The Werewolf: H.H Holmes and His Murder Castle // MONSTERS SERIES
Step inside the legend of H.H. Holmes and the chilling labyrinth he built during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. We'll follow a string of disappearances through the “Murder Castle” he built: a three story building with the sole purpose of killing as many people as discreetly as possible. Was Holmes a criminal mastermind, or has time twisted the tale?
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SOURCES
Devil in the White City (ebook) by Erik Larson
The Three Confessions of H. H. Holmes (ebook) by Adam Selzer
H. H. Holmes - Master of Illusion - since-removed Tru TV narrative on Holmes, access via Wayback Machine
Exploring the Site of the Infamous Murder Castle
Did Serial Killer H. H. Holmes Really Build a Murder Castle?
H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil by Adam Selzer (Google Books preview)
Forensic Scholars Today article on Holmes (some inaccuracies)
Interesting Reddit Thread on Murder Castle
On the Trail of the Arch-Fiend
Holmes Exhumed, Yes It Was Him
130 Years Later, Was Holmes’s Murder Castle a Myth?
Post Office Now On Murder Castle Site
The Shocking Truth About Dr. Holton
AskHistorians Holmes Debunking Thread
More Holmes Exhumation Coverage
The Enduring Mystery of H. H. Holmes - Smithsonian Mag
Rebecca Frost’s “H. H. Holmes Victims” posts
Top Ten Myths About H. H. Holmes
Rolling Stone Covers Holmes Exhumation
LOC Scan of Hard Copy of Holmes Autobiography
Holmes & the History of Self-Representation
Holmes’s New Hampshire Connections
More on the Lizzie/Quinian Angle
TRANSCRIPT
It’s rare that I can’t sleep after researching an episode, but this story kept me up all night last night.
Because I kept having nightmares where I was trapped in the murder castle that is at the center of our story today. The hotel that was built for one man to live out his darkest fantasies.
So consider that your warning before you listen to today’s episode, because it’s a dark one.
If you're interested in true crime that reads like gothic horror, real monsters that mirror mythological ones, and cases that will genuinely keep you up at night, you're in the right place. You're just like me. We upload once a week, so make sure to subscribe. And this month we’re talking about some of the worst monsters to ever walk the earth, like who I’m going to tell you about today, so make sure check out our special Monsters playlist with new episodes all October.
It was a cool and clear day in Chicago around the turn of the 19th century when a group of detectives walked down the dark steps into the basement of a looming, three story building owned by a man named HH Holmes.
Holmes himself had been a mystery, stories about a charming man with a string of missing women connected to him had travelled around Chicago, and now, Holmes himself was missing. Could this place hold any clues, they wondered?
The basement was huge and dark. But investigators noticed it was also full of strange things, like surgical tools, and old rags. There was even a gurney tucked away in a dark corner. What on earth did a guy need a gurney in the basement for? Next to the gurney was a patch of churned earth, like something had recently been buried.
The detectives had a bad feeling about what had occurred here, and one of them went upstairs to Holme’s office, where his walk in vault was.
But when he opened the door to the vault, he found a room with no shelves, no money, just barely big enough for a person to turn around in. And there inside, on the vault door, was a footprint, like someone had been locked inside and kicked as hard as they could in a desperate attempt to get out.
The detective pictured a young woman stepping inside the vault, laughing maybe, because Holme’s had told her to “Try the acoustics,” and she wanted to be polite. He could see The door swinging shut behind her. The latch turning. And then the pounding on the door as she tried to escape.
The truth was, there were clues all over this place about what happened to Holmes and the women who went missing in his wake. And it wouldn’t be long before it was dubbed by the media as a “Murder Castle” shortly after this discovery.
But who was HH Holmes, the man at the center of this mystery? And how did he come to build a murder castle?
Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. As always, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore, and today we are diving into the final episode of our Monster series, this time, taking a closer look at one of the most notorious american serial killers, HH Holmes. If you are new here, welcome to our community of the Darkly Curious. I love making Heart Starts Pounding every week, and I am so thankful for each and every one of you that help make that possible.
Now, before we dive in, a quick reminder, there is a special limited time extended free trial for HSP Premium going on on Apple Podcasts, so if you want a full 30 days to check out our back catalog of monthly bonus episodes, archived episodes, and more you have until the end of October which is rapidly appraoching
Also This Friday is also the finale of the special re-release of The Timekeeper, our horror audio drama so if you need to catch up you have two more days! Ok, we have a lot to cover so let’s get to it.
