Last Days of the Purebloods

CHAPTER TWO

Like the longtime terror of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Gellert Grindelwald, Tom Marvolo Riddle traced his roots to ancient sorcerers. His maternal great-grandparents, James and Elizabeth Gaunt, had inherited a small fortune in their tiny village of Little Hangleton, where the people still toiled in the fields and the small stream that gave the hamlet its name bled into the Irish Sea, under the ruins of a medieval fortress. But while Grindelwald fancied himself a chivalric statesman (his motto was "For the Greater Good"), Riddle fancied himself a shark. A longtime member of the Order of the Phoenix once said of him "Grindelwald and the Acolytes were just copper. Tom is nothing but steel".

A graduate of the Hogwarts class of 1945, Riddle had quickly joined the criminal underworld. His hatred of muggleborn sorcerers verged on clinical psychopathy, despite his own status as having immediate Muggle ancestry (his mother Merope had married a local aristocrat, hence his surname not being attached to any great wizarding family). While he was at Hogwarts, William Walpurgis had been running a criminal brotherhood operating out of Borgin and Burke, an antique shop in London's magical district. It was this brotherhood Riddle joined in 1946. He was determined to become the most feared sorcerer in the underworld. Walpurgis balked at stepping aside in Riddle's favor. But having just started a long sentence for racketeering and robberies, Walpurgis was quickly elbowed aside and Riddle took over the gang. Grindelwald, probably the only man who could have rivaled Riddle and potentially threatened his status, was out of the picture, with Albus Dumbledore preemptively solving his problem by defeating the Austrian pureblood and putting him on trial (Grindelwald was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in his hereditary castle of Nurmengard).

Riddle's murderous side soon emerged, killing customers of his shop and experimenting with dark magic. By 1980, he was undeniably the nastiest and most feared man in the wizarding world with his alias, Lord Voldemort, being associated with enormous and almost supernatural powers. But behind his sadism, the man from Little Hangleton was frightened of one thing—death. That year, one of his most trusted lieutenants, Severus Snape, informed him of a prophecy that one born at the end of July 1980 could bring him down. Riddle decided that the Potters, whose son had been born at that time, were potentially dangerous and that their son could fulfill the prophecy. Lily Potter and her husband James, went into hiding after realizing that Riddle was hunting them, intending to kill them and their son, Harry. Entrusting a friend to guard their location in the fall of 1981, they did not count on the fact that this friend, Peter Pettigrew, was a double agent in Riddle's pay. Within a week, Riddle killed the Potters, with the exception of the toddler, who escaped death for reasons that would remain a mystery for over a decade. Harry Potter subsequently became known as The Boy Who Lived, the only person known to have survived the killing curse. But Riddle had vanished, seemingly without a trace, leaving behind his robe.

The pudgy man who entered the Potter's house that night in 1981 described by Jonathan Teague to the police was none other than Peter Pettigrew and the man he knew as Seward was in fact named Sirius Black, a disgraced but opulently wealthy member of the House of Black, one of the oldest and proudest families in Wizarding England, claiming their descent from the Normans who conquered England in 1066.

Pettigrew, on the not unreasonable assumption that Riddle's followers would kill him if they found him, had gone into the Potter's house, retrieved Riddle's wand and fled through the back garden. He obviously intended to go into hiding. Black, a childhood friend of Pettigrew, found him on the streets of London. Pettigrew, fearing Sirius's wrath for good reasons, screamed that Sirius had blown the cover of the Potters and blew up a nearby gasoline tanker, killing a number of Muggles, thus throwing Black off his scent. In the ensuing chaos, he cut off his finger and fled to Yorkshire, in the form of a rat. Black, unable to offer a persuasive argument that he had not sold out the Potters to Riddle and implicated by a multitude of Londoners as the man who destroyed the tanker, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Azkaban without the possibility of parole.