Depraved Read online

  The urgency of the elder Pitezel’s tone attests to his desperate concern for the spiritual well-being of his namesake. Of his five children, Benjamin, Jr., had turned out to be the prodigal son. Two years earlier, he had seduced eighteen-year-old Carrie Canning of Galva, Illinois—the daughter of a Methodist minister—and gotten her with child. Thanks to a hastily arranged marriage, the baby—a girl named Dessie—had been born in wedlock. But the scandal had brought disgrace on both families.

  Carrie had recently given birth to a second daughter, Etta Alice, and the younger Pitezel was about to resume his responsibilities as head of his own household. His father, understanding both the weight of those responsibilities and the faults in his son’s nature, could only pray for the young man’s reform. Benjamin, Jr., was not insensible of his father’s gift, and the little notebook remained a treasured possession.

  But however appreciative he might have been of the offering, Benjamin Freelon Pitezel was a fully grown man, and his weaknesses of character were far too deeply ingrained to be overcome by even the most fervent of prayers.

  To a stranger, those weaknesses would not have been readily apparent. At twenty-three, Ben Pitezel cut a striking figure. Six feet tall and muscular, he had the broad back and square, calloused hands of a working man. But his features were as fine as those of any highborn hero in a popular romance—clean jaw, straight nose, soft, blue eyes, and sensitive mouth. His hair was thick and raven black, his upper lip adorned with a neatly trimmed mustache. His largest flaw was a warty growth on the back of his neck, just above the top of his shirt collar. It was easy enough to see why a plain-featured girl—even one as piously raised as Carrie Canning—would have succumbed to his blandishments.

  But his wastrel’s life would soon make its mark on his appearance. Already the air of a perennial ne’er-do-well hung about him. His willful disposition was made infinitely worse by his growing fondness for the bottle. In another few years, the drinking and hard living—including the bar fights that would leave him with a broken nose and several missing teeth—would coarsen his features considerably. Though he never entirely lost his good looks, no one would ever again mistake him for a gentleman. Rawboned and surly, he grew to look like what he was—a chronic hard-luck case with a peevish spirit and a shifty intelligence.

  His great redeeming feature was his devotion to his wife and growing brood of children, whose number eventually reached six (though one child, a boy named Nevit Noble, would die of diphtheria just short of his second birthday). But Pitezel’s loyalty to his family was offset by the hardships and grief that his alcoholism brought upon them.

  For ten grinding years, he dragged his family around the Midwest, drifting from job to job, town to town, always in and out of trouble. He earned honest money when he could, but his drinking made it hard for him to hold on to any work for very long. Throughout the 1880s, he was briefly employed as a circus roustabout, a lumbermill hand, a railroad worker, and a janitor. He’d also spent time in various jails for crimes ranging from petty larceny to forgery to horse stealing.

  Exactly when the Pitezels settled in Chicago is unclear, though they must certainly have arrived there no later than the fall of 1889. For hi November of that year, Benjamin answered a help-wanted ad in a local newspaper. Carpenters were needed for a new building in Englewood. The ad instructed applicants to contact Dr. H. H. Holmes.

  No record exists of Pitezel’s first, fateful meeting with Holmes. But surely the latter, with his genius for discerning a potential dupe, must have sized Pitezel up at a glance.

  In later years, Holmes’s cool manipulativeness—his skill at spotting and exploiting the weak points of his victims—would generate a host of wild claims. Countless articles and pamphlets would depict him as a being of nearly supernatural power, possessed of the ability to mesmerize his victims with a single, piercing stare.

  Clearly such assertions were nothing more than sensationalistic claptrap. Nevertheless, it is true that the cunning and charismatic Holmes was remarkably adept at playing upon the vulnerabilities of weaker-willed individuals.

  Pitezel was a case in point. In November of 1889, he hired on as a construction worker for Holmes. But before very long, he found himself performing a host of other, far more questionable activities.

