Chapter 24

I touched Sherlock’s shoulder. “She mentioned Lombroso, Sherlock, as you did before.” I whispered. “Is it his work that Hopgood is following then?”

“Lombroso is an Italian surgeon. A few years ago, he conducted a postmortem on a serial murderer and rapist. He discovered a hollow part of the killer’s brain, and he proposed that violent criminals were throwbacks to less evolved human types, identifiable by ape-like physical characteristics.”

Sherlock fumbled in the darkness and finally found lanterns and lit several. What we saw when the cellar was illuminated was the most grotesque and frightening display I’d ever witnessed.

On table after table were severed heads. Torsos were tossed in baskets in a corner. Some heads were shaved with markings on them indicating different sections of the brain and the so-called correlating behaviors.

This caught me off-guard in a way that even emergency medical situations had not and I felt myself wobble. Sherlock seized my arm and steered me back toward the stairs. I sat down on the bottom step. As he walked from table to table, he said, “It really began in Italy in 1871 when Lombroso met with a criminal, a man named Giuseppe Villella, a notorious thief and arsonist. Cesare Lombroso is an army doctor, who worked in lunatic asylums and become interested in crime and criminals while studying Italian soldiers. He wanted to pinpoint the differences between lunatics, criminals and normal individuals by examining inmates in Italian prisons.

“Lombroso found Villella interesting,” Sherlock continued, seemingly unaffected by the hideous and gruesome evidence before him. “So, when Villella died, Lombroso conducted a post-mortem and discovered that his subject had an indentation at the back of his skull, which resembled that found in apes. Lombroso concluded that some people are born with a propensity toward crime and were also savage throwbacks to early man.”

Sherlock wandered over to a bookcase along the stone wall. He took a book from the shelf, tapped it and walked over to hand it to me. “Lombroso wrote this,” he said. “The Criminal Man, published just a few years ago. His interest in forensics and crime is interesting but a bit warped. He seems to think that by looking at a skull, by considering palm lines and the size of orbits and cheek bones and so on, one can determine if the person is like an ape, if he’s insensitive to pain, if he craves evil for evil’s sake. Essentially, Lombroso believes that criminality is inherited and that criminals can be identified by physical defects that show them to be savage-like.”

Staring down at the skull of what appeared to be a youth, Sherlock said, “According to Lombroso,” he said, “a thief can be identified by his expressive face and small, wandering eyes. Murderers have cold, glassy stares, bloodshot eyes and big hawk-like noses.” He touched his nose and said, “I shudder to think how he would think of me.

“And rapists have what Lombroso calls ‘jug ears’. He also says that female criminals are more ruthless than males and that they are shorter and wrinkled and have darker hair and smaller skulls than normal women. And ones with prominent lower jaws are supposedly more wicked than all of the men put together. In my opinion, it’s madness.”

“Sherlock, this is... words fail me. We must find this monster. He is the one whose skull should be studied.”

“I concur.”