🏰 "Murder Castle: H.H. Holmes' House of Horrors"

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
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Peeping Tom's Serial Killers and all the good stuff. The

(02:05):
discovery of a murder in Philadelphia in October eighteen ninety
four opened the door to a case few could believe.
Marian Hedgepeth, a one time cellmate of a man who
went by the name H. M. Howard, informed police about
a recent scam. It involved insuring a man named Benjamin
Pitzel for ten thousand dollars with a Fidelity Mutual Life

(02:27):
association in eighteen ninety three in Chicago, and then faking
his death in a laboratory explosion by substituting a cadaver.
All participants were then to split the insurance payment, but
Howard had renegged and run off with the money. Hedgepeth
was informing on him as payback, and his detailed letter
about the scheme was passed along to the company. In

(02:48):
short order, they realized that H. M. Howard was actually
HH Holmes, clearly a swindler, a company representative who had
already expressed suspicions about the death scene. We examined the
circumstances surrounding the discovery of a body at thirteen sixteen
callow Hill Street and Philadelphia. It had been found in
a state of rigor mortise and so badly burned in

(03:11):
the face from chemicals and sun exposure that the identity
of the person could not be judged. Nevertheless, Holmes, accompanied
by one of Benjamin Pizel's children, had indeed identified this
body from certain characteristics as the remains of Pitzel. After
he'd collected the money, he disappeared with that child and
two more of Pizel's children. Given the details, company officers

(03:35):
tried unsuccessfully to track him, so they hired agents from
the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to go after the scoundrel.
As these more experienced men followed his trail around the country,
they gathered information about his numerous frauds, thefts, and schemes,
including other insurance scams years earlier in Chicago that had
provided him with funds to build a three story hotel.

(03:57):
He was among the top swindlers they had ever come across,
possibly the most accomplished. If he hadn't gotten greedy, he'd
still be in business, But this time they had him.
They finally caught up to Holmes in November, and one
of his childhood haunts in Vermont put him under surveillance
and gave the information to the police. On the afternoon

(04:19):
of November sixteenth, eighteen ninety four, H. H. Holmes was
arrested in Boston as he was preparing to leave the
country by steamship. He surrendered easily, possibly believing that he
could resort to his highly successful weapon, a glib tongue,
and a load of lies to get him out of
a tight spot. It's likely that he was further convinced

(04:39):
of this when they told him that he was being
charged with the rather petty theft of a horse in Texas. Secretly,
he knew a lot more about what he'd done, but
so did the police. Even so, neither side realized at
that moment what they were dealing with. The best sources
for the home story are the documents from the case itself.
Detective Frank P. Geyer's book on his experiences, which included

(05:03):
evidence not used in court and which Geyer describes as
one of the most marvelous stories of modern times, and
the autobiographical pieces that Holmes penned. At first, Holmes told
one story which included mundane details about his life and
a load of lies posed to cover up his crimes,
and then he offered a sensational confession which was printed

(05:24):
at the time in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and all three
documents are now available on a CD RHM from Waterfront
Productions as well. Since the home story was an immediate sensation,
editions of the major Philadelphia newspapers carried the story from
the moment he was arrested, and in nineteen seventy five
David Frank published The Torture Doctor, later found to have

(05:45):
been read by health care serial killer doctor Michael Swango.
In addition, authors Harold Scheckter and Eric Larsen both have
written exemplary renditions of the Holmes tale. Scheckter tells the
tale imaginatively as narrative non fiction, while Larson places Homes
in the context of the development of the Chicago's world
fare in eighteen ninety three, Larson's discussion about how he

(06:08):
researched the book offers even more insight. He admittedly encountered
some difficulty with the character of H. H. Holmes, since
the Philadelphia trial transcripts were limited to a single crime
he had performed the greater part of his monstrousness Elsewhere.
Larson found that many of the sources about this scoundrel
were inconsistent, as well as interlaced with Holmes's own fantastic embellishments.

(06:31):
In many instances, only Holmes ever knew what he had
actually done. Larson describes how he agonized over recreating incidents
to which there were no witnesses, and he admits that
even with Allah's research, he still did not know by
the end what had motivated Holmes to kill and had
only a slight understanding of psychopathy. Yet he does point

(06:53):
out one real advantage to his work. One of the
most striking and rather charming aspects of criminal investigation in
the eighteen nineties is the extent to which the police
gave reporters direct access to crime scenes even while the
investigations were in progress. Thus, they acquired fantastic details which
they passed on to anyone who cared to take a look.

(07:14):
As Geyer said, the story is among the most marvelous.
As Holmes was being processed in Boston, an agent from
the insurance company arrived, whom he recognized, so he readily
offered a confession of the fraud. In the glib manner
of a polished liar. He said that the damaged corpse
that he'd identified as Piitzel really had been a cadaver

(07:35):
that he'd acquired and substituted to collect the money. The
agent was amazed by Holmes's near convincing performance. When asked
to account for the Pizel children, who were not now
in his care, the suspect offered yet another convoluted tale.
The children had been left with their father, who had
gone to either South America or Florida carry Pitzell. Ben's

(07:56):
wife could not corroborate any of Holmes's story, except that
she was aware of the insurance scheme and that he
had been moving her around from one place to another
with promises of soon seeing her family. She was utterly
confused about the entire experience, and her flustered manner convinced
the interrogators that Pitzel was probably dead. They charged her

(08:17):
with conspiracy and put her under arrest, although they also
felt sorry for her, she seemed to have been caught
in something that she barely understood. Because the scheme had
occurred in Philadelphia, Detective Thomas Crawford arrived in Boston to
escort Holmes back to the city of brotherly Love. In
Depraved Scheckter recounts how Holmes bragged to the detective along

