Depraved Read online

  Even so, he kept as quiet as possible as he crept up to the second-floor landing. Peering into the front bedroom, he could see Pitezel, still fully clothed, sprawled faceup on the cot.

  Reaching into the left pocket of his suit jacket, Holmes pulled out one of his oversize handkerchiefs and tied it around his head, so that it hung below his eyes like the bandannas worn by Marion Hedgepeth and other Western road agents. But the purpose of Holmes’s mask was not to conceal his identity.

  It was to protect him from the fumes.

  From his opposite pocket, he withdrew another handkerchief, this one wrapped around a smooth, cylindrical object. He unrolled the object from the cloth. It was a small chemist’s bottle filled with clear liquid.

  Uncorking the bottle, he held his hands away from his body and saturated the handkerchief with the liquid.

  Then, stealing into the shuttered room, he stepped to the bedside and bent to Benjamin Pitezel’s face.

  18

  From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

  Eager to learn if Mr. Perry had managed to drum up any interest in his invention, Eugene Smith returned to 1316 Callowhill on Monday afternoon, September 3. As he approached the building, he saw that the front door was closed, but when he climbed the concrete stoop and tried the knob, he found the office unlocked. He pushed open the door and stepped inside

  A strange air of vacancy hung about the place. The room felt lifeless and musty, as though Perry had shut down his office for the weekend and had not yet gotten around to reopening it, though the time was already well past noon. The silence in the house seemed palpable. Mr. Perry was nowhere to be seen.

  Smith stood in the center of the floor and, at the top of his voice, called out the patent dealer’s name.

  Receiving no reply, he decided that Perry must have stepped out for a moment—perhaps to the saloon where the two men had enjoyed a drink the previous week. Smith pulled up one of the chairs and seated himself.

  Glancing around the room, he saw Perry’s hat and a pair of cuffs hanging from a big nail in the rear hallway. Perry’s chair had been moved away from his desk and stood, awkwardly angled, in a corner of the room. Otherwise there was nothing to notice about the office, except, perhaps, its complete lack of detail or character.

  Smith crossed his legs, folded his hands in his lap, and waited.

  About ten minutes later, a stranger entered—a sharp-featured man dressed in a black suit and carrying a black bag in one hand. The man had a full black beard and thick, black eyebrows that grew together above his nose. Smith decided that the man was a Jew.

  “Is the boss in?” asked the stranger.

  Smith shook his head. “I expect he’ll be back promptly. Take a seat.”

  The black-suited man declined the offer. He glanced around the room for a moment, then, consulting his pocket watch, announced that he had no time to wait. He nodded to Smith and left.

  Smith remained seated for a few more minutes, then rose with a sigh and walked to the door.

  As he stepped into the sunlight, closing the door behind him, Smith—though in no way alarmed—felt the first inklings of concern. It seemed odd to him that Perry would simply walk away from his office in the middle of the day without even bothering to lock up.

  Smith was back by nine the next morning. The front door was still closed, just as he had left it. He knocked and pressed an ear to the wood, listening intently.

  Silence. He put his hand to the knob and turned. The door was still unlocked.

  Inside, the office was exactly as it had been the previous afternoon. The chairs stood in precisely the same positions. Perry’s hat and cuffs still hung from the nail. Smith didn’t know what to think. He walked slowly to the chair he had occupied the day before and lowered himself onto the seat.

  “Mr. Perry,” he shouted.

  In the unfinished office, his call echoed slightly, then faded into absolute silence.

  Apprehension began to stir inside him. He halloed again, even louder. When his call went unanswered again he decided something was wrong.

  Rising, he walked over to the foot of the stairwell.

  He hesitated for a moment, peering upstairs. He listened hard for some living sound. But the house seemed completely deserted. An unpleasant smell drifted down from above. Slowly, Smith ascended the narrow staircase.

