The year is 1894 and police in Chicago enter a building owned known as the “Murder Castle.”
That day, cops find rooms with movable walls. They discover chutes in those rooms that lead
to a basement where vats of acid could turn a human body into mush. Around the entire
building are a labyrinth of corridors, some that lead nowhere. Some of the hallways contain
rooms that have vents built into them, where noxious gases can be released. Down in the
basement are the grizzliest discoveries: An operating table where bodies have been dissected,
and worse, a kind of stretching rack where one could perform the most diabolical experiments.
This shocking discovery would open the floodgates to the discovery of the atrocities committed
by Mr. Henry Howard Holmes, real-life Saw villain and one of America’s most evil serial
killers. This is how it all unraveled.
He wasn’t born Henry Howard Holmes. He made that name up later in an effort to distance
himself from his dastardly deeds. He was actually born with the name Herman Webster Mudgett.
On May 16, 1861, he became the third child of Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price,
English immigrants living in New Hampshire. As a kid, he excelled in school, which landed
him a place at the respectable Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated. He took work as a teacher.
He married young and had a child. This was a young man that seemed destined to live a
quiet life within the middle classes of the American public. But…something happened
and darkness encroached on the young man’s life.
Age 18, now with wife and child, he enrolled at the University of Michigan's Department
of Medicine and Surgery. He graduated and was said to be a brilliant student, if not
a person with some strange inclinations. It was while studying in the anatomy department
at this university that he began his life of crime.
The crimes were simple, if not macabre. He worked in the anatomy department of the college,
a job that gave him access to bodies that were to be dissected. Some of those cadavers
he sneaked out of the department and bashed them around a bit, making it look like they
had died in an accident. Prior to doing this, the young student had taken out insurance
policies on those people. You’d think this would not be so easy to do, even back then,
but it’s alleged he committed this scam on quite a few occasions.
He had cash in his pocket, a wife, and an infant child, but it seems he wasn’t interested
in staying settled down for long. One day he just took off, leaving the two behind,
and they would not see him for a very long time. Just before he left them, he created
a highly fictitious story that he knew would get back to them. They heard from others how
he’d been in some kind of train accident and lost his memory. As outlandish as that
seems, it kind of worked, and such lies would work again for him in the future.
He ended up in New York state, and while there, was connected to the disappearance of a young
boy. Did he kill that boy? It’s now thought he did, but no one can be sure. He also tried
to scam an insurance company out of $20,000 by using another cadaver he’d taken a policy
out on, but this time he was caught out. He was now getting quite the name for himself,
so naturally, he changed his name. Herman Webster Mudgett became H. H. Holmes.
It was at this point that he moved to Chicago, the place where his name would be cemented
in history. He married again, illegally of course since he hadn’t yet divorced, and
he started to make plans for future scams. He’d made sure to marry into a wealthy family.
He was also obviously well-educated, well-spoken, and you could say he had a gift of the gab.
That’s why he was always able to secure loans to buy properties. To pay those loans
back, he got loans on the properties he already had. He bit off more than he could chew, but
when creditors went after him, he always seemed to get himself out of the fix.
One of the ways he did this was to move around a bit. And so now, we come to one of the most
recognized addresses in crime history. That of 63rd and Wallace Streets. There he worked
as a clerk in a drugstore that was on the bottom floor. With some cunning he managed
to take it over and once that was done, he took over much of the building.
This was a massive place with rows of stores at the bottom and apartments on the third
floor. Then there was the second floor, where Holmes would create his house of horrors.
As you know, the basement is where the very ugly stuff went on.
He was still scamming, of course, selling from his drugstore magical drinks that could
allegedly stop alcoholism in its tracks. He sold a Canadian man an invention for $2,000,
although the gas-making machine wasn’t what it seemed. He also sold water that he said
was a cure for every ailment, which was water Holmes was stealing from the water mains.
Suffice to say, this man knew his way around industrial piping. This would help him later
when he gassed people to death. Holmes never stopped working on his building,
telling people that he was creating a hotel for the soon-to-arrive World’s Fair. In
truth, he was creating a monster of a building that didn’t make any sense. He’d hire
contractors and then fire them partway through the job. He was creating a house of many doors,
landings, rooms, that just didn’t look like anything anyone had ever seen. You could walk
down one hallway and it would just end. Rooms had no doors. Others had trapdoors.
How did he get away with not paying all these people to build his horror castle? The answer
is he’d lie through his teeth, and when that didn’t work, he changed the names on
the ownership documents. Fictitious people owned that building, as did a fictitious company
run by people that didn’t exist. His mother-in-law even owned the place at one point.
It was at this point in time that Holmes began killing people in that building. There was
his assistant Julia, who was with child and husband when she started working in his drugstore.
She began an affair with Holmes, so her husband took off. She and her child one day went missing
and were never seen again. There were other women, who Holmes’s wife
didn’t know about since she didn’t live at the castle with him. Holmes could meet
someone on the street, use his gift of speech to impress them, and within no time at all
they found themselves staying in a weird room on the second floor.
Holmes had learned a thing or two while building the monstrosity. He fitted alarms around the
building so when someone opened a door or stepped on a certain step, in his room he’d
hear a bell ring. He’d then know they were on the move.