Maybe you’ve read the book Devil in the White city about today’s Monster that we’re going to focus on–HH Holmes, I know I have and I love that book, but we actually put this whole episode together using completely different historical sources, which I’m very proud of so this is probably going to be a slightly different, but still historical telling of this morbid tale, so please, even if you know this story,comment if you’ve learned something new.
Now, this spooky season we’ve discussed Vampires, Sirens, and Boogeymen, but I want to talk today about a monster that blends in to society more than any of them. One that walks amongst us, until a full moon rises and changes them into a beast. Because to me, that’s what HH Holmes represents. A man with an insatiable monster living inside of him. A werewolf.
Werewolf lore might be the oldest of all of our monster folklore. There’s a wolf transformation that happens in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and that was written 1500 years before the Odyssey, where Siren folklore originated
The transformation of humans into wolves was typically a punishment from deities in early Western folklore—in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar is said to have turned a shepherd who was her former lover into a wolf as a way of breaking things off with him, causing him to be attacked by his own sheepdogs
But over time, this lore changed. The myth comes a little closer to its present-day form in the Norse Saga of the Volsungs from the 13th century, which includes the tale of a father and son living in exile in the forest, who steal enchanted wolf skins from two sleeping men and are transformed into wolves for ten days, enabling them to rampage through the forest killing many human men.
And by the European Middle Ages, wolf transformations stopped being the domain of fables about the whims of the gods, and became a very real fear shared by peasants and scholars alike.
Just like belief in witches became a proxy for society to deal with behavior they found socially unacceptable in women, the belief in werewolves became a proxy for society to deal with behavior they could not comprehend in men. And thus started the werewolf trials. Where 18 men and 13 women across Europe stood trial for their crimes as werewolves.
One of these people was Giles Garnier, the “Werewolf of Dole.” In the late 16th century, children in and around Dole, France began disappearing, with their bodies sometimes turning up mutilated or partially consumed. People presumed this was the work of a werewolf.
A hunting party deputized to catch the wolf discovered local hermit Giles Garnier crouched over a child’s body, and captured him.
Giles confessed to being a werewolf and said he’d made a deal with a demon to obtain werewolf ointment so he could more easily hunt food for himself and his wife, not realizing it would cause him to eat human children, too. He was burned at the stake in 1574.
Over time, the werewolf paranoia has calmed down, and today the myth is tied to high school boys. Less unexplainable carnage committed by town hermits, and more “where the hell you been loca?!” if you catch my drift.
But in the late 1800’s, as police walked through HH Holmes’ murder castle, they wondered how someone who fit so well into society, who was described as charming and witty, could have committed the atrocities he had, like a beast had been unleashed from inside him while no one was looking.
Just like how Giles Garnier left a trail of blood behind him, so did HH Holmes. Which is why in our monster series this month, he’s our werewolf.
But, let’s start at the beginning of his story.
H.H. Holmes was born as Herman Webster Mudgett, on May 16th 1861, to a farmer and a former schoolteacher in charming Gilmanton, New Hampshire. He was the third of five siblings in a family well-off enough to send him to school at the age of five. Both his parents were devout Methodists, who took “spare the rod, spoil the child” literally.
His father was a heavy drinker who beat Herman and denied him food if he misbehaved. His mother preferred to weaponize guilt, waking him in the middle of the night to kneel in front of him and pray for his immortal soul. From infancy onward, both of his parents held kerosene-soaked rags over his face to quiet him when he cried.
Today, we know that exposure to kerosene fumes can have negative neurological effects, in addition to causing physical complications like pneumonia and vomiting. But I doubt his schoolyard bullies were considering that when they were picking on him for being an odd kid.
He may have suffered from strabismus, also known as crossed eyes, causing him to avoid direct eye contact. Adults often accused him of lying with no proof other than his refusal to look them in the eye.
But also, there was his strange obsession with death and dismemberment.
Some say this started when Holmes was dragged to a local doctors office in 1866 by two young boys. They wanted to scare their strange little classmate by locking him in the office, alone with the real human skeleton that hung in the corner. But instead, seeing the human remains, the grinning skull, the dark empty eye sockets, awoke something in the boy. He left, not in tears, but with a dream of the day when he’d have his very own collection of shiny scalpels and the skills to wield them.
And Holmes stuck to that dream. After deciding to become a doctor, he developed his surgical skills by capturing stray pets and operating on them without anesthesia. When the animals died—as they invariably did—he kept parts of their bodies as mementos.
