Depraved Page 5

  But, while business was good for Holmes, the Castle required a great deal of upkeep, and even with the money from his tenants, his income proved inadequate for his desires. Living at a time—“The Age of Excess,” as it is sometimes called—when the millionaire entrepreneur was the cultural ideal, he lusted for the fortune that he believed was his due.

  In the fall of 1890, Holmes was already thirty years old, no longer a particularly young man by the measure of the day. Rapacious by nature, he became increasingly obsessed by money, embarking on a frantic series of commercial ventures. On the ground floor of the Castle, he opened and managed a string of businesses—a jewelry store, a restaurant, a barbershop. He manufactured glycerin soap and invested in a duplicating device called the ABC Copier, a forerunner of the modern-day mimeograph.

  That Holmes failed to make his million from these varied enterprises was undoubtedly due to the deformities of his character. Though he possessed all of the attributes that should have guaranteed his success—abundant energy, creativity, ingenuity, and drive—he was undone by his psychopathology.

  Dissatisfied with the revenues from his legitimate ventures, he embarked on a series of brazen swindles that revealed the icy underlying arrogance—distinctive of psychopaths—concealed beneath his personable exterior.

  There was the time, for example, when Holmes announced that he had invented a revolutionary machine for manufacturing cheap illuminating gas from tap water. Attracting the interest of a group of Canadian investors, Holmes invited the men to the Castle, where he led them down to a remote corner of the cellar, sequestered from the dungeonlike surroundings by a high wooden partition.

  Within this enclosure stood Holmes’s marvelous Chemical-Water Gas Generator. To one skeptical observer, the bizarre-looking contraption—a small iron tank sprouting a tangle of pipes, shutoff valves, and pressure gauges—resembled “a washing machine on stilts.”

  Unscrewing a metal cap, Holmes dumped a cupful of water down the spout, added some scoops of mysterious chemicals, turned a few valves, adjusted a knob here and there. An instant later, gas spewed from a vent. With a flourish, Holmes struck a match, held it to the jetting gas, and the little enclosure was aglow with light.

  The excited investors immediately agreed to purchase the patent from Holmes for nearly $10,000. It wasn’t until the Chicago Gas Company got wind of the device and sent an inspector to the Castle that the ruse was uncovered. A little pipe, cleverly concealed at the rear of the contraption, disappeared beneath the floor of the Castle and led straight to a public gas main. Holmes had simply tapped into the city supply.

  For unknown reasons, the gas company decided not to prosecute, though workmen did confiscate the machine, leaving Holmes with a sizable hole in his cellar floor. But in his own aberrant way, Holmes was a visionary. Staring down at the excavation, he was struck with an inspiration.

  Within days, the H. H. Holmes Pharmacy featured a new product—Linden Grove Mineral Water, an elixir presumably pumped from an artesian well that Dr. Holmes had bored in the basement of his Castle. Holmes peddled the potion for five cents a glass, two bits a bottle.

  The revivifying liquid proved highly popular with Holmes’s customers, who never guessed that they were drinking ordinary tap water doctored with a dash of vanilla extract and a soupçon of bitters.

  Even so, they might have counted themselves lucky to be cheated in this way. Vanilla-flavored snake oil was one of Holmes’s more harmless concoctions. Previous patrons—such as the unfortunate young Philadelphia woman whose tragic death had necessitated his flight from that city back in 1884—had ingested far worse.

  And there were many more victims still to come—men and especially women who would have been happy to lose nothing more than their money to the man they knew as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes.

  Only a month or so after the gas company carted away his bogus invention, Holmes came across a newspaper article that described an innovative process for bending plate glass, patented by a man named Warner.

  Shortly thereafter, Holmes appeared at the downtown office of a firm that manufactured oil-burning furnaces. Holmes explained to the manager that he was about to embark on a glass-bending venture, but before he could do so, the kiln in the basement of his office building required modification, since it did not generate the requisite heat.

