The Truth About HH Holmes, America's First Serial Killer | Random Thursday

according to the FBI at any given time there's 25 to 50 serial killers currently operating in the United States cool sleep tight kids we also have the highest number of serial killers per capita in the whole world USA USA USA serial killer is defined by the FBI as somebody who kills more than 3 people over the span of more than a month with emotional cooling-off periods in between but the general popular version of what a serial killer is is somebody who basically gets off on hurting and inflicting pain on other people and while we think of serial killers is a fairly you know modern phenomenon there's always been a small percentage of the population that has no empathy and gets pleasure out of seeing other people suffering I mean somebody's got to work the phones at Comcast customer support but you know we've always been fascinated by bandits and outlaws you know the the gunslingers the Old West Jesse James Billy the Kid those kinds of guys whose stories have become so sensationalized over the years it's hard to tell the difference between truth and legend so even though they were definitely you know bad guys that you wouldn't want to run into in a dark alley or anything the newspapers just reveled in their adventures and sometimes even painted them as a hero you know people that are fighting against the system and killing to stay alive and to square bad deals serial killers that was another thing that's not some hero trying to you know buck the system or something that is a sadistic bastard who gets off on murdering women and small children that's somebody punching down not punching up so serial killers get sensationalized in a different way focusing on the grotesque and the perverted in the McCobb what can you say it sells and this was a lesson the press learned over a hundred years ago with the first real serial killer in the United States the American Ripper himself HH Holmes all right so here's the deal with this video this video is sort of like a collaboration with myself clabon with myself when researching this video my fellow writer Ryan who's done a fantastic job helping me out with this channel he researched the heck out of this video and he found so much detail that we couldn't possibly fit into a video so what we did was we created a huge blog post out of that so if you want to get more detail on this story if this video just kind of like wets your appetite you want to get all the craziness involved you can follow the link is down in the description I'll take you and you can find out so much more SiC oh and by the way before you guys start asking in the comments yes this is that answers with Jo comm slash shirts I don't really wear my branded stuff on your very often but none of the sciency stuff really had much to do a serial killing I don't I don't carry serial killer shirts so if you like this and you want to represent have at it alright so let's start with the legend of HH Holmes and work our way backwards HH Holmes was a businessman and small-time hustler in Chicago in the 1890s who had a three-story hotel at the corner of 63rd and Wallace streets it was a modest business but the legend says that this was just a front what he was really doing was creating a killing Factory he modified the room so he could pump gas into the rooms to knock out his victims and then he would dump them down secret chutes down to the basement where he would have them dismembered and disposed of sometimes he would drop bodies down that chute unconscious but still alive so when the victim woke up they were tied to a table where he would torture them for days before finishing them off and he installed all this just before the Chicago world Columbian Exposition of 1893 when millions of people came and visited Chicago from all around the world these were his perfect victims people were much less connected back then you couldn't trace people from their credit card purchases or their cell phone activity sometimes people just disappeared and that's exactly what happened in Holmes house of horrors people would check in and then vanish in the middle of the night I never heard from again and the police finally caught on and searched this hotel they found the burned bodies of hundreds of victims in the basement bodies and bats of acid and overall just absolute horror show and Holmes became known as the American Ripper the devil of Chicago and America's first serial killer yeah that's the legend it's pretty dramatic the truth is way more convoluted and messy he was much less of a monster and much more Walter White but only in the bad ways like the small-time hustler that was just smart enough to always kind of slither out of trouble not the badass you know say my name Walter White first of all HH Holmes wasn't his real name his real name was Herman Webster Mudgett Herman was born in 1861 in Gilmanton New Hampshire and though the legend says that he grew up torturing animals his mother said that he actually loved animals especially dogs another part of the legend is that Holmes grew up really awkward and couldn't look people in the eye but the truth was he had something called a strabismus and his left eye which causes a loss of muscle control in fact he was a charming conversationalist by most accounts he married three women with throughout his life he was