EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (8 page)

The detective became suspicious and mentioned his strange encounter to his friend, Inspector Patrick McIntyre of Scotland Yard. He and McIntyre began to speculate that this Dr Neil was the Lambeth Poisoner. It seemed almost certainly to be the case when they realised that one of the men whom Cream had blackmailed under another name, lived at the same address as him in Lambeth Palace Road.

They began to investigate the background of Dr Thomas Neil. A detective was dispatched to Canada where he uncovered Cream’s dubious past. His movements were closely watched and they saw him use prostitutes. Fortunately, these women survived their encounters with him. Two prostitutes that he had met came forward to say that they had seen him in the company of Matilda Clover. Her body was exhumed and they were unsurprised to find that there were traces of strychnine.

Cream was arrested on 3 June.

The inquest into the death of Matilda Clover seemed to be going well for him at first. There seemed to be nothing more than hearsay evidence to support the charges of murder and he appeared to be relatively untroubled by the ordeal. Then, one day, a new witness was called. He looked up in amazement to see Lou Harvey, the woman he thought he had killed weeks ago, enter the court. When they asked if the man who had given her pills was present in court she had no hesitation in turning and pointing at Thomas Cream. He was charged with murder and taken to Newgate Prison.

At his trial, there was little doubt about the verdict and the jury took a mere nine minutes to find him guilty. The judge placed the black hat on his head and sentenced him to death.

Dr Thomas Neil Cream, the ‘Lambeth Poisoner’ was hanged on 16 November 1892. He left one tantalising mystery, however. In the moment before the trapdoor opened, he began to speak. ‘I am Jack…’ was all that he was able to utter before he plunged to his death. Was he Jack the Ripper? He had been in prison in the United States when the Ripper had been plying his trade. Or had he? Some suggest he bribed his way out of Joliet earlier than the stated date, or that a double had taken his place. It seems unlikely, but then so was the existence of a man such as Dr Thomas Neil Cream.

H. H. Holmes

He called it his ‘Castle’.

It was built on three stories and boasted one hundred rooms. With soundproof sleeping chambers, complete with peepholes, asbestos-padded walls, gas pipes, walls that slid across, making a room bigger or smaller as necessary, and trapdoors with ladders leading down to the rooms below. It was a maze of secret passages and false doors and a number of the rooms were filled with gruesome torture equipment. Chillingly, there was also a specially equipped surgery. He is thought to have placed victims in special rooms into which he pumped lethal gas, watching their death throes through peepholes. On occasion, he might even set fire to the gas to add a little more excitement. When he tired of that, there was always the ‘elasticity determinator’, an elongated bed to which a victim was tightly strapped and then stretched. He liked to experiment. Chutes, the sides greased for easier dispatch, led down to a two-level basement with a large furnace burning fiercely. Once he had finished with a corpse, he would slide it down a chute to the basement where he would use vats of acid and other chemicals to get rid of any evidence that it had ever existed. Or, he might remove all the flesh and sell the skeleton to a local medical school.

H. H. Holmes, real name Hermann Webster Mudgett, arrived in Chicago in the 1880s. The city was brimming with excitement as well as visitors, as the World’s Fair or Great Exposition was about to take place. Some estimates put the number of visitors to the city at a staggering twenty-seven million for the six months in which the Exposition ran, putting a strain on the forces of law and order, but also offering opportunities for crime and for psychopaths such as Mudgett, now going under the name Holmes. Holmes relished the thought of the countless vulnerable, single women fresh to the big city who would be prey to the charms of a successful ‘doctor’ with very good prospects such as himself. When he met anyone, he described himself as a well-off graduate of a prestigious medical school.

He found work as a prescription clerk in a pharmacy at 63rd and South Wallace Streets when he first came to town. The female owner of the premises where he worked left town suddenly, or ‘went to California’, as Holmes said at the time. She and her daughter were never heard of again and it is almost certain that he killed them. He took ownership of the business and bought an empty property across the road, on 63rd Street.

He began to raise money through murder and fraud in order to build his ‘Castle’ and then let rooms to young women who had come to Chicago to enjoy the fair. Of course, they quickly disappeared – he had tortured and murdered them and sold many of their skeletons to medical schools. The women he employed fared no better and probably proved even more lucrative for him. They were forced to take out life insurance policies as a condition of their employment and he claimed on these as he dispatched the women. He also carried out hundreds of illegal abortions in the Castle’s dark rooms and many of the patients did not survive the procedure.