  A few days later, a mechanic was dispatched to the Castle and ushered downstairs where, in a remote corner of the basement, the kiln hulked in the shadows. In the course of a long day’s work, the mechanic installed a new burner inside the kiln and hooked it to a large oil tank in the alley. At full blast, the kiln was now capable of reaching a temperature of three thousand degrees.

  Certainly that was hot enough to bend plate glass. What struck the mechanic as peculiar, however, were the dimensions of the kiln, whose inner chamber, constructed of fire brick, measured three feet high, three feet wide, and eight feet long. A slight man, he had been able to work inside the furnace without any trouble—indeed, it seemed a perfect size for a human being. But it couldn’t possibly accommodate a very large sheet of plate glass.

  The next day at work, he shared this observation with his supervisor. The kiln just didn’t seem very practical for commercial purposes, he reflected. Not unless—and here the two men laughed at the absurdity of the thought—Dr. Holmes was planning to operate a crematory.

  8

  “Alas, poor child,” replied the old woman, “whither have you come? You are in a murderer’s den. You think you are a bride soon to be married, but you will keep your wedding with death.”

  —Grimm, “The Robber Bridegroom”

  Full-figured and nearly six feet tall, Julia Smythe would undoubtedly seem buxom by modern standards: handsome rather than beautiful. But the feminine ideal of her day—epitomized by the statuesque “Gibson girl”—was considerably more fleshy. In the eyes of her contemporaries, the eighteen-year-old grocer’s daughter, with her thick chestnut hair and frank green eyes, was a strikingly lovely person.

  An uncommonly clever one, too. Even as a child, she was known for her quickness. “Pretty as a picture,” the folks in Davenport would say of her. “And sharp as a tack.” By the time she was thirteen, she was already keeping the books in her father’s store.

  Beauty, brains, ambition—Julia had been blessed with all three. Everyone who knew her predicted a great future for the girl and wondered what sort of husband she would settle on.

  She could certainly have had the pick of the crop. From the moment she reached marriageable age, she was besieged with suitors. Julia enjoyed their attentions and responded with a free-and-easy friendliness that earned her a reputation, among certain backbiting acquaintances, as a shameless flirt. But most of the townsfolk took a far more generous view of her character.

  There was nothing coquettish about Julia Smythe, they declared. She was simply a healthy, bright, high-spirited girl who took pleasure in male company. The fellow who finally persuaded her to become his wife would obviously have to be somebody special—a man whose intelligence, determination, and spunk were, at the very least, the equal of her own.

  And so, when the news got around town in early 1880 that Julia Smythe had become engaged to Icilius T. Conner, the reactions ranged from bafflement to outright shock.

  A native of Muscatine, Iowa, the twenty-year-old Conner—known since boyhood by his nickname, Ned—had drifted into Davenport several years earlier. A jeweler and watchmaker by trade, he had set himself up in a small shop on Main Street from which he eked out a meager living.

  Few customers ventured into the store. The problem wasn’t Ned’s skill as a watchmaker; he was a capable enough craftsman. But the shop itself seemed hopelessly glum, from its dingy display window—in which a pair of gold-plated pocket watches dangled forlornly—to its cramped, dusty interior. A sad, shabby air seemed to hang about the place. It hung about the proprietor, too. Though no one ever accused Ned of laziness, he did not impress people as a young man of much promise. W
ith his mousy appearance and diffident manner, he seemed like a person predestined—in spite of his hard work and perseverance—for failure.

  Exactly what the radiant young woman saw in him was a mystery to her family and friends. Everyone admitted that Ned had a sweetness about him. But then, so did a dish of milk toast. Folks had just naturally assumed that Julia would want someone with a bit more fiber.

  Julia’s mother and father—in spite of their disappointment, even dismay, at her choice—thought it best not to voice their reservations. Parental objection, they knew, would only cause their headstrong daughter to dig in her heels. So they held their tongues and silently prayed that Julia would come to her senses before the wedding day arrived.

  Their prayers went unanswered. In the summer of 1880, Julia Louise Smythe became Mrs. Ned Conner.

