H. H. Holmes

• 1. Introduction

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  H. H. Holmes confessed to 27 murders, and some of the people he named turned out to be alive. He was born Herman Webster Mudgett, and newspapers later called him the Beast of Chicago, the Devil in the White City and the Torture Doctor. His career in fraud included forgery, swindling, horse theft and bigamy, and between 1891 and 1894 it turned deadly. His most notorious crimes took place in Chicago around the time of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Yet the only murder for which he was ever convicted was that of a single accomplice. This documentary asks how much of the Holmes legend is real. What was the building that tabloids turned into a monument to horror? Who were the people who truly vanished around him? And how did a man who lied so easily finally run out of lies?

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• 2. A Boy From Gilmanton

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  Herman Webster Mudgett was born on the 16th of May 1861 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. He was the third child of Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, and both parents descended from the first English settlers in the area. Ellen and Arthur were his older siblings, and a younger brother named Henry followed. His parents were devout Methodists. His father worked at times as a farmer, a trader and a house painter, and was reportedly a heavy drinker who beat his children cruelly.

  At 16, the boy graduated with honors from Gilmanton Academy, after also attending Phillips Exeter Academy as an adolescent. His academic gifts made him a target for bullies. In one incident, classmates forced him to stand in front of a human skeleton and place its hands on his face. They hoped to frighten him. He was terrified at first, but later found the experience intriguing and claimed it helped him conquer his worries. An obsession with death followed, and he began dissecting animals.

  In 1879, Holmes enrolled at the University of Vermont, and he stayed for only one year. In 1882 he transferred to the Department of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Michigan. He graduated in June 1884 despite mediocre grades. Back in New Hampshire he had apprenticed under Nahum Wight, a noted advocate of human dissection. At Michigan he worked in the anatomy lab under Professor William James Herdman, the chief anatomy instructor. The two were said to have been involved in body snatching to supply medical cadavers. Years later, when he was suspected of murder and insisted he was only an insurance swindler, Holmes admitted that he had used cadavers to cheat life insurance companies several times while still a student.

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• 3. Wives and Aliases

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  On the 4th of July 1878, Holmes married Clara Lovering in Alton, New Hampshire. Their son, Robert Lovering Mudgett, was born in Loudon on the 3rd of February 1880. Robert grew up to become a certified public accountant and served as city manager of Orlando, Florida. He lived until 1956.

  In 1884, the year Holmes graduated, Clara moved back to New Hampshire. Housemates later recalled that he had been physically violent with her, and the two had little contact afterward. In Mooers, New York, a rumor spread that Holmes had been seen with a little boy who later disappeared. Holmes said the child had gone home to Massachusetts. No one investigated, and Holmes quickly left town. In Philadelphia he was hired as a keeper at Norristown State Hospital but quit after a few days. He then worked at a Philadelphia drugstore, where a boy died after taking medicine bought at the shop. Holmes denied any involvement and left the city at once. Before moving to Chicago he adopted the name Henry Howard Holmes, so that victims of his earlier scams could not expose him.

  In late 1886, while still legally married to Clara, Holmes married 24-year-old Myrta Belknap in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A few weeks later he filed for divorce from Clara, accusing her of infidelity. The claim could not be proven, and surviving paperwork suggests Clara was probably never told about the suit. The divorce was never finalized. It was dismissed on the 4th of June 1891 for "want of prosecution."

  Myrta gave birth to a daughter, Lucy Theodate Holmes, on the 4th of July 1889 in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Lucy later became a public schoolteacher. Holmes lived with Myrta and Lucy in Wilmette, Illinois, but spent most of his time tending to business in Chicago. In May 1893 he introduced his mistress Wilhelmina "Minnie" Williams as his wife. On the 17th of January 1894, in Denver, Colorado, he married Georgiana Yoke, while still married to both Clara and Myrta.

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• 4. The Castle Built on Debt

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  At the northwest corner of South Wallace Avenue and West 63rd Street in Englewood stood a drugstore owned by Elizabeth Holton. Holmes, newly arrived in Chicago in August 1886, took a job there. He proved a hardworking employee and eventually bought the store. Despite what several accounts claim, he did not murder Dr. E. S. Holton.

  Holmes then bought an empty lot across the street. Construction began in 1887 on a two-story building, with apartments upstairs and shops below, including a new drugstore. Holmes refused to pay the architects or the steel company, Aetna Iron and Steel, and they took him to court in 1888. In 1892 he added a third floor, telling investors and suppliers that it would serve as a hotel during the coming World's Columbian Exposition.