  As he approached the top of the stairs, he could see a bedroom straight ahead. He paused on the landing and peered into the room. He could see an empty cot with some bedclothes on it. Otherwise the room seemed vacant.

  The stench was much thicker up there, though Smith could not identify its source. He turned to look behind him.

  And froze.

  On the floor of the rear bedroom lay a body with its feet toward the unshuttered window and its head to the door. Its face was blackened and swollen. Smith needed only a single glance at the ghastly figure to realize that he was looking at a corpse.

  Rushing from the building, he burst onto the street and ran for the Buttonwood stationhouse.

  19

  When death puts out your flame, the snuff will tell, if we were wax or tallow by the smell.

  —Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

  Dr. William Scott, who ran a little pharmacy on the ground floor of his residence at Thirteenth and Vine, had just opened shop for the day when Officer Billy Sauer strode into the store. A dead man had been discovered that morning at 1316 Callowhill Street, the policeman explained. From the evidence, it appeared that the victim had been killed in an explosion. Would Dr. Scott mind stepping over to the address and examining the remains?

  Steeling himself for a grisly sight, the doctor followed Sauer a few blocks over to the faded little building, then up the narrow stairway and into the back room. Two men hovered over the prostrate corpse—a second police officer and a scrawny fellow in laborer’s clothes, who stood with a handkerchief clamped over his nose. Dr. Scott fished out his hankie and held it to his face as he entered the room. Even so, he nearly gagged at the stench. But when he took a closer look at the corpse, a few things struck him as peculiar.

  True, the face was in a putrid state—the skin dark and oozing, the thick tongue protruding, a noxious red fluid seeping out of the mouth. But instead of shattered limbs and mangled flesh—the mutilations one expected in a blast victim—the body was not only intact but stretched out neatly, almost ceremoniously, on the floor.

  Stiff and straight, legs together, the dead man lay flat on his back, left arm extended at his side. His right arm, bent at the elbow, rested across his chest, the hand cupped over his rigid heart.

  It almost seemed as though the man had passed away peacefully in his sleep. On the other hand, the body had clearly been charred by flames. The breast of his shirt was partly burned, as were his mustache and goatee, left eyebrow, and forelock. From the look of things, it seemed as though a sudden fire had flashed over his head and chest.

  Other evidence, too, pointed to an explosion. Beside his head lay a burned wooden match, a corncob pipe packed with singed tobacco, and a broken bottle of red fluid. A row of identical bottles—all uncorked, all containing a pungent blend of liquid chemicals—was aligned on the fireplace mantel.

  As Scott knelt beside the corpse for a closer examination, Officer Sauer proposed a theory. While lighting his pipe, the deceased had carelessly struck the match too close to the bottles, whose contents—judging by the smell—consisted of a volatile mix of benzine, chloroform, and ammonia. The flame had ignited the chemical fumes, touching off the fatal explosion.

  It seemed feasible, but the closer Dr. Scott looked, the larger his doubts grew. If Sauer’s scenario were correct, the corncob pipe would surely have been damaged by the blast. Almost certainly, it would have gone flying across the room. But in fact the pipe stood perfectly unscathed and upright a few inches from the corpse’s head, as though it had been neatly placed th
ere. Moreover, the broken chemical bottle looked as though it had been dropped, not shattered by an explosion.

  Still, Scott did not have a better explanation at the moment. In any case, his attention was now fully focused on the corpse.

  Death had blighted the features, though the scrawny working man—who introduced himself through his handkerchief as Eugene Smith, a business associate of B. F. Perry’s and the one who had discovered the tragedy—confirmed that the clothing, hair color, and general stature of the corpse matched those of the patent dealer. Gazing down at the blackened face, with its singed wisp of goatee, Scott suddenly recollected that he himself had met Perry on a previous occasion. About a month earlier, a sullen-looking stranger who introduced himself as a new arrival to the neighborhood had come into Scott’s pharmacy to make a small purchase. For some reason, one particular detail—the little tuft of hair sprouting from the man’s chin—had stuck in Scott’s mind.