  The marriage was troubled from the start. Perhaps Julia had dreamed that—with her at his side to inspire, assist, and advise him—her husband would blossom into a successful tradesman. If so, she quickly discovered how mistaken she was. Ned remained hopelessly inept at business affairs. Money barely trickled in.

  Her disappointment deepened into contempt. When she spoke to him, her voice had a cutting edge, which Ned tried his best to ignore. He did, however, grow increasingly resentful over the warm, friendly way she continued to treat other men. Alone, they would retreat into a charged, angry silence, broken only by a few bitter words. When this simmering tension reached the boiling point, they would break into violent, sometimes public, quarrels.

  Though Julia’s parents had foreseen her unhappiness, they could not condone a divorce. Their daughter would have to live with her mistake and make the best of the situation. They did what they could to smooth things over between the youngsters. For a while, the marriage seemed to go better. Then in the fall of 1882, Julia discovered that she was pregnant. Everyone hoped that the baby would bring the couple closer together.

  Unfortunately, the child was stillborn. The tragedy added more strain to the relationship. Soon afterward, Ned and Julia packed up and left Davenport, seeking a fresh start for both their business and their marriage. Over the next seven years, they lived in half a dozen towns in Iowa and Illinois—Columbus Junction, Muscatine, Bradford, and others. In each place, the same pattern of hopeful expectation, gradual disappointment, and ultimate failure repeated itself.

  In 1887, Julia gave birth again, this time to a healthy girl she and her husband named Pearl. Two years later—having failed to make a go of yet another small-town jewelry store—Julia and Ned came to a momentous decision. Though both of them were leery of cities, they resolved to try their luck in the place that seemed to hold out the last, best hope for success—Chicago.

  Ned had no trouble finding a job in a downtown jewelry shop, but his wages were pathetically small—barely enough for his family to subsist on. And then, sometime in late 1890, a sudden opportunity presented itself.

  Precisely how Ned came to learn of this opening is unclear. According to certain accounts, he came upon it in a newspaper classified. According to others, he was apprised of the position by a business acquaintance. Whatever the case, one fact is indisputable—shortly after his arrival in Chicago, Ned Conner learned that a gentleman named H. H. Holmes was seeking a qualified manager for a jewelry shop he owned in a building located at Wallace and Sixty-third streets in Englewood.

  Attired in his fanciest clothing, Ned traveled out to the suburb the very next day to meet Dr. Holmes. The interview proved satisfactory to both parties. Ned was offered the manager’s job at a weekly salary of twelve dollars, plus room and board for himself and his family. He accepted without hesitation.

  And so it was that, in November 1890, Ned, Julia, and baby Pearl took up residence in the third floor of Dr. Holmes’s Castle.

  What happened within the next few months was, if not inevitable, then at least unsurprising. Julia Conner was a warm-blooded woman married to a man she despised. Compared to her ineffectual husband, Holmes was a dashing figure—a bold, dynamic businessman, dapper and glib. And the constant presence of the splendid young woman must have been an irresistible temptation to Holmes.

  No one can say exactly when Julia became Holmes’s mistress, though it is certain that the two were lovers by March 1891.

  It is a mark of Ned’s haplessness that he did not foresee the affair—particularly given the scandal that preceded it, involving his younger sister, Gertrude.

  Eager to see the big city for the first time, the naive eighteen-year-old Gertie had come to visit her older brother shortly after he began working at the Castle. Dark-haired and lovely, she instantly caught the eye of Dr. Holmes. Soon thereafter, he declared his infatuation, volunteering to divorce his wife, Myrta, and take Gertie east with him to live. Shocked at the doctor’s impropriety she hastened back to Muscatine, though not before informing Ned of Holmes’s proposition.

  Soon after his failure with Gertie, Holmes focused his attention on Julia, who proved far more receptive. Before long, Holmes had fired his drugstore cashier—an efficient but plain-featured young woman named Dietz—and installed Julia in her place. Holmes and Julia made little effort to conceal their intimacy, which became an open secret among the drugstore regulars.