  The yellow press christened the building Holmes's "Murder Castle." Newspapers described secret torture chambers, trapdoors, gas chambers and a basement crematorium, and none of it was true. Other accounts spoke of over a hundred rooms arranged as a maze, with doors opening onto brick walls and staircases that led nowhere. In reality the hotel was moderately sized, largely unremarkable, and never finished because of Holmes's quarrels with the builders. It did contain a few hidden rooms. They held furniture he had bought on credit and never meant to pay for. Official findings suggest the strange architecture came from fraud, not from violent fantasy.

  The legend claimed Holmes lured Exposition visitors there to kill them and sell their skeletons to medical schools. He really had sold cadavers to medical schools, but he got them through body snatching rather than murder. No evidence shows he ever killed an Exposition-goer on the premises. One supposed victim, a Miss Kate Durkee, was found to be very much alive. In his own confession, Holmes said he usually suffocated victims with a chloroform overdose, lighting gas fumes or an airless vault. He also claimed to have starved some and burned others alive.

  Holmes also owned a one-story factory that he said would be used for glass bending. Nobody knows whether its furnace ever served that purpose. It was speculated that it destroyed evidence of his crimes.

  In August 1895, two men were seen slipping into the back of the Castle at 9 p.m. About half an hour later they ran away, and after several explosions the building went up in flames. Investigators found a half-empty gas can under the back steps. The structure survived, was largely rebuilt, and served as a post office until it was torn down in 1938. Today the site is occupied by the Englewood branch of the United States Postal Service.

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• 5. Women Who Vanished

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  On Christmas Eve of 1891, Julia Conner and her 5-year-old daughter Pearl disappeared. Julia, 31, was married to Dr. Laurence Conner, who had moved into Holmes's building and worked the jewelry counter at his pharmacy. When Laurence learned of her affair with Holmes, he quit and moved away, leaving mother and daughter behind. Holmes told shifting stories. First Julia had gone to visit a dying sister, then she had fled her former husband, and finally she had died during an abortion. Holmes was unlikely to have been skilled at that procedure, and the risk of death was high at the time. He later said he poisoned Pearl, probably to hide how her mother died. Excavation of his cellar turned up a partial skeleton, possibly that of a child around Pearl's age. Pearl's father later became a key witness against Holmes.

  Emeline Cigrand, 23, began working in Holmes's building in May 1892 and stayed six months. Holmes reportedly hired her as a secretary because of her link to a doctor who peddled a so-called vaccine for alcoholism. Those who saw her in the weeks before she vanished said she seemed to have lost interest in Holmes. She was last seen in December 1892. Her parents were told she had left to marry a man named "Robert Phelps." Her empty luggage trunk was sent back to her mother in Anderson, Indiana. Authorities suspected she was pregnant by Holmes and may have died in another botched abortion. Police later found her skeleton at the home of a Chicago physician, with help from M. G. Chappel, who admitted he had articulated three skeletons for Holmes.

  In early 1893, Wilhelmina "Minnie" Williams, a 24-year-old former actress, moved to Chicago. Holmes said he met her at an employment office, though he probably knew her from Boston years earlier, when he went by the alias "Harry Gordon." He hired her as his personal stenographer. He then persuaded her to transfer the deed to her property in Fort Worth, Texas, to a man named "Alexander Bond," which was another alias of Holmes. In April 1893 she signed the deed over with Holmes acting as notary. He later passed the property to his associate Benjamin Pitezel, who took the alias "Benton T. Lyman."

  In May 1893, Holmes and Minnie rented an apartment in Chicago's Lincoln Park as husband and wife. Her 18-year-old sister, Anna "Nannie" Williams, came to visit. On the 5th of July 1893 she wrote to her aunt that she planned to travel to Europe with "Brother Harry." The letter said: "Brother Harry says you need never trouble any more about me, financially or otherwise. He and sister will see to me. I hope our hard days are over." Neither sister was seen alive again, and Holmes kept using Minnie's name in later scams.

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• 6. The Pitezel Scheme

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  In the Chemical Bank building on Dearborn Street, Holmes met a 38-year-old carpenter named Benjamin Freelon Pitezel, who was exhibiting a coal bin he had invented. Pitezel had a criminal past and became Holmes's right-hand man in several schemes. A district attorney later called him "Holmes's tool... his creature." Insurance companies were pressing to prosecute Holmes for arson, so he left Chicago in July 1894. He reappeared in Fort Worth, on land that had come to him from the Williams sisters. There he again began a building without paying his suppliers and contractors.

  In July 1894, Holmes was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri, for selling mortgaged goods. It was his first brief stay in jail, and he was promptly bailed out. Behind bars he struck up a conversation with Marion Hedgepeth, a convicted outlaw serving a 25-year sentence. Holmes had a plan to swindle an insurance company out of $10,000 by insuring himself and faking his death. He offered Hedgepeth a $500 commission for the name of a trustworthy lawyer. Hedgepeth pointed him to a young St. Louis attorney named Jeptha Howe, who thought the scheme brilliant and joined in. The insurer grew suspicious and refused to pay. Holmes dropped the claim and devised a similar plan with Pitezel.

