HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES: "H. H. Holmes: UPDATE – Was he Jack the Ripper?" by Earl Staggs

It has been quite awhile since Earl was here with one of his “History’s Rich With Mysteries”guest posts. Earl is back today with an update on H. H. Holmes who he first wrote about last October.

History's Rich With Mysteries

When I look at the past, I find stories about people which fascinate me, particularly those in which there is a curious mixture of fact, legend, and mysterious uncertainty. In this series of articles, I want to explore some of those stories. I think of them as mysteries swaddled in legend. While truth is always desired in most things, truth easily becomes staid and boring. Legend, on the other hand, forever holds a hint of romanticism and an aura of excitement borne of adventure, imagination and, of course, mystery.

H. H. Holmes: UPDATE – Was he Jack the Ripper?

Jeff Mudgett believes his great-great grandfather, one of America's first and most prolific serial killers, was also London's Jack the Ripper. He studied his ancestor for more than twenty years and presented his evidence in his book, BLOODSTAINS.

I wrote about H. H. Holmes and his “Murder Castle” in this space a year ago. He may have killed as many as two hundred people, most of them during the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. That's more than the total killed by Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Gary Ridgway, and Ted Bundy combined. 

The Murder Castle

Convicted in 1894 of murder and fraud, the man born Herman W. Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire in 1861, who later changed his name to H. H. Holmes, was hanged in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896, nine days before his thirty-fifth birthday.

His great-great grandson, Jeff Mudgett, a retired attorney and former U.S. Naval Reserve Commander, also formed a theory that Holmes substituted someone else for the execution and made his escape. That theory was disproven when the body was exhumed, and a DNA test confirmed the identity of the corpse as H. H. Holmes.

Holmes was a scandalous figure in Chicago even before his murderous exploits were revealed. He was a talented con man who sold fake medicines, engaged in shady business deals, and was married to three women at the same time. He bought life insurance on people, presented stolen cadavers as their remains, and collected on the policies. Hardly a day went by that he was not threatened or sued by people he cheated or owed money to.

H. H. Holmes

That is, until a period in late 1888. For several months, Holmes' name was not bandied about in the newspapers or the courts of Chicago. Mr. Mudgett discovered evidence which shows a passenger named H. Holmes sailed to England during that time and was there when Jack the Ripper claimed his victims. Mudgett was assisted in his research by CIA criminologist Amaryllis Fox. The two of them traveled to London to study the five murders in the Whitechapel section of the city attributed to the Ripper.

Here is some of the evidence they developed and presented:

. . .eyewitness claimed Jack was short of stature. Holmes was approximately five feet seven.

. . .witnesses also said Jack spoke with an American accent.

. . .based on how his victims were carved up, London investigators were convinced Jack had anatomical or surgical knowledge. Holmes graduated from medical school and was a surgeon.

. . .a handwriting analysis indicated the writing of Jack and Holmes was a 97.95% match.

Critics of Mudgett's conclusions say Holmes and the Ripper could not have been the same person because their methods of killing were different. They point to the fact that the Ripper slit the throats of his victims, then removed various internal organs. Holmes, they say, did not do that. I could argue that perhaps he did.

In fact, Holmes killed in a number of different ways. Some of his victims were suffocated while some were given a deadly overdose of chloroform. Others were hanged, gassed, poisoned, or starved to death. The manner of death of many of his victims remains unknown since he incinerated many of them, left some to disintegrate in acid or lime pits, and stripped some down to skeletons which he sold to medical schools. For these reasons, it is not known how many he killed by which method.

It's quite possible he slit the throats of some of his victims and disemboweled them as Jack did during his Whitechapel reign of terror. It's also possible that Whitechapel in 1888 was a “training period” for Holmes during which he experimented with killing in the manner associated with Jack the Ripper, but moved on to other methods when he was back in the US by the beginning of 1889.

While in prison awaiting his execution, Holmes wrote a memoir which included his confession to twenty-seven murders, even though most counts put that number close to ten times that amount. He said nothing about the time he spent in London. Was that because he was not Jack the Ripper and did not commit the Whitechapel murders? Before trying to answer that question, consider the overall credibility of his confession.  Some of the twenty-seven people he said he killed were later found to be very much alive. With that in mind, it seems futile to place any credence in what he admitted to or did not admit to. One has to wonder, after the life he'd led, if he was in his right mind by then or if reality has escaped him. 

Over the years, a large number of suspects have been offered as the real identity of Jack the Ripper, some supported by convincing evidence. None of them, however, has been compelling enough to exclude all the others. Jeff Mudgett's belief that his great-great grandfather was the Ripper can be considered a suspect as strong as the others.

The bottom line is that we still don't know beyond a shadow of doubt who Jack the Ripper really was.

And, most likely, we never will.  

Earl Staggs ©2017

Earl Staggs earned all Five Star reviews for his novels MEMORY OF A MURDER and JUSTIFIED ACTION and has twice received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year.  He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. 

