Uncategorized – Page 4 – Rebecca Frost

H. H Holmes’ victims: Dr. Robert Leacock

Every serial killer has to start somewhere. The “serial” part means they had to keep going, eventually, but there’s always a first. For H. H. Holmes – at least in his newspaper confession – his first victim was a former medical school classmate, Dr. Robert Leacock.

Holmes attended the University of Michigan for medical school and did indeed graduate. Although “H. H. Holmes” wasn’t his real name, the MD was earned. Many sources trace his murderous intentions back to medical school, where he has also been accused of participating in grave robbing in order to have cadavers on which to learn. This also led to questions of whether enterprising medical students – or those looking to make money off a sale to a medical school – might murder in order to provide the students with learning material.

In his newspaper confession, Holmes actually says very little about Dr. Robert Leacock. He dismisses the murder because it “has been so often printed heretofore” and quickly moves on to the lament that, “like the man-eating tiger of the tropical jungle, whose appetite for bloodlust has once been aroused, I roamed about the world seeking whom I could destroy.” That’s all very dramatic, but it doesn’t tell us much about Leacock.

Earlier, in Holmes’ Own Story, Holmes had written of a previous insurance scam he had run in order to somehow prove that he could not, in fact, have murdered Benjamin Pitezel in a similar scam. The few details he gives about Dr. Robert Leacock’s murder do not quite line up with the information provided in Holmes’ Own Story but, since each is most likely a lie, that’s understandable.

But what’s the tale of the insurance scam he supposedly committed with his former schoolmate?

More than a decade before Pitezel’s death, Holmes supposedly decided to fake his own death using a lookalike cadaver in order to reap the insurance money. (He says that his wife would have been the one to inherit, but his third wife – the one he claimed at the time of the trial – hadn’t even met him yet. Apparently no one caught this inconsistency before his book went to press.) In this version, however, Holmes simply waited for someone to die who would look enough like him to count. He didn’t, according to the book, kill anyone for this scheme.

He also didn’t prepare very well. Holmes wanted to take the lookalike body north into Michigan and leave him, head crushed and with Holmes’ papers in his pockets, to be found and identified. Although Holmes should have had plenty of experience with both cadavers and decay during medical school, he planned poorly for transporting a body secretly by train.

It turns into a whole comedy of errors. The first trunk Holmes had specially made began leaking ice and odors, forcing him to stop and buy a new trunk. It couldn’t be seen to be empty, though, so while the shopkeeper prepared the trunk, Holmes walked back and forth with lengths of pipe he had also newly purchased in order to fill it. Then, when the new trunk was delivered to his hotel, he could pretend that it was full of his belongings.

It didn’t seem to occur to him that anyone involved in this various transactions might notice the oddity and remember him.

While apparently lost in a reverie, contemplating the lookalike corpse who was reclined on more ice in the room’s tub, Holmes’ room was invaded by detectives or secret service men or someone just that exciting. Using lies – common for Holmes – and threats (less common) he managed to get himself out of the initial situation, claiming the dead man was his brother. When Holmes left the hotel, though, he knew he was being pursued. (He was, of course, both interesting and cunning enough that any secret service agent would want to follow.)

Unfortunately for Holmes, the train he took ended up having an accident, delaying him just long enough for the secret service agent to catch up. Holmes did not flee the scene, leaving his suspicious luggage behind. No – instead he put his medical degree to use and cared for fellow passengers who were injured in the crash.

Perhaps since the secret service agent was alone this time, Holmes was able to bribe him, and therefore continue his way north with his smelly, sodden trunk. Holmes sums up the tale quickly by explaining that, a few weeks later, his plan went off exactly as he wished, and he walked away with the insurance money. (His wife, whose presence was never fully explained, is forgotten.)

Later he apparently gifted the trunk to friends who laughed with delight when he told them the tale, because they had always thought it was haunted.

Right. So.

Clearly there are a lot of problems with this story. For one thing, according to Holmes’ Own Story, it should have taken place in the early 1880s. Although he would have indeed been married to Clara (Lovering) Mudgett at that time, during the summer of 1895, when Holmes’ Own Story was published, Holmes was insisting that he was married to Georgiana Yoke and that he had never married another. This was because Georgiana was a witness in his murder trial and, if it were proven that the marriage were bigamous, she could indeed testify against him. Holmes married three women in his lifetime without ever divorcing any of them, and all three were still alive at the time of his death.