(08:39):
the way about his criminal career, admitting that he'd done
enough in his life to be hanged twelve times over.
He provided colorful tales about his various cons and claimed
to have the ability to hypnotize people to do whatever
he wanted. He even offered the detective five hundred dollars
to let him perform this feed on him and escape.
Crawford was unimpressed, declining the deal with grim humor, but

(09:03):
when reporters later heard about it, they attributed supernatural powers
to the scam artist. It was the age of Svengali,
a character made popular in a contemporary novel by George
de Mariier Trilby, and Holmes was thought to have such abilities.
Holmes even enjoyed this novel. Later in his cell Holmes
was eventually incarcerated in Moyamensing Prison and remained there for

(09:26):
several months. Larson indicates that his human whitewashed cell was
nine feet by fourteen feet with a barred window and
an electric lamp for light. He was well behaved, and
despite the daily journalistic discoveries of yet more of his
horrendous crimes, his guards apparently liked him. Some of them
did favors for him delivering the newspaper daily so he

(09:47):
could keep up with the details of the investigation. As
he did so, he realized that he'd have to come
up with a better confession. He was always scheming. Holmes
admitted to police in December eighteen ninety four that, rather
than substitute a cadaver in Akhn with Pitzel as it
originally said, the corpse had actually been Pizel, but he

(10:08):
had not been murdered, according to the story Holmes now
told Pizel and two other men, along with Pizel's wife,
were in on the scheme. Pizel had rented the house
at thirteen sixteen Calow Hill, equipping it with bottles of
chemicals as part of the appearance of a man having
an accident that was all well and good, but Holmes
noticed how Pizel was drinking, and one day found him

(10:30):
lying dead on the floor. Pitzel had apparently grown depressed
and used chloroform on himself. Holmes arranged the body and
proceeded with his plan to make it difficult to identify.
Destroyed a letter Pitsle had written, supposedly a suicide note,
and staged the scene to look like the result of
an accidental explosion. He then went out of town to

(10:50):
await a newspaper item that indicated that the body had
been found. He left the account like that, and several
more months passed without any word from the children. Holmes
had indicated to carry Piszel that they were with a guardian,
Minnie Williams, in England. On June third, eighteen ninety five,
Holmes was tried for conspiracy to defraud an insurance company,

(11:11):
but because the sentence would be light, his attorneys advised
him to plead guilty, which he did. The sentencing was
delayed for a later date, but even the papers were
now pressing for information about the Pizel children. They seemed
to have disappeared, and reporters wanted to know where they were,
so did carry Pizel, some one had to act. Detective

(11:32):
Frank Geyer was assigned to the job, and he went
later that same month on a highly publicized expedition to
find the missing Pizel children or their remains, whichever turned
out to be the case. He later penned a book
about his international trek. Even after his mission was accomplished,
he did not yet know exactly what kind of monster
he was dealing with. He simply knew he had a

(11:54):
job to do, a potentially unpleasant one, and he did it.
Larsen described Geier as a big man with a pleasant,
earnest face sporting a walrus mustache. Geyer's wife and daughter
had died recently in a fire, so his loss weighed heavily.
As he went in search of children who possibly had
been murdered. Holmes had offered no clues to assist, except

(12:17):
to say that the children had been left with a guardian,
with one female child posing as a boy. He even
shed tears at the idea that someone should accuse him
of killing innocent children, and Geier said of him, Holmes
is greatly given to lying with a sort of florid ornamentation.
The man he believed was an actor and accomplished Cohn,

(12:37):
so nothing he said could be trusted, especially in light
of the fac that this so called guardian of the children,
Minnie Williams, was also missing, along with her sister Nettie,
and both had once been closely associated with the suspect.
Holmes had kept up with the news each day as
papers were delivered to him, and had shifted the details
of his story as the situation demanded. Geier noticed this

(12:59):
and noted how it fit Holmes's pattern of treatment of others.
He played games and adjusted his strategy to whatever seemed
necessary to move them around like pawns in some game
he played to please himself. Such a matter of man
made the detective uneasy. No one could know from what
he said, what was true, or what he might be
planning next. Yet, Holmes did admit to having Alice Pitzel

(13:23):
fifteen in his custody after she had helped him to
identify her father's corpse for the insurance payoff, and to
picking up Howard eight and Nelly eleven and taking them
with them. Alice and Nelly had written letters to their
mother documenting their daily journey, which Holmes had collected but
had never mailed, and which were found in his possession.
Upon his arrest, he told their mother that they were

(13:45):
in the care of Manny Williams, a woman of means
in England. This woman had likely kept back their letters
Holmes had suggested in the interest of her own safety.
Yet Geyard found no trace of many Williams or the
children where Holmes had die said she would be. In fact,
the street name that Holmes offered for where to find
her did not exist in London. Instead of going to England,

(14:08):
where Holmes clearly was trying to direct him, Geyer focused
his efforts on North America. On June twenty sixth, Detective
Geyer set out by train into the Midwest with Alice's
and Nelly's letters to orient him, along with photos of
the children and of Holmes, and an inventory of items
and clothing associated with them. No one in the DA's
office expected to find any evidence at this late date,

(14:31):
and believed that Holmes had killed them and would have
been careful to dispose of the bodies. Yet the insurance
company had readily provided funds for the trip because it
would not have to pay out for Pizel's suicide, so
Geyer agreed to make the effort. In Cincinnati, he showed
photographs and asked around in various hotels for anyone who
might have seen Holmes or the children, and he finally

