H.H. Holmes: America's Worst Serial Killer

I am familiar with serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, but I had never heard of H.H. Holmes until I saw the documentary on Netflix. John Borowski's documentary, entitled H.H. Holmes: America's First Serial Killer, runs sixty-four minutes and gives a very detailed depiction of the man from his childhood to the day he was hanged for his crimes.

Holmes' real name was Herman Mudgett. He changed his name to H.H. Holmes after he graduated from medical school to avoid prosecution for numerous scams. Whether his murder spree started then is not known, but historians suspect that he developed his thirst for blood while in medical school. He disappeared for a while, and then resurfaced in Chicago in 1885.

While he continued running numerous scams and running up debts, he built an elaborate mansion that had approximately sixty rooms and an unusual floor plan. In order to avoid suspicion of his macabre plans, Holmes routinely fired contractors with the claim that they had done a poor job on building trapdoors, slides and the murder pit that the police would eventually find.

No one caught on to his behavior or the mansion's oddities because he manipulated them into thinking that he was a docile gentleman. Over the course of four years, he lured countless women into his mansion (dubbed the "Murder Castle"), where an unknown number of them met grisly deaths. After the victim died, he would send their bodies down to the basement and into the pits that were filled with acid and quicklime to destroy all traces of their body tissues. He sold their skeletons to medical schools across the country for as high as $200.00.

Holmes was eventually arrested for running a con in St. Louis. While waiting in jail, he swindled famous train robber, Marion Hedgepeth, into providing legal assistance in exchange for a $500 cut in a life insurance scam he was orchestrating on behalf of his deceased "right-hand man". This right-hand man was Benjamin Pitezel, whose death was originally ruled as accidental until Hedgepeth sent the Pinkerton Detective Agency after Holmes in an act of revenge.

Once the Pinkerton Detective Agency tracked him down, the horrors of Holmes' castle became known to the police and the public. Someone set the castle on fire after word got around that it was going to become a museum. H.H. Holmes taunted police investigators by changing his story every time they came to interview him. He showed no emotion when Pitezel's wife took the stand and wept over her murdered husband and three children.

The judge sentenced him to hang on May 7, 1896 at Moyamensing Prison. He requested that his body be buried in concrete so that it couldn't be dug up and dissected. For some reason, this was granted.