January 25, 2012 • 35 mins
In the first part of this episode, Deblina and Sarah covered Herman W. Mudgett's early life, including how he first became known as H.H. Holmes. But how did Holmes manage to complete his murder castle? What happened to him afterwards? Tune in to find out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a Chalk Reporting and I'm Fair Dowdy
and we were continuing here with our look at H. H. Holmes,
the man who is often referred to as America's first
(00:22):
serial killer and one of our most requested topics now.
Holmes became famous for the crimes he committed in Chicago
at the end of the nineteenth century, around the time
of the Chicago World's Fair. But where we are in
the story, we don't know him as a notorious serial
killer yet. From what we learned in part one of
this podcast, he's just a really shady guy, a con artist,
(00:45):
a criminal for sure. We know he's committed insurance fraud
with the help of stolen condavers, and he's been associated
with at least one strange disappearance, that of Mrs Holton,
the woman he bought his first Chicago drug store from.
And we should also mention that he's also a deadbeat
husband slash dad. He left his first wife and child
and is basically estranged from his second wife, Murda and
(01:07):
their daughter together. Where we left off, though he has, however,
constructed this very unusual building with gas jets and trapdoors
and hidden passageways, among other things, and he's done so
in a secretive manner so that nobody knows the full
extent of how creepy this building really is. On the surface,
(01:27):
of course, it's just a structure to house his businesses,
and it's a business itself as well. It's a hotel
for the world's fair crowd. But the building's odd and
rather creepy features in an understatement hint at an underlying
purpose that's a lot more sinister. So when we left
off with our story, a man named Jonathan Belknop was
(01:49):
just getting a sense of that underlying creepiness of this
hotel slash block of buildings. So Belknop was Holmes's second wife,
Murda's uncle, and Holmes had recently taken a loan from
him and then forged his signature on another note to
get more money. Holmes then invited bell Knap to tour
his new building, and against bell Knap's a better judgment,
(02:12):
convinced him to stay the night after They're creepy feeling
up on the roof. Yes, he tried to get Holmes
had tried to get him to go on the roof,
and he had a bad feeling about it and didn't
do it. And he had a bad feeling about spending
the night too, but he did it anyway. So this
is where we're going to pick up with our story.
So bell Knap carefully locked the door before we went
to bed that night. He later recalled initially thinking that
(02:34):
he and Holmes were the only two people in the
building at that time. The block of buildings, which is
already kind of a disturbing feeling, something like almost a
hundred rooms. So just imagine that Bellknap goes to bed,
but he can't sleep. He lies awake listening to the
sounds outside, like the occasional horse going by trains, and
then after a few hours he hears something more alarming.
(02:57):
Someone is trying his door and they slip the key
into the lock. So at that point Balknop called out
and the sound stops. Then a couple of minutes later
he heard someone walking down the hall, and this is
the first time that makes him feel like there may
have been two people at the door, not just Holmes
in the building. So he said something again to that
(03:18):
person who was maybe still there. This time, somebody answered him,
and Belknap later said it was Patrick Quinlyn, Holmes is
trusted caretaker who he mentioned in the first part of
the podcast, and Quinlan said that he wanted to come
into the room, but balk Knope wouldn't answer, the door,
wouldn't let him in, and eventually Quinlan went away. But Belknap,
(03:40):
as you can imagine it, still didn't get any sleep
that night after this bizarre interlude. In the early hours
of the morning, lay awake thinking about it. Right So,
not long after this incident, belk Nap discovers that Holmes
had forged his signature. Holmes apologized as profusely and somehow
manages to talk Belknap down, so Belknap never press charges
(04:04):
or reports the incident or anything that happened that night
that he spent the night in the building. According to
Eric Larson's book, though, which recounts these events in detail,
Belknap later said that he realized why Holmes had wanted
him to go on the roof of his building so
badly that day. Belknap said, quote, if I had gone,
the forgery probably wouldn't have been discovered because I wouldn't
(04:24):
have been around to discover it, so his hesitation about
going up there on the roof was justified, and it
kind of makes you think that he should have resisted
spending the night too, even though he ultimately got lucky
he had locked his door. He was awake when he
heard the key rattling around, And that's kind of why
we wanted to bring up this incident in the first place.
(04:47):
Even though it's not one of the most significant or
grewesome of Holmes's story, it illustrates what happened to a
lot of people who encountered Holmes, even though they weren't
as lucky as Belknap. Several p well may have had
a funny feeling about him, a funny feeling about homes
or his strange, creepy building, but they sort of went
along with whatever was going on because they didn't want
(05:09):
to be rude. And that was exactly what happened with Belknap.
He didn't want to offend his niece or her husband
and Sarah, you and I have talked about this a
lot since we started researching this topic. I mean, thank
you for instincts. Trust your instincts. I mean, a lot
of us don't we're so worried about being polite all
the time that we ignore some of those creepy feelings
that we have now and again occasionally turned out to
(05:30):
be justified. Another thing, though, a lot of people who
did experience something strange or had doubts about homes in
his building didn't report their concerns to the authority. So
maybe that's another lesson out of this. Go ahead and
let somebody know if if there's a strange situation going on.
He even at one point had a large rectangular kiln
(05:53):
built in the basement. Nobody thought anything of reporting that. Yeah,
And when the person who had built the kiln for
Holmes came by, he was just sort of like, oh,
you know, yeah, this was a kiln and I can
make it, yeah, but didn't realize until later what it
would be used for opening up pottery studio or something.
(06:14):
Homes exactly Well, I think it was because Holmes had
supposedly opened a glass business because so much glass was
needed at the time with all the construction going on
for the World's Fair, and so he sort of indicated
that he would need this kiln to create the glass
that he was making. But it was entirely the wrong shape.
I mean, it was this long rectangular kiln, more body
(06:37):
five than glass, more suited to something else, to burning
up something else rather than glass. But there's a that's
a big part of why Holmes was able to do
what he did for so long and not get caught.
But we should address that question a little bit before
we go further. I think, what exactly was he doing?
We need to talk about how exactly he put the
strange building and all these strange things inside of the
(07:00):
kiln in the vaults out there already. So one of
Holmes's primary agenda seemed to involve his employees. And as
we mentioned, he had several businesses in the building, including
a drug store and a barbershop and a restaurant, and
of course all those businesses he needed help to keep
them all running. Even early on, though people noticed that
(07:22):
homes of employees didn't really stick around very long. He
had a high turnover. And he also had this habit
of hiring young attractive girls, often naive girls from small towns.
He'd encourage them to bring all their money with them
and rent accommodations conveniently in his building right where they're working.
(07:44):
And he'd also have them take out life insurance policies
naming him as the beneficiary. I mean, I think that's
the strangest thing. That's not usually how employer employee relationships work.
But these girls would work for Homes for a little while,
and then suddenly they would just disappear, vanish off the earth,
often leaving their belongings in the rooms upstairs. Unfortunately, the
(08:08):
individual stories of all of these employees aren't necessarily known.
A lot of them really didn't know anybody when they
came to Chicago. They were sort of anonymous, and then
they were never found later. But there are a couple
of stories that stand out from the rest that we
want to go into. One involves a man named Ned Connor.
