hooligans—neighborhood boys sneaking a smoke in the hayloft of the O’Leary’s ramshackle barn at 137 De Koven Street on Chicago’s West Side. There were other explanations, too. Moralizing on the meaning of the catastrophe, the Reverend Granville Moody declared that it was clearly the work of a vengeful Lord, outraged at a citizenry that permitted saloons to do business on the Sabbath.

Whatever the cause, accident or divine retribution, the conflagration—which began early on the evening of Sunday, October 8, 1871—laid waste to the city in just over twenty-four hours. The West Side went first. Glancing out his bedroom window, a neighbor saw the flames rising from the O’Learys’ barn and made a beeline for the nearest firebox. But for reasons unknown, his alarm never registered. A full hour passed before a lookout spotted the glow from his post atop the Cook County Courthouse—and even more time was lost when he alerted the wrong engine company after misjudging the fire’s location.

The firemen who responded to his call were an exhausted crew, worn down from a battle with a three-alarm blaze that had raged just the evening before. By the time they arrived at the O’Leary place, the fire was racing northward through the neighborhood, a working-class warren of shanties, sheds, stables, and cottages. At ten P.M., when the flames ignited the wooden steeple of St. Paul’s Church at Clinton and Mather, the conflagration was officially out of control.

Any hopes that the Chicago River would check the fire’s progress were dashed just before midnight when the flames leapt the water, propelled by a parched, gale-force wind, as fierce as a blast from Vulcan’s bellows. The Parmalee Stage and Omnibus Company building—a brand-new, block-long, three-story structure—was instantly engulfed by a sweeping ocean of flame (in the words of one eyewitness).

For all its claims to grandeur, Chicago was, in fact, a tinderbox city. Almost two-thirds of its sixty-five thousand buildings were constructed completely of wood, and even its most imposing structures were generally wooden buildings with flimsy brick or fake-marble facades. Its slum districts were crammed with wooden tenements, while its wealthy homes featured wood floors, wood window frames, and wood roofs, with tidy wood fences ringing the grounds. Major downtown thoroughfares were paved with pinewood blocks, and over 650 miles of its sidewalks consisted of raised wooden slats. Wooden ships lay anchored in the Chicago River, which was spanned by wooden bridges.

There were some in Chicago who—decrying it as a city of everlasting pine, shingles, shams, and veneers—had warned of the potential peril. The situation was made even more hazardous by the worst drought in recent memory. Since the third of July, less than three inches of rain had fallen on Chicago—about a quarter of the usual amount. The parched weather and omnipresent wood made for an explosive combination.

When midnight came and the fire swept eastward into the downtown business district, the result was catastrophic.

One by one, the proudest buildings of the city fell—the Palmer House and the Grand Pacific Hotel, McVicker’s Theater and Crosby’s Opera House, Field and Lieter’s dazzling emporium and the supposedly fireproof stone building of the Chicago Tribune. Everywhere, wrote one reporter describing the calamitous scene, dust, smoke, flame, heat, thunder of falling walls, crackle of fire, hissing of water, panting of engines, shouts, braying of trumpets, wind, tumult, and uproar. By the time the nightmare ended, every hotel, theater, newspaper office, factory, store, public building, and bank in the business district was gone—reduced to ashes or a blackened shell.

The most devastating loss of all, however, was the destruction of the million-dollar Courthouse, the city’s showpiece, where Abraham Lincoln’s body had lain in state. Its five-ton bell had rung for countless civic ceremonies and tolled the warning when the conflagration began. At two-fifteen A.M., with the cupola blazing, the great bell crashed into the basement, and its thunderous fall seemed to sound the knell for the city itself.

By then, the flames had already raced across the State Street Bridge and gained a foothold in the North Side, the most prosperous residential district in the city, home to the stately mansions of Chicago’s elite—the McCormicks, Trees, Kinzies, Arnolds, Rumseys, and Ogdens. Long before sunrise, their splendid homes lay in smoldering ruins. Also consumed was the neoclassic building of the Chicago Historical Society, which housed, among other treasures, President Lincoln’s walking stick and the original draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Pandemonium reigned. With tidal waves of flame bearing down on them, frenzied hordes—at least 75,000 of the city’s 335,000 residents—took to the streets in desperate flight. The situation was made even more nightmarish by the utter breakdown of social order, as packs of thieves and hoodlums rampaged through the city, looting homes, office buildings, and stores, and preying on the panic-stricken citizenry.

