The Serial Killer Files (32 page)

As to her fate, questions linger to this day. Did Lamphere—her suspected accomplice—kill her and her children for unknown reasons, then set fire to the farmhouse in an attempt to cover up his crimes? Many people believed so.

Others, however, had doubts that the charred, decapitated woman in the cellar was Belle. For one thing, the body weighed just seventy-three pounds—inordinately small, even allowing for the shrinkage that results when meat is roasted at high temperatures. Lamphere himself claimed that Belle had staged her own death, then absconded with $100,000 in ill-gotten gains. In the end, she was officially declared dead. For many years, however, sightings of the infamous “Lady Bluebeard” were reported in places across America. In the popular mind, she continued to live on, a legendary monster immortalized in story and song:

Belle Gunness was a lady fair,

In Indiana State.

She weighed about three hundred pounds,

And that is quite some weight.

That she was stronger than a man

Her neighbors all did own;

She butchered hogs right easily,

And did it all alone.

But hogs were just a sideline

She indulged in now and then;

Her favorite occupation

Was a-butchering of men.

To keep her cleaver busy

Belle would run an ad,

And men would come a-scurrying

With all the cash they had.

Now some say Belle killed only ten,

And some say forty-two;

It was hard to tell exactly,

But there were quite a few.

And where Belle is now no one knows,

But my advice is fair:

If a widow advertises

For a man with cash—beware!

H. H. HOLMES

1860–1896

Herman Mudgett was a native of Gilmanton Academy, a tiny hamlet nestled among the Suncook hills at the southern end of New Hampshire’s Lake District. Born in 1860, Herman was a delicately built boy, blue-eyed and brown-haired, with a reputation as “the brightest lad in town.” Among his schoolmates he was also known to be slightly odd. His father devoutly believed in the Bible, especially Proverbs 13:24:

“he that spareth his rod, hateth his son.” Herman’s father loved his son and displayed his devotion by beating the boy with savage regularity.

Throughout his childhood, Herman kept mostly to himself, shunning other children. He did have one friend, a slightly older boy named Tom. But Tom died under tragic circumstances, plunging to his death from the upstairs landing of a deserted house he was exploring with Herman. Herman saw the accident clearly. He was standing right behind Tom at the time, so close that he could put out his hand and touch his friend’s back without even reaching at all.

Partly because of his delicate stature and partly because of his peculiar personality, Herman was often persecuted by the village bullies. One episode in particular left a lasting impression. One morning, two of Herman’s older schoolmates waited until the village doctor was away from his office on a house call, then waylaid Herman. Dragging him kicking and screaming inside, they wrestled him over to the human skeleton that the doctor had mounted on a metal stand in a shadowy corner of the office. They forced the bony fingers of the skeleton against the hysterical boy’s face, then let Herman go and left him shrieking on the floor.

H. H. Holmes asphyxiates two child victims inside a steamer trunk Ironically, it was to this traumatic experience that Herman later attributed his lifelong interest in anatomy. By the time he was eleven, he was already conducting secret medical experiments—first on frogs and salamanders, then on rabbits, kittens, and stray dogs.

New England was not large enough to contain Herman Mudgett’s ambitions. 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, Mudgett was an accomplished con artist who had learned how to bilk insurance companies of thousands of dollars. His method was simple: he would take out a life insurance policy for a fictitious person, acquire a corpse, claim that the corpse was the insured individual, and cash in the policy. Of course, the success of the scheme depended on Mudgett’s ability to acquire dead bodies. But at that activity, too, he had already become quite proficient.

In 1886, Herman Mudgett showed up in Chicago. By this time, he had assumed the pseudonym by which the whole world would eventually know him: Dr. Henry Howard Holmes.

Within a few months, the debonair Dr. Holmes had taken a job as a druggist’s assistant in the fashionable suburb of Englewood. The drugstore was owned by an elderly widow named Holton. Before the year was out, Mrs. Holton had abruptly disappeared. “Gone to California to visit relatives,” the handsome young assistant told inquiring customers. Only by then, he was no longer an assistant. The 1887 city directory listed a new proprietor of the pharmacy at Sixty-third and Wallace Streets in Englewood: Dr. H. H. Holmes.