Connor was a jeweler who moved to Chicago at the
end of eighteen nine beginning of eighteen nine one somewhere
(08:30):
in there, and he started managing the jewelry counter and
Homes drug store. He his wife, Julia, and their eight
year old daughter Pearl also rented an apartment above the store,
and Julia also ended up getting a job as a
clerk in the drug store. So at first Ned really
admired his young, handsome, wealthy employer looked up to him,
in fact, and a lot of people in the neighborhood
(08:53):
did so. He wasn't alone in that respect, but soon
he started to feel a little bit uncomfortable with how
a ten of Holmes was towards his wife. Julia was
very pretty and very tall. She was six ft tall
in fact, and she liked this attention from Holmes. Soon
Ned began to notice that customers kind of looked at
him with pity, and some people his friends even told
(09:16):
him that something was going on with Holmes and his wife.
And then one day Holmes made him an offer. He
offered to sell Ned at the pharmacy and set up
a super easy payment plan for him, offered to handle
all the legal stuff involved with transferring ownership, and Ned
didn't think twice it seems about why Holmes would want
(09:36):
to sell him the business, especially if he was potentially
carrying on with his wife during this. He did, and
the business was doing fine. I mean, he didn't have
any suspicions there. He just thought that owning the business
might help elevate him in his wife's eyes. But it
didn't work at all, because meanwhile Holmes was also encouraging
Ned to buy life insurance, telling him that once he
(10:00):
and Julia were on good terms again, he'd want to
protect his family. Ned refused that aspect of the deal.
But not long after he took ownership of the pharmacy
from homes creditors started showing up and apparently the previous
owner H. H. Holmes, of course, had bought everything in
the store, the furniture, even the stock, on credit and
(10:21):
hadn't repaid a dime. So the new owner, Ned was
stuck with all of this debt and the only thing
he could do is commit to repaying them as soon
as possible. So instead of a new drug store to
impress Julia with, he has this dead weight around his ankle.
So think about if this happened to you. I mean,
(10:41):
you would imagine Ned to go up to Holmes to
be really angry and get in a fight. Yeah, so
he approaches Holmes, but Holmes just acts really sympathetic and
gives Ned some sort of you know, hey, all businesses
have debts, and I'm sure you knew this when you
went into business, that was was out of line with
the deal. They right, thinking that saying trying to imply
(11:04):
that nothing was unusual, But of course, he didn't offer
to help him at all either, So things continue to
get worse between Julia and Ned, and Ned started to
kind of finally believe these rumors about Holmes and Julia.
He ultimately left Julia and Pearl and abandoned his interest
in the store, and Ned eventually divorced Julia, but he
couldn't get custody of Pearl even though he wanted to.
(11:25):
He wanted to go get her and and bring her
to live with him. Of course, this left Holmes with
Julia and Pearl, and Julia didn't seem quite as attractive
to him anymore for some reason. And then, to make
matters worse, in late eightee, Julia told Holmes that she
was pregnant and so obviously she expected him to marry her. So,
according to Larson's book, Holmes calmly agreed to marry her.
(11:48):
Apparently he had been promising that for some time, but
said that before he did that, she'd have to have
an abortion, which he would handle sense. Of course, he
was a doctor and everything he said he'd use chloroform
she wouldn't feel anything. So Julia agreed she had no choice.
She wanted to get married. She didn't want to be
an unmarried, pregnant woman in the late eighteen hundreds, so
(12:12):
a friend, another tenant in the building, last saw Julia
that Christmas Eve and even made plans with her to
see Julia and Pearl the next day, but neither of
them were ever seen again after that. Holmes told people
that they had gone to visit family in Iowa, and
then just after Christmas, Holmes employed the services of a
(12:34):
man named Charles M. Chapel, who had a very special
skill and one that implicates Holmes quite a bit. In
this case. Yes Homes paid Chapel thirty six dollars to
strip the flesh from a dead woman's body and then
reassemble the skeleton. Chapel recalled later that the face of
the body was unidentifiable the face had been disfigured, but
(12:57):
the body was unusually tall for a woman's, so that
kind of suggests that it might have been Julia. Chapel,
like Pizel and Quinlan, actually ended up becoming one of
holmes trusted accomplices. Although it appears as if Chapel really
didn't suspect murder, he may have not really known what
was going on. After all. Holmes was a doctor and
this could have just been the body of one of
(13:17):
his patients who died. Of course, that sounds a little
naive to most of us, but I guess there maybe
was no way to prove that he knew for sure
that it was murder. Holmes, of course, had called Chapel
in in order to make some more money too. He
ended up selling that skeleton to Hanuman Medical College in Chicago.
And we've mentioned before how u s medical schools in
(13:39):
the dred Will Actually we've talked about Burke and Hare too.
Medical schools around the world were really desperate for bodies,
even in skeleton form, to use an instruction, So some
doctors and students were even robbing graves at this point
to fulfill that need, satisfy that need, and Holmes knew
this and obviously used it as an opportunity to make
(14:01):
some good money off of off of these murders. And
unfortunately it's not the only time that Holmes used the strategy.
Another woman who ended up working for homes in Eine
two was a beautiful, young blonde woman named Emmeline sigrand
he sought her out to and offered her a job
because he'd heard of her beauty from Pizel, who'd come
(14:21):
across her while she was working at a facility where
he was in rehab. Holmes offered em Line twice her
previous salary to work for him, and she accepted. He
started wooing her right away, using all of his usual
charm that seemed to always work on the ladies. His
attentiveness that touched that we mentioned that was so but
(14:42):
at the same time comforting. So she fell in love
with him, and they would ride bikes together all over
the neighborhood. I think, if I remember from that book
was a cool new pastime. It was. It was, and
Holmes got really into buying bicycles, I guess. But eventually
she took in a part met in his building too.
She bought his whole facade. He even embellished his personal
(15:05):
story and told her that he was the son of
an English lord, but told her, you know, don't tell
anyone this is secret. I don't want it to get
out because I don't want anyone to know, Like he
just didn't want to brag or something. So this just
made him seem all the more romantic. She was head
over heels for him, but when a couple of her
cousins came to visit. They weren't so taken by the
whole situation. They didn't actually meet Holmes, but they found
(15:27):
his building to be really creepy and gloomy, much bell
Knap did. They didn't share their feelings about it, though,
because they didn't want to hurt em Line's feelings. So
later that year, Emilne and Holmes became engaged, but by
December eight she suddenly disappeared, much like Julia's situation. A
friend in the building started asking homes about em Line,
where is she? What happened to her? And he said
(15:48):
that she left to go marry a man named Robert
Eve Phelps. He even produced a typed up wedding announcement,
typed up a very plain looking wedding announcement that apparently
some members of her family received as well. He had
several that she had supposedly dropped off for tenants in
the building that he handed out, and then some of
(16:09):
her family members got one in the mail well. And
no surprise here, but Emilyne had never mentioned Phelps to
her friends in the building or to her family, so
people didn't quite buy this wedding announcement thing, they kept
on inquiring about her. Her hometown newspaper found out about
the wedding and printed that now very eerie founding announcement,
(16:30):
which said that the bride quote after completing her education,
went to Chicago where she met her fate. Not the
most romantic founding announcement. No, and I mean by fate
they were obviously referring to marriage in kind of an
oblique way. But uh, now that we know that her
fate was very different, darker than the darker So Emilyne's
(16:53):
friend in the building recalled seeing a large trunk brought
downstairs soon and after Emilyne disappeared. She later said that
she felt like Holmes had killed Emilyne, but she never
went to the police and remained living in the building.
So again another case of that somebody has a suspicion,
but they not only don't speak up about it, but
(17:14):
they don't get out of there for themselves. I don't
take actions to protect yourself. So Holmes also employed the
services of Chapel again around that time and sold the
skeleton to a Sala medical college. A few weeks later.