He invites any comments via email at earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net

He also invites you to visit his blog site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com to learn more about his novels and stories.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES: SHARON KINNE – She Killed Three and Got Away by Earl Staggs

It has been awhile since Earl last graced this blog with one of his columns, but he is back today. The cases he finds are simply mind boggling. They also serve as story idea generators for the writers among us. The case of Sharon Kinne is the subject of Earl’s guest post today.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES

When I look at the past, I find stories about people which fascinate me, particularly those in which there is a curious mixture of fact, legend, and mysterious uncertainty. In this series of articles, I want to explore some of those stories. I think of them as mysteries swaddled in legend. While truth is always desired in most things, truth easily becomes staid and boring. Legend, on the other hand, forever holds a hint of romanticism and an aura of excitement borne of adventure, imagination and, of course, mystery.

SHARON KINNE – She Killed Three and Got Away  by Earl Staggs

Sharon Elizabeth Hall was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1939. At the age of sixteen, she met twenty-two-year-old James Kinne. They dated until James returned to college in Utah. Sharon then wrote a letter to James telling him she was pregnant. James returned to Missouri, and they married in October of 1956. She later claimed she miscarried the child which brought about the marriage. She soon announced she was pregnant again, and their daughter Danna was born in the fall of 1957.

Sharon, a free spender who wanted the finer things of life, spent her days shopping and with other men. Before long, she was enjoying a steady affair with John Boldizs, whom she had known in high school.

By 1960, James Kinne wanted to divorce Sharon because of her spending habits and because he was sure she was being unfaithful. Sharon also wanted out of the marriage, but she was smart enough to know she would be better off financially as a widow than as a divorced wife. John Boldizs said she offered him $1000 kill her husband. Later, he claimed he thought she may have been kidding.

On March 19, 1960, Sharon reported she heard a gunshot. She rushed into the bedroom where James had been sleeping to find him bleeding from his head. Their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Danna, was on the bed holding one of her father's guns, a .22 caliber pistol. Sharon called for an ambulance, but James died before reaching the hospital.

Police were unable to recover fingerprints from the pistol, and neither Sharon nor Danna were tested for gunshot residue. Several family members said James often allowed his daughter to play with his guns. Police conducted a test in which the child demonstrated she was able to pull the trigger on the gun.

With no evidence to the contrary, investigators had no choice but to rule James Kinne's death an accidental homicide. Sharon collected about $29,000 in life insurance, equal to more than $200,000 in today's dollars.

Sharon wanted the gun returned to her, but the police kept it. She had a friend secretly buy her another .22 caliber pistol, but asked that it not be registered in her name.

Sharon used some of her life insurance proceeds to buy a Ford Thunderbird from Walter Jones, a salesman at a local dealership. The pair soon began an affair. Sharon wanted Walter to be her second husband, but he refused to leave his wife. When she told him she was pregnant with his child, he ended the affair.

The next day, Walter filed a missing persons report when his wife, Patricia, did not return home from work. He questioned his wife's coworkers and learned Patricia had met with another woman immediately after work. The description of the woman matched Sharon Kinne, and Walter confronted her.

Sharon admitted to meeting with Patricia to tell her about the affair. She told Walter she dropped Patricia off near her home after the meeting. 

After talking to Walter, Sharon called John Boldizs and asked him to help her look for Patricia. Sharon and John found Patricia's body in a secluded area outside of town where they had often gone on dates.

Patricia Jones had been shot four times with a .22 caliber pistol. Investigators were not able to find the gun.

Sharon, Walter, and John were interrogated by police. The two men admitted to dating Sharon, and both gave signed statements and took polygraph tests. Sharon gave an oral statement but refused to sign a written one or take a polygraph test.

Sharon was arrested for the murder of Patricia Jones on May 31, 1960, the same date of Patricia's funeral. At the request of the county sheriff, she was also charged with the murder of her husband, James. Sharon's attorneys were successful in having her released on bond.

The pistol that had killed James was ruled out as the weapon used in Patricia's death since that gun was still in police custody. The friend who had purchased a new .22 caliber gun for Sharon admitted to doing so, but Sharon claimed first that she had lost it on a trip out of state and later that it had simply disappeared.

She had told the truth when she told Wayne Jones she was pregnant. Her trial was delayed due to her advanced pregnancy. Sharon gave birth to a daughter, Marla Christine, on January 16, 1961.

PATRICIA JONES MURDER TRIAL

Sharon was tried first for the murder of Patricia Jones. After an all-male jury was seated, the trial began in mid-June 1961.

Across Missouri, Sharon Kinne became a household name. Extensive press coverage had made her more a celebrity than a criminal. In his book, “I'm just an ordinary girl: The Sharon Kinne Story,” author James C. Hays said:

“Sharon had control of that courtroom. She had control of the jury. She had control of the spectators. Everybody’s attention was focused on Sharon Kinne, even to the point where on the second day after the trial started, Sharon came moseying in late, fashionably late probably in her mind. The trial went on for about 10 days. The jury came back after deliberating only an hour and a half with a verdict of not guilty. The courtroom erupted in cheers. Jurors came out of the juror box and went over and got Sharon’s autograph. People in the audience came and got Sharon’s autograph.”

