by Adam Selzer
How a guy could fake being hanged in front of fifty witnesses was beyond me, and I assumed that a DNA test would prove that it really was him in the cement, but if any man could have faked his death like that, it was H. H. Holmes.
[contents]
Chapter 2
Myth and Mystery
A large part of my job these days seems to be clearing up misconceptions about Holmes. This doesn’t always make me very popular; people want to hear that Holmes killed hundreds of people, mainly World’s Fair patrons he lured to his hotel, then tortured in the basement on a medieval rack, a dissection table, or other such hardware. They want to hear that Holmes was driven by a deep inner need to kill. But most of this is just urban legend; if you dig around through the newspaper archives, you can trace how these stories grew from 1890s tabloids to 1940s pulps to modern retellings.
Really, I’m not even sure it’s accurate to call him a serial killer at all. The story that Holmes was “driven” to kill, not just a swindler who sometimes killed for money or to silence witnesses, comes from a quote largely attributed to Holmes himself: “I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer no more than the poet can help the inspiration to song, nor the ambition of an intellectual man to be great. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me ever since.”
There are a couple of problems with this quote: one is that you just can’t take anything Holmes ever said too seriously; he was a chronic liar. Also, Holmes doesn’t appear to have ever actually said it. The quote came from the Philadelphia North American, which published what it said were excepts of the (largely false) confession Holmes had written for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The North American claimed to have seen advance proofs, and their excerpts were carried in regional papers around the world. But those lines don’t appear in the Inquirer confession that was published the next day, and neither do the other stories they printed in the excerpt.
Exactly what, if anything, the people at the North American had seen is a matter of dispute. They could have been excerpting from an early draft, or they could have actually bought another, separate confession under the table from Holmes, who then simply lied when he denied having written it. They may have gotten a brief glance at the confession ahead of time and constructed their text from a mix of memory and imagination. Or they could have just made the whole thing up.
This is the way that it goes with most Holmes stories—most of what you hear about him today comes from some very fishy sources. The only information that I would consider particularly reliable is the medical report on his physical condition that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, from which we learn that his sexual organs were “unusually small.” And even in that report, they repeat some bizarre stories Holmes told the doctor about bricks falling on his head to account for the bumps and ridges in his skull.
Stripping away all the myths and rumors, one finds that most of the horror stories about him are probably crap. I would only confidently place three murders in the “castle” itself, plus perhaps a couple of people who may have received poison medicine from Holmes in the drugstore, then died elsewhere. Three other known Chicago victims may have been killed at the castle, but they all lived right near the glass-bending site, and were just as likely to have been done in there. There’s little or no evidence that he killed any strangers whose names aren’t known to us anymore; people who lived in the “castle” were able to furnish the police a pretty complete list of people who had lived there during the fair.
Still, sometimes I think that maybe H. H. Holmes has just swindled me from across the decades into thinking that he wasn’t quite as bad as he’s now advertised. Would he really go to all the trouble of building a place like the Murder Castle—which really was full of hidden rooms secret passages, and soundproof vaults—and only use it three times?
And even if he really only killed ten or eleven people, that’s more than enough to qualify him as one of Chicago’s greatest villains.
H. H. Holmes was a swindler, first and foremost—a charming man who seemed to be incapable of opening his mouth without lying. Imagine Harold Hill, the guy from The Music Man, with a mustache and a bowler hat, and then imagine how it would seem if, after Harold Hill left Iowa, Marian the Librarian was never seen again but had vanished from the face of the earth, along with Mayor Shinn’s wife and daughter; one of the guys from the school board; and Amaryllis, the piano student.
Born under the name Herman Webster Mudgett in New Hampshire around 1861, the facts of Holmes’ life are very difficult to put together. Even his census records seem to be lies; the 1870 census says that he’s nine years old, and the 1880 one says he’s twenty-three. By then, he was living with his first wife, Clara Lovering-Mudgett (Jeff’s great-great-grandmother), and his son Robert—Jeff Mudgett’s great-grandfather.
Shortly after that census was taken, he left his young family in New Hampshire and began attending medical school at the University of Michigan. Why he chose that school isn’t known, but if you do a little research on 19th century grave-robbing, you find that that school was known as a real hub for body snatchers. Many universities were at the time, really, digging up cadavers to dissect. It was sort of a rite of passage for medical students back then, and medical schools, always in need of bodies and unable to train new doctors without them, tended to have a “no questions asked” policy when someone showed up with a fresh corpse to sell. But even by 1880s standards, the University of Michigan is a university whose name came up a lot when newspapers talked about grave-robbing.
Around 1885, Mudgett, now calling himself H. H. Holmes, drifted to Chicago, where he found work in Doctor Holton’s pharmacy on 63rd Street. In short order, he became the owner of the place. It’s often been assumed that he murdered Dr and Mrs. Holton, but this seems to be just wild guesswork.