A desperate population turned to Allan Pinkerton and a special force of men from his famous detective agency to combat this rampant lawlessness. But neither Pinkerton’s Preventive Police nor the U.S. Army troops brought in under the command of Gen. Philip Sheridan could do much to stop the looting.

Sheridan had more success fighting the fire itself. Under his direction, several blocks of houses were blown up with gunpowder, halting the spread of the conflagration on the South Side.

It wasn’t until late Monday, however, that the tide finally turned, thanks to a sudden shift in the weather that seemed, to the beleaguered residents, like an act of Providence. At around eleven that night, the wind died down and a cold drizzle began to fall. By early Tuesday, the rain was pouring steadily, dowsing the last of the flames.

The scenes of devastation that greeted the survivors when sunrise came were almost too vast to comprehend. The vital hub of their metropolis had been transformed into a charred and smoking wasteland. In an area roughly one mile wide and four miles long, over seventeen thousand buildings had been obliterated entirely or reduced to charred walls and rubble.

The incineration of the downtown section was so complete that (as one historian has recorded) when some sight-seers clambered onto the roof of their omnibus for a better view of the ruins, they gazed across the main streets of the South Division—across what had been the heart of the business district—and saw men standing on the ground three miles away.

*  *  *

The Chicago Fire—The Greatest Calamity of the Age, as the papers quickly dubbed it—made news around the world and inspired an international outpouring of sympathy and support. Twenty-nine foreign countries contributed close to $1 million in aid. In the United States, money and material flowed in from every part of the nation. New York City donated $600,000, President Grant sent a personal gift of $1,000, the newsboys of Cincinnati volunteered two days’ of their earnings. The staff of the Ohio Female College donated sixty suits of ladies’ undergarments, while the citizens of Curlew, Nebraska, offered free parcels of land to any Chicagoan who wished to resettle in their town.

New Hampshirites pitched in, too. With the bulk of Chicago’s fire equipment disabled or destroyed, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company of Manchester, N.H., immediately shipped off a brand-new engine to help protect the stricken city.

Of course, not everyone in New Hampshire learned of the disaster right away. While the residents of the big Northeastern cities—New York, Boston, Philadelphia—received word of the fire even as it was blazing, the news took longer to reach the countryside.

Chicago’s ruins had already cooled before the tidings hit Gilmanton Academy, a tiny hamlet whose character had changed little since the founding, in 1794, of the venerable institution in whose honor the village was named. Nestled among the Suncook hills at the southern end of New Hampshire’s Lake District, Gilmanton Academy was (in the words of the man who would become its most infamous native) so remote from the outside world that . . . daily newspapers were rare and almost unknown. Even big news, like the burning of Chicago, filtered slowly into the little farming community, largely through the medium of weekly papers and a few periodicals.

Yet once the villagers got word of the catastrophe, they naturally were as hungry for details as the rest of the country. To the schoolchildren especially, the immolation of the great, faraway city seemed like one of the fabled cataclysms of ancient times—the burning of Rome or the burying of Pompeii.

One eleven-year-old Gilmanton boy was even more spellbound by tales of Chicago’s destruction than his schoolmates. His name was Herman, a slightly built boy with blue eyes and brown hair and a glib, peculiarly grown-up manner that revealed nothing of his profound emotional disorder.

From earliest childhood, he had been subjected to the regular brutalities of his father, a fierce disciplinarian who wielded the rod with an unsparing hand. His mother was a pious, submissive woman, incapable of shielding the boy from her husband’s cruelties. Though Herman had learned to profess his filial devotion, he detested both his parents and dreamed longingly of their deaths. Hearing of the Great Fire, he imagined them trapped by the hellish flames, their flesh consumed, their bones reduced to ashes. He yearned to be delivered from them, if not by their deaths then by his eventual escape.

Even at eleven, he knew that his will and intelligence required an infinitely larger sphere of operation than New Hampshire could possibly afford. Everyone remarked on his sharpness. A boy with a head on him, the neighbors would say. A lad with a future.

Partly because of his delicate stature but also because of his success at school, Herman had often been persecuted by the bigger boys in town, especially during his younger years.

