The
Doctors as Angels of Death: PART III
- (A 4 Part Mini-Series)
Holmes's Horror 'castle'
Then Holmes built his castle. It was a huge, three-story
hotel-like construction that included soundproof sleeping chambers with
peepholes, asbestos-padded walls, gas pipes, sliding walls, and vents that
Holmes controlled from his bedroom. The sleeping chambers also locked from the
outside. The building had secret passages, hallways that went in circles, false
floors, rooms with torture equipment (such as a device that stretched people to
twice their height), and a specially equipped surgery. There were also greased
chutes that emptied into a cellar, and a very large stove in the office. Into
this castle Holmes lured young women to seduce and drug them. Then he placed
them into chambers into which he pumped lethal gases.
Sometimes he'd ignite the
gas and incinerate his victims. He'd watch them react and when they died, he'd
slide them down the chutes into his cellar, where vats of acid and other
chemicals awaited them. He'd cut up their corpses on a dissecting table and
them dump them into the vats, but keep some of the organs.
Then he'd sell the bleached skeletons to medical schools.
One of his victims was a woman who'd become pregnant by him. Botching her
abortion, he killed her and then poisoned her teenage daughter. Other victims
were people who'd rented rooms from him in order to attend the nearby 1893
World's Fair.
Herman Pitezel
Holmes then married a third time and hired a lackey, Herman
Pitezel. In fact, Pitezel got into the act by taking out a life insurance
policy on himself and planning a way to "disappear." He and Holmes
planned to find a suitable corpse to perpetuate the fraud and then split the
proceeds. Pitezel should have known what was in store. Holmes was a greedy con
artist who wanted all of the money for himself. But eventually he made a mistake,
which put him on the run. To get money, he killed two sisters from Texas and
set fire to their house to try to claim the insurance money. (Another version
says that he set fire to part of the castle to get insurance money.)
Whichever is the case, it prompted an investigation, which
scared Holmes sufficiently for him to leave Chicago. He went right to Texas and
started swindling people out of thousands of dollars. Then he stole a horse and
the police went after him, catching him in Missouri. He skipped bail and went
after Pitezel, who awaited him in Philadelphia. Holmes smothered his accomplice
with chloroform and then burned him alive with acid to collect $10,000. Then he
persuaded Pitezel's wife and family to escape with him, convincing them that the
corpse the authorities had found was not Pitezel. He eventually killed three of
the five children, burning the boy in a stove in a rented home and burying the
girls in the cellar of yet another place. Finally, the police grabbed him in
Massachusetts and charged him with murder. On the way back to Philadelphia,
Holmes bragged endlessly about his criminal career. Some of his alleged schemes
seemed wildly improbable, but he did admit that he'd done enough in his life to
be hanged twelve times over.
He claimed to have the ability to hypnotize people to do
whatever he wanted, and when the press got hold of this story, they attributed
supernatural powers to the wretched physician. He became known as Bluebeard and
even the creature from the published book Dracula.
While in custody, over fifty people came to the police
station to claim that Holmes had victimized them in some kind of con. After
locating the bodies of the Pitezel children, investigators soon discovered
several complete skeletons and numerous bone fragments in the Chicago castle,
but Holmes insisted that he had nothing to do with them. Those people had
either taken their own lives, he claimed, or been killed by someone else. He
also said he did not kill Pitezel because the despairing man had committed suicide.
Even so, a story of grave robbing and a beheaded corpse was traced to Holmes
via his own strange tales. It was beginning to look as if his earlier
confession might have contained more truth than the police realized, and it
soon became clear that Holmes had killed more people than anyone had initially
suspected. In short order, the castle was taken over and remodeled as
"Holmes's Horror Castle," to be exhibited as a tourist attraction,
but before it opened, it burned to the ground. The police suspected some
accomplice of Holmes had done it.
While in prison, Holmes wrote a book to explain how he was
innocent of all the charges, but it had little effect on the outcome of his
trial. It was so self-serving that no one took it seriously, and there were other
more lurid tales about his crimes that made for better reading. Holmes tried to
defend himself at his trial, but was woefully inadequate. On November 4, 1895,
he was convicted of the first-degree murder of Herman Pitezel.
Finally, inspired by a considerable payment from the Hearst
newspaper syndicate, Holmes wrote out a long confession for The Philadelphia
Inquirer, insisting that he was born to be a murderer. It was his aim to
become the most notorious murderer in the world, a killer of monstrous proportions,
so he said that he'd killed over one hundred people. Having second thoughts, he
brought that number down to 27, and did include Pitezel. Giving the public what
they wanted in terms of gruesome details on killing and corpses, Holmes claims
that he couldn't help but do what he'd done. "I was born with the Evil One
as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world," he
lamented. Indeed, he believed that his face was taking an elongated shape of
the devil himself, yet he felt no remorse for anything he had done. Then in one
quick move, he recanted the confession, and in fact it turned out that several
of his "victims" were not dead at all. Yet so many people who'd
rented rooms from him had gone missing that estimates of his true victims reached
around 200, although it might have been closer to about 80.
