Free FIENDISH KILLERS (True Crime) by Anne Williams, Vivian Head, Amy Williams

water. However, he was not prosecuted and went on to run several other rackets, including selling fresh bodies to the medical schools in the area for students to dissect. Ironically, nobody asked where the bodies came from.
     
    D ISMEMBERED BODIES
     
    By the time he was thirty, Holmes was a successful businessman. He owned a pharmacy, a hotel, a jewellery store, a restaurant, a barber’s and several other businesses as well. He had many employees, including one named Ned Connor, who had moved to Chicago with his wife Julia and their daughter Pearl, to take up the position of manager in one of Holmes’s businesses. Unbeknown to Connor, Holmes was strongly attracted to Julia, a good-looking woman with red hair and green eyes. When Julia invited her eighteen-year-old sister Gertie to stay, Holmes propositioned her as well, promising to divorce his wife so that he could be with her. Gertie, however, was not interested, so Holmes turned his attention to Julia once more. This time, Julia fell in love with Holmes and soon became his lover. Eventually, Connor found out what was going on and the couple separated, after recriminations on both sides.
    Sadly, Julia was to suffer a great deal as a result of her attachment to Holmes. She became pregnant with their child and Holmes asked her to have an abortion, but Julia initially refused. Eventually, however, she agreed to let Holmes perform the operation on her, and he took her down to the cellar to do so. But instead of performing the abortion, Holmes murdered her instead, dismembering her body so that all the flesh was cleaned off, leaving only her skeleton, which he sold to a medical school for the sum of $200. Nobody knows exactly what happened to Julia’s daughter Pearl, but she was never seen alive again.
     
    G ASSED TO DEATH
     
    In 1893, a major exhibition opened in Chicago, bringing visitors flocking to the city, and to the hotel that Holmes had opened there. Over a period of three years or so, he selected his mostly female victims from the guests, took them to the soundproof rooms and tortured them, before gassing them to death and dissecting them. So that he would not be discovered, he constantly changed the staff who worked at the hotel, firing them every fortnight or so. In this way he was able to carry on his grisly work without detection.
    The usual way he operated was to murder his victims, then push the bodies down a secret chute that took them to the basement. There he would dissect them, remove all the flesh from the bones, and assemble their skeletons to be sold to medical schools. He also cremated his victims, throwing their bodies in huge lime pits so that they would be destroyed. In addition, there were two giant furnaces in the building, a torture rack and a huge assortment of poisons and acids designed to dispose of his victims in various ways, as the mood took him.
    Not content with this, Holmes decided to make more money by operating an insurance scam with one of his employees, Benjamin Pitezel. Pitezel took out a life insurance policy for $10,000, citing Holmes as the beneficiary. The idea was that Pitezel would then disappear, Holmes would find a corpse to disfigure, then identify it as Pitezel. Pitezel’s children would be roped in to help to identify the body.
     
    T HE LONG ARM OF THE LAW
     
    What in fact happened was that Holmes murdered Pitezel, then panicked when the police began to snoop around the hotel. Holmes set the hotel alight and escaped to Philadelphia, taking one of Pitezel’s daughters with him. Meanwhile, evidence of what had been going on in the hotel all those years finally came to light. The remains of over 200 bodies were found, and police launched a major manhunt.
    Eventually, Holmes was tracked down in Boston and arrested. While in custody, he struck up a friendship with another inmate, Marion Hedgepath, who constantly boasted to him about the various ways that he had made money illegally over the years. Holmes