  Pitezel agreed to fake his own death so his wife could collect a $10,000 life insurance policy, to be split with Holmes and Howe. In Philadelphia he would pose as an inventor named "B.F. Perry" and appear to die in a laboratory explosion that disfigured him. Holmes was supposed to find a suitable cadaver to stand in for Pitezel. Instead, on the 4th of September 1894, Holmes knocked Pitezel unconscious with chloroform and set his body on fire with benzene.

  The body turned up at 1326 Callowhill Street under the name "B.F. Perry." A coroner's jury returned a verdict of accidental death, and the body was first buried in Potter's Field. Three weeks later, attorney J.D. Howe arrived in Philadelphia to claim the $10,000 from the Fidelity Mutual Insurance Company. He brought Holmes along to identify the body, and Holmes and Alice Pitezel both confirmed it was Benjamin. At Holmes's later trial, forensic evidence showed the chloroform had been given after Pitezel was already dead. The insurance company knew nothing of this. Presumably the aim was to stage a suicide that would clear Holmes if he were ever accused of murder.

  Holmes collected the payout on the strength of a genuine corpse. He then persuaded Pitezel's unsuspecting wife, Carrie Alice Canning, to let him take custody of three of her five children. They were Alice, 13, Nellie, 9, and Howard Robert, 7. Holmes traveled with the children through the Northeastern United States and into Canada under assorted aliases. At the same time he escorted Carrie along a parallel route, telling her that her husband was hiding in London and lying about where her children were. In Detroit, just before the border, they were separated by only a few blocks. Elsewhere, Holmes was also staying with his current wife, who knew nothing of the affair.

  Holmes confessed to killing Howard on the 10th of October 1894 in a rented house in the Irvington neighborhood of Indianapolis. He was reported to have bought the drugs at a local pharmacy and had a repair shop sharpen the knives he used to chop up the body before burning it. Holmes later said he killed Alice and Nellie on the 25th of October 1894 by forcing them into a large trunk. He drilled a hole in the lid, ran a hose through it from a gas line, and asphyxiated the girls. He buried their bodies in the cellar of his rental house at 16 St. Vincent Street in Toronto.

  Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia police detective, began retracing Holmes's steps in June 1895 to find the three missing children. In Toronto he found the decomposed bodies of the two girls. He wrote: "The deeper we dug, the more horrible the odor became, and when we reached the depth of three feet, we discovered what appeared to be the bone of the forearm of a human being." Geyer also found unsent letters the children had written, which Holmes had kept. That discovery sent investigators back to Holmes's Chicago property, and Geyer followed the trail on to Indianapolis, where the boy's teeth and bone were discovered in the chimney.

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• 7. Capture and Gallows

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  On the 17th of November 1894, Holmes was arrested in Boston after the private Pinkerton National Detective Agency tracked him from Philadelphia. He was held on an outstanding horse theft warrant from Texas. Authorities had grown suspicious, and Holmes appeared ready to flee the country with his unsuspecting third wife.

  In July 1895, after the girls' bodies were found, Chicago police and reporters began searching the Englewood building. Detectives and a medical expert followed a trail of human blood from Julia Conner's dining room, through a dark chamber to a secret trapdoor, and down an elevator shaft into the basement. There they found a clot of blood mixed with human hair, bloodied child's underwear, a blood-soaked handkerchief and a rope with blood in its knots. In the private rooms of caretaker Pat Quinlan they found two theatrical trunks with painted-over initials "M.R.W.," identified as belonging to Minnie R. Williams. Investigators also confirmed that Pitezel had worked in Philadelphia under the name Robert E. Phelps. Emily Cigrand's father wrote from Indiana about a photograph of his daughter found at the Castle, and investigators matched it to the family album.

  Despite all the sensational claims, no evidence could convict Holmes in Chicago. The physical evidence tied to Castle victims was thin and circumstantial. It amounted to a piece of human bone possibly from Julia Conner, a child's remains possibly Pearl's, a burned gold watch chain and dress buttons apparently Minnie Williams's, and a tuft of female hair in a chimney flue. Philadelphia offered the clearest murder case, so Holmes was tried there for the death of Benjamin Pitezel. In October 1895 he was found guilty and sentenced to death.

  After the verdict, the Hearst newspapers paid Holmes $7,500 for the confession he wrote in prison. In those pages he remarked on how drastically his face had changed since he was jailed. On the 7th of May 1896, he was hanged at Moyamensing Prison. He stayed calm and amiable until the end, showing few signs of fear or despair. Even so, he asked that his coffin be encased in concrete and buried ten feet deep, because he feared body snatchers would steal his corpse for dissection. His neck did not break. He strangled slowly, twitching for more than fifteen minutes before he was pronounced dead.