The jury had decided the prosecution's case was not solid enough and found Sharon not guilty. After the verdict, Sharon was photographed giving her autograph to one of the jurors. She was returned to jail the same day to await trial for killing her husband.

THREE TRIALS FOR THE MURDER OF JAMES KINNE

At the first trial in January 1962, Sharon was convicted of killing her husband and received a sentence of life in prison. In March of 1963, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned that conviction on a legal technicality. Sharon was released on bond pending retrial.

The second trial ended in a mistrial.

The third trial ended with a hung jury in July 1964.

Sharon was again released on bail to await the fourth trial, scheduled for October 1964. That trial never took place. By then, Sharon had traveled to Mexico with a new boyfriend, Francis Puglise.  She left her children with James Kinne's father and traveled as Jeannette Pugliese, pretending to be the wife of her traveling companion.

In Mexico, Sharon went out alone to a bar one evening in September 1964 and met Francisco Parades Ordoñez, a Mexican-born American citizen. According to Sharon, he invited her back to his hotel room to show her some pictures. When he made sexual advances, she said she was forced to fire her gun to protect herself.  She claimed she had no intention of killing him, but her bullets struck him in the chest, and he died instantly. A hotel employee, Enrique Martinez Rueda, heard the shots and entered the room to investigate. Sharon said she feared he was also going to harm her and fired at him. Although injured, Rueda left the room, locked Sharon inside, and called police.

The local police rejected her story. They believed she hooked up with Ordonez with the intenton of robbing him. When he resisted, she shot him. She was arrested and charged with homicide and assault with a deadly weapon. In her purse, they found a gun and fifty shells. They found two more guns and more shells in her hotel room.

 While in prison awaiting trial, she was given the nickname "La Pistolera," Spanish for "the gunfighter." The Mexican press picked up on it, and once again, Sharon received a great deal of publicity.

At their trial in the summer of 1965, Francis Puglise was cleared of charges and deported to the United States. Sharon was convicted of homicide and sentenced to ten years. She immmediately appealed.  A three-man superior court reviewed her case and upheld the conviction. To Sharon's amazement, they also decided her original sentence was too lenient and increased it from ten years to thirteen.

Sharon Kinne was too clever and slippery, however, to spend thirteen years in a Mexican prison. On December 7, 1969, she escaped. How she pulled it off is unclear. While Mexican auhorities conducted a country-wide search for her, several theories arose, including:

. . .she bribed prison guards.

. . .the prison was understaffed and oversight was generally lax.

. . .a new boyfriend who happened to be a Mexico City policeman arranged her escape.

. . .Sharon disguised herself as a man and exited via a door carelessly left unlocked.

. . .the family of Francisco Ordoñez, the man she'd killed, arranged her escape and then killed her.

Sharon Kinne was never found and could still be out there somewhere in Mexico, the United States, or some other country. She would be 78 years old now.

She holds the distinction of being the subject of the longest currently outstanding arrest warrant for murder in the history of Kansas City, Missouri, and one of the longest outstanding felony warrants in American history.

Author James Hays felt Sharon was smart enough to do something with her life besides murder. He said:

“She could’ve used her intelligence and used her wit. She could’ve been a pioneer woman in politics or in academia or anything, but she chose to go the other way around. She let greed, avarice, and promiscuity rule her life.”

All things considered, I'd say Sharon did whatever she wanted to do no matter what, and considering the small amount of time she spent behind bars, she came out way ahead on the scales of justice.

As further proof of that, when Mexican police searched her hotel room after her arrest, they found a .22 pistol which later proved to be the one used in the murder of Patricia Jones. In spite of this damning evidence, even if she were to be found and apprehended, Sharon could not be charged again with Patricia's murder. Since she was declared innocent of that crime before, she is protected under the Double Jeopardy rule.

Earl Staggs ©2017

  

Texas author Earl Staggs earned all Five Star reviews for his novels MEMORY OF A MURDER and JUSTIFIED ACTION and has twice received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars.

He invites any comments via email at earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net

He also invites you to visit his blog site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com to learn more about his novels and stories.

The Case of H. H. Holmes Is Back In The News

Back last October Earl Staggs wrote about the case of serial killer H, H. Holmes in his piece titled

"H. H. HOLMES – A Man and His Murder Castle." Earl went through the actions of con man/serial killer H. H. Holmes as well as the layout of his famous "The Murder Castle."

Now, The Body Of 'Devil In The White City' Serial Killer H.H. Holmes Is Being Exhumed

according to a story linked to on Bill Crider's blog. Relatives hope to finally put to rest the idea that the notorious con man and serial killer was executed and did not escape, as some believe, to South America.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES: BELLE GUNNESS – Black Widow, Serial Killer, Gone Girl by Earl Staggs

It has been some time, but Earl is back today considering Belle Gunness and her record.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES

When I look at the past, I find stories about people which fascinate me, particularly those in which there is a curious mixture of fact, legend, and mysterious uncertainty. In this series of articles, I want to explore some of those stories. I think of them as mysteries swaddled in legend. While truth is always desired in most things, truth easily becomes staid and boring. Legend, on the other hand, forever holds a hint of romanticism and an aura of excitement borne of adventure, imagination and, of course, mystery.

