Mudgett, Herman Webster
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Wikipedia-Article "Herman Webster Mudgett"
Dr. H. H. Holmes was the alias of Herman Webster Mudgett (1861 - May 7, 1896). He was a 19th-century serial killer.
He was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, son of Levi Horton Mudgett and his wife, formerly Theodate Page Price. His early criminal career was based on fraud and forgery, including a cure for alcoholism, real estate scams, and a machine that purported to make natural gas from water.
On 8 July 1878, he married Clara A. Lovering of Alton, New Hampshire. On 28 January 1887, he (bigamously) married Myrta Z. Belknap in Minneapolis, Minnesota; they had a daughter named Lucy. He filed a petition for divorce from his first wife after marrying his second, but it never became final. He married his third wife, Georgiana Yoke, on 9 January 1894.
He managed to secure a Chicago pharmacy (by defrauding the pharmacist), and built a block-long, three-story building on the lot across the street. He called it The Castle and opened it as a hotel for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. The bottom floor of the Castle contained shops, the top his personal office, and the middle floor a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms. Over a period of three years, Holmes 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. Holmes had repeatedly changed builders, to ensure that no one truly understood the design of the house of evil he had created and reported it to the police. Once dead, their bodies went by chute to the basement, where they were either sold to medical schools or cremated and placed in lime pits for destruction.
Holmes 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. Holmes was put on trial for murder, and confessed to 27 murders (in Chicago, Indianapolis and Toronto) and six attempted murders. He was hanged on May 7, 1896, in Philadelphia.
It is said that when the executioner had finished all the preliminaries of the hanging, he asked, "Ready, Dr. Holmes?", to which Holmes said, "Yes. Don't bungle." Unfortunately for Holmes, aka Mudgett, the executioner did bungle; Mudgett's neck did not snap immediately, and he died slowly and painfully of strangulation over the course of about 15 minutes.
Although sometimes referred to as America's first serial killer, this is not the case. Other cases of serial murder predated his, with Thomas Neill Cream (a serial killer with at least one proven murder in the US) and the Austin Axe Murderer (sometimes called the Servant Girl Annihilator) being just two examples.
References
- Borowski, John (Director), H.H. Holmes, America's First Serial Killer [Motion picture documentary], Waterfront Productions, 2004.
- Borowski, John (2005). Dimas Estrada (editor) The Strange Case of Dr. H. H. Holmes. ISBN 0975918516.
- See also the list of many references on the Memorabilia page.
- Geary, Rick (2004). The Beast of Chicago: The Murderous Career of H. H. Holmes, Nantier, Beall & Minoustchine.
- Larson, Erik (2003). The Devil in the White City, New York: Vintage Books.
- Schecter, Harold (1994). Depraved, New York: Pocket Books.
- Adams, Cecil, “Did Dr. Henry Holmes kill 200 people at a bizarre "castle" in 1890s Chicago?”, The Straight Dope, 1979-07-06.