One episode in particular remained with him for the rest of his life. It happened when Herman was five, the year he began school.

The way to the schoolhouse ran past the village doctor’s front door, which was rarely closed. Emanating from the gloomy interior were sharp medicinal odors, associated in little Herman’s mind with the vile nostrums he was forced to imbibe whenever he was ill. Partly for this reason, and partly because of certain dark stories he had heard from his schoolmates (according to rumor, the doctor’s cabinets housed a collection of preserved human heads and amputated limbs), the office had assumed a terrifying dimension in young Herman’s imagination.

One day, having learned of Herman’s horror of the place, two of his older schoolmates waylaid him while the doctor was out on an errand and dragged him, struggling and weeping, over the terrible threshold.

Through his tears, Herman could make out a ghastly specter—a leering skeleton hovering in the shadows like a demon risen from the grave. Herman’s cries turned into terror-crazed shrieks, which only spurred on his tormentors. They wrestled him closer and closer to the looming skeleton, which seemed to reach out its bony hands, as if to seize the boy in a fatal embrace.

At that moment, the doctor came hurrying back to his office and—sizing up the situation at a glance—began shouting at the two bullies, who let go of Herman and raced out the doorway, leaving the hysterical boy gagging and sobbing at the foot of the mounted specimen.

Ironically, it was to this traumatic experience that Herman later attributed his interest in anatomy. By the time he was eleven, he was already conducting his secret medical experiments—first on salamanders and frogs, then on rabbits, cats, and stray dogs. He preferred to perform his operations on living creatures and became skilled at disabling his subjects without killing them. Sometimes, he retained a special part—a rabbit skull or cat’s paw—storing his treasure in a metal box, which he kept hidden in the cellar of his house.

Herman never showed his treasures to anyone. There was no one he cared to share them with. For a brief period during his childhood, he did have one close friend—an older boy named Tom, who died under tragic circumstances, falling to his death from an upstairs landing while he and Herman were exploring an abandoned house.

Herman never missed Tom. He much preferred his solitude, which gave him time to plan, scheme, and dream of the day when he would finally leave New Hampshire forever.

Given his great drive and ambition, it was only a matter of time before Herman realized his goal. Eventually, he would put his past behind him and make his way by a circuitous route to the resurrected metropolis of Chicago where he would become a permanent part of the city’s lore.

In a booming South Side neighborhood, he would construct a legendary residence. Allan Pinkerton’s agents, who had tried so tenaciously to maintain civic order at the height of the Great Conflageration, would come to regard him as one of their most memorable foes. And thanks to him, Chicago would once again find itself on the front pages of newspapers throughout the nation—not, this time, as the site of the Greatest Calamity of the Age but as the home of the Greatest Criminal of the Century.

2

Located twelve feet above the level, of the lake, with a perfect water, sewerage and gas system, and an excellent police and fire department, Englewood combines all of the conveniences of the city, with the fresh, healthful air of the country. . . . We have more enterprising men and less dead-beats than any other suburb in the country.

—Englewood Directory, 1882

Dr. E. S. Holton’s drugstore stood at the corner of Wallace and Sixty-third in the burgeoning business district of Englewood, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb just south of Chicago’s city limits. On a murderously hot day in July 1886, the proprietor himself, racked with prostate cancer, lay moaning in the swelter of his second-floor bedroom, while his sixty-year-old, soon-to-be-widowed wife toiled downstairs.

Business was booming. Normally, the constant flow of customers would have been a welcome circumstance. As it was—with a desperately sick husband to tend and no one to assist her in the store—Mrs. Holton was overworked to the point of collapse.

The recent surge in business was due partly to the weather. The wilting midsummer heat had caused a run on such revitalizing elixirs as Parker’s Ginger Tonic and Ayer’s Sarsaparilla. But the main reason for the Holtons’ thriving trade was the dramatic growth of Englewood itself.

Three years before the Great Fire, Englewood’s entire population had consisted of fewer than twenty families. By 1882, nearly two thousand Chicagoans had resettled in the lush, outlying suburb. By the time the decade ended, the Englewood Directory listed over forty-five thousand inhabitants, most of them urban refugees seeking the same advantages that would lure city dwellers to the suburbs throughout the coming century—fresh air, country quiet, and easy access to the metropolitan center.