a compulsive womanizer so I mean probably wasn't that awkward he trained as a surgeon before he moved to Chicago in 1886 where he made his fortune running small con jobs around town like renting out furniture and bikes under an assumed name and then selling them and it was while running these small con jobs that he took on the pseudonym HH Holmes when he spelled it out he would sometimes say Henry Howard or just Harry H Holmes having a fake name kind of helped him to skip out on bills homes eventually scanned enough money that he was able to buy a drugstore in the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood the legend has it that he murdered the owners but he probably just bought it and across the street from that drugstore he'd built a building a building that would later be known as the murder castle and not because it was a castle for a bunch of crows didn't murder murder of crows come a group of crows is called a murder of crows it's a joke the second floor of this building contained a baffling maze of hallways and rooms doors that led nowhere secret walls that opened up into secret rooms and people later assumed that this was to confuse his victim so he could murder them outside the prying eyes in fact the rooms were given names like the room of three corpses in the ex-fix iation chamber by the press but it was probably just meant to confuse repo-man it was a place where he could hide all of his furniture and bikes that he was later selling so that nobody could find them in fact one of the tenants of the building once said that he saw rooms of furniture that were just empty the next day and the whole thing about the hundreds of victims that came from the World's Fair apparently he didn't take in a single guest from the World's Fair in fact while the World's Fair was going on he was actually living in a different part of town and only visited that building because it was a fire on the third floor which was probably an insurance scam and this is actually the pattern with Holmes he was much less of a genocide on Monster and more of just a conman that was constantly juggling his scams which might not sound so bad you know just a guy running some cons a scammer bit of a shyster you might say I mean it's not like he felt like he killed people except he totally killed people like everything about HH Holmes a number of his victims is wrapped up and legend and outright lies some of which he told himself he had a great sense about how to confuse people by telling the truth and lying at different times but there are nine victims that are canonical and definitely assumed to be from HH Holmes five of which happened in the murder castle but the murder that did Holmes in was a guy named benjamin pitezel he was actually an accomplice of Holmes and they went in together on an insurance fraud scam so what they were gonna do was find a dead body and then fake Benjamin's death by passing off the dead body as his and then collect the insurance money from it and and give it to a widow that only appeared on paper and of course it would go to Holmes and he would split the money with Benjamin now getting a dead body wasn't difficult for Holmes because he had some some medical connections but he decided that the best way to pass off a dead body as benjamin pitezel body would be for it to you know actually be Benjamin but Tesla's body so he killed him which had the added bonus of not having to split the money with anybody so win-win but in this case the insurance company challenged the story that Benjamin was blown up in an accidental explosion they investigated and they wound up convicting Holmes of this murder and he was hanging just nine days before his 35th birthday but when investigating Holmes more murders and mysterious disappearances came to light in a past that was full of manipulation and deception the first victim that was definitely Holmes work was a woman named Julia Connor she worked at Holmes drugstore in the jewelry department with her husband Ned who was the jeweler and he sometimes the store for homes and the couple actually lived at Holmes castle and somewhere along the way julia and HH holmes had an affair this broke up their marriage ned ran away leaving julia there with her six-year-old daughter pearl by all accounts Julia and pearl were perfectly happy there but around Christmas of 1891 they both disappeared the castle janitor a guy named Pat Quinlan had apparently told his family that they had moved off to California but Pat was also known to be an accomplice of home so he might have been directed to say that regardless after Holmes was arrested and police started looking through the castle they actually dug up the remains of a six-year-old girl in the basement homes with later claimed responsibility for Julia's death but what he claimed was that he was trying to perform an abortion on her and she died on the operating table obviously nobody knows what really happened why pearl was killed as anybody's guess maybe she witnessed her mom's death maybe she was just responsibility he didn't want to keep up with but regardless after a few weeks after they disappeared he was actually renting out their room for other people and it was still had all their stuff in it yeah cording to the tenant that moved in the room had women's clothes strewn all about and apparently HH Holmes casually kicked a doll under the