TRULY TERRIFYING: HH HOLMES AND THE 'MURDER CASTLE'
Herman Webster Mudgett, better known under the pseudonym of Dr Henry Howard Holmes, was a 19th century entrepreneur who is widely regarded as one of the very first serial killers - at least, in the modern sense of the word.
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| Herman Webster Mudgett would later go on to be known as H.H.Holmes |
Born in 1861, Mudgett was the third child of Theodate Price and Levi Mudgett. Both devout Methodists, his parents owned and ran a farm in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Mudgett claimed to have been bullied as a child, including one incident where classmates forced him to touch a human skeleton after discovering his fear of the local doctor. Despite his claims that this event had terrified him, it is widely believed that this was the beginning of Mudgett’s obsession with death.
In 1878, Mudgett married his first wife Clara Lovering, who gave birth to a son named Robert in 1880.
Mudgett graduated from the University of Michigan’s Department of Medicine and Surgery in 1884. While attending the University, he would routinely steal corpses from the laboratory, disfigure them and claim they were killed accidentally in order to collect the insurance money from policies he had taken out on each deceased person. In 1886, he moved to Chicago to pursue a career in pharmaceuticals. He also became involved in several shady businesses and adopted the name of HH Holmes.
In 1887, while still married to Lovering, Holmes married Myrta Blekna, who later had a daughter, Lucy Holmes, in 1889. Holmes lived with his wife and daughter in Willemette, Illinois, though he spent most of his time in Chicago attending to business. In 1894, while still married to both Blekna and Lovering, Holmes married Georgiana Yoke. He also took up a lover in Julia Smythe, who would later become one of his victims.
Upon his arrival to Chicago, Holmes was given a job in the drugstore of Dr Elizabeth Holton. When her husband died, Holton agreed to sell the company to Holmes. He paid for it mostly through funds obtained by mortgaging the company’s stock and fixtures, a loan which he paid off in substantial instalments of $100 per month (around $2,625 in today’s money.) Using the profits he made from the shop, he bought a lot of land across the street. It was here that he built his three-storey, block-long hotel, dubbed “the Castle” by locals.
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| "The Castle" was a large building, constructed in time for Chicago's World Fair |
Holmes repeatedly hired and fired different builders from different companies to construct his project and, thus, was the only person who fully understood the complicated layout of the building, in particular the labyrinthine structure of the top two storeys. Features amongst the maze of 100 windowless rooms included doors that could only be opened from the outside, stairways that led to nowhere, doorways that would open to brick walls and hallways that sat at bizarre angles.
Opened as the World Fair Hotel in 1893, “the Castle” proved a success amongst those who had travelled to attend the fair, with much of the ground floor being dedicated to commercial space including Holmes’ own relocated drugstore and other shops. Selecting almost exclusively female members of staff as his victims (though some were also hotel guests or Holmes’ lovers), Holmes soon began his string of murders.
The ways in which the murders were conducted were gruesome, yet creative. His methods included, but were not limited to, locking victims in soundproof bedrooms with gas lines that allowed Holmes to asphyxiate them at his will and locking victims in a large, soundproof bank vault close to his second-storey office, where they would be left to suffocate. The bodies were dropped via a secret chute into the basement, where Holmes would meticulously dissect the corpses, strip them off flesh, craft them into skeleton models and send them off to medical schools across the country. Some bodies were cremated and others were dumped into lime pits for destruction. Due to the connections he had established whilst at medical school, Holmes had no issue illegally selling skeletons and organs.
Following the ending of the fair and the general decline of the economy, Holmes left Chicago. He first reappeared in Fort Wrath, Texas, where he had inherited the property of two heirless sisters, one of whom he had promised to marry and both of whom he murdered. After abandoning an attempt to construct another project similar to the Castle, Holmes travelled around the USA and Canada. During this time he was arrested for horse theft. Despite being bailed out quickly, he met convicted train robber Marion Hedgepath, with whom he cooked up a plan to take out a life insurance policy of $10,000 and to then fake his own death, promising Hedgepath a $500 cut for naming a lawyer who could be trusted. However, the insurance company became suspicious of Holmes and refused to pay.
Due to his inability to get insurance on himself, Holmes involved long-time associate Benjamin Pitezel who agreed to take apart on the condition that his wife would take half of the $10,000 insurance payout should the plan be successful. Holmes agreed but instead of faking Pitezel’s death as planned, actually killed his associate and even went on to manipulate Pitezel’s wife into granting him custody of three of her five children.
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| Holmes manipulated his dead associates wife into handing over three of their children. He would later murder all three. |
Holmes resumed travelling around the country, leading Mrs Pitezel on a parallel route and lying to her not only about her husband’s death (claiming he was in hiding in London), but the whereabouts of her children. The remains for the two Pitezel daughters were found in the cellar of a house Holmes had rented in Toronto, the third child and only son’s bones and teeth being found in the chimney of a house in Indianapolis.
Holmes’ murder spree ended in 1894, following his arrest in Boston. Hedgepath, angry that he have never been paid as promised, had tipped police off that Holmes was engaging in illegal activity and he had been tracked from Philadelphia. After the Castle’s custodian, Pat Quinlan, informed the police he had never been permitted to visit the top two floors, an extensive investigation revealed the horrors of Holmes’ life of crime.
The true extent of the murders has never been fully discovered. Holmes confessed to 27 counts of murder, however the true number of victims is thought to be closer to 200. Police reports state that there were so many disfigured remains in the Castle’s basement it was difficult to tell how many separate bodies there were. Although the victims were primarily blonde adult females, it was noted that many of the remains appeared to have come from men and children.
Holmes was hanged at Philadelphia County Prison in May 1896. He is quoted in his confession as saying; "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 sing — 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 since."
Keep it weird,
Jazz xo
Keep it weird,
Jazz xo
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