There is also the question of the insurance money. Different amounts are stated in Holmes’ Own Story and in his confession to the murder of Leacock. If, for example, Holmes had managed to get his hands on the $40,000 he said came with Leacock’s death, what happened to it? Where was it spent? Holmes never clarifies, and he never explains how he ended up with the money from his own apparent accidental death.

The story as originally told is meant to explain that Holmes, although a rogue, is not a murderer. He waited for a body that would look enough like him to be brought to the morgue rather than searching out his own double and then, even once he started to put his plan into practice, he made a mess of things. Far from being a slick and confident criminal, the Holmes in the original story made mistakes at every turn. He only managed to pull of the scam by bribing someone to look the other way.

It did make for a good story, though, so it also makes sense that Holmes’ confession would reference it. He dismisses a number of people in the same way, but arguing that much has already been written about them, without ever actually clarifying what happened, or how much of what has already been written is true.

Did Holmes actually murder a man named Dr. Robert Leacock in order to fake his own death and reap the insurance benefits? No. This is one of his false confessions, albeit one that may have helped boost sales of his book if by chance some curious reader had missed the adventurous corpse, trunk, and secret service man story.

How do you read for research?

Reading for research is different than reading for fun. Research comes with a purpose, and it’s helpful to have that purpose at least sketched out before picking up a research book. Otherwise you’ll end up having to go back and re-read more often than not. So: how do I read for research?

Short answer: with two highlighters and a pen.

Longer answer: it depends on whether it’s for a specific project or just a general true crime book. For general true crime reading – I can’t even just pick one up for fun anymore because there’s always something I want to highlight – I stick with my usual interests: representations of criminals and victims. If something is particularly interesting, important, or aggravating, I’ll also fold down the corner of the page. (Clearly on books I own. Don’t do this to an interlibrary loan. Scan them and make your own copies if they’re, say, a Ripper book so rare you can’t buy one for less than $2,500.) One color is for normal highlighting, and the other is for the most important of the important things. The pen is to scribble bon mots in the margins. (These usually look like “wut” or “no” or “???”)

If I’m reading for a project, sometimes the colors explode because I know a number of things I’m looking for. My old, ragged copy of The Stranger Beside Me, for example, has been highlighted and sticky-noted in six coordinating colors. Purple is where Ann Rule describes the scenes of the crimes, but there are colors for how Rule describes Ted Bundy; how he describes himself; about his romantic relationships; and so on. I did the close reading with all these themes in mind and yep, it took quite a while. This wasn’t during my first reading of the book, either – I’d already read it and knew the general plot, which helped. During the deep dive I could therefore concentrate on the threads I was looking for without having to worry about completely understanding everything I read.

Adding the sticky notes also helped me see patterns. Rule jumps back and forth between talking about her own life, her friend and coworker Ted, and the mysterious “Ted murders.” Seeing where the purple cropped up, for example, as compared to the sections Rule wrote about herself, says something about the narrative and how she wanted to tell it. There’s also one important sticky note hundreds of pages in where she finally admits that her Ted is indeed the Ted. (The downside? Clearly there are a ton of sticky notes on there, so the super most important of all the important ones can get lost. They’re a different style, but it can still take me a while to find the quote that I just know is in there.)

I’ve learned since then, though – one of my more recent multi-color adventures has a key in the front. That book is a reprinting of various newspaper articles and documents from police files, and it’s not always clear who the author or subject of each text is, so the colors help distinguish between the major players. This one isn’t the result of reading through from beginning to end with a bunch of colors in hand, but using the index to go color by color and person by person, because of the nature of the project. I didn’t need to do another complete read-through, especially since I’m already rather familiar with the general topic.