Young Herman’s morbid impulses may have gone far beyond dissections and animal abuse. His childhood friend, Tom, died in a fall while the two were exploring an abandoned house. At the time, it was assumed to be a tragic accident—but people in the community always wondered if odd little Herman Mudgett saw Tom perched on a ledge and gave him a good shove. From an early age, people could see the darkness brewing inside of the boy, they just never could have anticipated how dark it would get.
At age 17, Holmes married Clara A. Lovering, a farmer’s daughter whose family was better-off financially than his own. Clara paid his tuition, even after their son Robert was born when they were just 18 years old. And holmes never really was the guy to say thank you for a kind deed like this. He didn’t really say much to Clara- or his son for that matter- at all. He had been completely consumed by his new path.
See, holmes was obsessed with medical school, and even his classmates noticed his extraordinary enthusiasm for human dissection.
and enthusiasm for corpses went far beyond what was normal among med students at the time. Early in his studies, he was delighted when a professor let him bring home a dead infant. he left the corpse under his bed for so long that it began exuding black fluid, which nearly got him kicked out of the boardinghouse where he was staying. But as odd as he was, Holmes had a way of sweet talking people, and he was able to charm the woman who ran the boarding house into letting him stay.
but it didn’t help that his grades at this time were really not impressive, he was on thin ice at the school. It truly seems like it was the corpses that were keeping him interested in medicine. He loved the specimens in jars on his professors tables, he was obsessed with the fact that students had to go to the local cemeteries and dig up their own bodies for dissections. But other than that, the idea of opening up his own practice and helping people in his community just seemed…..unappealing
But so did life at home. Out in the world. Holmes was a charmer, but inside of his marriage, he was a monster. He would tell Clara all the time that he thought he could have done better if he waited until after medical school to choose a wife. Clara was seen with black eyes on several occasions after arguing with her husband. But some point in 1883, Clara had had enough. You might be fooling everyone else, Herman Mudgett, but I know who you really are. One evening, she took Robert and moved back to New Hampshire.
Holmes now found himself at a crossroads. Devoting his life to medicine was still an option, despite his poor grades. Still, there were plenty of villages in need of a doctor, and most patients wouldn’t ask about his grades.
But another option had presented itself. Back home in New Hampshire, Herman was considered odd, untrustworthy, and low-class. In Michigan, people saw him as handsome, bold, and charismatic. Women found his waxed mustache and forward, flirtatious behavior attractive.
He was charming, he found it easy to gain people’s trust, and he knew how to get ahold of human bodies… soon enough, he put two and two together, and came up with a way to make far more money than he ever could as a doctor. Insurance fraud.
Here’s how his scams worked: he’d recruit an accomplice and take out a large life insurance policy in their name, with himself as the beneficiary. Then he’d steal a body from the medical school and mutilate it badly enough that it was unrecognizable. That was the fun part. The last step was to report the insured person as dead, presenting the disfigured cadaver as proof. No one could prove who the body actually belonged to. So Holmes and his “dead” accomplice could then split the insurance payout.
One successful score netted him $12,500, the equivalent of more than $400,000 today. A country doctor couldn’t expect to make that kind of money in a decade.
This new money making scheme blended everything he liked together. Cadavers, confidence, and money. But he knew that if he was going to continue on this path, he’d have to go somewhere where he’d blend in more. Somewhere where his macabre crimes wouldn’t be noticed. A big city.
In 1886 he started going by a new name: Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, or H. H. Holmes for short. And armed with a medical degree and a new identity, 24-year-old Dr. H. H. Holmes made his way to Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper and the epitome of the Gilded Age, where many of the country’s most successful titans of industry made their fortunes.
Enormous wealth alongside total squalor, plus a rapidly growing population, made Chicago the perfect hunting ground for a con man with no conscience. There were always more rich people to scam. And there were always more poor people desperate enough to become his accomplices.
To ingratiate himself into the area, Holmes began working as a pharmacist at a drugstore located in the Chicago suburb of Englewood. His new boss was Dr. Elizabeth Holton. She had studied at the Woman’s Medical College of Chicago, one of a handful of women’s medical schools in the United States.
However, Within a few months, somehow Holmes was running the drugstore, and Dr. Holton was nowhere to be found.
