Darkest Waters (True Crime Box Set): Notorious USA by Katherine Ramsland

Author:Katherine Ramsland [Ramsland, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notorious USA
Published: 2014-09-11T23:00:00+00:00

PSYCHOPATH

IT WAS AN INSURANCE SCAM THAT UNCOVERED THE MONSTER. The year was 1895. It started in Philadelphia, but the bulk of the crimes had occurred in Chicago. This story has been told many times, most notably in Eric Larson’s Devil in the White City. I’ve written it as a short e-book, Psychopath, in order to offer and updated neuroscientific explanation of this type of predator. Still, it’s impossible to have a collection of true crime in Illinois without including the fiendish H. H. Holmes. He’s a central character.

If only Holmes had stayed true to the bargain he’d made with former cellmate Marion Hedgepeth, he might have continued to get away with murder, as he had done for years. However, for psychopaths, there’s little honor among thieves. They’re true to themselves alone, and Holmes was greedy.

He’d been born Herman Webster Mudgett, so it’s no surprise that he changed his name. To accomplish his goals of self-enrichment, he needed to be suave, and Mudgett just didn’t cut it. Holmes duped plenty of people, but he managed to operate under the radar, for the most part, until he talked his business partner, Benjamin Pitezel, into faking his own death. Pitezel was all for it, because he’d share in a $10,000 insurance payout. Or so he thought. Holmes intended to share it with no one.

In fact, he killed Pitezel and took Pitezel’s oldest daughter, Alice, to identify the body. Once she did, he grabbed the substantial benefit and thought he was home free. However, he forgot about the inmate he’d betrayed. Hedgepeth alerted the insurance company, who sent the Pinkerton Agency after the fraudster and thief. But Holmes was on the road, using false names and quickly changing his addresses. Strangely, Holmes had taken three of Pitezel’s children with him, perhaps as a cover. The agents finally caught up to him in Boston just before he boarded a ship. He was alone.

Detective Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia-based law enforcement officer, arrived to take him back for trial. On the train to Philadelphia, Holmes bragged about his criminal career, admitting that he'd done enough to be hanged twelve times over. Suspicious about the children, who were no longer with him, Geyer went cross-country on a highly publicized expedition to find them. To his disappointment, he discovered that each had been murdered.

Once Holmes was ensconced in a jail cell, his crimes in Chicago were also discovered. Not far from the site of the “White City,” or the World’s Exposition, Holmes had used a three-story hotel he’d built (often through fraud) to let rooms to young women arriving to attend the international fair. The “castle,” as he called it, had soundproof sleeping chambers, asbestos-padded walls, gas pipes, and vents that Holmes controlled. There were also greased chutes that emptied into a cellar, where he’d placed a large furnace.

Holmes would apparently place his chosen victims into special chambers into which he then pumped lethal gas and watched them react. Sometimes he'd ignite the gas to incinerate them, or place

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