I’ve tried reading in ebook format for research, and a couple books I’ve found have only been available as kindle versions so I’ve been forced to highlight and bookmark digitally, but that just doesn’t work as well for me. On the plus side you can easily download all the highlights from a single kindle book, including the location, which makes compiling notes easier than having to type them up, but on the other hand it’s all part of the process for me. I’ll do a lot of reading and highlighting and then a lot of typing up notes so that I’m reminded of various things I’ve read and I have a better idea of where things are going and how they hang together. I tried using a digital highlighter for a while, but the act of typing up the notes helps my memory. (Plus no digital highlighter is perfect, and correcting a scanned sentence just felt more annoying than typing up the whole thing.)

I think the most important thing, though, is to not limit yourself. I always have that extra highlighter as an “other” sort of category: I wasn’t specifically looking for this, but it’s interesting and it should be remembered. It might not affect my current project and its argument, but it could be useful to remember for a future idea. Or it might actually twist one of the themes I already had in mind and needs to be taken into account immediately. It always helps to know what you’re looking for when you dive in to a book or a chapter, but keep an eye out for the things you never expected, too.

H. H. Holmes’ victims: Julia and Pearl Conner

Last week we took a look at another pair of Holmes’ claimed victims, named in his confession of 27 murders. Minnie and Nannie Williams were sisters. This week we’re looking at a mother and daughter: Julia and Pearl Conner. They, like the Williams sisters, are very likely true victims of “America’s first serial killer.”

Julia’s husband, Ned, worked at the jewelry counter of the pharmacy in Holmes’ building, which explains how their paths crossed. Holmes and Julia began an affair, and eventually Ned simply left his wife and their daughter. Julia and Pearl remained at Holmes’ hotel, although it wasn’t long before no one heard from them again.

The usual date given for their murders is Christmas Eve, 1891. Julia is meant to have told Holmes that she was pregnant with his child and, not knowing that he was already married, demanded that he make her his wife. Holmes supposedly agreed to marry her as long as she would allow him to perform an abortion.

Julia did not live through the operation. It is possible that Holmes used the abortion as cover for his murderous plans, or that something went wrong and she died when he didn’t intend it. Certainly during his very last confession, given on the scaffold, Holmes admitted that two of his patients died as the result of an illegal operation. One of them may well have been Julia Conner. But what of her daughter?

The order of events is fuzzy and might go a long way to answering whether Julia’s death was intentional. In his newspaper confession, Holmes says that Pearl’s death was due to poisoning, and that Pearl died after her mother. In Holmes’ confession Julia is his third victim, and Peal his fourth – although apparently there was an accomplice in this case.

Holmes writes of a couple who not only wished to save Pearl, but to give the young girl to their elderly parents so they could raise her. They were the ones who actually gave Pearl the poison, although Holmes personally insisted on it. He “believed the child was old enough to remember of her mother’s sickness and death” and so, in time, Pearl might have said things that would have incriminated Holmes.

Aside from this mention of two guilty accomplices, Holmes also takes care to mention that, due to the suddenness of Julia’s death, he was unable to gain possession of some property she apparently owned. Ever solicitous, and at the time of printing two weeks away from his date with the noose, Holmes writes that he will be sure this note is passed to Julia’s relatives, who have more need of it than he does.

Then again, this is the same man who, earlier, stated that Pearl was off with other relatives until she was old enough to speak for herself and therefore out of danger. The same man who claimed the girl was alive could easily lie about money and property, although his usual MO did indeed seem to be to secure such things before committing murder.

Was Julia Conner’s death an accident, or did Holmes poison Pearl before her mother’s “operation” was even set to begin? Were the human remains discovered in the basement of the building actually Julia’s? It seems likely that Julia and Pearl Conner, like Minnie and Nannie Williams, were indeed victims of “America’s first serial killer,” but some things will never be known for sure.

H. H. Holmes’ victims: Minnie and Nannie Williams

H. H. Holmes – born Herman Webster Mudgett – was hanged after being found guilty of a single murder: that of Benjamin Pitezel. But, as we have seen before, Holmes himself confessed to 27 different murders. (At least, for one newspaper publication.) Who, then, did he confess to murdering?

Minnie Williams plays a large role in most variations of Holmes’ stories. As far as anyone can tell, the truth is that she met Holmes and was convinced to come to Chicago with them and then sign her inheritance over to him before he murdered her. Holmes also used her to lure her sister, Nannie, to the big city around the time of the Columbian Exposition, and Nannie also disappeared. The real Minnie was rather naïve and fell under the spell of a clever con man.

