Too many things left on this to-do list

When I get close to completing one of the tasks on my writing/editing to-do list, I tend to slow down. (Procrastination by blog post writing, anyone?) I can focus on one task at a time just fine, but when it gets closer to checking one off, my eyes drop down and I see everything else I have to do.

Yikes.

It doesn’t seem to matter how big or small each task is. If it’s an item on the list, it looms large. And there are always so many left to do. Even when a deadline is months away, the number of lines can make it seem like I don’t have enough time.

So … what’s the solution? Aside from stopping five pages short of this round of editing to write a blog post, that is. Which probably tells you that I don’t really have a solution.

I’m a fan of having notes in front of me to remind me what to focus on. Some of them are on a bulletin board. Others are on a dry erase board. Still more are on sticky notes. (I have a lot of notes.) They get moved around depending on how important they are, with the most urgent peering at me from around my laptop screen.

The full to-do list hides in a drawer, thanks. I don’t need to stare at all of those lines and tasks every day.

I’m going to try limiting my sightline tasks to just two: the one I’m about to finish, and the next one in line. That’s it. Just two tasks. If you can travel miles in the dark by your headlights, you can write a book two tasks at a time.

It’s important to know that you have (so much) more to do, but it’s just as important to keep track of the fact that you are, actually, making progress. Items are being ticked off the list. You’re not at the last item (or the deadline) just yet, but you’re getting closer. Sure, there’s a long way to go, but look at how far you’ve come.

I’ve got my two tasks right there, staring at me, so we’ll see how this works. I’ve got five pages left to edit on this round, and it should be quick, if I can manage to focus on them and not the five pages left of my to-do list.

Butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, and blinders on. Let’s do this.

On good days, write. On bad days, write.

I’m not sure who originally said it or where I first saw it – Joanne Harris tweeted it in 2017 – but it’s been on my mind this week. And it seems to sound at least a little better than “You’re going to be writing for the rest of your life.” That’s more like a prison sentence.

I’ve been thinking about it based more on how much of a process writing is and how long the timeline stretches. For a single piece, you’re conceptualizing, drafting, rewriting, submitting, revising and resubmitting, getting rejected, getting to the next step for more revising and resubmitting, and – eventually, if you’re lucky – proofing something and seeing it in print. It takes a long time to get something from inside your head to in front of other people’s eyeballs.

When I was in grad school, they cautioned us about it in another way: if you’re tenure track, go for many articles instead of one book. If the book falls through (and they do, for all kinds of reasons, during different steps of the process), then you have nothing. If a single article stalls out, at least you have others.

It’s one of the reasons to always have multiple projects in process, all at different stages. Some of those stages are a bunch of waiting. Others are quick, possibly frenzied, work. You can’t always control when you’ll hit each step – when you get the proofs back and when they’re due, for example – so you need to be flexible. When you’re juggling, know which balls are rubber and which are glass, so you know which ones can be dropped without shattering.

But it’s also because, when you get a rejection, you didn’t put all your eggs (or breakable glass balls) in one basket. There’s something else to fall back on for the days when you can’t bring yourself to wade through reviewers’ comments, and a way to boost yourself up again to get to the point where you can.

(Disclaimer: yes, okay, having multiple projects going on at once also increases your chances of getting multiple rejections at once. Say, two in one day, even. But you can handle rejection, and the way you think about rejection, and you won’t ever get to acceptance, even with minor revisions, if you don’t keep submitting.)

But here’s the other thing: after you get good news, you keep writing. Even then.

Part of it is the previously-mentioned precarious nature of publishing. Until your writing is actually in print, there are still a bunch of hurdles and stumbling blocks. You don’t get to permanently hang up your writer’s hat once you get that acceptance email. There’s always more work to do prior to publication, for one. And you probably want to get published again, too.

So on bad days – rejection days – you write. And on good days 0\- acceptance days – you write, too. Maybe not on the project that got the rejection or the acceptance, but … you write. Having multiple projects means you can make sure it’s useful writing, especially when you don’t want to deal with reviewers’ comments or confront why, exactly, your piece got rejected. And on good days, you can take that energy and channel it into another project because you’re not done yet.