After em Line, Holmes moved on to a woman named
Minnie Williams, who he courted previously long distance while she
was finishing school in Boston and he was in Chicago.
(17:35):
She wasn't attractive like most of the girls that Holmes
got involved with, but she did have other virtues. Specifically,
she was an heiress to a Texas real estate fortune,
so Many happened to move to Chicago in February of
pretty much following Holmes. She hadn't heard from him in
a while, but she was still really in love with him.
She knew him by a different alias, though, Henry H. Gordon,
(17:59):
and she called him Harry, so when Holmes found out
that Many was in town, he immediately called on her
and started things up again. He asked her to come
work for him so they could see each other whenever
they wanted, but he specifically asked that she called him
Henry Howard Holmes when they were in public, because you know,
he adopted that name for business purposes, and she didn't
(18:21):
want her coming in and making anybody suspicious or wonder
who he really was. So during their courtship, he also
convinced her to sign over the deed to her Texas property,
which was her vast heiress's inheritance to someone named Alexander Bond,
who then in turn signed over the deed to a
(18:42):
Bent and Tea, a lineman. Holmes convinced many that it
was a smart business transaction. You know, she'd make more
money off of it. He would take care of everything,
I'm sure. And what many didn't know was that Bond,
the original person she signed it over to, was another
one of Holmes's aliases, and Lyman was an alias of
(19:02):
that trusty assistant of Holmes then Pipes All. So essentially
he had gotten her to give him her fortune, and
he promised many a wedding, and they ended up having
a small one, just the two of them and a preacher,
and she thought it was all legal, but there's no
record today of their marriage. Many had been writing throughout
(19:22):
this entire affair, though, to her sister Anna, just talking
about how happy she was, and how great Holmes was
and now handsome, and what a great businessman. And when
the World's Fair got underway, Holmes invited Anna to visit
and to come see the fair with them. She came,
though she had reservations at first, but when she got
there she just got taken in by holmes charm like
everyone else, and he promised to take both of the
(19:45):
women to Europe, and Anna even sent for extra clothes
and things from home in preparation for her long journey.
So it seemed too people back home like she was
really going to be taking the jule. But both Anna
and Minnie disappeared around that time in the summer of
eight Soon after that, Holmes hired a man named Stephus
Humphrey to pick up a large trunk and a box
(20:07):
from his building. The box was long and had dimensions
somewhere to a coffin, and Holmes had that sent to
the train station where he'd pre arranged to have it
ship somewhere, and the trunk was sent to Chapel, Oh. So.
Of course, as we mentioned, there were a lot of
other people who were never seen again after staying in
(20:27):
holmes Is building, and they weren't all his employees or
all these would be fiances or wives. As planned, he
had turned his building into a world's fara hotel. In
still most of his guests were women. According to Larson's book,
when men would come by to enquire about renting a room,
the place would suddenly be mysteriously full. But when young
(20:49):
women came by, there were always vacancies. But the strange
thing about Holmes, and I think maybe we were discussing
this earlier, it's something that disturbs us, particularly about homes.
He didn't usually kill people face to face, but he
liked to be nearby so that he could hear what
was going on as he killed them. Right, if he
locked them in his air tight vault, for instance, he
(21:11):
could just barely hear the sounds. I mean, remember it
was soundproof, but he could just barely hear someone crying
or calling out for help. Often, though, he'd just turn
on one of those gas valves and let someone die
in their sleep in their room, or he'd sneak in
and knock them out with chloroform. So, not surprisingly, his
hotel often smelled of gas, or it smelled slightly medicinal.
(21:33):
That would add to the overall creepy feeling people get
when they visit this place. Yeah, especially if you're eating
in the restaurant or something. But I guess maybe people
chalked being a doctor, or they're being the drug store nearby.
I'm not sure, although most drug stores don't smell like
gas or medicine. Of course, though with all of these
people disappearing, at least some folks were coming and inquiring
(21:55):
what happened to their kin folk. Most of them were
family members, including Emily family, who thought that it was
really strange she had never written them after her sudden
marriage to this man they'd never heard of. Yeah, I
think she used to write them very frequently. She was
a good daughter and very close to her and she
just went off the map. So they were afraid that
she had gone to Europe on a honeymoon after her
(22:15):
wedding and had suddenly died there, and that maybe her
husband didn't know how to get in touch with them.
So still not suspecting, really felt play, just hoping that Holmes,
is their last point of contact, would have some kind
of information on their daughter. Yeah, although maybe they suspected
more as time went by. The guardians of Minnie Williams
were also suspicious, and they hired a lawyer to go
(22:37):
look for her and protect her estate. So Holmes started
to feel the pressure, started to feel the heat of
all these inquiries and from creditors to it turned out
that pretty much nothing he'd bought for that monstrous building
was paid for. He had a way to weasel out
of everything. I mean, just some examples. That airtight vault
that he built. When the company that installed it came
(22:58):
to collect, he told them, sure, you can have this back.
I mean, you know, if you say that you need
it back if they can't pay for it, but you'll
have to pay for the damages cause to the building
when you remove it. And the companies that had sold
him furniture would come to repossess their goods and he'd say, okay,
go get it, and then they wouldn't be able to
find it in his labyrinth of creepy rooms. He'd have
(23:20):
it hidden somewhere, and with all these secret staircases, good
luck actually trying to find your stuff. Eventually, though, a
lot of people, a lot of the creditors at Holmes
owed money to got together and they hired a lawyer.
He realized at that point that his days in Chicago
were numbered, so he set the top floor of his
building on fire, hoping to collect the insurance money. But
(23:41):
the policy was in the name of one of his
aliases here him S Campbell, and so when he filed
the claim, an investigator got suspicious and started looking into it.
So Holmes never really got to claim that money because
if he had gone to claim it, this guy who
was suspicious of and probably would have busted him. So
instead he fled to Fort Worth, tex after that to
(24:01):
take advantage of Mini's land that he had had transferred
to himself through that roundabout way. He took his new
girlfriend with him, Georgiana Yoke, and he took his trustee
assistant Pizel, too, but before leaving he ensured pipe of
life for ten thousand dollars and maybe the assistant should
start worrying he will become a victim. At this point,
(24:24):
Holmes wasn't able to successfully get his hands on Mini's estate,
so they ended up moving on to St. Louis, where
Holmes took over another drug store, and of course he
tried to pull one of his usual scams, stocking the
store on credit and then trying to sell it and
get the new owner to pay for the stock. But
this time it didn't work. He was arrested for fraud
and he went to jail for a short time. Before
(24:45):
he left jail, though, he confided in another criminal there,
a train robber named Marion Hedgepeth. Holmes asked Hedgepeth for
the name of a good attorney one that so, in
other words, a bad attorney, like someone he could trust
with his shady dealings, and promised to pay hedge Pet
five dollars for the information the referral fee on the exactly,
(25:06):
and he told hedge Pet about his plans to fake
his friend Pizel's death and collect the ten thousand in
insurance money. So when Holmes got out, he and Piezel
proceeded with their plan, and Piezel, under an alias, opened
up his own business for buying and selling patents, and
the two were planning on faking an accident and then
using a disfigured cadaver to collect that life insurance money,
(25:30):
kind of a throwback from his college days, pulling one
of his old scams. So on September four, a customer
came by Pizel's business and found the door locked, and
when he came back with the police later, they broke
in and found a body that seemed to have gotten
caught in an explosion inside. They determined that the body
(25:50):
was B. F. Perry, which was Piezel's alias, and that
he had died of burns. So after the body went
unclaimed for a little while and was bare aid, the
Fidelity Mutual Life Association received a letter that said that
Perry was actually Pizel, who had been insured by their company,
and soon after the lawyer Homes had hired with hedge
Peth's recommendation, visited Philadelphia to try to get the claim.