On May 7, 1896, Holmes was taken to the hangman's noose, and
even there he changed his story. He claimed to have killed only two women, and
in the middle of a sentence, the trapdoor opened and he was hung. Because he
feared grave robbers---especially physicians who wanted to study his brain---he
asked that his body be buried deep and covered entirely with cement. The grave
was dug ten feet down and the coffin was so heavy that it tumbled into the hole
upside down.
That's how it remained. While Holmes is almost larger than life in
his deadly deeds, another physician has brought the anomaly of the killing
healer into sharper focus. Rather than target patients, he slaughtered his
entire family.
How
Doctors Can Kill
Since the motives for murder by a medical professional are
all over the map, it's instructive to narrow down the types of killers to
serial killers who happen to be doctors and doctors who kill repeatedly for
gain or power. Situational murders, such as killing one's wife, are generally
easy to explain, as are mercy killings.
Doctors who kill over and over, or who
kill in some utterly brutal manner, are more difficult to understand. According
to Lawrence Miller, a police psychologist in West Palm Beach, Florida, there's
a neurological facet to predatory killing that is linked to the typical hunting
behavior of males. While serial killers tend to act out of some intense
fantasy, their hunger for violence is on the extreme end of a continuum linked
to the stalking and predation that characterize many normal social activities
of human life, such as hunting, romantic pursuit, entrepreneurial enterprises,
and group combat.
"It is pathological," says Miller, "only in
terms of degree, not the nature of the act." In other words, it's not a
brain disease that sets them apart in kind. They act out, feel empowered, and
continue to want that energy, just as males in battle want the thrill of
victory. Some feel better after a murder, others feel better during it. From
the idea that such behavior is on a continuum with normal human behaviors,
theories like that from Robert Jay Lifton. To participate in evil, doctors must
possess the psychological mechanism that allows it. He proposes the notion of "doubling"
as an explanation for the Nazi doctors, and then generalizes this as a
possibility for any other medical practitioner. There's a prior self---the
original person before doubling takes place---and the doubled self---the one
that emerges from some dark place. Lifton calls doubling the "Faustian
bargain," because one sacrifices something of oneself to gain something
one thinks one needs. Doubling is "the division of the self into two
functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self." This is not
to be confused with a dissociative identity disorder in which the person has
two functional personalities, nor a schizoid type of psychosis.
Doubling is in
fact an adaptive mechanism in the human psyche that under certain conditions
helps us to survive, but it can also be stretched too far. The doctor that
doubles in order to kill learns to use his ability to adapt as a way to form a
self-structure that encompasses all of his behaviors. That is, he can
redistribute his sense of morality to accommodate his killing by having one
part of him disavow the other. He's aware of what he's doing but doesn't have
to consider the meaning of it.
The doubled self is responsible for what it does—which often
involves altering what murder means---and whatever the prior self-gains from
this shift reinforces the doubling behavior, ensuring more of it in the future.
The doubled self can act autonomously but can still be connected to the prior
self from which it arises. That is, a doctor can view himself as a
compassionate, humane person and still go out and kill. The killing self
provides a means for the prior self to survive as much as possible without
guilt. The killing self is the one doing the deeds, not the "real"
self. However, there's always the danger that the killing self can take over
and become the dominant self, as seemed to have been the case with H. H. Holmes
and many of the Nazi doctors. The killing self may so violate the prior self
that it gives way, finally, to evil. Nevertheless, to call forth the evil in the
first place was a moral choice, so the prior self is still morally responsible
if not actively feeling guilty.
Depending on the personality involved, several types of
doubling can occur:
·
The limited doubler: This person kills only
under certain circumstances that he can somehow allow, such as in response to
great financial or personal need. In Auschwitz, many doctors did what they were
told in order to stay alive.
·
The enthusiastic doubler: This person is pleased
to know that he can kill, get away with it, and still function normally. He has
an adaptive affinity to it.
·
The conflicted doubler: Both parts of the self
retain their power, so that killing produces guilt but the person cannot
imagine resolution, so the killing continues.
Lifton believes that doctors as a group may be more
susceptible to doubling than others, because they're used to skeletons and
corpses, and because they learn to develop a "medical self" with a
professional demeanor that may hide many things. They become inured to death
and learn to function under many diverse demands. Add to that a heroic vision
such as that offered by the Nazis and you get a lot of psychological support
for doubling. They can be the paradoxical healer/killer, living in associated
but separate realities. Looking back on the cases, the idea of doubling seems
to cover them all, although it still doesn't explain why a person would choose
to double as a killer in the first place. To adapt to Nazi conditions is one
thing, but to kill one's entire family or a succession of vulnerable patients
is quite another. Doubling may be more insidious than adaptive, more an
acceptance of the capacity for evil than a way to survive.
At least some countries are responding, however, by
instituting more agencies to monitor death rates in hospitals and nursing care.
Hopefully these safeguards will detect people like Shipman and Swango before
they harm many people.
To be continued….