Before long, the profits from his store—combined with proceeds from assorted scams—allowed Holmes to construct a magnificent new residence for himself on a vacant lot across the street from his drugstore.

In one respect, the building bore a striking similarity to its owner. Its exterior spoke of nothing but affluence and good taste. But behind the handsome facade it presented to the world, there existed a labyrinthine realm of madness and horror.

Holmes called his new building the Castle. It contained over one hundred rooms linked by secret passageways, fake walls, concealed shafts, and trapdoors. Some rooms were soundproofed and padded with asbestos; peepholes in the doors allowed Holmes to see into them. Many were equipped with gas pipes connected to a large tank in the cellar. From a control panel in his office, Holmes could fill any of the chambers with poison gas. Chutes ran from the second and third floors of the building to the basement, where Holmes kept a laboratory, complete with dissection table, surgical instruments, and an oven large enough to accommodate a human body.

Shortly after moving into the Castle, Holmes invited a watchmaker named Conner—who was blessed with a statuesque wife, Julia, and a lovely infant daughter named Pearl—to set up shop in a section of the pharmacy. Before long, the seductive Dr. Holmes had made Julia his mistress. When she became pregnant by Holmes, the outraged Mr. Conner packed up his belongings and left for good. Holmes, however, was not prepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood. He performed a crude abortion on Julia, killing her in the process, then dispatched little Pearl with chloroform.

When the Chicago World’s Fair opened in 1893, decent lodgings were hard to find in the city. Holmes began renting rooms to tourists. Few were ever seen alive again. Throughout this period, local medical schools received a regular supply of human skeletons from Dr. Holmes. Since the schools were in desperate need of high-grade anatomical specimens, no questions were asked.

Holmes was finally arrested after killing his confederate, Ben Pitezel. Holmes used Pitezel’s corpse to pull off his favorite life insurance fraud, but was caught by clever investigators. The discovery of the horrors inside his Chicago “Murder Castle”—along with the revelation that he had killed three of Pitezel’s children to cover up his scam—sent shock waves throughout the country. The trial of the

“Arch-Fiend” (as Holmes was quickly dubbed) became the century’s greatest criminal sensation.

Following his conviction, he confessed to twenty-seven murders, though authorities believed that the death count was closer to fifty—ten times the number racked up by Jack the Ripper.

Police discover human remains in the basement of Holmes’ “Murder Castle”

(Courtesy of Rick Geary)

Because the careers of these two serial killers coincided, some crime buffs regard them as transatlantic counterparts. But others—in recognition of the handsome young doctor’s appalling double life—have seen Holmes as the American version of a different Victorian monster. If ever there was a real-life Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, these people say, then surely Henry H. Holmes was the man.

1870–1936

Edward Budd was an able-bodied, energetic young man, the eldest child of a poor, working-class family scraping by in a New York City tenement. In late May 1928, hoping to find summer work as a farmhand, he placed a classified ad in a newspaper: “Youth, 18, wishes position in country.”

Albert Fish by Joe Coleman

Several days later, a frail-looking old man with gentle eyes and a drooping mustache showed up at the Budds’ apartment. Introducing himself as Frank Howard, the little man explained that he was hiring help for his truck farm on Long Island. He had spotted Edward’s ad in the paper and had come to interview the young man for a job.

Mr. Howard gave Edward the once-over and seemed satisfied by what he saw. He made a generous offer and arranged to return in a few days to pick Edward up and drive him to the farm.

A few days later, on Sunday, June 3, the old man returned. Edward was out on an errand. Mrs. Budd invited her son’s new employer to have lunch with the family while they awaited the young man’s return.

Shortly afterward, while Mr. Howard sat at the Budds’ kitchen table, the youngest member of the family

—a glowing little girl named Grace—wandered into the room. She instantly caught the old man’s eye.