As the Chamber of Commerce boasted, Englewood was the best locality for suburban residence in the vicinity of Chicago. . . . Seven leading lines of railway furnish forty-five trains each way daily. All of these trains must stop at Englewood. These magnificent facilities give us advantages possessed by no other suburb of Chicago, the majority of which are mere flag stations, dependent upon one or two dummy trains a day, while the regular trains whizz through the town unmindful of its interests.

It was the proximity of Sixty-third and Wallace to the Western Indiana Railway Station (located less than a block away from the Holton’s store) that made that intersection a hub of thriving commerce. Eventually—after the suburb was officially annexed by the city in 1889—the Holton’s neighborhood would become known as the most prosperous and best-developed cross street in the great city of Chicago (according to one local historian).

On that broiling afternoon in 1886, however, there was still a fair amount of undeveloped land along Sixty-third Street. Indeed, looking out through the store’s big, pane-glass display window—over the neatly arranged packages of Paine’s Celery Compound, the amber bottles of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, and the advertising placards for Dr. Moore’s Indian Root Pills and Henderson’s Digestive Tablets—the druggist’s wife would have seen, across the street and catercorner to the store, a large, grassy plot, studded with luxuriant oak trees.

Had Mrs. Holton glanced out the window at a certain point late in the afternoon, she would have seen something else, too—a nattily attired gentleman peering intently at the patent medicines on display and then, after giving his suit vest a small, fastidious tug, striding determinedly through her wide-flung front door.

Mrs. Holton—who knew all of her customers by sight if not by name—did not recognize the strikingly attractive young man who stepped into the store. Weighing a shade under 150 pounds and standing five feet seven inches tall, he had an erect, manly carriage and moved with a quiet grace. His eyes were slate blue, his hair—which showed itself at the temples beneath the brim of his handsome fedora—was a silky chestnut brown. He wore a walrus mustache in the style of the day but kept it carefully trimmed and slightly upcurled at the corners. Beneath the mustache, his lower lip seemed almost feminine in its fullness.

His brown suit was spotlessly clean, his cravat neatly tied, and the linen shirt-cuffs that protruded from his coat sleeves were affixed with gold buttons. A solid-gold watch chain, adorned with a charm of rich design, was strung across his vest-front. All in all, the new customer would have struck any observer—especially, perhaps, one of the opposite sex—as a fine figure of a man.

As it happened, the young man was not a customer at all. Politely doffing his hat and favoring Mrs. Holton with a slight bow, he introduced himself as Dr. H. H. Holmes, a graduate of the University of Michigan, with training and experience as a druggist. He had recently moved to the area, he explained, and was seeking employment in a store such as Mrs. Holton’s. He had come to inquire if she might be in need of an assistant.

To the beleaguered, overburdened Mrs. Holton, the young man, appearing at such a difficult moment in her life, must have seemed heaven-sent.

She hired him on the spot.

The wall shelves and display cases of the Holtons’ cavernous store were packed with the countless commercial cure-alls—the liver pills and stomach bitters, neuralgia remedies and regulator teas, catarrh ointments and consumption syrups—that flooded the American marketplace in the decades following the Civil War. But a druggist was more than a nostrum peddler. His job required the compounding of medicinal powders and potions, and at that delicate task Dr. Holmes clearly excelled. His long, delicate fingers moved with marvelous dexterity, and Mrs. Holton—herself not a licensed druggist—was delighted to place the job of filing prescriptions entirely in his deft hands.

Beyond ascertaining that he had worked in a drugstore on Columbia Avenue in Philadelphia, Mrs. Holton never saw the need to inquire very closely into the history of Holmes’s employment. His manifest skill was proof enough of his experience. And Holmes himself saw no need to discuss the details of his previous job, particularly its unfortunate denouement. It still pained him to think about the accident that had necessitated his hasty departure from Philadelphia—the sudden, inexplicable poisoning of a woman customer who had died after ingesting a medicine Holmes had prepared for her that morning. Holmes did not hold himself responsible for that tragedy and, understandably enough, was not eager for news of it to get around.

Besides medicine, Holmes was adept at dispensing another commodity, too—a suave, smooth-tongued charm, which he proffered freely to his female customers, many of whom began to patronize the store with surprising frequency. The Holtons’ business, already vigorous, prospered as never before.