  Holmes was buried in an unmarked grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery in Yeadon, a western suburb of Philadelphia. On New Year's Eve 1909, Marion Hedgepeth, who had been pardoned for informing on Holmes, was shot and killed by Police Officer Edward Jaburek during a hold-up at a Chicago bar. On the 7th of March 1914, the Chicago Tribune reported the death of Patrick Quinlan, the Castle's former caretaker, saying that "the mysteries of Holmes's castle" would now go unexplained. Quinlan had killed himself with strychnine. His body was found in his bedroom with a note that read: "I couldn't sleep." His surviving relatives said he had been "haunted" for months and suffering from hallucinations.

  In 2017, amid allegations that Holmes had escaped execution, his body was exhumed. The testing was led by Janet Monge of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Because the coffin was set in concrete, the body had not decomposed normally. His clothes were almost perfectly preserved and his moustache was intact. Dental records identified the remains as Holmes, and he was reburied.

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• 8. Confessions and Legend

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  Dr. Robert Leacock, a medical school classmate, supposedly died at Holmes's hands in 1886 for insurance money. Leacock actually died on the 5th of October 1889 in Watford, Ontario. Of the 27 killings Holmes confessed to, only eight are confirmed, and one more is considered probable. A banker named Rogers from Morgantown, West Virginia, whom Holmes said he killed in 1888, was later found alive. So was L. Warner, a glass factory owner Holmes claimed to have burned in a basement kiln. The janitor Robert Latimer, said to have been starved, turned out to share a name with a railroad flagman. Holmes himself listed Latimer among the living in his own story.

  Some confessed killings do hold up. Emily Van Tassel disappeared in 1891 after working at Holmes's drugstore. Holmes called her Rosine Van Jassand, and her murder is confirmed. Charles Milford Cole of Baltimore vanished in July 1894 after a telegram from Holmes told him to come to Chicago. That murder is confirmed too. Virginia Anna Betts died suddenly on the 8th of February 1892 one block from the Castle, and Holmes claimed to have poisoned her. Murder is judged probable. Eva Gertrud Conner, Julia's sister-in-law, died on the 18th of July 1892 of neuralgia of the heart, weeks after leaving Holmes's employ, so murder is considered unlikely.

  Other names sit on the list of suspected victims. John DeBrueil, a 68-year-old creditor, collapsed and died in the Castle drugstore on the 17th of April 1891. A witness said Holmes had just poured a black liquid down his throat. Foul play was not suspected, but in 1895 investigators learned his life was insured and Holmes had profited. A man named Dr. Russler had an office in the Castle and went missing in 1892. Kitty Kelly, a stenographer, disappeared the same year. John Davis of Greenville, Pennsylvania, went to the 1893 World's Fair and vanished, and he was declared legally dead in 1920. Harry Walker of Greensburg, Indiana, disappeared in November 1893 after reportedly insuring his life to Holmes for $20,000. In June 1894, Holmes and Pitezel allegedly took George Thomas to a swamp on the Tombigbee River in Mississippi and killed him. In 1895, Lucy Burbank's bankbook was found with human hair in a Castle chimney flue. In 1919, twenty-three years after the execution, the remains of an unknown man and woman were found on a farm in Lake County, Illinois, and they may have been Nannie Williams and John Davis.

  Some accounts estimate Holmes's body count as high as 133. Many inaccuracies persist because of ineffective police investigation and the hyperbolic yellow journalism of the 1890s, which later writers often treat as historical record. Holmes made it harder still, giving contradictory accounts of his life. He first claimed innocence, then said Satan had possessed him. Since the 1990s he has often been called a serial killer. The author Adam Selzer questions that label, writing that the murders tied to Holmes "generally had a clear motive: someone knew too much, or was getting in his way, and couldn't be trusted." Selzer argues they were a necessary part of furthering his swindling and protecting his lifestyle.

  The legend has proven durable in fiction. In 1927, the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman" featured a killer who gasses his victims in a strongroom. Robert Bloch's 1974 novel American Gothic fictionalized the story of Holmes. A film of The Devil in the White City, with Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese, was due to begin filming in 2015. In 2019, Scorsese and DiCaprio were named executive producers of a television version for Paramount TV and Hulu, but Hulu dropped it and its future is undecided. Stephen Aberle played Holmes in the Supernatural episode "No Exit," and Joel Johnstone played him in the Timeless episode "The World's Columbian Exposition." The Murder Castle appears in the game The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me. In 2026, American Murder Song released "H. H. Holmes (Gluttony)," a song based on the murders attributed to him.

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