There are a few different stories about how Holmes came to own Dr. Holton’s business, ranging from proposing marriage, then refusing to follow through after she’d signed over the store, to killing her and her daughter. But Dr. Holton was already married, and public records indicate she ended up outliving Holmes, so it’s likely he simply bought her out of the business.
But the drugstore was just a stepping stone. He already had his eye on a new scam.
Across the street from, and belonging to the drugstore, there was a vacant lot of land that he was now in possession of. And though there was nothing there, Holmes had a vision, and an insatiable appetite. Like werewolf that can’t control when he changes shape and feasts on victims, Holmes pictured a place where all of his darkest impulses could be acted upon.
His vision was for a hotel, one that would welcome in the swarm of people coming to chicago to start new lives. People who were arriving solo, no family to check in on them. People who would not be missed.
At once, he got to work on what would be called his “Murder Castle”
Holmes bought the lot on credit, saying he was building a hotel for the 1893 World’s Fair. He then took a second loan against the lot to pay off the first, both of which he knew he’d never really pay off. It didn’t matter though; he put the property under the name of his new “wife,” Myrta Belknap—though he was still legally married to Clara—so when the bills came, collectors would chase Myrta and her mother while he vanished.
Holmes ran out of money from just buying the materials for the building, and didn’t have anything left to pay the actual workers, so he kept construction going with a revolving con. He lured contractors to start without full payment, dismissed them when they pressed for wages, and hired new crews who didn’t yet know his reputation.
The building itself was a jumble of a bunch of different things—drugstore at street level, rental rooms above, a third floor that never opened
But The constant turnover had a side benefit: No one ever worked on it long enough to see what the entire thing looked like on the inside once completed, but Period tabloids interviewed various workmen and associates about the parts they had worked on. The only full picture of the “murder castle” is from those interviews, and they painted a very, very morbid picture. Of a place that wasn’t just a boarding house for people coming to chicago, but as a place where murder could be done swiftly and for enjoyment. Here’s just some of what they said, according to those tabloids:
There was a giant stove on the third floor, eight feet tall and three feet wide. Why there needed to be a stove up there, on the floor where no one would ever visit, was anyone’s guess.
In the basement, one worker had to install vats of quicklime. Quicklime was used in cement, but is also extremely corrosive, and was used back in the day to dissolve bodies.
Another worker mentioned that there was a special dumbwaiter set up to carry cargo from the sealed-off third floor to the equally secluded basement. The worker found it strange that it didn’t stop at the more accessible floors in between, as if it was for moving something in total secret, just to the most shadowy places of the castle.
The worst part might have been the basement, where it was reported Holmes had built a torture room. According to papers, there was an operating room for medical experiments, and even lethal gas jets that allowed him to kill or incapacitate hotel guests in their rooms, while watching through secret peepholes as they struggled.
He also had A machine called the “elasticity determinator” that was designed to stretch out human bodies to their maximum capacity, eventually tearing them limb from limb, straight out of the medieval torture playbook. Holmes even invented an alarm system that alerted him whenever people moved about the castle, to keep “guests” from escaping prematurely.
Then, there was the walk-in safe in his office, the one where police found the single footprint. This was a place he could lock women in and wait for them to suffocate. It was easy for him to ask a woman helping him run the business to run into the safe and grab him something, and then close the heavy, metal door behind her and lock it from the outside. It would only take a few hours for her to suffocate, and if that didn’t work, a few days to die from lack of water.
One worker described another hidden room that could be entered only by a trapdoor in the ceiling. It was theorized that people could be dropped in and left to starve.
By the way, that secret room had another, less morbid function: when Holmes bought the furniture he intended to actually use to furnish his building, the seller sent an agent to watch the exits until Holmes paid in full. No furniture was removed from the building, so when the sellers showed up to collect, they planned to repossess their wares if Holmes couldn’t pay. But the building was empty.
Of course, these are all just snapshots of the boarding home Holmes had built, but what we do know is that he had a proclivity for dissection, a pathological urge to make money, and no empathy for anyone around him. And now, he had a giant house full of out of towners where he could let his dark side completely take over.
And that is when a woman named Julia Conner entered his life.
In September of 1889, Julia Connor walked into the drug store on the bottom floor of the Murder castle to ask for a job. She had just moved to Chicago with her husband, Ned Conner and their four-year-old daughter, Pearl. The well dressed, mustachioed Holmes offered a job, and immediately got to work on charming young Julia.
