Chicago Serial Killer HH Holmes: The King of His Castle

How Herman Webster Mudgett became Henry Howard Holmes is a long story and it is "Holmes", rather than "Mudgett", that has gone down in history as the name of one of the most fiendishly inventive serial killers of all time.

Holmes opened his new hotel in Chicago just in time to take advantage of the increased trade in the city caused by the 1893 World's Fair. But the hotel offered its guests far more than room and board and, indeed, if you were a young and pretty woman you stood a great chance of never checking out.

Holmes had acquired a vacant lot on the corner of Wallace and 63^rd Street, Chicago, shortly before the Fair's opening, and had quickly built his three-story block long "Castle" on the site. The ground floor contained only run of the mill shops, including Holmes's drugstore, but the upper two floors gained international notoriety after they were found to contain, apart from innocent seeming guest suites, a maze of over one hundred interconnected hallways and smaller rooms. Blind corridors, secret passageways and senseless stairways that lead nowhere abounded and at least one chute lead directly from the suites down into Holmes's basement torture chambers.

Holmes was not picky and his victims were culled mainly from ex-lovers who had originally been tricked into visiting him by reading his enticing advertisements in lonely hearts' publications. He also preyed freely on hotel guests and hotel employees. He usually killed his victims by gassing them in the hotel rooms, whose doors, once closed, could not be opened from the inside. He would then maneuver the corpses down to the basement via the chute. Once in the basement, he either dismembered the bodies and disposed of the pieces in lime pits, or dissected them and sold the skeletons to a nearby medical school. He also apparently ran an abortion clinic from the hotel premises but this clinic quickly gained a reputation for one where the patients had an extremely high fatality rate ...

Holmes also forced all of his employees to take out insurance policies on their lives with him as their beneficiary. After these employees had disappeared, and were presumed dead by the various insurance companies involved, Holmes would then cash the policies in. And although this happened time and time again, no one realized that Holmes was killing these people simply to file claims on their policies. Towards the end of his career, Holmes rightly considered himself to be an expert on insurance fraud and it is therefore ironic that, despite his undeniable talent in this area, he was finally brought low because of a botched insurance scam.

In 1894, Holmes and friends Benjamin and Carrie Pitezel conspired to perpetrate an insurance fraud that would involve Pitezel and Holmes faking the former's death and Carrie then cashing in Pitezel's $10,000.00 life insurance policy and sharing the proceeds with Holmes and her husband. The policy was duly taken out, with Carrie Pitezel as the sole beneficiary, and, shortly thereafter, Benjamin Pitezel was duly "killed" in an explosion. But what Holmes tried to convince the insurance company was true actually was true as he had killed Pitezel before the explosion took place and had then arranged the corpse in such a way so that it appeared that Pitezel had been killed by the explosion. Holmes also wanted the policy proceeds all to himself and he realized that the easiest way to make this happen was to get rid of the remaining Pitezel family members. He therefore invited three of Pitezel's five children, Alice, Nellie and Howard, to visit him - ostensibly to identify their father's body for the insurance company - and, after a short delay during which he and the children travelled extensively so as to confuse possible pursuers, he killed them. He then began urging Carrie Pitezel to send her other two children to him. She did not do this, however, as she had had no recent contact with her missing three children or with her husband and she was beginning to realize that something was wrong.

Holmes was then unexpectedly arrested on an outstanding horse theft warrant and while he languished in jail in Philadelphia the facts of the Pitezel affair became public knowledge. While the Philadelphia police built a case against him for the murder of Ben Pitezel and his three children, the Chicago police began to investigate the crimes that had allegedly taken place in the bloody Murder Castle. Holmes was eventually charged with killing Benjamin Pitezel and the case soon went to trial. After a short trial that lasted only six days, and a jury deliberation period that lasted only two and a half hours, Holmes was convicted. Such was the public belief in Holmes's guilt that the jurors were said to have unanimously agreed on his guilt within one minute but that they stayed out for two and a half hours just "for the sake of appearances". Knowing that the game was up, Holmes then confessed to the 27 murders that he had apparently committed in his Castle. He was, however, never tried for these further crimes.

Holmes was given the death sentence for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel and was hanged at the Philadelphia County Prison on May 7^th 1896. Unlike body-snatcher William Burke, however, Holmes's corpse was not dissected for the greater good of science as his last wish was granted and he was buried in concrete so as to deter potential resurrectionists and thrill seekers.

Sources:
Schechter, Harold. The Serial Killer Files. New York: Ballantine Books (2003)
Wilson, Colin. The History of Murder. Edison: Castle Books (2004)
H H Holmes Wikipedia
Holmes Cool To The End The New York Times
Pepper Partin H H Holmes in Irvington Indiana H H Holmes in Irvington
Liz Spikol Holmes Sweet Holmes Philadelphia Weekly
Troy Taylor The Murder Castle of HH Holmes Weird & Haunted Chicago
Katherine Ramsland HH Holmes, One of America's Worst Serial Killers TruTV Crime Library