(14:52):
found someone who remembered the small group of travelers under
the alias Alex E. Cook. It was a name Holmes
had used in business matters before that clerk pointed Geier
in another direction, and through much questioning, he came across
a woman who had seen Holmes and a boy together
in a house to which a large stove had been delivered,
but Holmes had then given her the stove, apparently because

(15:15):
he'd noticed that she'd been watching him. Geire now felt
that he had a firm hold on the end of
a string which was to lead me ultimately to the
consummation of my difficult mission. He went from there to Indianapolis,
Holmes's next destination according to the letters. In this city,
Geier found a trail that gave him a good sense
of where the children had been. Larson points out that

(15:38):
it was an exceedingly hot day, which made the investigation
more burdensome. Finally, however, Holmes's odd game became clear. He
was moving his wife, one of three, all of whom
were unaware of the others, and the three children about
in the same city without any party being aware of
the other. Geier could not understand why, if Holmes intended

(15:59):
to kill the children, he would go to such effort
and expense to move them so often. The puzzle deepened,
and the fate of the children seemed darker still. Geier
then went to Chicago and Detroit, the town from which
Alice had written the last of her letters to her mother,
in which she expressed dismay that they were not together.
He also learned, to his surprise, that Holmes had added

(16:21):
a third party to his game, missus Carey Pitzel and
her other two children. He had placed her three blocks
from where he roomed the three children in his care,
but had not allowed them to realize it or see
one another. But Alice also wrote something from that location
to her mother that made Geier's blood run cold. Howard
is not with us now. Going on to Toronto, Geier

(16:44):
looked up real estate ations to find out if a
man had rented a house for only a few days.
It took considerable time to impress each agent with the
importance of making a careful search for us. He found
a house that Holmes had rented, which was surrounded by
a six foot fence. The family residing there knew about
some loose dirt under the house. They dug it up firmly,

(17:05):
believing they would find one or more of the children
to raise the suspense. They kept working as it grew dark,
but they had to give up without finding anything. Geier
struck out there as the renter turned out to have
been a different man. Still, the intrepid detective felt certain
the children had been killed somewhere in that town, so
he persisted and found another rental that seemed suspicious. He

(17:28):
went to check it out. Geier learned that a man
with children at this place had asked for the loan
of a spade to plant potatoes in his cellar, and
had brought only a bed, mattress and large trunk to
the house. A woman identified Holmes from a photograph as
the man who had rented the house. Geier went there,
discovered that the house had a dark cellar accessible via

(17:49):
a trapdoor, and found an area of soft dirt on
the floor. When he pushed a shovel into it, a
stench arose, and they knew he'd come to the right spot.
A long dark journey had produced what he'd both hoped
for and had feared human remains. After digging three feet
he found a small armbone, so he employed an undertaker

(18:11):
to take charge. In short order, they exhumed the corpses
of two unclothed girls, which they believed were Nellie and
Alice Pitzel. Alice was found lying on her side with
her hand to the west, Geier wrote. Nellie was found
lying on her face with her head to the south,
her plaited hair hanging neatly down her back. A crew

(18:31):
of men lifted them from the grave and transferred them
to coffins. Gruesomely, as Nellie was lifted, her heavy braid
pulled the scalp away from her skull. Geyer was widely
congratulated on his persistence and success. He sent a telegram
to Philadelphia about the day's events and concluded in his book,
thus it was proved that little children cannot be murdered

(18:53):
in this day and generation, beyond the possibility of discovery.
Searchers found a toy in the house that was listed
in Carrie Heitzel's inventory of things that her children had owned,
which assisted Geier in a firm identification of the remains,
as did pieces of partially burnt clothing. Then they bought
Missus Pizel to Toronto to confirm she was allowed to

(19:13):
see the children's hair and teeth, as the remains were
too putrefied for her to you. She recognized them instantly
and swooned in grief. She now knew that Holmes had
lied to her and had killed her children, But Geyer
still knew that there was one more child to find,
little Howard. His trek was not yet done, although it

(19:33):
now appeared to be fully pessimistic. He used logic and
items from the letters to determine that Howard had been
separated from the girls before their arrival in Detroit, so
it was time to return to Indianapolis. He arrived there
on July twenty fourth. As before, he proceeded to gain
the assistance of real estate agents from around the city
to learn the details of short term rentals from the

(19:55):
previous October. By this time, Geyer's trek had become of
supreme and tre to the nation, and the newspapers heralded
his arrival. He was considered a real life Sherlock Holmes,
and people wanted to know his every step the way
they read a suspenseful piece of fiction. This was both
a curse and a boon. He received many leads, which

(20:16):
he followed, but most of them just wasted his time.
Days came and passed, he wrote, but I continued to
be as much in the dark as ever. Geier feared
that the bold and clever criminal might have bested him
on this one. It seemed increasingly more likely that little
Howard might never be found. Back in Philadelphia, Holmes avidly

(20:37):
kept track of Geyer's journey. At first, he felt empowered,
believing that Geyer could never find the children, but with
the discovery of the girl's remains, things looked grim. He
had to think up a tale to exonerate himself and
place the blame on others. Even as he did so,
investigators were analyzing the children's letters, and they sent ideas

(20:57):
to Geyer. Some things had been overlooked or misunderstood, and
with renewed care, Geier discovered that the children had been
in Indianapolis four days longer than he'd figured. He narrowed
the frame of time that was unaccounted for to only
two days, and then returned to Chicago. To check on
a child skeleton recently found. It was not Howard, nor