Holmes, though, tells us multiple different stories about her.

In Holmes’ Own Story, his autobiography published before his murder trial, Holmes takes a lot of the accusations that have been leveled at him and turns them to Minnie. Rather than an innocent, Minnie comes to Holmes already having had lovers. In this version, she is the one to pursue him, even getting an apartment where the two of them can live together apparently as husband and wife. This was, according to Holmes, all Minnie’s idea.

When Nannie came to visit, she stayed in the guest bedroom of this apartment. Minnie had to be away for one night and asked her “husband” to keep Nannie company. Nannie, however, insisted that she was fine, so Holmes spent the night elsewhere. When he returned the next day it was to find Minnie already there, standing over Nannie’s dead body. She had come home, seen that the only bed slept in was Nannie’s and assumed her husband had spent the night there, as well. According to Holmes, Minnie killed her sister with a single hot-blooded blow.

Holmes helped Minnie get rid of her sister’s body – by putting it in a trunk and sinking it in Lake Michigan – and then told Minnie he never wanted to see her again.

For her part, Minnie left to seek treatment for her mental health, which explained why her relatives were not able to contact her. She was, of course, ashamed of what she had done.

Luckily for Holmes, though, Minnie seemed to gather herself together enough to be schoolmistress to the three Pitezel children he had collected. (You remember the strange journey he took them on.) In Holme’s Own Story, Minnie Williams was a member of one of the groups, traveling with the children and eventually taking them out of Holmes’ care and away with her to England. She, of course, had to hide because she’d murdered her sister. At one point Holmes ordered a coded message to be put in the newspaper, asking Minnie to reveal herself and the still-living children.

Most of the way through the book, however, Holmes comes to a different conclusion. It seems that Minnie returned to him with a new lover, a Mr. Edward Hatch, who looked very much like Holmes himself. Hatch was the one who in fact murdered the children, but, according to Holmes in this instance, it was done at Minnie Williams’ own bidding.

Holmes speculates that Minnie Williams, a woman he had apparently rightfully scorned, was madly jealous of Holmes’ recent marriage. In order to destroy Holmes’ life, she plotted with her lookalike lover to get Holmes framed for the murder of the children. (Why she had Hatch hide the children’s bodies so well if she wanted Holmes to be clearly known as a murderer is not exactly explained.)

Minnie Williams, therefore, becomes not only a loose woman and guilty of her sister’s murder, but is now the mastermind behind the deaths of the Pitezel children.

In his newspaper confession, when Minnie and Nannie Williams become two of Holmes’ 27 murders, he does at least attempt to undo the damage he has done to Minnie’s reputation. He wronged her not only through murder, but through all the lies he told about her afterward.

Minnie and Nannie Williams become murders 20 and 21 in this recitation, and Holmes heaps on the emotion when he does what he can to clear Minnie’s name. Now she was a “virtuous woman” before he met her, and she was never once “temporarily insane,” especially since it was Holmes, and not Minnie, who had killed Nannie. Once Holmes had various signed documents, he killed her, although he does not specify how. Nannie Williams, according to this version, died locked in the giant safe in Holmes’ murder castle.

Although not all 27 victims Holmes listed in this confession were in fact dead – and some were likely made up completely – Minnie and Nannie Williams are two who very likely died because of Holmes and his greed. Holmes had the habit of using people for all he could get from them, and then disposing them so they could not reveal what he had done. Once the Williams sisters had given Holmes what he wanted, he very likely did murder them

How do you get back to a writing project you haven’t worked on in a while?

November is National Novel Writing Month, and I’ve participated every year since 2010. The goal is to write 50,000 words during 30 days, and it’s geared toward fiction. By the end of the month you should have a large chunk of a first draft of a novel. Which is awesome, and I love the community and everything that comes with it, but … academic work? What academic work?

It hasn’t been a whole month since I’ve worked on this project, but it’s been a good couple of weeks. So now I have to pick it back up, and recalibrate my brain to academic writing instead of fictional fantasy, and remind myself of what, exactly, I said I’d write in the first place.

