Breakfast with the Murder Demon: the Last Meal of H.H. Holmes, America's First Serial Killer {Serial Killer Supper Series, Part IV}

Choosing the final killer for my Serial Killer Supper series - at least for October; frankly, I'm having too much fun to stop forever - was no easy task. I don't know if you've noticed, but there is no shortage of crazed murderers in this world. That said, how could I resist featuring Herman Webster Mudgett, aka Dr. Henry Howard Holmes aka H.H. Holmes,  the man billed as "America's First Serial Killer?"

Serial Killer Supper Series: Schnitzel, Fried Potatoes, & White Wine; the Last Meal of the Dusseldorf Ripper

In honor of the wondrous, gloomy, and shadowy month of October - temporal home of the year's best holiday, Halloween - I bring you "Serial Killer Suppers," a weekly series in which I will feature a notable meal of a notorious killer. I'm excited, as the series combines two of the things I love most in the world: food and murder. (Say it with me, Hitchcock style: MUH-deh.)

That's not to say I love the actual killers, or their hideous acts, although I do find serial killers to be particularly fascinating. The psychology of multiple murderers, their peculiar and horrible methods, the pleasure, often sexual, they derive from the act of killing, their unstoppable compulsions, their inability to empathize or sympathize with their victims - all of this makes them seem somehow simultaneously less and more than human. After all, notorious killers such as Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac Killer have become more monster than man in the popular imagination, endowed with almost supernatural powers and superhuman prowess.