Writers write, period.

On good days, write. On bad days, write.

Whether you drink vodka or champagne instead of coffee as you do is up to you.

What’s your writing schedule look like?

It’s a common question, especially when other people are trying to figure out how to plan for a project: Rebecca, what’s your writing schedule look like? How do you do it?

It’s a complicated answer, one of those that starts with “It depends.” It doesn’t even just depend on who you are as an author and how you work best. For me it also depends on the project, the time of year, what else is going on in my life, and things I probably haven’t even identified yet. So piece of advice #1 is: you have to be willing to adapt.

I’ve had projects where I write at least x number of words every single day until the book is done. Every. Single. Day. It’s not something I’d really recommend, because that’s a quick trip to burnout, but if the project itself is on fire, I don’t stop myself. Some days I wake up seriously wanting to write, and if there’s time in my schedule for it, I’m not going to stop myself.

There are too many days when I wake up not feeling like I want to write.

My current schedule has me at my laptop three days a week, with “writing” as my main task for two hours at a time. Let’s break that down.

Why two hours? Concentration. It takes a while to get into the zone (if today happens to be a “zone” day), so the time slot can’t be too short, but I definitely feel myself fading before two hours is up. If I specifically say “two hours,” then I can quit without feeling like giving up. If I’m still writing at speed when the timer dings, I can finish off the thought and feel good about it.

This doesn’t mean that I spend the entire two hours typing words. If you have a longer writing session like that, you can break it up using the Pomodoro Technique, or you can treat it more like stray thoughts during meditation: notice you’ve gone off somewhere and bring yourself back to the task at hand. No judgment.

I don’t usually turn off the internet or anything like that during these sessions. There are times when I’ll write and highlight something to look up later, and other times I’ll go ahead and google the tidbit I need. (This is frequently where the wandering happens, but again, I’ll remind myself I’m supposed to be writing and bring myself back to Word.) It’s an option, though, if you still find yourself too distracted, and there are all sorts of apps and things you can use to help.

Three days a week is a good balance for me because it still allows me to take weekends off while also forcing me to sit here in front of the screen. (Butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, as one of my grad school professors likes to say.) Having Tuesdays and Thursday mornings as “not-writing” times also gives me the flexibility to do the things you need to do if you’re writing that aren’t actually typing words.

Reading. Resting. Engaging in a hobby so my thoughts can keep on ticking over behind the scenes. Maybe re-reading something I’ve written. Or just daydreaming.

Having some structured work mornings, some unstructured work mornings, and some non-work weekend mornings is a good approach for me right now. I’m currently on top of my writing projects, so I don’t need to force myself to write more or work faster.

The breaks are necessary to allow me to keep up my energy and enthusiasm, and the strict three days ensure I keep up my momentum. I’ve even taken a whole week off in the middle of my current project, and here’s the important thing about breaks if “resting” gives you anxiety: name the expiration date. “I’m taking today off, but I’ll be back at it tomorrow.” Or “I’m taking this week off, but Monday morning I’ll be at my desk again.”

If you schedule your breaks like you schedule your writing, you can take the same approach: when your attention wanders and you start doing something that isn’t currently your priority, bring yourself back. No, you don’t need to be thinking about your article right now. If you get a massive brainwave, write down a note so you don’t forget it, and let it go for now. You need time to rest and recuperate and take a step back so those connections can be made.

So right now the short answer to “How do you do it?” is “Two hours at a time, one word after another.”

How do you write?

The garbage will do

The other day someone took to twitter to ask writers what their first drafts look like. Are they tight and polished? How much work do you have to do once you get things drafted? Is it all clean and basically perfect?

I’ve got more space to answer here, so I’ll start with this: no one sees my first drafts. Just me. I’m not even going to take a photograph of one of the pages to give you an example of what it looks like after I’ve read it through and marked it up. So that’s comforting, at least: nobody ever has to see your first draft.

