What makes a serial killer the worst of his/her kind? Well, it’s probably a few things,
such as the body count, but for most people it would more likely be the nature of the
killing. The UK’s Harold Shipman, aka, Doctor Death, may have killed well over 200 people,
but you could say his modus operandi wasn’t as depraved as some killers’. Richard Ramirez,
the American Satanist, got up close and personal to his victims, and did all manner of horrific
things to them. Albert Fish tortured, mutilated, killed, and ate children, and he was subsequently
called a “psychiatric phenomenon”. The list goes on, and the total depravity of killers
can chill your spine. Today we are going to feature one person who often receives the
superlative of “worst”, in this episode of the Infographics Show, H. H. Holmes - Is
He the Worst Serial Killer in US History?
Where do we start? Well, what about the fairly recent revelations that the killer who is
the focus of today’s show may have been none other than Jack the Ripper. It’s an
outside chance, and no indisputable evidence has been seen, but the great-great grandson
of Herman Webster Mudgett, aka, H. H. Holmes, aka, the “Devil in the White City”, came
forward in 2017 and said he had evidence that proved his deceased relative was London’s
infamous ripper. The great-great grandson, Jeff Mudgett, believes Holmes was never actually
executed, having found a way out of it after employing his well-known trickery. He also
claims that Holmes’ diaries (which he is now the owner of) describe viciously mutilating
and murdering prostitutes in London. Could the man said to be “America’s first serial
killer” be much worse than we thought? This is very likely not the case, because in 2017
his body was exhumed and was found to be largely preserved due to the fact Holmes got his wish
and was buried in a coffin filled with concrete. A DNA test was performed and indeed, it revealed
that the preserved body was that of H. H. Holmes.
So, what about H. H. Holmes, why is he said to be one of the worst, if not the worst in
history? What exactly did he do to get that epithet?
First of all, we don’t know how many people he killed. He confessed to 27 murders, but
police have only ever been sure about nine of his murders. Some people believe that he
may have killed in the region of 200 people, but that is very questionable. It isn’t
how many people he killed, however – as we say, Dr. Shipman is never regarded as the
worst killer – but the manner in which he supposedly killed people. He was said to be
a sadist, a fella with a brutal propensity for watching people suffer and feel pain,
and he would do this when they were locked inside one of his torture rooms. But let’s
start from the beginning.
He was born in New Hampshire on May 16, 1861, and his childhood has been written about extensively.
Did he torture animals, as many serial killers have been said to do, or was his childhood
fairly normal? He is said to have admitted himself, "I was born with the very devil in
me…The inclination to murder came to me as naturally as the inspiration to do right
comes to the majority of persons."
His early life fits the pattern of regular folks. He graduated high school, got married,
had a kid, went to university. He then dropped out of one university and later went to another
from which he graduated. If anything does point to his wicked ways, it’s that he studied
human dissection, and as a young man was said to be violent towards his wife. But then things
got out of hand.
He started to move from city to city, and on at least two occasions was linked to the
murders of young boys. One boy disappeared after allegedly being seen with Holmes, and
another died after taking drugs from the pharmacy where Holmes worked. He certainly liked to
keep moving, which could be the reason why most accounts of his life state that before
he finally arrived in Chicago, he had become a big-time fraudster. Notably, it’s said
his cons involved insurance, with one biography saying, “Holmes was stealing and mutilating
medical cadavers and pretending they were victims of accidents to collect money.”
As for the dead children, police never linked them to Holmes. It’s only in retrospect
that we might wonder if he had anything to do with them. In Chicago, though, that’s
where the ghastly stuff really took place, when Holme’s created his sick piece de resistance
that become known as his “Murder Castle.”
This was a three-story building on Chicago’s 63rd and Wallace streets. A huge place, it
took up an entire block. He called it the World's Fair Hotel, built for the upcoming
World's Columbian Exposition, but it never really became a proper hotel. Holmes had all
manner of problems with suppliers and was accused of possible insurance fraud when part
of it burned down. It was always a shady project, only because Holmes seemed to have a difficult
relationship with anyone involved with it. In 1937, long after Holmes’ arrest, the
Chicago Tribune described the place as queer, stating it had “chimneys stuck out where
chimneys should never stick out. Its stairways ended nowhere in particular. Winding passages
brought the uninitiated with a frightful jerk back to where they had started from.” They
called it mysterious and crooked, as distorted as the killer’s mind, with rooms with no
doors and doors with no rooms. The stuff of nightmares.
The thing with the house, is that Holmes was the only person who knew how it actually worked.
It was kind of a maze, a house of horrors that made no sense to other people. It was
to this mad place that he invited mainly young women to stay. Some say it’s hard to tell
exactly what he did, though, or who he killed, only because the man who was married to three
people at the same time liked to tell a lot of lies.
Benjamin Pitezel was a friend of Holmes, and also an accomplice in some of his crimes.
Pitezel had agreed with Holmes to do a scam, whereby Pitezel’s death would be faked and
they would share a $10,000 life insurance payment. However, Holmes never got a cadaver
which he would say was his friend’s, rather he knocked his friend out with chloroform
and then set him on fire. Holmes later said he murdered three out of five of Pitezel’s
children. Two of their bodies were found buried in the hotel.
Holmes is also said to have murdered his mistress Julia Smythe, as well as her daughter Pearl.
No one knows exactly what happened to them, but they went missing while staying at the
hotel. This was not the first young woman who’d fallen for Holmes who would die when
staying with him, with several young women said to be his victims.
One of the reasons why Holmes is so notorious is because of the stories that surfaced about
his home being a massive torture chamber. Some skeptics, though, have said this has
been greatly exaggerated. These supposed exaggerations tell us that some of the rooms would have
instruments of torture hidden in the walls, such as blowtorches, tools for tearing apart
bodies, hidden poison, and corrosive acid. It’s said there was a “hanging room”,
a “torture rack,” and that there were “gas chambers,” a “quicklime pit,”
and also that the walls were ironclad to prevent people from escaping. Once they died, there
were chutes from which the bodies could easily be disposed.
But, at the time, newspapers were well-known for their exaggeration, and later others said
perhaps Holmes was not as bad as first thought. In the “Gem of the Prairie: An Informal
History of the Chicago Underworld,” by Herbert Asbury, he writes that perhaps Holmes wasn’t
quite the sadistic torturer others had said he was. Maybe even his house of horrors was
less of a trap made by a demented man than it was a badly built hotel. We can find many
websites that write sensational stories about him, but more serious journalism is skeptical
about his deeds. Some people even doubt he said, “I was born with the very devil in
me.” In fact, it was later revealed that he was said to have a hanging room only because
police found a rope, and that he chopped his victims up only because they found knives
and a worn-out table. Mr. Holmes was no doubt a dastardly character, a heartless scammer,
and a cruel murderer and thief, but as for the rest of the story, maybe, just maybe,
there has been some embellishments.
Do you know more about HH Holmes that we neglected to mention here? Can you think of a serial
killer more heinous that he? Let us know in the comments! Also, be sure to check out our
other video called The Most Infamous Serial Killer - Why Was He Never Found?! Thanks for
watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time!