Unhappily, prosperity was of no avail to the elderly owner, who did not outlive the summer. By the time of the old man’s death, Holmes’s duties had extended beyond the pharmacological to include handling the store’s account books, as the grieving Mrs. Holton grew increasingly remote from the day-to-day operations of the business.

Sometime during the latter part of August, not long after the druggist’s death, Holmes approached the widow with a proposal to purchase the store. After giving the matter some thought, the old lady accepted on the condition that she be permitted to remain in her apartment upstairs.

She had nowhere else to go, she explained to Holmes. She had no living relations, and in any case she preferred to spend her declining years in the rooms she had occupied so happily with her late husband.

Holmes agreed to the terms, and the deal was consummated. The deed was signed, the down payment rendered, and the familiar sign above the entranceway replaced with the gold-lettered name of the drugstore’s new proprietor, H. H. HOLMES.

Holmes was soon to become a familiar figure in Englewood. When he had first gone to work at the drugstore, he had commuted from his lodgings at some distance from the suburb. Even Mrs. Holton had never been able to ascertain precisely where Holmes made his home, receiving vague and elusive answers on the few occasions she had inquired.

Soon after purchasing the store, however, Holmes took rooms a few blocks away. Early on weekday evenings and on Sunday afternoons, he would stroll around the neighborhood; walking stick in hand, he was the very picture of suave self-possession, tipping his hat to the ladies and pausing to exchange small talk with the men. His fellow merchants along Sixty-third Street regarded the well-spoken, industrious young druggist as an asset to the community.

Mrs. Holton, however, was coming to a very different conclusion about her former employee. Relations between Holmes and the elderly widow had become increasingly bitter over the issue of his purchase payments—or, more precisely, nonpayments. Holmes kept promising to deliver the money and then, with equal consistency, failing to come up with it. The situation became so desperate for Mrs. Holton that she finally threatened Holmes with legal action, and when that tactic failed, filed papers against him.

What happened next remains a mystery, though one fact is indisputable. Shortly after Mrs. Holton brought suit against Holmes, she dropped out of sight.

When her former customers, having noticed her absence from the neighborhood, inquired as to her whereabouts, Holmes informed them that she had moved away from Chicago. With her husband gone, he explained, the apartment had come to seem painfully empty to the lonely widow, and so she had decided to go live with relatives in California.

By then, of course, Holmes had already given up his rooms in the nearby boarding house and moved his belongings into the far more convenient living quarters directly above his store.

*  *  *

Just a few years later, the name of H. H. Holmes would be emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers throughout the United States (and beyond). Enterprising reporters would scour the country for anyone who could furnish information on the man. And scores of individuals, even those who had had only the most casual dealings with him, would step forth and volunteer their recollections.

But Mrs. Holton, who had learned so much about the man who called himself H. H. Holmes, remained forever silent. Like so many other women who met and fell prey to his enticements, the elderly widow was never seen or heard from again.

3

Godliness is in league with riches. . . . Material prosperity is helping to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more unselfish, more Christ-like. . . . In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes.

—Bishop William Lawrence,

The Relation of Wealth to Morals (1901)

To the good burghers of Englewood, particularly the mothers of marriageable daughters, it seemed a terrible waste that a gentleman of Dr. Holmes’s eminent qualifications should remain a bachelor. Personable, educated, infused with the entrepreneurial spirit of the age, he appeared supremely well suited for matrimony. For such a man to refuse to take a wife seemed vaguely irresponsible, if not unnatural.

It was with markedly mixed emotions, then, that his neighbors reacted to the news, which spread rapidly through the community early in 1887, that Dr. Henry Howard Holmes had gotten married.

His bride, the former Miss Myrta Z. Belknap, was a buxom young woman with long blond curls, placid brown eyes, and a soft, baby-smooth face. Holmes had met her during a business trip to Minneapolis in late December 1886 and, after a whirlwind courtship, wed her there on January 28, 1887.

For several months after their return to Chicago, the new Mrs. Holmes worked contentedly at her husband’s side as a salesclerk in the store. Quiet and self-effacing, she had nothing of Holmes’s glib, outgoing charm. Customers were struck by the contrast in their personalities—and by the open adoration in the young woman’s eyes whenever she gazed at her handsome, successful husband.