I did respond with this photograph of my personalized editing stamps, and I want to talk a bit more about them. Starting with a question to you: how many times would you have to anticipate writing something before you bought a self-inking stamp to use instead?

Yeah.

Not only are my first drafts far from perfect, but I know what issues I should be looking for. I’m predictable.

Why not just correct those issues while I’m drafting, then? You try it. Writing’s hard. It’s enough of a struggle to get the words on the page without also adding the idea of perfection on top of it. Have you ever found yourself staring at a blank cursor because you don’t want to make a mistake? That’s no way to get things written.

So, while I won’t show you an ink-covered draft page, I will at least go through my stamps with you.

cite! – the meaning behind this one should be clear enough, but having this stamp also means accepting a particular practice: that I don’t have to always stop and look something up when I’m writing. If it’s going to interrupt the flow, I’ll just dump something in that’s close to what it should be and then go back and look it up later, during editing.

delete – not everything I write will make the final cut. It’s sad, but sometimes darlings have to be killed. Or at least moved into a different document.

transition – ah, yes. I am fond of using headings to jump from one topic to another without adding in a transition. Part of it is how I need to write the next section before I fully understand what I’m transitioning to. Another part is being able to jump from section to section when I’m writing without forcing myself to follow the outline point by point.

SO? – the big one. I’m rather fond of knowing exactly why I’m talking about something and how it connects back to my main point, but not actually coming out and saying it. And again, that’s fine, because (again again) nobody reads my first drafts. It’s something that can easily be picked up and worked in on a second pass.

unpack – yeah, it’s a buzzword, but these stamps are tiny and you can only fit so many letters on them. Basically this fits in with SO?: there’s something going on here, but I haven’t actually slowed down enough to say it. I’m trying to get through all of these ideas without fully laying them out and explaining and making connections. The ideas are all there, which is the most important part, and I can add in the support while I revise.

wut – everyone’s favorite. Look, there are times when I just have no idea what I was saying. Maybe I’ll figure it out. Maybe it’ll get changed to delete.

awk – sometimes I’m an awkward duck and it shows in my writing. Revising makes me look less awkward. Did I mention I never show anyone my first draft?

LONG – I like long sentences. I think they make me look more academic. But, when I go back and read them, I really see that they make me look difficult to follow. It’s another easy fix.

I have stamps of these things because I know that I do them. I anticipate that I’ll keep on doing them.

I give myself permission to keep on doing them.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. (Thanks, Terry Pratchett.) No one else has to see it. No one has to judge it – not even you. Get the words on the page first so you can shift to concentrating on having them make sense before you show them to someone else.

I, personally, recommend the personalized stamps. They add a little bit more fun to the process. And maybe a little bit more self-acceptance, too.

How do you care about a project for months?

Books take a long time to write. It’s exciting at first, getting the initial idea, working up the proposal, and hoping you get accepted, but then … you live with the idea for months, writing and revising, and other ideas pop up and seem more interesting. How do you hang in there long enough to finish when staring at a page of the manuscript makes you want to tear your hair out?

The advice totally comes from the James and the Giant Peach movie: try looking at it another way. (Imagine a giant stop-motion earthworm saying it with an English accent. Unless that makes it more scary than helpful.)

Last week I forced myself to tackle the conclusion of the book I’m currently working on. When you start a book, you pick one way of organizing your ideas. You have to – otherwise it’s nonsense. And you pick something that you thing readers will be able to follow easily, while still getting your point. But, when you pick one organization, it means rejecting all the others.

I like to write up all my chapters and read them through before going for the conclusion. The time between reading and starting to write can vary, but it’s at least long enough for me to read what I’ve actually written (as opposed to what I thought I’d write) and highlight the main points. Then I like to type up all my notes, print them off, and cut then apart so I can rearrange them.

For me, the actual act of cutting and arranging is more useful than manipulating everything digitally. I start sorting my little strips of paper into piles based on very general section ideas. Last week I put a bunch of sticky notes on the floor with proposed categories and dealt out the strips of paper into each one. This can mean adding another sticky note if there are too many strips that don’t seem to fit, or combining a couple if their piles are smaller and the ideas too similar.

