If I was to host a hypothetical head-to-head tournament to determine
the most evil serial killer of all time, who do you think would win?
The safe money would be on history's homicidal heavy hitters - Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy,
Jeffery Dahmer. But if you had to bet your entire life savings on one individual, you could do a
lot worse than back the man often referred to as America's first serial killer - HH Holmes.
During a reign of sheer terror in Chicago in the late 19th century, Holmes is thought
to have brutally murdered more than 200 people at a rate of more than 40 per year.
Many of his victims met their maker in a house of death that came to be known as the murder
castle. Built to a labyrinthine plan that only Holmes himself understood, the sprawling complex
was full of secret passages, trap doors, and soundproofed torture chambers. Holmes lured
hundreds of innocent people to this morbid mansion with murder on his mind, and after killing them
in the most horrific ways imaginable, some were dissected, others were stripped of their flesh
and sold to medical schools as skeletons, and still others were melted in giant vats of acid.
When you take into account the volume and sheer brutality of his crimes, it's hard to imagine
anyone can rival HH Holmes for the title of the most evil serial killer ever to have lived...
...but there's a catch. You see,
almost nothing I've told you about HH Holmes so far is actually true.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't just make it up. Every single detail - the sky-high body count,
the castle of death, the dissections and torture chambers - it's a matter of public
record. The staggeringly gory story is the subject of newspaper articles,
encyclopaedia entries, and multiple documentaries.
Which makes it all the more strange that the entire thing is utter nonsense.
This is the confusing tale of HH Holmes, America's most misunderstood murderer.
Holmes was born under the rather less enigmatic epithet of Herman Webster Mudgett on the 16th of
May 1861 in the town of Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Almost nothing is known about his early years.
Some sources claim he had an abusive alcoholic father and that his favourite childhood pastime
was to torture the local wildlife, but those are just rumours with no documented evidence.
Mudgett married at the age of just 17 to the first of what would eventually be 4 wives,
though since he never bothered actually divorcing
any of them we can add bigamy to his soon-to-be long list of crimes.
Mudgett was never a particularly strong student, but he managed to scrape his way to a medical
degree from the University of Michigan, and it was there that we hear rumours of his earliest
crimes. Despite his reputation as one of America's most notorious serial killers,
Mudgett's first felonious forays didn't involve *creating* cadavers, but selling them.
In those days, corpses were a surprisingly valuable commodity,
sold on the black market to medical schools for anatomical research. And Mudgett was only too
happy to dig up the deceased from the local cemeteries in order to make some fast cash.
...Or at least, that's what several sources claim. Again, there's no real evidence to prove he was a
bodysnatcher, but that probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. I'm no criminal mastermind,
but if I was in the business of selling corpses, I probably wouldn't write receipts.
We *do* know that body snatching was relatively commonplace at the time,
and Michigan university was a bit of a hotspot. There's also the probably-not-coincidental fact
that after his execution some years later, Holmes was so worried someone might come along and dig
up his remains that he asked to be buried in a block of solid concrete 10 feet underground.
So yeah, there's a fair chance this particular Holmes rumour is actually true.
After graduating in 1884, Mudgett worked several odd jobs across the American northeast,
gaining a reputation as a bit of a womaniser and a lot of a conman.
Two years later he moved to Chicago, where he restyled himself under the now infamous
pseudonym of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes - HH Holmes to his mates. Most historians agree
the name change was designed to stop the various people he'd swindled from tracking him down, but
I‘m guessing he was probably also just a bit sick of having a name like a squib from Harry Potter.
According to the traditional tale, on arriving in Chicago he found work at a local pharmacy,
where he eventually murdered his boss to seize control of the business.
In truth, Mudgett - well, Holmes - bought the drugstore fair and square. Far from
being Holmes' victims, the previous owners outlived him by several decades,
a fact that's proven by the dates on their headstones which still survive to this day.
Between the pharmacy and a growing list of illegal activities, Holmes was fast
becoming a wealthy man. So he did what any of us would do with a bit of spare cash - he bought
an empty plot of land and started work on a giant death factory (we've all been there).
This grand building you see before you, known today as the 'murder castle,' was the result.
Now, if you happen to be especially observant, you may already have noticed that this infamous
'castle' looks suspiciously like a fairly standard mixed use commercial building.
And it turns out there's a pretty good reason for that - that's exactly what it
was. There were shops on the ground floor and apartments above. Holmes added a third
storey in 1892 which he planned to use as a hotel, but it was never finished.