(26:15):
So the company paid Holmes, who kept all the money
and didn't give any to Pizel's widow or several children.
And at first it seemed like he was going to
get away with us, but he made a fatal mistake.
He never did give hedge Peth that five dollars he
promised him, So Hedgepeth got mad and ratted out Homes
to the insurance company. And after looking into it and
(26:36):
finding evidence about all of the shady dealings that had
really happened with the alias and all of that, Fidelity
called in the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which we have done
a podcast on them before, and the detective agency tracked
down Homes to Boston. He was arrested on November sev
(26:57):
and confessed to one count of insurance for all he
pled guilty to that in the summer of eight. There's
another creepy catch with this story, though. The thing was
he kept on changing his own story so much about
all other aspects of that crime, including what really happened
to Pizel, because you know, everybody was assuming that he
had faked they had been in the togather and faked
(27:18):
Pizel's death. Pizel wasn't anywhere to be found, though, and
Holmes couldn't answer questions about that. So the authorities ended
up exhuming the body they had buried as Pizel and
performed an autopsy on it. They found that the body
was not some kind of stand in dead body, it
was Piezel himself, not a random cadaver, and that he
(27:40):
had been killed not in an explosion but by chloroform.
So now Holmes is facing a murder charge. And there
was still a question of what happened to Pizel's children,
who homes have been traveling with for a while after
the fraud. I mean, this kind of complicates the story
a little bit. But sometime in between when he had
pulled off this fraud with Pizel, supposedly with Piezel, but
(28:01):
now we know it was sort of on Pizel, he
was traveling around with three of Pizel's children. So Holmes
ha told the authorities that Minnie Williams had taken the
children to London our Texas era, right, But a Philadelphia
detective named Frank Geyer he didn't buy this. He lost
his own wife and children not long before, and so
(28:23):
he was really motivated to find these kids. He launched
this drawn out investigation in which he traveled to all
the cities that Holmes had been to recently, kind of
tracked his male path, and it took a couple of months,
but he finally found these kids. Unfortunately, they want alive though.
He found the bodies of the two girls, Nellie and Alice,
in Toronto, and he found the charred remains of Pizel's
(28:45):
son Howard in a kitchen stove in Indianapolis. The search
for the kids is actually really fascinating part of home story.
I thought, I wish we could spend more time on
it now in this story, but it's uh. Laursen goes
into it a lot in the book, so if you
pick that up, will get to learn for the murder
Castle and that phase of his career. But yeah, this
(29:06):
hunt for the children was an interesting kind of conclusion
to it all. And is it just reveals more I
guess about holmes character and how synistry was when he
was doing these awful crimes, and the fact that his
serial killer profile just would change so dramatically, going from
luring people in and dispatching them in a very hands
(29:29):
off kind of way to murdering these kids for no reason,
no money. Very strange. With Holmes suspected of quite a
few murders by now, though, the Chicago Police decided to
search that abandoned castle in Inglewood, and what they found was,
of course horrifying human remains and stoves and fireplaces and
(29:52):
chimneys throughout the building, a lot of horrible stuff in
the basement, yeah, bloody dissecting tables, surgical instruments, that kiln
that we mentioned which still contained bone fragments. They also
find found quick line pits beneath the floors, as well
as a vat of corrosive acid and the bones of
a small child which might have been Pearl Connor. And
(30:14):
the vault somehow had an impression of a woman's footprint
on the inside of the door, which authorities believed to
belong to in the line. So it's clear now why
this is known as the murder Castle. But they weren't able.
The police weren't able to conduct a more thorough investigation
because in August eighteen, a mysterious fire destroyed the castle
(30:40):
and the rest of the evidence inside. And that's partly
why will never know exactly how many people homes killed.
Some estimates put the numbers low. Well it's still a lot,
but at some put it at as high as two people.
Holmes went on trial for Pitzel's murder in October. It
was called one of the trials of the century, but
(31:01):
it only lasted for about six days. The jury returned
a verdict in a couple of hours, though according to
Joneses History magazine article which you mentioned in the previous podcast,
the jurors said it really only took them a minute
to make their decision, but they just stayed out longer
for appearance's stake. Holmes was hanged May seven, eight six,
but not before he changed his story a number of times.
(31:24):
I mean, he said that he didn't kill a lot
of people, and then he said he killed people that
they later went and found out we're still alive. And
it was very confusing. He just kept changing what had happened,
and he wrote his memoir while he was imprisoned to
get sympathy, and he also sold the rights to his
final confession to William Randolph Hurst for seven thousand, five
(31:45):
hundred dollars, And in that confession he said that he
killed twenty seven people. Didn't you wonder who ended up
with that money eventually too? I mean, he must have
a math quite a fortune with his gams and his
ability to never pay his tab anywhere. But I don't know.
Maybe some of you guys could let us know if
(32:06):
you have an answer to that. Towards the end, though
Holmes wrote quote, 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.
Another kind of interesting point, he was so afraid of
people taking his body after he died, Even he had
(32:28):
done so much to other people's bodies, he was so
afraid of his own being taken and having stuff done
to it. He had concrete poured into his coffin and
also over his coffin in his grave so that people
couldn't steal his body. And then, of course with a
story this chaotic. There's also a curse involved, a possible curse.
We haven't had a curse since the Ice Man. Actually
(32:50):
that's it's yeah, So lots of weird stuff happened to
people involved with the case after holmes death. Guyer became ill,
the jury foreman on his case was electrocuted, the priest
who had given Holmes his last rites died suddenly, and
an office of an insurance company that Homes had cheated
(33:10):
caught on fire. So the Curse of H. H. Holmes. Yeah,
you guys decide what you think about that. It's certainly
a scary story though. These ethereal killer tales always creep
me out a lot. But I know, listeners do you
like them? A lot? Listeners like them? It's to be
kind of split. I mean, we sort of did a
little informal poll around the office here at how stuff works,
(33:32):
and you know, we found that some people are really
into real killer stories and really like researching them. And
I think Sarah and I both fall on the opposite camp,
were not as much interested in serial killers. But you know,
it's always fun to reach an interesting story. So it
just makes me really in a fascinating story. Yes, I
think that's probably a good time for us to transition
(33:53):
away from serial killers and into listener mail. So we're
not going to transition too far after all. Because our
postcard that we're featuring today does still have a skeleton
on it, although it's kind of in a can't be
funny way. It's from Marie. She sent it as a
holiday card. Um, and just to give you guys a description,
(34:17):
it is a skeleton holding a crystal ball and it
says Alexander Crystal Seer sees your life from the cradle
to the grave. However, Marie has kindly painted over the
grave scene in the in the crystal ball and put
a Christmas tree with a shining rhyme stone on top,
(34:37):
so um holiday cleaning things up a little bit. Thank you, Marie.
And uh, if any of you guys want to send
us an email, we have changed our address again. We're
now at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com and that
should make our mail delivery a little more reliable than
it's been the past. It's been spot in the last
(34:58):
month that we haven't replied to you. That's why. But
also maybe don't pre send everything or we'll never be
able to catch up. That's true too again, though, Facebook
and Twitter at Myston History are always great ways to
reach us as well, and if you want to learn
a little bit more about our somewhat scary topic today,
(35:18):
we have an article called how serial Killers Work, and
you can find that by visiting our homepage at www
dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future, Join
House to Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The hou Stuff Works iPhone
(35:41):
up has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a Chalk Reporting and I'm Fair Dowdy
and we were continuing here with our look at H. H. Holmes,
the man who is often referred to as America's first
(00:22):
serial killer and one of our most requested topics now.