Sorting my ideas this new way made me remember why I’d liked it in the first place. I’ve been working with them in one order – the chapter order, the book proposal order – for months, but putting all the main ideas together in a single pile helps me see how the chapters are connected to each other instead of being isolated ideas.

It also helps remind me of the “so what?” that can get forgotten when focusing on each individual chapter instead of the whole book.

And I kept hearing Earthworm in my head: try looking at it another way. Taking a step back to look at the forest and organizing it in a way other than just by type of tree. Putting down the individual puzzle pieces and looking at the picture on the front of the box again.

It can be a lot harder when the deadline suddenly seems closer and you realize you have to finish something that you might not think is any good anymore. There’s the temptation to keep banging away the same way you always have, just trying to get it done, instead of taking a breath and trying something else. But keeping your nose to the grind isn’t always the best way to get things done.

Sometimes you need to let things drop, take a deep breath, and look at them a different way so you can help remind yourself about why this idea was worth all the effort in the first place.

Was H. H. Holmes really a “serial killer”?

He gets called “America’s first serial killer,” but H. H. Holmes – born Herman Webster Mudgett – was hanged in 1896 for a single murder. Only one count was ever brought against him a courtroom, and we know by now that his confession to 27 murders isn’t believable. So was he really a serial killer, or is that just part of the myth?

The thing is, Holmes didn’t know the phrase “serial killer” when he was confessing. The backstory that everyone seems to know today – absent father, abusive mother, history of starting fires and harming animals and wetting the bed, etc. etc. – didn’t become common knowledge until the last quarter of the twentieth century. (Mindhunter, anyone?) Although the term may have been coined earlier, it still wasn’t in enough time for Holmes to have known it.

And when you consider the “big names” of serial killing – what Peter Vronsky calls the Golden Age – they look more like Jack the Ripper than H. H. Holmes. The most famous serial killers murder and mutilate for their own personal pleasure, and the crimes are usually messy. These get categories as “lust murders,” and Holmes wasn’t a lust murderer.

The murder for which he was hanged, that of Benjamin Pitezel, was part of an insurance scam. Holmes tried to stage his friend’s murder as some sort of accident so that Pitezel’s widow could collect on the $10,000 life insurance policy … and Holmes could relieve her of much of it.

The Pitezel children – Alice, Nellie, and Howard – are harder to explain, considering the strange journey Holmes took them on before killing them, but he used Alice to identify her father’s body and then all three children to control their mother. Holmes may not have had a plan fully hatched by the time he took possession of Nellie and Howard, and he may have abandoned the children in multiple cities, but he doesn’t seem to have tortured them. When Holmes decided it was time to kill Howard and then the girls, he didn’t use a knife. Holmes opted for poison and suffocation.

His earlier murders, at least the ones it seems reasonable to think he actually committed, weren’t killing for the sake of killing. Holmes killed for money, or when one of his mistresses either tired or annoyed him, but he wasn’t a lust murderer. When Holmes could con someone or talk his way out of something, he did.

Not all serial killers are lust murderers, a subset of hedonistic killers. But Holmes doesn’t really fall under any of the other main categories of visionary, mission-oriented, or power/control, either. He doesn’t come across as looking for revenge, trying to eliminate a certain group of people, or someone who gets any sort of pleasure out of murder. For Holmes, it feels like the next step for a con man when he can’t talk his way out of a situation and he doesn’t particularly care about the sanctity of human life.

Where Holmes does fit the definition, though, is how he killed multiple people at different times and in different locations, returning to “normal life” between the murders. He hid the murders, getting rid of physical evidence and even writing letters to cover up for his victims’ absence when noticed. He knew that what he was doing could lead to legal persecution, but that’s exactly what he used murder to avoid.

