Author Colby Van Wagoner Releases True Crime Fiction Mulberry Lane.

Online, February 24, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Author Colby Van Wagoner releases his third paperback, and ebook Mulberry Lane. The book is now available on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Mulberry Lane, based on the shocking true events of serial killer H.H. Holmes! From his early childhood, to a student at Michigan Medical University, Holmes developed a taste for murder, and the macabre. Mistreated and tortured in his childhood, Holmes quickly transformed into a cunning and ruthless killer. Drawing on his rage, and disregard for humankind, Holmes move to Chicago. He soon opened a hotel during the World's Fair to lure unsuspecting victims. After his capture, authorities discovered Holmes' "Murder Castle," where it is believed he slaughtered more than two hundred people. H.H. Holmes is one of the most notorious, and vicious serial killers of all time!

While in Chicago during the summer of 1886, Holmes came across Dr. E.S. Holton's drugstore at the corner of S. Wallace and W. 63rd Street, in the neighborhood of Englewood. Holton was suffering from cancer while his wife minded the store. Holmes got a job there and then convinced her to sell him the store. They agreed she could still live in the upstairs apartment even after Holton died. Once Holton died, Mrs. Holton mysteriously disappeared and Holmes told people she was visiting relatives in California. As people started asking questions about her return, he told them she enjoyed California so much that she decided to live there.

Holmes purchased a lot across from the drugstore, where he built his three-story, block-long "Castle"-as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood. It was opened as a hotel for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure used as commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes's own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle so only he fully understood the design of the house, thus decreasing the chance of being reported to the police.

After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), lovers and hotel guests, torturing and killing them. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate. The victims' bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty.

"I know what I have researched, discovered, and written about H.H. Holmes, in Mulberry Lane, will have a major impact on anyone daring to read this book. Serial killers are cunning manipulators of their victims and environments. They will be forever studied and remembered throughout history!" Author of Mulberry Lane, Colby Van Wagoner.

When he was caught Holmes stated in the end, near his execution, "I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. I was born with the "Evil One" standing as my sponsor, beside the bed, where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since."

Mulberry Lane the fiction based on serial killer H.H. Holmes is now available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com, and other international online booksellers at these links (Just copy and paste the links below into your browser to order):

Mulberry Lane; Barnes and Noble.com link for nook, and paperback:

http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?WRD=mulberry+lane+van+wagoner&page=index∏=univ&choice=allproducts&query=Mulberry+Lane+van+wagoner&flag=False&ugrp=0

Mulberry Lane; Amazon.com link for Kindle and paperback:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Mulberry+Lane+van+wagoner