18 Facts Most People Didn't Know About H. H. Holmes

OCTOBER 19 2018- He has been called America's first serial killer. He wasn't many serial killers preceded him, including the Harpe Brothers and several others. His name wasn't H. H. Holmes, he claimed to kill many more people than he actually murdered, including some who are still alive, and besides being a serial murderer, he was a bigamist, a thief, and was suspected by some of being the London slasher known to history as Jack the Ripper. He is said to have preferred to kill young women of less than conspicuous background, but he wasn't particularly picky when it came to selecting his victims, and the only murder for which he was convicted was of his male business partner. 

Eventually Holmes confessed to more than two dozens murders. Though subsequent writers have attributed many more to him, some of them accusing him of killing more than two hundred people, only nine murders have been confirmed as being his actions. He exhibited an almost craftsmen's life pride in his killings in his confessions, expressing nothing in the way of remorse before meeting his end on the gallows, on which he denied killing anyone. In the 1940s, he became the subject of articles in the thrilling crime magazines of the day, and much of his life was fictionalized, creating a myth which is still repeated, much of it false. A con artist in life, his life continues to con Americans, and he became a mythologized demon. 

Here are some of the facts about Herman Webster Mudgett, who entered history and legend as H. H. Holmes. 

missing when Mudgett was a child, this too is uncorroborated by contemporaneous accounts. As the third born of three siblings, Mudgett's childhood was mostly unremarkable, and he was bright enough to complete high school by the age of sixteen. 

Following high school Mudgett worked for a time as a teacher and private tutor in his native Gilmanton, New Hampshire. On Independence Day, 1878, the seventeen-year-old Mudgett married Clara Lovering in Alton, New Hampshire. He studied briefly at the University of Vermont before entering medical school at the University of Michigan, where in accordance with the standard practice of the time the study of human anatomy was supported by the dissection of cadavers. Mudgett had prior experience in human dissection from a brief period when he apprenticed under Dr. Nahum Wight prior to medical school. He completed his course of study at Michigan in 1884, though by that time Clara, according to friends the victim of abuse at Mudgett's hands, had returned without him to New Hampshire. Other accounts have her tiring of his philandering. They nonetheless remained married.

After graduating, which was itself nearly derailed due to a scandal involving a woman he had promised to marry despite being already married, Holmes eventually surfaced in Philadelphia, where he worked for a time in a pharmacy. When a customer died after taking medications prepared by Holmes, he relocated, turning up in Chicago in 1885. Though his medical degree read Mudgett, he continued to work under the name Holmes; Chicago in the 1880s was not a town noted for strict law enforcement or legal niceties. Holmes was employed in Chicago at a drugstore located on the corner of Wallace Avenue and West 63rd, by a man who was a fellow graduate of the University of Michigan, who owned the store with his wife, Elizabeth Holton. Part of Holmes' mythology is that he poisoned the druggist and murdered his widow, neither of which is true. Both were still alive when Holmes was executed in Philadelphia. 

life. The friend, Dr. Robert Leacock, was at the time practicing medicine in Canada, and died there three years later. There has been speculation that Dr. Leacock's name was attached to one of the cadavers Holmes used to defraud insurance companies, but as with most things associated with his claims, little evidence and less proof has been presented. 

After marrying Myrta, Holmes decided that it could be a good idea to divorce his first wife, and eventually filed papers to do so. Evidence suggest that Clara Lovering never received the divorce papers and it was never finalized. Holmes, who had a son with Clara, also had a daughter with Myrta, born in 1889 while Holmes was working as a successful businessman in Chicago. Unsatisfied with having two wives, in 1894 Holmes took a third, exchanging vows with a woman named Georgiana Yoke in Denver, Colorado. Along with three wives (though he lived with but one at a time), Holmes was prone to taking mistresses, some of which became his victims. The myth that one of them was the widow of his Chicago employer began during his sensational trial, in fact both the owner of the Chicago drugstore and his wife outlived Holmes. 

Columbian Exposition in 1892, an international celebration held in Chicago to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the exploratory expedition of Christopher Columbus. At least, that's what his legend says. 

