could not wait to spend forever with my best friend, the dark prince of my heart.
“I do.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Before I wrote Stalking Jack the Ripper, I read a jailhouse confession written by Herman Webster Mudgett, aka Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, or H. H. Holmes, the con man dubbed “America’s first serial killer.” His book started the all-important “what if?” scenario my muse craves. There are many theories and arguments about who Jack the Ripper really was, but there was something about Holmes that always made me wonder if he was indeed the infamous serial killer who terrorized London.
There were a lot of puzzle pieces that seemed to fit nicely with the “Holmes as the Ripper” theory—the personality, the medical background, the fact that he was in London at the time of the murders, his handwriting closely resembling Ripper letters sent to police, an eyewitness claiming an American was the last person seen with a Ripper victim, and more.
For those of you who enjoy details: Holmes actually traveled on the RMS Etruria, the setting I chose for Escaping from Houdini, before he began building that labyrinthine murder castle in Chicago. He was a con man and opportunist, much like Mephistopheles, which gave Audrey Rose the much-needed lesson in dealing with sleight of hand and its many applications before this final showdown.
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