The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (24 page)

H.H. Holmes

At the same time that
Jack the Ripper
was terrorizing London, America was home to its own psychopathic monster. Calling himself Dr. H. H. Holmes, he was at least as notorious in his own day as “Saucy Jack.” But while the latter’s fame has grown through the years, Dr. Holmes—for unexplained reasons—has largely been forgotten. In the chronicle of American crime, however, he occupies a special place: he was our country’s first documented serial killer.

Dr. H. H. Holmes, the nineteenth-century “multi-murderer”

(Courtesy of the Illinois State Historical Society)

Much about his life and crimes remains shrouded in mystery. We know that his real name was Herman Mudgett, that he was born in the tiny New Hampshire village of Gilmanton Academy, and that—like other budding sociopaths—he enjoyed conducting “medical experiments” on small, living creatures during his childhood.

In his early twenties, he wed a young female acquaintance—the first of several wives he would acquire without ever bothering with the formality of a divorce. He abandoned her within a few years of the marriage. After a year of college in Vermont, he transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduating with a medical degree in 1884. By then, he was already an accomplished swindler who had learned to bilk insurance companies of thousands of dollars. His method was simple. He would take out a life insurance policy for a fictitious person, obtain a corpse, claim that the corpse was the insured individual, and cash in on the policy. Of course, the scheme depended on Mudgett’s ability to acquire dead bodies. But at this activity, too, he grew proficient.

In 1886, he showed up in Chicago under a new name—Henry Howard Holmes. Within a few months, he had taken a job as a druggist in the fashionable suburb of Englewood. The pharmacy was owned by an elderly
widow, who mysteriously disappeared a few months later, leaving Holmes as the new proprietor. A consummate con artist, he had no trouble finagling large sums of cash from gullible investors. Combined with the proceeds from assorted scams, this money allowed him to construct a magnificient residence on a vacant lot across from his store. He called it “The Castle.” It contained dozens of rooms, linked by secret passageways, hidden staircases, fake walls, concealed shafts, and trapdoors. Some of the rooms were soundproofed, lined with asbestos, and equipped with gas pipes connected to a large tank in the cellar. From a control panel in his office, Holmes could fill these chambers with asphyxiating gas. A pair of chutes ran from the second and third floors to the basement, where Holmes kept a fully equipped dissection lab.

Inside the walls of this Gothic horror house, an indeterminate number of people disappeared—including a string of susceptible young women who had fallen under the spell of Holmes’s insidious charm. During the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Holmes also rented rooms to tourists, many of whom were never seen again. Throughout this period, local medical schools—in desperate need of high-grade anatomical specimens—purchased a regular supply of human skeletons from Dr. Holmes, no questions asked.

He was finally arrested for the murder of a confederate, Ben Pitezel. Holmes used Pitezel’s corpse to try to pull off his favorite insurance scam, but he was caught by clever investigators. Following his trial—the most sensational of its day—he confessed to twenty-seven murders. The enormity of his deeds made him the most infamous criminal of his age, known throughout the land as “Holmes, the Arch Fiend.” He was hanged in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896.

“I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. . . . I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since.”

From the confession of Dr. H. H. Holmes

H
OMEBODIES

Some serial killers range far and wide in search of their prey. Others, however, have a more domestic bent. Luring their victims to their houses or apartments, these psychos commit their gruesome murders in the comfort of their own homes—and sometimes even conceal the dead bodies right on the premises.

Shortly after a mousy little man named John Reginald Christie vacated his London flat in 1953, the new tenants began noticing an unpleasant smell that seemed to be emanating from a hollow place in the kitchen wall. Tearing down the wallpaper, they discovered a concealed cupboard containing three female corpses. When police made a search of the premises, they found a fourth decomposed body—that of Christie’s own wife—under the dining room floorboards, and the skeletal remains of two other victims buried in the backyard. (See
The Wrong Man
.
)

In the 1970s, both Dean Corll and John Wayne
Gacy
turned their homes into suburban torture chambers, committing dozens of atrocities on bound and helpless young men. Each of these sociopaths perpetrated more than thirty at-home murders without ever arousing the suspicions of his next-door neighbors. Corll buried the corpses along the shore of a nearby lake (see
Partners
). Gacy likewise dumped some of his victims in a river—but not until he had run out of room on his property, where police eventually dug up twenty-nine bodies.