Holmes had several secret rooms built in the hotel, which was never completed, which he later claimed to have been built for the purpose of his killing spree, though in reality the rooms were mostly used for the purpose of hiding supplies and furnishing for which he never paid his suppliers. By 1890, Holmes was living on the premises, operating his own drugstore on the first floor, with several tenants living on the upper floor, including Julia Smythe, who worked at his drugstore selling jewelry. Smythe's husband abandoned her and their child after learning that his wife was involved in an affair with her employer. Smythe remained at the drugstore and resided in the hotel with her child until vanishing sometime in 1891, last seen on Christmas Eve. What became of her and her child has never been determined with certainty, Holmes later claimed that she died during a botched abortion, though he never explained what happened to the child. 

City was incomplete. 

According to the legend by the time of the Columbian Exposition, Holmes had established his modus operandi. He advertised in newspapers for young women to work in his businesses and live in his building. He took out life insurance policies on all of his employees and residents. He also made it known to the young women who turned up at his door that he was in the market for a wife, despite already having one with whom he lived in the nearby suburb of Wilmette, Illinois, and another abandoned back east. As the Exposition drew young women to the city, Holmes drew them to his Castle, from which they would simply vanish, forgotten and unlooked for, at least for a time. In 1893, Holmes began to expand his criminal enterprise beyond murder and insurance fraud, taking on a partner by the name of Benjamin Pitezel. 

beneficiary. 

By that summer several insurance companies had made note of the sums being paid to Holmes, as well as the frequency of his claims. A mysterious fire broke out at the Castle. Several investigators began to dig around his businesses and accounts. Recognizing that Chicago was becoming a bit hot for him, Holmes left Chicago in the summer of 1894, traveling to Forth Worth, planning to use the property he had conned out of the vanished Minnie Williams to create a new business along the lines of his Chicago enterprises. Never one to pay his bills when he could instead scam someone out of money, he borrowed money using furniture as collateral, then sold the furniture, in St. Louis, for which he was arrested. After being bailed on jail, Holmes made contacts with a less than scrupulous attorney, to whom he revealed plans to fake his own death as part of yet another insurance scam. 

Howe's law partner was his older brother and was not part of the scheme, Holmes decided not proceed with legal pursuit of the claim, and instead came up with a modified scheme including Howe and Benjamin Pitezel. 

The new plan featured Pitezel setting himself up as a Philadelphia chemist, who would be killed in a lab explosion, leaving his body too disfigured for reliable identification. Holmes would again provide a cadaver suitable to the scheme and the insurance payment would be made to Pitezel's widow, who would then split it with Holmes and Pitezel. Pitezel traveled to Philadelphia under as assumed name and rented an appropriate space. Shortly after Pitezel arrived in the city Holmes visited with the partner's wife and announced a modification to the plan, to which she acceded. Whether Howe knew of the new plan has never been fully established, but when Holmes went to Philadelphia to execute the scheme, he did not bring along a cadaver. 

a rented house. 

Holmes then went to Indianapolis where he killed the remaining Pitzel child and burned the body in the fireplace of yet another rented home. Meanwhile, a detective from Philadelphia investigating Holmes found the decomposed bodies of the Pitezel children in Detroit. When Chicago police got wind of the investigation into Holmes's activities, they began looking at several missing persons of their own, and a search of Holmes's Castle was conducted. The search of the Castle was sensationalized by the Chicago newspapers at the time and became the source of most of the myths surrounding Holmes, nearly all of which are false. The truth is the Chicago police did not find sufficient evidence to charge Holmes with any crimes in Chicago. There was no torture equipment, no killing machinery, and no evidence of criminal activity. 

The castle became a torture chamber designed for the completion of murder on a large scale in the minds of the sensationalist press, without evidence. The Chicago police were unable to develop evidence to charge Holmes with the crimes which his legend says he committed in the building. They did come up with evidence that Holmes had cheated his lenders and contractors when completing the structure, skimping on material and avoiding his bills. 