(21:19):
would Holmes, when asked, yield a word of assistance. The
King of Fabricators threw the blame on another man as
the likely perpetrator. Geire traveled to several more places, but
instinct told him to settle in Indianapolis and keep searching there.
Despite the lack of success, Geier continued to believe that
he would make a breakthrough in this town. No less

(21:40):
than nine hundred supposed clues were run out, he later wrote,
but he needed a new strategy. He then went to
the smaller outlying towns, going through them as systematically as
he had done in Indianapolis. Then in Irvington, he struck Peydrt,
a man who had rented a house in October. Remembered
Holmes because his manner was so rude and abrupt, and

(22:02):
he recalled that a boy had been with this irascible
short term tenant. Relieved and certain that he was at
the end of the trail, Geier proceeded to the rental property.
There was no disturbance in the floor of the cellar
that he could find, which discouraged him at first, but
there was a trunk in a small alcove and near
it some disturbed dirt. Geyer dug into the area but

(22:23):
found nothing. In a barn, he found a coal stove, and,
remembering Holmes's earlier purchase of a large stove, which he
had then abandoned, Geier suspected that this was a clue.
On top were stains that looked like dried blood. By telegram,
Missus Pitzel identified the trunk as hers. Geier left the place,
but returned when he heard there was news. A doctor

(22:46):
who had poked around showed him pieces of charred bone,
part of a skull, and a femur that he said
had belonged to a male child. They'd found it in
a pipe hole in the chimney. Geier dismantled the chimney
and found more human remains, a complete set of teeth
and a piece of jaw identified by a dentist as
being from a boy seven to ten years old. At

(23:07):
the bottom of the chimney, Geyer recorded was found quite
a large charred mass, which, upon being cut, disclosed a
portion of the stomach, liver and spleen, baked quite hard.
The pelvis of the body was also found. Plenty of
witnesses had seen homes back in October when he was there,
and identified him from the photograph that Geyer carried. One

(23:29):
man even recalled helping him to install the stove. Convinced
he had finally, albeit tragically, found Howard Pitzel, and having
it confirmed by other clues, Geire enjoyed the best night's
sleep he'd had in two months. The search for truth
had finally reached satisfaction. It was now August twenty seventh,
fully two months after he'd left on this journey, and

(23:51):
five weeks since he'd found Howard's unfortunate sisters. On September twelfth,
Holmes was indicted by a grand jury for the murder
of Benjamin Pyitzel. He entered a plea of not guilty,
and his trial date was scheduled for October twenty eighth.
Even as he adopted a pretense for the court, people
were learning much more about him. In Chicago, Holmes, it seemed,

(24:13):
had quite a list of murders to his name. Holmes,
whose real name was Hermann Webster Mudget, had arrived in
Chicago during the eighteen eighties, already married to two women.
The city was preparing for the World's Fair or Great Exposition,
which meant that there was plenty of opportunity for a
clever man for fraud and theft. Eric Larsen writes eloquently

(24:34):
about the White Cities development, describing the many hurdles its
designers and investors encountered in the process just barely preparing
the massive grounds and time for business. Some twenty seven
million people went through the exposition during its six month venue,
which overtaxed the city's resources and inspired plenty of crime,
most of which police could not investigate. Holmes was among

(24:57):
those who took advantage. He planned a he head for
the many visitors who would be searching for lodging as
close as possible to the fair, knowing that among them
would be the most vulnerable prey, single naive women on
their own, who would easily succumb to a successful and
charming doctor. He presented himself as a graduate of a
prestigious medical school and a man of means. His first

(25:19):
Chicago employment was as a prescription clerk at sixty third
in South Wallace Streets, but he soon took over from
missus E. S. Holton, who then went to California with
her daughter. Indeed, No one ever heard from them again,
but Holmes took control of the shop. Across the road
was a property on sixty third Street, which he bought.

(25:39):
Soon he was gathering funds through murder and fraudulent schemes
to build his three story, one hundred room castle, as
he referred to it. When he eventually felt the need
to leave, he tried to burn it down to collect insurance.
In this building, investigators now found evidence of even greater
crimes than swindling. In bigamy. Holmes had offered rooms to

(26:00):
young women arriving to attend the fair, but many of
those women associated with them had disappeared. In addition, he
had employed a number of young women who had also disappeared.
From what could be reconstructed, it seems that Holmes had
tortured and murdered these women, disposing of their corpses in
his furnace in the cellar, or defleshing them and selling

(26:20):
the skeletons to medical schools. Scheckter describes what the place
was like. Holmes's castle included sound proofed sleeping chambers with
peep holes, as best as padded walls, gas pipes, sliding walls,
and vents that homes controlled from another room. Many of
the rooms had low ceilings and trap doors in the floors,

(26:41):
with ladders leading to smaller rooms below. The building had
secret passages, false floors, rooms with torture equipment, and especially
equipped surgery. There were also greased shoots that emptied into
a two level cellar in which Holmes had installed a
large furnace. There is even an aspe justus line chamber
with gas pipes and evidence of something having been burned inside.

