H. H. Holmes’ victims: Rogers, a wealthy banker

The eighteenth murder in Holmes’ confession has a few more twists and turns than some of the others, but I think you’ll still recognize some of his preferred tropes.

Rogers himself is described as “a wealthy banker” from a Northern Wisconsin town, who had to be enticed to come to Chicago. But not by Holmes. In this murder, Holmes works with an accomplice.

This accomplice was a young Englishman who met Holmes in 1891. (Maybe. We already know Holmes isn’t that great at dates.) This Englishman was a fine partner in Holmes’ usual real estate scams, and apparently he was good at the patent scam, too. In fact, this Englishman was such a good criminal that Holmes, somehow, decides to withhold his name completely. He starts off coy, arguing that said Englishman couldn’t be arrested simply on his own say-so, and simply refuses to give the Englishman a name.

It was, however, the Englishman who convinced Rogers to come to Chicago, not Holmes. The Englishman must have been just about as clever as Holmes, because he made sure that none of Rogers’ friends or family would know why, exactly, Rogers had come to Chicago. Those back home in Wisconsin wouldn’t be able to say who Rogers had gone to meet.

Holmes and the Englishman got Rogers to go into the Castle by saying they had patents in there for him to see, and at first Rogers – wisely, you might think – refused to sign the “checks and drafts for seventy thousand dollars” that were there instead. Granted, either Holmes of his incredibly criminal English friend could have forged them once Rogers was dead, but that’s apparently not how Holmes worked.

You’re probably figured out which room Rogers had been led to.

Holmes used the gas hookups in the room to nauseate Rogers – which probably wasn’t much of a trick, since Rogers had been in there long enough to starve – to convince Rogers to sign.

Now, here’s another of those things that readers today might not swallow: Holmes writes that Rogers signed the securities, “all of which were converted into money and by my partner’s skill as a forger in such a manner as to leave no trace of their having passed through our hands.”

Yeah. His partner was a skilled forger, but they still lured Rogers into the gas chamber, starved him, and hit him with the gas in order to get him to sign them. Did Holmes and his friend not already have exemplars of Rogers’ signature? Why couldn’t they just have gotten Rogers to Chicago, killed him, and forged everything without the extended torture?

Once the signatures were obtained, Holmes and his English friend apparently had a standoff about what to do with Rogers who was, at that point, still alive. Each tried to wait the other out so he didn’t actually make the suggestion of murder himself – although clearly they couldn’t have followed through with getting all of the money and still let Rogers go – but it was only when Holmes started getting ready to let Rogers leave that the Englishman made the murder suggestion.

And, in spite of the fact that Rogers was in the sealed room with the gas, Holmes made the Englishman kill Rogers using chloroform. Granted, Holmes was an accessory to murder, but he makes it clear that he did not kill Rogers himself, even though Rogers is counted among his 27 victims. The Englishman then left Holmes to deal with the body and apparently gambled away much, if not all, of his money before dawn.

So what we have here is Holmes presenting his readers with an unnamed stranger who is an excellent forger, willing to commit murder, and who had regaled Holmes with tales of “all other forms of wrongdoing, save murder, and presumably that as well.” By the end of Holmes’ recounting of Rogers’ death, the Englishman clearly is guilty of murder. But, just as he does with all other mentions of accomplices, Holmes refuses to give a name.

He instead teases his readers with the story of a man who is worse than Holmes himself, and who apparently gambled away $35,000 in a single night. Not only was Rogers murdered, but half his wealth didn’t even go to the murderers. Instead the three other men playing cards with the Englishman apparently became the big winners, and they didn’t need chloroform, either.

Holmes is, however, as untrustworthy when it comes to large sums of money as he is when it comes to timelines. The far more likely explanation is that he didn’t name the Englishman because there simply wasn’t an Englishman. He was simply trying to spin a tale that incorporated some of the more interesting headlines about himself, and perhaps didn’t want to attach a real name to a fake murderer, the way he has to fake victims.

Really Holmes is trying to be Bundy a century before Bundy rose to infamy. Bundy wanted to threaten people with the fact that, as bad as he was, he wasn’t the only one out there. They could send him to the chair, but that wouldn’t really save anyone. And that’s what Holmes is doing here, too: taunting his readers with the idea that someone just as bad as he is currently still walks free. Holmes could tell the man’s name, but he simply refuses. And what could they tempt him with, anyway? His execution was two weeks away.

So Rogers from Wisconsin is likely another of Homes’ made-up victims, the way his Englishman seems to be a made-up accomplice. But it’s not an effort to remove his own guilt, because Holmes counts Rogers as one of his own victims. It’s simply Holmes proud to have manipulated someone else into doing his bidding, the way he lived his life as a con man.

What do you think? Could the Englishman be real? Did Holmes go to his death without revealing the names of other criminals just as bad as he was – or worse?