H. H. Holmes

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Holmes' mugshot, 1895
Holmes' mugshot, 1895

Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1860 – May 7, 1896), better known under the alias of "Dr. H. H. Holmes," was an American serial killer.

Holmes trapped and murdered possibly hundreds of guests at his Chicago hotel, which he opened for the 1893 World's Fair. He confessed to 27 murders, though only nine have been confirmed.

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 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. In addition, Harold Schechter has written a biography of his life titled Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America's First Serial Killer.

Although Holmes is sometimes referred to as America's first serial killer, his crimes occurred after those of others such as Thomas Neill Cream (who committed his serial crimes in England), the Servant Girl Annihilator and the Bloody Benders.

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[edit] Biography

He was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, son of Levi Horton Mudgett and his wife, formerly Theodate Page Price. He grew up poor with an alcoholic father, and was often bullied as a child. He claimed that, as a child, he had been forced by other students to view and touch a human skeleton. He graduated from U-M Medical School in 1884 and moved to Chicago to practice pharmacy. He also began to engage in a number of shady business, real estate and promotional deals under the name "H. H. Holmes."[1] His early criminal career was based on fraud and forgery, including a cure for alcoholism, real estate scams, and a machine that purported to make natural gas from water.

On July 8, 1878, he 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 his first wife at the time. He and Belknap had a daughter named Lucy. He filed a petition for divorce from his first wife after marrying his second, but it never became final. He married his third wife, Georgiana Yoke, on January 9, 1894. He also had a relationship with Julia Smythe, the wife of Ned Connor, a former employee of his who fled Chicago. She would later become one of his victims.

Holmes secured a Chicago pharmacy by defrauding and eventually murdering the pharmacist and his family, and built a block-long, three-story building on the lot across the street. Neighbors called this building "The Castle". Holmes opened it as a hotel for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, using the rest of the structure for shops he rented. The bottom floor of the Castle contained these shops (one a jeweler, for example), his personal office, and the upper floors a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways that would open to brick walls, stairways to nowhere, doors that could only be opened from the outside, and a host of other maze-like constructions. Over a period of three years, Holmes selected female victims from among his employees, lovers, or hotel's guests, and tortured them in soundproof chambers fitted with gas lines that permitted him to asphyxiate them at any time. Holmes had repeatedly changed builders during the initial construction of the Castle, to ensure that no one truly understood the design of the house he had created, who might then report it to the police. In addition, according to law at that time, by firing workers every two weeks, he didn't have to pay them. The victims' bodies went by a secret chute to the basement, where they were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into a skeleton model, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated their bodies and 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 rack to create a race of "giants." Because of the connections he gained through medical school, he was able to sell skeletons and organs with little difficulty.

Following the World's Fair, and with creditors closing in, Holmes left Chicago and apparently murdered people as he traveled around the country, though only the corpses of his close associate and children were ever located. He was arrested in 1895 when police discovered his connection with this former business associate, Benjamin Pitezel, and three of his children. His habit of taking out insurance policies on some of his victims before killing them might have eventually exposed him regardless, but it wasn't until his custodian revealed to the police that he was never allowed to clean the upper floors that terror seized the local department. A fire of mysterious origin consumed the building on August 19, but not before the police had spent a month inspecting the building, learning Holmes' methods for committing the murders and disposing of the remains fairly efficiently.

The number of his victims has typically been estimated between 20 to 100, and even as high as 230 by some estimates, using missing persons records at that time; however, the only verified number is 27, though police had commented that some of the bodies in the basement were so badly marred and distorted that it was difficult to tell how many there actually were. His victims were primarily women, but included some men and children.

Holmes was put on trial for murder, and confessed to 27 murders (in Chicago, Indianapolis and Toronto) and six attempted murders. He wrote various contradictory accounts of his life, initially claiming innocence, and later that he was possessed by Satan. His talent for lying at will made it difficult for researchers to determine any truth in his writings.

He was hanged on May 7, 1896, in Philadelphia. According to the New York Times coverage of the execution, Holmes said to the executioner, "Take your time: don't bungle it." Holmes' neck did not snap immediately; he instead died slowly, infrequently twitching over ten minutes before being pronounced dead 15 minutes after the trap was sprung.[2]

[edit] References in popular culture

  • Allegedly the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Retired Colourman was based upon H.H. Holmes.
  • The "No Exit." episode (2.6) of the TV series Supernatural features Holmes's murderous ghost still active in the modern era, killing women in an apartment building constructed on the site of his execution.
  • Mercedes Lackey, in her fantasy novel Born to Run, makes reference to Holmes when one of her villians uses his story in a snuff pornographic film.
  • The Holmes case is mentioned as current news in the Caleb Carr novel "The Alienist."
  • Robert Bloch's novel American Gothic features a character named "G. Gordon Gregg" whom the author states in an afterword is a fictionalised version of Holmes.
  • Anthony Boucher used the names "H H Holmes" and "Herman W Mudgett" as pseudonyms.
  • In the season 2 episode of Gargoyles, "Revelations," protagonist Goliath is trapped within a phony hotel reminiscent of Holmes' hotel in Chicago.
  • Fabuel and Le henanff wrote a graphic novel series about him h.h.holmes Part 1: Englewood.
  • Cartoonist Rick Geary wrote about Holmes in a volume of his Treasury of Victorian Murder (See below)

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ U-M's Most Murderous Alumnus
  2. ^ "Holmes Cool to the End", The New York Times, 1896-05-08, p. 1.

[edit] References

  • New York Times; May 8, 1896, Wednesday; Holmes Cool to the End; Under the Noose He Says He Only Killed Two Women. He denies the Murder of Pietzel. Slept Soundly Through His Last Night on Earth and Was Calm on the Scaffold. Priests with him on the Gallows. Prayed with Him Before the Trap Was Sprung. Dead in Fifteen Minutes, but Neck Was Not Broken. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; May 7, 1896; Murderer Herman Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes, was hanged this morning in the County Prison for the killing of Benjamin F. Pietzel. The drop fell at 10:12 o'clock, and twenty minutes later he was pronounced dead.

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Holmes, H. H.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mudgett, Herman Webster (birth name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Gilmanton, New Hampshire, United States
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1896
PLACE OF DEATH Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
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