  Undoing the clothing of the dead man, Scott noted that, compared to the lower body, the upper torso and head were in a far more putrescent state. Here, too, Scott was struck by the arrangement of the corpse, which lay facing the open window. The shutters had been angled in such a way that, for much of the day, sunlight bathed the body from the waist up, accelerating the decay.

  Sighing, Dr. Scott rose to his feet. There was nothing more he could do. It was time to transport the corpse to the coroner’s lab for a formal autopsy—not much of a trip since, as Scott and the police officers knew very well, the city morgue was located only a few yards away. Indeed, the window of the room overlooked the morgue.

  To Scott and the others, this seemed a grim coincidence. But the proximity of the morgue suggested something else, too. As foul as the stench from Perry’s body was, the smell would not immediately have alerted the neighbors to his death. Wafting through the open window and up the chimney, the fetor was largely camouflaged by the death stink from the morgue.

  If it hadn’t been for Smith, the corpse might have lain there for a much longer period. Eventually it would undoubtedly have been discovered—but not until its features were thoroughly decomposed.

  The autopsy took place that afternoon, the corpse having been stored for the interim in the cold house. Coroner’s physician William Mattern conducted the postmortem, with two colleagues—morgue superintendent Benjamin and his assistant, Thomas Robinson—attending. Dr. Scott, who by now had developed a keen interest in the case, was also present as a witness (or “sight-seer,” as he put it), jotting down notes of the proceedings in a book he had brought along for that purpose.

  Mattern began by noting the disfiguration of the face through mortification. The teeth, which were in strikingly poor condition (“unkempt” was Mattern’s description), were examined for irregularities. The corpse’s hair was black and just starting to thin, with the front “combed pompadour” and a cowlick sticking out on the left. The only other distinguishing features were the small, “stumpy” mustache and the wispy goatee.

  Opening the skull, Mattern found a normal brain, free of any congestion. Next, he removed the heart. It was empty of any blood. “Paralysis of the heart,” Dr. Scott wrote to Mattern’s dictation. “Indication—sudden death.”

  The lungs were highly congested and full of blood, the liver and spleen similarly engorged. A glance at the kidneys revealed that Perry had been a man who, as Dr. Scott noted, “never refused a drink when he had a chance to take it.” The kidneys were nephritic or “pig-black,” a condition characteristic of alcoholics.

  Though the stomach was empty of food, it contained a significant quantity—perhaps an ounce or two—of a fluid that proved, through smell and taste, to be chloroform. The lungs, too, gave off the unmistakable odor of chloroform.

  The involuntary muscles of the excretory organs had relaxed at the moment of death, causing a spontaneous evacuation of both bladder and bowels.

  Mattern took note of one more detail. While flames had clearly singed Perry’s right arm—the one found resting on his chest—there were no burn marks at all on the axilla or underside of the arm, the part lying against the body. To the coroner, this could only mean one thing—that (as Scott recorded in his notebook) “the burning had been done after the arm had been placed on the breast.”

  Mattern’s conclusion—presented at the inquest that was held the following day—was that B. F. Perry had died of chloroform poisoning. The police, however, held firmly to their theory of death by explosion.

  In the end, the jurymen rendered a verdict that covered a range of possibilities—that Perry had died from “congestion of the lungs, caused by the inhalation of flame, or of chloroform, or other poisonous drug.” The ultimate question—whether his death was due to accident, suicide, or foul play—was left open.

  And that was how matters stood on Wednesday, September 5. News of the mysterious death of the equally mysterious B. F. Perry—whose body was returned to the cold house, where, according to local practice, it would be stored for eleven days, awaiting a claimant—appeared first in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The story was quickly picked up by the wire services, which sent out a squib to newspapers in all the major cities—including, of course, St. Louis.

  20

  A violent man enticeth his neighbor…

  moving his lips he bringeth evil to pass.