Holmes’s finances were in a mess at the end of the World’s Fair and, with creditors moving in, he abandoned Chicago and moved to Fort Worth, Texas. He had killed a couple of railroad heiress sisters, but before killing them, had arranged their affairs so that he would inherit property they owned in Texas. He intended to construct another death factory, along the lines of the Castle in Chicago, but the authorities in Texas were not as easy to fool as those in Chicago and he abandoned the project.

He set off on his travels around the United States and Canada and is thought, in all likelihood, to have continued in his murderous ways, although no bodies were found to corroborate this.

It was his killing of a business partner, Benjamin Pitezel and his children that was his downfall. Pitezel and Holmes had concocted a scheme whereby Pitezel would fake his death so that his wife could collect on a $10,000 insurance policy. This would be split with Holmes whose role in the scheme was to provide a body to stand in for Pitezel. But Holmes, who never really liked Pitezel, actually did kill him and used the real corpse to collect the insurance money. He told Mrs Pitezel that her husband was hiding out in South America and persuaded her to allow him to have custody of three of her five children. The three children were killed in various locations as he traveled across America.

But, his luck was finally running out. Pinkerton’s detective agency had been on his heels for a while and they finally arrested him in Boston in November 1894. They had long had suspicions about his activities, but it was only when they gained entry to the Castle that these suspicions were confirmed. They found a number of intact skeletons and countless fragments of human bones, including the pelvis of a fourteen-year-old.

When investigators finally examined the Castle, after Holmes’s arrest, the media had a field day. ‘The Castle is a Tomb!’ screamed the headline in the
Chicago Tribune
.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
called it a ‘charnel house’. True crime writers made it a staple of the genre. In Philadelphia, a Holmes Museum opened. As for the narcissistic Holmes, he wrote a memoir,
Holmes' Own Story, in which the Alleged Multimurderer and Arch Conspirator Tells of the Twenty-two Tragic Deaths and Disappearances in which he is Said to be Implicated
. ‘My sole object in this publication is to vindicate my name from the horrible aspersions cast upon it,’ he wrote, ‘and to appeal to a fair-minded American public for a suspension of judgment.’ He attempted in the book to make himself seem completely normal and, typical of the narcissistic tendency of the psychopath, saw the book as being of literary merit.

In the book, Holmes, born in 1861, describes being brought up in Gilmanton Academy, in New Hampshire where his lies and pranks resulted in punishment by his father. He also talks about the day that his interest in medical matters began. A gang of boys tried to frighten him by confronting him with a skeleton in a local doctor’s office. Rather than terrify him, of course, it made him resolve to pursue a career in medicine. He obtained a medical diploma from the University of Michigan and opened a medical practice. Around this time, he was involved in an insurance fraud, he admits in the book, helping someone to substitute a dead body for his own. Following that, he took a job in an asylum but it proved to be an experience that scarred him and haunted him for many years. Following that, he had moved to Chicago.

He claimed that the women who had stayed at his property had simply left, even going as far as saying that they had benefited from knowing a man such as him.

He told the story of one young woman, Minnie Williams. She had arrived at his door having had an abortion and feeling ashamed. She was suicidal, he claimed, and he took her in, engaging her to work as his secretary for a while. When her sister, Nettie, had arrived, Minnie had become jealous of her because she had fallen for Holmes, and struck her on the head with a stool, killing her. Holmes claimed to have helped Minnie put the body in a trunk, convey it to Lake Michigan and toss it in. Minnie had then left, he claimed and he had burned the items of clothing she had left behind.

He defended himself at his trial, the first murderer in United States criminal history to do so. His performance in court was described as ‘remarkable’ by one newspaper. He displayed the cool detachment of the psychopath immediately as he questioned candidates for jury service in his case. However, he still made mistakes, becoming too bogged down by detail and showing no emotion following a detailed description of the corpse of his so-called friend and business associate, Pitezel, by asking for a lunch-break. He spent the afternoon trying to prove that his associate’s death was suicide, but all the expert witnesses posited that he could not possibly have killed himself. Anyway, the chloroform that Holmes claimed Pitezel used to kill himself, had actually entered his body after death.