BELLE GUNNESS – Black Widow, Serial Killer, Gone Girl

by Earl Staggs

No one is sure how many people Belle killed. Most authorities estimate between 25 and 40. Among the victims were husbands, wannabe husbands and, worst of all, her own children.

She was born in Norway in 1859 as Brynhild Paulsdatter Størset. In 1881, she came to America, changed her name, and settled in the midwest. Now going by the name Belle, she married Mads Sorenson in 1884, and gave birth to four children. Two of their children died quite young of acute colitis, a sickness which closely resembles poisoning. Their mother had life insurance policies on the children and collected the money promptly after their deaths.

The couple opened a candy store in Chicago, but the store did not do well and mysteriously burned down within a year. Belle and Mads collected the insurance money and used it to buy a new home.

Belle's husband had two insurance policies. He passed away on July 30, 1900, which happened to be the only day the two policies overlapped. The official cause of death was ruled heart failure. His family suspected foul play, but before those charges could be pursued, Belle collected on the insurance policies the day after her husband's funeral and moved out of state.

After buying a farm near LaPorte, Indiana, Belle came across a man she had known before who was now a widower. She and Peter Gunness married in 1902. While under Belle's care, Peter's infant daughter died soon afterward. Peter himself passed away only months later under cloudy circumstances. Once again, personal tragedy lined Belle's pockets with insurance money.

Belle immediately began searching for a new mate. She placed ads in major newspapers. The ads referred to her as a "comely widow" and stated "Triflers need not apply." A man came from Minnesota with money to pay off Belle's mortgage. He and his money disappeared a week later. Another man came from Missouri. He also brought money for the mortgage, but something about the way Belle looked at him frightened him. He ran back to Missouri as fast as he could.

Ray Lamphere was the one man who stuck around. Belle hired him to help run her farm. Secretly, he longed for Belle himself and resented the other suitors she lured to the farm. Belle eventually came to realize Ray was mentally unstable and fired him.

Men continued to come as a result of Belle's ads and were never seen again.

One of them, an elderly widower named Ole B. Budsberg, from Wisconsin, was last seen alive with Belle at a bank in LaPorte. He mortgaged his Wisconsin property and received several thousand dollars in cash. Budsberg's sons, who were not aware he had gone to meet Belle, came across her name among his papers and wrote to her in the hope she might help them locate their father. Belle responded saying she had never met their father and knew nothing about him.

Andrew Helgelien, her last victim, came from South Dakota after Belle wrote in a letter to him:
 

My heart beats in wild rapture for you, My Andrew, I love you. Come prepared to stay forever.

Andrew arrived at Belle's farm in January, 1908, full of hope like all those before him. He brought with him a check for $2900, which he and Belle deposited in a bank a few days after his arrival. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared.

Andrew's brother did not believe the vague details Belle gave him about Andrew's disappearance and continued to make aggressive inquiries. This, apparently, unnerved Belle to the point she felt she needed to take drastic steps.

In the early morning hours of April 28, 1908, Belle's home burst into flames. Joe Maxson, the man Belle hired to replace Ray Lamphere, awoke as the fire raged and leapt from a second-floor window. The remains of Belle's children were found in the ruins of the fire.

A woman's body was also found in the burned house. Even though the head of the woman was not found, authorities assumed it was Belle.

Belle had previously reported Ray Lamphere to the police as a possible threat to her because she'd fired him. Ray was arrested and charged with murder and arson. He became gravely ill after being convicted of arson, but before passing away, told authorities all about Belle's murderous habits.

According to Ray, he had never killed anyone, but he'd helped Belle dispose of her victims. Usually, he said, she drugged them, killed them with a blow to the head, then dismembered the bodies. She'd learned the art of dissection from her second husband, Peter Gunness, who had been a butcher.

Normally, Ray helped Belle bury the bodies in the pig pen and other places, but sometimes she chopped the bodies into small pieces and fed them to the pigs. Searchers found the bones of at least a dozen men when they dug up the pen.

The remains of seven unknown victims were eventually discovered in unmarked graves in the pauper's section of a local cemetery. The bodies of another man and Jennie Olson, a girl Belle had adopted and raised, were found in another cemetery. Some neighbors reported Belle had told them Jennie was away at a finishing school in another state. Other neighbors had been told Jennie was attending college in Los Angeles.

Further investigation revealed that the female body found in the burned-out farmhouse was not Belle. Belle was a large woman weighing well over two hundred pounds. The woman found after the fire was no more than five feet three inches tall and weighed approximately 150 pounds.