After a short period, however, Myrta Holmes was seen only infrequently in the store. At her husband’s insistence, she busied herself upstairs with domestic chores or passed the time window-shopping along Sixty-third Street.

It was not that she had proved to be an incompetent clerk. Holmes simply wanted her out of the way. She had quickly become a nuisance to him, cramping his flirtatious style. An incorrigible ladies’ man, he refused to modify his behavior merely because he was burdened with a wife. If anything, his manner toward his female patrons grew steadily more seductive in the months immediately following his marriage.

As for Myrta, though she did her best to make light of her husband’s behavior—to dismiss it as nothing more than the mark of his natural gallantry—she could not help being pained by it. Eventually she was moved to make mild protests to which Holmes responded snappishly. Tensions mounted. Myrta’s meek complaints turned into angry recriminations. By the time a year had passed, visitors to the store witnessed increasingly embarrassing scenes, which generally ended with Holmes hissing sharp imprecations while Myrta stormed tearfully upstairs.

Before long, the situation grew intolerable. Divorce was out of the question. In spite of her husband’s faults, which made it impossible for her to continue living with him above the store. Myrta still loved Holmes. Besides, she could not abide the stigma of divorce. And there was another, even more compelling reason why she would not consider ending her marriage.

By the spring of 1888, Myrta Holmes was pregnant.

New living arrangements had to be made. Though Myrta, in her weekly letters home, had bravely concealed the painful truth from her parents, she was finally forced to reveal to them just how dire her situation had become. Her mother and father responded without hesitation. In the summer of 1888, the elder Belknaps moved into a tidy, two-story, redframe house in Wilmette, Illinois, just north of Chicago, and took Myrta in to live with them. Holmes agreed to provide financial support and pay regular visits to his wife.

Once again, H. H. Holmes found himself living alone on Sixty-third Street—a position that suited him perfectly, given the plan that was taking shape inside his head.

*  *  *

Though Holmes had clearly come to regard Myrta as a serious inconvenience, there are reasons to believe that he cared for her, after his fashion.

The first was a legal action he initiated on February 14, 1887, just a few weeks after his marriage. On that date, Holmes appeared at the Cook County Courthouse to file divorce papers against Clara A. Lovering Mudgett of Alton, New Hampshire—his childhood sweetheart and first wife, to whom he was still wed at the time of his union to Myrta Z. Belknap.

Myrta, of course, did not know of Clara Mudgett’s existence—or that her own marriage to Holmes, being bigamous, had no legal validity.

As it happened, Homes never followed through on his divorce from Clara Mudgett, and the suit was eventually dismissed by the court for default of appearance of complainant. Still, for a fleeting moment, Holmes had at least contemplated doing right by Myrta Belknap—possibly the first time in his life that he had ever experienced such an impulse, and certainly the only time it can be documented.

In the years to come, there would be other indications that Holmes felt something like human warmth for Myrta. But perhaps the most convincing proof is simply this: unlike most of the women who became intimately involved with Holmes during his years in Chicago, Myrta Belknap lived to enjoy her old age and died of natural causes.

*  *  *

With his wife out of the way, Holmes lost no time in putting his master plan into motion. To those customers who inquired after Myrta’s whereabouts, he explained that the stresses of her physical condition, combined with prolonged exposure to the din of the nearby railway trains—whose clanging bells, piercing whistles, and chugging engines sounded constantly throughout the day—had left her in a state of nervous exhaustion. Being preoccupied with the demands of his business, he had thought it best to consign her to the care of her parents. His customers conveyed their sympathy and continued to regard the enterprising young druggist as a paragon.

And indeed, in all outward respects, Holmes was the very model of the up-and-coming young businessman. Say to yourself, ‘My place is at the top!’ preached Andrew Carnegie in his popular lecture, The Road to Business Success. Holmes—an avid devourer of the how-to advice of his day—had clearly taken the message to heart. The Holtons’ corner drugstore could not contain his colossal ambitions. Fortunes were to be made by young men of pluck, drive, and vision. Holmes would not be satisfied until he became the owner of a magnificent building that proclaimed his success to the world.

There were other reasons why he desired to construct a building of his own. His