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Even as a child in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, Herman Mudgett was considered a lad with a future, a boy who professed filial devotion while secretly fantasizing his parents' deaths. By age eleven he was conducting secret experiments on small animals and strays, becoming skilled at disabling his subjects without killing them. In 1886 he appeared in the Chicago suburb of Englewood, Illinois, and introduced himself as Dr. H. H. Holmes to the wife of the ailing owner of Holton's drugstore. He was hired on the spot, and under his management the store prospered. But when Holmes's attempt to purchase the drugstore from Mrs. Holton went sour, and she sued him, she inexplicably disappeared - never to be seen or heard from again.
As Jack the Ripper was terrorizing London, Holmes was building his infamous "Castle," a grandiose residence and veritable fortress bristling with battlements and turrets. He hired and fired a succession of workmen to build the castle, thus eliminating witnesses to its secrets: a labyrinth of trapdoors, winding passageways, dark dead-end halls, stairways to nowhere, bedchambers fitted with peepholes and asphyxiating gas pipes, soundproof vaults and torture chambers, greased chutes large enough to send human bodies from the living quarters to a cellar equipped with acid vats, a crematorium, a dissecting table, and cases full of gleaming surgical tools.
Alternately donning the mantles of doctor, druggist and inventor, Holmes was also a get-rich-quick schemer and bigamist, with three wives and innumerable lovers - at least one of whom ended up a prize skeletal specimen, sold to a medical college for nearly two hundred dollars. But his increasing audacity and carelessness during his reign of terror led to his discovery and to "The Trial of the Century," in which Holmes finally confessed to twenty-seven murders. While he later recanted - maintaining his innocence until his final breath - he had already achieved immortality as the most monstrous criminal of his day.
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Illinois, Chicago, United StatesShowing 8 featured editions. View all 8 editions?
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1
Depraved: The Definitive True Story of H.H. Holmes, Whose Grotesque Crimes Shattered Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
January 27, 2004, Pocket Star
Mass Market Paperback
in English
0743490355 9780743490351
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2
Depraved: The Definitive True Story Of H.H. Holmes, Whose Grotesque Crimes Shattered Turn-Of-The-Century Chicago
February 2004, Pocket Star
Paperback
in English
1439124051 9781439124055
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3
Depraved: the shocking true story of America's first serial killer
1998, Pocket
in English
0671025449 9780671025441
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5
Depraved: the shocking true story of America's first serial killer
1996, Pocket Star Books
in English
0671690302 9780671690304
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7
Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America's First Serial Killer
September 1994, Pocket Books
Hardcover
in English
0671732161 9780671732165
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8
Depraved: the shocking true story of America's first serial killer
1994, Pocket Books
in English
0671732161 9780671732165
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Book Details
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"Legend lays the blame for the disaster on Mrs. Patrick O'Leary's cow, though the likelier suspects were a crew of young hooligans-neighborhood boys sneaking a smoke in the hayloft of the O'Leary's ramshackle barn at 137 De Koven Street on Chicago's West Side."
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- Created April 29, 2008
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March 17, 2024 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
December 7, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
April 5, 2014 | Edited by ImportBot | Added IA ID. |
August 6, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |