H. H. Holmes

 

H. H. Holmes was the alias of Herman Webster Mudgett, an American serial killer who is thought to have been responsible for literally hundreds of murders, although only a few of these were ever confirmed. His most notorious crimes involved entrapping large numbers of mostly female employees and guests at his Chicago hotel and torturing them, before gassing them to death and selling their bodies to medical schools.

 

The Evil One

 

Mudgett was born in New Hampshire on May 16, 1860, the son of an alcoholic father and a timid, submissive mother. He later wrote, ‘I was born with the devil in me. I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into this world. He has been with me ever since.’ As a child, Mudgett was bullied remorselessly by his father, and his mother was too intimidated to intervene. However, the young Herman did well at school, being intelligent, charming, and good-looking. Despite the problems of his home life, he was convinced he would do well in the world and had an ambition to be a doctor. As an adolescent, he took to killing and dismembering small animals, conducting experiments on them, and became fascinated with anatomy.

By the age of eighteen, Mudgett had married a young woman called Clara Lovering and was studying at the University of Michigan Medical School. However, he was expelled from there for stealing corpses, and had to relinquish his hopes of becoming a doctor. He changed his name to Dr Henry Howard Holmes and found work at a pharmacy, which went well until the woman he was working for, a Mrs Holton, disappeared. At the same time, Mudgett remarried, though without divorcing his first wife, and had a daughter with his new wife, Myrta Belknap. The couple named their daughter Lucy. He then married yet again to a woman named Georgiana Yoke, and went on to have an affair with the wife of a colleague, Julia Smythe, who later became one of his victims.

 

Torture rooms

 

Mudgett then murdered the pharmacist and his wife, and with the money he gained, began to construct a large building across the street from the store, which residents of the area called the ‘Castle’. It was a block-long, three-storey building and during its construction many of the building contractors were hired and fired. The reason, as it later emerged, was that Holmes did not want anyone to know what the real purpose of the building was. It had many secret rooms and passages, some of them fitted with gas jets. In the basement, there were large vats and secret chutes that led down to torture rooms. Also in the basement there was a dissection table and surgical tools.

While the building was under construction, Holmes was involved in various scams to make money. One of these was to take water from the tap, mix it with vanilla essence, and sell it in the pharmacy as ‘Linden Grove Mineral Water’. The authorities found out soon enough and he was banned from selling the water. However, he was not prosecuted and went on to run several other rackets, including selling fresh bodies to the medical schools in the area for students to dissect. Ironically, nobody asked where the bodies came from.

 

Dismembered bodies

 

By the time he was thirty, Holmes was a successful businessman. He owned a pharmacy, a hotel, a jewellery store, a restaurant, a barber’s and several other businesses as well. He had many employees, including one named Ned Connor, who had moved to Chicago with his wife Julia and their daughter Pearl, to take up the position of manager in one of Holmes’s businesses. Unbeknown to Connor, Holmes was strongly attracted to Julia, a good-looking woman with red hair and green eyes. When Julia invited her eighteen-year-old sister Gertie to stay, Holmes propositioned her as well, promising to divorce his wife so that he could be with her. Gertie, however, was not interested, so Holmes turned his attention to Julia once more. This time, Julia fell in love with Holmes and soon became his lover. Eventually, Connor found out what was going on and the couple separated, after recriminations on both sides.

Sadly, Julia was to suffer a great deal as a result of her attachment to Holmes. She became pregnant with their child and Holmes asked her to have an abortion, but Julia initially refused. Eventually, however, she agreed to let Holmes perform the operation on her, and he took her down to the cellar to do so. But instead of performing the abortion, Holmes murdered her instead, dismembering her body so that all the flesh was cleaned off, leaving only her skeleton, which he sold to a medical school for the sum of $200. Nobody knows exactly what happened to Julia’s daughter Pearl, but she was never seen alive again.

 

Gassed to death

 

In 1893, a major exhibition opened in Chicago, bringing visitors flocking to the city, and to the hotel that Holmes had opened there. Over a period of three years or so, he selected his mostly female victims from the guests, took them to the soundproof rooms and tortured them, before gassing them to death and dissecting them. So that he would not be discovered, he constantly changed the staff who worked at the hotel, firing them every fortnight or so. In this way he was able to carry on his grisly work without detection.

The usual way he operated was to murder his victims, then push the bodies down a secret chute that took them to the basement. There he would dissect them, remove all the flesh from the bones, and assemble their skeletons to be sold to medical schools. He also cremated his victims, throwing their bodies in huge lime pits so that they would be destroyed. In addition, there were two giant furnaces in the building, a torture rack and a huge assortment of poisons and acids designed to dispose of his victims in various ways, as the mood took him.

Not content with this, Holmes decided to make more money by operating an insurance scam with one of his employees, Benjamin Pitezel. Pitezel took out a life insurance policy for $10,000, citing Holmes as the beneficiary. The idea was that Pitezel would then disappear, Holmes would find a corpse to disfigure, then identify it as Pitezel. Pitezel’s children would be roped in to help to identify the body.

 

The long arm of the law

 

What in fact happened was that Holmes murdered Pitezel, then panicked when the police began to snoop around the hotel. Holmes set the hotel alight and escaped to Philadelphia, taking one of Pitezel’s daughters with him. Meanwhile, evidence of what had been going on in the hotel all those years finally came to light. The remains of over 200 bodies were found, and police launched a major manhunt.

Eventually, Holmes was tracked down in Boston and arrested. While in custody, he struck up a friendship with another inmate, Marion Hedgepath, who constantly boasted to him about the various ways that he had made money illegally over the years. Holmes responded by telling Hedgepath about the murder of Pitezel so as to claim the insurance money, and then went on to claim that he had committed many such murders for financial gain. Hedgepath promptly informed the police of Holmes’s story, and Holmes was duly charged with the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. The story that came out deeply shocked the police and, later, the public. Holmes told his captors how he had burned Pitezel alive, despite the man’s cries for mercy and his pitiful attempts to pray for salvation when his final end came.

Meanwhile, the police at the Castle in Chicago were tallying up the body count, and found that at least 100 young women, most of them typists and secretaries, had been murdered in the building. The killings had evidently followed a pattern: these young women had caught Holmes’s eye, become his lovers and ended up being murdered. Not only did the police find the bodies of the women; there were also children, including Alice, Nellie and Howard Pitezel, whose remains were found in the building. Alice and Nellie had been thrown into a trunk and gassed to death, while their brother had been poisoned and burned before being dismembered.

Despite the mounting evidence against him, Holmes was adamant that he was innocent and continued to plead not guilty to murdering Pitezel. However, when he was brought to trial, the jury did not believe his story and he was convicted of first-degree murder. On November 4, 1895, he was sentenced to death. Before his hanging, he confessed to twenty-seven murders and six attempted murders.

On May 7, 1896, Herman Mudgett, alias Dr H. H. Holmes, was hanged in Philadelphia. According to the New York Times, Mudgett told the executioner: ‘Take your time; don’t bungle it.’ However, the executioner did not make a very good job of the hanging. Holmes’s neck did not immediately snap and he died slowly, twitching for a good fifteen minutes before he was finally pronounced dead.