The Chicago police had searched the Castle before Holmes was ever charged with a murder, on more than one occasion, looking for property against which Holmes had borrowed money which he had not repaid. Articles appeared in Chicago newspapers describing the building's secret rooms well before the sensational news following his being charged with the murder of Pitezel. They were described as the means of hiding property, or moving it from room to room one step ahead of the creditors. The myth that Holmes planned the Castle to be used as a murder factory during the Columbian Exposition also fails to take into account the fact that construction began in 1887, well before the Exposition was planned for Chicago. Also forgotten in the fact that during the exposition Holmes attempted to burn the Castle (for the insurance), which explains the oversize gas tank in the cellar. The attempt failed. 

a twenty-five year term for train robbery, and it was he, who had long experience with the Missouri criminal system, who recommended Jeptha Howe. 

Later Hedgepeth informed prison authorities of the scheme which had been proposed by "Howard" and when word was passed along to authorities in search of Holmes, who was well known as a con artist and swindler, the investigation into the death of Pitezel became one of murder rather than simply insurance fraud. Hedgepeth was eventually pardoned for informing on Holmes and met his death when he was shot during a robbery of a Chicago bar on New Year's Eve, 1909. He took with him his motive for informing on Holmes, he had not been promised anything when he approached the authorities with the story. Likely, it was because he had been promised something from Holmes and never received it, the $500 which Holmes, if he remained true to character, simply decided not to pay as promised. 

Holmes for his "confession" during his trial and Holmes obliged with tales admitting to 27 murders, some of them of people who were still alive. The fiction that he killed the Horton's emerged in his "confession". A neighbor of the Castle told a Chicago newspaper that he had long suspected Holmes as the murderer of a woman who died sometime later of heart failure, as attested by her physician who issued a death certificate. 

During the 1940s, the number of murders attributed to Holes was frequently recorded as being upwards of 200, without references or sources being identified. The high number was attested to by the ever more graphic descriptions of the Murder Castle, which was so efficient in the disposing of bodies that it was implied that the number was likely even higher than that. By the twenty-first century, Holmes was accused of being not only America's first serial killer, but the Whitechapel murderer known to history as Jack the Ripper as well, though the Ripper killings took place in 1888, a time when Holmes was in Chicago, frequently in court as a result of lawsuits over construction of the Castle and his non-payment of loans. Nine murders have been confirmed with Holmes being the likely killer, including that of Benjamin Pitezel, for which he was convicted. At his hanging Holmes denied killing anyone, other than accidentally during performance of abortions. 

identifying it as Pitezel, whom he claimed he had found after he committed suicide. He claimed Pitezel had left a note asking him to distribute the insurance money to his children, and to make it appear as if he had died in an accident. 

It was then that Minnie Williams reappeared in his story, according to Holmes, she was in London, where she had custody of Pitezel's children. When the charred remains of Pitezel's sons were discovered in Indiana, Holmes denied all knowledge of them, as he did when the decomposed bodies of the two girls were found in Michigan. Several other missing persons were traced to Holmes, yet he continued to deny all knowledge of any murders until he provided his sensational confession to Hearst after he was convicted of murder, in exchange for cash which was sent to his then 18-year-old son with the first of his three wives. He was convicted of two crimes, insurance fraud, to which he pleaded guilty on the second day of his trial, and the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, convicted by a jury. He was not charged with any othermurders. 

potential charges of fraud which drove Holmes to leave Chicago for Texas, and which led to his meeting with Hedgepeth and Howe. 

Despite the lack of evidence, or perhaps because of it, the newspapers sensationalized the scant findings in the castle. When Holmes stood on the gallows and made his final statement, which refuted that given to Hearst earlier when he accounted for 27 murders, he denied killing anyone other than two women during what he called a criminal medical procedure, which in the late nineteenth century was often a euphemism for abortion. "I only want to say that the extent of my wrongdoings in the taking of human life consisted in the death of two women, they having died at my hands as the result of criminal operations", stated Holmes, according to an eyewitness to the execution, and reported in the San Francisco Call. According to the same account, the two women to which Holmes referred were Emily Cigrand and Julia Smythe Connor. 

housed retail businesses, which by their nature have numerous visitors throughout the course of the business day, which included Saturdays in the 1890s. 

