shrieking” into the doctor’s office. “Nor did they desist,” Mudgett wrote, “until I had been brought face to face with one of its grinning skeletons, which, with arms outstretched, seemed ready in its turn to seize me.
“It was a wicked and dangerous thing to do to a child of tender years and health,” he wrote, “but it proved an heroic method of treatment, destined ultimately to cure me of my fears, and to inculcate in me, first, a strong feeling of curiosity, and, later, a desire to learn, which resulted years afterwards in my adopting medicine as a profession.”
The incident probably did occur, but with a different choreography. More likely the two older boys discovered that their five-year-old victim did not mind the excursion; that far from struggling and shrieking, he merely gazed at the skeleton with cool appreciation.
When his eyes settled back upon his captors, it was they who fled.
Gilmanton was a small farming village in New Hampshire’s lake country, sufficiently remote that its residents did not have access to a daily newspaper and rarely heard the shriek of train whistles. Mudgett had two siblings, a brother and sister. His father, Levi, was a farmer, as was Levi’s own father. Mudgett’s parents were devout Methodists whose response to even routine misbehavior relied heavily on the rod and prayer, followed by banishment to the attic and a day with neither speech nor food. His mother often insisted he pray with her in her room, then filled the air around him with trembly passion.
By his own assessment, he was a “mother’s boy.” He spent a good deal of time alone in his room reading Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe and inventing things. He built a wind-powered mechanism that generated noise to scare birds from the family fields and set out to create a perpetual motion machine. He hid his most favored treasures in small boxes, among them his first extracted tooth and a photograph of his “twelve-year-old sweetheart,” although later observers speculated these boxes also contained treasures of a more macabre sort, such as the skulls of small animals that he disabled and then dissected, alive, in the woods around Gilmanton. They based this speculation on the hard lessons learned during the twentieth century about the behavior of children of similar character. Mudgett’s only close friend was an older child named Tom, who was killed in a fall while the boys were playing in an abandoned house.
Mudgett gouged his initials into an old elm tree at his grandfather’s farm, where the family marked his growth with notches in a doorjamb. The first was less than three feet high. One of his favorite pastimes was to hike to a high boulder and shout to generate an echo. He ran errands for an “itinerant photographer” who stopped for a time in Gilmanton. The man had a pronounced limp and was glad for the help. One morning the photographer gave Mudgett a broken block of wood and asked him to take it to the town wagon maker for a replacement. When Mudgett returned with the new block, he found the photographer sitting beside his door, partly clothed. Without preamble, the photographer removed one of his legs.
Mudgett was stunned. He had never seen an artificial limb before and watched keenly as the photographer inserted the new block into a portion of the leg. “Had he next proceeded to remove his head in the same mysterious way I should not have been further surprised,” Mudgett wrote.
Something about Mudgett’s expression caught the photographer’s eye. Still on one leg, he moved to his camera and prepared to take Mudgett’s picture. Just before he opened the shutter, he held up his false leg and waved it at the boy. Several days later he gave Mudgett the finished photograph.
“I kept it for many years,” Mudgett wrote, “and the thin terror-stricken face of that bare-footed, home-spun clad boy I can yet see.”
At the time Mudgett described this encounter in his memoir, he was sitting in a prison cell hoping to engineer a swell of public sympathy. While it is charming to imagine the scene, the fact is the cameras that existed during Mudgett’s boyhood made candid moments almost impossible to capture, especially when the subject was a child. If the photographer saw anything in Mudgett’s eyes, it was a pale blue emptiness that he knew, to his sorrow, no existing film could ever record.
At sixteen Mudgett graduated school and, despite his age, took a job as a teacher, first in Gilmanton and then in Alton, New Hampshire, where he met a young woman named Clara A. Lovering. She had never encountered anyone quite like Mudgett. He was young but poised and had a knack for making her feel good even when she was inclined to feel otherwise. He spoke so well and with such warmth, always touching her in small affectionate ways, even in public. His great flaw was his persistent demand that she allow him to make love to her, not as a lover in formal courtship but in that way that was supposed to come only after marriage. She held him off but could not deny that Mudgett aroused within her an intensity of desire that colored her dreams. Mudgett was eighteen when he asked her to elope. She agreed. They married on July 4, 1878, before a justice of the peace.
At first there was passion far beyond what the dour gossip of older women had led Clara to expect, but their relationship chilled rapidly. Mudgett left the house for long periods. Soon he was gone for days at a time. Finally he was just gone. In the wedding registry of Alton, New Hampshire, they remained married, their contract a legal if desiccated thing.
At nineteen Mudgett went to college. Initially he set his sights on Dartmouth but changed his mind and instead went directly into medical school. He enrolled first in the medicine program at the University of Vermont in Burlington but found the school too small and after only one year moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, one of the West’s leading scientific medical schools, noted for its emphasis on the controversial art of dissection. He enrolled on September 21, 1882. During the summer of his junior year he committed what he called, in his memoir, “the first really dishonest act of my life.” He took a job as a traveler for a book publisher, assigned to sell a single book throughout northwestern Illinois. Instead of turning in the proceeds, he kept them. At the end of the summer he returned to Michigan. “I could hardly count my Western trip a failure,” he wrote, “for I had seen Chicago.”
He graduated in June 1884 with a lackluster record and set out to find “some favorable location” in which to launch a practice. To do so he took another job as a traveler, this time with a nursery company based in Portland, Maine. His route took him through towns he might otherwise never have encountered. Eventually he came to Mooers Forks, New York, where, according to the
Wherever he went, troubling things seemed to occur. His professors in Michigan had little to say about his academic talents but recalled that he had distinguished himself in a different way. “Some of the professors here recollected him as being a scamp,” the university said. “He had a breach of promise with a hairdresser, a widow, who came to Ann Arbor from St. Louis, Mich.”
In Mooers Forks there were rumors that a boy seen in his company had disappeared. Mudgett claimed the boy had returned to his own home in Massachusetts. No investigation took place. No one could imagine the charming Dr. Mudgett causing harm to anyone, let alone a child.
At midnight, many nights, Mudgett would pace the street outside his lodging.
Mudgett needed money. Teaching had paid a poverty wage; his medical practice yielded an income only slightly larger. “In the fall of 1885,” he wrote, “starvation was staring me in the face.”
While in medical school he and a fellow student, a Canadian, had talked about how easy it would be for one of them to buy life insurance, make the other the beneficiary, then use a cadaver to fake the death of the one insured. In Mooers Forks the idea came back to Mudgett. He paid a visit to his former classmate and found that his financial condition was no better. Together they devised an elaborate life insurance fraud, which Mudgett described in his memoir. It was an impossibly complex and gruesome plan, likely beyond the powers of anyone to execute, but his description is noteworthy for what it revealed, without his intention, about his astigmatic soul.
Broadly stated, the plan called for Mudgett and his friend to recruit a couple of other accomplices, who together would fake the deaths of a family of three and substitute cadavers for each person. The bodies would turn up later in an advanced state of decomposition, and the conspirators would divide the $40,000 death benefit (equivalent to more than one million dollars in twenty-first-century valuation).
“The scheme called for a considerable amount of material,” Mudgett wrote, “no less than three bodies in fact,” meaning he and his friend somehow had to acquire three cadavers roughly resembling the husband, wife, and child.