He even offered Julia’s husband Ned a job running the jewelry section of the drug store. It seemed like Ned couldn’t take care of the Conner family, Holmes remarked, but he could. He’d make sure Julia and her family were taken care of, and he even offered her room and board up on the second floor of the castle.
It wasn’t long before the neighboring apartments heard Ned screaming at Julia most nights. It was not a very well kept secret that she was sneaking out at night to go visit Holme’s room. Ned eventually moved out and filed for divorce. Julia kept her daughter and stayed behind.
Julia may or may not have known her new boyfriend was already married to Myrta, and that he had just welcomed a two year old daughter with her, and she almost certainly didn’t know he was also married to Clara. Myrta often stayed at her mother’s home in nearby Wilmette. When Holmes took up with Julia, he probably encouraged Myrta to spend most of her time away from the city.
On Christmas Eve 1891, Julia came to Holmes with what she hoped would be good news: she was pregnant with his child, and wanted to marry him.
Holmes gave her a big smile, the one he was known for, where his eyes wouldn’t really crinkle. But then, he got very serious.
Don’t you think we should be married first, he asked? This overwhelmed Julia, being Holme’s wife was all that she wanted. Yes, she’d love to marry him before the baby came.
But that’s not what he meant. He calmly explained to her that he would marry her, but only if she’d get rid of the baby. Good news though, with his medical training, he could take care of the problem himself if she trusted him.
This was not what Julia wanted to hear, but she was in a tough position. Recently divorced, working a ton to support her young daughter, and now, pregnant without a husband. So, she agreed to Holmes’ plan, because at least by doing this she’d have a husband. A second set of income. A father for young pearl.
So one evening, Julia accompanied Holmes down into the castle's basement, underneath the drug store. She saw what a dump it was, the dirt floor, the old medical equipment sprawled out and not clean. It honestly looked like a scene from a saw movie. She went over and sat on the gurney, and Holmes followed her, giving her that smile he always gave. Reassuring but juuuust a bit off. He doused a rag in chloroform, the main anesthetic used in surgery back in the day, and before she even had a moment to understand what was happening, he held it over her mouth and nose. No one ever saw Julia Connor after that.
No one saw her daughter Pearl after that, either. Holmes would later claim during an investigation that after Julia died he gave Pearl to an elderly couple, who later poisoned her. But if that was true… it wouldn’t explain why bones believed to be Pearl’s were later excavated from the castle’s basement.
Julia was the start of a pattern for Holmes, using women until they became inconvenient, then making them disappear.
He did it again less than a year later, to his secretary and mistress, Emeline Cigrand. Emeline disappeared without a trace, but one day, Holmes was seen carrying a large trunk out of the castle, and he wouldn’t tell anyone what was inside. It was her skeleton. Holmes had stripped it of flesh and muscle, and then sold it to the Hahnemann Medical College.
Then there was Minnie Williams a Texas actress he’d first met some years ago in New York. She happened to be in Chicago for the 1893 worlds fair, applying for work as a stenographer. Holmes deployed all the same tactics, hiring her and then starting an affair. Minnie soon moved in, bringing her sister Nannie along.
The two lived basically as husband and wife, and Holmes even agreed to marry her. That’s because she had something that he wanted : A piece of property in Fort Worth ned her inherited property in Fort Worth, worth somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000. She signed the land over to him which was his only stipulation for the two getting married. They had a small ceremony with a priest, but Minnie wouldn’t live long enough for the marriage to be legally filed.
Both sisters vanished shortly after the wedding. Holmes would later attribute the footprint in the safe to Nannie. He locked the door behind her and left her there, kicking and screaming on the inside, while he finished up paperwork at his desk. Perhaps he stripped her skeleton too and sold it to a local university once he was sure she was dead.
As for Minnie, he took her on a train journey, poisoned her, and buried her body in the basement of a house a few miles outside Chicago.
Neither of the Williams’ sisters’ bodies were ever found, so how they died will probably remain a mystery… but we know why they were killed: like Holmes’s previous victims, they were his former intimate associates, murdered as soon as they inconvenienced him.
There was never a lack of young, attractive women coming to work at Holme’s castle. No one was reporting any of the missing women, and Holmes always had an excuse for the neighbors that started to catch on. Oh Julia and Pearl? They moved to california, don’t worry about it.
Nearly all the girls who worked for Holmes were required to become certified as notaries, so they could sign fraudulent documents for him. Those who ended up knowing too much about his scams never left.