The main purpose of the Castle was to bilk investors and lenders, and the evidence that Holmes did so repeatedly is undeniable. He was sued in Chicago courts more than 50 times, which were all reported in the Chicago newspapers, as were the frequent visits of the police to the Castle, accompanying bill collectors to enforce court orders. Following the Columbian Exposition some newspapers claimed, without supporting evidence, that more than fifty women had been traced from attendance at the exposition to the Castle, from which they vanished from sight forever. But the police found no evidence of them. What they did find, such as a length of rope, became evidence that Holmes had hanged some of his victims, gas lines became designed for asphyxiation in airless rooms, rather than the source of illumination as they were in most houses, in the fevered imaginations of the reporters of the day. A wood stove for head became a crematorium.  

the ground in August of 1895 (or any other year). It was damaged by fire and repaired, remaining in use until the 1930s, when it was torn down. It was during the building's demolition that many of the pulp magazine stories about Holmes and the Murder Castle re-emerged, and also during that period, that most of the extant photographs of the building were taken. The descriptions of the media which were unsupported by evidence when written forty years earlier were repeated, usually with substantial embellishment. They continue to be repeated and embellished in the twenty-first century. 

his face. He wrote of killing for "pecuniary gain" and that as his murders piled up he developed "the light regard I had for the lives of my fellow beings". Holmes wrote of killing one of his male victims by starving them almost to death before needing the room in which he was held, "for another purpose and because his pleadings had become unbearable, I ended his life." Holmes also described victims selected for the purpose of extorting their money, starving and gassing them over a period of time before they signed over securities and accounts to him, after which he finished them off and sold their bodies to medical schools. The chilling nature of his narrative sold well, and despite it being self-described as true, he later renounced the entire tale. 

In some reproductions of the confessions, Holmes was quoted as saying, "I was born with the devil in me," which did not appear in all newspapers which ran portions of the statements he gave. Whether Holmes uttered the words which explain his becoming a serial killer through the impetus of Satan has been debated ever since, as have so much of his life and his crimes. At the time of his execution, Holmes again recanted, denying his guilty in any killings. Holmes gave his final statement, according to his own words, because, "by not speaking I may be made to acquiesce in my execution." After his execution, rumors began almost immediately that he had somehow managed to escape, and that the man buried outside Philadelphia had been another cadaver. The rumors led to his body being exhumed and tested for DNA evidence in 2017. 

18. There Are Those Who Believe He Was Jack the Ripper

H. H. Holmes has been mythologized by those to whom he has become a cottage industry, with longstanding rumors that he escaped the gallows and fled to South America, and even that he was the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders assigned to the killer known as Jack the Ripper. As early as 1898, newspapers reported that Holmes had bribed the jailers who carried his living body out of prison in a coffin, after which he vanished. The rumors were based, in part, on Holmes being buried ten feet underground, sealed in concrete. A story in an 1898 edition of the Chicago Inter-Ocean claimed that Holmes was live and living in Paraguay, earning a living as a coffee grower. The exhumation of the body and confirmation that it was in fact Holmes (through dental records) did little to end the speculation. 

The truth about H. H. Holmes is forever obscured by the sensationalist manner in which he was described by the newspapers of the time, by his own contradictory statements, and by the continuing efforts to link him to crimes around the world. His name makes money through mystery tours, blogs, books, television specials, and films. Understanding that first and foremost he was a swindler and a liar, who killed primarily for profit, and who sold his story for profit, is important to his story. His alleged memoir, Holmes Own Story, said to have been written in prison, expresses his complete denial of involvement in the murder of his partner, the crime for which he was executed. Holmes was not Ameria's first or worst serial killer. But he was a murderer without conscience. "The legend of the Devil in the White City is effectively a new American tall tale," wrote Adam Selzer, after researching the Holmes legend for years. "And like all the best tall tales, it sprang from a kernel of truth."