While working as a doctor in India, he beat his native servant to death and returned to England in a sullen, bitter state. After his wife died, he began living with his stepdaughters in his old mansion. He concocts sinister plans to control a modest annual inheritance and prevent his daughters from marrying, thereby seizing the money entirely. With his terrifying strength and ungovernable temper, he has intimidated everyone in the local town. He allows gypsies to reside on his property and keeps a cheetah and a baboon he brought from India. He uses a very poisonous Indian snake (the Speckled Band) as a weapon that leaves no physical trace, spending his intelligence on these murderous ends to become, as Holmes describes him, a consummate and educated criminal.