So: is Holmes a serial killer? The answer is “Yes, with a few buts.” Yes, but he isn’t a lust murderer like Bundy. Yes, but it’s hard to diagnose him for certain considering the time and place in which he killed.

Yes, but he wasn’t America’s first. Just the first one to show up in most contemporary timelines. Serial murder existed long before the term and the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (now the Behavioral Analysis Unit), and therefore long before expert definition and explanation could be applied during their lifetime. Holmes made his mark – and started his own myth – at a time when he couldn’t claim the title for himself.

Reframing rejection

The other day I was updating my spreadsheet of proposals and queries. It’s kind of a depressing process, because it means checking my emails again for dates of rejections, but it also reminds me of what I’ve sent out, what’s been decided, and what’s still hanging. As far as guessing when I’ll hear back, well, that’s another question for another time, but it got me thinking about rejections.

The thing is, there’s no secret language in a rejection that actually means “You suck.” Even those form rejections – they don’t actually mean your work is terrible or that you’ve somehow failed as a person. It’s not the greatest feeling in the world to receive them, no, but “I’m sorry, this isn’t a fit” honestly, truly doesn’t mean your ideas are worthless or your writing is garbage.

Imagine you’re decorating a wall. Maybe you’ve just moved, or rearranged the furniture, or put up new wallpaper. You’ve got this space, and you have a lot of lovely artwork. Of course it’s lovely – you’ve bought it all, and you’ve got a good eye. But you’re working with a few limitations.

The first is simply space. If you have more art than you have wall space, something has to be cut. As hard as you try, you just can’t squeeze it all in there.

So next you look at composition: what goes with what? Can you make a nice arrangement of these five pieces, but the other three don’t really fit? Maybe they don’t work with the color scheme or the overall theme. The other three might go together, but they aren’t going to work here. If you tried to cram one in, it would just stand out and throw everything off.

And when you do get the five arranged, does the light hit them properly? Are they too crowded, after all? Do you need to switch something around, or buy a new frame, or even wait until an order arrives so you have enough hardware to hang things?

You’re not passing on something because it isn’t good. It just doesn’t fit here, among all the other pieces. Pieces, of course, that you personally can see, but the artists can’t. Van Gough wasn’t pondering how he might paint something that would look good between this Monet and that Picasso. He was just … painting. Producing his best work. Not sure which pieces would become popular enough to be dorm room posters and which would become obscure.

When you’re the writer submitting your work, you don’t really get to see the wall or the other pieces. You’re offering your idea up and hoping that it makes the final cut – that it looks good in the space and fits with the other authors around you.

And that’s something you have no control over. When you get the “Thank you for sharing, but this doesn’t fit” email, that’s all it means: I’ve got a wall and a wide selection of artwork, and yours didn’t end up fitting the overall tableau.

There are certainly ways to get an idea of the wall – reading multiple issues of a journal before you submit to it, for example – but unless you’re an editor selecting articles for your own collection, there’s no guarantee of getting in. Which means a list of rejections, and the need to be resilient and seek out the next possible wall on which to display it.

How long is your list of rejections?

H. H. Holmes’ victims: Emeline Cigrand

Emeline Cigrand is the eleventh victim H. H. Holmes claims in the newspaper confession published two weeks before his execution. She is likely one of his real victims – not a lie created to bump up his body count.

She was also connected to Holmes long before his confession.

Emeline Cigrand was brought to Chicago to work as Holmes’ stenographer. Depending on the version of the story, Holmes either hired her through a Chicago typewriter firm, or Benjamin Pitezel met her while he was away on the “Gold Cure” for alcoholism and then informed Holmes of the beautiful secretary. Either way, it was known that Emeline Cigrand moved to Chicago in order to work for Holmes.

The story Holmes tells in his confession is the same one he sold her parents after her disappearance: that she had met a man and was going to leave him for her. The difference is that, in responding to Peter Cigrand in a letter, Holmes argued that Emeline had indeed married this unnamed man and had then moved away with him suddenly. In a second letter, sent a few weeks later, Holmes claims that the new “Mrs. Phelps” has been located and her unexplained absence satisfactorily clarified.

