H.H Holmes

Serial killers

One of the most notorious tracts of land in Chicago is the small block along 63rd street where H. H. Holmes-- “America’s Serial Killer” --once built his “Castle for Murder.” When, in 1887, Herman W. Mudgett (alias H.H. Holmes) was hired as a shopkeeper in a drugstore in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, he had been officially “missing” for two years. Still a very young man, the not-quite 30-year-old Holmes had already substantially ruined his life. About a decade earlier, he had married local girl Clara Lovering and settled down in New York for a time, where he worked as a schoolteacher before hearing the call of higher education. Holmes moved with Clara to Michigan, where he began medical school. The couple’s time together was brief, however. Holmes sent his young wife home to her New Hampshire family; soon after, he was thrown out of school for stealing cadavers from the college anatomy lab and criminally charged for using them in insurance scams. He then “disappeared.” A year later, Holmes was hired in Englewood, and his boss, a woman by the name of Holden, soon went missing herself. Though family members, friends, and fellow businesspeople were alarmed, Holmes explained that Holden had decided to move to California and had sold the business to him. Holmes wasted no time in finding a second wife, ignoring the fact that his pending divorce from Clara Lovering was stuck in the legal system and, thus, not finalized. His new fiancée, Myrtle Belknap, was the daughter of North Shore big-shot John Belknap. Two years after their wedding, Belknap left Holmes. Their marriage had been an odd one at best; Myrtle lived in Wilmette with her family while Holmes continued to live on the city’s South Side. After his second wife’s walkout, Holmes began construction of an enormous “hotel” on the property he’d purchased across from the old Holden drugstore. With money from further insurance scams, Holmes raised his Englewood “castle” to awesome heights. Plans for the hotel, however, resembled a funhouse of some sort: the triple-story wonder contained 60 rooms, trap doors, hidden staircases, windowless chambers, laundry chutes accessed from the floors, and a stairway that led to a precipice overlooking the house’s back alley. In only a year, the “World’s Fair Hotel” was completed, and its owner sent out word that many of its plentiful rooms would be available to out-of-town visitors to the Columbian Exposition. And so the horror began. Detectives and later scholars surmised that a high number of the fair’s attendees met gruesome ends at the hands of Holmes in the “hotel” he built as a giant torture chamber. It was later discovered that the building contained walls fitted with blowtorches, gassing devices, and other monstrosities. The basement was furnished with a dissecting table and vats of acid and lime. Alarms in his guest rooms alerted Holmes to escape attempts. Some researchers believe that many were kept prisoner for weeks or months before being killed by their diabolical innkeeper. Others believe Holmes was not really “into” killing. That it was all for the money. Along with his hotel of horrors, Holmes had other ways of attracting victims. Placing ads in city papers, he offered attractive jobs to attractive young women. Insisting on the top-secret nature of the work, the location, and his own identity, he promised good pay for silence. In the competitive world of turn-of-the-century Chicago, there were many takers. Far from satiated, Holmes also advertised for a new wife, luring hopeful and destitute girls with his business stature and securing their trust with what must have been an irresistible charm. After disposing of numerous potential employees and fiancées in his chambers of terror, Holmes decided to seriously find another mate. In 1893, he proposed to Minnie Williams, the daughter of a Texas realty king. Williams shared Holmes’s violent nature and lawless attitude. Soon after they met, Williams killed her sister with a chair. Her understanding, empathic fiancé dumped the body into Lake Michigan. Yet, the two were not to live horrifically ever after. Holmes employees Julia Connor and her daughter, Pearl, were distraught at the news that their boss would be taking a new wife. Julia had been smitten with Holmes at the expense of her own marriage, and she and Pearl had worked with their employer to pull off a number of his insurance swindles. Not long after objecting to the coming union, Julia and Pearl disappeared. When Julia’s husband, Ned, came calling for them, Holmes told him that his family had moved to another state. In reality, Julia’s alarm over Holmes’s imminent marriage stemmed not only from mere longing but from the fact that she was pregnant with his child. Her death was the result of an abortion that Holmes had performed himself. Stuck with Pearl as an annoying witness, he poisoned the child. In 1894, the Holmeses went to Colorado with an Indiana prostitute in tow. Georgianna Yoke had moved to Chicago to start afresh and had answered one of Holmes’s marriage ads in a local paper. Introduced as Holmes’s cousin, Minnie and Holmes saw the same thing in Yoke: a girl with wealthy parents and a substantial inheritance awaiting her. In Denver, Minnie witnessed her husband’s marriage to Yoke, and from there the trio went to Texas, transferred Minnie’s property to Holmes, and conducted a few assorted scams. Not long after, the group returned to Chicago and Minnie, Yoke, disappeared. Around the same time, Holmes’s secretary, Emmeline Cigrand, was literally stretched to death in the Castle basement along with her visiting fiancé. Finally, in July of 1894, Holmes was arrested for mortgage fraud. Though his third wife sprung him with their dirty bail money, Holmes had used his short time behind bars to launch yet another scam. Holmes planned to run a big insurance fraud at the expense of early accomplice Ben Pitezel, who had served time for one of their swindles while Holmes had walked away. Hoping to eliminate the possibility of Pitezel’s squealing on their earlier capers, Holmes planned to get richer by rubbing the man out. With a shyster lawyer in tow, Holmes killed Pitezel in his Philadelphia patent shop after taking out an insurance policy on Pitezel’s life. When Holmes neglected to pay a share of the winnings to his old cellmate, Marion Hedgepeth (who had helped him plan the swindle), Hedgepeth turned in Holmes’s name to a St. Louis cop, who made sure the tip got to Pinkerton agent Frank Geyer. While Geyer dug up the dirt on Holmes, Holmes was digging graves for fresh victims. After Pitezel’s death, Holmes had told his widow, Carrie, that some of Ben’s shady dealings had been found out, and that he had therefore gone to New York incognito. Holmes then took Carrie and the Pitezel children under his dubious care. The family did not know their husband and father was dead. While on the road with Georgianna and the remaining Pitezels, Holmes decided to send Carrie back east to stay with her parents. The Pitezel children were left in the hands of Holmes, who first killed Carrie’s son, Howard, in an abandoned Indiana house, and then gassed her daughters after locking them in a trunk while the group was staying in Toronto. Next, Holmes returned to his first wife Clara and, after explaining that he had had amnesia and mistakenly married another woman, was forgiven. Whatever devilish plans Holmes had for his first love were thwarted when he was charged with insurance fraud. Holmes pleaded guilty while Frank Geyer searched the castle with police. What they found was astounding: the torture devices, the homemade gas chambers, the shelves of poison and dissection tools, the vats of lime and acid; all revealed the true criminality of the man being held for mere fraud. Evidence of the purpose of the grim house was easy to find: a ball of women’s hair was stuffed under the basement stairs, Minnie’s watch and dress buttons remained in the furnace, bits of charred bone littered the incinerator. Through the hot summer of 1895, crews worked to unearth and catalog all of the building’s debris. Then, in late August, the Murder Castle burned to the ground in a mysterious fire, aided by a series of explosions. Gasoline can verified arson, but no one could tell if it was one of Holmes’s many adversaries or the man himself that had done it.