Herman Webster Mudgett (May
16, 1861 – May 7, 1896), better known under the alias of
Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was an American
serial killer.
Holmes
opened a hotel in Chicago
for the
1893 World's
Fair
, which he built himself and was the location of
many of his murders. While he confessed to 27 murders, of
which 9 were confirmed, his actual
body
count could be higher.
The case was notorious in its time and received wide publicity via
a series of articles in
William
Randolph Hearst's newspapers. Interest in Holmes' crimes was
revived in 2003 by
Erik
Larson's
The Devil
in the White City, a best-selling non-fiction book that
juxtaposed an account of the planning and staging of the World's
Fair with Holmes' story.
Early life
Mudgett
was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire
. He was the son of Levi Horton Mudgett and
Theodate Page Price. The family was descended from among the first
settlers to the area. His father was a strict disciplinarian, and
Mudgett was often
bullied as a child. He
claimed that, as a child, schoolmates forced him to view and touch
a human skeleton after discovering his fear of the local doctor's
office. The bullies initially brought him there to scare him, but
instead he was utterly fascinated.
Herman
Mudgett graduated from the University of Michigan
Medical School in 1884. While enrolled, he
stole bodies from the school laboratory. Disfiguring the corpses
and claiming that the people were killed accidentally, Mudgett
collected insurance money from policies he had taken out on each
one. After graduating, he moved to Chicago to practice pharmacy. He
also began engaging in many shady businesses, real estate, and
promotional deals under the name "H. H. Holmes".
On July 8, 1878, Holmes married Clara A.
Lovering of Alton, New
Hampshire
. On January 28, 1887, he married Myrta Z.
Belknap in
Minneapolis,
Minnesota
; he was still married to Lovering at the time,
making him a bigamist. He and Belknap
had a daughter named Lucy Theodate Holmes, born 4 July 1889 in
Englewood, Illinois.
The family of three resided in the upscale
Chicago suburb of Wilmette
—although
Holmes spent most of his time in the city tending to
business. He filed a petition for
divorce from his first wife after marrying his
second, but the divorce was never finalized. He married his third
wife, Georgiana Yoke, on January 9, 1894. He also had a
relationship with Julia Smythe, the wife of Ned Connor, his
one-time employee who later fled Chicago. Julia became one of
Holmes' victims.
Chicago and the "Murder Castle"
While in Chicago during the summer of 1886, Holmes came across Dr.
E.S.
Holton's drugstore. at the corner of Wallace
and 63rd Streets, in the neighborhood of Englewood
. Holton was suffering from cancer while his
wife minded the store. Through his charm, Holmes got a job there
and then manipulated her into letting him purchase the store. They
agreed she could still live in the upstairs apartment even after
Holton died.
Once Holton died, Holmes murdered Mrs. Holton
and told people she was visiting relatives in California
. As people started asking questions about
her return, he elaborated the lie and told them she enjoyed
California so much that she decided to live there.
Holmes purchased a lot across from the drugstore, where he built
his three-story, block-long "Castle"—as it was dubbed by those in
the neighborhood.
It was opened as a hotel for the World's
Columbian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure used as
commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained
Holmes' own relocated drugstore and various shops (a jeweler, for
example), while the upper two floors contained his personal office
and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways
opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to
nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other
strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed
builders during the construction of the Castle so only he fully
understood the design of the house he had created, thus decreasing
the chance of being reported to the police.
After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected most female
victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a
condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for
which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary),
lovers and hotel guests, and tortured and killed them. Some were
locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him
asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims
were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where
they were left to suffocate . The victims' bodies went by secret
chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected,
stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to
medical schools. Holmes also
cremated some
of the bodies or placed them in
lime pits for destruction.
Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of
various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the
connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and
organs with little difficulty. Holmes picked one of the most remote
rooms in the Castle to perform hundreds of illegal abortions. Some
of his patients died as a result of his abortion procedure, and
their corpses were also processed and the skeletons sold.
Capture and arrest
Following the World's Fair, with creditors closing in and the
economy in a general slump, Holmes left Chicago.
He reappeared in
Fort
Worth
, Texas
, where he
had inherited property from two railroad heiress sisters, to one of
whom he had promised marriage and both of whom he murdered.