The Cigrands carefully examined the last letters they received from their daughter. One of them said she was going to get married, and the very last one lamented that she had in fact married a bad man and would leave him as soon as possible. Upon closer inspection, this last letter was determined to be a forgery.

The truth, at least as Holmes claims it in his confession, centers on the large vault he had installed inside his “Murder Castle.” Because Emeline had become his mistress as well as his indispensable secretary, he couldn’t let her go.

Holmes writes that Miss Cigrand stopped by on her way to her wedding and Holmes offered her a counter proposal: if she wrote a letter to her fiancé telling him that she decided, at the last moment, she could never be happy with him, Holmes would take her to another city and live there with her as husband and wife. The letter to the fiancé made it clear that it would be useless to look for her, thereby covering Holmes’ trail.

He says she was “very willing” to write the letter, except he also tells readers that, at the time he made this proposal, Emeline Cigrand was locked in the room-sized vault. The only way for her to escape it is to agree to write the letter, which she apparently did, before suffering a slow and lingering death.

It seems that, in spite of this turn of events, Emeline did not think to destroy the letter, or perhaps Holmes forged one to the fiancé the way he seems to have done with one to her family. Either way, Emeline disappeared at the end of 1892 and Holmes did not confess until 1896. He maintained that she had married and gone abroad with her new husband.

Emeline Cigrand is believed to be a “true” victim of Holmes, along with Julia Connor (and her daughter) and Minnie Williams because she was known to be his mistress. Holmes killed for money, the way it seems he killed Minnie’s sister, Nannie, but he also killed women once he had tired of them or they became annoying to him. It seems that Emeline Cigrand may have also known more of Holmes’ dealings than he felt comfortable and so, in his mind, the only way to ensure her silence was through her death.

Holmes’ bald statement that he locked Emeline Cigrand in the vault and left her there to die just increased the legend surrounding his Murder Castle and his own status as a heartless killer. While this confession may have allowed her family to gain some measure of closure, it would have also been terrible for them to read.

Breaking down the writing process

I was talking with my writing buddy last week a little bit about my process. He’s working on his dissertation proposal, I’m working on a book manuscript, and we Zoom together three days a week for two hours at a time. We chat, catch up, and then mute ourselves and get to work. It’s accountability in that I block out the time but, at the end, we can shrug at each other and say “Nope, today was awful, didn’t get it done,” and it’s fine. No consequences.

When we start, we ask each other what our goal is for that session. Mine’s usually not very specific – “I’m working on Chapter 8” – but on Friday I finished proofreading the main body of my manuscript. I rewarded myself with a gold star in my planner and, when we regrouped, the question came up: so, what’s next?

Let’s look at the gold star first: it says “editing done” because “editing done for the intro through Chapter 9 on the first pass of the draft” wouldn’t fit. But it still deserves a star because it’s necessary, and it’s finished. There are a lot – a lot – of little steps on the way to publishing a book, and if you don’t celebrate all of them, no one will.

The star also helps me visualize how I’m breaking things down into those steps. Right now I have two more on my immediate to-do list: move all the edits from the hard copy to the Word document, and write the conclusion. These can be done at the same time, jumping back and forth when one gets to be too annoying. (Usually making all the little changes, adding in the missing transitions, searching for quotes or citations, etc.)

But the point my writing partner took away from it is that not all of the steps can – or have to be – done at the same time.

Yes, reading and writing will overlap, but I don’t sit down at my computer thinking about the next seven steps. (This is something I’ve personally been working on because, if you know me, you know I’m always worried about the next seven steps.) When we Zoom for our sessions, my goal is specifically writing the next part of a given chapter.

Not researching it during those two hours. Not pausing to look something up and getting sucked down a black hole. Not even footnoting properly. Just … writing the next part.

Giving myself permission to write it imperfectly and come back to fix all that later.