So the good part: Past Rebecca wrote up a book proposal. Academic book proposals don’t usually include a full manuscript – it’s “just” the intro and a sample chapter or two – but they do include a full outline. It’s something I really don’t like doing at the time, but I rely on it a ton as I’m working on the book. For this project, I not only had to submit chapter titles, but also a quick summary of what each chapter is about. The framework is there.

Before this break, I’d also compiled my notes for each chapter. I like to print them out so I have have them next to my laptop while I’m writing. They’re not entirely organized the way I need them for each chapter, but they’re all present and accounted for, so I can highlight the most important things and then cross them off as I use them.

I’ve even got my little tabs so I can switch to a different chapter if the muse is being difficult. (That’s a good way to get your words in for the day – switch to a different section. You paint yourself into a corner by the end and have to write the more difficult bits, but by then you’ve got so much of the project done that it looks like such a small hurdle. Or so I tell myself.)

But then the new problem I give myself is that I have various files for various chapters but, especially after a break, I don’t remember what chapter is in what step of the process.

So I started off my day with arts and crafts. I figure I’ll use this again, so I’ve got my foam board divided into sections with labels across the top: not started; notes exist; barely begun; mostly there; needs another look; integrated (into the whole book and not just as a stand-alone file); and ready for a final read. These are all chosen based on what I know about myself and my writing process, so you could easily have more or fewer, depending on how you work.

The chapter numbers, plus a quick reference word or two, are on sticky notes that can be moved from column to column. (I’ve made all the sticky notes one color because there are times I’m working on multiple projects, so … there might need to be another color added if, for example, my chapter proposal for an edited collection gets accepted in January.)

This helps me step back and take a look at the forest instead of my trees (or, in the case of paragraphs, individual pine needles). Nine chapters, plus intro and conclusion, feels a lot more manageable than “Okay in this chapter I need to discuss three books, but this one has fourteen, and this other one over here …” It also helps me remember which chapters have been completely abandoned in search of inspiration and which still need just a little something before they get integrated.

Some days it’s also easier to focus on the small thing: today, I’m going to move this chapter from “notes exist” to “barely begun.” (That’s actually my goal, although I’ve already put Chapter 5’s sticky note into the other column. It’s only jumping the gun if I finish this blog post and then don’t work on chapter five.)

It may look a bit like silly arts and crafts, but it helps remind me of the scope of the whole project, and how much I’ve already done – and, perhaps most importantly, it reminds me of all these cool ideas I’ve had that are worth the struggle to actually write down.

What does it look like when you come back to an older project?

Why I write about serial killers

“How did you get interested in serial killers?” Let’s face it – that’s probably the most common question I get asked once people learn what I do. At least it’s one I actually have an answer to. And even a specific date for.

I was in London in July 2007. My mom was helping me plan the trip and I told her that I had to be there on July 20, because Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out at 12:01am on the 21st. I stood in line, got my book, and made sure to read all of it before leaving my hotel room in the morning, just to make sure I wouldn’t run into any spoilers. Except then I didn’t have anything to read.

I took the underground to the zoo but for some reason on my way back the station I’d used was closed. There was a sign directing people to the next station, and that street took me past a bookshop. (Not there one where I got Harry Potter – that was at King’s Cross Station.) I went in and decided to look for a book about Jack the Ripper, since there were advertisements everywhere for Ripper walks and the like, but they all started after dark. I didn’t feel like trying to find my way back to the hotel that late, all by myself, so I figured hey, let’s see if they have a book.

I ended up asking if they had any books about Jack the Ripper – silly question – and I got directed to an entire bookshelf. I’d been hoping for, I don’t know, a couple books to choose from, instead of a couple dozen, and was honestly stumped. I’d already been given a bit of a long-suffering look when I’d asked if they had any books, so I decided not to ask again. I pulled out the two thickest books and arbitrarily chose Philip Sugden’s The Complete History of Jack the Ripper.

