A few years after Jack the Ripper left at least five corpses of prostitutes with their faces disfigured in the London neighborhood of Whitechapel, a 34-year-old man sat before a judge in Philadelphia (USA) to answer a single murder charge . Herman Webster Mudget had killed a partner of his, with whom he was in league with a fraud scheme. He was sentenced to death and hanged in 1896, shortly before his 35th birthday.
While waiting for his execution, Mudget, who had changed his last name years to Holmes, accepted an offer from the newspapers of the magnate William Randolph Hearst to write and publish in his diaries his autobiography, for which he charged $ 7,500 (6,900 euros), a million for the time. And in it he expanded telling that he had actually killed 27 people, more than enough to consider him as a pioneer of serial murders in the American way.
"I was born with the devil inside," he said in that text, which delighted American readers. "I was born with the evil one as my protector located next to the bed where they gave birth to me. I was thrown into the world and since then it has accompanied me."
But something was wrong with his story. It was not clear if those deaths had been the result of his criminal instinct, an overflowing imagination and ego, or a last desire to hoard money: soon after, Kati Durkee, to whom the text mentioned, came to the fore. What better proof that Holmes was lying than the resurrection of one of his victims?
Almost on the scaffold, Holmes was at odds: he claimed that he had actually only killed two people, but that count was also not credible. The investigation failed to locate about 200 people who had dealt with that elegant, apparently affable character with blue eyes, one of them slightly squint, and who avoided keeping his gaze with his interlocutors. They had been wiped off the map without a trace. How many of them were, in effect, victims of Holmes?
The HH Holmes case is one of the most confusing in American criminal history. His figure grew after his death, fueled by popular literature, the press, also the cinema and the interest of some less rigorous historians. Some claim that he visits London the same 1888, trying to link it with the crimes of the unknown murderer of Whitechapel. What is certain is that the fantasists had good raw material to generate the myth: that character had had an elegant building built in the prosperous south of Chicago, a Victorian air hut that the neighbors soon designated as "Holmes Castle". After being detained, rumors spread that Holmes had taken advantage of the Columbian Universal Exposition of 1893 to rent rooms to tourists and murder them. There was talk that the house was full of secret rooms, that he had installed sliding ramps and acid tanks inside.
A skeleton in childhood
To get to know the real HH Holmes you have to go back to his early years. He spent a childhood in his native New Hampshire marked by a strict education and a brilliant passing through school. A visit to the doctor was etched in his mind forever: in the office there was a real human skeleton, a common thing at that time, but the doctor had placed it with his arms outstretched, as if looking for a hug. The image horrified and intrigued him in equal parts, picks up the 2004 documentary HH Holmes: America's first serial killer. A rigid childhood and a traumatic childhood experience were enough as ingredients to create in the eyes of Americans the figure of the first serial killer in modern American history.
Whether it was the result of his revealing visit to the doctor or not, Holmes enrolled in Medicine at the University of Michigan on September 21, 1882, where he graduated. As he later confessed, there he learned to use the corpses of dissections to fraudulently collect life insurance. He subscribed these insurances to third parties, a practice authorized at the time, and then passed the bodies that he obtained in the faculty through those of the holders.
After a tour of several cities in which he was associated with the disappearance of some children, he decides to change his name and start a new life. Great Chicago awaits you, a city undergoing reconstruction after the devastating fire that had destroyed it in 1871. Real estate investors were swarming and jobs were pouring in. That New Hampshire man would henceforth be called Henry Howard Holmes, Dr. HH Holmes - the best known, but only one on a list of at least 16 aliases he used to hide throughout his life.
A former college colleague a little older than he offers him to work at his pharmacy, which Holmes would end up buying. It is made with good money by selling a so-called mineral water with cosmetic properties, which in reality was only the one that came out of the tap. Publish announcements in the press: "Normelle. Try it. Leaves skin soft, white and smooth." There were not his pufos: he created a generator that, he said, turned water into gas for combustion.
In 1888 he bought a farm near his pharmacy. The same year of the Jack the Ripper crimes in London, a splendid and modern building stands, brick by brick, the aforementioned "Holmes Castle". He had designed it himself. The first floor houses your apartment and offices, but the second floor has an intricate structure with thirty rooms. It employs dozens of bricklayers and foremen to lift it. Then, after selling and repurchasing his own pharmacy several times, he added a third floor, thinking of making it profitable with the universal exhibition of 1893.