(27:05):
It was believed that Holmes placed his chosen victims into
the special chambers, into which he then pumped lethal gas
controlled from his own bedroom, and then watched them react.
Apparently he gained some fiendish pleasure from this activity. Sometimes
he'd ignite the gas to incinerate them, or perhaps even
place them in the elasticity determinator, an elongated bed with

(27:28):
straps to see how far the human body could be stretched.
When finished, he might have slid the corpses down the
chutes into the cellar, where vats of acid and other
chemicals awaited them. Many more details about Holmes's activities here
can be found in Scheckter's and Larsen's books. Investigators discovered
several complete skeletons and numerous incinerated bone fragments in the

(27:49):
Chicago Castle, including the pelvis of a fourteen year old.
According to Blundell, there was also a blood stained noose
and a vault filled with quicklime. Yet Holmes insisted that
he had nothing to do with any murders. Those people
had either taken their own lives, he claimed, or were
killed by some one else. Nevertheless, newspaper headlines described the

(28:12):
chamber of horrors. The Chicago Tribune announced that the castle
is a tomb, and the Philadelphia Inquirer described bones removed
from the Charnel House. It wasn't long before true crime
pulp paperbacks were published. To slake the public's thirst and
to turn a profit, authors searched far and wide for
even more murders that Holmes may have committed. As far

(28:35):
back as eighteen seventy nine, Chicago police estimated his toll
to be as high as one hundred and fifty. In Philadelphia,
the Homes Museum opened to the curious, but Holmes was ready.
He'd always gotten his way with his gift of the gab,
and he figured he could do so again. Despite how
the odds seemed stacked against him, he offered his memoir

(29:00):
to exonerate himself. Holmes, now thirty four, penned Holmes's own story,
in which the alleged multi murderer and arch conspirator tells
of the twenty two tragic deaths and disappearances in which
he is said to be implicated. He included his supposed
prison diary as an appendix, which Larsen believes he invented
rather than kept as a daily log. The diary as

(29:22):
a boring rendition of his routine, probably intended to make
him appear to be an ordinary Joe with an interest
in books, and presented as a means for his betterment.
He viewed the whole as a literary work as befitted
his narcissistic temperament, and claimed that he had written it
with mature deliberation and against the protest of his attorney
and acquaintances. He claimed that the murders he had been

(29:45):
accused of were a blatant attempt to ensure that his
trial would not be fair and impartial. He wanted a
formally and publicly deny them all. Thus, he set out
to offer a narrative of his entire life, including a
full disclosure of his dealings with a Pizel family. My
sole object in this publication is to vindicate my name

(30:05):
from the horrible aspersions cast upon it, he wrote, and
to appeal to a fair minded American public for a
suspension of judgment. In his memoir, which he got a
journalist to assist him to publish, Holmes described Gilmanton Academy,
New Hampshire, the town in which he grew up, as
Hermann Webster Mudget. He was born there in eighteen sixty

(30:25):
one and claims to have experienced an ordinary life, with
an ordinary set of parents and a normal schoolboy routine.
Larsen disputes this, having learned from experts that psychopathic children
are generally involved in conduct disorders and juvenile delinquency, but
this is not always the case. Generalizations offer poor ways
to get at the truth of individual cases, and since

(30:48):
there's no evidence either way, we cannot know what Holmes's
childhood was really like. He describes a turning point in
his life as the day some older boys forced him
into a village doctor's office and faced a with a skeleton.
It was a wicked and dangerous thing to do to
a child of tender years and health Holmes says, Though
he admits that the experience cured him of his fears,

(31:10):
he attributes his desire to go into medicine to this
memorable incident. He also discusses his childhood lies in pranks
and how his father punished him. It was in college,
he says, where he did his first truly dishonest act.
He represented a fraudulent book, earning money from it for
his expenses. He received a medical school diploma, he says,

(31:31):
from the University of Michigan in ann Arbor, and then
opened a practice. He then attempted, unsuccessfully to commit his
first insurance fraud, helping someone to fake his own death
with a purloined cadaver. From there, he served a stint
as a doctor in an insane asylum, which haunted him
for years. He changed his name to H. H. Holmes
and posed as a pharmacist in Chicago. That was an

(31:54):
ominous start to his career. Holmes continues in his memoir
with a Poor Me Fashion, describing the ills that befell
him and the hardships he endured before meeting Ben Pitzel
in eighteen eighty eight. They fell into a partnership that
involved various pursuits that financially benefited them both. Holmes also
speaks about some of the missing women associated with them

(32:15):
so that he can assure readers that they did things
such as announcing they were going to leave and disappearing
on their own. He also indicated that many young women
were alive and well and better off for having known him.
As for Minnie Williams, who had disappeared without a trace,
Holmes offered a story of a woman who had fallen
on to difficult times, had an illegitimate child, and was suicidal.

(32:38):
She had an abortion, felt terribly ashamed, and left everyone
she knew. She served as a secretary for a time
and often ate meals in his building, which he claimed
would account for any bone remains that might be found
in the furnace. His sister Nettie arrived, also referred to
as Nanny, and in short order died. It seemed that

(32:59):
Minnie had decided to that Nettie fancied Holmes, so she
struck her with a stool and killed her. Having often
suffered from bouts of mania, she was quite without restraint
in such matters. Holmes helped Manie to place the body
in a trunk and dump it into Lake Michigan. But
from my sight it has never passed, writes Holmes about
the incident, Nor has there been a day an hour

(33:21):
since that awful night that I would not have given
my life if by doing so that of Nettie Williams
could have been returned. Holmes then broke everything off with Minnie.
She went away, and he burned the clothing she left
behind or gave it to Pitzel. No one heard from
Minnie again, except for Holmes, supposedly, who said he helped

(33:42):
her to handle her land investments in Texas. He also
describes how he first met the Pizel family and the
business ventures into which he entered with Benjamin Pitzel. In
the end, he insists that he had no motive to
kill anyone, and says that he was always quite generous,
so that even average could not count, as it was
inconsistent with his character. He also did not have a

(34:05):
bad temper and had made no dishonest transactions. He also
did not believe he was insane, having no mental illness
in his family and no finding of it from doctors
who had examined him. Thus far, of the Pizel situation,
Holmes said the Pizel was worth more to him alive
than dead, so why would he have engaged in murder?

