TD: Good evening Mr. Henshaw. I'm Agent Drake with the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
I'll be conducting your interview today. JH: So good to know the good commissioner
is frittering away that mountain of tax dollars on outsourcing actual police work.
Tell me, Agent, would you like to wait until after you've conducted your interview to beat
the hell out of me, or would you rather just get it out of the way? TD: I'm not like that. JH:
Then you are a very atypical Pinkerton indeed. TD: I could be genuine. I could just want to
help you. JH: You would be the first. TD: Most are quick to accept their preconceptions as fact
in the process ignoring those little bits of truth hiding just on the surface.
For example, it is widely accepted you killed your victims to claim portions of their wealth
moving on to the next like a common parasite. JH: Flatterer.
In the year 1890, Gotham saw a string of murders. Most of the victims were wealthy middle-aged
women, and all were found dead with no signs of struggle. Police were stumped, but one thing
they knew for sure: these women had not died of natural causes. All of them were found having
multiple muscles in their faces pulled back in risus sardonicus, otherwise known as rictus grins.
This led the police to believe that the cause of death was poisoning by strychnine.
After investigating and interviewing friends and family of the victims, police found a potential
suspect: Jerome Henshaw, the illegitimate son of Emily Henshaw and a household manservant.
The Henshaws were a less prominent wealthy family in Gotham, but the scandal of Jerome’s
birth was still the talk of Gotham. Jerome was raised in the wealth of the Henshaw family,
but due to his illegitimacy, would not be privy to an inheritance. As the boy grew into adulthood,
he became more and more resentful towards his mother and fathers—the one he knew and the one
he didn’t. He was by his birth a “black sheep” in the family, but he also resisted any kindness
or love they had to show him, believing he was better than they were. Jerome had
to believe he was better than they were; it was a better alternative than listening to and believing
all the taunts and jabs from his step-siblings. He learned to rely solely on himself.
When he reached young adulthood, Jerome began to realize the limits of the wealth of the Henshaw
family. He lived with his mother and step-family, and only had limited access to the family trust.
He tried to discover his biological father’s identity from his mother, but all he could
glean from her was that he had become a drunk and a criminal after fleeing the Henshaw estate.
Eventually, she let slip that he lived on the outskirts of Skinner’s End, a slum in Gotham City.
Regardless of his own investigations, Jerome was never able to find his father, only reports of a
petty criminal in a red hood who had been shot down by police in a botched robbery attempt.
Because he was not an heir, Jerome found the need to accumulate wealth of his own. Growing up
in high society, he knew of many older women who had lost their husbands to the Civil War or other
traumas, and he quietly befriended them, carrying on multiple affairs and clandestine friendships.
He charmed gifts of money and other valuables from them, preying on their pity for the poor bastard
son of Emily Henshaw. When he had taken all he could from them without it becoming suspicious,
they would be tragically found dead. Jerome had studied which poisons would be the most accessible
and also most effective, and he settled on strychnine as his weapon of choice.
It wasn’t until the third victim that the police began to suspect someone was murdering
these wealthy widows. They had incorrectly assumed that the first two deaths were suicide by poison,
as suicide was falsely considered to be strictly a female malady in those days.
After realizing their mistake, the police took action. Under the authority of Commissioner
Tolliver, Inspector James Gordon was charged with finding the perpetrator of these grisly murders.
James Gordon had previously fought in the Civil War alongside Thomas Wayne and Jacob Packer.
When all of them had returned to Gotham, Jacob had left to go abroad, and Thomas had delved into
his medical practice. Gordon felt adrift because a part of him had never really left the battlefield.
He enlisted in the Gotham Police, and quickly earned his reputation as a rigid idealist,
flying in the face of corruption. The young police officer had met the love of his life,
Barbara Kean, soon after. The two became engaged and married,
giving birth to their daughter, Barbara Gordon, and their son, James Gordon, Jr. Gordon proved to
be as rigid a father as he was a police officer, though he was not unjust towards his children.
Their family was quite progressive. His wife was close friends with Selina Kyle,
the two having become acquainted at suffragist meetings. Eventually, after what seemed like
an uphill battle at times, Gordon achieved the rank of Inspector. Commissioner Tolliver
was running for mayor of Gotham, and he wanted to deliver results in order to bolster his campaign.
As a result, Gordon was also under a lot of pressure to catch the murderer. In Tolliver’s
mind, his reputation was everything, and this case would make or break his success in campaigning
for mayor. Tolliver was rumored to be corrupt, occasionally taking bribes from dubious sources,
so Inspector Gordon had very few resources at his disposal, as he was considered an idealist
by his colleagues. Some claimed that Tolliver was out to get rid of Gordon. In spite of this,
the inspector immediately got to work interviewing friends and family of the deceased women.
Gordon soon found the common thread—a name: Jerome Henshaw. Jerome had been
following the investigation in the papers, and arrogantly assumed the police wouldn’t
be able to discover him as the murderer. When Inspector Gordon came knocking at his door,
he allowed himself to be questioned, thinking he was still able to avoid discovery of his crimes.
The questioning did not go as well as Jerome thought it would, and when Inspector Gordon left,
he found himself panicking. Thinking with the irrationality of a frightened animal, he turned
to the thing that had solved all his problems thus far—the strychnine he’d used on the widows.
Instead of killing him, it caused his facial muscles to spasm into a rictus grin, damaging
his facial nerves. He laid on his bedroom floor, near death, until discovered by a housemaid.
He was immediately rushed to the hospital where the police and
Inspector Gordon were soon able to confirm Jerome guilty. Once he was physically able,
he went to trial for the murders of the three widows. The Gotham Gazette dubbed him the “Merry
Widower” due to his ghastly appearance and the nature of the atrocities he had committed.
Deemed clinically insane, he was sent to Arkham Asylum under the care of Dr. Hugo Strange.
Strange was delighted to have such a celebrity of an inmate as Jerome, and even took his
rehabilitation upon himself, conducting private sessions with the bastard son of Emily Henshaw.
No one knows how or why, but it was here, facing the horrors of the asylum and the
darkness within himself, that Jerome Henshaw died and something much darker was born. Some
attribute it to Strange’s unconventional, even unethical, methods, but whatever the case, Gotham
would face many horrors at the hands of Jerome, or as he would better become known: The Joker.
TD:
We then missed the answers, having believed they found all they need to know. But they missed the
way the corners of your mouth twitch upward when the grisly deaths of your victims were discussed,
and the quickening of your breath.
I believe you enjoyed killing them in such an agonizing fashion. JH: Well, I dare you to find
any artisan that is not proud of his craft. And, of course, you are correct in that the
average citizen is fast to believe in what they perceive as fact; missing all the little details.
Even about you, Agent. TD: Oh? Is that right? Indulge me then, what has been dismissed about
me? JH: Why, the scarring on your knuckles, of course. It's no secret that you Pinkertons are a
pragmatic group. But most of you use a billy club when enforcing your specific brand of justice.
It appears we all have our extracurricular activities,
Agent.