  In the old-fashioned meaning of the word—“one who is actuated by the will of another and is ready to do his bidding”—Benjamin Pitezel became H. H. Holmes’s creature.

  6

  Not by a mountain side, nor on the bank of a rushing river, stands an old and deserted castle; but by the side of a lay of four railroad tracks leading south out of the great city of Chicago … is a castle of modern construction.

  —Robert L. Corbitt, The Holmes Castle (1895)

  Remarkable feats of architecture were nothing new to Chicagoans in the last decades of the nineteenth century. After all, it had taken only a few years for the entire city to rebuild itself from the wreckage of the Great Conflagration. Reconstruction had begun before the ruins had cooled. Six weeks later, the burned-out districts boasted more than two hundred new buildings of brick and stone. By the end of the 1880s, that number had expanded to nearly one hundred thousand, and brilliant young architects such as Louis Henri Sullivan and John Wellborn Root had turned Chicago into an urban showcase—the world’s first city of skyscrapers.

  Even so, the construction taking place at Sixty-third and Wallace streets between the fall of 1888 and the spring of 1890 was impressive enough to arouse the excited interest of the local citizenry.

  It was not the height of the building that made it so notable. Compared to the ten-and twelve-story office towers springing up in the city’s commercial district, the new structure was relatively squat—only three stories tall when completed. But in square footage, the place was imposing, utilizing every inch of the 50-by-162-foot corner lot.

  Moreover, the sheer amount of activity involved in its construction was striking. Neighborhood residents, pausing in their daily rounds to watch the magnificent new edifice taking shape, marveled at the number of laborers who swarmed over the site.

  Strangely, however, the work seemed to progress at a remarkably slow pace. Even allowing for its massive dimensions, the building should not have taken a skilled work crew more than six months to erect. But for seemingly mysterious reasons, a solid year and a half passed between groundbreaking and completion.

  It would have taken an unusually observant onlooker—someone who paid particular attention to the identity of the construction workers—to solve the mystery. Such a person would have noticed that none of the men remained on the job very long. Most of them were fired after a week or two; others lasted only a few days before being replaced.

  By the time the final nail was hammered home and the last coat of paint applied, more than five hundred craftsmen and common laborers had come and gone.

  For all the neighborhood interest in the project, however, no one seemed to notice this extraordinary turnover. Certainly no one could have guessed that it was a deliberate ploy on the part of the building’s owner, architect, general contractor, and construction foreman—Dr. H. H. Holmes.

  Though this endless cycle of hiring and firing slowed construction down by at least a year, it served two important purposes for the devious Dr. Holmes. First, it saved him a significant amount of money in wages. A mason or plumber might put in a full two weeks of work before asking to be paid. As soon as he did, Holmes would accuse him of doing substandard work and sack him on the spot, without forking over a nickel.

  The second purpose was distinctly more sinister. By insuring that each man worked on only a small part of the structure before being replaced, Holmes was able to conceal its overall layout from the world. A carpenter might be fired after erecting a few doorframes, a bricklayer after putting up a single basement wall. As a result, only one man—Holmes himself—had a clear picture of the building’s total design.

  The young doctor’s caution in this regard is understandabl
e, since anyone privy to the floor plans would certainly have questioned Holmes’s architectural qualifications—if not, indeed, his sanity.

  Because the construction site was just across the street from his drugstore, Holmes was able to spend hours each day overseeing the project—dictating orders, issuing demands, and of course, dismissing employees on a regular basis. Neighborhood gawkers witnessed more than one angry scene between the imperious young doctor and embittered workers who had been peremptorily fired for their supposed incompetence. Some of the latter eventually filed suits, which Holmes, with his shyster’s cunning, managed to mire in protracted litigation.

  Those who resorted to more direct physical threats found themselves backing off quickly. Though Holmes was an infinitely more dangerous man than anyone could have guessed at the time, his appearance was not especially intimidating. What gave his enemies pause was the presence of the hard-bitten assistant who seemed to hover constantly at Holmes’s side—Benjamin Pitezel.