Holmes became famous for the crimes he committed in Chicago
at the end of the nineteenth century, around the time
of the Chicago World's Fair. But where we are in
the story, we don't know him as a notorious serial
killer yet. From what we learned in part one of
this podcast, he's just a really shady guy, a con artist,
(00:45):
a criminal for sure. We know he's committed insurance fraud
with the help of stolen condavers, and he's been associated
with at least one strange disappearance, that of Mrs Holton,
the woman he bought his first Chicago drug store from.
And we should also mention that he's also a deadbeat
husband slash dad. He left his first wife and child
and is basically estranged from his second wife, Murda and
(01:07):
their daughter together. Where we left off, though he has, however,
constructed this very unusual building with gas jets and trapdoors
and hidden passageways, among other things, and he's done so
in a secretive manner so that nobody knows the full
extent of how creepy this building really is. On the surface,
(01:27):
of course, it's just a structure to house his businesses,
and it's a business itself as well. It's a hotel
for the world's fair crowd. But the building's odd and
rather creepy features in an understatement hint at an underlying
purpose that's a lot more sinister. So when we left
off with our story, a man named Jonathan Belknop was
(01:49):
just getting a sense of that underlying creepiness of this
hotel slash block of buildings. So Belknop was Holmes's second wife,
Murda's uncle, and Holmes had recently taken a loan from
him and then forged his signature on another note to
get more money. Holmes then invited bell Knap to tour
his new building, and against bell Knap's a better judgment,
(02:12):
convinced him to stay the night after They're creepy feeling
up on the roof. Yes, he tried to get Holmes
had tried to get him to go on the roof,
and he had a bad feeling about it and didn't
do it. And he had a bad feeling about spending
the night too, but he did it anyway. So this
is where we're going to pick up with our story.
So bell Knap carefully locked the door before we went
to bed that night. He later recalled initially thinking that
(02:34):
he and Holmes were the only two people in the
building at that time. The block of buildings, which is
already kind of a disturbing feeling, something like almost a
hundred rooms. So just imagine that Bellknap goes to bed,
but he can't sleep. He lies awake listening to the
sounds outside, like the occasional horse going by trains, and
then after a few hours he hears something more alarming.
(02:57):
Someone is trying his door and they slip the key
into the lock. So at that point Balknop called out
and the sound stops. Then a couple of minutes later
he heard someone walking down the hall, and this is
the first time that makes him feel like there may
have been two people at the door, not just Holmes
in the building. So he said something again to that
(03:18):
person who was maybe still there. This time, somebody answered him,
and Belknap later said it was Patrick Quinlyn, Holmes is
trusted caretaker who he mentioned in the first part of
the podcast, and Quinlan said that he wanted to come
into the room, but balk Knope wouldn't answer, the door,
wouldn't let him in, and eventually Quinlan went away. But Belknap,
(03:40):
as you can imagine it, still didn't get any sleep
that night after this bizarre interlude. In the early hours
of the morning, lay awake thinking about it. Right So,
not long after this incident, belk Nap discovers that Holmes
had forged his signature. Holmes apologized as profusely and somehow
manages to talk Belknap down, so Belknap never press charges
(04:04):
or reports the incident or anything that happened that night
that he spent the night in the building. According to
Eric Larson's book, though, which recounts these events in detail,
Belknap later said that he realized why Holmes had wanted
him to go on the roof of his building so
badly that day. Belknap said, quote, if I had gone,
the forgery probably wouldn't have been discovered because I wouldn't
(04:24):
have been around to discover it, so his hesitation about
going up there on the roof was justified, and it
kind of makes you think that he should have resisted
spending the night too, even though he ultimately got lucky
he had locked his door. He was awake when he
heard the key rattling around, And that's kind of why
we wanted to bring up this incident in the first place.
(04:47):
Even though it's not one of the most significant or
grewesome of Holmes's story, it illustrates what happened to a
lot of people who encountered Holmes, even though they weren't
as lucky as Belknap. Several p well may have had
a funny feeling about him, a funny feeling about homes
or his strange, creepy building, but they sort of went
along with whatever was going on because they didn't want
(05:09):
to be rude. And that was exactly what happened with Belknap.
He didn't want to offend his niece or her husband
and Sarah, you and I have talked about this a
lot since we started researching this topic. I mean, thank
you for instincts. Trust your instincts. I mean, a lot
of us don't we're so worried about being polite all
the time that we ignore some of those creepy feelings
that we have now and again occasionally turned out to
(05:30):
be justified. Another thing, though, a lot of people who
did experience something strange or had doubts about homes in
his building didn't report their concerns to the authority. So
maybe that's another lesson out of this. Go ahead and
let somebody know if if there's a strange situation going on.
He even at one point had a large rectangular kiln
(05:53):
built in the basement. Nobody thought anything of reporting that. Yeah,
And when the person who had built the kiln for
Holmes came by, he was just sort of like, oh,
you know, yeah, this was a kiln and I can
make it, yeah, but didn't realize until later what it
would be used for opening up pottery studio or something.
(06:14):
Homes exactly Well, I think it was because Holmes had
supposedly opened a glass business because so much glass was
needed at the time with all the construction going on
for the World's Fair, and so he sort of indicated
that he would need this kiln to create the glass
that he was making. But it was entirely the wrong shape.
I mean, it was this long rectangular kiln, more body
(06:37):
five than glass, more suited to something else, to burning
up something else rather than glass. But there's a that's
a big part of why Holmes was able to do
what he did for so long and not get caught.
But we should address that question a little bit before
we go further. I think, what exactly was he doing?
We need to talk about how exactly he put the
strange building and all these strange things inside of the
(07:00):
kiln in the vaults out there already. So one of
Holmes's primary agenda seemed to involve his employees. And as
we mentioned, he had several businesses in the building, including
a drug store and a barbershop and a restaurant, and
of course all those businesses he needed help to keep
them all running. Even early on, though people noticed that
(07:22):
homes of employees didn't really stick around very long. He
had a high turnover. And he also had this habit
of hiring young attractive girls, often naive girls from small towns.
He'd encourage them to bring all their money with them
and rent accommodations conveniently in his building right where they're working.
(07:44):
And he'd also have them take out life insurance policies
naming him as the beneficiary. I mean, I think that's
the strangest thing. That's not usually how employer employee relationships work.
But these girls would work for Homes for a little while,
and then suddenly they would just disappear, vanish off the earth,
often leaving their belongings in the rooms upstairs. Unfortunately, the
(08:08):
individual stories of all of these employees aren't necessarily known.
A lot of them really didn't know anybody when they
came to Chicago. They were sort of anonymous, and then
they were never found later. But there are a couple
of stories that stand out from the rest that we
want to go into. One involves a man named Ned Connor.
Connor was a jeweler who moved to Chicago at the
end of eighteen nine beginning of eighteen nine one somewhere
(08:30):
in there, and he started managing the jewelry counter and
Homes drug store. He his wife, Julia, and their eight
year old daughter Pearl also rented an apartment above the store,
and Julia also ended up getting a job as a
clerk in the drug store. So at first Ned really
admired his young, handsome, wealthy employer looked up to him,
in fact, and a lot of people in the neighborhood
(08:53):
did so. He wasn't alone in that respect, but soon
he started to feel a little bit uncomfortable with how
a ten of Holmes was towards his wife. Julia was
very pretty and very tall. She was six ft tall
in fact, and she liked this attention from Holmes. Soon
Ned began to notice that customers kind of looked at
him with pity, and some people his friends even told
(09:16):
him that something was going on with Holmes and his wife.