There he sought to construct another castle along the lines of his
Chicago operation. However, he soon abandoned this project, finding
the law enforcement climate in Texas inhospitable. He continued to
move about the United States and Canada, and while it seems likely
that he continued to kill, the only bodies discovered that date
from this period are those of his close business associate and
three of the associate's children.
In July 1894, Holmes was arrested and briefly incarcerated for the
first time, for a horse swindle that ended in St. Louis. He was
promptly bailed out, but while in jail, he struck up a conversation
with a convicted train robber named
Marion Hedgepeth, who was serving a 25-year
sentence. Holmes had concocted a plan to bilk an insurance company
out of $20,000 by taking out a policy on himself and then faking
his death. Holmes promised Hedgepeth a $500 commission in exchange
for the name of a lawyer who could be trusted. He was directed to
Colonel Jeptha Howe, the brother of a public defender, who found
Holmes’ plan to be brilliant. Holmes' plan to fake his own death
failed when the insurance company became suspicious and refused to
pay. Holmes did not press his claim; instead he concocted a similar
plan with his associate, Pitezel.
Pitezel had agreed to fake his own death so that his wife could
collect on the $10,000 policy, which she was to split with Holmes
and the shady attorney, Howe. The scheme, which was to take place
in Philadelphia, was that Pitezel should set himself up as an
inventor, under the name B. F. Perry, and then be killed and
disfigured in a lab explosion. Holmes was to find an appropriate
cadaver to play the role of Pitezel. Holmes then killed Pitezel,
although some have argued that Pitezel, an alcoholic and chronic
depressive, might in fact have committed suicide. Forensic evidence
presented at Holmes' later trial, however, showed that chloroform
was administered
after Pitezel's death, presumably to fake
suicide. Holmes proceeded to collect on the policy on the basis of
the genuine Pitezel corpse. He then went on to manipulate Pitezel's
wife into allowing three of her five children (Alice, Nellie, and
Howard) to stay in his custody. The eldest daughter and baby
remained with Mrs. Pitezel. He traveled with the children through
the northern United States and into Canada. Simultaneously he
escorted Mrs. Pitezel along a parallel route, all the while using
various aliases and lying to Mrs. Pitezel concerning her husband's
death (claiming that Pitezel was in hiding in
South America) as well as lying to her about
the true whereabouts of her other children—they were often only
separated by a few blocks.
A Philadelphia detective had tracked Holmes,
finding the decomposed bodies of the two Pitezel girls in Toronto
. He then followed Holmes to Indianapolis
. There Holmes had rented a cottage. He was
reported to have visited a local pharmacy to purchase the drugs
which he used to kill Howard Pitezel, and a repair shop to sharpen
the knives he used to chop up the body before he burned it. The
boy's teeth and bits of bone were discovered in the home's
chimney.
In 1894 the police were tipped off by his former cell-mate,
Marion Hedgepeth, whom Holmes had
neglected to pay off as promised for his help in providing Howe.
Holmes's
escapade ended when he was finally arrested in Boston
on November
17, 1894, after being tracked there from Philadelphia by the
Pinkertons. He
was held on an outstanding warrant for horse theft in Texas, as the
authorities had little more than suspicions at this point and
Holmes appeared poised to flee the country, in the company of his
unsuspecting third wife.
After the custodian for the Castle informed police that he was
never allowed to clean the upper floors, police began a thorough
investigation over the course of the next month, uncovering Holmes'
efficient methods of committing murders and then disposing of the
corpses. A fire of mysterious origin consumed the building on
August 19, 1895, and the site is currently occupied by a U.S. Post
Office building.
The number of his victims has typically been estimated between 20
and 100, and even as high as 230, based upon missing persons
reports of the time as well as the testimony of Holmes' neighbors
who reported seeing him accompany unidentified young women into his
hotel—young women whom they never saw exit. The discrepancy in
numbers can perhaps best be attributed to the fact that a great
many people came to Chicago to see the World's Fair but, for one
reason or another, never returned home. The only verified number is
27, although police had commented that some of the bodies in the
basement were so badly dismembered and decomposed that it was
difficult to tell how many bodies there actually were. Holmes'
victims were primarily women (and primarily blonde) but included
some men and children.
Trial and execution
While Holmes sat in prison in Philadelphia, not only did the
Chicago police investigate his operations in that city, but the
Philadelphia police began to try to unravel the whole Pitezel
situation—in particular, the fate of the three missing children.