(34:25):
In conclusion, he writes, I wish to say that I
am but a very ordinary man, and to have planned
and executed the stupendous amount of wrongdoing that has been
attributed to me would have been wholly beyond my power.
He asked the general public to withhold judgment of his
guilt or innocence until he could disprove them at his trial.
He would also work to bring justice to those for

(34:48):
whose wrongdoings I am today suffering. However, this publication was
so transparently self serving that readers preferred the more lurid
tales provided in newspapers. No one really believed Holmes's own story,
although it is an interesting collector's item for criminologists. Holmes's
attorneys attempted to get his trial continued, but were unsuccessful.

(35:11):
In addition, there is a struggle between Chicago and Philadelphia authorities,
says Blundell, as to who would get to try him first,
but he remained in Philadelphia. The trial commenced as scheduled
on October twenty eighth. It lasted five days. On the
first day Holmes tried to defend himself, but proved unable
to establish points in his favor. The best account of

(35:34):
the trial comes from the speech reprinted in Guyer's book
from the district attorney George S. Graham, who recounts it
in detail, yet he does not include some of the
more interesting events. For example, from a distance. A phrenologist,
John L. Cappan made an analysis of Holmes, which was
published during the trial in the New York World. He

(35:56):
described the repulsive face and pointed out that great murderers
have blue eyes. Holmes's expression, Capin said was cruel and inhuman,
and his ears twisted out of shape stamped him as
a criminal. This was all evidence of devilry and vice.
In other words, cap'n convicted a man not yet found

(36:17):
guilty based on appearances alone. At the trial, also described
in detail by Scheckter, Holmes requested to defend himself. Judge
Arnold allowed it, saying it's your constitutional right to try
your own case. Holmes questioned prospective jury members, at which
point his team of attorneys left the court room. Holmes

(36:38):
demonstrated the coolness with which he handled stress and tried
rejecting each person who said he had read the papers,
but the judge pointed out that this was not considered
a cause for challenge in any event, This all occurred
well before the Supreme Court would rule about the unfairness
of pre trial publicity. The jury was seated and the
trial Proceededsames's request to defend himself, Scheckter says, was unprecedented.

(37:04):
No accused murderer had done it before in the United States,
so several lawyers and law students attended. A reporter for
the Philadelphia Inquirer described Holmes's performance in court as vigorous
and remarkable. He was deferential to the judge but nasty
to the prosecutor. He asked for an analysis of the
liquid that he was accused of using as a poison

(37:26):
for the children, which the DA did not have in
his possession, and he wanted the most recent work done
on toxicology, claiming that as a doctor, he himself could
analyze it, though his credentials were false. This left the
impression of a man who was prepared to use science
to exonerate himself. Yet Holmes often deflected the questioning with

(37:46):
forays into minutia, and he frequently squabbled with a prosecutor,
who was likely disturbed at having to spar in court
as an equal with the defendant. Holmes made an error when,
after Pitzel's corpse was described in gruesome detail, he requested
a lunch break as he was hungry. He appeared to
have no sense of sorrow over the supposed suicide of

(38:07):
a partner and friend. For the rest of that day,
while he handled his questioning in a professional manner, he
failed to elicit any points to support his innocence. The
professional witnesses all concluded that Peitzel could not, as Holmes claimed,
have committed suicide. The judge ordered an evening session over
Holmes's protest. Holmes claimed that he was feeling ill, but

(38:29):
it was clear that he was failing to establish his case.
The evening session opened with a surprise. Holmes asked that
the court allow his two defense attorneys to re enter
the case, and with that he relinquished his role as
a criminal lawyer. While he now had competent counsel, he
had probably hurt his case between his antics and his

(38:49):
obvious fatigue. By the end of the first day, the
jury had a good look at the defendant's loss of
confidence and inability to shake the strongest witnesses. He may
not have admitted his guilt, but his actions indicated that
he had admitted defeat. He got up only once to
examine another witness, his latest paramour and third wife, who

(39:09):
testified against him, using a heavy dose of emotion, as
if stricken by her betrayal. He nevertheless failed to move
her to change her testimony about his behavior. On the
day that Pizel was allegedly murdered, the prosecution made its
case quite elaborately, prepared to show his activities from thirty
five witnesses from the various places Holmes had gone after

(39:30):
the Pizel murder, but the judge had ruled that the
trial must be limited to the Pizel murder, so Graham
showed how they made Pizel's identification, and adding in whatever
they were allowed about Holmes's reprehensible behavior. They proved with
doctors that the chloroform that had supposedly killed Pizel by
self administration actually had been forced into him after he

(39:51):
was already dead. So Pizel was dead and had not
died from natural causes or his own hand. Given Holmes's
admitt about being with them there was really no other
choice for jurors. In addition, Carrie Pizel had won the
court room with her mournful rendition of learning that her
children were dead. In his closing argument, which lasted more

(40:13):
than two hours, Graham called Holmes the most dangerous man
in the world and asked jurors not to be afraid
to do their duty and operate like honest men. In
the end, the jury convicted Homes of Benjamin Pisel's murder,
and the judge sentenced him to death by hanging. After
his conviction, and as his attorneys prepared an appeal for