One of the rooms on the second floor includes a hatch that opens directly into a hole that leads to the basement. Why would Holmes want something like that? In the basement there is an oven supposedly used to melt glass. That doctor turned apothecary sold skeletons to medical schools, collects the documentary about his life in 2014.
Benjamin, his partner and friend
After wandering the interior and the south of the country for a time, in 1894 he committed the only crime in Philadelphia for which he will be tried. You have to go five years ago for the victim to appear in your life. Attracted by the prosperity of Chicago, in 1889 Benjamin F. Pitezel arrived in the city, a man with bad luck at work and drunk, who supports a family of women and five children as best he can. Find a job as a carpenter for the house Holmes is building.
Benjamin manages to become the businessman's right hand . And HH Holmes becomes one more member of the Pitezel family. Both embark on plots to swindle insurance companies, until Holmes decides to kill him. Were you afraid of being exposed if your friend and partner ever betrayed you? In order to pass to posterity as a bloody murderer, his way of ending life could not have been smoother: he slept him and killed him with successive doses of chloroform. He placed the body as if he had suffered an accident in one of his habitual drunks. So close was he to the family, that after Benjamin's death, Holmes took custody of three of his five children. And he murdered all three.
Historian Adam Seltzer, the author in 2017 of a verbose biography in which he debunks many of the myths surrounding this murderer, believes that more than a bloody urge that led Holmes to kill children was his fear of discovery. One of Holmes's daughters, Alice, had heard him say that his father was still alive, even after she learned that he had been found dead. Holmes killed his brother Howard, dismembered his body and burned it in a stove. Alice and her sister, later, killed them, awkwardly buried them, and with the same awkwardness tried to burn their clothes without succeeding.
Running from the stalking of the insurance companies he had scammed, Holmes toured much of the interior of the United States. The police accuse him of Pitezel's death and he is detained. The press will later call him "the mega-demon of the time" or "the greatest criminal of the century who is dying." They will even refer to his figure as "the most perfect incarnation of an abysmal and anomalous evil that will go down in history with lurid airs of legend". But that March of 1893 the only thing mentioned in the newspapers, included in the coverage of the universal exhibition, was that Holmes had cheated with corpses to collect insurance and that he had used the secret rooms of his house and his secret passageways to defraud his creditors. , who demanded the payment of objects well hidden by him on the middle floor. Decades later, "Holmes Castle" became known as the "Castle of Murders".
In a police statement, he says Pitezel is still alive, having seen him just three weeks ago. And that the children were fine too, as far as he knew. The press says, exaggerating, that he is a womanizer who has had dealings with up to 200 women in Chicago. A doctor examines it. He notes that he has "unusually small" genitalia. Neighbors ask to be excavated in the basement of the building. Bones appear there, which forensic experts cannot associate with specific people.
Tests to know your feelings
Already convicted, the director of the psychoneurology department of the National Office of Education, a prominent criminologist, wants to test him. He subjects it to the kymographion , a device that, he says, is used to measure human emotions. Why doesn't he deny his guilt? Asks the investigator. "I'd rather be executed than incarcerated for life," he replies.
In his biography of the murderer, Adam Selzer describes him as a "great liar", who cheated on his three wives (he never got a divorce from the first one, that is, he was bigamous), his friends, his lawyers, his employees ... even their own journal. Of the murders that he attributed to himself or attributed to him, he considers that at least 22 were not such.
The biographer believes that, purely, only the Pitezel murders can be attributed unequivocally to Holmes, since they were the only victims of which their bodies appeared and could be identified. Did five women also die at your hands? Julia Conner, a woman Holmes had sued for default and had an affair with, and her daughter Pearl? Both mysteriously disappeared. Maybe the castle bones were his. Emeline Cigrand, a woman who had come to Chicago looking for, like many others, a job, and who supposedly disappeared to emigrate to Europe, as she told her father in a letter that he found suspicious? And what happened to Minnie Williams, an actress turned, due to material needs, into a stenographer, who probably collaborated with Holmes in some of her tricks to defraud? And with his sister Minnie, the only victim who would have stayed at the alleged Holmes hotel?
The Holmes case attracted so much interest that, after his conviction, his house almost became a tourist attraction, but soon it caught fire. Over the years, the area was demolished and a post office was located on the farm. In its cellars, a 19th century brick service tunnel is the only remnant of that strange castle.
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