Ray Lamphere told authorities Belle cleaned out her bank accounts two days before the fire. The day before the fire, he said, she drugged her maid, bashed in her head, beheaded her, tied weights to the head, and threw it into a deep swamp. Belle left the maid's body in the house to be discovered as her own. Finally, Belle rendered her three children, ages one, five and nine, unconscious with chloroform, smothered them to death, and left their bodies in the house with the decapitated maid.

According to Ray, Belle was a very wealthly woman. He estimated she had murdered at least forty-two men after taking their money, and had accumulated more than $250,000. That amount would be equivalent to more than six million in today's dollars.

Belle, he claimed, had made herself disappear. Although sightings of her were reported for many years after her disappearance, none of them were proven.

The number of murders Belle Gunness committed places her among the worst of known serial killers. She could easily be considered the worst of them all since her own children were among her victims.

Earl Staggs ©2016

Texas author Earl Staggs earned all Five Star reviews for his novels MEMORY OF A MURDER and JUSTIFIED ACTION and has twice received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars.

He invites any comments via email at earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net    

He also invites you to visit his blog site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com to learn more about his novels and stories.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES: MARY SURRATT - The First Woman Executed by the US May Have Been Innocent by Earl Staggs

Earl Staggs is back today with another “History’s Rich With Mysteries” guest blog post. Today he considers the case of Mary Surrat.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES

When I look at the past, I find stories about people which fascinate me, particularly those in which there is a curious mixture of fact, legend, and mysterious uncertainty. In this series of articles, I want to explore some of those stories. I think of them as mysteries swaddled in legend. While truth is always desired in most things, truth easily becomes staid and boring. Legend, on the other hand, forever holds a hint of romanticism and an aura of excitement borne of adventure, imagination and, of course, mystery.

MARY SURRATT - The First Woman Executed by the US May Have Been Innocent

by Earl Staggs

On April 14, 1865, while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC, and five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union Army, Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States, was shot by John Wilkes Booth. The first American president to be assassinated died the following morning. Vice President Andrew Johnson automatically became President. 

Twelve days later, Booth was tracked to a farm in Bowling Green, Virginia, and killed.

Immediately, anyone who'd had contact with Booth was rounded up and jailed. Eight of them were tried by a military tribunal headed by newly ascended President Johnson. Four of them were convicted and hanged. One of the four was Mary Surratt, owner of a boardinghouse in Washington which Booth and several other suspects were known to frequent.

Mary Surratt was the first woman executed by the United States government. Many believed in her innocence then and a number of historians still do today.

Mary Elizabeth Jenkins, born in Waterloo, Maryland, was seventeen when she married John Surratt. In 1853, they purchased land near what is now Clinton, Maryland, two hours by horseback from Washington, DC, and built a tavern and a post office. The property became known as Surrattsville. They raised three children, Isaac, Anna, and John Jr., and over the next few years, acquired other properties, including a boardinghouse in Washington. In 1864, two years after her husband died, Mary rented the tavern in Surrattsville to an ex-policeman named John Lloyd and moved to the house in Washington.

Lloyd would later provide key evidence against her at her trial. Louis J. Weichmann, a boarder in Mrs. Surratt's house and friend of her son John Jr., also gave incriminating testimony against her. The testimony of those two men was largely responsible for Mary being found guilty. Both men were found not guilty.

The trial lasted seven weeks, with 366 witnesses testifying. On June 30, 1865, Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt and Mary Surratt were convicted as co-conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and sentenced to death by hanging. After sentencing Mary Surratt to hang, five of the nine jurors signed a letter recommending clemency, but President Johnson refused to stop the execution and later claimed he never saw the letter.

After the guilty verdict, Mary's daughter Anna stood on the White House lawn and pled unsuccessfully to see President Johnson, hoping she could convince him to have pity on her mother. She was not granted permission to see him.

From the scaffold, Lewis Powell said, "Mrs. Surratt is innocent. She doesn't deserve to die with the rest of us."

The executions took place on July 7, 1865.

John Wilkes Booth’s original plan was to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners of war being held in Richmond. He and Mary Surratt's son John Jr. recruited others and held meetings as Mary's boardinghouse in Washington and the tavern in Surrattsville. The kidnap plan fell through at the last minute, and Booth decided to assassinate Lincoln instead. He assigned co-conspirators to assassinate Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward, but Booth was the only one who was successful. They believed murdering the President and two of his possible successors would throw the U.S. government into chaos and dysfunction.

Some historians still believe that while Mary possibly knew about the kidnap plot, she was not aware of Booth's last minute decision to assassinate instead. Had she been tried for being part of the aborted kidnap plot, her sentence might have been prison time instead of the gallows. Many also believe false testimonies by Louis Weichmann and John Lloyd were instrumental in her conviction and their being set free.

Mary's defense attorney argued that Lloyd could not be believed because he was "a man addicted to the excessive use of intoxicating liquors" and was motivated to "exculpate himself by placing blame" on Mary.

Lincoln assassination scholar Thomas Reed Turner says that, of the eight people accused of plotting to kill Lincoln, the case against Surratt remains "the most controversial...at that time and since."