It’s not a small book, and not quick reading. I had it done in a matter of days. And I’d bought my second Ripper book before leaving London. By the time I’d signed the contract to write Ripper’s Victims, I owned around 40. That book cites about 80. At last count, thanks to an app on my phone that helps me keep from buying doubles, I own 120. And those numbers are just for single-subject book-length accounts of the Ripper crimes. (For comparison, in that same app, my general “true crime” bookshelf has 187 titles listed.)

Almost every bookstore has a true crime shelf. It’s the one genre I routinely seek out when I go into them, and the one genre where I still prefer to have paper copies instead of eBooks – it makes citations easier, and it’s easier to scribble notes in the margins or flip back to find that one special quote. When I start organizing an idea I’ll pull books out and reorganize them, grouping certain ones together as a visual representation of my ideas. Plus it’s just cool to have so many bookshelves full of my research.

So how did I get interested in serial killers? I was in London for the ending of Harry Potter, and it turned out that the next book I picked up marked a new beginning.

But what does it actually mean to “kill your darlings”?

It’s a common piece of writing advice that is frequently attributed to William Faulkner: “In writing you must kill all your darlings.” And it sounds cool – a little bit of murder, a little bit of love. But … what does it really mean? Is it just for novelists who need to off their favorite character somewhere within the story?

That’s the most common misinterpretation of the advice: that it calls for a literal – or at least literary – death. That aspiring authors need to read up on fight scenes or medical terminology and autopsy reports. That well-loved characters need to be offed and then mourned, perhaps in the spirit of reaching a word count goal. It’s actually a bit more brutal than that.

Your darlings are the things that make you not want to hand over your work to an editor. The parts you know you’ll resist changing, even if the comments come back and make it clear that no, this won’t be publishable until you do. The words, phrases, or ideas you’ll cling to because yes, this does indeed seem like a fine hill to die on, thank you very much.

Sometimes the comments you get back tell you about other people’s darlings. I had a manuscript returned that asked me to get rid of every single instance of “Therefore.” There were only two, but someone, somewhere, had killed this person’s darlings in the past and it was a lesson he remembered. Therefore (I know, I know) he had to make sure no one else allowed his darlings to live.

Other times it’s a lot harder than searching your document for a single word and finding substitutes. Your entire proposal can be a darling, and it can be rejected outright. Or, of course, there’s “revise and resubmit” in which you’re confronted with a list of changes, and you have to get out your ax. Or at least your red pen.

It’s a balancing act. Clearly whatever you wrote will not be published at this venue exactly as it is, but presumably you want to see it in print there, since you submitted it. Usually, upon first read-through of the comments, some of them even seem reasonable. They might feel like easy changes. Yes, of course I can do A, B, and C. A change here, a tweak there, and you’re working your way down the list exactly like you’re supposed to. Until …

Your darling.

Now, you don’t always have to accept and implement the comments and suggestions with 100% agreement. There is space for a conversation here: I understand where you’re coming from, but I made these choices for this reason. But, more often than not, there’s still some sort of issue that has to be changed. The sticking points where you’ll just be told to revise and resubmit again – or take it elsewhere because clearly you’re refusing to play the game according to the rules – unless you do something about it.

That. That’s your darling.

I, for one, am a fan of copying and pasting my darlings into a separate document where I can pretend they live out a happy life. On a farm in the country, perhaps. Where I could totally visit, if I really wanted to. And where they can live on, unchanged, while I negotiate the feedback and do my best to keep my ego in check (because just look at how darling my darlings are!).

Kill off your characters if you have to, but they’re not your only darlings.

What about you? Do you know your own darlings? Are any of them absolute sticking points?

The Craft of an Index

It’s one of the last steps needed before a nonfiction book can be published, but it’s also tedious … annoying … and incredibly necessary: the index.

I recently finished creating the one for my most recent book, Media and the Murderer: Jack the Ripper, Steven Avery and an Enduring Formula for Notoriety, and I got a lot of surprised responses: wait, a person has to do that? Why?

There are a number of reasons why it takes a human to sort through a book to make the index actually … useful.

For example, I reference the Duke of Clarence and Avondale; Prince Albert Victor; and Prince Eddy … and they’re all the same person. A computer could be asked to search for and categorize all proper nouns, but someone along the line has to recognize that they’re all the same person. (And add in the cross-references in the index to make sure that someone who knows him as Prince Eddy can find all the references.)

