A Killer Con Man Surfaces
Holmes, born Herman Webster Mudgett, was a medical doctor by trade. He later emerged as a greedy neighborhood con artist who was motivated to murder for money and “to get people out of the way,” Selzer says. “Killing was just something that he had to do in the course of business.”
After briefly practicing medicine in New York, Holmes, accused of fraud and murder, abandoned his wife and young child and moved to the Windy City in 1885, where he became partner at a pharmacy in Chicago’s South Side. His first victim was likely his business associate, E.S. Holton, who went missing and whose body was never found—making Holmes the sole pharmacy owner. It’s plausible his paramour, Julia—who was pregnant with his unborn baby, per The Devil in the White City—and her daughter, Pearl, were his next victims.
“He needed to get rid of people who knew too much or who were getting in the way of his operations,” Selzer says, adding that Julia’s death may have been an illegal abortion procedure he performed that might have gone awry. Pearl’s death followed.
“He was very money-motivated,” Halley Fuqua, co-host ofMACABRE Dark History Podcast, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Pretty much everything that he did was centered around insurance schemes and fraud.”
Fuqua notes that most of Holmes’s victims “came from money.” “He had them either sign over their estates or insurance policies,” she continues. “He had them take out insurance policies in his name—both women and some of his business partners. Children that were connected to these people were also targets. It was a lot of preying based on the convenience of getting rid of these people that would get him a payout.”
The Infamous ‘Murder Castle’
Holmes saw Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 as another crooked business opportunity, and across the street from his pharmacy, he purchased what would be known as his infamous “Murder Castle.”
The first floor contained a bevy of retail shops, with apartments on the second level. He added a third floor with the intention of using it as a hotel to host guests during the months-long exhibition. He reportedly rigged the soundproof house of horrors with trapdoors, hidden passageways, gas vents, peepholes and a torture table in the basement.
“A lot of that has kind of been exaggerated,” Selzer admits. “There were a couple of secret passages and hidden rooms in there, but they weren't so secret that everybody who lived and worked in the building didn't know about them.”
Despite the unnerving features in the building, Selzer says it was typically used to hide stolen property, as the majority of the murders occurred off-site: “There was a hidden chamber where the drug clerk slept at night. There was a passage that led from one of the rooms down into the basement. Doors got wallpapered over really just for hiding stolen furniture, more than anything else.”
However, investigators did recover some bone fragments in the basement before the property was torn down.
H.H. Holmes’s Murderous Methods
Unlike contemporary serial killers, Holmes didn’t necessarily demonstrate a preferred method of murder. “Strangulation, asphyxiation, and he did poison with chloroform,” Fuqua says.
Nor did he exercise a rigid practice in victim selection.
“A couple of women that he was having an affair with, one of their children, one of their sisters,” Selzer lists as some of Holmes’ casualties, who were typically seduced, defrauded, then murdered. “It's kind of a mix of people, really. It wasn't like the kind of modern serial killer where he just has the type.”
Authorities caught on to Holmes's nefarious deeds when the dead bodies of his assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, and Pietzel's three children—Alice, Nellie and Howard—were discovered as part of an insurance fraud scheme, where Holmes was the beneficiary of a $10,000 payout. It’s believed most of the Pitezels were chloroformed. Afterward, Holmes torched the family patriarch’s body, while he stowed the girls’ remains in a trunk and dismembered Howard’s corpse before it was put in a stove.
Holmes was only tried and convicted for Benjamin’s murder in 1895. As a result, he was hanged a year later, with one last request.
“His final wish was that he'd be buried under a fair amount of concrete,” Fuqua says, “because he didn't want his body to be disturbed.”
Holmes's desire was fulfilled, and he was subsequently laid to rest in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in a Philadelphia suburb.