Jeffrey
Dahmer
was another homebody homosexual killer, who not only turned his cramped Milwaukee apartment into a death chamber but filled it with an appalling assortment of human remains. His British counterpart, Dennis
Nilsen
, played out twisted little scenes of domesticity with the dead bodies of his male victims—bathing them, snuggling with them in bed, propping them up in front of the TV, or seating them at the dinner table.

One of the most gruesome of all domestic serial killers was a deranged German innkeeper named Karl Denke. Denke was so reluctant to leave home that he didn’t even bother to go out shopping for food. During the post-World War I era, he murdered almost three dozen lodgers, then butchered their carcasses, pickled the meat in brine, and stored it in his basement. When Denke was finally arrested in 1924, he told the police that he had been eating nothing but human flesh for the past three years (see
Cannibalism
).

H
OMOSEXUALITY

In a tome called
A Casebook of Murder,
British crime maven Colin Wilson makes the rather remarkable statement that Ed
Gein
, the infamous Wisconsin ghoul, was “a sexually normal man.” Since, among other things, Gein was guilty of digging up the bodies of elderly women, dismembering the corpses, and performing unspeakable atrocities upon them, it takes a moment to figure out that what Wilson really means is that, whatever other kind of creature Gein was, at least he wasn’t a
homosexual
While the implications of Wilson’s remark are truly staggering (i.e., that grave robbing, necrophilia, dismemberment, etc., are more “normal” than homosexuality), he does manage to put his finger on a salient fact of serial murder. The great bulk of its practitioners are, indeed, heterosexuals.

More specifically, criminologists estimate that at least 86 percent of male serial killers are heterosexual—meaning that they derive their deepest gratification from raping, mutilating, and murdering women. Still, though numerically inferior, gay serial killers include some of the foremost monsters of our time.

Throughout his two marriages, for example, John Wayne
Gacy
was busily having sex with teenage boys—twenty-seven of whom ended up buried in the crawl space beneath his suburban house. Likewise, Jeffrey
Dahmer
preyed exclusively on young males. So did the infamous British serial killer Dennis
Nilsen
, whose murders—like Dahmer’s—seemed at least partly motivated by a desperate desire to prevent his male pickups from leaving in the morning. Less well known—though every bit as heinous—was California’s “Freeway Killer,” William George Bonin, a Vietnam vet and truck driver responsible for torturing and then murdering twenty-one young men during the 1970s.

Serial sex murder, as practiced by men, is virtually unknown among
Women
, homosexual or otherwise. A recent exception is the lesbian hooker Aileen
Wuornos
, who killed a string of male motorists along a Florida highway in 1989 and 1990.

Certain lust murderers are possessed of such ravening appetites that they are, in effect, bisexual, preying indiscriminately on both male and female victims. During a three-year span in the late 1890s, for example, a hideously disfigured maniac named Joseph
Vacher
, armed with knives, scissors, and a butcher’s cleaver, roamed the French countryside, savaging
nearly a dozen victims before his capture in August 1897. Vacher’s victims—who suffered unspeakable sexual mutilations at his hands—ranged from a fifty-eight-year-old widow to a fourteen-year-old boy. Andrei
Chikatilo
, the Russian “Beast of Rostov,” likewise tortured, mauled, raped, and cannibalized members of both sexes, many of them adolescents. And while the desperately deranged American pedophile Albert
Fish
preferred to commit his atrocities on boys, he was happy to settle for a pretty little girl when a male victim wasn’t available.

Homosexual Serial Killers in the Cinema

Gay serial killers—psychopathic homosexuals who prey on members of their own gender—are a rarity in movies. Aileen Wuornos, for example—whose sordid story is told in the Oscar-winning biopic
Monster
—was a lesbian, but her homicidal rage was directed strictly at men. Conversely, “Buffalo Bill”—the flagrantly effeminate psychokiller of
The Silence of the Lambs
—targets only female victims.

The only mainstream Hollywood movie (so far as we know) to deal with homosexual serial murder is William Friedkin’s 1980
Cruising.
Friedkin’s shocker was widely—and, to a large extent, deservedly—reviled by critics (in his
Movie and Video Guide,
Leonard Maltin tosses around words like “distasteful,” “sick,” and “degrading”). Still, it’s a deeply unsettling film, starring Al Pacino as a New York City cop on the hunt for a gay homicidal maniac in pre-AIDS Greenwich Village.