I wasn’t thinking about the conclusion while I wrote each chapter. The chapter intros and conclusions come last during that step and, when I was proofreading, I was highlighting the points I need to include in my conclusion. And I haven’t even gotten around to formatting everything properly yet – I want it all there first before I worry whether my citation style is up to snuff or if my headings look right.

It’s okay – even necessary – to put blinders on while you’re focusing on a task. Setting a clear and manageable goal for your writing session (and a reasonable length for that session) is necessary and incredibly helpful. For one thing, it gives you the focus necessary to build up all the pieces you need to complete a big project. For another, it allows you to feel like you’ve accomplished things at different points along the way.

It’s not just gold stars for “They offered me a book contract!” and “I delivered the manuscript!” Those two moments are months apart, and you have to figure out a way to keep going to meet your deadline. A way to feel like you’re making progress.

I choose gold stars and a recognition of my accomplishments. How about you?

H. H. Holmes and the 27 body problem

There are many considerations that come along with being a serial killer, some of them more practical than others. One of these is “What do you do with the bodies?” In order to be labeled a serial killer in the first place, there have to be multiple victims. Serial killers therefore have to figure out what to do with the bodies so that they don’t get caught. But what are your options if you’re a nineteenth century physician living in Chicago?

One answer is, of course, H. H. Holmes’ “Murder Castle” … and that might offer up some actual solutions in the midst of all of the myth. There were at least some human remains discovered in the basement, but hardly enough to credit Holmes’ claim of 27 total victims, even if the final 4 were killed elsewhere. At times Holmes has also been suspected of buying a “glass-bending furnace” in order to cremate his victims, especially when authors like to multiply that number by a factor of 10. If Holmes used his “castle” as a hotel during the Columbian Exposition, then there are at least 250 bodies that have to be accounted for.

The bodies of his final victims – Benjamin, Alice, Nellie, and Howard Pitezel – were all found. So if Holmes didn’t bury or cremate the others, what happened to them?

  • sunk in a lake – in Holmes’ Own Story, after Holmes says Minnie Williams killed her sister, Nannie, he helped Minnie get Nannie’s body into a trunk and then rowed out into Lake Michigan and threw the trunk over.
  • sold – Holmes had, after all, been a medical student and would have known that medical schools had difficulty finding cadavers for practice. He claimed to have sold some of the bodies to “a party … whose name I withhold” and who paid him between $25 and $45 per body. (Even in his “confession,” Holmes refuses to reveal the names of anyone who supposedly helped him with the 27 murders. This mysterious party is likely still out there, buying corpses for either medical dissection or insurance scams, as Holmes wrote those words.)
  • used for insurance – Holmes claims he killed his first victim because he knew the man was insured for a large sum. He doesn’t explain how he got his hands on any of that money, especially since he gets confused in referencing his own previous stories, but presumably this man’s body had to be identified and returned to his loved ones.
  • left to be discovered – Holmes claims he killed one man after taking him out on a fishing trip. Holmes learned the man had money and presumably killed him in order to rob him. How he explained the absence of his fishing partner at the end of the day isn’t clarified.
  • self-defense – Holmes also says he shot at least one of his victims in self defense. In this case the body was quickly discovered and taken care of.

Even in his written confession to 27 murders, Holmes doesn’t always mention what, exactly, became of the bodies after he killed them. But remember, Holmes was writing in 1896. No one was watching CSI or reading true crime books. When he makes a casual mention of storing a body for months, nobody questions what state it would be in by the time he would have wanted to stage his insurance scam.

Holmes makes one nod to the realities of hiding a dead body when he admits that he selected the Pennsylvania office for Benjamin Pitezel because of its proximity to the city morgue. People in the area would be used to the smell of decomposition, so he hoped that Pitezel’s body would not be discovered until he was unidentifiable. But this raises a question: if he knew that a single dead body could alert the neighbors, how in the world was he supposed to kill over a dozen in one location without being discovered?

Holmes’ confession, lengthy as it is, still leaves numerous questions surrounding his supposed victims, and his reliability already falters because he named victims who were in fact still alive. There is no doubt that Holmes was a murderer, but not of 27 people.