Depraved
Serial murderersCase studiesSerial murdersBiographyCriminals, united states
3.0
Open LibraryAbout this book
Even as a child in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, Herman Mudgett was considered a lad with a future, a boy who professed filial devotion while secretly fantasizing his parents' deaths. By age eleven he was conducting secret experiments on small animals and strays, becoming skilled at disabling his subjects without killing them. In 1886 he appeared in the Chicago suburb of Englewood, Illinois, and introduced himself as Dr. H. H. Holmes to the wife of the ailing owner of Holton's drugstore. He was hired on the spot, and under his management the store prospered. But when Holmes's attempt to purchase the drugstore from Mrs. Holton went sour, and she sued him, she inexplicably disappeared - never to be seen or heard from again. As Jack the Ripper was terrorizing London, Holmes was building his infamous "Castle," a grandiose residence and veritable fortress bristling with battlements and turrets. He hired and fired a succession of workmen to build the castle, thus eliminating witnesses to its secrets: a labyrinth of trapdoors, winding passageways, dark dead-end halls, stairways to nowhere, bedchambers fitted with peepholes and asphyxiating gas pipes, soundproof vaults and torture chambers, greased chutes large enough to send human bodies from the living quarters to a cellar equipped with acid vats, a crematorium, a dissecting table, and cases full of gleaming surgical tools. Alternately donning the mantles of doctor, druggist and inventor, Holmes was also a get-rich-quick schemer and bigamist, with three wives and innumerable lovers - at least one of whom ended up a prize skeletal s…
Themes & subjects
Serial murderersCase studiesSerial murdersBiographyCriminals, united states
Characters & people
Setting
IllinoisChicagoUnited States
About the author
Harold Schechter
28 June 1948
Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature and culture. Renowed for his true-crime writing, he is the author of the nonfiction books *Fatal*, *Fiend*, *Bestial*, *Deviant*, *Deranged*, *Depraved*, and, with David Everitt, *The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers*. He is also the author of *Nevermore* and *The Hum Bug*, the acclaimed historical novels featuring Edgar Ellen Poe. He lives in New York State and is the father of YA novelist, Lauren Oliver. — Mostly from *Depraved*
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