The proper nouns are probably the easier ones to find, too. When I’m scanning through a page to see what to underline for the index, the capital letters help.

This time around I settled on four colors to help me sort through what was going on and keep the ideas in mind as far as what I was looking for. Green was general; blue referred to the murdered women; yellow was names of secondary importance; and prink referred to Jack the Ripper and Steven Avery.

There’s another rule of thumb here: if it’s mentioned in your title – as the Ripper and Avery are – then they’re on a lot of pages and they don’t get their own entry. The Ripper mentions got divided into their own categories (although there’s always the chance that this might get changed once someone at the publisher has a look and maybe a chuckle – things have been consolidated before) but what happens with Steven Avery, the main subject of Making a Murderer?

He gets his name, yes, but not a list of pages where he’s mentioned. If you know anything about MaM, you know he’s got a wrongful conviction and an exoneration – and those two categories go under his name with page numbers to follow. Instead of just being one big blob of Steven Avery mentions, he gets categorized.

The same thing can happen with some of the people I label as secondary figures. Ken Kratz, for example, has a “press conference” category, and Brendan Dassey has his “confession.” So even when it’s an easy search for someone’s name, there’s still some parsing going on. What do I think people who pick up this book might be looking for? How can I make it easier for them to find it (and therefore cite me)?

But it’s a pain. I groan at my past self for making all sorts of connections to serial killers both factual and fictional, because each mention is another entry in the index. Zac Efron, Mark Harmon, Johnny Depp … they’re all in this one. Hannibal Lecter is on multiple pages. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer … they all go in the index.

Aside from the proper nouns, there are certain themes that happen to appear in my work. Some of them were major players in my dissertation: Puritan execution sermons, trial reports, and the explanation of why the adversarial trial matters. Some are specific to this book.

And the reason you do it yourself, as opposed to hiring someone else to do it, is that you know from the start what your important parts are. So therefore I knew that execution sermons had to make it in, even from the very first mention. That got underlined.

I can use the search option to go back through and make sure I’ve gotten all the pages for a certain term, as long as I remember that profiling, profiler, and profiles are all possible terms to file under “psychological profiling” … but I still need to make all of those connections so that someone who wants to use my book can know exactly where to look.

The Curse of H. H. Holmes

We’ve already spent a lot of time covering the real-life events of one H. H. Holmes, “America’s first serial killer.” If you missed them, check out Holmes story Part I, Part II, Part III, and the murder castle discussion. But maybe all of those are too depressing, considering the man didn’t actually murder 250 people in his custom-designed building. Maybe I’ve taken all the fun out of it.

So. Let’s talk about Holmes’ curse.

We already know that Holmes had his body placed in an extra-large coffin and encased in cement so that no one would be able to dig him up and use him for medical experimentation. He was eventually disinterred for an episode of American Ripper, to dispel the rumor that Holmes himself had snuck away and a lookalike was executed his place, but that just prevented people from reaching in. It did not, apparently, prevent Holmes from reaching out.

The death of anyone who had any connection whatsoever to the Holmes case was considered suspicious … and another victim to add to Holmes’ list. Holmes was said to have “the evil eye” – have you counted how many times Erik Larson mentions his eyes in Devil in the White City? – and, in the two decades or so following his execution, around 30 deaths were attributed to it.

The Superintendent of the Indianapolis Police Force, responsible for the invesigation into Howard Pitezel’s death, was thrown from his horse during a parade. He was, perhaps, lucky – he didn’t die, but he dealt with the effects of his injuries for the rest of his life.

One of the coroner’s physicians who had testified against Holmes at his trial suddenly dropped dead from blood poisining.

The trial judge and lead coroner both died suddenly from previously undiagnosed illness.

The prison superintendent at Moyamensing Prison, where Holmes was held and executed, committed suicide.

The father of one of Holmes’ victims was horrifically burned in a gas explosion.

Frank Geyer, the detective who had finally tracked down Alice, Nellie, and Howard Pitezel, was struck with a sudden illness. He did recover.