bed the next murder attributed to Holmes was a woman named Emmeline segrand just like Julius she also worked for Holmes and eventually had a romantic relationship with him Hey ladies don't date this guy when she disappeared in 1892 Holmes claimed that she had run off to get married but one of the tenants of the hotel claimed the day after she was last seen Holmes and pet Quinlan were seen carrying out a large crate he would later claim responsibility for her death but he used the same excuse that he used for Julia that she died in a botched abortion attempt set side by side the murders of Julia pearl and Emmeline looked less like some sadistic killer that gets off on hurting people and more like somebody that just is a narcissist trying to get rid of his obligations a narcissist with zero empathy which is basically a psychopath there are two more people who Holmes killed in his murder castle a pair of sisters named Winnie and nanny Williams and these are kind of the most mysterious of all of his victims Holmes had a gift for confusing things by sometimes confessing to crimes that he hadn't committed in denying crimes that he very clearly committed and even though he very clearly killed men nanni he never claimed responsibility for it according to his story Minnie was actually a murderer she and him were having an affair and when nanny came over she flew into a jealous rage hitting nanny over the head with a stool and killed her Holmes then helped her dispose of the body and then helped her to leave the country according to Holmes but both sisters disappeared at the exact same time they were last seen on July 5th 1893 and then days that followed Holmes made several purchases and winnings name all of which you know he made money on so I mean he killed her at this point Holmes had a pretty impressive body count going but believe it or not we're not even at the crazy part yet because something I didn't mention before was the homes actually had two wives with two separate families while he was living in Chicago and in 1894 things started getting a little hot around all of his insurance scams so he had to leave them behind he went from Chicago to Denver where he collected some debt that was owed to many Williams and while he was there he got married again three marriages going on at this point this one was named Georgiana yoke and she actually followed him from Denver to Fort Worth where he got into trouble for stealing horses really dude he was chased out of town pretty quickly and learned the meaning of the phrase don't mess with Texas he bounced to st. Louis where he had a chance to start a new drugstore business but decided hey it's much better to just rip off your suppliers instead but his old Chicago hustles didn't work out so well in st. Louis so he was arrested and put in jail for a brief period of time where he just couldn't help but brag to his cellmate about all of the insurance scams he was running after we made bail he rushed off to Philadelphia and now low lying cash and desperate for a payday and this is where he met up with his old friend Ben Petzl remember Ben the guy that was going to work with Holmes to fake his own death and then Holmes just killed him that's where this happened knocked him out with chloroform then burned his body but it actually gets way worse than this because Ben actually had a wife and family his wife name was Cary he had a daughter named Alice that was 15 a daughter named Nellie that was 12 and a son named Howard that was 8 Cary and possibly the children knew that there was this insurance scam going on so when they identified the body they thought it was the fake dead body they had no idea that it was actually their father and husband the insurance company cut homes a check for $10,000 and then he told Kerry that he would reunite her with Ben but he didn't think that the kids should go along with him he didn't think that they should get wrapped up in this scam so he put them and under the protection of a friend of his named Minnie Williams yeah that many Williams who had been dead for a year at that point what he actually did was move these kids around himself and kept them separate from their mother while he shuttled them all around the country on a wild goose chase also his wife Georgiana was with him and she had no idea about any of this other stuff so somehow he shuffled these people around on this insane route from Philly to Cincinnati to Indianapolis to Detroit with stops in Toronto and Ogdensburg New York three different groups of people none of which had any idea that the other people were involved in all this sometimes they were writing the same trains and even staying in the same hotel eventually the children became too much for him to want to deal with so he did what pretty much came naturally to him at this point it's believed that Howard the eight-year-old was poisoned and then burned apparently some of his teeth and chunks of his skull were found in the flue of the stove in a house that homes and rented along the way and the bodies of Allison Nellie were found buried in a shallow basement amazingly during all this he had time to go back to his hometown and visit his first wife Clara and his son Robbie and he told them that he had been in a railway accident and had been experiencing amnesia for the last six years and they were so happy to see him they were totally