He called her over, sat her on his knee, and exclaimed over her beauty. She reminded him, he said as he caressed her silky brown hair, of his own ten-year-old granddaughter.

Suddenly, he turned to her parents as though an idea had just struck him. His niece, who lived in upper Manhattan, was having a birthday party that afternoon. He had decided to attend the party for a few hours, then pick Edward up afterward. Perhaps Grace would like to come along with him? It was going to be quite a party—with lots of children and games and ice cream. He would take good care of her and bring her home before dark.

Mrs. Budd felt a little uncertain about letting her child go off with a virtual stranger. Still, Mr. Howard seemed so utterly harmless that her qualms seemed foolish. And besides, the old gentleman had offered her son a desperately needed job.

She allowed herself to be persuaded. “Let her go,” Grace’s father urged. “She doesn’t see much good times.” Grace was gotten up in her prettiest outfit. Then, the creature known as Frank Howard—whose name was really Albert Fish and whose kindly demeanor concealed a mind of unimaginable depravity—took the child by the hand and led her away from home toward a subway station.

Before boarding the train, the old man stopped to retrieve a canvas bundle he had stashed behind a corner newsstand on his way to the Budds’ apartment. Wrapped inside were a butcher’s knife, a cleaver, and a saw.

To describe Albert Fish as the black sheep of his family is almost a laughable understatement. No eminent American family has ever been cursed with any sheep blacker. Though his ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and his namesake had served as secretary of state in the Grant administration, Albert Fish—whose given name was actually Hamilton Fish—came from a branch of the family characterized by poverty and psychosis. When he was five, his parents, unable to afford his upbringing, placed him in a public orphanage. There, Fish had a teacher whose preferred form of discipline was to strip her young charges naked and beat their bare bodies while the other boys and girls watched. Fish came away from this experience with a singular education. What he learned, as he later put it, was to

“enjoy everything that hurt.”

At twenty-eight, Fish was making an irregular living as a housepainter and handyman. He married a nineteen-year-old woman who would eventually abandon him for another man, leaving Fish to care for their six children. He was an affectionate father and grandfather. At the same time, he admitted to other feelings toward children. As he grew older, he became increasingly possessed by what he described as a

“lust for their blood.”

Obsessed throughout his life with religion, Fish began to have searing visions of Christ and His angels and to hear the voice of God addressing him in dark, quasi-biblical terms. “Blessed is the man who correcteth his son in whom he delighteth with stripes.” “Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their head against their stones.” He saw himself as Abraham and each of his little victims as a young Isaac. “It seemed to me,” he later explained, “that I had to offer a child for sacrifice, to purge myself of sins, iniquities, and abominations in the sight of God.”

His compulsion to kill grew overpowering.

Even today, no one knows the precise number of Fish’s victims, though it seems certain that he molested several hundred and slew at least fifteen. Most were children of the slums. Many of his victims were black, and authorities—after a cursory investigation—simply gave up the search. Eventually, authorities would learn some of the horrifying details from Albert Fish himself.

But that wouldn’t happen until six years after Grace Budd’s disappearance. And on June 3, 1928, Grace Budd’s parents had no way of knowing any of these facts about the monster who called himself Frank Howard—the friendly old man who led their little daughter onto the New York Central Railroad, while, tucked under one arm, he carried the canvas bundle containing the tools he liked to think of as his

“implements of hell.”

Over the course of the next six years, the New York City police—led by Detective William King of the Missing Persons Bureau—conducted a massive manhunt for the Budd girl and her kidnapper. Hopes were raised and dashed with dismaying regularity.

Then, in November 1934, a letter addressed to Grace’s mother arrived at the Budds’ apartment. Its contents were unspeakably demented. The anonymous writer began by recounting a story he had heard about “a famine in China,” during which boys and girls under the age of twelve were seized and cut up and their meat sold. The writer explained that he had been told this story by an acquaintance, a sea captain who had lived in Hong Kong. “On Sunday June the 3 1928,” the letter continued, “I called on you at 406 W. 15 St… . 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… . I took her to an empty house in Westchester… . I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take her meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it.