  Ned alone seemed oblivious of the affair, although given his jealous bent, it was more likely that he turned a willfully blind eye on his wife’s infidelity. Perhaps—having found status and contentment for the first time in his career—he was afraid to jeopardize his position as the manager of Holmes’s thriving shop. In the end, however, even he could not ignore the situation—particularly after several ostensibly well-meaning acquaintances took him aside one day to alert him of his wife’s scandalous behavior.

  Forced into an ugly confrontation with Julia, Ned demanded that she break off her relationship with Holmes at once, threatening to leave her unless she complied. When she flatly refused, Ned had no choice.

  In March 1891, he moved out of the third-floor flat, spending the first night sleeping downstairs on the floor of Holmes’s barbershop. Soon afterward, he took an apartment downtown and secured a new job at the H. Purdy Company.

  For a few months, hoping that she would finally come to her senses, he kept in close touch with his wife and their child. When it finally became apparent that she had no intention of ending her affair, he sued for divorce.

  A few weeks later, Ned left Chicago to start his life anew. Eventually, he would take another wife and open a series of small-town jewelry shops, whose successive and predictable failure never seemed to discourage him from trying yet again.

  Long before Ned Conner remarried, however, Holmes had grown tired of Julia.

  Strong-willed and ambitious, Julia had no intention of being relegated to the role of Holmes’s kept woman. She regarded herself as his partner, not his concubine, and insisted on taking a more active part in his affairs. She wanted Holmes to make her his bookkeeper and to send her to a local business college so that she could master the intricacies of accounting. Holmes agreed to both proposals.

  By then, however, he had already resolved to rid himself of Julia. Her purposeful, independent spirit—so refreshingly different, at first, from the meek submissiveness of the other women he had known—had grown tiresome to him. He was also unhappy about her deepening involvement in his affairs. But most galling of all was a development that occurred sometime in November 1891, when Julia announced that she was pregnant and expected Holmes to marry her.

  Evidence suggests that, when Holmes refused, Julia reminded him of how much she already knew about a number of his more questionable dealings. Holmes got the point. He agreed to divorce Myrta and marry Julia—but only on one condition.

  He already had a child by Myrta—a two-year-old daughter named Lucy, to whom he paid periodic visits. And, of course, in marrying Julia, he would be adopting little Pearl as his own. He was not prepared to assume any additional burdens.

  He would make Julia his wife, he declared. But only if she agreed t
o a voluntary abortion. He would perform it himself.

  Julia was initially horrified at the idea, though Holmes finally won her over, assuring her that the procedure was perfectly safe. He had performed it many times during his medical school days in Ann Arbor, on behalf of fellow students who had gotten local girls pregnant.

  Holmes thought it best to proceed at once, though Julia kept finding reasons to delay. Finally, they agreed on a date—December 24, Christmas Eve, 1891.

  Holmes spent several hours late that afternoon making his preparations in the basement, where the operation was to take place. By sunset, Julia was in a state of such extreme agitation that she could not bring herself to put Pearl to bed.

  Holmes offered to do it.

  Leaving Julia huddled in a chair in his bedchamber—a knitted shawl thrown over her shoulders—Holmes proceeded down the dim-lit hallway to the little apartment Pearl and Julia shared.

  Before he reached the apartment, however, he stopped at his office, where he removed a bottle of colorless liquid and a cotton cloth from a locked drawer in his desk.

  Fifteen minutes later, he returned to his bedchamber. Pearl had gone right to sleep, he assured Julia. He was sure she wouldn’t awaken anytime soon.

  Then, putting an arm about the shivering woman, he led her to a hidden staircase whose existence she had never suspected and ushered her down to the murk of the cellar, where his subterranean laboratory awaited.

  9

  But woe to the riches and skill thus obtained,

  Woe to the wretch that would injure the dead,

  And woe to his portion whose fingers are stained

  With the red drops of life that he cruelly shed.

  —Anonymous, Ballad on William Burke

  In January 1892, H. H. Holmes discovered that one of his employees—a machinist named Charles M. Chappell—possessed a highly specialized skill: mounting human skeletons.