fine with the fact that he said that he married Georgiana because she was a nurse that was taking care of them I mean this guy but Holmes's luck finally ran out the insurance company that dealt with Ben Patel's death challenged the the original story they hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency who found a slew just an entire trail of fraud and scam victims along the way as well as a former cellmate that shared with them everything that Holmes had bragged about when he was in jail from November 1894 to July 1895 fragments of the truth started popping up left and right and Holmes was arrested extradited to Philadelphia where he faced charges for the murder of Ben Patel and all the craziness that they found in the Chicago castle started to come to light after an excavation order was done and of 1895 very quickly the trickle of press interest turned into an absolute flood everything got blown completely out of proportion details became big mountains of evidence ashes that were found the basement turned into hundreds of bodies and in fact they called one room the hanging room because they found a rope in it crowds flocked to the murder castle to see the place where all this stuff happened in fact in one day 4900 people showed up and had to be kept away by the police but hundreds actually got into the castle and ransacked the place but even after the potential children's bodies were found the lawyer for HH Holmes convinced the judge to only let the evidence around been Patel's death be involved in the case 12 jurors convicted Holmes of killing bin all of his appeals were denied and even as he was standing at the gallows the only debts he claimed responsibility for with Julianne Emmaline's from the botched surgeries after his execution the story and The Legend of HH Holmes just spread even more hundreds of people were claimed to have been his victims from the World's Fair when in fact probably hundreds of people just disappeared because people just disappeared back then sometimes some people claim Holmes faked his own death and later on some actually said that he might have been Jack the Ripper before he moved to Chicago one of the people who actually believes the Ripper story is Geoff Mudgett the great-great-great grandson of HH Holmes and he actually had Holmes's body on earth and did DNA tests on to make sure that that was actually his body it was and by the way this wasn't easy to do because Holmes insisted that a concrete dome be built over his grave so the people wouldn't desecrate it Holmes today is remembered more for the crimes that he might have committed than the crimes that he actually committed which is a shame because these are real people whose lives were destroyed like dozens of them when you count the family members and everything that's enough isn't it Holmes wasn't a super villain though it makes us feel better to think of him that way if we can think of him as some supernaturally evil person then we can convince ourselves that we're nothing like him labels kind of create a little bit of a distance there he was a man who told lies with every other breath who hated earning an honest buck when a crooked one would do and he thought he was smarter than everybody and then he would always get away with it and like everybody else he started small Clara Lovering Mudgett his his first and only legal wife once said to a criminologist that she had a hard time accepting that he did these things saying quote but of course he has worked himself up to it little by little and I think having done some little wrong he had been driven to a greater one for a cover in each one growing worse of course it's more easy to go in the wrong after the first few steps regardless of he was more Walter White than Zodiac killer HH Holmes was the first serial killer to really capture the public consciousness sadly he was not the last as I said is beginning in this video there is a blog post with much more detail on all of this that's link down the description I invite you to go check it out if you want more details but tell me what you think do you think that HH Holmes was the super villain did he have a murder castle that he murdered hundreds of people was eject or Ripper tell me what you think in the comments hope you guys enjoyed this video this is a little bit different from the kind of stuff that I normally do I'm kind of liking to do the the biography type stuff this is definitely in a dark direction but tell me what you think alright thanks for watching you guys please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this video I do videos on more science related topics and futurism every once in while it Doven some dark stuff because we're dark people sometimes if you check out some my other videos and you like him I do invite you to subscribe I come back with videos every Monday and every Thursday all right with that I'm gonna let you go sleep tight everyone and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 680,764

Rating: 4.9068174 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, HH Holmes, devil in the white city, chicago, serial killer, america's first serial killer, Chicago World columbian Exposition 1893, Famous serial killer, worst serial killer, crime history, murder castle, american ripper, jack the ripper

Id: QAYeIXTc1NQ

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2019