Tag: serial killer

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.

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.

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.

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?