The office of the claims manager for the insurance company Holmes had cheated caught fire and burned. Apparently the only untouched items inside were a framed copy of Holmes’ arrest warrant and two portraits of Holmes.

The fiancee of one of Holmes’ defense lawyers died suddenly.

An occupant of Holmes’ Murder Castle committed suicide.

The jury foreman was electrocuted.

Marion Hedgepeth, who had informed on Holmes’ insurance scam, was shot and killed during a holdup.

The Murder Castle itself was mysteriously gutted by fire.

Holmes’ caretaker committed suicide and left a note that said “I couldn’t sleep.” His relatives said he had been suffering hallucinations and may even have been “haunted.”

The list goes on.

It reads rather like Holmes’ own confession to 27 murders, with a variety of people from different walks of life, with various connections to him, and different causes of death. They would never have been linked together at all if not for the name of H. H. Holmes … or for the rumor of the curse that Holmes himself began before his death.

What do you think? Is each and every death on this list completely explicable? Or was Holmes working to increase his body count from beyond the grave?

5 tips to get yourself writing

Even if you’re good at writing – even you say you like writing – there will be some days when you don’t want to do it. Days when you have to use every trick up your sleeve to make yourself get words on the page. (Days when you write a blog post rather than work on your current project, even …)

Days when you’ll seize any conceivable distraction.

So what can you do to keep up the momentum?

Schedule your writing time. Block it out in your calendar. Tell other people that it’s your writing time. Granted, you’re not going to be writing at top speed for every minute of that time, but you’re making it a clear intention. When I’m distracted during that time, I’m distracted from writing. It’s like what they tell you about meditation: acknowledge the fact that your mind is wandering, and then bring it back to the task at hand.
Recognize what parts of the project are going to be most troublesome. This is absolutely a personal thing, but right now I’m about to “start” something. The start is my struggle. It’s not just the start of a project, but the start of a section – a chapter or something under a new heading. The way I usually get around it is to never end a writing session at the end of a section – at the very least I’ll give myself a few notes to go on.

You can’t always plan it that way to be nice to yourself. Today, for example, is my first day back at the project since writing and sending in the proposal. I had other things going on and didn’t want to continue writing it without knowing if the proposal might be rejected, so I have to get over this hump. But, whenever possible, I do what I can to make Future Rebecca’s life easier.
Remove distractions. I have a specific writing desk. There are books in the room, yes, but I don’t bring my knitting in here – one distraction down. There’s no door to keep the cats out, so that’s a wash, but there’s also no tv. I rarely turn off the wifi when I write – I’d rather do a quick search and put the proper date in now instead of later – but I’ll turn on the Forest app on my phone and put it on the harshest setting: you can’t leave the main screen until the timer is up, or else your little digital tree dies. I’ve even got the comments customized so it tells me to keep on writing.

Do I mean “Bore yourself into having to write the thing you’re putting off”? I might indeed.
Give yourself a carrot. Set a reasonable, achievable, goal and then tell yourself you can’t do something fun until you’ve reached it. Dickens used to tell his servants not to give him his clothes until he hit his daily word count, so he’d be naked and confined to his study until he got there, but it doesn’t have to be that extreme.

It also doesn’t have to be mean – this isn’t “I can’t get up to use the bathroom until I hit 500 words” or “No refills on my coffee until I finish this section.” You don’t want to make writing harder because you’re ignoring bodily needs or running low on caffeine. It’s a reward: once I hit my word count, I can have some candy, or spend 20 minutes working on my fun knitting project, or get lost in an internet search of nothingness for a while.
Write something – anything – else to get words flowing. You can hop to another section of the project, or start making notes about what’s bugging you about the project, or write something else completely – it doesn’t have to be connected to the project you’re putting off. You can also switch it up and get out a pen and some paper instead of using your laptop. This is your chance to use different colors, or to write down the other things that are bothering you, or to get a quick shopping list out of the way. Once you start writing, it makes it easier to switch the flow of words back to your original topic.

The more you write – the more you follow your schedule – the better you’ll get at forcing yourself to focus simply by trial and error. If something works for you, hang on to it. If one of these tips doesn’t, then reject it and start searching for another.

What do you do to help yourself focus on writing?