Capturing the Devil (Stalking Jack the Ripper #4)(124)

One of the more interesting things that emerged about Holmes being the Ripper came from his great-great-grandson—Jeff Mudgett—after he’d read two of Holmes’s private diaries ( Bloodstains, 2011). One theory claimed Holmes had trained an assistant to kill the women in London, and that his true mission was to harvest their organs so he could make a serum to increase his life span. Whether this is true or not was never confirmed.

That possible motive was where the idea of Nathaniel harvesting organs to cheat death came from. Speaking of Nathaniel—one of the reasons I made Frankenstein his favorite novel was because Holmes’s most trusted associate—

Benjamin Pitezel—had been called his “creature” in real life. I used this detail and played with their roles in the Ripper killings in Stalking Jack the Ripper, and once again when the truth behind Nathaniel’s involvement is revealed in Capturing the Devil. Benjamin Pitezel was not included in these works of

fiction, but he was part of the inspiration behind Nathaniel’s character.

Another rumor circulated about this infamous killer calling himself “Holmes”

as an homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, which also planted the kernel of an idea to give Thomas Sherlockian deduction skills to track this predator.

Now, I’m not fully convinced Holmes is the Ripper, but it certainly gave me lots to work with while crafting this series. One of the best parts about any mystery is researching and coming up with your own theories. Who do you believe Jack the Ripper was? Maybe one day we’ll finally have an answer to that question. For now, I’d like to imagine that Audrey Rose and Thomas solved the crime, only to be thwarted—once again—by the slick con man, who burned their only evidence the way he incinerated bodies in his murder castle.

Like Audrey Rose in this final installment, I have a chronic condition. It was important for me to write a character who also wasn’t able-bodied, in hopes that others might see themselves, too. I believe it’s invaluable to see characters with all different backgrounds and abilities starring in their own stories. I based most of Audrey Rose’s symptoms on my own, and am so proud that a cane-carrying, scalpel-wielding goth girl in STEM defeated the ultimate villain.

In order to continue Audrey Rose and Thomas’s story without a large time lapse, I took some liberties with historical timelines. Here are a few: The World’s Columbian Exposition, aka the Chicago World’s Fair, opened in 1893, not 1889, and more than twenty-seven million people visited it. The Paris Exposition Universelle also hadn’t opened until May of 1889, though Audrey Rose references the Eiffel Tower.

H. H. Holmes began working on the World’s Fair Hotel, his infamous murder castle, in early 1887. In 1888 he was sued by a company he’d fired (and hadn’t paid) to build part of it, and fled to England briefly that autumn.

The murder of Carrie Brown took place on the night of April 23, 1891, not January 22, 1889 and her body was discovered on April 24, 1891. Many details of her autopsy scene were kept quiet, mostly because the police didn’t want people to panic at the thought of Jack the Ripper stalking American streets. The interior of the East River Hotel described in my story is fiction.

Frenchy Number One and Frenchy Number Two were both real suspects, and police did arrest Ameer Ben Ali. All of the evidence that Audrey Rose points out is historically accurate—there were no bloodstains leading to his room or anything other than the slightest circumstantial evidence tying him to the case.

Thomas Byrnes was really an NYPD chief inspector who didn’t think highly

of Scotland Yard after Jack the Ripper slipped from their grasp.

As with all good mysteries, there are still many debates about the actual body count for both Jack the Ripper and H. H. Holmes. All of the victims mentioned in this story were real or suspected victims. I gave some of them their own backgrounds, mixing fact and fiction. For instance, Holmes was known to take ads out in newspapers, hoping to hire young women to work in the shops below his murder castle. Once they were there, they usually didn’t survive. Mr.

Cigrande was not really anyone who yelled about demons or who was an eyewitness to the Holmes crimes, but his daughter was one of the suspected victims. Minnie Williams and her sister were both thought to be murdered by Holmes. Minnie was said to once be an actress, which is why I made her part of Mephistopheles’s Shakespeare play. (She also really was hired by Holmes to be a stenographer.)

Queen Elizabeth did grant peerages to a few Indian families, though only one family was granted a hereditary peerage plus the title of baron in 1919. It was the first and only baronetcy awarded.

The wedding and engagement practices mentioned are all historically accurate, though as Audrey Rose points out, their brief engagement period was unusual.

H. H. Holmes fled Chicago in July of 1894 and was going to build another murder castle in Texas when he was arrested and jailed briefly. While there, he told a fellow inmate of an insurance fraud scheme and inquired about a lawyer he could trust if he faked his death. The scheme failed, but Holmes was undeterred. He tried again with his partner in crime Benjamin Pitezel, but instead of pretending to kill him, he actually murdered his longtime associate and collected the ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy. Frank Geyer, a police officer from Philadelphia, hunted Holmes as he traveled from Detroit to Toronto to Indianapolis with Pitezel’s children. (Holmes ultimately killed them—Geyer discovered their bodies in the various locations where they’d stayed.) The Pinkertons finally tracked Holmes down and arrested him in Boston in 1894. He was executed in 1896. (Though rumors circulate that he pulled the ultimate sleight-of-hand con and convinced someone else to die in his place.) Alas, his murder castle wasn’t destroyed in the fiery battle with Audrey Rose, but in the summer of 1895 police did investigate the building, horrified when they discovered greased chutes that dropped to the basement, an incinerator that reached three thousand degrees, vats of acid, soundproofed rooms and vaults, and gas pipes that Holmes had control over (amongst other horrors). A fire did