The Killer With Cachet
Documentary one of several recent projects on Chicago psychopath
By MIKE RAMSEY
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
May 15, 2003
CHICAGO - The blood-spattered biographies about H.H. Holmes keep coming.
Chicago's 19th-century swindler and murderer had sunk to secondary status in
the annals of American crime until he figured prominently in author Erik Larson's
recent best-seller, "The Devil in the White City," an account of the
1893 World's Fair on Lake Michigan that has caught Hollywood's attention.
Now comes independent Chicago filmmaker John Borowski's documentary, "H.H.
Holmes: America's First Serial Killer," which focuses solely on the life
and career of the seminal psychopath.
The wealth-obsessed Englewood pharmacist built a Gothic lair known as "The
Castle," which purportedly included gas-rigged bedrooms, greased chutes,
acid vats and a cellar crematorium.
Holmes did away with at least a half-dozen people there - maybe scores of others,
including fair visitors who rented lodgings from him - before he was undone
by an insurance-fraud scheme in Philadelphia and hanged in 1896.
"It's more fascinating for people to try and imagine that this one man
could have killed hundreds of people," the 30-year-old Borowski said recently
at his Chicago apartment and studio, "because look what he did by the time
he was in his early 20s: Without a penny in his pocket, he came to Chicago and
built this huge building. One man. Almost like what I did with this film - without
a penny in my pocket."
Borowski leveraged his production's six-figure budget by using credit cards,
loans from friends and family members and by bartering with colleagues, he said.
Three years in the making, the Holmes documentary is finally slated for release
on DVD next month through a Web site, www.hhholmesthefilm.com.
His "64-minute roller coaster ride," as he calls it, incorporates
period photographs and illustrations as well as modern footage of the New Hampshire
town where Holmes was born in 1861 and the Philadelphia courtroom where he was
tried. The film also features atmospheric re-enactments in black and white that
evoke Borowski's fondness for classic horror films and special effects that
relied on imagination rather than lots of money.
By coincidence, his project comes on the heels of the "White City"
book, which has brought Holmes' story to a wide audience and may result in a
movie version (actors Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly are developing
separate projects about the killer). Crowding the field even more is San Diego
artist Rick Geary's graphic novel, "The Beast of Chicago," to be released
in July as part of his series on infamous 19th-century crimes.
"At least it's something that people are thinking about," Geary said.
"It just seems that a lot of things are coming together, and that can only
help my project."
Previous studies on Holmes have included "Psycho" author Robert Bloch's
fictional "American Gothic" in 1974, historian Allan Eckert's 1985
novel "The Scarlet Mansion" and Harold Schecter's detailed 1994 bio
"Depraved," which inspired Borowski and is cited as a source by Larson.
"He wasn't a serial sex killer the way his contemporary Jack the Ripper
was," says Schecter, explaining Holmes' relative obscurity today. "Crimes
like that I think speak more directly to our own obsessions about them - the
dangers of sex, extreme forms of violence. There was always something a little
bit quaint about Holmes."
Holmes was more in the Jekyll-and-Hyde vein: charming on the outside, particularly
to women, while scheming and ruthless on the inside.
His known murder victims were acquaintances who trusted him, including mistresses
he had conned financially. Following his final scam, the Philadelphia ruse,
he killed a loyal assistant and three of the man's children - crimes that earned
him overnight notoriety and a date with the hangman.
"Everything that he saw was a potential dollar sign," Borowski said.
The centerpiece of the Holmes legend, his bizarrely constructed "castle
of horrors" at 63rd and Wallace streets, was destroyed by a suspicious
fire. Biographers, faced with numerous gaps in the killer's lifetime, also are
at a loss to determine how many people Holmes murdered there.
He confessed to about 30 killings in his sensational jailhouse memoirs for publisher
William Randolph Hearst, but some of his victims later turned up alive. Eckert
thinks Holmes killed more than 100, but Schecter puts the tally at nine, including
those he killed outside Chicago.
"Most of the stuff - if not all of it - about the horrors that occurred
in the Englewood castle were fabrications," he said. "When you look
at the pictures of the castle, it just looks like some ugly office building.
It was probably constructed very, very amateurishly inside partly because Holmes
kept running out of money."
(This last quote is one I personally disagree with. Holmes' intention was to fool people into believing he operated an upscale hotel, therefore it is my belief that the exterior and interior which people seen had to look decent. -John Borowski)