Mary's son John escaped capture by fleeing the country for several years but later admitted he was part of the original kidnap plot. He was later tried but was not convicted of involvement in the assassination.

Was Mary Surratt merely a boardinghouse keeper who supported her son's friends without knowing they planned to assassinate the President of the United States? Historians disagree, but most agree that the military tribunal that tried Mary Surratt and the others had less stringent rules of evidence than a regular criminal court would have had.

Mary Surratt's boarding house later became a restaurant

The Surrattsville tavern and Mary Surratt's boardinghouse in Washington are historical sites run by the Surratt Society. The courtyard of the Washington Arsenal, now named Fort LeslieJ. McNair, where the executions took place, is now a tennis court.

Earl Staggs ©2016

Texas author Earl Staggs earned all Five Star reviews for his novels MEMORY OF A MURDER and JUSTIFIED ACTION and has twice received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars.

He invites any comments via email at earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net   

He also invites you to visit his blog site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com to learn more about his novels and stories.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES: "H. H. HOLMES – A Man and His Murder Castle" by Earl Staggs

Texas author Earl Staggs is back this month with his latest “History’s Rich With Mysteries” guest blog. This time he considers the case of H. H. HOLMES – A Man and His Murder Castle. 

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES

When I look at the past, I find stories about people which fascinate me, particularly those in which there is a curious mixture of fact, legend, and mysterious uncertainty. In this series of articles, I want to explore some of those stories. I think of them as mysteries swaddled in legend. While truth is always desired in most things, truth easily becomes staid and boring. Legend, on the other hand, forever holds a hint of romanticism and an aura of excitement borne of adventure, imagination and, of course, mystery.

H. H. HOLMES – A Man and His Murder Castle

by Earl Staggs

H. H. Holmes confessed to killing twenty-seven people, and some feel he may have killed two hundred or more in the US and Canada. He began his life of crime as a bigamist and a successful scam artist, but he would progress to become one of America’s first serial killers and possibly the most prolific. 

He was born Herman Webster Mudgett on May 16, 1861, in Gilmonton, New Hampshire. Considered a highly intelligent boy, he expressed an interest in medicine. There were early signs of what he would become. He reportedly practiced surgery on animals. It is also possible he was responsible for the death of a friend. After graduating high school at the age of sixteen, he took teaching jobs in nearby towns and soon married Clara Lovering, the first of his three wives.

At the age of eighteen, he enrolled in the University of Vermont, but left after only one year and entered the University of Michigan's medical school. He graduated in June 1884. While attending school, he took out life insurance policies on people he knew, presented cadavers he had stolen as their remains, and collected on the policies. He may have also used the bodies for experiments.

His marriage quickly fell apart, and he abandoned his wife and their son. He spent the next couple of years working various jobs in several cities and continued with his scams. When he feared he might get caught, he moved to Chicago in 1886 and changed his name. While he used a number of aliases, he was most commonly known as Henry Howard (or “H. H.”) Holmes.

In Chicago, he found a job in a drugstore owned by Everett Holton. Not long after Holmes went to work for him, Holton died, allegedly from natural causes. Within weeks, Holton's wife sold the store to Holmes, and then she mysteriously disappeared. The store provided Holmes with cash to continue scamming. One of his enterprises was selling an “elixir” out of the store which was nothing but tap water.

THE MURDER CASTLE

In 1888, he began building a massive, elaborate, block-long hotel which local residents called “The Castle.” Later, when it became known that Holmes murdered a large number of people inside it, the imposing structure became known as “The Murder Castle.”

Holmes hired carpenters, electricians, and other workers to complete the building, but fired them after they completed one room. That way, no one knew all the features he designed into the place.

While the third floor seemed normal for a hotel, other floors featured narrow, maze-like hallways with doors and stairways leading to nowhere. There were blind passageways, hinged walls, false partitions, rooms with no doors and rooms with many doors. There were other doors leading to various kinds of torture chambers. One secret room could only be entered through a trapdoor in the ceiling. Victims were locked in and left to die of hunger. Another door opened onto a chute which went to the basement. This provided for easy and convenient body disposal. He installed an alarm system on all the bedroom doors which alerted him whenever someone left their room. Holmes also had gas lines inside the walls running to the bedrooms. He would turn on the gas at night when his victims were asleep. The bedrooms walls were lined with asbestos to silence their screams.

The basement was described as a medieval torture dungeon with chains and other means of restraints, a stretching rack, acids vats, and lime pits. There was also a crematorium disguised as a glass furnace, and many of his victims are believed to have been burned to ashes. He stripped the bodies of some victims down to skeletons and sold them to medical schools and universities.

There was no shortage of victims. In 1893, The World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, opened and from then on, millions of tourists per year came to see the amazing exhibits and buildings which were left in place. Holmes' hotel offered attractive lodging for unsuspecting tourists, especially elderly men and women. Some left the castle unharmed while many were tortured and killed. He reportedly seduced a number of women, became engaged to them, and after he took all their money, his fiancees would suddenly and strangely disappear.