  The construction workers cheated of their pay weren’t the only ones who came to regret their dealings with Dr. Holmes. So did the suppliers who provided the new building with its various and often highly peculiar appurtenances.

  There was, for example, the enormous safe—as large as a walk-in bank vault—that Holmes purchased on credit before his building was half-completed. When the vault was delivered, Holmes installed it in a vacant area on the third floor of the building, then constructed a room to contain it, making sure that the doorway was so small that the safe couldn’t possibly pass through. When Holmes, in typical fashion, failed to meet any of his payments, the safe company dispatched a crew to repossess the vault. Holmes offered to let them remove it but warned that if they damaged his building in any way, he would slap the company with a ruinous lawsuit.

  The vault stayed where it was.

  Holmes employed a similar stratagem to acquire the other accoutrements he claimed to require as part of his pharmacological pursuits. These included a massive kiln fitted with a cast-iron door and a grate that slid in and out on rollers; a large zinc tank; an assortment of vats designed to store corrosives such as acid and quicklime; and enough asbestos-covered, sheet-iron plates to line the walls of several rooms.

  For weeks after construction was completed in May 1890, excited crowds gathered to admire the splendid new addition to their neighborhood. Stretching nearly half the length of Wallace Street, the building—with its turreted roof, tessellated cornices, mullioned bay windows, and sham battlements—was indeed an impressive sight, a perfect reflection of its proud and ambitious young owner.

  Of course, the crowds had no way of knowing what the striking facade concealed—any more than they could see behind Dr. Holmes’s admirable exterior, into the bizarre and labyrinthine operations of his mind.

  To be sure, part of the building was open to the public. The first floor consisted of a string of street-level shops, some run by Holmes, others leased to local merchants, who were delighted to do business in such a prime location. In the coming years, thousands of patrons would enter the property. But, limited to ground level, they couldn’t possibly suspect the dire secrets hidden elsewhere in the building—in the depths of the cellar and the dark of the chambers upstairs.

  In addition to Holmes’s private office, with its curving bay window that overlooked Wallace Street, the third floor contained three dozen rooms. The majority of these were unexceptional. Comfortably furnished with beds, bureaus, rocking chairs, rugs, and wall mirrors, they were indistinguishable from the lodgings available in countless hostelries throughout the city. The guests who eventually stayed in these quarters, however, must have found it peculiarly frustrating to locate their rooms, which were strung along a tortuous network of narrow, weirdly angled hallways. Dimly lit by gas jets mounted on the walls at widely spaced intervals, these corridors took strange and unexpected turns, terminating in dead ends, stairways that seemed to lead nowhere, and perpetually locked doors to which only Holmes possessed the key.

  One of these closed-off rooms, adjacent to his office, contained the walk-in bank vault, whose interior had been modified by the addition of a gas pipe. The flow of gas through this conduit was controlled by a cut-off valve concealed inside a closet in Holmes’s sleeping chamber.

  The second floor of the building was even more mazelike than the third. Indeed, its floor plan was similar to the labyrinthine layout of a carnival funhouse, though the hidden surprises it contained were considerably more frightening. Fifty-one doors lined six shadowy corridors, which zigzagged at crazy angles. Behind the doors lay thirty-five rooms, a few fitted up—like the lodgings upstairs—as ordinary bedchambers.

  There was nothing ordinary about the other rooms.

  Some were airtight, lined from floor to ceiling with the asbestos-covered steel plates that Holmes had procured. Others had been soundproofed. Still others were so narrow and low-ceilinged that they were little more than closets.

  Most of the rooms had been rigged with gas pipes connected to the control panel in Holmes’s bedchamber. The doors to these rooms could be locked only from the outside and were equipped with special peepholes that permitted the landlord to keep a close eye on his guests.

  And then there were the other, equally sinister features of the second story—the secret passageways, concealed closets accessible through sliding panels, trapdoors opening up into darkness, and large, greased shafts that led straight to the cellar.