But Holmes wasn’t totally flying under the radar. It seemed like some of his past misdeeds were starting to catch up with him. The police stopped by the castle regularly now, usually to investigate reports of him cheating one creditor or another. Holmes knew what they might find if they ever got a warrant to search the whole place. I mean, god forbid they check his basement.
The World’s Fair’s ended in October 1893 and the steady flow of new people coming into the city began to slow. There were less workers to scam, less young women with no family to employ. With multiple lawsuits pending against him, the cops sniffing around, and his sources of revenue drying up, Holmes realized he had to let the castle go. From now on, he’d need to stay one step ahead of his creditors in a literal sense—by never remaining in one place for long.
And you would think that leaving the Murder Castle would set him on a slightly different path, but it would actually be the start of one of the most depraved crimes he’d ever commit.
For his next set of crimes, Holmes needed an accomplice, and he had just the person in mind. Benjamin Pitezel was 38, a handy worker with a melancholy streak, a drinking problem and five children at home in St. Louis. He’d worked on a few of Holmes’ schemes in Chicago because the checks—at least when they came—meant food on the table. Holmes liked that Benjamin never asked too many questions. Now, whether that was because he knew better or because he was too dumb to really know what was happening, I’ll let you decide.
By November 1893, Holmes was moving around a LOT to avoid the police and debt collectors. He skipped from city to city—Denver, Fort Worth, St. Louis—marrying again under an alias, stripping assets from businesses, and talking his way out of corners.
He ended up getting arrested in St. Louis on a mortgage-fraud caper in July 1894, he shared a cell with a train robber named Marion Hedgepeth who said that he could help Holmes with an insurance scam. He’d give him the name of a crooked lawyer who would help him commit as many scams as he wanted, as long as Holmes’ kept bringing him bodies so they could trick the insurance companies. All Hedgepeth asked for was a cut, and Holmes agreed.
That’s where Benjamin came in. Holmes asked Benjamin to buy a $10,000 life insurance policy (that’s $360k today). Then, they’d fake his death, go get a body, and use the lawyer to complete the scam. Then they could all split the money.
Benjamin thought this was a way to bring money home for his family, to put food on the table. He forgot that Holmes was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and nothing he ever did matched what he said he was going to do.
Benjamin didn’t know that this decision would inadvertently bring his family into Holmes messed up world. Because Holmes decided that faking Benjamin’s death wasn’t good enough, to really do this scam, Benjamin was going to need to die.
Following Holmes’s directions, Benjamin set up shop in Philadelphia under the name “B. F. Perry,” a patent-office front that would become the stage for an “accident.” Holmes, meanwhile, wrote cruel, forged letters to Benjamin in his wife’s voice—he wanted to make it seem like the couple was having an argument that would set Benjamin off on a binge.
On September 2, 1894, Holmes slipped into Benjamin’s house when no one was expecting it. Whether Benjamin was drunk, as Holmes later claimed, or sober as the medical evidence indicated, the result was the same: Ben was chloroformed, then the store was set on fire, all to make it look like a chemical explosion from a careless pipe. And that was that, The man Benjamin trusted was the man who ensured his body would be “found.”
Now the insurance company needed to identify the body before it would pay. Carrie Pitezel—Benjamin’s wife—had been in on this plan, and she was under the impression this was a con to keep the family afloat. So She couldn’t risk the company seeing through it.
At Holmes’s urging, she allowed their 14-year-old daughter, Alice, to travel with him to Philadelphia to “identify” the remains. Poor, young Alice, thought she’d go visit Holmes and her father, take a look at a stranger’s body, and then lie and say it was her father. She thought she was helping her dad take care of his family, she knew that her younger siblings were hungry, and this was her duty to make sure everyone in her family was taken care of.
But that’s not what she saw At the morgue, Alice looked down at the charred remains and recognized what no teenager should have to: her father’s broken nose, a mole on his neck, the bent fingernail he’d always had. She looked at Holmes in horror, but he just gave her a smile. Tell the insurance company what we talked about, Alice. He said. And she did. And The company paid out. Holmes’s lawyer took a cut, though he never paid his share to his cellmate that recommended the lawyer And Holmes took something else: custody of Benjamin’s children.
Holmes wrote to Mrs. Pitezel to tell her that Benjamin was in hiding, that Alice was safe with a kindly widow in Kentucky, that the younger children should join their sister “just for now.” Mrs. Pitezel agreed to let 9-year-old Nellie and 8-year-old Howard travel with Holmes, because she was frightened of jeopardizing the plan.