Many rooms could be only locked from the outside, so when one of those rooms started to fill
with poisonous gas, the occupant would not be able to get out. It’s also alleged that
one person was burned to death, in a room whose walls had been made from fire-proof
material. There were other rooms that once the door
had been closed they became almost airless, so within a matter of time, the victim would
be suffocated. After such an event took place, Holmes could easily get the body down to the
basement since the room had been fitted with a chute. Other rooms were connected to small
elevators. Sometimes he might have just locked a door and let a person die of dehydration.
Years later, he admitted he’d starved a woman in a room.
When the bodies hit the dissecting table, Holmes would go to work on them. Having worked
in the medical profession, he knew very well that organs and other body parts were expensive
and in high demand. He would take what he wanted from the bodies and throw the waste
into vats of lime or acid. He may have done something much worse, too.
Ok, so surely someone must have been on to him. This was a man with a lot of skeletons
in his closets, possibly literally as well as figuratively.
First, you need to know that during this time Holmes had met a man in Chicago named Benjamin
F. Pitzel. Pitzel was no stranger to crime himself, but the jury is still out whether
these two became partners in crime. Holmes then met and married a woman named
Minnie Williams. He was actually married to three women now, and there would also be a
fourth. After marrying Williams, he managed to get her to sign the deed to her property
to a man that was just another alias of Holmes. The deed would eventually be signed over to
another man, who was an alias of Pitzel. If all that looks suspicious, it was. Minnie’s
sister, Annie, went to Chicago to meet her sister and her mysterious new husband, and
she, nor her sister, were ever seen again. They both likely became unwitting organ donors.
To cover his tracks, Holmes wrote a letter to the girls’ aunt, signed by Annie, that
said things were going swimmingly and she and her sister were heading off to Europe.
An actual real letter was written much earlier from Minnie to Annie. In that missive, Minnie
wrote that she’d met a man named Harry Gordan whom she described as “handsome, wealthy,
and highly intelligent.” Holmes would later tell the cops that Minnie
had killed Annie after the two of them had vied for his attention, but it’s unlikely
this was the case. What we know for sure is that Holmes had many relationships, some with
the 150 young women who worked for him during those years. It’s also true that when the
World Fair came to Chicago there were a lot of missing person cases.
In 1893 things started to come undone for Holmes. He’d ripped off too many creditors
and some of them were after him. For that reason, he tried to claim on insurance for
a fire at the building which he’d actually started himself. The police now knew this
guy had a bad reputation and one investigator named F. G. Cowie looked into Holmes’s past.
Something seemed awfully wrong with this educated fella, was the conclusion of the cop.
In 1894, Holmes had already fled Chicago to go and live in the house he’d scammed out
of the Williams’ sisters. While there he was jailed for trying to commit another scam.
While in that jail he told a man about a plan he had to take out a life insurance policy
on himself and then fake his own death. He needed the guy’s help, and if that was forthcoming,
he’d cut the guy in on the scam. In the end, faking his own death didn’t work and
the other criminal didn’t receive any money. It was then that Holmes turned to Pitzel again
for help. He told him that he should fake his death. The plan was for Holmes to create
an inventor named B. F. Perry who was actually Pitzel. This guy would die in a lab experiment
gone wrong but the body that police would find would be a cadaver that Holmes had acquired.
After that, Holmes and Pitzel would collect on the life insurance policy.
Except Holmes being Holmes didn’t want to share the loot, so one day he turned up at
Pitzel’s house, knocked him out with chloroform, and burned his body, making it look like an
explosion had happened in the lab. Holmes was then in the money because he’d actually
taken a life insurance policy out on the real Pitzel.
Holmes went to Mrs. Pitzel’s house and told her that her husband was doing some business
in London, England. He told her that he could help her take care of her five kids, of which
three left that day with Holmes. The kids were never seen alive again. Holmes later
said he forced two of them to get inside a large trunk. Once they were in, he made a
hole and pumped gas in there through a hose. Not long after, an investigator was on the
lookout for Holmes and the three missing kids. The cops discovered remains of the girls at
the house where Holmes was staying and they found the teeth and some chopped-up bits of
the boy in the chimney. The game was almost up.
Investigators now started to put this man’s life under a microscope. It didn’t take
long to understand that many people had gone missing who’d been unfortunate enough to
cross his path. It’s then they went to the Castle and made those grizzly discoveries.
What’s worse, they found what looked like a rack. It was assumed by some that Holmes
had used it to torture people into telling him what he wanted to know. It was also understood
that for a while Holmes had been working on a theory. He believed that if you slowly stretched
a body it would become taller over time. He wrote that by doing this humans could create
a race of giants. It will never be known if he actually stretched some of his victims
in an attempt to see if he was right. On October 28, 1895, Holmes represented himself
for the first day of his trial. It was said that he showed a “remarkable familiarity
with the law.” Still today, a lot is uncertain about his
crimes and his motives. The biggest number put forward is that he killed 200 people,
although it is certain that he killed nine. He confessed to 27 murders, but then again,
he told a lot of lies. May 7, 1896, the day of his execution by hanging,
Holmes was said to have looked very calm. His neck didn’t break immediately, so his
body twitched for a good 15 minutes. After 20 minutes, he was pronounced dead.
As for his final words, not long before he departed this world he had asked if he could
be buried deep under concrete. He was worried someone might steal his body and sell his
organs. Now you need to watch, “How Charles Manson
Came to Lead One of the World’s Most Dangerous Cults.” Or, have a look at...