Others were lured in by the offer of employment. He chose victims from his female staff. They were required to take out life insurance policies with Holmes as the beneficiary. He paid the premiums and collected on the policies after he killed them.

Though slight of stature, he was well-educated and mannered, and had no problem attracting female admirers. In fact, he was quite the lady’s man. At one point, he was married to three women at once and somehow kept each unaware of the others. Strangely enough, no harm came to his wives, but several mistresses disappeared without a trace.

One of his mistresses, Julia Smythe, became pregnant and pressured Holmes to marry her. He said he would, but first she had to agree to let him perform an abortion. Instead of an abortion, he gave her an overdose of chloroform, killing her.

Shortly after that, Holmes sold a skeleton to the university for $200.

Another mistress, Emmaline Cegrand, also worked as his personal secretary. After he grew tired of her, he asked her to retrieve a document from an airtight, sealed room, and locked her inside it so she would suffocate.

Once again, Holmes had a skeleton to sell.

Holmes kept busy with his various scams during the day and slaughtering people at night. His adventures eventually led him to spend time in Fort Worth, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and other cities as well as in Canada, usually with a mistress or an accomplice along for assistance. His big mistake came when he failed to pay one of his accomplices. The accomplice told all he knew to the police. Holmes was pursued by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to Boston where he was arrested on November 17, 1894, and charged with murder and fraud.

When the police entered the Murder Castle, they found piles of bones, blood-stained torture implements, and other evidence of the horrors that took place there. They had a long list of names of people who had gone missing from the World's Fair and traced fifty of them to the Murder Castle. They suspected even more had lost their lives there, but identifying them was impossible because of the manner of death and disposal of the victims.

During his sensational trial, Holmes was dubbed the Monster of 63rd Street, The Torture Doctor, The Modern Bluebeard, The Mighty Murderer, and The Beast of Chicago. At the time, he was more famous than Jack the Ripper.

During his trial, Holmes confessed to twenty-seven murders. The correct number may well have been two hundred or more. No one knows for sure.

On May 7, 1896, H. H. Holmes was hanged, nine days before his thirty-fifth birthday.

It's interesting that when the gallows trap sprung, his neck didn't snap as it was supposed to. He twitched for more than fifteen agonizing minutes as he slowly strangled to death. Some people felt it was a just end for a monster.

There have been a number of books and movies on the life of H. H. Holmes. One book, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, will be the basis of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Holmes. Martin Scorcese will direct.

The author/editor/critic Anthony Boucher (after whom Bouchercon, the annual mystery conference sponsored by Mystery Writers of America was named) used the pseudonym H.H. Holmes for some of his works. When asked why he used that name, he explained, “. . .most of my friends assumed that ‘H.H. Holmes’ was derived from the great Sherlock. Not so. Holmes was an alias for one of the outstanding criminals of the century, Herman W. Mudgett. Later, I used Mudgett’s real name for some of my printed verse.”

An attempt to burn the Murder Castle to the ground took place in 1895. Some felt it was an attempt by Holmes' supporters to destroy evidence of his crimes. Others felt a few enraged citizens wanted to destroy the building so it could not be turned into a tourist attraction. The castle survived the fire, however, and remained in place until 1938 when it was torn down. A branch of the US Postal Service now occupies the space.

If it's true H. H. Holmes killed two hundred or more people, he surpassed the total killed by Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Gary Ridgway, and Ted Bundy combined. How can one human being take the lives of so many others? Perhaps the answer to that question is hidden somewhere in our DNA. Or maybe there's a code imbedded in our brain waves.  Whatever it is, we might someday know the answer and be able to determine very early in their life if someone is predestined to becoming a serial killer. Hopefully, we would also have the ablity to cure that person and prevent it from happening.

Earl Staggs ©2016

Texas author Earl Staggs earned all Five Star reviews for his novels MEMORY OF A MURDER and JUSTIFIED ACTION and has twice received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars.

He invites any comments via email at earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net

He also invites you to visit his blog site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com to learn more about his novels and stories.

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES: "RUBY McCOLLUM - Justice in Black and White" by Earl Staggs

As July draws to a close it is time once again for the latest “History’s Rich With Mysteries” column by Texas author Earl Staggs. This time he looks at the case of Ruby McCollum. What happened is just stunning.

 

HISTORY’S RICH WITH MYSTERIES

When I look at the past, I find stories about people which fascinate me, particularly those in which there is a curious mixture of fact, legend, and mysterious uncertainty. In this series of articles, I want to explore some of those stories. I think of them as mysteries swaddled in legend. While truth is always desired in most things, truth easily becomes staid and boring. Legend, on the other hand, forever holds a hint of romanticism and an aura of excitement borne of adventure, imagination and, of course, mystery.

RUBY McCOLLUM - Justice in Black and White

by Earl Staggs

On Sunday morning, August 3, 1952, in Live Oak, a farming town in north Florida, forty-three-year-old Ruby McCollum, the wealthiest black woman in town, entered the office of Dr. C. Leroy Adams, a prominent white physician, and shot him dead. 