In 1893 Chicago played host to a World's Fair - a 6-month bonanza that attracted a staggering
27 million visitors. Probably the most famous element of the commonly told HH Holmes story
is that he built his murder castle to take advantage of this huge influx of tourists.
In the era before people posted 450 social media updates every single day, tourists were vulnerable
- their friends and relatives often had little idea of exactly where they were at any one time.
So, according to the story, Holmes built his murdery mansion as a way of ensnaring large
numbers of hard-to-trace World’s Fair visitors - preferably young women ripe for murdering.
That all sounds fairly logical - well, if you’re a serial killer - but it turns out that Holmes
started building his 'castle' several years before the Chicago World's fair had even been planned.
Admittedly work on the third floor did roughly coincide with the announcement of the Fair,
but we can be fairly certain he didn't lure any young women there for Netflix
and dismemberment because the hotel part was never actually finished.
Several people were indeed murdered on the premises - more on that in a minute - but the
whole 'murder castle' concept is total nonsense. The original architectural plans for the building
don't show any secret passageways, trap doors, or purpose-built torture chambers, and the building
simply wasn't big enough to have enclosed the complex labyrinth later accounts claimed.
Almost all these wild stories came from the press after Holmes was finally brought to
justice a few years later. It might sound unlikely that journalists could have gotten
the details of the case so incredibly wrong, but Holmes' capture happened to coincide with
the heyday of what's now known as yellow journalism - a style of reporting where
newspapers just made everything up to sell more copies. Why does that sound familiar?
But while there's no evidence the building was some kind of murder metropolis,
it *was* used as the base of operations for a wide range of less gruesome cons and schemes.
To put it simply, if HH Holmes believed something could make him money,
he was already doing it. During his criminal career he's known to have forged checks,
stolen horses, bought expensive items on credit with no intention of ever paying off the loans,
and defrauded a wide variety of insurance firms in multiple ingenious ways.
But while he wasn't the mass murdering maniac most people think he was,
Holmes was still a killer - and a pretty prolific one at that. We know for sure
that he murdered 4 people, and there's a good chance there were at least 9 victims.
The first is thought to have been Julia Connor, the wife of one of Holmes' employees, Ned.
Holmes and Julia started an affair in the early 1890s, and when Ned found out
he quite understandably quit his job and moved away. Not long afterwards,
Julia and her daughter Pearl went missing, never to be seen again.
We don't know for sure what happened to them, but Holmes later claimed Julia had fallen pregnant,
and that she'd died when he attempted to perform an illegal abortion. It's generally
assumed he killed Pearl because she knew too much about the circumstances of her mother's
death and therefore represented a dangerous loose end. Julia's remains were never found,
but the body of a girl of about Pearl's age was dug up in Holmes' cellar after his arrest.
5 months after Julia and Pearl went missing, Holmes struck again in incredibly similar
circumstances - he started a relationship with one of his employees - Emeline Cigrande - before she
suddenly went missing. Once again, Holmes claimed a botched abortion was to blame.
In retrospect that man probably shouldn’t have had a medical licence.
The following year two more women with ties to Holmes disappeared,
Minnie and Nannie Williams. As with all the others, the details are sketchy, but it's
thought Holmes scammed them out of some property, then murdered them before they had a chance to
go to the police. Much like Julia Connor and Emeline Cigrande, their bodies were never found.
There are plenty more stories about people turning up at Holmes' 'castle' never to be seen again,
and several of them are quite possibly true. But convincing evidence is extremely thin
on the ground and it's likely we'll never know exactly how many people Holmes killed,
though there’s zero chance it was anywhere near the commonly circulated 200.
By 1894, he'd swindled (and murdered) so many people in Chicago that he decided it was probably
best to move on. He travelled first to Fort Worth, then St. Louis, and it was there that the
law finally caught up with him. Considering he was very probably a serial killer at this point, It’s
almost laughable that Holmes was jailed for the heinous crime of failing to pay off store credit.
Remarkably it was his first stint in jail, and while he didn't stay behind bars for long,
his brief incarceration kicked off a chain of events that would
eventually lead to him being hanged for murder... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
While in jail, Holmes met a man by the name of Marion Hedgepeth,
better known as the Handsome Bandit. Handsome Hedgepeth was a Wild West gunslinger who was
serving 25 years in the slammer for train robbery. Both being colossal bastards, Holmes and Hedgepeth
soon struck up a friendship, and between them they cooked up a scam with a potentially huge payoff:
Holmes was going to fake his own death.