  —Proverbs 16: 29, 30

  At first, she had prayed that the plan would be scuttled—that Benny would come to his senses, or that Holmes, realizing the risks, would lose his stomach for the scheme. But as the summer went by, she saw that they meant to go through with it.

  For weeks, she had been scanning the papers, expecting the news any day. Even so, it came as a shock when the story actually appeared—a single column in the September 6 issue of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, reporting the death of a Philadelphia patent dealer named B. F. Perry, killed under peculiar circumstances.

  It was not that she believed the article. Benny had assured her that the news of his death would be false. What appalled her was the enormity of the fraud and the terrible peril and shame to which her husband had exposed them. If Benny was caught, it was not only he who would suffer but she and the children as well.

  The weeks of strain and uncertainty had taken their toll on her health. For days she had been suffering from blinding migraines and bouts of nervous prostration. But she could not afford to be sick. As it was, she and the children were barely getting enough to eat.

  Through the wall that separated the kitchen from the tiny bedroom that all five children shared, she could hear a muffled, croupy cough. Little Wharton, less than a year old, had been ill for a week. But she had no money for a doctor. Before setting off for Philadelphia, Benny had provided her with some living expenses, but the meager funds had run out in mid-August. Since then, she had been forced to rely on whatever menial jobs she could find—laundry, mending, and the like.

  In all her life, she could not remember ever feeling more frightened, alone, and confused.

  Seated at the kitchen table, she started to read the story again, but her vision dissolved in a sudden blur of tears. Dropping the paper onto the table, she covered her face with her hands and surrendered herself to her misery.

  The sound of her sobs brought the older children running. Huddling around her chair, they stroked her quaking shoulders and asked if she was sick. It was then that Alice glanced down at the newspaper and spotted B. F. Perry’s name, which she recognized at once. She had seen it on the envelopes that her mama mailed off every week to Philadelphia.

  “It’s Papa,” she cried. “He’s dead, he’s dead!”

  Her siblings stood dumbstruck for a moment, then broke into a tearful clamor. Even Dessie joined in the general outburst, having completely forgotten the evening, several months earlier, when her father had staggered into the kitchen and mumbled something cryptic about his death.

  At that instant, someone pounded on the door. Composing herself as best she could, Carrie rose from her chair and made her
way to the front of the flat.

  Pulling open the door, she found herself face-to-face with H. H. Holmes.

  When Holmes had returned to Mrs. Alcorn’s boardinghouse on Sunday afternoon—five or six hours after departing for his ostensible meeting in the suburban village of Nicetown—he seemed breathless and flushed. Entering the bedroom, he asked Georgiana if she was well enough to travel. Georgiana, who did in fact feel stronger than she had in days, looked curiously at her husband and nodded yes.

  How had the meeting gone? she asked, eyeing him closely. Perspiration dripped from his brow, and when he stripped off his suit jacket and shirt, she could see that his underclothes were soaked.

  “As well as I could have hoped,” he replied without elaborating.

  “Is something wrong, Harry?” Georgiana asked. “You seem so hurried.”

  “Not at all, my dear. The day seemed so splendid that I decided to walk from the depot, and I’m simply a bit winded.”

  While Georgiana arose from the bed and began making preparations to leave, Holmes refreshed himself at the washstand, then donned a clean suit and went downstairs to inform Mrs. Dr. Alcorn of their imminent departure.

  When the landlady asked where they were going, Holmes explained that they would be traveling to Harrisburg to close out the deal with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. He instructed Georgiana to repeat the same tale.

  That night, the two of them bid good-bye to Adella Alcorn, then climbed into a waiting carriage, which carried them to the depot, where they boarded the late train not to Harrisburg but to Indianapolis.

  The overnight trip left Georgiana feeling drained. By the time they arrived in Indianapolis on Monday morning, September 3, she had suffered a setback. Holmes helped her to the nearest lodging, an unprepossessing little hostelry named Stubbins’ European Hotel, located a block from Union Depot.