Philadelphia detective Frank Geyer was given the task of finding
out. His quest for the children, like the search of Holmes' Castle,
received wide publicity. His eventual discovery of their remains
essentially sealed Holmes' fate, at least in the public mind.
Holmes was put on trial for the murder of Pitezel and confessed,
following his conviction, to 27 murders in Chicago, Indianapolis
and Toronto, and six
attempted
murders. Holmes was paid $7,500 by the
Hearst Papers in exchange for this
confession. He gave various contradictory accounts of his life,
claiming initially innocence and later that he was
possessed by
Satan.
His facility for lying has made it difficult for researchers to
ascertain any truth on the basis of his statements.
On May 7,
1896, Holmes was hanged at Moyamensing Prison, also known as the
Philadelphia
County Prison. Until the moment of his
death, Holmes remained calm and amiable, showing very few signs of
fear, anxiety or depression. Holmes' neck did not snap immediately;
he instead died slowly, twitching over 15 minutes before being
pronounced dead 20 minutes after the trap was sprung. He requested
that he be buried in concrete so that no one could ever dig him up
and dissect his body, as he had dissected so many others. This
request was granted.
On New Year's Eve, 1910,
Marion
Hedgepeth, who had been pardoned for informing on Holmes, was
shot and killed by a police officer during a holdup at a Chicago
saloon. Then, on March 7, 1914, a story in the
Chicago
Tribune reported the death of the former caretaker of the
Murder Castle, Pat Quinlan. Quinlan had committed suicide by taking
strychnine, and the paper reported that
his death meant "the mysteries of Holmes' Castle" would remain
unexplained. Quinlan's surviving relatives claimed Quinlan had been
"haunted" for several months before his death and could not
sleep.
In popular culture
- "Murder Castle," the August 3, 1943 episode of the American
radio horror show Lights
Out, written by Arch Oboler, is
directly inspired by the Holmes case.
- The second season
episode "No Exit" (November 2, 2006) of the television series
Supernatural features Holmes
who, as a ghost haunting an apartment building on the lot where he
was hanged, is responsible for the murders of several women who
lived there.
- The Robert Bloch novel American
Gothic (1974) is a fictionalized account of the crimes
perpetrated in Holmes' "Castle," but is grounded in the real facts
of the case.
- The White City (2004), a work of historical fiction by
Alec Michod, depicts a serial killer fashioned after Holmes who
preys upon children attending the 1893 World's Fair.
- The Devil in the
White City is a 2003
non-fiction book by Erik Larson that details the life of
Holmes.
- Caleb Carr's novel The Alienist has a protagonist whose
grandmother has fixated on H.H. Holmes. She does not have a good
night's sleep until he is hanged.
See also
Notes and references
- New Hampshire. Registrar of Vital Statistics. "Index to births,
early to 1900", Registrar of Vital Statistics, Concord, New
Hampshire. FHL Microfilms: film number 1001018
- Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). Board of Health. "Death registers,
1860–1903". Salt Lake City: Filmed by the Genealogical Society of
Utah, 1962.
- New Hampshire. Registrar of Vital Statistics. "Index to births,
early to 1900", Registrar of Vital Statistics, Concord, New
Hampshire. FHL Microfilms: film number 1001018
- Lucy Theodate Holmes, passport application, U.S. Passport
Applications, 1795-1925 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The
Generations Network, Inc., 2007. Original data: Passport
Applications, January 2, 1906-March 31, 1925; (National Archives
Microfilm Publication M1490, 2740 rolls); General Records of the
Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives,
Washington, D.C.
- The Devil in the White City
- Holmes admitted having only 2 women die during a criminal
operation.
- Holmes was thus simultaneously moving three groups of people
across the country—each ignorant of the other two.
- This number reached by Holmes' confession, for which the
Philadelphia Enquirer paid him. Some of the names on the list
turned out to be those of people still alive,
- Patrick B. Quinlan, death certificate, 4 Mar 1914, Portland,
Ionia, Michigan. Digital image of death certificate
- Schechter, H. (1994). Depraved: The Shocking True Story of
America's First Serial Killer, New York: Pocket Books
- "Supernatural" No Exit (2006). Internet
Movie Database. Retrieved September 12, 2009.
Further reading
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