Holmes also told her that he could protect her cut of the insurance payout, so along with the children, she sent her $7,000.
Holmes's schemes before this were unthinkable, but it was always clear that it was somewhat of a game to him. Whether he was lying to an insurance agents face or figuring out the best way to construct a vault house so no one could hear a woman’s scream. There were other ways for him to make money and mess with corpses, he could have just gone and been a doctor. But no, he had a dark side that needed to be unleashed, one that enjoyed the deception that came with being a fraudster, a murderer.
And once he got Mrs. Pitezel’s children, the game was on. What followed, was one of the saddest games of cat and mouse I’ve ever read about.
Because eventually, Mrs. Pitezel figured that everything had died down enough. The insurance company had paid, and no one was asking questions anymore. Could she please have her children, her husband, and the money back?
But Holmes couldn't afford to pay her back the $7000, and he didn’t know what she’d do once she realized her husband was dead. So he kept making up excuses. At one point, he stashed Alice, Nellie, and Howard in an Indiana boardinghouse, but told Mrs. Pitezel that they were being educated in Europe.
It wasn’t long before she was demanding to see Benjamin and the children. On numerous occasions Holmes sent Mrs. Pitezel a train ticket, assuring her that she’d meet Benjamin at her destination, then told her when she arrived that the insurance company was sniffing around and Benjamin had to flee.
He did the same with regard to the children—every time he promised Mrs. Pitezel a chance to see her other three kids, he whisked them off somewhere else just before the planned reunion. It seemed like he enjoyed taunting her and watching her become more and more frantic. time after time she believed him, because not believing meant admitting something unthinkable.
Every time Holmes evaded Mrs. Pitezel, he told her it was because the insurance company was closing in. He had no idea that there actually were investigators closing in on him at this time.
It was the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the famous chicago based private investigators. They had been contacted by train robber Marion Hedgepeth who was still sore that Holmes had stiffed him on his share of the insurance scam money. Hedgepeth told them everything about Benjamin’s faked death for an insurance payout. He didn’t know that Benjamin had actually been murdered, but he wanted to get back at Holmes. And the pinkertons took on the case because it was especially gruesome.
Holmes was smart, and evasive, but he was no match for the Pinkertons. In Boston on November 17, 1894, the Pinkertons finally grabbed him—technically they got him on a Texas horse-theft warrant. It didn’t matter. They had him. The press swarmed the handsome doctor who had “cheated insurers with cadavers,”
The country was shocked. And it didn’t take long for reporters to do a little more digging into his back story, and soon they were asking about other names, other missing women, and the three missing children that Mrs. Pitezel had gone to the press about. Holmes denied everything. He told one story, then another. Eventually he admitted Benjamin was dead—but called it a suicide.
That would not do anything to help Holmes. Actually- things were about to get a lot worse for him. Because in Philadelphia there was a detective named Frank Geyer. And Frank had recently lost his wife and his daughter in a fire. So when he heard Mrs. Pitzels’ plea, to help find her missing children, he knew he had to do something.
He volunteered to search for Alice, Nellie, and Howard. He didn’t believe for a second that the children were being educated in Europe, he knew men like Holmes, and if he was willing to lie about the death of the children's father, then he was definitely lying about them. Geyer followed the paper crumbs instead—he looked at unsent letters found among Holmes’s effects, postmarks, hotel registers, real-estate ledgers. And he was able to construct a map of everywhere he had taken the children. And it was heart breaking, because many times, Mrs. Pitezel would arrive at those locations just moments after Homes had escaped with her kids. She had been so close to saving them.
Geyer got to work. He started following the path that holmes’ and the children took, asking witnesses along the way if they had seen the traveling group. On July 15, 1895, after days of knocking on doors in Toronto, a real-estate agent remembered a nervous tenant who’d asked to borrow a shovel. It wasn’t much of a lead, but it was something.
He led Geyer to the house on Vincent Street. In the cellar, Geyer noticed that the floor looked like it had recently been turned up, so he started digging, and what he found made his heart drop.
There were two small bodies in a shallow grave. Alice and Nellie.
Geyer then boarded another train for Indianapolis to look for the youngest boy, Howard. He was sure now he was searching for remains.
Howard proved harder to find. Geyer re-searched neighborhoods he’d already canvassed and followed near-useless tips by the hundreds. Finally, on August 27, he located a home that Holmes had rented with Howard.
