H. H. Holmes: Master of Illusion
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Afflicted
He sensed that his own countenance was changing as he sat in prison, and that he looked more satanic than before. “I have become afflicted with that dread disease, rare but terrible...a malformation... My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil - that the similitude is almost completed.” He self-diagnosed “acquired homicidal mania” and “degeneracy,” which meant he was a moral idiot.
Holmes said he was confessing in part to justify the scientific deductions. Little did he know they weren’t scientific at all. But his motive was more likely to bring attention to himself and to wallow in one last flight of grandiosity. No doubt he enjoyed the idea of having an affect on an audience.
His first murder, he admitted, was by overdose of laudanum of a former schoolmate for insurance money. Holmes claimed (probably falsely) that it had given him a terrible guilty conscience, but he’d then developed an appetite for blood. The second murder, he said, was “accidental,” when he got into a physical altercation with a man who owed him money. Then he killed a few people to sell to a “corpse dealer” for payment of $25 to $45 apiece. Later he lost touch with this dealer, so he sometimes buried victims in the dirt floor of his offices. Some victims he poisoned, some he bludgeoned, and a few he closed into his vaults for gassing and asphyxia - “a slow and lingering death.” Most of these cases involved money, threat of exposure, or some other form of enrichment for Holmes. Sometimes he used confederates as accomplices.
In one case, when he attempted to murder three young women at the same time, with chloroform, they escaped and turned him in. Holmes was arrested but inexplicably not prosecuted for attempted murder, or even for assault. In some cases, Holmes either did not know or could not recall the name of a victim or near-victim.
Readers were most interested in what Holmes might say about the Williams sisters and the Pitezel family, and for both he provided quite a few details (although how much is true is anyone’s guess).
