Links:
Demon
Doctors:Physicians as Serial Killers
The
Torture Doctor-
Herman
Webster Mudgett, M.D., alias Dr. H. H. Holmes
From:
Chapter 3: "Nightmare on 63rd Street"
in Demon Doctors: Physicians as Serial Killers
By Kenneth V. Iserson, M.D.
Galen Press, Ltd., Tucson, AZ,
The following excerpt introducing the chapter describes the known
facts about "the torture doctor," Herman Webster Mudgett,
M.D. It is a fictionalized description of the work of the most prolific
serial killer in U.S. history, who killed more than 150 men, women,
and children-many of them in his infamous "murder castle"
on Chicago's South Side as the grand 1893 Columbian Exposition enlivened
the city.
The
gorgeous young woman was becoming tiresome. No longer an exciting
lover, she had also begun to interfere with his other dalliances-she
even suggested that she knew what he was doing to women in the basement.
It was time to end this relationship-permanently. She wouldn't willingly
accompany Holmes to his dungeon, but that was no problem. Waiting
until she was asleep, he draped a chloroform-soaked rag over her
face. When she was unconscious, he dragged her body to the greased
chute and pushed her. She slid to the castle's bottom floor, the
next subject of his torturous experiments to produce a race of giants.
Awakening groggily,
she found her arms immobilized and stretched over her head. Her
feet were locked down to the table. And there was Holmes standing
above her, his eyes brighter than she had ever seen them. He moved
to adjust some machinery, and she felt her arms slowly being pulled
tight as her body was stretched by Holmes's self-made rack.
"Not too fast,"
he mumbled, "not too fast." He stripped off her nightclothes,
and ran his hands over her live, intact body for the last time.
Then, picking up a scalpel, he carefully began to cut the ligaments
holding her joints tight, just as he had learned to do in anatomy
and surgery training. His mustache twitched as he smiled when she
begged him to stop and then screamed as the blade sliced neatly
through her alabaster skin.
Holmes
enjoyed watching them suffer and scream. In his suave manner, he
asked her if she would like him to prolong her agony. She stared
at the man she thought she knew and loved, and screamed again. He
paused only long enough to feel his sexual excitement build, before
continuing the live dissection. Gradually, ever so gradually, her
body lengthened as the gears tightened and she lapsed into unconsciousness.
It was time to gratify his urges on his mistress, who was his unwilling
specimen pinned to the table.
At
last, he was satisfied and now had a little pity. "Chew this,"
he said, as he stuffed a cyanide tablet in her mouth. Her eyes widened
with horror as the death spasms commenced. Her body, wracked with
pain, suffered in terminal agony. Now dead, she was just a piece
of meat to cook in the crematory. There were more where she came
from.
©Galen Press, Ltd., 2001
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