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The Ripper was a sexual sadist, a stalker who more directly reflects the anxieties of our age, according to Mr. Schechter. Dr. Holmes was a product of The Gilded Age, a late 19thcentury period of feverish enterprise and gaudy excess and Chicago was its nucleus.He was always seeking to profit from his victims turn them into cold cash in one way or another, Mr. Schechter says. Getting in the way of Holmes and his lust for wealth wasnt a good idea.Dr. Holmes was hanged for one murder in Philadelphia, but he might have committed hundreds more in Chicago.Authorities suspected as many as 50 visitors to the Worlds Fair in 1893 made a tragic choice of lodging and stayed at Dr. Holmes boardinghouse, later dubbed Nightmare Castle and The Castle of Horror.In addition, as many as 100 young, female stenographers who answered Dr. Holmes continual string of newspaper ads disappeared forever after they entered the threestory labyrinth.The mansion was filled with doors that opened to brick walls, stairways to nowhere, an elevator without a shaft and a shaft without an elevator.There was an airtight and soundproof vault, torture chambers, dissecting tables, a crematorium, chemical vats, quicklime pits and humansized greased chutes leading from the living quarters to the cellar.The bedrooms had peepholes and were equipped with asphyxiating gas pipes connected to a control panel in Dr. Holmes closet.Dr. Holmes also had an elasticity determinator, a curious contraption he claimed could stretch experimental subjects to twice their normal length and produce a race of giants. Those who viewed it and lived said it appeared to be a medieval torture rack.Exactly why this onstrous mansion was built is a mystery trapped inside its architects psychopathic mind. Unfortunately for historians, much of the knowledge about the man comes from scores of pulp, truecrime books and from Dr. Holmes own story published from prison in 1895.Like the maneating tigers of the tropical jungle, whose appetites for blood have once been aroused, I roamed about this world seeking whom I could destroy, Dr. Holmes wrote.Dr. Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett on May 16, 1860, in the rural New Hampshire hamlet of Gilmanton.I was born with the devil in me, he wrote. I couldnt help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing. And I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world. He has been with me ever since.He grew up in a household with an abusive father and a pious, submissive mother, developing a penchant early on for killing and maiming stray

 

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