From what we can gather of his next several years, his life was a flurry of swindles, schemes, and affairs. Known at various times as H. H. Holmes, O. C. Pratt, H. M. Howard, H. S. Campbell, Harry Gordon, Frank Wilde, and a host of other names, he married a woman in the north suburbs while running the drugstore clear on the other side of town (where he carried on with several women). In addition to the drugstore, Holmes ran a company in the Loop (the main downtown area) that sold a primitive copying machine, and he also ran a glass-bending company or two scattered around town, a candy store near Wicker Park, and a host of other places, some of which we’re still just now re-discovering. At nearly every place, he seems to have found a way to make money dishonestly. In the drugstore, he claimed to have developed a cure for alcoholism that he sold from the drugstore, along with a mysterious, magical “mineral water” that turned out to be regular old Lake Michigan water. He tricked the gas company into thinking he’d found a way to make gas from water. He was sued constantly for non-payment for furniture, fixtures, and real estate. Along the way, he took up with a couple more women, none of whom seemed to know that he was already married to a woman in the north suburbs (not to mention one in New Hampshire).
Around 1889, as Chicago began lobbying to become the site of the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition, a World’s Fair to rival the one Paris had just hosted and show the world what America, the scrappy upstart nation, could do, Holmes began construction on his masterpiece, a three-story building across the street from the pharmacy. There, he operated a new drugstore, while a restaurant, candy store, tinsmith, and jeweler occupied other spaces on the first floor.
The third floor was mostly flats—small apartments where people lived for a few weeks or months at a time.
And the second floor was a maze of secret passages and hidden rooms, including a walk-in vault that he made sure was soundproof and airtight.
The “World’s Fair Hotel” wasn’t a hotel the way we normally think of them now—there was no lobb
y, no front desk, and no “check-out time.” Most of the people who took rooms on the third floor were people who lived there for weeks or months at a time, not naive fair patrons who came for a night or two. They paid rent, not nightly rates.
Rumors persist that Holmes kept up a practice of selling bodies to medical schools, or to “articulators” who took the meaty corpses and turned them into clean skeletons to sell to doctos and school. His time in college certainly prepared him for such dealings, but this, too, is mostly based on rumor. A skeleton “articulator” named M. G. Chappel (misnamed as Charles in many papers) claimed to have purchased bodies from Holmes, but police didn’t take him seriously. Most of his stories didn’t hold up to any fact checking, and his family said he was given to making up—and believing—wild stories when he was drinking.
But there were definitely a few missing people—friends, employees, and girlfriends of Holmes, not to mention their children—by the time the police caught up with him in the fall of 1894, a year or so after the World’s Fair ended.
After the fair, he cooked up a scheme with Benjamin Pitezel, his best friend and partner in many swindles: they were going to fake Pitezel’s death and get his life insurance money. He told Pitezel they were going to go to Philadelphia, find a body that looked like him, and make it look like he died in an explosion. One would really imagine that Pitezel should have known better, but journey to Philadelphia Pitezel did, and there Holmes simply killed him with chloroform, then made it look as though he’d died while lighting a pipe too close to a bottle of explosive chemicals.
Holmes alerted the insurance company that the man who had died under the name B. F. Perry was really Pitezel, and went out to the graveyard with a lawyer, a doctor, and one of Pitezel’s daughters to have the body exhumed and identified. The $10,000 payout from Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance was supposed to go to the widow, but Holmes promptly swindled her out of most of it.
He then began to travel the country with three of Pitezel’s children, Alice, Nellie, and Howard. At the same time, he was traveling with Pitezel’s wife, and two of his other children, in another group, but neither group ever realized the other was nearby. Indeed, Holmes’ latest wife, Georgiana, was also traveling with him at the time, and had no idea that he was simultaneously transporting two other “detachements” around. As the D.A. would later say at his trial, no military general was ever better organized.
But the insurance company smelled a rat. Tracing Holmes to Boston, they tried to have him arrested for passing off a stranger’s body as that of Benjamin Pitezel. The police there didn’t want to act on the coroner’s warrant the insurance company had drawn up, but found that Holmes was also wanted in Texas for his involvement in a horse swindle and arrested him for that. Upon his arrest, Holmes immediately volunteered to go to Philadelphia to stand trial for insurance fraud rather than take his chances as a horse thief in Texas.
However, while newspapers published breathless accounts of how he had defrauded the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company out of ten thousand bucks by faking Benjamin Pitezel’s death, a detective hired by the company suspected that the story was far worse than that. This was no substitute body—there was murder in the case.
As the story spread, people noticed that a handful of individuals connected to Holmes had disappeared.
Early in the days of the “castle,” Holmes had hired one Ned Connor, who had moved to Chicago from Iowa with his wife, Julia, and their young daughter, Pearl, to work as a jeweler in the drugstore. He soon hired Julia to help around the office as well, and he and Julia seemed to become awfully close. Ned and Julia were drifting apart by then, and eventually agreed to separate. Holmes never came out and said he was with Julia, but in a later conversation with Ned, he said something that he couldn’t have known unless he had been “intimate” with her (what he could have said must be left to the imagination; if Ned told reporters what it was, newspapers were too polite to print it).
Julia and her daughter, Pearl, were seen in the castle by other residents around Christmas 1891, but were never seen again after that. None of the bones eventually found in the castle were ever proven to be human, but a few looked like the bones of a child, and part of a child’s coat was found in the basement.