And then one day Holmes made him an offer. He
offered to sell Ned at the pharmacy and set up
a super easy payment plan for him, offered to handle
all the legal stuff involved with transferring ownership, and Ned
didn't think twice it seems about why Holmes would want
(09:36):
to sell him the business, especially if he was potentially
carrying on with his wife during this. He did, and
the business was doing fine. I mean, he didn't have
any suspicions there. He just thought that owning the business
might help elevate him in his wife's eyes. But it
didn't work at all, because meanwhile Holmes was also encouraging
Ned to buy life insurance, telling him that once he
(10:00):
and Julia were on good terms again, he'd want to
protect his family. Ned refused that aspect of the deal.
But not long after he took ownership of the pharmacy
from homes creditors started showing up and apparently the previous
owner H. H. Holmes, of course, had bought everything in
the store, the furniture, even the stock, on credit and
(10:21):
hadn't repaid a dime. So the new owner, Ned was
stuck with all of this debt and the only thing
he could do is commit to repaying them as soon
as possible. So instead of a new drug store to
impress Julia with, he has this dead weight around his ankle.
So think about if this happened to you. I mean,
(10:41):
you would imagine Ned to go up to Holmes to
be really angry and get in a fight. Yeah, so
he approaches Holmes, but Holmes just acts really sympathetic and
gives Ned some sort of you know, hey, all businesses
have debts, and I'm sure you knew this when you
went into business, that was was out of line with
the deal. They right, thinking that saying trying to imply
(11:04):
that nothing was unusual, But of course, he didn't offer
to help him at all either, So things continue to
get worse between Julia and Ned, and Ned started to
kind of finally believe these rumors about Holmes and Julia.
He ultimately left Julia and Pearl and abandoned his interest
in the store, and Ned eventually divorced Julia, but he
couldn't get custody of Pearl even though he wanted to.
(11:25):
He wanted to go get her and and bring her
to live with him. Of course, this left Holmes with
Julia and Pearl, and Julia didn't seem quite as attractive
to him anymore for some reason. And then, to make
matters worse, in late eightee, Julia told Holmes that she
was pregnant and so obviously she expected him to marry her. So,
according to Larson's book, Holmes calmly agreed to marry her.
(11:48):
Apparently he had been promising that for some time, but
said that before he did that, she'd have to have
an abortion, which he would handle sense. Of course, he
was a doctor and everything he said he'd use chloroform
she wouldn't feel anything. So Julia agreed she had no choice.
She wanted to get married. She didn't want to be
an unmarried, pregnant woman in the late eighteen hundreds, so
(12:12):
a friend, another tenant in the building, last saw Julia
that Christmas Eve and even made plans with her to
see Julia and Pearl the next day, but neither of
them were ever seen again after that. Holmes told people
that they had gone to visit family in Iowa, and
then just after Christmas, Holmes employed the services of a
(12:34):
man named Charles M. Chapel, who had a very special
skill and one that implicates Holmes quite a bit. In
this case. Yes Homes paid Chapel thirty six dollars to
strip the flesh from a dead woman's body and then
reassemble the skeleton. Chapel recalled later that the face of
the body was unidentifiable the face had been disfigured, but
(12:57):
the body was unusually tall for a woman's, so that
kind of suggests that it might have been Julia. Chapel,
like Pizel and Quinlan, actually ended up becoming one of
holmes trusted accomplices. Although it appears as if Chapel really
didn't suspect murder, he may have not really known what
was going on. After all. Holmes was a doctor and
this could have just been the body of one of
(13:17):
his patients who died. Of course, that sounds a little
naive to most of us, but I guess there maybe
was no way to prove that he knew for sure
that it was murder. Holmes, of course, had called Chapel
in in order to make some more money too. He
ended up selling that skeleton to Hanuman Medical College in Chicago.
And we've mentioned before how u s medical schools in
(13:39):
the dred Will Actually we've talked about Burke and Hare too.
Medical schools around the world were really desperate for bodies,
even in skeleton form, to use an instruction, So some
doctors and students were even robbing graves at this point
to fulfill that need, satisfy that need, and Holmes knew
this and obviously used it as an opportunity to make
(14:01):
some good money off of off of these murders. And
unfortunately it's not the only time that Holmes used the strategy.
Another woman who ended up working for homes in Eine
two was a beautiful, young blonde woman named Emmeline sigrand
he sought her out to and offered her a job
because he'd heard of her beauty from Pizel, who'd come
(14:21):
across her while she was working at a facility where
he was in rehab. Holmes offered em Line twice her
previous salary to work for him, and she accepted. He
started wooing her right away, using all of his usual
charm that seemed to always work on the ladies. His
attentiveness that touched that we mentioned that was so but
(14:42):
at the same time comforting. So she fell in love
with him, and they would ride bikes together all over
the neighborhood. I think, if I remember from that book
was a cool new pastime. It was. It was, and
Holmes got really into buying bicycles, I guess. But eventually
she took in a part met in his building too.
She bought his whole facade. He even embellished his personal
(15:05):
story and told her that he was the son of
an English lord, but told her, you know, don't tell
anyone this is secret. I don't want it to get
out because I don't want anyone to know, Like he
just didn't want to brag or something. So this just
made him seem all the more romantic. She was head
over heels for him, but when a couple of her
cousins came to visit. They weren't so taken by the
whole situation. They didn't actually meet Holmes, but they found
(15:27):
his building to be really creepy and gloomy, much bell
Knap did. They didn't share their feelings about it, though,
because they didn't want to hurt em Line's feelings. So
later that year, Emilne and Holmes became engaged, but by
December eight she suddenly disappeared, much like Julia's situation. A
friend in the building started asking homes about em Line,
where is she? What happened to her? And he said
(15:48):
that she left to go marry a man named Robert
Eve Phelps. He even produced a typed up wedding announcement,
typed up a very plain looking wedding announcement that apparently
some members of her family received as well. He had
several that she had supposedly dropped off for tenants in
the building that he handed out, and then some of
(16:09):
her family members got one in the mail well. And
no surprise here, but Emilyne had never mentioned Phelps to
her friends in the building or to her family, so
people didn't quite buy this wedding announcement thing, they kept
on inquiring about her. Her hometown newspaper found out about
the wedding and printed that now very eerie founding announcement,
(16:30):
which said that the bride quote after completing her education,
went to Chicago where she met her fate. Not the
most romantic founding announcement. No, and I mean by fate
they were obviously referring to marriage in kind of an
oblique way. But uh, now that we know that her
fate was very different, darker than the darker So Emilyne's
(16:53):
friend in the building recalled seeing a large trunk brought
downstairs soon and after Emilyne disappeared. She later said that
she felt like Holmes had killed Emilyne, but she never
went to the police and remained living in the building.
So again another case of that somebody has a suspicion,
but they not only don't speak up about it, but
(17:14):
they don't get out of there for themselves. I don't
take actions to protect yourself. So Holmes also employed the
services of Chapel again around that time and sold the
skeleton to a Sala medical college. A few weeks later.
After em Line, Holmes moved on to a woman named
Minnie Williams, who he courted previously long distance while she
was finishing school in Boston and he was in Chicago.