  Cavernous and dank, the brick-walled cellar had the aspect of a Gothic-horror dungeon—a resemblance reinforced by the grim paraphernalia it contained. It was here that Holmes kept his acid tank, quicklime vats, dissecting table, surgeon’s cabinet, and the other gruesome tools of his trade. In years to come, the basement would also house a grotesque contraption dubbed an “elasticity determinator.” According to its inventor—Dr. H. H. Holmes—the apparatus was a technological marvel, whose purpose was to produce “a race of giants” by stretching experimental subjects to twice their normal length.

  To those who viewed it up close, however, the device did not appear to be a miracle of modern technology.

  It appeared to be a medieval torture rack.

  It is impossible to say who first christened the building with its byname. Perhaps it was a neighborhood resident, paying tribute to the imposing look of Holmes’s creation. Or perhaps it was Holmes himself, whose talent for self-promotion matched his grandiose ambitions. Whatever the case, soon after its completion, Englewood’s citizens began referring to the new building as “the Castle.”

  In later years, of course, that name would be modified, and the looming structure at the corner of Wallace and Sixty-third streets would become known to the world by other phrases:

  Bluebeard’s Castle. Murder Castle. Nightmare Castle. The Castle of Horror.

  Ladykiller

  7

  I told you, you must have confidence, unquestioning confidence, I meant confidence in the genuine medicine, and the genuine me.

  —Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

  In June 1890, a month after the completion of his Castle, Holmes put his drugstore up for sale and quickly found a prospective buyer—an enterprising young Michiganite named A. L. Jones, who had come to Chicago with a new wife, a modest inheritance, and a determination to establish himself as a businessman in the hustling city. At Holmes’s invitation, Mr. Jones visited the shop on a prearranged afternoon and was impressed by the constant flow of customers—never realizing that Holmes had ensured an unusually brisk trade by supplementing his regular clientele with hirelings, brought in to make phony purchases.

  At the end of the day, the two men sat down to talk business. Why, Mr. Jones inquired, had Dr. Holmes decided to sell such a thriving enterprise?

  Holmes had anticipated such a question and was ready with a response. It was the very success of the store that now made it impossible for him to continue running it, he explained. The profits he had reaped during the past few years had permitted him to ex
pand into other activities, which now required his complete attention. With Holmes’s departure from the business, Jones would have the neighborhood all to himself.

  A bargain was struck. The purchase price amounted to Mr. Jones’s entire patrimony, but the young man had little doubt that the investment would soon repay itself. In July 1890, the drugstore originally established by Dr. E. S. Holton changed hands once again.

  A few weeks later, a large, horse-drawn delivery truck pulled up in front of Holmes’s Castle, just across the street from the little drugstore. As its new owner and his young wife watched with mounting confusion, workmen began uncrating a load of elegant store fixtures—glass-fronted display cases, rich, dark-wood cabinets, marble-topped counters—and hauling them through the semihexagonal entranceway of the vacant corner store of the Castle.

  Before long, a magnificent wooden sign, carved in the shape of a mortar and pestle, hung over the entranceway. Glittering gold letters in the center of the ivory-painted icon proclaimed H. H. HOLMES PHARMACY.

  The interior of the store did justice to the splendor of the sign. Stepping out of the hectic street, a customer would first pass by a massive column supporting the arched ceiling of the entranceway. Overhead, a dazzling Catherine-wheel design seemed to radiate from the Corinthian capital of the pillar. Moving into the store proper, the visitor’s eyes would be dazzled by the frescoed stucco work that graced the ceiling and walls; by the black-and-white diamonds that tiled the floor; by the marbled elegance of the countertops; by the brassy shine of the soda fountain spigots; and by the sparkling elixirs that filled the glass cases and lined the walnut shelves.

  Holmes’s handsome new pharmacy—which soon became a neighborhood showplace—made his old store seem as dingy as a cowshed. It didn’t take long before the hapless Jones was compelled to close up shop and return to his native village, a ruined man.