(40:34):
new trial, which failed, Holmes took up the pen again
to make a confession. Largely inspired by a promise of
a ten thousand dollars payment from the Hearst newspaper syndicate.
He published it in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was his
third full blown tale to date about his activities with
a Pizel incident. Aiming now to become the most notorious

(40:54):
killer in the world, he claimed to have killed more
than one hundred people, apparently have second thoughts, he reduced
that number to twenty seven, including Pitzel and his children.
He insisted that he could not help what he'd done.
I was born with the evil One as my sponsor,
beside the bed where I was ushered into the world.
He lamented the reading of his death warrant had been

(41:17):
carried out, and he faced execution by hanging on May seventh.
It now seemed a fitting time. If ever, he wrote
to make known the details of the twenty seven murders,
of which it would be useless to longer say I'm
not guilty. He admitted that there was overwhelming proof for
his complicity in these deaths, and said that he would
address only those cases that had been investigated, and hoped

(41:39):
the people would not therefore suppose from his silence on
others that he must be guilty. It seemed to him
sufficient that Detective Geire had gone over his life with
a fine tooth comb, so to speak, and there was
really no place to hide. Holmes claimed that he wanted
to make the confession at this point for several reasons,
and he chose the Philadelphia Inquirer as medium for making

(42:01):
his revelations public. He assured his readers that he was
not seeking attention, and that the entire enterprise was distasteful
to him, as he admitted to the murders. He said
he was thus branding myself as the most detestable criminal
of modern times. Indeed he was. He sensed that his
own countenance was changing as he sat in prison, and

(42:22):
that he looked more satanic than before. I've become afflicted
with that dread disease, rare but terrible, a malformation. My
head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I
believe fully that I'm growing to resemble the devil, and
that similitude is almost completed. He self diagnosed acquired homicidal

(42:43):
mania and degeneracy, which meant he was a moral idiot.
The criminological theories at the time were fueled by Cesarre Lombroso,
an Italian anthropologist and professor at the University of Turin.
By eighteen seventy six, Lombroso had published Lumo de Lancuente,
believing that human behavior could be classified with objective tests.

(43:06):
Lombroso was convinced that certain people were born criminals, identifiable
by specific physical traits such as bulging brows, long arms,
and ape like noses. They were throwbacks to more primitive times,
and he called them degenerates. Lombroso's ideas had spread quickly
across Europe and America, supported by the new evolutionary thinking.

(43:28):
Thus Holmes fell into this erroneous diagnostic mania. In another
decade or so, Lombroso would be discredited. Yet, in keeping
with a theory, Holmes saw a prominence on one side
of his head and a corresponding diminution on the other side.
Also a deficiency in his nose and ear, and the
lengthening or shortening of various limbs. One criminologist, tou Psalm,

(43:52):
pronounced him guilty just from his appearance. Holmes said he
was confessing in part to justify the scientific deductions. Little
did he not, oh, they weren't scientific at all. But
his motive was more likely to bring attention to himself
and to wallow in one last flight of grandiosity. No
doubt he enjoyed the idea of having an effect on
an audience. His first murder, he admitted, was by overdose

(44:15):
of laudanum of a former schoolmate for insurance money. Holmes claimed,
probably falsely, that it had given him a terrible guilty conscience,
but he'd then developed an appetite for blood. The second murder,
he said, was accidental when he got into a physical
altercation with a man who owed him money. Then he
killed a few people to sell to a corpse dealer

(44:37):
for payment of twenty five to forty five dollars apiece.
Later he lost touch with this dealer, so he sometimes
buried victims than the dirt floor of his offices. Some
victims he poisoned, some he bludgeoned, and a few he
closed into his vaults for gassing and aphyxia, a slow
and lingering death. Most of these cases involved money, threat

(44:58):
of exposure, or some other of enrichment for Holmes. Sometimes
he used confederates as accomplices. In one case, when he
attempted to murder three young women at the same time
with chloroform, they escaped and turned him in. Holmes was arrested,
but inexplicably not prosecuted for attempted murder or even for assault.

(45:19):
In some cases, Holmes either did not know or could
not recall the name of a victim or near victim.
Readers were most interested in what Holmes might say about
the Williams sisters and the Pizel family, and for both
he provided quite a few details, although how much is
true is anyone's guess. Holmes made a point to affirm
the Christian character of Manny Williams, and he retracted many

(45:41):
of the statements he had made about her, regarding her
state of mind and her alleged murder of her sister.
She was never in an asylum or secreted away to
protect her reputation. He now said he'd first met her
in eighteen eighty eight in New York, and then encountered
her five years later in Chicago. He persuaded her to
give him several sizable sums of money, and then maneuvered

(46:02):
her to invite her sister to Chicago so he could
get a bead on their property in Texas. Nannie or
Nettie assigned her worldly goods to him, he said. After that,
Holmes writes, she was immediately killed in order that no
one in or about the castle should know about her
having been there, save the man who burned her clothing
to his chagrin. She did leave something behind, her footprint

(46:24):
on the door of the vault, which she produced during
an unsuccessful struggle to survive. This was how Chicago authorities
hoped to prove she was murdered. Holmes told Minnie that
her sister had given up her journey north. He then
secured Minnie's property in his own name and killed her
as well. He poisoned her and burned her in the
cellar of a house that he owned. He tried to

(46:45):
implicate her as the murderer of her sister and the
Pizel children, which he was now repudiating. This is the
saddest and most heinous of any of my crimes, he commented. Next,
he turned his attention to Pitzel. Holmes indicated that from
the first hour they met, he knew that he would
kill the man. Everything he did for Pizel that seemed