That evening, Holmes requested that his two legal representatives be reinstated. He realised, too late, that he was unable to defend the case properly.

In summing up, the Prosecution attorney described Holmes as ‘the most dangerous man in the world’.

He was convicted, unsurprisingly of the murder of Benjamin Pitezel and the judge sentenced him to death by hanging.

Holmes now decided to write a confession. It was not from a sense of remorse, however, but because he had been offered $10,000 for it by Hearst Newspapers. It appeared in
The Philadelphia Inquirer
. He claimed to have murdered more than 100 people, attempting it would seem to make his mark as the world’s most notorious killer, but swiftly retracting that number and reducing it to twenty-seven.

His first murder, he said, had been of a former school-friend whom he had dispatched with a dose of laudanum, in order to make a claim against an insurance policy he had taken out on him. The second, however, had been an accident. He had killed a man in a fight over money he claimed had been owed to him. Following that, he had killed a few people whom he sold to a man who would then sell them on to medical schools. He was paid between $25 and $45 for each of them. When he lost contact with this dealer in bodies, he would bury the unclaimed victims in the floor of his offices. He explained the various methods he had used – beating to death, gassing in vaults and asphyxia. Many of these people died because there was something in it for Holmes, money or avoidance of exposure and he even had help sometimes. It was a miracle he avoided detection for so long. On one memorable occasion, he had attempted to kill three young women at the same time, using chloroform. They managed to escape and reported him to the police. He was arrested but, unbelievably, was not prosecuted.

He told the truth about the Williams sisters, how he had persuaded Minnie to give him several large sums of money. She and her sister had property in Texas and he wanted to get his hands on it. He persuaded her to get her sister Nettie to come to Chicago and she was killed immediately. He had told Minnie that her sister had changed her mind about visiting, and persuaded her to sign everything over to him. He then poisoned her and buried her in the cellar of another house that he owned. His efforts to blame her for the murder of her sister and of the Pitezel children he decribed as ‘the saddest and most heinous of my crimes’.

Regarding Pitezel, he said that he knew he was going to kill him from the first moment he met him. He won his confidence by showing kindness and consideration for him but meanwhile was showing him forged letters from Mrs Pitezel to her husband. Pitezel had drunk heavily and Holmes killed him while he was in a drunken stupour. While Pitezel was still alive, he lay him on his bed, tied him up, poured benzene over him and set fire to him. Pitezel came to and screamed for mercy, but he suffered an agonising death. When he was dead, Holmes cut the ropes from his body and poured chloroform into his stomach to make it look as if he died accidentally in an explosion. His aim was yet another insurance policy. True to character, Holmes described leaving the house ‘without the slightest feeling of remorse for my terrible acts’.

In a macabre aftermath, he is reported to have visited Pitezel’s grave some weeks after his interment, in the pretense of acquiring some samples for analysis. He claimed that he found cutting into the corpse with a knife ‘inordinately satisfying’.

His murders of the Pitezel children were even grimmer. He hid them away in a hotel for a week and then began by poisoning Howard. He then proceeded to cut the boy’s body up into pieces small enough to be put into a stove that he had purchased for just that purpose.

He took the girls to Chicago, Detroit and Toronto, letting them believe that they would be imminently reunited with their mother. He told them to climb into a large trunk and closed the lid on them, having drilled a small airhole so that they were able to breathe. He then pumped gas through the hole, killing them. He buried them in shallow graves, as ever taking pleasure in killing another human being. He had been like a father to them for eight years, but felt not an iota of remorse.

Even on the gallows in Philadelphia, on 17 May 1896, Holmes changed his story, claiming now that he had only killed two people. He tried to say more, but the trapdoor opened as he was in mid-sentence and this most remorseless of all killers plunged to his death. At least his death was not easy, faint consolation for his victims and their families – it took him fifteen minutes to die. At his own request, to deter body-snatchers, he was buried in cement, so that his body could not be dug up and dissected.

By the time he died, his Castle was no more. On 19 August 1895, a mysterious fire had destroyed it. A U.S. Post Office now occupies the site of the killing factory run by America’s first serial killer.