(17:35):
She wasn't attractive like most of the girls that Holmes
got involved with, but she did have other virtues. Specifically,
she was an heiress to a Texas real estate fortune,
so Many happened to move to Chicago in February of
pretty much following Holmes. She hadn't heard from him in
a while, but she was still really in love with him.
She knew him by a different alias, though, Henry H. Gordon,
(17:59):
and she called him Harry, so when Holmes found out
that Many was in town, he immediately called on her
and started things up again. He asked her to come
work for him so they could see each other whenever
they wanted, but he specifically asked that she called him
Henry Howard Holmes when they were in public, because you know,
he adopted that name for business purposes, and she didn't
(18:21):
want her coming in and making anybody suspicious or wonder
who he really was. So during their courtship, he also
convinced her to sign over the deed to her Texas property,
which was her vast heiress's inheritance to someone named Alexander Bond,
who then in turn signed over the deed to a
(18:42):
Bent and Tea, a lineman. Holmes convinced many that it
was a smart business transaction. You know, she'd make more
money off of it. He would take care of everything,
I'm sure. And what many didn't know was that Bond,
the original person she signed it over to, was another
one of Holmes's aliases, and Lyman was an alias of
(19:02):
that trusty assistant of Holmes then Pipes All. So essentially
he had gotten her to give him her fortune, and
he promised many a wedding, and they ended up having
a small one, just the two of them and a preacher,
and she thought it was all legal, but there's no
record today of their marriage. Many had been writing throughout
(19:22):
this entire affair, though, to her sister Anna, just talking
about how happy she was, and how great Holmes was
and now handsome, and what a great businessman. And when
the World's Fair got underway, Holmes invited Anna to visit
and to come see the fair with them. She came,
though she had reservations at first, but when she got
there she just got taken in by holmes charm like
everyone else, and he promised to take both of the
(19:45):
women to Europe, and Anna even sent for extra clothes
and things from home in preparation for her long journey.
So it seemed too people back home like she was
really going to be taking the jule. But both Anna
and Minnie disappeared around that time in the summer of
eight Soon after that, Holmes hired a man named Stephus
Humphrey to pick up a large trunk and a box
(20:07):
from his building. The box was long and had dimensions
somewhere to a coffin, and Holmes had that sent to
the train station where he'd pre arranged to have it
ship somewhere, and the trunk was sent to Chapel, Oh. So.
Of course, as we mentioned, there were a lot of
other people who were never seen again after staying in
(20:27):
holmes Is building, and they weren't all his employees or
all these would be fiances or wives. As planned, he
had turned his building into a world's fara hotel. In
still most of his guests were women. According to Larson's book,
when men would come by to enquire about renting a room,
the place would suddenly be mysteriously full. But when young
(20:49):
women came by, there were always vacancies. But the strange
thing about Holmes, and I think maybe we were discussing
this earlier, it's something that disturbs us, particularly about homes.
He didn't usually kill people face to face, but he
liked to be nearby so that he could hear what
was going on as he killed them. Right, if he
locked them in his air tight vault, for instance, he
(21:11):
could just barely hear the sounds. I mean, remember it
was soundproof, but he could just barely hear someone crying
or calling out for help. Often, though, he'd just turn
on one of those gas valves and let someone die
in their sleep in their room, or he'd sneak in
and knock them out with chloroform. So, not surprisingly, his
hotel often smelled of gas, or it smelled slightly medicinal.
(21:33):
That would add to the overall creepy feeling people get
when they visit this place. Yeah, especially if you're eating
in the restaurant or something. But I guess maybe people
chalked being a doctor, or they're being the drug store nearby.
I'm not sure, although most drug stores don't smell like
gas or medicine. Of course, though with all of these
people disappearing, at least some folks were coming and inquiring
(21:55):
what happened to their kin folk. Most of them were
family members, including Emily family, who thought that it was
really strange she had never written them after her sudden
marriage to this man they'd never heard of. Yeah, I
think she used to write them very frequently. She was
a good daughter and very close to her and she
just went off the map. So they were afraid that
she had gone to Europe on a honeymoon after her
(22:15):
wedding and had suddenly died there, and that maybe her
husband didn't know how to get in touch with them.
So still not suspecting, really felt play, just hoping that Holmes,
is their last point of contact, would have some kind
of information on their daughter. Yeah, although maybe they suspected
more as time went by. The guardians of Minnie Williams
were also suspicious, and they hired a lawyer to go
(22:37):
look for her and protect her estate. So Holmes started
to feel the pressure, started to feel the heat of
all these inquiries and from creditors to it turned out
that pretty much nothing he'd bought for that monstrous building
was paid for. He had a way to weasel out
of everything. I mean, just some examples. That airtight vault
that he built. When the company that installed it came
(22:58):
to collect, he told them, sure, you can have this back.
I mean, you know, if you say that you need
it back if they can't pay for it, but you'll
have to pay for the damages cause to the building
when you remove it. And the companies that had sold
him furniture would come to repossess their goods and he'd say, okay,
go get it, and then they wouldn't be able to
find it in his labyrinth of creepy rooms. He'd have
(23:20):
it hidden somewhere, and with all these secret staircases, good
luck actually trying to find your stuff. Eventually, though, a
lot of people, a lot of the creditors at Holmes
owed money to got together and they hired a lawyer.
He realized at that point that his days in Chicago
were numbered, so he set the top floor of his
building on fire, hoping to collect the insurance money. But
(23:41):
the policy was in the name of one of his
aliases here him S Campbell, and so when he filed
the claim, an investigator got suspicious and started looking into it.
So Holmes never really got to claim that money because
if he had gone to claim it, this guy who
was suspicious of and probably would have busted him. So
instead he fled to Fort Worth, tex after that to
(24:01):
take advantage of Mini's land that he had had transferred
to himself through that roundabout way. He took his new
girlfriend with him, Georgiana Yoke, and he took his trustee
assistant Pizel, too, but before leaving he ensured pipe of
life for ten thousand dollars and maybe the assistant should
start worrying he will become a victim. At this point,
(24:24):
Holmes wasn't able to successfully get his hands on Mini's estate,
so they ended up moving on to St. Louis, where
Holmes took over another drug store, and of course he
tried to pull one of his usual scams, stocking the
store on credit and then trying to sell it and
get the new owner to pay for the stock. But
this time it didn't work. He was arrested for fraud
and he went to jail for a short time. Before
(24:45):
he left jail, though, he confided in another criminal there,
a train robber named Marion Hedgepeth. Holmes asked Hedgepeth for
the name of a good attorney one that so, in
other words, a bad attorney, like someone he could trust
with his shady dealings, and promised to pay hedge Pet
five dollars for the information the referral fee on the exactly,
(25:06):
and he told hedge Pet about his plans to fake
his friend Pizel's death and collect the ten thousand in
insurance money. So when Holmes got out, he and Piezel
proceeded with their plan, and Piezel, under an alias, opened
up his own business for buying and selling patents, and
the two were planning on faking an accident and then
using a disfigured cadaver to collect that life insurance money,
(25:30):
kind of a throwback from his college days, pulling one
of his old scams. So on September four, a customer
came by Pizel's business and found the door locked, and
when he came back with the police later, they broke
in and found a body that seemed to have gotten
caught in an explosion inside. They determined that the body
(25:50):
was B. F. Perry, which was Piezel's alias, and that
he had died of burns. So after the body went
unclaimed for a little while and was bare aid, the
Fidelity Mutual Life Association received a letter that said that
Perry was actually Pizel, who had been insured by their company,
and soon after the lawyer Homes had hired with hedge
Peth's recommendation, visited Philadelphia to try to get the claim.