(47:06):
to be a kindness was merely a way to gain
his confidence. Pitzel met his death on September second, eighteen
ninety four. Holmes wrote fake letters from Missus Pitzel to
show him, which precipitated about of drinking. Holmes watched and
waited until he was able to come upon Pizel in
a drunken stupor in the middle of the day. He
packed his bags in readiness to leave, and then went

(47:28):
to where Pitzel lay in bed bound him, saturated his
clothing and face with benzine, and lit a match. He
literally burned his former accomplice alive. Apparently, Pizel cried out
and prayed for mercy, begging Holmes to end his suffering
with a speedy death, all of which had on me
no effect. When Pizel finally expired, Holmes extinguished the flames,

(47:52):
removed the ropes, and poured chloroform into his stomach to
make the death appear to be accidentally brought about by
an explosion. That way, the insurance company would quickly pay
the full amount of the claim. He left the body
in a position that exposed it to the sun for
however long it would be before some one had found him,
presumably to further deform it for difficulty and identification. I

(48:14):
left the house, he wrote, without the slightest feeling of
remorse for my terrible acts. However, Holmes said, the chloroform
apparently also had the effect of depriving the tissues of alcohol,
so that no one would know that Pizel had been
in a drunken state. At any rate, Pizel was still recognizable.
More bizarre, Holmes says that three weeks later he visited

(48:36):
the grave where Pizel was buried and pretended to be
acquiring samples for a microscopic analysis, he said he found
that cutting into the corpse with a knife was inordinately satisfying.
As for young Howard Pizel, Holmes also had a story
to tell. He had every intention of murdering the three
Pizel children, so he hid them in a hotel until

(48:57):
he could find a way that would not draw suspicion.
After a week, he poisoned the boy and then cut
him into pieces small enough to go through the door
of a stove he had purchased. He felt nothing about
these acts, only the pleasury gained from killing another person.
He then took the girls to Chicago, Detroit, and Toronto. There,
Alison Nellipitzel met their fate. They were the twenty sixth

(49:20):
and twenty seventh of his victims. He made them believe
they would soon be reunited with their mother, whom he
had also brought to Toronto. In some diabolical game, while
he plodded how he'd get rid of them, he compelled
them both to get inside a large trunk and close
them inside, leaving an air hole. He then returned and
pumped gas into the hole to kill the girls, even

(49:41):
as their mother was traveling on to New York he
dug shallow graves, removed their clothing, and dumped them without
a thought. He considered that for eight years before their deaths,
I had been almost as much a father to them
as though they had been my own children. He had
a plan to end Missus Pizel's life, along with those
of her two remaining children, with nitroglycerin, but he was

(50:03):
arrested in Boston before he managed to achieve this. He
closed his confession by saying that his last public utterance
would be of remorse for these vile acts. He did
not expect anyone to really believe them, and Geyer later
says in his book that Holmes's account, published in many
papers on April twelfth, eighteen ninety six, was so inconsistent

(50:23):
with the facts that they had gathered about the Pizel
children's demise that it was at once discredited in police circles. Then,
in one quick move, according to Geier, Holmes recanted the confession,
and in fact, it was learned that several of his
victims were not dead at all, or died in ways
clearly unassociated with him. When told by police that his

(50:44):
tale was untrue, he supposedly said, of course, it's not true,
but the newspapers want a sensation, and they got it. Nevertheless,
police did believe what he had said about the murder
of Benjamin Pizel. Geyer found it vile that Holmes would
not tell the truth even as he stood on the
brink of eternity. On May seventh, eighteen ninety six, H. H.

(51:06):
Holmes went to the hangman's noose. His last meal was
boiled eggs, dry toast, and coffee. Even at the noose,
he changed his story. He claimed to have killed only
two people and tried to say more, but at ten
thirteen the trap door opened and he was hanged. Blundell
says that it took him fully fifteen minutes to strangle

(51:26):
to death on the gallows. Afraid of body snatchers who
might capitalize on his corpse, Holmes had made a request.
He wanted no autopsy, and he instructed his attorneys to
see that he was buried in a coffin filled with cement.
This was taken to Holy Cross Cemetery south of Philadelphia,
and two Pinkerton guards stood over the grave during the
night before the body was finally interred into a double grave,

(51:49):
also filled with cement. No stone was erected to market,
Larson states, although its presence is recorded on a cemetery registry.
Holmes's attorneys had turned down an offer of five thousand
dollars for his body, and even refused his brain to
Philadelphia's Wistar Institute, which hoped to have its experts analyzed
the organ for better understanding of the criminal mind. Larsen

(52:11):
recounts a series of strange events afterward that gave credence
to the rumors that Holmes was satanic, including several weird
deaths and a fire at the DA's office that destroyed
everything there save a photograph of homes. During this case,
another American phenomenon arose from society's fascination with sensational crime.

(52:31):
Thousands of people lined up to see the Chicago murder site,
so a former police officer remodeled the infamous building as
Holmes's Horror Castle, an attraction that offered guided tours to
the suffocation chambers and torture rooms. But before it opened,
it mysteriously burned to the ground. So many people who
rented rooms from homes during the fair had actually gone

(52:53):
missing that sensational estimates of his victims reached around two
hundred and some people perpetuated this unsubstantiated toll. Even today.
It's likely that Holmes' own figure from his recanted confession
is low, but there's no way to know just how
many he actually killed. So miss book about six Things

(54:13):
Undublicty with People, and they still miss book affort dixtings
Undublicty with People,

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🏰 "Murder Castle: H.H. Holmes' House of Horrors"

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