Another known victim, Emeline Cigrand, came to the “castle” to work as a stenographer in Holmes’ office. Rumor had it that she and Holmes became more than friends, and one day she, too, vanished. Holmes told everyone that she had gone off and married a man named Robert Phelps, and even showed them a cheaply printed wedding announcement. Some say that “Phelps” was really Holmes’ friend Ben Pitezel, but I’d say that Robert Phelps probably never really existed at all. Emeline had simply been done away with, and Holmes had invented Phelps as the cover story. Holmes later claimed to have killed her in the soundproof vault, one of few portions of his 1896 “confession” that may actually have been true. Her father, though, examined the place and felt that it was impossible; he believed she had been killed in the bathroom. Exactly what led him to think this is unclear, but it’s one more example of how difficult it is to get to the truth of the matter today.
There were a couple of other victims who were probably killed in Chicago, though I’m less confident that they died in the castle. A woman named Minnie Williams caught Holmes’ eye by having some valuable property in Fort Worth; she became romantically involved with him and wrote to her sister, Anna, to come visit them in Chicago. She was going to marry “Brother Harry,” she said (Holmes was calling himself “Harry Gordon” around her), and they could all go to Europe together. Holmes rented the two of them an apartment on Wrightwood Avenue, ten miles from the castle (but a short walk from the glassworks). Anna disappeared in a matter of weeks (Holmes later claimed Minnie had killed her in a jealous fit), but Minnie remained with Holmes until well after the fair ended, variously being presented as his wife, cousin, or sister. She even served as a witness at his 1894 wedding to his next wife, Georgiana Yoke.
A girl named Emily Van Tassel worked in a candy store Holmes had some financial interest in and vanished without a trace (she, too, lived awfully close to the “glass-bending factory”).
Beyond this, there are a few other possible victims who have been identified. In his confession, Holmes claimed to have killed twenty-seven people in all. Most of the confession, though, is useless for clues. Some of the people he claimed to have killed were still alive. Others never seem to have existed at all.
When he was arrested, Holmes told authorities that Pitezel’s three children had gone to London with Minnie Williams and a mysterious man named Hatch (whom he presumably made up). But when a detective uncovered the bodies of Alice and Nellie Pitezel beneath a house Holmes had rented in Toronto, making it obvious that this was no simple case of insurance fraud, authorities back in Chicago got the bright idea that they should probably investigate the building he owned that was full of secret rooms and passages. They already knew about the building—it had been featured in a big Tribune article before the fair even started. But authorities only ever suspected him of using the secret rooms to hide furniture that he’d bought on credit and never paid for.
Now, newspapers gave rooms on the second floor lurid names, such as the “Room of the Three Corpses,” the “Death Shaft,” the “dummy elevator for lowering bodies,” the “asphyxiation chamber,” the “maze,” the “black closet,” the “mysterious closed room,” the “sealed room,” and the “hanging secret chamber.”1 A woman’s footprint was found burned into the inside of the soundproof vault (faint enough that they missed it for the first couple of days). A trap door beneath the bathroom floor led down a secret staircase into the cellar. Neighbors lined up to say that they’d suspected Holmes all along, and to tell lurid accounts of how they’d narrowly escaped becoming one of his victims.
There was no talk of any torture equipment in the basement at the time, but there were certainly a few unsettling su
rprises down there. There was a pit full of quicklime—which was used to speed decomposition—buried five feet below the ground. Behind one wall, they found a twelve-foot-long tank full of some sort of gas. A worker (who must have been a regular genius) decided to light a match to get a better look at the inside of it and caused a minor explosion. An equally brilliant guy decided to taste the stuff inside and spent a couple of hours acting “as one demented.”
These were guys put in charge of investigating the place.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that they didn’t find anything conclusive. The quicklime pit appeared to be unused. They found a few bits of bones that were thought to be human (though the forensics to prove it were a few years off), and some blood-stained clothes. For a while they thought they’d found human bones in the stove upstairs, but they were later said to be nothing more than fire clay. The furnace was nowhere near large enough to burn an entire body.
M. G. Chappel, the skeleton articulator, said there were acid pits and more skeletons, but his stories never seemed to go anywhere. He showed police a skull he claimed to have gotten from Holmes, and that he’d then displayed in a tree in his yard for a while (one can only imagine what this guy’s neighbors must have thought of him), but, again, there was no way to test the DNA on the skull at the time to connect it to any of Holmes’ known victims. For some time, skeletons in various medical schools around the Midwest would occasionally be said to be the bones of Holmes’ victims, but it was never provable, and, though they were still known to be in police custody a few years later, no one knows where they are now.
The man who had helped Holmes build the gas tank said that Holmes had told him that it was for bending glass, but that he could have easily used it to cremate bodies. The man further said that Holmes later set up another “glass-bending” facility in a shack a couple of blocks away that had now been torn down. A few weeks later, police swooped into a small glass-bending “factory” Holmes had owned on the North Side, and found that it had once contained a furnace more than ten times the size of the tank they found in the castle.