(26:15):
So the company paid Holmes, who kept all the money
and didn't give any to Pizel's widow or several children.
And at first it seemed like he was going to
get away with us, but he made a fatal mistake.
He never did give hedge Peth that five dollars he
promised him, So Hedgepeth got mad and ratted out Homes
to the insurance company. And after looking into it and
(26:36):
finding evidence about all of the shady dealings that had
really happened with the alias and all of that, Fidelity
called in the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which we have done
a podcast on them before, and the detective agency tracked
down Homes to Boston. He was arrested on November sev
(26:57):
and confessed to one count of insurance for all he
pled guilty to that in the summer of eight. There's
another creepy catch with this story, though. The thing was
he kept on changing his own story so much about
all other aspects of that crime, including what really happened
to Pizel, because you know, everybody was assuming that he
had faked they had been in the togather and faked
(27:18):
Pizel's death. Pizel wasn't anywhere to be found, though, and
Holmes couldn't answer questions about that. So the authorities ended
up exhuming the body they had buried as Pizel and
performed an autopsy on it. They found that the body
was not some kind of stand in dead body, it
was Piezel himself, not a random cadaver, and that he
(27:40):
had been killed not in an explosion but by chloroform.
So now Holmes is facing a murder charge. And there
was still a question of what happened to Pizel's children,
who homes have been traveling with for a while after
the fraud. I mean, this kind of complicates the story
a little bit. But sometime in between when he had
pulled off this fraud with Pizel, supposedly with Piezel, but
(28:01):
now we know it was sort of on Pizel, he
was traveling around with three of Pizel's children. So Holmes
ha told the authorities that Minnie Williams had taken the
children to London our Texas era, right, But a Philadelphia
detective named Frank Geyer he didn't buy this. He lost
his own wife and children not long before, and so
(28:23):
he was really motivated to find these kids. He launched
this drawn out investigation in which he traveled to all
the cities that Holmes had been to recently, kind of
tracked his male path, and it took a couple of months,
but he finally found these kids. Unfortunately, they want alive though.
He found the bodies of the two girls, Nellie and Alice,
in Toronto, and he found the charred remains of Pizel's
(28:45):
son Howard in a kitchen stove in Indianapolis. The search
for the kids is actually really fascinating part of home story.
I thought, I wish we could spend more time on
it now in this story, but it's uh. Laursen goes
into it a lot in the book, so if you
pick that up, will get to learn for the murder
Castle and that phase of his career. But yeah, this
(29:06):
hunt for the children was an interesting kind of conclusion
to it all. And is it just reveals more I
guess about holmes character and how synistry was when he
was doing these awful crimes, and the fact that his
serial killer profile just would change so dramatically, going from
luring people in and dispatching them in a very hands
(29:29):
off kind of way to murdering these kids for no reason,
no money. Very strange. With Holmes suspected of quite a
few murders by now, though, the Chicago Police decided to
search that abandoned castle in Inglewood, and what they found was,
of course horrifying human remains and stoves and fireplaces and
(29:52):
chimneys throughout the building, a lot of horrible stuff in
the basement, yeah, bloody dissecting tables, surgical instruments, that kiln
that we mentioned which still contained bone fragments. They also
find found quick line pits beneath the floors, as well
as a vat of corrosive acid and the bones of
a small child which might have been Pearl Connor. And
(30:14):
the vault somehow had an impression of a woman's footprint
on the inside of the door, which authorities believed to
belong to in the line. So it's clear now why
this is known as the murder Castle. But they weren't able.
The police weren't able to conduct a more thorough investigation
because in August eighteen, a mysterious fire destroyed the castle
(30:40):
and the rest of the evidence inside. And that's partly
why will never know exactly how many people homes killed.
Some estimates put the numbers low. Well it's still a lot,
but at some put it at as high as two people.
Holmes went on trial for Pitzel's murder in October. It
was called one of the trials of the century, but
(31:01):
it only lasted for about six days. The jury returned
a verdict in a couple of hours, though according to
Joneses History magazine article which you mentioned in the previous podcast,
the jurors said it really only took them a minute
to make their decision, but they just stayed out longer
for appearance's stake. Holmes was hanged May seven, eight six,
but not before he changed his story a number of times.
(31:24):
I mean, he said that he didn't kill a lot
of people, and then he said he killed people that
they later went and found out we're still alive. And
it was very confusing. He just kept changing what had happened,
and he wrote his memoir while he was imprisoned to
get sympathy, and he also sold the rights to his
final confession to William Randolph Hurst for seven thousand, five
(31:45):
hundred dollars, And in that confession he said that he
killed twenty seven people. Didn't you wonder who ended up
with that money eventually too? I mean, he must have
a math quite a fortune with his gams and his
ability to never pay his tab anywhere. But I don't know.
Maybe some of you guys could let us know if
(32:06):
you have an answer to that. Towards the end, though
Holmes wrote quote, 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.
Another kind of interesting point, he was so afraid of
people taking his body after he died, Even he had
(32:28):
done so much to other people's bodies, he was so
afraid of his own being taken and having stuff done
to it. He had concrete poured into his coffin and
also over his coffin in his grave so that people
couldn't steal his body. And then, of course with a
story this chaotic. There's also a curse involved, a possible curse.
We haven't had a curse since the Ice Man. Actually
(32:50):
that's it's yeah, So lots of weird stuff happened to
people involved with the case after holmes death. Guyer became ill,
the jury foreman on his case was electrocuted, the priest
who had given Holmes his last rites died suddenly, and
an office of an insurance company that Homes had cheated
(33:10):
caught on fire. So the Curse of H. H. Holmes. Yeah,
you guys decide what you think about that. It's certainly
a scary story though. These ethereal killer tales always creep
me out a lot. But I know, listeners do you
like them? A lot? Listeners like them? It's to be
kind of split. I mean, we sort of did a
little informal poll around the office here at how stuff works,
(33:32):
and you know, we found that some people are really
into real killer stories and really like researching them. And
I think Sarah and I both fall on the opposite camp,
were not as much interested in serial killers. But you know,
it's always fun to reach an interesting story. So it
just makes me really in a fascinating story. Yes, I
think that's probably a good time for us to transition
(33:53):
away from serial killers and into listener mail. So we're
not going to transition too far after all. Because our
postcard that we're featuring today does still have a skeleton
on it, although it's kind of in a can't be
funny way. It's from Marie. She sent it as a
holiday card. Um, and just to give you guys a description,
(34:17):
it is a skeleton holding a crystal ball and it
says Alexander Crystal Seer sees your life from the cradle
to the grave. However, Marie has kindly painted over the
grave scene in the in the crystal ball and put
a Christmas tree with a shining rhyme stone on top,
(34:37):
so um holiday cleaning things up a little bit. Thank you, Marie.
And uh, if any of you guys want to send
us an email, we have changed our address again. We're
now at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com and that
should make our mail delivery a little more reliable than
it's been the past. It's been spot in the last
(34:58):
month that we haven't replied to you. That's why. But
also maybe don't pre send everything or we'll never be
able to catch up. That's true too again, though, Facebook
and Twitter at Myston History are always great ways to
reach us as well, and if you want to learn
a little bit more about our somewhat scary topic today,
(35:18):
we have an article called how serial Killers Work, and
you can find that by visiting our homepage at www
dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future, Join
House to Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The hou Stuff Works iPhone
(35:41):
up has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.
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