As it turned out, a doctor owned the place. He was horrified by the possibility a body was hidden there, and joined the search. Two neighborhood boys offered to help, too. After hours of searching every nook and cranny, it was the boys who stuck their arms up the chimney pipe… and pulled out a handful of ashes containing human teeth. Further sifting of the chimney’s contents produced a piece of femur and a chunk of human skull, followed by a baked mass of human tissue that appeared to consist of Howard’s pelvis, spleen, stomach, and liver.
Meanwhile, Chicago police searched the building that would be christened the “Murder Castle.” There were human remains in quicklime downstairs, small bones that belonged to young Pearl.
There were several pieces of damning evidence inside the enormous stove: a woman’s shoe, two human ribs (one of them “partially consumed”), pearl buttons and human hair believed to belong to Minnie Williams, bits of a purse, and bits of dress fabric.
But the search party almost seemed to be cursed. Early in their process, a careless investigator caused a gas leak in the basement, and another man carried a candle downstairs before the gas had dissipated. The resulting explosion injured five men.
Prosecutors faced a paradox. The papers had already taken this story and run with it. They had basically convicted Holmes of dozens—hundreds—of murders. But the evidence—especially with the “castle” burned—was thin and scattered.
In the end, Holmes was just charged with the death of Benjamin Pitezel. He felt like he could represent himself and win the favor of the jurors, as if he could charm them the way he had charmed so many people he had tricked before. But The jury was so convinced of Holmes’s guilt, it hardly needed discussion. They actually had to sit in silence for a while just to make it appear they had deliberated. Then they returned to the courtroom with their guilty verdict.
Holmes was sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed On May 7th, 1896, and per his own instructions, his body was buried ten feet deep and cement was poured on top of it. After a lifetime of graverobbing, Holmes didn’t want his own body dissected.
HH Holmes has gone down in American history as being one of the most depraved killers of all time. But, similar to the tales that spread throughout Europe of werewolves, he has been mythologized in a way. His story is like American Folklore at this point.
Before Holmes was executed, he sold a confession to the press for $7500, that’s almost $270,000 today In which he claimed to have committed 27 murders. Now, did it matter that many of the victims he named were proven later to be alive and well, and not serial murdered by Holmes? No. Those names entered the myth of the man. Even when he recanted that whole confession on the scaffold at his execution, it didn’t matter.
He confessed to killing a guy he just called Rodgers in 1888, by hitting him on the head with an oar during a fishing trip in West Morgantown VA, to steal his money. That could never be verified because there were no missing people in the area that matched that description
He said he shoved a man named L. Warner (date unknown) in a glass bending kiln, burning him to death, so he could clean out the man’s bank accounts. L. waner was found alive, but he owned the glass bending kiln that was inside of the murder castle, so maybe that’s how Holmes made the connection?
He said he killed a girl named Katie Durkee by locking her in his vault until she suffocated so he could steal her money and property. Except that she was alive and well in Omaha, and in 1896 issued a public statement swearing she had “was never killed by Holmes or anyone else.” The two had met briefly and he used her name on some of his forged documents.
Even after his death, his myth continued to grow.
Holmes’s modern-day descendant, Jeff Mudgett, believes Holmes was also Jack the Ripper—a theory that would require him to fake his own death on the gallows, escape his grave, and catch a boat to London.
So In 2017, Mudgett successfully petitioned to have Holmes’s body exhumed and DNA tested, believing it would prove to be a fake—the result of another successful body swap.
But DNA and dental records confirmed the body really did belong to Holmes… as did his signature mustache, which they said was still visible on his skull.
So….maybe Holmes wasn’t Jack the Ripper, and maybe he didn’t kill as many people as he said that he did, but his myth will live on forever, and will continue to grow with every retelling of his story.
But that’s the thing with Monsters, right, if I had to put a bow on our monster series for the month. All of the monsters we discussed, Werewolves, Sirens, Vampires, Boogeymen, their myths are some of the oldest stories we have on earth, and they continue on to this day. And maybe Holmes’ story will as well.
But that is all I have for you today. If you want to hear more about the myth of holmes, please join me over on the High Council Tier of Patreon. I’m going to go through some of his other confessed crimes, and how we decided what was most likely a real murder, and which ones he made up.
And please join me here next week for another spooky season episode, this time it’s going to be some of the creepiest stories I’ve received from listeners. Just in time for Halloween, I love it.
I can’t wait to see you then, and until next time, stay curious.