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Herman Webster Mudgett (1861 - May 7, 1896) was a 19th-century serial killer, better known as H.H. Holmes. He was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, son of Levi Horton Mudgett and his wife, formerly Theodate Page Price. His early criminal career (mostly using the pseudonym Dr. H. H. Holmes) was based on fraud and forgery, including a cure for alcoholism, real estate scams, and a machine that made natural gas from water.
He managed to secure a Chicago pharmacy and the property attached to it (by defrauding the pharmacist), and built a row of three-story buildings on it. The bottom floor was shops, the top his personal office, and the middle floor a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms. He called it The Castle and opened it as a hotel for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.
Women checked in, but they did not check out. Over a period of three years, Mudgett tortured his selected victims in soundproof and escapeproof chambers which were fitted with gas lines that permitted Mudgett to asphyxiate the women at any time. Once dead, their bodies went by chute to the basement, where they were either sold to medical schools or cremated.
He was discovered when a fire broke out in the building, revealing the carnage therein to the police and firemen, though he might have been caught eventually anyway, as he had taken out insurance policies on some of his victims before killing them.
The estimates placed the number of victims as between 20 to 100, including mostly women but some men and children; some estimates go as high as 200. Mudgett (as Holmes) was put on trial for murder, and confessed to 28 murders (in Chicago, Indianapolis and Toronto) and 6 attempted murders. He was hanged on May 7, 1896, in Philadelphia. |
H.H. Holmes: America's First Serial Killer
DVD
By John Borowski
Erik Larson's bestselling book 'The Devil in the White City' introduced America to one of the most horrific but little-known episodes in our nation's criminal history. When the shocking exploits of the mysterious Dr. H. H. Holmes became known, U.S. tabloids dubbed him the American Jack the Ripper. H.H. HOLMES: AMERICA'S FIRST SERIAL KILLER is the first film to tell the entire true story of this grisly episode. It focuses on Holmes' entire life of crime and villainy, from childhood to his death sentence and ultimate execution. Original photographs and newspaper reports of the period create a chilling authenticity, while actor Tony Jay (Time Bandits, Disney's Beauty and the Beast) provides spooky, insightful narration to enliven the proceedings.
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The Devil in the White City
By Erik Larson
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his "World's Fair Hotel" just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.
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Depraved:
The Definitive True Story of H.H. Holmes, Whose Grotesque Crimes Shattered Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
By Harold Schechter
Herman Mudgett, who called himself Dr. H. H. Holmes, seemed the epitome of the late 19th century "Golden Age": he was a well-dressed, charismatic, self-made entrepreneur (think Andrew Carnegie). Unfortunately for his many victims, he was also a liar, bigamist, debtor, con man, and murderer. The setting for several of his murders was the bizarre urban "castle" he built in Chicago--a ramshackle construction with mazelike corridors, soundproof rooms, sealed vaults, oversized furnaces, and chutes leading down to the cellar. Holmes's undoing was an insurance scam in which he planned to use a corpse supplied by a doctor to fake his partner's death, but ended up killing the partner, his wife, and his five children. The Boston Book Review wrote, "Schechter's account of this charming, repulsive monster is both an astonishing piece of popular history as well as a near clinical analysis of as sinister a killer as this country has ever produced."
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The Beast of Chicago:
An Account of the Life and Crimes of Herman W. Mudgett, Known to the World As H.H. Holmes
By Rick Geary
In this graphic novel series, Geary covers some of history's most famous murders in meticulously researched, beautifully drawn volumes. This one takes on H.H. Holmes, one of America's first serial killers, whose "murder castle" shocked and stunned the era. It's 1886, and Holmes arrives in Chicago, a seemingly clean and enterprising young man but actually a murderous con artist with a spectacular ability to talk people into trusting him. Over the next five years, he spins an insanely complicated web of cons and evasions, as acquaintance after acquaintance disappears. He acquires three wives and numerous children-all unaware of each other-and his "boarding house" (aka the "murder castle") becomes a place where tourists check in but don't check out. This boarding house houses everything from a gas chamber to an abattoir for victims. Holmes's murder spree ends with an increasingly desperate flight from the law covering several states and involving the murders of three children. Geary renders all of this in a bouncy pen and ink style, the cheerfulness of which belies the horrid events, complete with maps, diagrams and charts to help readers follow the complex story. Despite its charming outward appearance, Geary's art has a chilling subtext that makes the story even more creepy. He's able to make everyday conversation as unsettling as the gruesome violence that figures prominently in every story. Geary is an underrated master of comics, and this book will equally interest history buffs, true crime enthusiasts and fans of good comics.
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The Scarlet Mansion
By Allan W. Eckert
The Scarlet Mansion is a novel based on the life of Herman Mudgett, alias Dr. Henry Holmes, one of the most notorious serial killers of all time, who, before 1900, murdered no less than 133 people. This is a fascinating view of this highly dangerous person from the time of his first murder, when he is only 12 years old, to his adult years when he has built a huge, 105-room mansion in Chicago, with most of the space devoted to chambers for torture and death. But then an incredible chase begins, involving kidnapping and more murders when a detective gets on his trail.
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