If you're wondering how pretending to die could possibly be a get rich quick scheme,
I've got two words for you: Life Insurance.
Holmes was bailed not long afterwards and he promptly put the plan into action. We
don't know exactly how he staged his own death,
but we do know the insurance company became suspicious and refused to pay out.
Holmes was undeterred. He knew he could pull the scam off if only he could make things a
little more convincing. But faking your own death isn't like fighting Malenia in
Elden ring - you can't keep trying over and over and over and over and over and
over.... again. And that meant Holmes needed to find someone else who was
willing to fake his own death in return for a slice of the life insurance pie.
That man was his long time business associate and literal partner in crime,
Benjamin Pitezel, and their plan was pretty simple.
Step 1: Take out a fat life insurance policy in Benjamin’s name
Step 2: Get hold of a dead body of about his size and build
Step 3: Blow said body up in a planned explosion,
making sure it gets good and burned in the process to conceal its original features.
Step 4: Report the death
Step 5: …Profit
The only question was, how to make sure the insurance company wouldn't see through the
ruse. Holmes had already discovered just how hard they were to fool… but that experience
gave him an idea - what if he didn't have to fool them in the first place?
As you've probably already guessed, rather than risk using a random corpse,
Holmes simply murdered Benjamin Pitezel so he could make the claim for real.
Pitezel’s wife had been in on the scam from the start - she was the one who needed to
file the claim with the insurance firm - but she had no idea her husband had been double
crossed. She went through the entire claims process - including identifying the charred
remains of her dearly beloved - all while believing he was really hiding out in London.
Of course, there was only so long that deception could last - sooner or later
Mrs Pitezel and her children were going to want to see their husband and father again.
But Holmes wasn’t worried - by this point in his career as a
professional arsehole he had plenty of experience tying up loose ends…
Along with Benjamin, to keep his secret safe Holmes murdered 3 of the 5 Pitezel children.
Two of the girls - Alice and Nellie - were forced into a large trunk which Holmes filled
with asphyxiating gas, while one of the boys - Howard - was poisoned, dismembered, and burned.
The Pitezel family killings are the only Holmes murders we can be sure he committed - not only
did he confess to the crimes after his arrest, he gave detailed descriptions
of how and where they took place, and he also told police where they could find the remains.
Thankfully, those were the final murders HH Holmes would ever have the chance to commit.
Because his old prison pal the Handsome Bandit had been doing some talking.
It turns out Holmes had bragged about all manner of evil deeds while locked
up with Handsome Hedgepeth, and the train robber had decided to use that information
to buy himself an early release. He told the police everything he knew.
Holmes was arrested in Boston on the 17th of November 1894. Despite his numerous crimes,
a relative lack of evidence meant he was tried solely for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel.
But that alone was more than enough to see him given the death sentence. On May the 7th 1896,
HH Holmes was hanged. When the trap was sprung his neck didn't break, and he was
left twitching at the end of the rope for a full 20 minutes before finally being pronounced dead.
As I've already mentioned, we have some highly questionable 19th century journalism to thank
for many of the more outrageous stories told about HH Holmes today,
but it’s worth pointing out that Holmes himself is responsible for much of the confusion.
Before his death, Holmes admitted to killing 27 people. The confession,
delivered straight from the homicidal horse's mouth, should have been pretty
solid evidence. But things were never that simple when it came to HH Holmes. Not only
did Holmes’ version of events contain several contradictions and revisions,
he also claimed to have killed several people who turned out to still be very much alive,
and several others who were known to have died of natural causes hundreds of miles away.
As for what his motive was for confessing to crimes he didn't commit, your guess is
as good as mine. Some people believe he was deliberately trying to fan the
flames of his own legend before his death, while others think he was trying to confuse
the prosecution during his trial. Perhaps he was just a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Even now, almost 130 years after his death, mystery continues to swirl around HH Holmes.
Along with the widespread misinformation about his life and deeds, a decades-long conspiracy
theory claimed that Holmes didn’t really die in 1896. Instead, according to the theory,
he pulled off one last trademark scam, escaping his own execution by convincing
someone else to ‘take the fall’ in his place. The rumour gained so much backing that in 2017,
his remains were exhumed from their concrete tomb for examination.
Thankfully, genetic testing proved conclusively that the one thing HH couldn’t cheat was death.
Thanks for watching.