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.
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