Dr. Adams treated many of the black families in town, including Ruby's, and had recently been elected to the state senate. He was known as the “poor man’s doctor,” the “best friend a man ever had,” and the “only doctor who visited coloreds.” His funeral was the largest in the history of Suwannee County. Newspapers said the “beloved Dr. Adams” had been murdered by an angry “Negress” over her doctor bill.

She was born Ruby Jackson in Zuber, Florida, in 1909, and in 1931, married Sam McCollum, the operator of a large and prosperous gambling enterprise. Their holdings grew to include a number of bars which sold illegal liquor and flourished by paying off local law enforcement officers. They also owned several large farms in the state and a local funeral home. They settled into a large two-story home in Live Oak, a small town with a population of about 4,000 people, where they raised four children, were well-respected in the community, and contributed liberally to their church. 

Ruby's trial that year was a sensational one widely covered in the United States press, as well as by international papers. The prosecuting attorney claimed Ruby shot him when they argued about a disputed bill. 

Ruby testified that Dr. Adams had been forcing her to have sex with him for several years, that he was the biological father of her youngest child, and she was pregnant by him for the second time. She said she fired at the doctor in self-defense when he attacked her.

She was not allowed to say much more than that. Her testimony was continuously interrupted by objections made by the prosecutor and sustained by the judge. The jury, made up entirely of white men, did not learn from her that she was torn between her husband who threatened to shoot her if she had another white baby and Dr. Adams who threatened to shoot her if she aborted his child. 

Zora Neale Hurston, a noted black journalist, novelist, and anthropologist who covered the case for The Pittsburgh Courier, maintained that Ruby's trial was the first time in history that a certain unwritten but widely recognized antebellum law was called into question. Known as “Paramour Rights,” it gave white men the right to a "Negro" woman even if she was married and placed no responsibility on the white man for support of the women or their offspring. As hard as it may be to believe, it was a common practice since before the Civil War and it continued well into the 20^th Century. 

Ms Hurston, who was forced to observe the trial from the second-floor gallery reserved for black people, wrote, "I had the feeling that the trial was a conspiracy of silence. The real story took place behind a curtain of secrecy."

Staid members of the Segregationist South considered the relationship between Ruby and Dr. Adams nothing more than an instance of Paramour Rights rather than one of sexual abuse and certainly not something that needed to be discussed in public. 

Ruby served as bookkeeper for her husband's varied businesses, and many prominent members of the white community knew their names were recorded in her ledgers, along with a record of "no-interest loans” from Sam McCollum. 

Then there were rumors about Dr. Adams having his hand in Sam’s gambling operation, serving as the connection with the white establishment which provided immunity for Sam’s illegal gambling and liquor operations in Suwannee County.

None of these issues were brought out in the one-sided trial. From the time she was arrested and throughout the trial, Ruby was placed under a gag order by the judge and was not allowed to speak with anyone except her attorneys and immediate family.

On December 20, 1952, Ruby McCollum was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair. 

On appeal, her case was overturned by the State Supreme Court on July 20, 1954. Prior to the second trial, however, she was examined and declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. She was committed to the state mental hospital at Chattahoochee, Florida, an institution known for mis-treatment such as keeping patients on Thorazine and giving electroshock therapy. 

She remained there for twenty years. In 1974, her attorney obtained her release under the Baker Act as she was not considered a danger to herself or others. 

In November, 1980, Ruby was interviewed at a rest home in Silver Springs, Florida. As is  common after electroshock therapy, her memory of the entire ordeal with regard to Dr. Adams and her trial for his murder had faded.  (The process of electroshock therapy as it was used in those days was well-known to produce the side effect of memory impairment.)


On May 23, 1992, Ruby McCollum died of a stroke at the at the age of eighty-two. She was buried beside her brother who died a year earlier in a cemetery behind the New Hope Baptist Church near Ocala, Florida.

While it cannot be denied that Ruby took a man's life, we can look back now and reflect on all she suffered. We can consider the mitigating circumstances of her actions and her inability to tell all of the details of her story in court. She was robbed of the opportunity a second trial might have afforded by being conveniently declared mentally ill and institutionalized where her memory was erased. 

Others have looked at the facts of Ruby's ordeal and called it a landmark case with a positive influence on the civil rights movement. Never before had a “Negress” talked in open court about her sexual abuse by a white man and being forced to bear his children. They point to the fact that her case was the first ever to bring the so-called “Paramour Rights” issue into the open. They can say her case sounded the death knell of that last vestige of slavery in this country which provided no protection for a black woman against rape by a white man.

While some people think along those lines, I find myself more concerned about the horrible subjugation and deprecation Ruby and certainly thousands of other black American women had to endure during the many decades Paramour Rights were practiced in this country.

Earl Staggs © 2016

Earl Staggs earned all Five Star reviews for his novels MEMORY OF A MURDER and JUSTIFIED ACTION and has twice received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year. He served as

Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. He invites any comments via email at earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net

He also invites you to visit his blog site at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com to learn more about his novels and stories.