A Mrs Julia Conner and her daughter moved into the house, and Mrs Conner became pregnant by Holmes, so her husband left her. Mrs Conner died in the course of an operation for abortion, and Holmes poisoned the daughter, afraid she might talk about her mother’s death.
Holmes next killed a companion on a fishing trip, discovering he was carrying a great deal of money; the man – named Rodgers – was killed with blows from an oar. A southern speculator named Charles Cole was also killed for his money – his skull was so damaged by the blow that his corpse was useless to the medical school. After that, Holmes killed a domestic servant called Lizzie because he was afraid the janitor was about to run away with her and he wanted to retain his services. Holmes was preparing to ship this corpse to the medical school when his secretary, Mary Haracamp, walked into the room together with a pregnant woman named Sarah Cook. Holmes swiftly pushed them into the tiny room he called ‘the vault’, to be suffocated.
A girl named Emily Cigrand became his new secretary and also his mistress. When she told him she was getting married, Holmes lured her into the ‘vault’ and ordered her to write a letter to her fiancé breaking off the engagement. The girl wrote the letter, but Holmes nevertheless turned on the gas and watched her die a lingering death. His later confession makes it clear that he was now beginning to take considerable pleasure in watching people die.
Ten more victims followed within months. Holmes began using poison; the motive was normally to extort money, but when – as in most cases – the victims were women, they usually became his mistresses too. One of these mistresses was a girl called Minnie Williams, from whom Holmes had swindled several thousand dollars. Holmes murdered her sister Nannie in the vault, and also somehow persuaded her brother to make him the beneficiary of an insurance policy; the brother was later shot ‘in self defence’. By that time, Minnie had also been murdered; she had confessed to an insurance representative that a fire in the ‘castle’ had been deliberate arson.
Soon afterwards, Holmes acquired a partner in crime, a man named Benjamin Pitezel. This may seem out of character; but in fact, Holmes planned to murder Pitezel from the beginning. Their first joint venture in crime landed Holmes in jail for the first time. He bought a drug store in St Louis, mortgaged the stock, then let Pitezel remove it. He spent ten days in jail before being bailed out by his current ‘wife’, a girl named Georgiana Yoke. It was in prison that Holmes met the famous train-robber, Marion Hedgepeth, and confided in him that he had worked out a perfect insurance swindle. It involved insuring a man’s life, getting him ‘killed’ in an accidental explosion, and substituting another body for that of the victim. Hedgepath gave Holmes the name of a crooked lawyer to deal with the insurance company, and Holmes promised to give him five hundred dollars if the plan was successful.
In August 1894, the police were called to a house in Philadelphia where a body had been discovered; it was that of a man who had apparently died in an explosion involving chloroform. The corpse was, in fact, Pitezel. Holmes was the beneficiary, and the insurance company paid up ten thousand dollars. But he failed to pay either Hedgepeth or the crooked lawyer. Hedgepeth denounced Holmes; the insurance company realised they had been defrauded, and Holmes was suddenly a wanted man.
In fact, Holmes was engaged in disposing of the rest of Pitezel’s family, Mrs Pitezel and her five children. He had somehow persuaded Mrs Pitezel to allow him to take three of the children to ‘join their father’. Fortunately, he was located while Mrs Pitezel and two of the children were still alive. He was taken back to Philadelphia, where a post mortem had revealed that Pitezel had died of chloroform poisoning. A detective named Geyer succeeded in tracking down the remains of the three missing children, two girls in Toronto – buried in a cellar – and the nine-year-old boy in a house near Indianapolis, where only a few charred bones were left.
After he had been sentenced to death, Holmes published a full confession of his murders – twenty-seven in all. This is so horrifying that it has been suggested that the confession was partly fabricated – although Holmes had made no attempt to suggest he was insane and it is difficult to imagine any other motive. Moreover, where it was possible to check, the confession was found to be accurate. He claimed to have starved the janitor to death in the ‘vault’; in fact, bricks had been torn from the wall by someone attempting to dig his way out. He claimed that Nannie Williams had marked the door of the vault by kicking it in her death struggles; this footprint was found. He claimed that he had killed Pitezel by tying him up and burning him alive with benzine, in spite of his screams for mercy; the injuries were consistent with this, and since the later inquest showed that Pitezel had died from chloroform poisoning, they must have been inflicted before death. Holmes declared in his confession that he committed his crimes ‘for the pleasure of killing my fellow beings, to hear their cries for mercy and pleas to be allowed even sufficient time to pray…’ Instruments of torture were found in the ‘castle’, including a rack, barrels of acid, a dissecting table and surgical knives. One room had been lined with asbestos, and the gas pipe that entered it seemed to be designed as a kind of blow torch.
What seems clear is that, unlike Pieydagnelle, Baker or Pomeroy (see the next chapter), Holmes was not a born sadist. He seems to have spent eight years in practice in New York state, living with his wife and child and behaving perfectly normally. He was a petty swindler, no more. He became a mass murderer and torturer by slow degrees. His only ‘abnormality’ during the early stage is his appetite for women, and it seems probable that the peepholes in the rooms of the ‘castle’ were constructed with a view to voyeurism – during the Chicago Exhibition of 1880 he had many female guests.
Oddly enough, Holmes became convinced that his increasing callousness was accompanied by increasing physical degeneracy – he was obviously acquainted with the now-discredited theories of Cesare Lombroso, who postulated the existence of a criminal ‘type’ distinguishable from a normal man. He was also convinced of a theory that has been revived in our own time: that the two sides of the face reflect different aspects of the character, the left reflecting the ‘natural’ character and the right the ‘acquired’. This means that if a mirror is placed down the centre of a photograph of a face, and a photograph taken of the two left halves, it should have a different character from a similar photograph taken of two right halves. (In an early issue of The Criminologist – November 1966 – Nigel Morland printed two such photographs of the mass murderer Peter Manuel, and the difference between them is startling.) Holmes was convinced that one side of his face – and body – had developed various signs of ‘degeneracy’, a comment that David Franke in The Torture Doctor (New York, 1975) takes to be an indication of ‘the primitive state of the science of criminology in 1886’ (p. 183). But a photograph of Holmes reveals that the two sides of his face are quite different, and that it is the right that looks degenerate – the side that is governed by the left cerebral hemisphere, the ego. Holmes speaks of ‘the malevolent distortion of one side of my face and of one eye – so marked and terrible that… Hall Caine [a contemporary novelist]… described that side of my face as marked by a deep line of crime and being that of a devil…’
Like Jack the Ripper, Holmes is a kind of grim landmark in social history. But his sadism was far more cold and calculated than that of the Ripper. Why, then, has he never aroused the same horrified fascination as the Whitechapel killer? The answer is partly, of course, that the Ripper was never caught, so we are free to fantasise him into a monster. But it is also because Holmes’s contemporaries failed to grasp his motivations. The account of the case in Thomas S. Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910) – the American equivalent of the Newgate Calendar – treats him as a swindler who murdered for money. The confession was disregarded – Holmes had already made one lengthy confession in which he insisted that he was innocent of murder, and the second was considered just as untrustworthy. Later writers on the case have been inclined to believe he exaggerated his ‘wickedness’ to make it more saleable to the newspapers. But we have seen other cases in which a criminal who has been sentenced takes pleasure in describing his crimes in detail. The whole point of such a confession is that he enjoys telling the precise truth, without excuses or exaggeration.